If Harry Lewin had never come to Stoke Peveril, Edie Meredith would
certainly have married her cousin Evan.
For Evan Meredith was the sort of man that any girl of Edie's
temperament might very easily fall in love with. Tall, handsome, with
delicate, clear-cut Celtic face, piercing yet pensive black Welsh eyes,
and the true Cymric gifts of music and poetry, Evan Meredith had long
been his pretty cousin's prime favourite among all the young men of all
Herefordshire. She had danced with him over and over again at every
county ball; she had talked with him incessantly at every lawn-tennis
match and garden-party; she had whispered to him quietly on the sofa in
the far corner while distinguished amateurs were hammering away
conscientiously at the grand piano; and all the world of Herefordshire
took it for granted that young Mr. Meredith and his second cousin were,
in the delightfully vague slang of society, "almost engaged."
Suddenly, like a flaming meteor across the quiet evening skies, Harry
Lewin burst in all his dashing splendour upon the peaceful and limited
Herefordshire horizon. He came from that land of golden possibilities,
Australia; but he was Irish by descent, and his father had sent him
young to Eton and Oxford, where he picked up the acquaintance of
everybody worth knowing, and a sufficient knowledge of things in general
to pass with brilliant success in English society. In his vacations,
having no home of his own to go to, he had loitered about half the
capitals and spas of Europe, so that Vichy and Carlsbad, Monte Carlo and
Spezzia, Berlin and St. Petersburg, were almost as familiar to him as
London and Scarborough. Nobody knew exactly what his father had been:
some said a convict, some a gold-miner, some a bush-ranger; but whatever
he was, he was at least exceedingly rich, and money covers a multitude
of sins quite as well and as effectually as charity. When Harry Lewin
came into his splendid property at his father's death, and purchased the
insolvent Lord Tintern's old estate at Stoke Peveril, half the girls and
all the mothers in the whole of Herefordshire rose at once to a fever of
anxiety in their desire to know upon which of the marriageable young
women of the county the wealthy new-comer would finally bestow himself
in holy matrimony.
There was only one girl in the Stoke district who never appeared in the
slightest degree flattered or fluttered by Harry Lewin's polite
attentions, and that girl was Edie Meredith. Though she was only the
country doctor's daughter--"hardly in our set at all, you know," the
county people said depreciatingly--she had no desire to be the mistress
of Peveril Court, and she let Harry Lewin see pretty clearly that she
didn't care the least in the world for that distinguished honour.
It was at a garden party at Stoke Peveril Rectory that Edie Meredith met
one afternoon her cousin Evan and the rich young Irish-Australian. Harry
Lewin had stood talking to her with his easy jaunty manner, so perfectly
self-possessed, so full of Irish courtesy and Etonian readiness, when
Evan Meredith, watching them half angrily out of his dark Welsh eyes
from the corner by the laburnum tree, walked slowly over to interrupt
their _tete-a-tete_ of set purpose. He chose certainly an awkward
moment: for his earnest serious face and figure showed to ill advantage
just then and there beside the light-hearted cheery young Oxonian's.
Edie fancied as he strolled up to her that she had never seen her cousin
Evan look so awkward, so countrified, and so awfully Welsh. (On the
border counties, to look like a Welshman is of course almost criminal.)
She wondered she had overlooked till now the fact that his was
distinctly a local and rustic sort of handsomeness. He looked like a
Herefordshire squireen gentleman, while Harry Lewin, with his Irish
chivalry and his Oxford confidence, looked like a cosmopolitan and a man
of society.
As Evan came up, glancing blackly at him from under his dark eyebrows,
Harry Lewin moved away carelessly, raising his hat and strolling off as
if quite unconcerned, to make way for the new-comer. Evan nodded to him
a distant nod, and then turned to his cousin Edie.
"You've been talking a great deal with that fellow Lewin," he said
sharply, almost angrily, glancing straight at her with his big black
eyes.
Edie was annoyed at the apparent assumption of a right to criticise her.
"Mr. Lewin's a very agreeable man," she answered quietly, without taking
the least notice of his angry tone. "I always like to have a chat with
him, Evan. He's been everywhere and knows all about everything--Paris
and Vienna, and I don't know where. So very different, of course, from
our Stoke young men, who've never been anywhere in their whole lives
beyond Bristol or Hereford."
"Bristol and Hereford are much better places, I've no doubt, for a man
to be brought up in than Paris or Vienna," Evan Meredith retorted
hastily, the hot blood flushing up at once into his dusky cheek. "But as
you seem to be so very much taken up with your new admirer, Edie, I'm
sure I'm very sorry I happened at such an unpropitious moment to break
in upon your conversation."
"So am I," Edie answered, quietly and with emphasis.
She hardly meant it, though she was vexed with Evan; but Evan took her
immediately at her word. Without another syllable he raised his hat,
turned upon his heel, and left her standing there alone, at some little
distance from her mother, by the edge of the oval grass-plot. It was an
awkward position for a girl to be left in--for everybody would have seen
that Evan had retired in high dudgeon--had not Harry Lewin promptly
perceived it, and with quiet tact managed to return quite casually to
her side, and walk back with her to her mother's protection, so as to
hide at once her confusion and her blushes. As for Evan, he wandered off
moodily by himself among the lilacs and arbutus bushes of the lower
shrubbery.
He had been pacing up and down there alone for half an hour or more,
nursing his wrath and jealousy in his angry heart, when he saw between
the lilac branches on the upper walk the flash of Edie's pretty white
dress, followed behind at a discreet distance by the rustle of Mrs.
Meredith's black satin. Edie was walking in front with Harry Lewin, and
Mrs. Meredith, attempting vainly to affect a becoming interest in the
rector's conversation, was doing the proprieties at twenty paces.
As they passed, Evan Meredith heard Harry Lewin's voice murmuring
something in a soft, gentle, persuasive flow, not a word of which he
could catch individually, though the general accent and intonation
showed him at once that Harry was pleading earnestly with his cousin
Edie. Evan could have written her verses--pretty enough verses, too--by
the foolscap ream; but though he had the Welsh gift of rhyme, he hadn't
the Irish gift of fluency and eloquence; and he knew in his own heart
that he could never have poured forth to any woman such a steady, long,
impassioned flood of earnest solicitation as Harry Lewin was that
moment evidently pouring forth to his cousin Edie. He held his breath in
silent expectation, and waited ten whole endless seconds--a long
eternity--to catch the tone of Edie's answer.
Instead of the mere tone, he caught distinctly the very words of that
low soft musical reply. Edie murmured after a slight pause: "No, no, Mr.
Lewin, I must not--I cannot. I do not love you."
Evan Meredith waited for no more. He knew partly from that short but
ominous pause, and still more from the half-hearted, hesitating way in
which the nominal refusal was faintly spoken, that his cousin Edie would
sooner or later accept his rival. He walked away, fiercely indignant,
and going home, sat down to his desk, and wrote at white-heat an angry
letter, beginning simply "Edith Meredith," in which he released her
formally and unconditionally from the engagement which both of them
declared had never existed.
Whether his letter expedited Harry Lewin's wooing or not, it is at least
certain that in the end Evan Meredith's judgment was approved by the
result; and before the next Christmas came round again, Edie was married
to Harry Lewin, and duly installed as mistress of Peveril Court.