A fortnight later, Lady Fanny, having meanwhile paid a rapid visit to an
uncle's house, was again at Mrs Ravenhill's. She had flung over her
engagements in Scotland, remarking, and with reason, that until she
could get hold of Milborough, and have things started on their proper
lines, she would rather not encounter the rush of autumn country-house
gaieties. She professed herself to be occupied in the study of economy,
as although her fortune would be large, she declared that it would be
all given away except a fragmentary residue.
"I mean to shock him by my trousseau, though," she announced one morning
when she sat on the carpet in Millie's bedroom. "I shall show him just
a few of the bills, and see his face!"
Justice to Mr Elliot obliged Millie to remark that she believed he
would like Fanny to have the very best, but she was scouted.
"The best, yes, but if you knew his ideas of what the best costs! Now,
Millie, I'll be quite fair, I'll say nothing, and the next time you see
him, get out of him what he supposes would be the expense of a
wedding-dress. If his imagination conjures up a sum beyond five or six
pounds, I'll give you a silver frame for his photograph. There, is that
comfortable?" She patted Millie's ankle.
"I'm sure it's too tight. I couldn't walk."
Lady Fanny consulted a small book on her lap, and began mournfully to
unfasten a roller bandage.
"I suppose it _is_ too tight, but I really don't see why you should
expect to walk about when you're done up in strips. And that was my
best figure of eight. However, of course if you insist upon such
trifles--oh, _what_ is it, Millie? You shouldn't shriek!"
"Not with a pin running straight in? Oh!"
Lady Fanny began, with shaking fingers, to search for the offending
instrument. Found, it was discovered to have punctured a hole from
which a small drop of blood was oozing. The girls looked at each other.
Fanny got up and walked to the window. From that refuge she
remarked--"You'd better bathe it."
"Aren't you coming to assist?"
"You can manage that by yourself."
Millie laughed.
"You won't do for the hospitals yet, Fanny! There! A bit of
sticking-plaster is on, and I am quite tidy. Suppose we give up the
bandaging, and try something else?"
Lady Fanny came eagerly back.
"Yes, something else. Will you have a broken collar-bone, or shall I
take your temperature? Only--" with a sigh.
"What?"
"The thermometers do break so easily! This is my third. Please be
careful."
Millie promised. The thermometer was inserted under Millie's arm.
"Now we can talk," Lady Fanny remarked with satisfaction, stretching
herself in a basket-chair. "Oh dear, oh dear, don't you think it a
little hard that I can't get proper attention from Milborough? This
waiting is horrid."
"Oh, horrid!" Millie agreed. "But you must hear soon. I suppose the
fact is that he has been so busy since he came back, that he has not had
the time to go into it."
"Busy! Milborough busy! Little you know him. Too idle to read his
letters is more likely. But I do think he might take the trouble to
open mine."
"I wonder whether he met the Martyns?" Millie said reflectively.
"If he has, and if I know Milborough, he has fallen in love with Miss
Dalrymple." Fanny was too much concerned with meditation on her own
affairs to notice that Millie made a quick movement before she said--
"You forget--poor Mr Forbes! I do think it is so terribly sad!"
"Ah, but I did not say that Miss Dalrymple had fallen in love. No, no,
I think better of her. Even if she had not--but she must have cared!
She would never have let him join them after all that had happened,
unless she had intended to marry him. Her face is not like one of those
horrid girls who lead men on just to throw them over. No, Millie. If
you and Mr Wareham thought that of her, you were both shamefully
unjust."
"He did not think so." She spoke with difficulty. "Fanny, I don't
think you understand. _He_ would never blame Miss Dalrymple."
A string of undecided questions ran through Lady Fanny's mind, quick as
lightning. "Shall I? Shan't I?" She gave way, and inquired
carelessly--
"Do you mean to tell me, seriously, that Mr Wareham was smitten?"
"Yes. The more I look back the more I think so."
Millie spoke in a low voice. Her friend jumped up and kissed her.
"Goose!" A cry followed. "Good gracious! Millie! The thermometer!"
"Safe, safe, where you put it."
"Oh, you're a dear. You're made to be experimented upon. Now let us
see."
With heads close together, hair mingling, and the thermometer on a table
before them as if it were something which would go off if meddled with,
it was studied. First Millie said she could see nothing. Turned
delicately, a thread-like line revealed itself.
"Normal is 98 degrees--about."
"This looks like degrees!"
"Then you must be very ill."
Lady Fanny turned a tragic face upon her friend, and Millie shuddered
with a feeling of preliminary collapse. The practical instincts of her
mother, however, came to her rescue.
"What was it when you began?"
"That!" Fanny pointed mournfully.
"It hasn't moved?"
"It never does!"
Suspicion began to twinkle in Millie's eyes.
"Which end do you put in?"
Fanny pointed again, this time with dawning hesitation.
"And the other is the bulb! Oh-h-h!" They fell upon each other, as
young creatures do, with bubbling laughter. Fanny screwed up her
thermometer vindictively, and tossed it into a basket; then, to get out
of the reach of Millie's mockery, skilfully turned the conversation to
the point from which it had broken away. She produced Lord Milborough's
letter, and, for the twentieth time, took opinion upon its
meaning--"Dear Fan--Don't be a baby. I'll write by and by,"--on her
dignity as to the baby, and perplexed by being, as it were, set on the
shelf, at a moment which for a woman is the one moment to which all time
has been leading up.
"It is so strange, so strange!" she repeated. "A whole week ago!"
Millie, turned to sympathy at once by the droop of the mobile mouth,
uttered her consolations.
"Dear, you couldn't expect him to like it _very_ much, and perhaps it is
better he should not write at once. Now he will have time to think it
over, and be sensible."
"John has had no answer either, for I told him to telegraph." She
released herself from Millie, and sat up, fun sparkling in her eyes.
"Though I knew that was asking too much. If I'd been an old woman to be
got into a hospital now! But just for ourselves--oh, the extravagance
of it!--he couldn't, he couldn't, he couldn't! So perhaps Milborough's
had the decency to write to him."
"And, anyway, you'll be your own mistress in a year."
"Yes." She made a face. "A whole year! Besides, I want Milborough to
be nice. And here he leaves me, not even telling me when he is to be at
Thorpe again, or whether I'm to ask any one, or--I tell you what,
Millie, perhaps we can see something in the _World_. I'll run
down-stairs and get it."
The _World_ gave the required information. Lord Milborough's name
figured in a list of visitors at a big Yorkshire country-house. There,
it also appeared, were to be found Lady and Miss Dalrymple; and after
the girls' surmises, the names had a certain significance.
"He has actually left the yacht! There is something, I am certain there
is something! At another time I should write and ask him," cried Lady
Fanny. "Now, where is Mr Wareham?"
His movements were not recorded.
"Not there, at any rate. Millie, I told you you were a goose. But I
have no patience with Miss Dalrymple! That poor man just dead, and here
she is, amusing herself. Oh, yes, that explains! I know Milborough.
But how can she turn from one to the other? Tell me quickly, Millie, is
she the girl to marry him just for the position? Because--a marriage
without love--I never before knew how horrible it must be! And poor
Milborough, he isn't very good, I know, but I do hope he will never have
that fate." Millie felt faithless to her friend--cruel--for the glad
throb in her heart, and the instantaneous wish to extol Miss Dalrymple.
She briskly argued that with the choice which lay before her, there was
not the temptation to snatch at this world's prizes which might beset an
older or less beautiful woman. Besides--she smoothed over the fact of
their being in the same house as possibly a mere coincidence. Fanny
listened, shrewd enough to see something of the forces which pulled her
friend's reasons, and set the active puppets dancing, yet with her
imagination captivated, as it had been all along, by dreams of Anne
Dalrymple.
Elsewhere the notice in the _World_ was remarked and commented upon.
Wareham was still at Firleigh, with old Sir Michael. There he had taken
Hugh, and there the young heir was laid by the side of old forefathers,
youth stepping in to sleep between them as quietly as they. For
centuries Forbes' had lived and died there; they lay, cross-legged and
mailed, in niches; knelt stiffly on brasses, with children in graduated
rows behind; their names stared down from marble tablets, vaults held
them closely; a few, Hugh's young mother one, had prayed to be laid
under the daisied grass of the churchyard, where the larks sang, and
showers and sunshine fell. Wareham often thought of it as the most
peaceful place he knew.
The Hall itself had suffered many transformations. It stood, as always,
in a cup of land, sheltered by ground and trees, but the demon of damp
had only been exorcised by late generations at the cost of architectural
beauty, and instead of the fine old red stone house, up rose a solid,
substantial square. On one side a terrace flanked it, while the garden
was out of sight of the windows, lying behind, and a little higher than
the house. Through it the family passed to church, always on foot, for
weddings and funerals alike; through it, with the summer flowers massed
in gorgeous colour all round, Hugh was carried, three white wreaths
lying on his breast, and Sir Michael watching from a bedroom window.
The old man was very ill, so ill that they all knew there would be a
second, what--from the ancient custom--the people round Firleigh called
"carrying," before long. But his spirit was still masterful, and his
fingers clasped the reins he could not use. He was keen that Wareham
should stay.
"When you're gone, I shall think of twenty questions I had to ask," he
said. "There's no one but you, Dick, to answer them. Your room's
always kept for you. What d'ye want? Paper, ink, books? Miles will
order down anything. And you'll never need to come again. Stop two or
three weeks, till--till it doesn't all seem so raw."
Of course Wareham stopped.
A sister of Sir Michael's was there, a kindly woman, but a little
precise, and Ella, Hugh's only sister, a girl who required to be
well-known before you could even in thought extract her from a crowd of
other girls. Anything distinctive she appeared to shun. Hugh she
adored, and Wareham admired the self-command which crushed back outward
manifestations of grief, but it made conversation difficult, since one
subject was uppermost in their hearts, and that Ella shrank from, as
from a touch on a wound. Sir Michael tolerated no other. Wareham sat
for hours in the window, the old man in a great chair by the fire, for
fire was necessary for his chilled blood; long silences between them,
then perhaps a dozen questions strung on end, each harping on the same
note. Miss Dalrymple's name was like a match to powder.
"She's the cause," Sir Michael would violently burst out. "Without that
woman, Hugh would have been living still. She should be branded as a
jilt. Mark you, Dick, so sure as there's a God above, it'll come home
to her one of these days. I shan't forget my poor boy when he came down
to tell his old dad that he'd got her to say she'd marry him. I heard
him on the stairs. Up he came, three at a time, and into my room with a
whoop." He rambled away into details, where failing memory lost itself
as bewilderingly as a traveller in a wood. But he never let go his
clutch upon Anne's sin. Wareham, whose heart smarted to hear her
blamed, tried in vain to soften judgment.
"Remember, sir, that if she had made a mistake, she went the best way to
mend it."
"Mistake? What mistake?"
"That of supposing she loved Hugh well enough to marry him."
Sir Michael smote his thigh weakly.
"She would have, if she'd had a heart as big as a pea. Do you tell me
he wasn't the boy to make a girl love him? Why, there wasn't man,
woman, or child could stand out against Hugh when he set himself to win
them. A heartless jade, Dick, a heartless jade!"
Wareham eyed the carpet with a frown. Sir Michael's anger was
unreasonable, because based on imperfect knowledge, and its daily
repetition irritated him. One argument, and one only, sometimes availed
to check it.
"He loved her to the last, sir. It would have cut him to the quick to
think you hadn't forgiven her."
The old man covered his face with his hand.
"That was the boy all over. He had his mother's kindly nature, sweet as
sunshine. Never bore a grudge. If he and his cousin fell out and
fought, Hugh would lend him his pony an hour afterwards, without a
backward thought at his bruises. However badly she'd treated him, he'd
have smoothed it over to you. Would she have married him?"
"He thought so."
"Ay, ay, he would make the best of it. But what did you think, Dick?"
The question he had never yet been able to answer. He muttered
something to the effect that principals knew best in such a matter. It
seemed to him likely.
"Wrong, sir, wrong. Hugh has told me one thing, and you another, and my
own sense, if it isn't what it was, may be trusted for the rest. She's
one of those creatures that like to keep men dangling round them. Tell
you what, Dick. When you write a book about them, call it _The World's
Curse_."
When Wareham read the notice in the _World_, he tried to persuade
himself that it was with an indifferently critical eye. If Anne could
turn so swiftly from one to the other--let her! He even smiled over it,
acknowledging the aptness of the possible marriage. If love were out of
the question, as well one man or the other, the betterness consisted in
the income, and he mentally took off his hat, and stepped aside. His
persuasions, however, were open for his heart to argue with. Lord
Milborough might love, but women such as Anne do not invariably carry
out what the worlds judgment insists must be their action; the Anne he
believed himself to have discovered was too complex to be counted upon.
His heart wandered in meadows where hope sprang and budded, for if she
held a thought of him, she would not be unfaithful to it, and in a few
weeks' time his lips would be unsealed. Free to love her--free to woo.
Wareham's blood leapt at the thought! Hitherto he had never seen her
except in bonds, in fetters; a passion of wild words flew to his lips at
the bare dream of permitted speech. Once he caught himself muttering,
"I love you, I love you!" when Sir Michael was uttering his usual tirade
against her, and something hasty which he uttered in defence gave the
old man a suspicion. He thundered out--
"You're not playing the fool too, Dick?" Wareham pulled himself
together.
"I hope not, but if you saw her, you'd understand her charm."
"Saw her? Don't let her come here. I couldn't trust myself. D'ye
hear?"
There was difficulty in soothing him, and his suspicion died in the
greater disturbance.
Two or three large estates covered the neighbourhood, so that of actual
neighbours Firleigh had not many. The houses had shooting-parties
filling them, with whom the Forbes' in their trouble had, of course,
nothing to do; the ladies of the houses drove over to see Ella, who
escaped from them as much as she could, clinging to solitude.
Wareham used to take a gun and a dog and go across the fields, more by
way of pleasing his host, who believed that here was enjoyment, than
because he cared about it himself. He was not in the mood for sport;
what, however, he did like was the rich ripeness of the time, the filmy
cobwebs glittering on the grass, the pale yellow of the reaped
corn-fields against the earth-brown. To sit on a log, and let fancy
weave other cobwebs, blue and white smiling down upon him from above,
had its pleasantness, and, what was more, its peace. Report of the
birds he brought back did not satisfy Sir Michael, who was always
wanting to bribe him into staying by the best inducements he could
offer.
"We must get Dick a day with Ormsleigh," he said to his daughter, one
day. "Pottering about here is miserable work for a young man. He'll be
off before we can look round."
"Catherine will be here to-day. I'll tell her what you wish, father."
"Ay, do. Catherine, now," he muttered. "There would have been a girl!"
Ella vanished.
The invitation came. Wareham would have refused, but that he saw old
Sir Michael had set his heart upon the matter, for Lord Ormsleigh's
shooting was the best in the county.
"I'll go," he said to Ella, "since your father won't believe that I like
sport better as an excuse than a pursuit."
"Dear old dad! His imagination is not strong enough to conceive that
any one can find enjoyment except in the ways he liked himself."
She had overtaken him as he was strolling home across the park. Ella
had been to the village, and had just turned in from the road, which at
this point sank into a cutting, so as to be out of view of the house.
They walked slowly, now and then standing still to look at an opening
between the trees, revealing blue depths. For a woman, Ella was tall,
and carried herself uprightly. Looking at her, you gathered an
impression of force in reserve. To the outer world she was cold.
Wareham knew her better, a medium intellect, but a strong true heart.
He saw now that she had something to say, and waited. She said it as
they stood still.
"Dick,"--she turned and faced him, breathing hard--"let me hear about
Miss Dalrymple."
"I expected you to ask."
"And I couldn't before. I've been afraid."
"Of what?"
"That I might not be able to go in and out to father without distressing
him. I've been keeping everything back, pressing it down with a leaden
weight. There, that will do. Don't let us talk about myself, but--tell
me--how was it between them? Would she have married him?"
He had to fall back again on the same answer.
"He thought so."
"And you thought not? I see it in your face."
"Then my face lies, for I cannot tell. Remember, I did not even see
them together. A woman might have got to the bottom of it all, but I
felt myself hopelessly floundering on the surface. He was content,
isn't that enough for you to remember?"
Her eyes met his gravely.
"Don't think that I am like father in blaming her," she said. "I
believe I understand. And I am glad that Hugh was spared suffering, for
he loved her with all his heart, and she would not have married him."
Wareham looked at her in surprise. Just then they heard steps and men's
voices coming along the hidden road: here and there a detached word or
two reached their ears. Was it a trick of fancy which made two of these
words sound like "Miss Dalrymple"? As the tramp died away, he looked at
Ella, and lifted his eyebrows inquiringly.
"Lord Ormsleigh's party going home from shooting," she said. "They
sometimes cut across by the road when they have been at Langham."
"Did you hear a name?"
"No."
"I could have sworn that one of them spoke of Miss Dalrymple."
"That is very unlikely. More probably she was in your thoughts just
then."
He felt guiltily conscious that she was seldom long out of them. But
whether his companion had heard or missed it, the more he thought about
it the more positive he felt that those were no phantom words which had
crossed his hearing. What should have brought her name into the men's
mouths? Common-sense, which sometimes becomes a very imp of mockery,
burst out laughing in his face. Why not, as well as any other name? In
these days, beauties unseen and untalked about hardly count as such,
fierce lights beat everywhere, tongues discuss familiarly, a serenade is
not the gentle tribute of one lover for one ear, but a whole band,
drums, trumpets, waking the silence, banging, flaring, calling all men
to listen. He had to own this, for he had often moralised upon it. But
to feel and to moralise are different conditions, and he resented that
careless twitter of Anne's name in the road.