SIR MALCOLM LOFTDALE.
Meg had more than once explored the house and the grounds. She had performed the pilgrimage under the expansive wing of Mrs. Jarvis; she had wandered alone over the mansion and rambled through the park, feeling delight in the old-world charm of the place. The touch of tragic mystery brought into the atmosphere by the picture on which a ban had been laid now added to the spell of its fascination. The lofty rooms, with somber gilt or painted ceilings; the faded tapestries and brocaded hangings; the dusky tones of the furniture, upon which the sunbeams fell with an antique glow, appeared to her steeped in the mystery of associations. Every room seemed a chapter in an unknown story, the thought of which kindled her fancy. The park, with its lengthening vistas, its sylvan retreats, and patriarchal trees, a branch of the silver river sweeping through its stately alleys; the stretches of lawns, the flower-gardens, the glass structures in which bloomed a tropical vegetation, enchanted her.
It was like living in a picture, she thought, to live amid such peaceful, beautiful, finely ordered surroundings, whose past haunted them like a presence. After the crude and noisy bustle of immature possibilities to which she was accustomed, the wearied splendors of this domain came to her as a revelation of novel possibilities in the setting of life.
A week had elapsed, Meg had almost grown accustomed to the place, and yet she had not seen its owner. She had at first begun every morning by asking Mrs. Jarvis if there was a probability of her seeing Sir Malcolm Loftdale during the course of the day, but the housekeeper on each occasion had given an evasive answer, and Meg now asked no more. She might have felt wounded at this breach of hospitality had not the behavior of the servants precluded all idea of a slight being offered to her. They paid her obsequious attention, they obeyed her slightest expressed wish. She might have imagined herself the queen of the domain. The solitude, the homage paid to her, the regard for her comfort, reminded her of a fairy tale where the host remains unseen and the heroine lives in splendor and isolation. She wondered often why her benefactor kept himself thus sternly secluded. She began to think it could not be the old gentleman she had seen in her childhood; why should he avoid her? If it were a stranger was it because of some unsightly physical affliction, some form of mental derangement? was it a brooding melancholy that caused him morbidly to shrink from contact with outsiders? A longing to be of comfort mingled with the curiosity she felt concerning her mysterious host.
One late afternoon as she rambled in the park she saw, framed in by trees as in a picture, the figure of a tall, slender, white-haired gentleman walking toward her. She recognized him at once. It was the mysterious stranger, twice met in her childhood. He held his head high. What a head it was! There was an eagle cast of physiognomy, a chill expression in the eyes, a hardness on the lips. He wore a country suit and carried a heavy gold-headed stick; a diamond stud on a jeweled seal caught the light and shone. These little details curiously impressed themselves upon Meg. She stopped, asking herself if this was the master of the house?
The stranger glanced toward her, lifted his hat, and with an old-world salute passed on. Meg determined not to look after him; but she could not resist the temptation, and turning round she saw him ascending the steps of the house. On questioning the housekeeper, Meg found that the picturesque old gentleman was Sir Malcolm Loftdale.
Next morning Meg was standing arranging some flowers in the window of the little room she had chosen for her morning retreat—it looked out on a pleasant side alley of the grounds in the center of which stood a sun dial—when the door suddenly opened, and the gentleman she had seen in the park on the previous evening entered unannounced. He did not advance beyond the threshold, but he closed the door after him and kept one hand on the handle. He did not extend the other in greeting.
At sight of him Meg's heart fluttered, and she acknowledged by a flurried inclination of her head his stately bow.
He was handsomer than she had imagined him to be; but the light of his stern blue eye remained cold, and there was a remoteness in the steady glance that he fixed upon her.
"I beg you, Miss Beecham, to excuse me for not having welcomed you before," he said in a voice of cold courtesy. "I trust you will forgive me for exercising a privilege age is apt freely to indulge near youth—that of following the usual routine of life. I am a solitary, my life is organized for loneliness."
"You have been most kind, sir," muttered Meg, in a tumult of timidity.
"My servants have received strict orders to attend to your comfort. I hope they have been attentive?"
"They have been very attentive," replied Meg.
"I fear the days may seem to drag heavily for you, Miss Beecham," the old gentleman resumed, without a shadow of softening in the coldness of his voice or the scrutiny of his glance. "I have thought—to relieve their tedium—that you might like a horse. I will have one broken for your use. There are pretty rides about."
"I do not know how to ride, sir," said Meg, touched and bewildered by the thoughtfulness and repellent manner of her host.
"My old groom would teach you; he is a most trustworthy and respectable man," said Sir Malcolm.
"Thank you sir," said Meg. Then with desperate courage, as her benefactor seemed about to retire, she added breathlessly: "I should not feel lonely, sir—not—if you would let me be with you a little—if you would let me read for you, or do something for you. You have been so good to me all those years."
The old gentleman bowed hastily; the expression of his cold glance seemed to grow colder as he replied: "I assure you, Miss Beecham, you need feel yourself under no obligation to me for what I have done. It is very little."
"Little! It was everything to me!" said Meg hurriedly, her voice trembling with restrained emotion. "You twice saved me from a wretched fate. But for you, sir, as you told me on that evening you took me back to school, I would have been as uncared for as a workhouse child."
"I wish, if you will allow me distinctly to state my wishes, that allusion to the past be dropped between us. I can repeat only that you are under no obligation," replied her host, his thin lips remaining tense in their cruel firmness of line, his glance courteously repellent. "When the case was pointed out to me it became my plain duty to do what I did."
"I do not understand; I only know that if you had not been good to me I should have been ignorant and homeless," answered Meg with reckless iteration.
There was a pause, Sir Malcolm frowned, then he said with the same impassible frigidity:
"If you choose, Miss Beecham, to consider that you are under a debt of gratitude to me, allow me to say that you will express it in the manner most agreeable to me by never referring to the subject."
Bowing once more with that impassible fineness of mien, the old gentleman opened the door and disappeared.
Meg felt crushed as by some physical blow. The gratitude that she had harbored in her heart till it was filled to bursting all those years was thrown back upon it, and the pain stifled her. She realized her loneliness as she never had realized it before. She wandered blindly out into the park, and for the first time, in the heart of nature, she felt like an outcast. She rebelled against the isolation to which her benefactor would condemn her. It felt like an insult.
To be grateful to those who are good to us is a sacred right. He had no authority to take from her this God-given privilege. After awhile she grew calmer, but a melancholy fell over her such as she had never known.
Day succeeded day, and the intercourse between Meg and her host remained but little changed. She watched him curiously whenever she had the opportunity. She came to know his habits. A young man was closeted with him for some hours every morning. Mrs. Jarvis told Meg he was Sir Malcolm's secretary, and read the papers to him, as the baronet's eyesight was beginning to fail. He had lodgings in the village.
Sir Malcolm rode out alone, walked alone, took his meals alone, spent his evenings alone. Occasionally some elderly country squires called at the house; but there was apparently no intimacy between the baronet and his neighbors. Meg often watched her host wandering about the park; there was an alley he haunted. As he paced backward and forward, his hands behind his back, his tall figure, slender almost to gauntness, clothed in the somewhat old-fashioned costume he affected, his white hair shining like spun glass about his pale, high-featured face, she thought he looked like a ghost which had stepped down out of one of the pictures. Little by little she grew to feel an intense interest in that stately specter.
Whenever they met Sir Malcolm was courteous and cold. Sometimes he passed her by with that old-world salute; oftener he stopped to inquire after her comfort, to offer with distant interest suggestions for her amusement. He recommended her books to read; he once pointed out to her the parts of the house to which historical interest was attached.
He attracted and repelled Meg. She was always in a fright when she was near him. His glance withered every impulse to pass the distance he imposed between them. A chill air seemed around him, as might be round an iceberg. The look of power on his face, the suggestion his appearance gave of a strong, self-contained personality, possessed for her the same sort of fascination as the flash and iridescence of an iceberg that will not melt. The interest Meg felt for her host kept pace with her fear. She always connected that picture turned to the wall with his history and his character. There it was always in presence, and yet under apparently some black disgrace.
Away from Sir Malcolm, she would indulge a zeal to win his regard, to conquer it. Watching his solitary pacings to and fro, a pity would fill her heart for the lonely man who had been so good to her. In his presence came the chill, checking every expression of emotion. Sometimes when she met his glance she fancied her benefactor disliked her.
The sadness deepened upon Meg—the sadness of a sensitive nature condemned to isolation. The inaction of her days wearied her. She looked back with a touch of nostalgia on the busy schooldays, and mourned anew for Elsie, who had allowed her to give love. Meg's pride also rebelled against eating the bread of idleness under her benefactor's roof: that gentle independence had grown a sort of second nature with her.
One morning she was aware of a certain flurry through the house. Mrs. Jarvis told her that Sir Malcolm's secretary had been called away suddenly to London on important family business, and that the master was left with his papers alone.
Meg received the information in silence. For a few moments after the housekeeper left she stood still, thinking. Once or twice she walked to the room and came back irresolute. She at last went determinedly out of the room and made her way to the library, where Sir Malcolm spent the greater part of his time indoors.
She knocked, but scarcely waited for permission to open the door. Walking swiftly in before he could recognize her, she stood by Sir Malcolm's chair.
"I have come to ask if I may read to you, sir, in the absence of Mr. Robinson?" she said in the smooth, quick voice of mastered timidity.
He looked up surprised, and rose.
"I could not accept it of you," he said with a bow.
"Why not?" she asked with breathless gentleness.
"Did Mrs. Jarvis suggest to you to come?" he said with a quick frown, an evidence of irritation he suppressed at once.
"No," said Meg. "I heard Mr. Robinson had left, and I hoped that you would let me take his place."
"That would be impossible. I would not lay such a tax upon any lady," he said with courteous definiteness of accent and manner.
"Why will you not let me read to you?" asked Meg pleadingly.
"Because," he answered, with an attempt at lightness of tone that did not yet take from its distance and firmness, "young ladies do not care for politics, and politics alone interest me."
"They would interest me if I read them for you," said Meg with timid persistence.
"Allow me to beg you to put into the balance against this plea the argument that it would be disagreeable to me," Sir Malcolm replied, with a directness the brutality of which was veiled by the stately tone of dismissal in his voice and manner. "And the spirit that impelled you to undertake the task would make it all the more painful."
As Meg did not answer he continued:
"Excuse the frankness of my refusal. I thank you, nevertheless, for the offer."
He glanced toward the door, and as she moved away he advanced to open it for her; but Meg paused on her way. Her spirit was up; the fear that hitherto had quelled her before him fell from her. She had grown suddenly irritated at his invincible coldness. She would expose herself to no more rebuffs.
"May I ask you, sir, to be so kind as to spare me a moment? I have a request to make."
"Certainly," he replied, turning back; he sat down and pointed to a chair near his. But Meg remained standing.
Embarrassment, resolution kept her motionless with a touch of angular rigidity in her pose. Her voice, unsteady at first, grew more controlled as she went on:
"Before leaving school I had an offer of a situation as governess to three young children. You were kind enough, sir, to ask me on a visit. I thank you for the hospitality you have shown me. I think my visit must now come to an end. With your permission I shall inquire if the place is still vacant, and take it if it be."
"Why do you want to go, Miss Beecham?" said Sir Malcolm. "Are you not comfortable here?"
"Comfortable, yes," said Meg. She paused as if hesitating, then she added brusquely, "I do not think I care much for comfort."
There was something primitive, almost childish, in Meg's manner; but it gave the impression of the strength rather than of the weakness of childhood. It came with a freshness that was as the scent of the flower rather than that of the toilet perfume.
Meg's mood seemed to pique the old gentleman; he looked curiously at her, almost as if for the first time he recognized in her an individuality.
"You do not care for comfort. That is a great source of independence," he observed.
"I wish to be independent," said Meg with gentle spirit.
"You are proud. It is a spirit that should be repressed," he answered.
"I do not know if I am proud," replied Meg, her low, feeling voice under evident restraint. "I know it pains me to be here receiving everything, giving nothing in return."
"What could you give?" he asked with a slight contraction of his hard lips.
"I could give proofs of what I feel—gratitude," she said.
"I have explained I do not want gratitude," he replied with chill distinctness. "I do not either wish to receive it or to inspire it."
"You cannot help my feeling it," Meg broke out with spirit and with a vivid glance; "that is beyond your control. You may condemn me to silence and to apparent apathy, but the gratitude is here all the same; and because I cannot express it, it becomes a burden and hurts me."
There was a pause, during which Sir Malcolm continued to look at Meg with that new look of curiosity, as if for the first time he recognized her as a personality.
"Am I to understand," he said slowly, "that you wish to leave my house because I do not care for any allusion to be made between us of the part I have taken in defraying the cost of your education?"
Meg made a quick gesture. "Because you will let me do nothing for you, and also because I want to be independent. I would never wish to leave you if I could be of service to you—never; but as you will not let me, I ask you to let me go and earn my own living."
Sir Malcolm bowed his head. "I understand; you do not wish to be dependent upon me for your maintenance."
"No, sir."
"Suppose," resumed her host after a pause, "I were to feel disposed to accept the offer you just now made to me, to replace Mr. Robinson during his absence, would you allow me to do so?"
Meg gave an exclamation of acceptance.
Meg reads the morning papers to Sir Malcolm.—Page 255.
"Understand me," said the old man with deliberate distinctness, looking full at Meg. "It is a business proposal. I still maintain my point. I do not want gratitude. If I accept your services, it is on the condition that you will accept a remuneration."
Meg colored. For a moment she knit her brows, then she said with effort, "I shall accept the chance of being of service to you under any condition, sir, that you may name."
"So be it, then," said the baronet.
At a sign from him Meg sat down and took up the Times. "Where shall I begin, sir?" she asked.
"With the first leader, if you please," he replied with an inclination of the head, crossing his knees, and composing himself to listen.
Meg read, mastering her nervousness with a strong effort of will. Once or twice she looked up and caught his eyes fixed upon her, with that new curiosity in their glance that seemed to humanize their expression.
After she had read the Times, the political leaders of the Standard, and selections from its foreign correspondence under Sir Malcolm's directions, a third paper remained—the local organ apparently—the Greywolds Mercury. At the murmured injunction of her auditor, "The leader, if you please," Meg once more set upon her task.
The article handled a book upon the rights of property which had lately appeared and was making a stir. As Meg read the opening paragraph her voice faltered and hesitated. She was reading a fierce attack upon Sir Malcolm Loftdale.
She looked up distressed and flurried. The old man set his jaw. "Go on," he said, and Meg continued. She could scarcely follow the drift of what she read for sympathy with the pain she was inflicting upon her benefactor. She confusedly gathered that Sir Malcolm had raised rents in order to get rid of certain tenants on his estate; that the compensation he gave his ejected cottagers might appear to justify the proceeding, which nevertheless remained in the eyes of the writer of the article an infamous cruelty.
"I think this will suffice for to-day, Miss Beecham," said the baronet, when she had read to the end.
She rose as he spoke. She noticed he looked paler. "Is there no letter, sir, that I can write for you?" asked Meg.
"None this morning, I thank you," he replied with that fine air of dismissal which awed Meg. He preceded her to the door, and held it open for her to pass out.