The kind old clergyman said that title was pretty, if a little odd
for England.
“I did not know exactly how one should address her,” he remarked; “if
she would be known here as Miss Caldini----”
“Oliver always calls her the Countess Fanny,” interrupted Ambrosia. “I
suppose he has got into that way, and we must follow it. She is, too,
you know, a contessa--or contessina; in Italy all the children take
the title, and that makes it a much more common affair than it is over
here. Her name is Francesca Sylvestra Caldini; but, as I say, Oliver
always calls her the Countess Fanny, and I suppose we must do the
same. As you have remarked,” added Ambrosia with something of an
effort, “it is a pretty name, and I dare say suits her very well;
though it has that touch of the fantastic that I should have thought
would not have appealed to Oliver.”
“She is, I suppose,” asked Mr. Spragge, “a Roman Catholic?”
And Ambrosia said, yes, she supposed so, and there would be a slight
awkwardness and difficulty there. Though one wished to be extremely
tolerant, yet to be tolerant did require a certain exercise of
patience. Of course, the girl could be nothing else than a Romanist,
brought up in Italy by Romanist parents; but it was awkward; there was
no Roman Church or priest nearer than Truro, and that, in the winter,
was almost inaccessible. How would the girl contrive? Perhaps she was
ardent in her faith, and perhaps not; Ambrosia did not know. But the
subject was tiresome. Here again, it was strange in Oliver, who was
such a firm and ardent Churchman, to betroth himself to what he had
always hitherto termed “a papist”; and Ambrosia smiled into the fire,
not without irony. Mr. Spragge did not smile, though his thought was
the same as the thought of Ambrosia--that this was, of course, a clear
case of infatuation. The man cared nothing about anything, except
possessing the girl; this, put crudely, was what was in the minds both
of Ambrosia and of the clergyman, and there lay their distress and
their problem.
Neither of them was very sympathetic toward, or very capable of
dealing with, crude or violent passion. Ambrosia did not wish to be
shut up in the house with these two people during the winter months of
their betrothal; and Mr. Spragge did not want to stand by and be a
witness of what, in his own heart, he condemned as a most unsuitable
and unworthy matrimonial arrangement.
Sherry and biscuits were brought in, and Ambrosia was glad of the
wine. Even though she sat close to the fire, she had the sensation
that her blood was chill, and running sluggishly in her veins.
“I suppose,” she reflected regretfully, “that Oliver should never have
gone out to Italy to fetch her home. It seemed to me at the time an
injudicious arrangement. We should both have gone, or someone else
should have been sent--Dr. Drayton and his sister, for instance, or
even yourself. That would have been a far wiser proceeding.”
“What,” asked the clergyman, “induced Mr. Sellar to go himself, and to
go alone?”
“I don’t know,” said Ambrosia. “You know that he is impulsive and
self-willed; and I think the very fact that I remarked that it was not
suitable persuaded him to take that course. She is, you see, our
second cousin and he her guardian, and it seems she has no nearer
relations; and her parents died so suddenly----”
Ambrosia paused, for as she spoke of the death of the Countess Fanny’s
parents she had again, and very acutely, that sensation of Death
making a circle round them, cutting them off from the rest of the
world. Yes, here it was again! Two sudden deaths, casting the Countess
Fanny into their midst! If those two strangers had lived, why, neither
she nor Oliver would have been likely ever to meet this foreign girl.
“Well,” she added, endeavouring to cast off this sombre reflection,
“there it is, she was left in some great castle outside Rome, with
only a Frenchwoman, a certain Madame de Mailly, as her companion. And,
as she inherits Flimwel Grange, there seems to have been some decision
that she should come over here and claim the place--it is very
troubled in Italy now. I don’t quite understand what her lawyers and
guardians decided, but at least, as you know, they wrote to Oliver,
who was left the girl’s guardian, and asked if there was someone who
could fetch the girl home; and Oliver himself went.”
“Is this French lady accompanying her?” asked Mr. Spragge.
“Only as far as Calais, I believe,” replied Ambrosia. “I do not think
Oliver cared for her at all, or she for Oliver. I gathered, indeed,
from his letters that there was some warm dispute between them, and
that, though the Countess Fanny could obviously not travel alone with
Oliver, the lady had been dispensed with as soon as her chaperonage
was no longer necessary.” And Ambrosia smiled again, reflecting on
what was likely to have been that passage of arms between her brother
and the unknown Frenchwoman.
“It is perhaps as well,” said Mr. Spragge with some relief. “I do not
think our village, Miss Sellar, would be altogether acceptable to a
lively French lady used to foreign society!”
“But will it,” asked Ambrosia at once, “be acceptable to the Countess
Fanny?”
“Well,” said the clergyman, “she has made her choice, as one says, and
must even make the best of it, I suppose that she will find interest
and excitement in her new life. There will be a great deal for her to
learn, of course, and I dare say a great deal for her to unlearn!”
“But youth,” remarked Ambrosia, “does not enjoy either learning or
unlearning! There are few diversions here, and, for a young girl,
hardly any company. We are, when you come to think of it, Mr. Spragge,
a very odd little community. There are just the fisher-folk, the
farmers, Dr. Drayton, yourself--and who else? There is seldom any
society at Lefton Park, and Oliver is so rooted to the place that I do
not think he would be easily induced to go away, even for a brief
visit.”
“Yes,” agreed Mr. Spragge, “it is a lonely and a quiet place, and I am
sorry that my own children are married and far away, and that Dr.
Drayton has none; also that, as you say, Lefton Park entertains so
little society. It will, no doubt, I am afraid, be very dull for the
Countess Fanny!”
“I shall be what company I can for her till the spring,” replied
Ambrosia; “and then I, also, hope to go away; not unreasonably, I
think, Mr. Spragge? I have lived here all my life, and know the place
too well!”
“It is certainly not a lively life for a beautiful young woman,” said
Mr. Spragge, in his most fatherly and courteous manner; “and I can
well understand that when you are married to Lord Vanden you will be
glad to leave us.”
“You make me feel ungrateful!” said Ambrosia. “Of course I belong
here, and I never can belong anywhere else; and, I do believe, love it
all as I never can love anything else; but there comes a time when one
is melancholy, and it seems lonely and confined in interest. There are
times, too, sir, when the landscape oppresses me, and the constant
thought of the winter terrifies me! I must confess that I do look
forward with dread to the long months before the spring comes.” And
her lips and her hands trembled a little as she spoke.
“A brilliant woman in a dull place!” smiled the old clergyman. “What
you say is most natural, and I can only admire you for the spirit with
which you have endured such a long monotony!” (“And with,” he thought,
“a difficult man!” For he did not either very much admire or very much
like Oliver Sellar.)
“Lord Vanden is away,” he added, “is he not? Or has he returned since
I was last at Lefton Park?”
“He is still in London,” said Ambrosia, “eager with plans about the
new lighthouse. Oh, how absorbed he is in that subject! I wish he had
been here to-day, to go with us to the ferry! The more of us there
are,” she added, with a smile, “the easier, I think, it will be. And
now, it is surely time that we departed? The boat is most uncertain,
and just because we are late it may be early.”
“It would be dreadful to miss them,” agreed Mr. Spragge; and Ambrosia
went upstairs and put on her mantle and her bonnet. As she tied the
strings under her chin and looked into the large, mahogany-framed
mirror, she thought of the words that the old clergyman had just
spoken: “A brilliant woman in a dull place!” That was probably the
truth; she was not beautiful, but she was graceful, elegant, polished,
charming--a creature for crowds, brilliant functions--one who could
wear clothes and jewels grandly; witty, cultured, amiable; not, by
nature, the least austere or melancholy. Well, here she was--shut up
for twenty-seven years at Sellar’s Mead, in the loneliest part of
Cornwall, in the extreme of England. Next year, in the spring, she and
Lucius would get away. Whether he wished it or not, she would take him
away! For his own sake as well as hers. It was not much of a title or
much of a fortune, but it _was_ a title and a fortune; in not so many
years she would be a countess--not a toy title from Italy, but an
English countess--and the means, meagre as they were, would be
sufficient, with her careful management, to support that splendid
pretension. She would go with Lucius to London, to Paris--perhaps to
Vienna or Florence; and she would meet people like herself--stately
and elegant women, polished and charming men. People who “did
things”--soldiers, diplomats. She would entertain herself by music,
singing, painting. She would dress with taste, if not in the extreme
of luxury. She would have a beautiful equipage and well-trained
servants. She would not often come to Lefton Park, and perhaps not
ever to Sellar’s Mead. That depended on the Countess Fanny. Why, with
this brilliant prospect before her, could she not brace herself with
more patience to endure the time of waiting? She was angry with
herself for her own despondency. Perhaps it was because Luce was away?
Why must he so frequently go away, absorbed in the lighthouse and in
his schemes for the lighthouse? It irritated his father and irritated
her; and yet he must do it. Even this special day, when she would have
liked his counsel and support, when she would very much have desired
him beside her at the ferry, when Oliver brought his foreign bride, he
must be away, consulting with engineers in London about the
lighthouse. The lighthouse was very well--of course it must be there;
and she was glad that the Earl, even out of his constrained means, had
been able to contribute so lavishly towards the cost of the
lighthouse. There was a grandeur about that gesture, even though it
meant something off her own prospective fortune. Perhaps next year the
clay-pits would pay better, and they could give even more. Ambrosia
was not mean-minded. In everything she was lavish and generous, though
so careful and thrifty in her management.
But this absorption in the thing itself--that did not please her. She
agreed entirely with the old Earl, who had said: “It is for us to pay
the money, not to build the thing.” But Luce did not think so. He was
interested in the lighthouse as a separate entity, not as a mere
splendid gesture of generosity and princely sumptuousness; something
individual--a creation, almost a personality.
Ambrosia, as she again went downstairs, was thinking that when she was
married to Luce she would break him of this obsession about the
lighthouse. They would go away, and he, perhaps for years, would never
see St. Nite’s Head or St. Nite’s Lighthouse.
The brougham was at the porticoed door, and Ambrosia ran her practised
eye over the turn-out. Very neat and faultless; nothing wrong
anywhere. She stepped inside with Mr. Spragge.
The wind was cold, and the sky deepening in its metallic grey colour.
The trees were all bent in one way under that invisible power of the
wind--bent towards the sea, for the wind was rushing up from the land.
“They will have a rough crossing!” remarked Mr. Spragge, and he began
to excuse his wife for not accompanying them on this expedition of
welcome, for, he said, she had been ill for the last two or three
days, and not able to leave the house.
Ambrosia listened with an inward impatience to these excuses. Lord
Lefton had made the same. He, too, was ill. So much illness, so much
old age and death! Ambrosia shut her eyes. She did not wish to see the
prospect from the carriage windows. Every day, now, those hills and
roads would be more and more grey, more and more bleak, the trees more
and more leafless, the fallows a deeper tint of barren russet; the
long winter ahead, with Oliver and this strange girl on her hands!
She interlaced her fingers nervously. It was cold in the brougham, and
she was shivering when they reached the ferry, where the road ended
suddenly on a dreary stretch of foreshore.
She had always disliked the ferry, which had helped to cut them off
from the outer world. The train came no nearer than Truro, and from
Truro one must take the coach to St. Lade, and at St. Lade one must
cross this wide, deep arm of sea and river mingled, and so reach the
isolation of St. Nite’s Head.
Mr. Spragge got out of the brougham and walked up and down, conversing
genially with the fishermen and others by the little platform where
the small steamer put in. Ambrosia remained in the brougham on the
smooth piece of road above the foreshore, and stared from the window
at the prospect. It seemed to her to hold neither beauty nor
tenderness. The wind was casting long fragments of ash-coloured clouds
above the ash-coloured water, which was ruffled into heavy waves. On
either side the shores were clothed with dreary pines, now a dingy
black against the vinegar colour of the hills.
“What is this restless impatience?” Ambrosia asked herself. “It is my
own country--my own place; I ought to love it! And yet, far from
loving it, I am scarcely able to tolerate it!”
She could see the boat now--a black smear in the distance, labouring
heavily under a banner of murky smoke; and her heart began to beat
with what she herself called a foolish trepidation.
“How stupid not to be able to meet a moment like this! How stupid to
be afraid of anything or anyone! No misfortune has happened, and I am
to marry Luce in the spring. Why must I be so despondent and so
foolish?”
And Ambrosia accused her long seclusion from the world for her present
nervousness. She ought to have more social ease, and if she had been
allowed to leave St. Nite’s before she would have had this social
asset. She would not have trembled before a moment like this. She
tried to forget herself and consider the feelings of the strange,
half-foreign girl being brought towards her on that distant boat.
_She_ had some excuse for nervousness, some good cause for feeling
faint and sick! What a landscape to meet her astonished eyes! What a
prospect of gloom and ashes! How cold the wind would seem, how chilly
the air! How rough the people! Even to Ambrosia the inhabitants of
Cornwall were most uncouth and crude. What would they seem to this
elegant Italian? And Oliver--how had Oliver behaved during the long
and tedious journey? Ambrosia could guess that he had been difficult.
That was her word for Oliver. In her loyalty to her brother, she used
that expression in preference to a more severe term. Oliver was
difficult, she would say; but the word meant to her a great deal more
than “difficult.” She wondered if, by now, it meant more to the
Countess Fanny.
She left the brougham as the boat put in, and, stepping daintily, came
down on to the shore of stones and mud, holding high her stiff taffeta
skirt with one hand and putting back the fluttering veil from her face
with the other.
There was hardly anyone on the boat--only a few rough fisher-people, a
farm-boy, and Oliver, and--yes--there was the girl, standing eagerly
at the rail. Not in mourning, though she had so recently lost her
parents. Ambrosia at once noted that, and was vexed with herself for
noticing, for she was not there to pick faults in this stranger. No,
not in mourning; that figure at the rail wore a green bonnet and a
striped shawl. Perceiving Ambrosia she took out a tiny handkerchief,
and waved it with a great deal of excitement. Ambrosia did not care
for that gesture, or for the excitement. For a second time she checked
herself from finding fault.
Oliver raised his hat, and bowed stiffly; Mr. Spragge bowed with the
best figure he could muster. Ambrosia was conscious of a certain
grotesqueness, almost of a certain ridiculousness, in the whole
meeting of the four of them, here on this windy, muddy foreshore, with
this dark and gloomy landscape about them, with the rough peasants and
fishermen grinning and gaping. Not a very beautiful or charming scene,
but she, Ambrosia, must plainly make the best of it, and throw what
grace she could over these unpromising circumstances.
The Countess Fanny stepped off the boat. She moved buoyantly down the
rough gangway. With sailing skirts and billowing shawl and fluttering
veil, she stepped on to the shore.
Ambrosia instantly embraced her and disliked her. Alas!