upon Walderhurst riding his fine chestnut, erect and staid, and be
saluted by the grave raising of his whip to his hat. Or to return to the
Farm just as the Palstrey barouche turned in at the gate with Lady
Walderhurst sitting in it glowing with health and that enjoyable
interest in all things which gave her a kind of radiance of eye and
colour.
She came at length in a time when she did not look quite so radiant.
This, it appeared, was from a reason which might be regarded as natural
under the circumstances. A more ardent man than Lord Walderhurst might
have felt that he could not undertake a journey to foreign lands which
would separate him from a wife comparatively new. But Lord Walderhurst
was not ardent, and he had married a woman who felt that he did all
things well--that, in fact, a thing must be well because it was his
choice to do it. His journey to India might, it was true, be a matter of
a few months, and involved diplomatic business for which a certain
unimpeachable respectability was required. A more brilliant man, who had
been less respectable in the most decorous British sense, would not have
served the purpose of the government.
Emily's skin had lost a shade of its healthful freshness, it struck
Hester, when she saw her. There was a suggestion of fulness under her
eyes. Yet with the bright patience of her smile she defied the remote
suspicion that she had shed a tear or so before leaving home. She
explained the situation with an affectionally reverent dwelling upon the
dignity of the mission which would temporarily bereave her of her mate.
Her belief in Walderhurst's intellectual importance to the welfare of
the government was a complete and touching thing.
"It will not be for very long," she said, "and you and I must see a
great deal of each other. I am so glad you are here. You know how one
misses--" breaking off with an admirable air of determined cheer--"I
must not think of that."
Walderhurst congratulated himself seriously during the days before his
departure. She was so exactly what he liked a woman to be. She might
have made difficulties, or have been sentimental. If she had been a
girl, it would have been necessary to set up a sort of nursery for her,
but this fine amenable, sensible creature could take perfect care of
herself. It was only necessary to express a wish, and she not only knew
how to carry it out, but was ready to do so without question. As far as
he was concerned, he was willing to leave all to her own taste. It was
such decent taste. She had no modern ideas which might lead during his
absence to any action likely to disturb or annoy him. What she would
like best to do would be to stay at Palstrey and enjoy the beauty of it.
She would spend her days in strolling through the gardens, talking to
the gardeners, who had all grown fond of her, or paying little visits to
old people or young ones in the village. She would help the vicar's wife
in her charities, she would appear in the Manor pew at church regularly,
make the necessary dull calls, and go to the unavoidable dull dinners
with a faultless amiability and decorum.
"As I remarked when you told me you had asked her to marry you," said
Lady Maria on the occasion of his lunching with her on running up to
town for a day's business, "you showed a great deal more sense than most
men of your age and rank. If people _will_ marry, they should choose the
persons least likely to interfere with them. Emily will never interfere
with you. She cares a great deal more about your pleasure than her own.
And as to that, she's so much like a big, healthy, good child that she
would find pleasure wheresoever you dropped her."
This was true, yet the healthy, childish creature had, in deep privacy,
cried a little, and was pathetically glad to feel that the Osborns were
to be near her, and that she would have Hester to think of and take care
of during the summer.
It was pathetic that she should cherish an affection so ingenuous for
the Osborns, for one of them at least had no patience with her. To
Captain Osborn her existence and presence in the near neighbourhood were
offences. He told himself that she was of the particular type of woman
he most disliked. She was a big, blundering fool, he said, and her size
and very good nature itself got on his nerves and irritated him.
"She looks so deucedly prosperous with her first-rate clothes and her
bouncing health," he said.
"The tread of her big feet makes me mad when I hear it."
Hester answered with a shrill little laugh.
"Her big feet are a better shape than mine," she said. "I ought to hate
her, and I would if I could, but I can't."
"I can," muttered Osborn between his teeth as he turned to the mantel
and scratched a match to light his pipe.
Chapter Twelve
When Lord Walderhurst took his departure for India, his wife began to
order her daily existence as he had imagined she would. Before he had
left her she had appeared at the first Drawing-room, and had spent a few
weeks at the town house, where they had given several imposing and
serious dinner parties, more remarkable for dignity and good taste than
liveliness. The duties of social existence in town would have been
unbearable for Emily without her husband. Dressed by Jane Cupp with a
passion of fervour, fine folds sweeping from her small, long waist,
diamonds strung round her neck, and a tiara or a big star in her full
brown hair, Emily was rather superb when supported by the consciousness
that Walderhurst's well-carried maturity and long accustomedness were
near her. With him she could enjoy even the unlively splendour of a
function, but without him she would have been very unhappy. At Palstrey
she was ceasing to feel new, and had begun to realise that she belonged
to the world she lived in. She was becoming accustomed to her
surroundings, and enjoyed them to the utmost. Her easily roused
affections were warmed by the patriarchal atmosphere of village life.
Most of the Palstrey villagers had touched their forelocks or curtsied
to Walderhursts for generations. Emily liked to remember this, and had
at once conceived a fondness for the simple folk, who seemed somehow
related so closely to the man she worshipped.
Walderhurst had not the faintest conception of what this worship
represented. He did not even reach the length of realising its
existence. He saw her ingenuous reverence for and belief in him, and was
naturally rather pleased by them. He was also vaguely aware that if she
had been a more brilliant woman she would have been a more exacting one,
and less easily impressed. If she had been a stupid woman or a clumsy
one, he would have detested her and bitterly regretted his marriage. But
she was only innocent and gratefully admiring, which qualities,
combining themselves with good looks, good health, and good manners,
made of a woman something he liked immensely. Really she had looked very
nice and attractive when she had bidden him good-by, with her emotional
flush and softness of expression and the dewy brightness of her eyes.
There was something actually moving in the way her strong hand had wrung
his at the last moment.
"I only _wish_," she had said, "I only do so _wish_ that there was
something I could _do_ for you while you are away--something you could
leave me to _do_."
"Keep well and enjoy yourself," he had answered. "That will really
please me."
Nature had not so built him that he could suspect that she went home and
spent the rest of the morning in his rooms, putting away his belongings
with her own hands, just for the mere passion of comfort she felt in
touching the things he had worn, the books he had handled, the cushions
his head had rested against. She had indeed mentioned to the housekeeper
at Berkeley Square that she wished his lordship's apartments to remain
untouched until she herself had looked over them. The obsession which is
called Love is an emotion past all explanation. The persons susceptible
to its power are as things beneath a spell. They see, hear, and feel
that of which the rest of their world is unaware, and will remain
unaware for ever. To the endearing and passion-inspiring qualities Emily
Walderhurst saw in this more than middle-aged gentleman an unstirred
world would remain blind, deaf, and imperceptive until its end
transpired. This, however, made not the slightest difference in the
reality of these things as she saw and felt and was moved to her soul's
centre by them. Bright youth in Agatha Norman, at present joyously
girdling the globe with her bridegroom, was moved much less deeply,
despite its laughter and love.
A large lump swelled in Emily's throat as she walked about the
comfortable, deserted apartments of her James. Large tears dropped on
the breast of her dress as they had dropped upon her linen blouse when
she walked across the moor to Maundell. But she bravely smiled as she
tenderly brushed away with her hand two drops which fell upon a tweed
waistcoat she had picked up. Having done this, she suddenly stooped and
kissed the rough cloth fervently, burying her face in it with a sob.
"I do _love_ him so!" she whispered, hysterically. "I do so _love_ him,
and I shall so _miss_ him!" with the italicised feelingness of old.
The outburst was in fact so strongly italicised that she felt the next
moment almost as if she had been a little indecent. She had never been
called upon by the strenuousness of any occasion to mention baldly to
Lord Walderhurst that she "loved" him. It had not been necessary, and
she was too little used to it not to be abashed by finding herself
proclaiming the fact to his very waistcoat itself. She sat down holding
the garment in her hands and let her tears fall.
She looked about her at the room and across the corridor through the
open door at his study which adjoined it. They were fine rooms, and
every book and bust and chair looked singularly suggestive of his
personality. The whole house was beautiful and imposing in Emily's eyes.
"He has made all my life beautiful and full of comfort and happiness,"
she said, trembling. "He has saved me from everything I was afraid of,
and there is nothing I can _do_. Oh!" suddenly dropping a hot face on
her hands, "if I were only Hester Osborn. I should be glad to suffer
anything, or die in any way. I should have paid him back--just a
little--if I might."
For there was one thing she had learned through her yearning fervour,
not through any speech of his. All the desire and pride in him would be
fed full and satisfied if he could pass his name on to a creature of his
own flesh and blood. All the heat his cold nature held had concentrated
itself in a secret passion centred on this thing. She had begun to
awaken to a suspicion of this early in their marriage, and afterwards by
processes of inclusion and exclusion she had realised the proud
intensity of his feeling despite his reserve and silence. As for her,
she would have gone to the stake, or have allowed her flesh to be cut
into pieces to form that which would have given him reason for
exultation and pride. Such was the helpless, tragic, kindly love and
yearning of her.
* * * * *
The thing filled her with a passion of tenderness for Hester Osborn. She
yearned over her, too. Her spinster life had never brought her near to
the mystery of birth. She was very ignorant and deeply awed by the mere
thought of it. At the outset Hester had been coldly shy and reticent,
but as they saw each other more she began to melt before the unselfish
warmth of the other woman's overtures of friendship. She was very lonely
and totally inexperienced. As Agatha Slade had gradually fallen into
intimacy of speech, so did she. She longed so desperately for
companionship that the very intensity of her feelings impelled her to
greater openness than she had at first intended.
"I suppose men don't know," she said to herself sullenly, in thinking of
Osborn, who spent his days out of doors. "At any rate, they don't care."
Emily cared greatly, and was so full of interest and sympathy that there
was something like physical relief in talking to her.
"You two have become great pals," Alec said, on an afternoon when he
stood at a window watching Lady Walderhurst's carriage drive away. "You
spend hours together talking. What is it all about?"
"She talks a good deal about her husband. It is a comfort to her to find
someone to listen. She thinks he is a god. But we principally talk
about--me."
"Don't discourage her," laughed Osborn. "Perhaps she will get so fond of
you that she will not be willing to part with us, as she will be obliged
to take both to keep one."
"I wish she would, I wish she would!" sighed Hester, tossing up her
hands in a languid, yet fretted gesture.
The contrast between herself and this woman was very often too great to
be equably borne. Even her kindness could not palliate it. The simple
perfection of her country clothes, the shining skins of her horses, the
smooth roll of her carriage, the automatic servants who attended her,
were suggestive of that ease and completeness in all things, only to be
compassed by long-possessed wealth. To see every day the evidences of it
while one lived on charitable sufferance on the crumbs which fell from
the master's table was a galling enough thing, after all. It would
always have been galling. But it mattered so much more now--so much more
to Hester than she had known it could matter even in those days when as
a girl she had thirstily longed for it. In those days she had not lived
near enough to it all to know the full meaning and value of it--the
beauty and luxury, the stateliness and good taste. To have known it in
this way, to have been almost part of it and then to leave it, to go
back to a hugger-mugger existence in a wretched bungalow hounded by
debt, pinched and bound hard and fast by poverty, which offered no
future prospect of bettering itself into decent good luck! Who could
bear it?
Both were thinking the same thing as their eyes met.
"How are we to stand it, after this?" she cried out sharply.
"We can't stand it," he answered. "Confound it all, something _must_
happen."
"Nothing will," she said; "nothing but that we shall go back worse off
than before."
* * * * *
At this period Lady Walderhurst went to London again to shop, and spent
two entire happy days in buying beautiful things of various kinds, which
were all to be sent to Mrs. Osborn at The Kennel Farm, Palstrey. She had
never enjoyed herself so much in her life as she did during those two
days when she sat for hours at one counter after another looking at
exquisite linen and flannel and lace. The days she had spent with Lady
Maria in purchasing her trousseau had not compared with these two. She
looked actually lovely as she almost fondled the fine fabrics, smiling
with warm softness at the pretty things shown her. She spent, in fact,
good deal of money, and luxuriated in so doing as she could never have
luxuriated in spending it in finery for herself. Nothing indeed seemed
too fairy-like in its fineness, no quantity of lace seemed in excess.
Her heart positively trembled in her breast sometimes, and she found
strange tears rising in her eyes.
"They are so sweet," she said plaintively to the silence of her own
bedroom as she looked some of her purchases over. "I don't know why they
give me such a feeling. They look so little and--helpless, and as if
they were made to hold in one's arms. It's absurd of me, I daresay."
The morning the boxes arrived at The Kennel Farm, Emily came too. She
was in the big carriage, and carried with her some special final
purchases she wanted to bring herself. She came because she could not
have kept away. She wanted to see the things again, to be with Hester
when she unpacked them, to help her, to look them all over, to touch
them and hold them in her hands.
She found Hester in the large, low-ceilinged room in which she slept.
The big four-post bed was already snowed over with a heaped-up drift of
whiteness, and open boxes were scattered about. There was an odd
expression in the girl's eyes, and she had a red spot on either cheek.
"I did not expect anything like this," she said. "I thought I should
have to make some plain, little things myself, suited to its station,"
with a wry smile. "They would have been very ugly. I don't know how to
sew in the least. You forget that you were not buying things for a
prince or a princess, but for a little beggar."
"Oh, don't!" cried Emily, taking both her hands. "Let us be _happy_! It
was so _nice_ to buy them. I never liked anything so much in my life."
She went and stood by the bedside, taking up the things one by one,
touching up frills of lace and smoothing out tucks.
"Doesn't it make you happy to look at them?" she said.
"_You_ look at them," said Hester, staring at her, "as if the sight of
them made you hungry, or as if you had bought them for yourself."
Emily turned slightly away. She said nothing. For a few moments there
was a dead silence.
Hester spoke again. What in the world was it in the mere look of the
tall, straight body of the woman to make her feel hot and angered?
"If you had bought them for yourself," she persisted, "they would be
worn by a Marquis of Walderhurst."
Emily laid down the robe she had been holding. She put it on the bed,
and turned round to look at Hester Osborn with serious eyes.
"They _may_ be worn by a Marquis of Walderhurst, you know," she
answered. "They may."
She was remotely hurt and startled, because she felt in the young woman
something she had felt once or twice before, something resentful in her
thoughts of herself, as if for the moment she represented to her an
enemy.
The next moment, however, Hester Osborn fell upon her with embraces.
"You are an angel to me," she cried. "You are an angel, and I can't
thank you. I don't know how."
Emily Walderhurst patted her shoulder as she kindly enfolded her in warm
arms.
"Don't thank me," she half whispered emotionally. "Don't. Just let us
_enjoy_ ourselves."
Chapter Thirteen
Alec Osborn rode a good deal in these days. He also walked a good deal,
sometimes with a gun over his shoulder and followed by a keeper,
sometimes alone. There was scarcely a square yard of the Palstrey Manor
lands he had not tramped over. He had learned the whole estate by heart,
its woods, its farms, its moorlands. A morbid secret interest in its
beauties and resources possessed him. He could not resist the temptation
to ask apparently casual questions of keepers and farmers when he found
himself with them. He managed to give his inquiries as much the air of
accident as possible, but he himself knew that they were made as a
result of a certain fevered curiosity. He found that he had fallen into
the habit of continually making plans connected with the place. He said
to himself, "If it were mine I would do this, or that. If I owned it, I
would make this change or that one. I would discharge this keeper or put
another man on such a farm." He tramped among the heather thinking these
things over, and realising to the full what the pleasure of such powers
would mean to a man such as himself, a man whose vanity had never been
fed, who had a desire to control and a longing for active out-of-door
life.
"If it were mine, if it were mine!" he would say to himself. "Oh! damn
it all, if it were only mine!"
And there were other places as fine, and finer places he had never
seen,--Oswyth, Hurst, and Towers,--all Walderhurst's all belonging to
this one respectable, elderly muff. Thus he summed up the character of
his relative. As for himself he was young, strong, and with veins
swelling with the insistent longing for joyful, exultant life. The
sweating, panting drudgery of existence in India was a thought of hell
to him. But there it was, looming up nearer and nearer with every
heavenly English day that passed. There was nothing for it but to go
back--go back, thrust one's neck into the collar again, and sweat and be
galled to the end. He had no ambitions connected with his profession. He
realised loathingly in these days that he had always been waiting,
waiting.
The big, bright-faced woman who was always hanging about Hester, doing
her favours, he actually began to watch feverishly. She was such a fool;
she always looked so healthy, and she was specially such a fool over
Walderhurst. When she had news of him, it was to be seen shining in her
face.
She had a sentimental school-girl fancy that during his absence she
would apply herself to the task of learning to ride. She had been
intending to do so before he went away; they had indeed spoken of it
together, and Walderhurst had given her a handsome, gentle young mare.
The creature was as kind as she was beautiful. Osborn, who was
celebrated for his horsemanship, had promised to undertake to give the
lessons.
A few days after her return from London with her purchases, she asked
the husband and wife to lunch with her at Palstrey, and during the meal
broached the subject.
"I should like to begin soon, if you can spare the time for me," she
said. "I want to be able to go out with him when he comes back. Do you
think I shall be slow in learning? Perhaps I ought to be lighter to ride
well."
"I think you will be pretty sure to have a first-class seat," Osborn
answered. "You will be likely to look particularly well."
"Do you think I shall? How good you are to encourage me. How soon could
I begin?"
She was quite agreeably excited. In fact, she was delighted by innocent
visions of herself as Walderhurst's equestrian companion. Perhaps if she
sat well, and learned fine control of her horse, he might be pleased,
and turn to look at her, as they rode side by side, with that look of
approval and dawning warmth which brought such secret joy to her soul.
"When may I take my first lesson?" she said quite eagerly to Captain
Osborn, for whom a footman was pouring out a glass of wine.
"As soon," he answered, "as I have taken out the mare two or three times
myself. I want to know her thoroughly. I would not let you mount her
until I had learned her by heart."
They went out to the stables after lunch and visited the mare in her
loose box. She was a fine beast, and seemed as gentle as a child.
Captain Osborn asked questions of the head groom concerning her. She had
a perfect reputation, but nevertheless she was to be taken over to the
Kennel stables a few days before Lady Walderhurst mounted her.
"It is necessary to be more than careful," Osborn said to Hester that
night. "There would be the devil and all to pay if anything went wrong."
The mare was brought over the next morning. She was a shining bay, and
her name was Faustine.
In the afternoon Captain Osborn took her out. He rode her far and
learned her thoroughly before he brought her back. She was as lively as
a kitten, but as kind as a dove. Nothing could have been better tempered
and safer. She would pass anything, even the unexpected appearance of a
road-mending engine turning a corner did not perceptibly disturb her.
"Is she well behaved?" Hester asked at dinner time.
"Yes, apparently," was his answer; "but I shall take her out once or
twice again."
He did take her out again, and had only praise for her on each occasion.
But the riding lessons did not begin at once. In fact he was, for a
number of reasons, in a sullen and unsociable humour which did not
incline him towards the task he had undertaken. He made various excuses
for not beginning the lessons, and took Faustine out almost every day.