The Rock Ahead: A Novel. (Vol. 2)

by Edmund Yates

THE ROCK AHEAD.

[BOOK THE SECOND.]
(Continued.)

[CHAPTER IV.]

Pursuit.

The clearance effected under the superintendence of the Office of Works, for the amalgamation under one roof of the various Courts of Law, has carried away a large portion of Clement's Inn, and has obliterated the pillared entrance to that dusky but genial home of the shady and impecunious. In the days of our story, however, Inn and entrance were still there; the former tenanted by human sheep of various degrees of blackness--roistering government-office clerks, with the Insolvent Court--which at the outset of their career had been but a light cloud as small as a man's hand, but which year by year had assumed larger and more definite proportions--ever lowering over them; third-rate attorneys, who combined law with discount, "doing" little bills for ten and twenty pounds with the aforenamed government clerks, and carefully putting in an appearance at Somerset House on pay-days to receive their money, or the refresher which was to induce the withholding of the document--it is always "a document"--until another quarter had elapsed; agents for companies of all kinds of limited and unlimited liability; newspaper writers obliged to have cheap chambers in the neighbourhood of their offices; foreigners representing continental firms, and wanting a cheap and quasi-respectable address; an actor or two, a score of needy men-about-town, and a few Jews. Round the pillars seethed and bubbled a scum of humanity of the nastiest kind--vendors of the fried fish and the pickled whelk, boot-blackers of abnormally horrid appearance: and emaciated children from the neighbouring Clare Market and the adjoining courts, thieves and impostors from their infancy, hung about the cab-rank, and added to the general filth and squalor. A pleasant Slough of Despond, that little spot, now standing bare and cleared, surrounded by the balmy Holywell, the virtuous Wych, with Drury Lane running from it at right-angles, and the dirtiest corner of the great legal cobweb of courts and alleys at its back.

It was a hot morning in July when a cab drew up at the pillars, and Gilbert Lloyd jumped out, paid the driver, and made his way into the Inn. The exhalations from the barrows of the fried-fish vendors were potent, and the change to the faint, sickly perfume of the West-Indian pine-apple, tastefully arranged in slices on an open barrow which blocked the immediate thoroughfare, was scarcely refreshing. Perhaps in July the second-hand garments, even the uniforms, which the Jewish gentlemen who deal in such trophies hang up at the entrances of their warehouses, are a thought stronger in flavour than in the winter; and a fifth-hand portmanteau, which has seen a great deal of service under various owners, is apt, under the influence of the sun, to suggest its presence. But Gilbert Lloyd paid no heed to anything of this kind; he had roughed it too long to care for what came between the wind and his nobility; not being a literary photographer on the lookout for "character," he paid no attention to any of the surroundings, but went straight on, making his way through the jostling crowd until he arrived at a door, on the posts of which was painted "Gammidge's Private-Inquiry Office, ground-floor." A farther reference to the right-hand door of the first-floor discovered a still more elaborate placard, announcing that "Nichs. Gammidge, many years in the detective police, undertook inquiries of a private and confidential nature; agents all over the Continent; strictest secrecy observed; divorce cases particularly attended to; ring right-hand bell; and no connection with foreign impostors trading on N.G.'s new invention."

Gilbert Lloyd with some difficulty--for in the dingy passage there was but little light even on that bright summer morning--read this description, and in obedience to its suggestion pulled the right-hand bell. The sound of the bell, vibrating loudly, apparently had the effect of putting a sudden stop to a muttered conversation of a groaning character, which had been dimly audible; the door was opened by a spring from the inside, and Gilbert entered. He found himself in a low-ceilinged dirty room, with no other furniture than a couple of chairs and a very rickety deal table. The windows were covered more than half-way up with blinds improvised out of old newspapers; a clock with one hand was on the wall; an almanac, much ink-scored and pin-marked, stood on the mantel-shelf; and a limp map of Great Britain, evidently torn out of an ancient Bradshaw, was pinned behind the door. At first, on entering, Gilbert Lloyd thought himself the sole occupant of the room; but when his eyes had become accustomed to the partial darkness, he discovered someone rubbing himself against the wall at the opposite end of the room, and apparently trying to squeeze himself through into the next house. A little hard looking at and careful study made him out a very thin, small, white-faced young man, with hollow cheeks, a sharp face, and a keen restless eye. As Gilbert's glance fell on him, or rather, as he seemed to feel it fall on him, he shook himself with an odd restless motion, as though to endeavour to get rid of some spell of fascination, but evidently desired to keep as much as possible in the background. The groaning, smothered conversation meanwhile had recommenced in another quarter, and Gilbert, looking round, noticed a door evidently leading into an inner room.

"Is this Mr. Gammidge's office?" he asked abruptly of the white-faced young man.

The white-faced young man gave a sudden start, as though a pin had been run into him, but never spoke.

"Mr. Gammidge's office--is this Mr. Gammidge's office?" repeated Gilbert.

"I--I believe so," said the white-faced young man, taken aback by the sharpness of the key in which the inquiry was made. "I have no reason to think it's not."

"Where is Mr. Gammidge?"

"Not in!" Wonderfully sharp and pert came this reply; constant lying in one groove oils the tongue so splendidly.

"Not in?" echoed Gilbert half savagely.

"Not in! Sure to be in later in the day. Got most important business on just now for--"

"Stow it!" The words came not from the white-faced young man, nor from Gilbert, but yet they were perfectly audible.

On hearing them, the white-faced young man became silent at once, and Gilbert looked round in amazement. The muttered groans became fainter, a sound as of clinking money was heard, then as of the opening of a door, the farewell of a gruff voice, the departure of a thick pair of boots; then one door slammed, and the inner door, which Gilbert had noticed on his first entrance, opened, and a man stood in the doorway with a beckoning forefinger.

A short stout man in a brown wig, with a fat unintelligent face, with heavy pendulous cheeks and a great jowl, and a round stupid chin, but with an eye like a beryl--small, bright, and luminous; a man with just sufficient intelligence to know that he was considerably overrated, and that the best chance for him in keeping up the deception lay in affectation of deepest mystery, and in saying as little as possible. Mr. Gammidge had been made a hero in certain police-cases during his professional career, by two or three "gentlemen of the press," who had described a few of his peculiarities--a peculiar roll of his head, a sonorous manner of taking snuff, a half-crow of triumph in his throat when he thought he saw his way out of a complication--in their various organs. Henceforth these peculiarities were his stock-in-trade, and he relied upon them for all his great personal effects.

When Gilbert Lloyd obeyed the influence of the beckoning forefinger, he passed through the door of communication between the inner and outer rooms, and found himself in an apartment smaller and not less dingy than that he had left. In the middle of it was a large desk, on which were a huge leaden inkstand, a few worn quill-pens, and a very inky blotting-pad. Sentinel on one flank stood a big swollen Post-office Directory, two years old; sentinel on the other, a stumpy manuscript volume in a loose binding, labelled "Cases." The walls blossomed with bills offering large sums as rewards for information to be given respecting persons who had absconded; and on a disused and paralytic green-cloth screen, standing in a helpless attitude close by the desk, was pinned a bill, setting forth the Sessions of the Central Criminal Court for the year, with the dates on which Mr. Gammidge was engaged in any of the trials pending distinguished by a broad cross with a black-lead pencil.

As soon as Gilbert Lloyd had entered the room, Mr. Gammidge closed the door carefully behind him, and placing himself in front of him, indulged him with the peculiar roll of the head, while he took a sonorous pinch of snuff, and said in a thick confidential voice, "Now, captin?"

"I'm no captain," said Lloyd shortly, "and you don't recollect me; though you're ready to swear you do, and though I have employed you before this."

Lloyd paused here for a moment; but as Mr. Gammidge merely looked at him helplessly, and muttered under his breath something about "such a many gents," he went on.

"My name is Gilbert Lloyd. I manage Lord Ticehurst's racing matters for him; and last year I employed you to look after one of our boys, who we thought was going wrong; do you recollect now?"

"Perfectly," said Mr. Gammidge, brightening. "Boy had been laid hold of by a tout from a sporting-paper, who was practisin' on him through his father, given to drink, and his sister, on 'oom the tout was supposed to be sweet."

"Exactly; well, you found that out clearly enough, and got us all the information required. Now I want you again."

"More boys goin' wrong, sir?" asked Mr. Gammidge. "They're the out-and-outest young scamps; they're that precocious and knowin'--"

"It's not a boy that I want to know about this time," said Lloyd, checking the flow of his companion's eloquence; "it's a woman."

"That's more in my way; three-fourths of my business is connected with them. Did you 'appen to take any notice of the young man in that room as you came through? He's the best 'nose' in London. Find out anything. Lor' bless you, that young man have been in more divorce cases than the Serjeant himself. He can hide behind a walking-stick, and see through the pipe of a Chubb's latch-key. There's nothing like him in London."

"Put him on to my business at once, then. Look at this card." Mr. Grammidge produced a large pair of tortoiseshell-rimmed double eye-glasses, and proceeded to make an elaborate investigation. "You know the name? I thought so. Now, your man must keep account of everyone who goes in here by day or night, so long as she's at home; and when she goes out he must follow her, and, so far as he can, find out who speaks to her, and where. There is a five-pound note to begin with. You understand?"

"You may look upon it as good as done, sir," said Mr. Gammidge, commencing to make a memorandum of the number and date of the bank-note in his pocket-book, "and to let you know at the old address?"

"No; when he has anything to tell, drop me a line, and I'll meet him here. Good-day."

The white-faced young man, entering fully into his new occupation, speedily deserved the encomiastic remarks which had been lavished upon him by his principal, and in a short time Mr. Lloyd was furnished with full information as to the personal appearance of the various visitors at the Bayswater villa, and of the friends whom Miss Lambert was in the habit of meeting away from her home. In both these categories Gilbert Lloyd found, as he had expected to find, a very accurate representation of Miles Challoner. The information, all expected as it was, irritated and chafed him; and he gave up a whole day to considering how he could best put a stop to the ripening intimacy between Miles and Gertrude, or, at all events, weaken it. Finally, he decided on paying a visit to Mrs. Bloxam, and seeing whether she could not be frightened with a suspicion, perfectly undefined, of something horrible and mysterious which would take place if the intimacy were permitted to go on unchecked. Accordingly, upon a day when the white-faced young man had ascertained that Miss Lambert would be for some time absent from home, Mr. Lloyd presented himself at the Bayswater villa, and, without sending in his name, followed the servant into the room, where Mrs. Bloxam was seated. At first sight of the man who had dared in former days to invade the sanctity of her sheepfold and carry off one of her pet lambs, the old lady was exceedingly indignant, and her first impulse was to order the intruder to leave the house; but a moment's reflection convinced her that as he yet had the power of being exceedingly dangerous to Gertrude, or, at all events, of causing her the greatest annoyance, it would be better to temporise. She therefore listened to all Gilbert Lloyd's bland assurances that, although there was an unfortunate estrangement between his wife and himself, he took the greatest interest in her career, and it was purely as a matter of friendship that he had come to warn her, through her ablest and best friend, of the danger she incurred in forming a certain acquaintance. So well did Mrs. Bloxam play her listening part, and so earnest was she in her thanks to her informant, that even the rouséturfite was taken in, and went away convinced that he had made his coup..

A few days afterwards he called again, and this time asked for Miss Lambert. The servant said that Miss Lambert was out. For Mrs. Bloxam: Mrs. Bloxam was out. Gilbert Lloyd then took out a card and handed it to the servant, begging her to give it to her mistress; but the servant, just glancing at it, handed it back, saying she had strict orders, in case the gentleman bearing that name ever called again, to refuse him admittance, and to return his card.

[CHAPTER V.]

Rebuffed.

The cool determination of Gertrude's conduct, the resolution which did not shrink from a proceeding calculated to excite at least observation by her servants, took Gilbert Lloyd completely by surprise. Concealing, by a desperate effort, the passion of anger which flamed up in him, he turned away from the door, and got into the hansom awaiting him; but when quite out of sight of the gilded-bronze gates, and the miniature plantation of the Bayswater villa, he stopped the cab, got out, and pulling his hat down over his brow, walked on rapidly, in a mood strange indeed to his calculating and self-contained nature.

By what fatality had this woman once more turned up in his life--this woman of whom he was well rid, his marriage with whom had been a mistake--a failure--and his parting with whom had been the commencement of a new and decidedly fortunate era in his life? His thoughts were in a whirl, and for a time resisted his attempts to reduce them to order and sequence. The physical convulsion of rage claimed to have its way first, and had it. He had known that feeling many times in his life--the maddening anger which turns the face white and the lips livid, which makes the heart beat with suffocating throbs, and dims the sight. He knew all about that, and he had to bear it now, and to bear it in silence, without the relief of speech, with only the aid of solitude. He could not swear at Gertrude now, as he had done many a time when annoyance had come to him through her; he could not insult, threaten, strike her now; and much of the fury he felt was due to the powerlessness which drove him nearly mad, and which was his own doing. Ay, that was the worst of it, the least endurable part of the wrath which raged within him. This woman, who had been in his power, and had been made to experience the full significance of her position; who had loved him once, and of whom he had wearied, as it was in his nature to weary of any desired object when attained,--this woman held him in supreme indifference and contempt, and set him at naught without fear or hesitation. In the force and irrationality of his anger, he forgot that she was acting quite within the letter and the spirit of the convention made between them; that he it was who had abandoned its spirit at almost the first sight of her, and had now received a humiliating check in endeavouring to violate its letter. For a long time his anger was blind, fierce, and unreasoning--directed almost as much against himself as against Gertrude--his wife! his wife! as he called her a hundred times over, in the vain assertion of a position which he had voluntarily abdicated, and which he knew, in the bottom of his angry heart--even while the anger seethed within it--he would not be prepared to resume, were the opportunity afforded him. But as he walked on and on, getting by degrees into outlying regions of the far west--almost as little known to him as California--the habit of calculation, of arranging his thoughts, of (metaphorically) laying his head on the exact process or combination which he required--a faculty and habit of which he felt the value every day--resumed its sway over him, and he no longer raged blindly about what had happened, but set himself to think it out. This, then, was a parti prison the part of Gertrude; this, then, was a game in which he was her adversary--with a purpose to gain; she--his, with nothing in view but his defeat. Her cards were resolute ignoring of his existence; the absolute and inexorable adherence to the agreement made between them at Brighton. His cards were persistent following and watching of her, which the coincidences of his position and the facility with which he could make her circle of acquaintance his, added to the exigencies of her professional career, which she could not control, however unwelcome they might be, rendered easy of playing. The next question was, what end did he propose to himself in this sudden revulsion of feeling, this sudden irruption into his prosperous and pleasant life of an element which he had hoped, intended, and believed to be banished from it for ever? This question he could not answer clearly. The mists of anger and jealousy arose between him and the outline of his purpose. Was it to undo the past? Was it to woo and win once more this woman, whom he had driven away from him, and who had just made evident to him the weakness of his determination and the strength of her own? Was it to put himself entirely and unreservedly under the yoke of her power, from whose possible imposition he had been glad to escape by the final expedient to which he had resorted? Had he any such rash, insane notion as this in his thoughts? He did not know, he was not certain; he was not sure of anything but this--that Gertrude had refused to see him, and that he was resolved she should, come what might; she should not carry that point, she should not have the triumph at once of fidelity to their strange unnatural compact on her own part, and of having forced him to break it on his. He had dismissed her easily enough from his thoughts, but he could not dismiss her from them now; she kept possession of them now, in the pride of her beauty--how handsome she was! he had never supposed she would have grown into such commanding, self-possessed beauty as hers was now--and in the triumph of her talent--as she had never done since the brief earliest days of their disastrous marriage. Gilbert Lloyd was a man on whom success of any kind produced a strong impression. It counted for much in the rekindling of his former passion for Gertrude that she was now a successful artist, her supposed name in everyone's mouth, holding her own before the world, a woman with a position, an entourage, and an independent career. His thoughts wandered away among scenes which he had long forgotten, in which she was the central figure, and into imaginary pictures of her present life; and he repeated over and over again, with rage--waxing dull by this time--"But she is my wife! she is my wife! no matter what she chooses to do, no matter how she chooses to act towards me, she is my wife! I have only to declare it if I choose." And the consequences to which she, judging by her present conduct, would probably be entirely indifferent--was he prepared to face them? He could not answer this question either; he was not yet cool-headed enough to estimate them aright.

A devouring curiosity concerning Gertrude took possession of him--a craving eagerness to know what were her movements, who were her associates, how she lived; even the disposition of the rooms in her house, and her domestic relations. The absolute ignorance of all these things in which he remained, though his imperious will demanded to be informed of them, exasperated him; and with his fruitless anger there was mingled a grim humour, as he thought of the scenes through which they had passed together, as he recalled Gertrude in the intimacy of their domestic life. And now he was the one person in the world from whom she concealed herself, the one person shut out from her by a barrier erected by her inflexible will. Was he? Time would tell. He had not been ignorant daring the sometimes stormy, sometimes gay and careless, but always unsatisfactory, period which preceeded their separation, that he was by no means so indifferent to Gertrude as she was to him. On the contrary, he had realised that clearly and plainly, and it had sharpened his anger towards her and hardened his heart in the hour of their parting; and he had hated her then, and chafed under the knowledge that she did not hate him, that she was only glad to be rid of him, had only ceased utterly to love him, and learned utterly to despise him. Justly esteeming himself to be a good hater, Gilbert Lloyd found it difficult to understand how it was that he had so soon ceased to hate Gertrude, had so easily yielded to the sense of relief in having done with all that portion of his life in which she had a share, and had never had any serious thought of her, or speculation about her future; for to such an extent had his cynicism gone now that this period of oblivion and ease had in its turn expired, and she had again crossed his path to trouble him. He could only account for this curious phase through which he had passed by what seemed to him an insufficient reason--the new interests in his life, the success which attended his speculation in that "rich brute Ticehurst's" affairs--for thus did the more fastidious and not less vicious man of the two characterise, in his meditations, the coarse animal he was devoting himself so successfully to exploiter.. Such a chance, after so long a run of ill-luck, varied only by a coupon which he preferred not to dwell in remembrance--a chance, as he thought, with an ominous darkening of his evil face, which, if it had only been afforded him a little sooner, might have averted the necessity for such a coup, was calculated to occupy him entirely, and banish from his mind, anything which might divert him from the pursuit of his object.

And now it seemed wonderful to him that he could have thus forgotten her--now, when he was under the renewed spell of her beauty and her scorn.

There was an extraordinary fascination for him, even in the midst of his anger, in the mingled strangeness and familiarity with which she presented herself to his mind. He had a good deal of imagination, though but little poetry, in his nature, and the extraordinarily exceptional position of this woman and himself--the strangeness of the knowledge that she had accepted the fact of there being nothing mutual or even relative in their position now or ever--appealed, in the midst of his passion, to his imagination.

That she should dare to treat him thus,--that she should know him so little as to dare to treat him thus. He thought this, he said this more than once through his shut teeth; but he was not a fool, even in his rage, and he knew he was talking folly to himself in the moment that he uttered the words. Why should she not dare? Indeed, there was no daring about it. He had made the position for himself, and he was for the first time brought face to face with all the details of it. What was that position externally in the world's sight, in the only point of view in which he had any practical right to consider it? Just this: Miss Lambert did not choose to admit him to her acquaintance. He was helpless; she was in her right. He might force her to meet him in the houses of other people--at the Marchioness of Carabas' house, for instance--simply because she could not afford, out of consideration for her own social position, to give up her patroness; and also (he began to understand Gertrude now sufficiently to know that this second argument was by far the stronger), because she Would never suffer the consideration of meeting or not meeting him to influence her actions, to form a motive of her conduct in the smallest degree. He felt that with a smart twinge of pain, the keen pain of mortified self-love. He had simply ceased to exist for her--that was all; she had taken the full sense of their convention, and was acting on it tout bonnement.. He might, therefore, calculate safely upon meeting her, without her consent, at other houses than her own; but forcing or inducing her to admit him there, was, he felt, entirely beyond his power. He was wholly insensible to the extreme incongruity of such a possibility, had it existed; and no wonder, for in their position all was incongruous, and propriety or impropriety had lost their meaning.

In the conflict of feeling and passion in which Gilbert Lloyd was thus engaged, there was no element of fierce contention wanting. Love, or the debased feeling which he called and believed to be love, and which fluctuated between passion and hate, baffled design, undefined fear, and jealousy, in which not merely Gertrude was concerned, but another who had a place in his life of still darker and more fatal meaning, and a more bitterly resented influence over his fate. When he had fought out the skirmish with the newly reawakened love for the wife whom he had almost forgotten, and been beaten, and had been forced to surrender so much of the disputed ground to the enemy, fear marshalled its forces against him, and pressed him hard. But not to the point of victory. Gilbert Lloyd was a man with whom fear had never had much chance; and if he had yielded somewhat to its influence in the separation from his wife, it was because that influence had been largely supported by long-smouldering discontent, ennui, a coincidence of convenience and opportunity, and a deserved conviction that the full potency or Gertrude's will was at work in the matter. There was little likelihood that fear should master him now; but it was there, and he had to stand, and repel its assaults. If he attempted to molest, to control Gertrude in any way; if it even became her interest or her pleasure to get rid of him in actual fact, in addition to their convenient theory,--fear asked him, Can she not do so? Is she not mistress of the situation, of every point of it? And he answered, Yes. If she chose to carry out the divorce--which they had mutually instituted without impertinent legal interference--would he dare to intervene? He remembered how he had speculated upon the expediency of encouraging the "rich brute's" penchant for the fashionable singer, when he had no suspicion who the fashionable singer was; and a rush of fury surged all over him as he thought, if she had chosen to encourage him, to marry him, for his rank, would he, Gilbert Lloyd, her husband, have dared to interfere? Fear had the best of it there; but he would not be beaten by fear. This enemy was strong mainly because he could not rightly calculate its strength. How much did Gertrude know, or how little? Was it knowledge, or suspicion only, which had prompted her to the decision she had adopted, and the prompt action she had taken upon it? To these questions it was impossible he could get any answer; and he would, or thought he would, just then--for he was an unlikely man to stick to such a bargain, if he could have made it--have given years of his life to know what had passed that memorable day at Brighton, before he had returned to the deathbed of his friend, and there encountered Gertrude. The dying whisper which had conveyed to the young woman the power she had used so promptly was unknown by Lloyd; on this point--the great, the essential point of his musings--all was conjecture, dark, terrifying, and undefined.

Had love and fear only possessed his dark soul between them, the strife might soon have ended, in a division in which the man's own safety would have been consulted. Gilbert Lloyd would have made up his mind that, as his first fancy for Gertrude had passed away, so this eccentric renewal of it would also harmlessly decline. The whole difficulty might have resolved itself into his persuading Ticehurst to go abroad in his company, until the "rich brute" should have escaped all risk of an "entanglement," which Lloyd would have painted in the most alarming colours, and Lloyd himself have recovered from a passing fit of weak folly, which he might have been trusted to learn to despise, on a sober consideration of its bearing on his interests in the career in which he had contrived with so much difficulty to lancerhimself.

But the look which he had seen in Gertrude's proud calm face--the smile which was so absolutely new to him, that it would have thrilled him through with jealousy to whomsoever addressed, because it revealed to him that she had never felt for him that which prompted its soft and trusting sweetness--the smile which had fired all the evil passions in his exceptionally evil nature--had shown Gilbert a far more terrible truth: she had never given him such a smile. Soit.. He had had such as he had cared for, and he was tired of them, and done with them, and as bright and beautiful were to be had for love or money, particularly for money. Thus he might have thought, half in consoling earnest, half in mortification, and acted on the reassuring argument. But the smile, the unknown smile, which had not lighted her face upon their bridal day, which had never adorned the happiest hour--and they had had some happy hours--of their marriage, had beamed upon the man whom of all men living Gilbert Lloyd hated most bitterly--and that man was his brother. His brother, Miles Challoner, their dead father's darling son--(and when Lloyd thought of his father his face was horrible to see, and his heart was foul with curses and unnatural hate, for he hated his dead father more than his living brother),--the heir who had been his rival always, his master in their nursery, the object of his bitterest envy and enmity when he was so young that it was a mystery of the devil how such passions could have a place in his childish heart. In the name of the devil,--in whom Gilbert Lloyd was almost tempted to believe as he watched that smile, and felt the tempest rise in his heart, like the waves under the moonbeams,--how had thiscomplication come about! This he could readily ascertain, but what would it avail him to know it? If she loved this hated brother of his, what could he do? Enjoy the hideous revenge of keeping quiet, and letting their mutual love grow into the blessing and hope of their existence perhaps, and then come forward and expose all the truth, and crush the two at once? And then? His own share in this, what would it be? Utter ruin; and for his brother the sympathy of the world! To be sure it would be deep disgrace for the women who, secretly a wife, encouraged a man to love, and to hope to win her; but she could deny her love and the encouragement, and nobody could prove either, and she was entirely ignorant of the relation subsisting between Miles Challoner and him. Of this Gilbert Lloyd did not feel a moment's doubt. Miles would not divulge a fact in which a terrible family secret was involved, to anyone; he had taken his line towards Gilbert on their first accidental meeting far too decidedly for the existence of any doubt on that point. If, on the other hand, Gilbert Lloyd were to yield to the promptings of passion and revenge, and betray the relationship, ruin of a double kind would inevitably overtake him; vague indeed as to its source or manner, but not admitting of any doubt. He knew that such would be the case, thus: One communication only had been addressed to the man who is here called Gilbert Lloyd, by his father, after his sudden departure from Rowley Court. It was brief, and contained in the following words:

"I have placed in the hands of a friend in whom I have entire confidence the narrative of the events which have ended with your banishment from my house, and your erasure from our family annals for ever. This friend is not acquainted with your personal appearance, and cannot therefore recognise you, should your future conduct enable you to present yourself in any place where he may be found; but he will be in close and constant intercourse with my son; and should you venture, either directly or remotely, to injure my son, in person, reputation, estate, or by any means whatever, this friend, being warned by me to investigate any such injury done to my son, on the presumption that it comes from you, will be enabled to identify you; and is, in such ease, bound to me by a solemn promise to expose the whole of the facts, and the proofs in his possession, in such manner as he may judge best for bringing you most certainly and expeditiously to that punishment which human weakness has prevented my being the means of inflicting upon you. I give you this information and warning, in the interest of my son, and also because I desire to turn you, by the only motive available for my purpose, from the commission of a crime whose penalty no one's weakness will enable you to evade.."

Gilbert Lloyd had never been able during all the vicissitudes of his career--in all its levities, its successes, its failures, its schemes--to forget the warning, or even the phrasing, of this terrible letter. He had burned it in a fury which would have hardly been assuaged by the blood of the writer, and had tried to persuade himself afterwards that he scoffed at the suspicions and the threat and the precaution alike. But the effort failed: he did not scoff--he believed and feared, and remembered; and in this strange and ominous complication, which had brought his brother across his path under circumstances which any man might have feared, he felt the futility of his pretended indifference to an extent which resembled terror.

He wondered at himself now, when he remembered that whenever he had thought about his wife at all in the early days after their separation, in the few and scattered speculations which had arisen in his mind about her, the idea of her ever loving another man had found no place. So intense was his egotism, that, though he did not indulge in the mere vanity of believing that she still loved him, and would repent the step she had taken, he did not in the least realise her matter-of-fact emancipation from the ties which they loosed by mutual consent. He had sometimes wondered whether she got on well with her liberty and her hundred pounds; whether she had gone back to the drudgery of school-life, in the intensified form that drudgery assumes to a teacher; whether she had any friends, and how she accounted to them for her isolation; with other vague and placid vaticinations. But that this young and handsome woman, who had found out the unworthiness of her first love, had been rudely awakened from her woman's dream of happiness, and had exchanged all the sentiment with which she had regarded him for horror and contempt, and a steadily maintained purpose of utter separation--that she should have a second love, should dream again, never occurred to him. As little had he thought about the probability of his meeting her in the widely divergent course which his own life had taken from any within the previous experience of either. But he had met her; and one of the unexpected results of that undesirable event was to awaken him, with a shock, to the strongest suspicion that she did love and dream again, and that the object of the love and the dream was the man he most hated--was his brother. How Gilbert Lloyd would have regarded this circumstance, had he carried out his acceptation of the situation with such good faith and such complete indifference as Gertrude evinced, had he been able to see her again perfectly unmoved and without the slightest wish to alter anything in their position, he did not stop seriously to consider. This might have been; and for a minute or two his mind glanced at certain cynical possibilities in such a case, which might have enabled him to gratify his spite towards both his wife and his brother, in comparative security. But it was not; and that which was, absorbed him wholly.

Alternately raging against the feelings which possessed him, and arranging the facts of the case in order, and forcing himself to ponder them with his accustomed coolness, Gilbert Lloyd walked on for many miles without taking note of distance. When at length he bethought him of the time, and consulted his watch, he found he must hasten back to town, to be ready to dine with the "rich brute," who was to entertain a party of choice spirits devoted to the turf that day. The occasion was an important, and Gilbert Lloyd intended that it should be a profitable, one. In the midst of the anger and perturbation of his spirit, he was quite capable of attending to his own and his patron's interests--when they were identical; and there was no mental process, involving no matter what amount of passion or scheming or danger, which Gilbert Lloyd could not lay aside--ranged in its due place in his memory--to await its fitting time; a valuable faculty, and not a little dangerous in the possession of a man at war, more or less openly, with society.

The next day, as Gilbert Lloyd, as usual admirably mounted, turned into the Park, and made for the then almost deserted Lady's Mile, a carriage swept rapidly by. Two ladies occupied the back-seat, and on the front Lloyd beheld the unusual apparition of Lord Sandilands. The ladies were the Marchioness of Carabas and Miss Lambert. They saw him; and Lady Carabas gave him a bow at once graciously graceful and deliciously familiar; but Miss Lambert looked straight before her with such exquisitely perfect unconsciousness, that it never occurred to either of her companions that she had recognised Gilbert Lloyd.

Then savage anger took possession of him once more, and scattered all the process of thought he had been going through to the winds, and he swore that, come what might, he would meet her where it would be impossible for her to avoid him.

[CHAPTER VI.]

Gertrude speaks.

Lord Ticehurst's attachment to the turf was by no means of a lukewarm or of a perfunctory character. He was not one of the young men of the present day, who keep a racing-stud as they keep anything else, merely for their amusement; who exult indecently when they are successful, who are even more indecently depressed when they are unfortunate. Having such a man as Gilbert Lloyd for his "confederate," manager, and agent, the young nobleman did not require to look into the details of his stud and his stable as he otherwise would have done; but nothing was ever done without his knowledge and approval, and his heart was as much bound up in turf-matters as it had been when, under the initiation of Plater Dobbs, he first made his entrance into the Ring. Perhaps if this attachment to racing-matters and racing-men had been less strong, Lord Ticehurst would have noticed a certain change in Lloyd's manner towards him which would have displeased him much. For, notwithstanding that he struggled hard against the display of any such feeling, there arose in Gilbert's breast a sullen animosity, a dogged dislike to his friend and patron, which very often would not be kept down, but came surging up into his face, and showed itself in knit brows and tightened lips, and hard cold insolence of bearing. This was very different from the deep and bitter hatred with which Gilbert Lloyd regarded Miles Challoner, though it sprung from the same cause, the admiration which each of them felt for Gertrude. In the present state of his feelings for her, it enraged Gilbert to think that anyone should dare to pay attention to one who had been, who by the law still was, his property: but the depth and measure of his hatred was very much acted upon by the knowledge that Lord Ticehurst was merely regarded by Gertrude as one of a hundred hangers-on, while Miles Challoner stood in a very different position. But though this angry feeling from time to time got the better of Gilbert Lloyd's usually placid and equable temperament, and led to exhibitions of temper which he was afterwards frightened at and ashamed of, they were never noticed by the kindly-hearted, thick-headed young man whom he had in training, or, if they were, were ascribed to some of those "tighteners" and "botherations" which were supposed to fall naturally to "old Gilbert's" lot in transacting his business of the turf. "There's bad news up from the Pastures, I suppose," Lord Ticehurst would say to some of his friends, after the occurrence of some little episode of the kind; "old Gil's uncommon cranky this mornin', and no two ways about it. It's always best to leave him to come round by himself when he is in this way, so lets you and me go down to Rummer's and get some luncheon." But throughout all his annoyances, and the renovated passion for his wife,--passion of the strongest, wildest, most enslaving kind, was now always present in his heart,--Gilbert Lloyd held carefully to his business career, losing no opportunity of showing himself of service to his pupil, and taking every care that his pupil was made aware of the fact.

"I say, Etchingham," said Gilbert one morning, glancing up from his accounts at his lordship, who was moodily looking out of window, smoking, and wondering whether he should propose to Miss Lambert before the season finally broke up, or leave it until next spring,--"I say, Etchingham I'm pretty near sick of town."

"Same here!" replied his lordship; "fusty and beastly, ain't it? Well, we're close upon cutting it; it's Goodwood the week after next, and then there's Brighton--"

"O, curse Brighton!" broke in Lloyd.

"All right," said Lord Ticehurst, lazily dropping into a chair. "Curse Brighton by all means. But what a rum fellow you are! You wouldn't go to the Brighton Meeting last year; and I recollect that there was a talk about it at Rummer's; and Jack Manby--the Bustard, you know--said you'd never go there again, since in Gaslight's year, I think he said, the sea-air spoiled your complexion."

"Manby's a chattering idiot," said Lloyd savagely; "and next time you hear men talking of why I don't go to the Brighton Meeting, you may say I don't go because it isn't a meeting at all, a third-rate concern with a pack of platers to run, and a crowd of cockneys to look at them. You may say that."

"Much obliged," said Lord Ticehurst; "you may say it yourself, if you want to. I don't hold with mixin' myself up in other fellows' shines;" and he sucked solemnly at his cigar, and did his best to look dignified.

"My dear old Etchingham, don't be angry. I was vexed at hearing you repeat the gabble of those infernal fellows at that filthy tavern--it isn't anything better--because it's not only about me they talk. However, that's neither here nor there. I suppose you'll have the wind-up dinner at Richmond as usual."

"All right, Gil, my boy!" said his good-tempered lordship; "there's no bones broke, and it's all squared. Of course we'll have the dinner. Let's see," looking at his memorandum-book; "Friday-week, how will that suit? Mrs. Stapleton Burge's party. O, ah, that's nothing!" he added quickly, growing very red.

"Very well," said Gilbert quietly. "Friday-week, since you've only got Mrs. Stapleton Burge's party; and that's nothing, you say. Friday-week will do. I'm to ask the usual lot, I suppose?"

"Yes, usual lot, and one or two more, don't you think? It was deuced slow last time, I remember. Only old Toshington to talk, and everybody's tired of his old gab. Ask someone to froth it up a bit, one of those writing-fellows one sees at some houses, or an actor who can mimic fellows, and that kind of thing, don't you know?"

"I know," said Gilbert, by no means jumping at the suggestion; "but I generally find that your clever fellows who write are miserable unless they have all the talk to themselves; and the actors are insulted if you ask them to do any of their hanky-panky, as though, by Jove, they'd be invited for anything else. However, I'll look up some of them, and do my best. Anybody else?"

"No, I think not. Unless, by the way, you were to ask that man that my aunt's taken up lately--Challoner."

The name brought the blood into Gilbert's face, and he paused a moment before he said: "I don't think I'd have that fellow, Etchingham, if I were you."

"What's the matter with him? Ain't he on the square? Bad egg, and that kind of thing?"

"I know very little about him," said Gilbert, fixing his eyes on Lord Ticehurst's face; "nothing, indeed, for the matter of that; and he's never crossed me, and never will have the opportunity." I said, "if I were you."

"Yes, well--I know. Drop the riddle business and speak out. What do you mean?"

"Plainly, then, I've noticed--and I can't imagine how it has failed to escape you--that this man Challoner is making strong running for a lady for whom I have heard you profess the greatest admiration--Miss Lambert."

"O, ah, yes--thanks; all right," said Lord Ticehurst, looking more foolish than usual--in itself a stupendous feat; "well, I ain't spooney particularly on Challoner, so you needn't ask him."

Peers of the realm, and persons known as "public characters," command more civility and attention in England than anyone else. With tradesmen, hotel-waiters, and railway-porters this feeling is so strongly, developed that they will leave any customer to serve a great lord or a popular comedian. Lord Ticehurst's name stood very high at the Crown and Sceptre at Richmond, not merely because he was an earl--they see plenty of them during the season at the Crown and Sceptre--but because he was free-spoken, lavish with his money, and "had no cussed pride about him." Consequently, whenever he dined there the dinner was always good, which is by no means always the case at the C. and S.; and the present occasion was no exception. There were about twenty guests, all men, and nearly all men of one set, who, though they were mostly wellborn and, in the main, tolerably educated, apparently never sought for and certainly never attained any other society. The outside world was familiar with their names, through seeing them printed in the newspapers as attending the various great race-meetings; and with their personal appearance, through seeing them at Tattersall's and in the Park, especially on Sundays in the season. Some had chambers in the Albany, some in smaller and cheaper sets; many of them lived humbly enough in one bed-room in the lodging-house-swarming streets round St. James's; all of them haunted Rummer's in Conduit-street; and most of them belonged to some semi-turf, semi-military, whole card-and-billiard-playing club. Some of them were believed to be married, but their wives were never seen with them by any chance; for they never went into society, to the opera or the theatres; and they were always put into the bachelor quarters at country-houses, and into the topmost rooms at the hotels, where they treated the female domestics in a pleasant and genial way, a compound of the manners of the groom and the commercial bagman.

They gathered in full force at the Crown and Sceptre that lovely July afternoon; for they knew that they would have a good dinner and wine without stint. Captain Dafter was there--a little wiry man with sandy scraps of whisker and a mean little white face, but who was the best amateur steeplechase rider in England, with limbs of steel and dauntless pluck. Next to him sat a fat, heavy-healed, large-jowled man, with a face the shape and colour of an ill-baked quartern loaf; a silent stupid-looking man, who ate and drank enormously, and said, and apparently understood, nothing; but who was no less a personage than the "Great Northern," as he was called, from having been born at Carlisle; the enormous bookmaker and King of the Ring, who began life as a plumber with eighteenpence, and was then worth hundreds of thousands. There, too, with his neatly-rolled whiskers and his neatly-tied blue bird's-eye scarf, with its plain solid gold horseshoe pin, was Dolly Clarke, the turf-lawyer. Years ago Dolly would have thought himself lucky if he ever made six hundred a-year. Six thousand is now nearer Dolly's annual income, all brought, about by his own talent, and "not standing on any repairs," as he put it, a quality which is to be found in the dictionary under the word "unscrupulousness;" for when old Mr. Snoxell, inventor of the Pilgrim's-Progress Leather for tender feet, died, and left all his money to his son Sam, who had been bred to the law, Sam took Dolly Clarke into partnership, and by combining shrewdness with bill-discounting and a military connection with a knowledge of turf-matters, they did a splendid business. You would almost mistake Dolly Clarke for a gentleman now, and Samuel Snoxell calls all the army by their Christian names. Next to Dolly Clarke was Mr. Bagwax, Q.C., always retained in cases connected with the turf, and rather preferring to be on the shaky and shady side, which affords opportunities for making great fun out of would-be-honest witnesses, and making jokes which, of all the persons in court, are not least understood, by Mr. Justice Martingale, who knows a horse from a wigblock, and is understood to have at one time heard the chimes at midnight. The redoubtable Jack Manby, called "the Bustard," because in his thickness of utterance he was in the habit of declaring that he "didn't, care about bustard so long as he got beef," was there; and old Sam Roller the trainer, looking something like a bishop, and something more like Mr. Soapey Sponge's friend, Jack Spraggon; and a tall thin gentlemanly man, who looked like a barrister, and who was "Haruspex," the sporting prophet of the Statesman.. Nor had Gilbert Lloyd forgotten his patron's hint about the enlivening of the company by the representatives of literature and the drama. Mr. Wisbottle, the graphic writer, the charming essayist, the sparkling dramatist; Wisbottle, who was always turning up in print when you least expected him; Wisbottle, of whom his brilliant friend and toady M'Boswell had remarked that he had never tetigited anything which he hadn't ornavited;--Wisbottle represented literature, and represented it in a very thirsty and talkative, not to say flippant, manner. As the drama's representative, behold Mr. Maurice Mendip, a charming young fellow of fifty-five, who, in the old days of patent theatres and great tragedians, would have alternated Marcellus with Bernardo, playing Horatio for his benefit, when his landlady, friends, and family from Bermondsey came in with tickets sold for his particular behoof, but who, in virtue of loud lungs and some faint reminiscence of what he had seen done by his betters, played all the "leading business" in London when he could get the chance, and was the idolised hero of Californian gold-diggers and Australian aborigines. He was, perhaps, a little out of place at such a party, being heavy grave, and taciturn; but most people knew his name, and when told who he was, said, "O, indeed!" and looked at him with that mixture of curiosity, and impertinence with which "public characters" are generally regarded. The other guests were men more or less intimately connected with the turf, who talked to each other in a low grumbling monotone, and whose whole desire was to get the better of each other in every possible way.

The dinner, which had called forth loud encomiums, was over; the cigars were lighted, and the conversation had been proceeding briskly, when in a momentary lull Dolly Clarke, who had the reputation for being not quite too fond of Gilbert Lloyd, said in a loud voice: "Well, my lord, and after Goodwood comes Brighton, and of course you hope to be as lucky there."

"We've got nothing at Brighton," replied Lord Ticehurst, looking uneasily towards where Gilbert was occupying the vice-chair.

"Nothing at Brigthton!" echoed Dolly Clarke, very loud indeed; "why, how's that?"

"Because we don't choose, Mr. Clarke," said Gilbert, from the other end of the table--he had been drinking more than his wont, and there was a strained, flushed look round his eyes quite unusual to him--"because we don't choose; I suppose that's reason enough."

"O, quite," said Dolly Clarke, with a short laugh. "I spoke to Lord Ticehurst, by the way; but in your case I suppose it's not an 'untradesmanlike falsehood' if you represent yourself as 'the same concern.' However, you used to go to Brighton, Lloyd."

"Yea," replied Gilbert quickly, "and so used you, when you were Wiggins and Proctor's outdoor clerk at eighteen shillings a-week--by the excursion-train! Times have changed with both of us."

"Lloyd had him there, Jack," whispered Bagwax, Q.C., to his neighbour the Bustard. "Impudent customer, Master Clarke! I recollect well when he used to carry a bag and serve writs, and all that; and now--"

"Hold on a binnit," said the Bustard; "he's an awkward customer is Clarke, and he'll show Gilbert no bercy." And, indeed, there was a look in Mr. Dolly Clarke's ordinarily smiling, self-satisfied face, and a decision in the manner in which his hand had, apparently involuntarily, closed upon the neck of the claret-jug standing in front of him, that augured ill for the peace of the party in general, or the personal comfort of Gilbert Lloyd in particular. But old Sam Roller's great spectacles had happened to be turned towards the turf-lawyer at the moment; and the old fellow, seeing how matters stood, had telegraphed to Lord Ticehurst, while Mr. Wisbottle touched Clarke's knee with one hand under the table, and removed the claret-jug from his grasp with the other, whispering, "Drop it, dear old boy! What's the good? You kill him, and have to keep out of the way, and lose all the business in Davies-street. He kills you, and what becomes of the policies for the little woman at Roehampton? Listen to the words of Wisbottle the preacher, my chick, and drop it." And it having by this time dawned upon Lord Ticehurst that there was something wrong, that young nobleman cut into the conversation in a very energetic and happy manner, principally dilating upon the necessity of his guests drinking as much and as fast as they possibly could. The first part of the proposition seemed highly popular, but certain of the company objected to being hurried with their liquor, and demanded to know the reason of their being thus pressed. Then Lord Ticehurst explained that he was under the necessity of putting in an appearance that night at the house of a very particular friend, where an evening party was being held; that it was an engagement of long-standing, and one which it was impossible for him to get off. This, he added, need be no reason for breaking up their meeting; he should only be too delighted if they would stop as long as they pleased; and he was quite sure that his worthy vice would come up to that end of the table, and fill his place much more worthily than it had hitherto been filled.

But to this proposition there was a great deal of demur. Several of the guests, keen men of business, with the remembrance of the morrow's engagements and work before them, and having had quite sufficient wine, were eager to be off. Others, who would have remained drinking so long as any drink was brought, scarcely relished their cups under the presidency of Gilbert Lloyd, who was regarded by them as anything but a convivialist; while others, again, had engagements in town which they were anxious to fulfil. Moreover, the plan proposed by his patron was anything but acceptable to Gilbert Lloyd himself. Ordinarily almost abstemious, he had on this occasion taken a great deal of wine, and, though he was by no means intoxicated, his pulses throbbed and his blood was heated in a manner very unusual with him. From the first moment of Ticehurst's mentioning that he was going on this evening to a party at Mrs. Stapleton Burge's house, Gilbert felt convinced, by his friend's manner, that he must have some special attraction there, and that that attraction must be the presence of Gertrude. This thought--the feeling that she would be there, surrounded by courtiers and flatterers--worried and irritated him, and every glass of wine which he swallowed increased his desire to see her that night. What matter if he had been rebuffed! That was simply because he had not had the chance of speaking to her. Give him that opportunity, and she would tell a very different tale. He should have that opportunity if he met her face to face in society; it would be impossible for her, without committing a palpable rudeness--and Gilbert Lloyd knew well that she would never do that--to avoid speaking to him. Château qui parle est pret de se render.. A true proverb that; and he made up his mind to tell Lord Ticehurst to take him to Mrs. Stapleton Burge's gathering, and to run his chance with Gertrude.

So that when he heard his patron propound that he should remain behind, to fan into a flame the expiring embers of an orgie which, even at its brightest, had afforded him no amusement, his disgust was extreme, and uncomplimentary as they were to himself, he fostered and repeated the excuses which he heard on all sides. Nor did he content himself with passive resistance, but went straight to Lord Ticehurst, and taking him aside, told him that this was, after all, only a "duty dinner;" that all that was necessary had been done, and it was better they should break up then and there. "Moreover," said he, "I've a fancy to go with you to-night. You're always telling me I don't mix enough in what you call society; and as this is the end of the season, and we're not likely to be--well, I was going to say bothered with women's parties for a long time, I don't mind going with you; in fact, I should rather like it. These fellows have done very well, and we can now leave them to shift for themselves." Lord Ticehurst's astonishment at this suggestion from his Mentor was extreme. "What a queer chap you are, Gil!" he said; "when I've asked you to go to all sorts of houses, first-class, where everything is done in great form and quite correct, you've stood out and fought shy, and all that kind of thing. And now you want to go to old Mother Burge's,--old cat who stuffs her rooms with a lot of people raked up from here and there! 'Pon my soul there's no knowing where to have you, and that's about the size of it!" But in this matter, as in almost every other, the young man gave way to his friend, and the party broke up at once; and Lord Ticehurst and Gilbert Lloyd drove home to Hill-street, dressed themselves, and proceeded to Mrs. Stapleton Barge's reception.

Mrs. Stapleton Burge lived in a very big house in Great Swaffham-street, close out of Park-lane, and though a very little black-faced woman herself, did everything on a very large scale. Her footmen were enormous creatures, prize-fed, big-whiskered, ambrosial; her chariot was like a family ark; the old English characters in which her name and address were inscribed surged all over her big cards. She had a big husband, a fat fair man with a protuberant chest, and receding forehead, and little eyes, who was a major in some Essex yeomanry, and who was generally mistaken by his guests for the butler. Everybody went to Mrs. Stapleton Burge's; and she, sometimes accompanied by the major, but more frequently without him, went everywhere. Nobody could give a reason for either proceeding. When the Stapleton Barges went out of town at the end of the season, nobody knew where they went to. Some people said to the family place in Essex, but Tommy Toshington said that was all humbug; he'd looked up the county history, and, there wasn't any such place as Fenners; and he, Tommy, thought they either retired to the back of the house in Great Swaffham-street, or took lodgings at Ramsgate. But the next season they appeared again, as blooming and as big as ever. Lord Ticehurst, in his description of Mrs. Barge's parties, scarcely did that worthy woman justice. People said, and truly, that those gatherings were "a little mixed;" but Lady Tintagel took care that some of the very best people in London were seen at them. If Mrs. Burge would have her own friends, that, Lady Tintagel said, was no affair of hers. Mrs. Burge swore by Lady Tintagel, and the major swore at her. "If it wasn't for that confounded woman," he used to say, "we shouldn't be going through all this tomfoolery, but should be living quietly at--" He was never known to complete the sentence. Lady Tintagel was Mrs. Barge's sponsor in the world of fashion, and the major lent money to Lord Tintagel, who was an impecunious and elderly nobleman. When Lady Tintagel presided over a stall at an aristocratic fancy-fair for the benefit of a charity, Mrs. Burge furnished the said stall, and took Lady Tintagel's place thereat during the dull portion of the day. Lady Tintagel's celebrated tableaux vivantswere held in Mrs. Burge's big rooms in Great Swaffham-street, the Tintagel establishment being carried on in a two-roomed house in Mayfair. Mrs. Burge "takes" Lady Tintagel to various places of an evening, when the Tintagel jobbed horses are knocked up, and never has "her ladyship" out of her mouth.

When Lord Ticehurst and Gilbert Lloyd arrived at the hospitable mansion, they found the rooms crowded. It was a great but trying occasion for Mrs. Burge--trying, because it was plainly the farewell fêteof the season; and all the guests were talking to one another of where they were going to, while she, poor woman, had a dreary waste of seven months before her, to be passed away from the delights of fashionable life. To how many people did she promise a speedy meeting at Spa, at Baden, in the Highlands, in Midland country-houses? and all her interlocutors placed their tongues in their cheeks, and knew that until the next summons of Parliament drew the town together, and simultaneously produced a card of invitation from Mrs. Burge, they should not meet their hostess of the night. Meantime, the success of the present gathering was unimpeachable. Everybody who was left in London had rallied round Great Swaffham-street; and there was no doubt but that the Morning Postof the coming day would convey to the ends of the civilised world a list of fashionables which would redound in the most complete manner to the éclatof Mrs. Stapleton Burge.

The necessary form of introduction had been gone through--scarcely necessary, by the way, in Great Swaffham-street; for the men always averred that Mrs. Burge never knew half the people at her own parties--and Lord Ticehurst, having done his duty in landing Gilbert, had strolled away among the other convives, with what object Gilbert well enough knew. He, Gilbert Lloyd, had rather a habit of trusting to chance in matters of this kind; and, on the present occasion, he found that chance befriended him. For while his patron, eager and anxious-eyed, went roaming round the room in hot search for the object of his thoughts, Gilbert, no less anxious, no less determined, remained quietly near the entrance-door, and narrowly watched each passing face. He knew most of them. A London man of-half-a-dozen seasons can scarcely find a fresh face in any evening party on which he may chance to stumble. We go on in our different sets, speaking to every other person we meet, and familiar with the appearance of all the rest--what freshness and variety! Some of the passers-by raised their eyebrows in surprise at seeing Lloyd in such a place; others nodded and smiled, and would have stopped to speak but for the plain noli-me-tangereexpression which he wore. He returned the nods and grins in a half-preoccupied, half-sullen manner, and it was not until he heard Miles Challoner's voice close by him that he seemed thoroughly roused. Then he drew back from the door-post, against which he had been leaning, and ensconcing himself behind the broad back of a stout old gentleman, his neighbour, saw Gertrude enter the room, on Miles Challoner's arm. They had been dancing; she was flushed and animated, and looked splendidly handsome, as evidently thought her companion. Her face was upturned to his, and in her eyes was a frank, honest look of love and trust, such a look as Gilbert Lloyd recollected to have seen there when he first knew her years ago, but which had soon died out, and had never reappeared until that moment. And it was for Miles Challoner that her spirits had returned, her love and beauty had been renewed; for Miles Challoner, whom he hated with a deadly hate, who had been his rock ahead throughout his life, and who was now robbing him of what indeed he had once thrown aside as valueless, but what he would now give worlds to repossess. Gilbert Lloyd's face, all the features of which were so well trained and kept in such constant subjection, for once betrayed him, and the evil passion gnawing at his heart showed itself in his fiery eyes, surrounded by a strained hot flush, and in his rigidly set mouth. Tommy Toshington, tacking about the room to avoid the pressure of the crowd, and coming suddenly round Lloyd's stout neighbour, was horrified by the expression in Gilbert's face.

"Why, what's the matter, Lloyd, my boy?" asked the old gentleman; "you look quite ghastly, by Jove! Ellis's claret not disagreed with you, has it?"

"Not a bit of it, Tommy; I'm all right," said Gilbert with an effort; "room's a little hot--perhaps that's made me look a little white."

"Look a little white! Dammy, you looked a little black when I first caught sight of you. You were scowling away at somebody; I couldn't make out who."

"Not I," said Gilbert, with an attempt at a laugh; "I was only thinking of something."

"O, shouldn't do that," said Mr. Toshington; "devilish stupid thing thinking; never comes to any good, and makes a fellow look deuced old Lots of people here to-night;" then looking round and sinking his voice, "and rather a mixture, eh? I can't think where some of the people come from; one never sees them anywhere else." And the old gentleman, whose father had been a dissenting hatter at Islington, propped his double gold-eyeglass on his nose, and surveyed the company with a look of excessive hauteur..

"See!" he said presently, nudging Gilbert with his elbow; "you reck'lect what I told you, down at the Crystal Palace that day, about Etchingham and Miss What-do-you-call-'em, the singer?--that it wasn't any go for my lord, because there was another fellow cutting in in that quarter--you reck'lect? Well, look here, here they are,--What's-his-name, Chaldecott or something, and the girl."

"I see them," said Lloyd, drawing back.

"All right," said Toshington; "you needn't hide yourself; don't you be afraid, they're much too much taken up with each other to be looking at us. Gad, she's a devilish pretty girl, that, ain't she, Lloyd? There's a sort of a something about her which--such a deuced good style too, and way of carryin' herself! Gad, as to most of the women now--set of dumpy little brutes!--might be kitchen-maids, begad!"

"Just look, Toshington, will you? I can't see, for this old fool's shoulder's in the way. Has Challoner left Miss Lambert?"

"Yes, he's stepped aside to speak to Lady Carabas; Miss Lambert is standing by the mantelpiece, and--"

"All right, back in half a-second!" and made straight for the place where Gertrude was standing.

"Now, that's a funny thing!" said old Toshington to himself, as he looked after him. "What does that mean? Is Lloyd making the running for his master, or is that a little commission on his own account? No go either way, I should say; the man in the beard means winning there, and no one else has a chance."

As Gilbert Lloyd crossed the room, Gertrude looked up, and their eyes met. The next instant she looked round for Miles Challoner, but he was still busily engaged in talking to Lady Carabas. Then she saw some other ladies of her acquaintance, seated within a little distance, and she determined on crossing the room to them. But she had scarcely moved a few steps when Gilbert Lloyd was by her side. Gertrude's heart beat rapidly; she scarcely heard the first words of salutation which Gilbert uttered; she looked quickly round and saw that though Miles was still standing by Lady Carabas's chair, his eyes were fixed on her and Lloyd. What could she do? What is that her husband says?

"Too much of this fooling! You musthear me now!"

With an attempt at a smile, Gertrude turned to her persecutor and said, "Once for all, leave me!"

"I will not," said he, in a low voice, but also with a smile on his face. "You cannot get away from me without exciting the suspicion, or the wonder at least, of the room. How long do you imagine I am going to let this pretty little play proceed? How long am I to look on and see the puppets dallying?"

Gertrude flushed scarlet as he said these words, but she did not speak.

"You're carrying this business with too high a hand," said he, emboldened by her silence. "You seem to forget that I have a word or two to say in the matter."

"See, Gilbert Lloyd," said Gertrude, still smiling and playing with her fan, "you sought me; not I you. Go now, and--"

"Go!" said Gilbert, who saw Miles Challoner looking hard at them,--"go, that he may come! Go! You give your orders freely! What hold have you on me that I am to obey them?"

"Would you wish me to tell you?"

"Tell away!" said Lloyd defiantly. "I don't mind."

"Here, then," said Gertrude, beckoning him a little closer with her fan, then whispering behind it. But one short sentence, a very few words, but, hearing them, Gilbert Lloyd turned death-white, and felt the room reel round before him. In an instant he recovered sufficiently to make a bow, and to leave the room and the house. When he got out into the street, the fresh air revived him; he leaned for a moment against some railings to collect his thoughts; and as he moved off, he said aloud, "He did suspect it, then; and he told her!"

[CHAPTER VII.]

Half-revealed.

Of all the places on which the autumnal moon, approaching her full like a comely matron, looks down, there are many far less picturesque and less enjoyable than that bit of Robertson-terrace, St. Leonards, which adjoins the narrow strip of beach communicating with the old town of Hastings proper. On this beach the moonbeams play.

"Among the waste and lumber of the shore, Hard coils of cordage, swarthy fishing-nets, Anchors of rusty fluke, and boats updrawn,"

casting grim and fantastic shadows, and bringing oddest objects into unwonted and undue prominence. Robertson-terrace--as hideous, architecturally considered, as are the majority of such marine asylums for the temporary reception of Londoners--stands back from the road, and has its stuccoed proportions somewhat softened by the trees and shrubs in the "Enclosure," as the denizens love to call it, a small oblong strip of something which ought to be green turf, but what, under the influence of promenading and croquet-playing, has become brown mud. In the moonlight on this lovely night in early autumn, some of the denizens yet linger in the Enclosure. Young people mostly, of both sexes, who walk in pairs, and speak in very low tones, and look at each other with very long immovable glances; young people who cannot imagine why people ever grow old, who cannot conceive that there can be any pleasure except in that one pastime in which they themselves are then employed--who cannot conceive, for instance, what enjoyment that old gentleman, who has been so long seated in the drawing-room balcony of No. 17, can find in life.

That old gentleman is Lord Sandilands, who, the London season over, has come down to St. Leonards for a little sea-air, and quiet and change. One reason for his selection of St. Leonards is that Miss Grace Lambert and Mrs. Bloxam are staying within a few miles' distance, at Hardriggs, Sir Giles Belwether's pretty place. Lord Sandilands had been invited to Hardriggs, also, but he disliked staying anywhere except with very intimate friends; and, moreover, he had come to that time of life when rest was absolutely essential to him, and he knew that under Sir Giles Belwether's ponderous hospitality he would simply be moving the venueof his London life without altering any of its details. Moreover, the old gentleman, by coming to St. Leopards, was carrying out a kindly scheme long since laid, of giving Miles Challoner occasional opportunities of seeing Miss Lambert. Miles was not invited to stay at Hardriggs; he did not even know Sir Giles Belwether; but he became Lord Sandilands' guest in the lodgings in Robertson-terrace, and, as such, he was taken over by his friend to Hardriggs, introduced to the host, and received with the greatest hospitality. Lord Sandilands has this advantage over the youthful promenaders in the "Enclosure," that while they cannot imagine what he is thinking of, he perfectly well divines the subject of their thoughts, and is allowing his own ideas to run in another vein of that special subject. He has just made Miles confess his love for Grace Lambert, and all the drawbacks and disadvantages of the position are opening rapidly before him.

"I might have expected it," said the old gentleman half-aloud; "I knew it was coming. I saw it growing day by day, and yet I never had the pluck to look the affair straight in the face--to make up my mind whether I'd tell him anything about Gertrude's parentage; and I don't know what to do now. Ah, here he is!--Well, Miles, had your smoke? Lovely night, eh?"

"A lovely night, indeed! No end of people out by the sea."

"You wouldn't mind a turn in that lime-walk at Hardriggs just now, Miles, eh? with--Kate Belwether, or someone else?"

"Rather the someone else, dear old friend. And so you weren't a bit astonished at what I told you to-day?"

"Astonished, my boy! I astonished? Why, where do you think my eyes have been? I declare you young fellows think that to you alone has been confided the appreciation of beauty and the art of love!"

"Anyone who imagines that must have ears, and hear not, so far as your lordship is concerned," said Miles, laughing. "Now, of John Borlase, commonly known as Baron Sandilands, the ladies whom he courted and the conquests which he made, are they not written in the Chronique Scandaleuseof the period?"

"Well, I don't know that. I'm of an old-fashioned school, which holds that no gentleman should so carry on his amourettesthat the world should talk about them. But the idea of your thinking that I should be astonished when you told me that you were head over ears in love with--with Miss Lambert! Nourri dans le sérail j'en connais les detours, Master Miles."

"And if not astonished, you were also not annoyed?"

"Annoyed! Not the least bit in the world. I don't mean to say that the matter looks to me entirely one of plain-sailing, my dear boy; there are certain difficulties which will naturally arise."

"Do you think that Grace's friends will make any obstacle? By the way, my dear lord, do you know anything of Miss Lambert's relations? I have never heard of or seen any connection but Mrs. Bloxam; but you who are so intimate with the young lady will probably know all about them."

A half-comic look of embarrassment overshadowed Lord Sandilands' face as he heard this inquiry, and he waited for a moment before he replied, "Not I, indeed, my dear Miles; Miss Lambert has never spoken to me of her relations--indeed, I understood from her that she was an orphan, left to Mrs. Bloxam's charge. I shouldn't think you need look for any objection to your marriage being made by the lady's friends."

"That is one point happily settled; then the world?"

"The what?"

"The opinion of the world."

"Ah, that's a very different matter! You're afraid of what people will say about your marrying a singer?"

"To you, dear old friend, I will confess candidly that I am. Not that I have any position, God knows, on the strength of which to give myself airs."

"My dear boy, that's where you mistake. If you hada position, you might marry not merely a charming and amiable and lovely girl like this, against whom no word ought to be uttered, but even a person without the smallest rag of reputation; and the world would say very little about it, and would speedily be silenced. Look at--no need, however, to quote examples. What I have said is the fact, and you know it."

"I am forced to acknowledge the truth of your remark, but while acknowledging it, I shall not permit the fact to turn me from my purpose. If Miss Lambert will accept me for a husband, I will gladly risk all the tattle of all the old cats in Belgravia."

"Your sentiments do you credit, my dear boy," said the old nobleman with a smile, "though the juxtaposition of 'tattle' and 'cats' is scarcely happy. I've noticed that when people are in love, the arrangement of their sentences is seldom harmonious. I suppose you feel tolerably certain of Miss Lambert's answer to your intended proposal. You are too much a man of the present day to anticipate any doubt in the matter."

"I should not be worth Miss Lambert's acceptance if I had any such vanity; and I know you're only joking in ascribing it to me."

"I was only joking; but now seriously, do you fear no rivals? You see how very much the young lady is sought after. Are you certain that her preference is given to you?"

"As certain as a man can be who has not 'put it to the touch to win or lose it all,' by ascertaining positively."

"And there is no one you are absolutely jealous of?"

"No one. Well,--no, not jealous of,--there is one man whom I regard with excessive distrust."

"You don't mean Lord Ticehurst?"

"O, no! Lord Ticehurst's manners are rough and odd; but he is a gentleman, and, I'm sure, would 'behave as such,' in every possible way, to Miss Lambert. Indeed, no duchess of his acquaintance can be treated with greater respect than she is by him. I would not say as much of the other man."

"Who is he?"

Miles hesitated a moment before he said, "Lord Ticehurst's great friend, Mr. Gilbert Lloyd."

"Mr. Gilbert Lloyd!" repeated Lord Sandilands, with a low whistle--"that's a very different matter. I don't mind telling you, my dear Miles, that I have had an uncomfortable impression about that young man ever since the first night we met him at Carabas House. It's singular too; for I know no real harm of the man. His tastes and pursuits are not such as interest or occupy me; though, of course, that is the case with scores of persons with whom I am acquainted, and towards whom I feel no such dislike. Very odd, isn't it?"

Miles looked hard at his friend to see whether there were any latent meaning in the question; but seeing that Lord Sandilands was apparently speaking without any strong motive, he said:

"It is odd. Perhaps," he added, "it is to be accounted for by the feeling that this--Mr. Gilbert Lloyd is not a gentleman?"

"N-no, not that. Though the man, amongst his own set, has an air of turfy, horsey life which is hideously repellent, yet with other people he shows that he knows at least the convenancesof society, and is not without traces of breeding and education. I fancy that in this case I am suffering myself to be influenced by my belief in physiognomy. The man has a decidedly bad face; deceit, treachery, and cruelty are written in the shifty expression of his sunken eyes, in his thin tightened lips."

"And you really believe this?" said Miles earnestly.

"I do; most earnestly. Depend upon it, Nature never makes a mistake. We may fail to read her properly sometimes, but she never errs. And in this case her handwriting is too plain to admit of any doubt."

Miles shuddered. The old gentleman noticed it, and laid his hand kindly on his friend's knee; then he said:

"But, after all, there's no reason for us to fear him. You say that he has been somewhat marked in his attention to Grace?"

"More than marked. Did you not notice the other night at the house of that odd woman, Mrs. Burge--O, no, I forgot, you were not there; but it was just before we left town, and Miss Lambert had been dancing with me, and I had only left her for a minute when Lloyd went up and spoke to her."

"Well?"

"Of course I don't know what he said, but they both seemed to speak very earnestly, and after a very few moments he left her abruptly and hurried away."

"Well, I don't think that proceeding ought to cause you much disquietude, Master Miles. In all probability, from what you say, Miss Lambert was giving Mr. Lloyd his congé, or, at all events, saying something not very pleasant to him. Have you ever spoken to her about Lloyd?"

"Once or twice only."

"And what has she said about him?"

"She seems to have taken your view of the question, my dear old friend, for she spoke of him with cold contempt and irrepressible dislike, and begged me never to mention his name to her again."

"Really, then it seems to me that you have nothing to fear in that quarter. That this Mr. Lloyd is a dangerous man I am convinced; that he would be desperate in any matter in which he was deeply interested, I don't doubt; but he may be as desperate as he pleases if Grace dislikes him, and loves you. By the way, as that question is still a moot point, Master Miles," added the old gentleman with a sly look, "the sooner you get it settled, the better. We shall be driving over to Hardriggs to-morrow, and I should think you mightfind an opportunity of speaking to the lady in private. I know I would at your time of life, and under the circumstances. And if you want an elderly gooseberry-picker, you may command me."

But seeing that Miles Challoner's face wore a stern and gloomy expression, Lord Sandilands dropped the tone of badinagein which he had been speaking, and said with great earnestness and softness:

"There is something strangely wrong with you to-night, Miles; something which keeps crossing your mind and influencing your thoughts; something which I am convinced is apart from, and yet somehow connected with, the subject we have been discussing. I have no wish to pry into your secrets, my dear boy; no right and no desire to ask for any confidence which you may not feel disposed to give. But as, since the death of my dear old friend, I have always regarded myself as your second father, and as I have loved you as I would have loved a son, I cannot bear to see you in obvious grief and trouble without longing to share it and to advise and help you."

There was a pathos in the old man's tone, no less than in his words, which touched Miles deeply. He took his friend's hand and pressed it, and his eyes were filled with tears, and his voice trembled as he said:

"God knows, my dearest friend, how willingly I acknowledge the truth of all that you have just said, and how recognisant I am of all your affection and kindness. I amtroubled and disturbed, but there is nothing in my trouble that need be hid from you; nothing, indeed, which your sympathy and counsel will not lighten and tend to disperse."

"That's right," said the old nobleman, brightening up again. "Come, what is this trouble? You're not worried for money, Miles?"

"No. I had an odd letter from my lawyers yesterday about some mortgage that Sir Thomas Walbrook is interested in, but I haven't gone into the matter yet. No, not money,--I wish it were only that!"

"What then? You've not gone and mixed yourself up with any--any connection--you know what I mean--that you feel it necessary to break off before you propose to Miss Lambert?"

"Not I, dear old friend; nothing of the sort. Though my trouble is caused by what I think the necessity of giving a full explanation on a very difficult and delicate matter, before I ask Grace to become my wife."

"In the name of fortune, what is it, then?" asked Lord Sandilands.

"Simply this," said Miles, his face resuming its grave expression; "you know that my father's life was overshadowed and his whole mental peace destroyed, at a period when he might reasonably have looked forward to much future enjoyment, by the conduct of my younger brother, Geoffrey?"

"Ah! now I begin to comprehend--"

"Wait, and hear me out. That conduct, the nature of which I never could learn, and do not know at this moment, blighted my father's life, and changed him from an open-hearted, frank, genial man, into a silent and reserved valetudinarian. For years and years Geoffrey's name was never mentioned in our house. I was brought up under strict orders never to inquire about him, directly or indirectly; and those orders I obeyed to the letter. Only when my father was on his deathbed--you recollect my being telegraphed for from your house, where I was staying? I spoke of Geoffrey. I asked why he had been sent away, what he had done--"

"Your father did not tell you?" interrupted Lord Sandilands eagerly.

"He did not, he would not. It was just before he expired; his physical prostration was great; all he could say was that Geoffrey was, and for ever must be, dead to me. He implored me, he commanded me with his dying breath, if ever I met my brother to shun him, to fly from him, to let nothing earthly induce me to know him or acknowledge him."

"Your poor father was right," said Lord Sandilands; "he could have said nothing else."

"Do you justify my father's severity?" cried Miles in astonishment. "Do you hold that he was right in dying in anger with one of his own children, and in bequeathing his anger to me, the brother of the man whom in his wrath he thus harmed?"

"I do; I do indeed."

"Do you tell me that any crime not punishable by law could justify such a sentence?--a sentence of excommunication from his home, from family love, from--"

"Stay, stay, Miles. Tell me, how has this subject cropped up just now? What has brought it into your thoughts?"

"Because, as a man of honour, I feel that I ought to tell Miss Lambert something at least--as much as I know--of the story before I ask her to be my wife. Because I would fain have told her that my father was harsh and severe to a degree in his conduct to Geoffrey."

"That is impossible; that you can never say. Listen, Miles; I know more of this matter than you suspect. I know every detail of it. Your father made me his confidant, and I know the crime which your brother attempted."

"You do?--the crime!"

"The crime. The base, dastardly, hideous crime, which rendered it impossible for your father to do otherwise than renounce his son, and bid you renounce your brother for ever."

"Ah, my God!" groaned Miles, burying his head in his hands.

"There is no reason to be so excited, my poor boy," said Lord Sandilands, laying his hand gently on him. "You need tell Grace nothing of this; and be sure that this wretched Geoffrey will never trouble you again. He is most probably dead."

"Dead!" shrieked Miles, raising his livid face and staring wildly at his friend. "He lives--here amongst us! I have seen him constantly; he has recognised me, I know. This man of whom we were just speaking,--this man whom you call Gilbert Lloyd,--is my younger brother, Geoffrey Challoner!"

[CHAPTER VIII.]

L'Homme propose.

When a man of Lord Ticehurst's character and disposition makes up his mind to achieve a certain result--in the turf slang of the day, "goes in for a big thing"--he is not easily thwarted, or, at all events, he does not give up his idea without having tried to carry it through. The indiscreet, illiterate, but by no means bad-hearted, young nobleman aforenamed had given himself up, heart and soul, to a passion for the opera-singer known to him as Miss Grace Lambert, and had gone through a psychological examination of his feelings, so far as his brain-power permitted, with the view of seeing how the matter lay, and what would be his best means for securing his ends. The notion of succeeding dishonourably had never entered his head, or at least had not remained there for a moment. In that knowledge of the world which comes, no one knows how, to persons who are ignorant of everything else--that savoir fairewhich is learned unconsciously, and which can never be systematically acquired--Lord Ticehurst was a proficient. He was not, as times go, an immoral man, certainly not a wicked one; but he lived in a loose set, and it did not arise from conscientious scruples that he had not "tried it on" that Grace Lambert should become his mistress. Such a result would have given him considerable éclatamongst his friends, and his religious notions were not sufficiently developed to make him shrink from taking such a step. He did nottake it because he knew it would be useless; because he knew that any such offer would be ignominiously rejected; that he would be spurned from the door, and never permitted again to be in the society of the girl whom he really loved. There was only one way out of it--to offer her marriage. And then the question came, Did he really love her sufficiently for that, and was he prepared to stand the consequences?

Did he really love her? He thought he could put in an answer to that, by Jove! Did he really love her? You should ask old Gil about that! Old Gil knew more of him than anyone else; and he could tell you--not that he knew what it was, what was the reason of it, don't you know?--that for the whole of last season he had been an altered man. He knew that himself--he confessed it; he felt that he had not taken any proper interest in the stable, and that kind of thing; indeed, if he had not had old Gil to look after it, the whole thing would have gone to the deuce. He knew that well enough, but he could not help it. He had been regular spoons on this girl, and he was, and he should be to the end of the chapter, amen. That was all he had got to say about it. His life had been quite a different thing since he had known her. He had left off swearing, and all that cussed low language that he used to delight in once upon a time; and he'd got up early, because he thought there was a chance of meeting her walking in the Park (he had met her once, and solemnly walked between her and Mrs. Bloxam for an hour without saying a word); and he had cut the balletand its professors, with whom formerly he had very liberal relations. The coryphéesand the little rats, whom he had been in the habit of calling by their Christian names, who knew him by the endearing abbreviation of "Ticey," and to whom formerly he was delighted to stand and talk by the hour, received the coldest of bows from their quondam friend, as he stood amongst the wings of the opera-scenery on the chance of a word of salutation from the prima donnaas she hurried from her dressing-room on to the stage. But that word and the glance at her were enough. "It's no good," he used to say; "it won't do after that. If I go away to supper at old Chalkstone's, and find Bella Marshall and Kate Herbert and half-a-dozen of the T.R.D.L. balletthere, 'pon my soul it don't amuse me when they put the lobster-claws at the end of their noses; and I think Bagwax and Clownington and old Spiff--well, damme, they're old enough to know better, and they might think about--well, I don't want to preach about what we're all coming to, and what must be precious near for them."

A man of this kind thus hit suffers very severely. The novelty of the passion adds considerably to his pangs. The fact that he cannot speak out his hopes and wishes irritates and worries him. To throw the handkerchief is easy enough at the first start--becomes easier through frequent practice; but to win the prize is a very different matter. With a lady of his own rank it would have been much easier wooing; but with Grace, Lord Ticehurst felt himself placed at a double disadvantage. He had to assuage the rage of his friends at the honour he was doing her, and he had to prove to her that he was doing her no honour at all. The former, though a difficult, was the easier task. Lord Ticehurst knew his aunt, Lady Carabas, quite well enough to be aware that, though she was the first grande damewho had introduced Miss Lambert into society, and that though up to that minute she had been the young lady's most steadfast friend, she would be the very first to rail against the mésalliance, and do all she could to cry down that reputation which she had so earnestly vaunted. Others would follow suit at once, and he and his wife would have to run the gauntlet. His wife! Ah, that was just the point; he would not care a rap if she were his wife, if he had her brains and her beauty to help in winning the game for him. But Lord Ticehurst's knowledge of the world was too great to permit him to flatter himself thus far; he knew that he had never received any substantial acknowledgment from Miss Lambert; and he recollected, with a very unpleasant twinge, what Gilbert Lloyd had said about Miles Challoner's attentions in that quarter--attentions received almost as favourably as they were earnestly proffered, as Lord Ticehurst had had an opportunity of witnessing at Mrs. Stapleton Burge's reception.

Young noblemen of large fortunes are not in the habit of fighting with their inclinations and wishes. Lord Ticehurst felt that he must do his best to make this girl marry him--whether she would or not, he felt was doubtful, and acknowledged the feeling to himself with an honest frankness which was one of his best characteristics. He bore away with him his dull, wearying heartache, his "restless, unsatisfied longing," to Goodwood, where it cankered the ducal hospitality, and made him think but little of the racing-prizes which he carried off. He bore it away with him to the hotel at Eastbourne, where, pending the Doncaster week, he and his friends had set up their Lares and Penates, and were doing their best to gain health and strength from the sea-breezes and quiet, and make up for the ravages of the London season.

Except in the desultory manner already narrated, Lord Ticehurst had not revealed to his confederate the state of his feelings towards Miss Lambert. He had said nothing positive to him regarding what was now his fixed intention, of proposing for that young lady's hand, and it is probable he would have been consistently reticent had not chance brought the confession about in this way.

It was a splendid August morning, and the two gentlemen were seated in the largest sitting-room of the pretty hotel, with its bay window overlooking the pleasant promenading crowd of seaside loungers, bathable children, bathed young ladies with their limp hair hanging down their backs, old gentlemen walking up and down with mouths and nostrils wide open to inhale as much ozone as possible during their stay, and the other usual common objects of the sea-shore. Breakfast was just over, and cigars had already been lighted. The blue vapour came curling round the sides of the sporting-print in which Gilbert Lloyd's head and shoulders were enveloped, and mixed with another blue vapour which stole over the more massive folds of the Times, with which Lord Ticehurst was engaged.

A shout of "Hallo!" betraying intense astonishment, roused Gilbert from his perusal of the vaticinations of "Calchas." "What makes you hallo out like that? What is it?" he asked.

"What is it! O, nothing particular," replied Lord Ticehurst; adding immediately, "By Jove, though!"

"No, but I say, Etchingham, something must have roused you to make you give tongue. What was it, old boy? No more scratchings for the Leger?"

"No, something quite different to that. Well, look here, if you must know;" and his lordship lazily handed the paper to his friend, and pointed to a particular paragraph.

"Advertisement!" said Lloyd as he took it. "Now what the deuce can you find to interest you among the advertisements?" But the expression of his face changed as he saw, in large letters, the name of Miss Grace Lambert; and on further perusal he found that Mr. Boulderson Munns, whose noble style he immediately recognised, informed the British public that he had made arrangements with this distinguished prima donnafor a tour during the winter months, in the course of which she would visit the principal cities in England, Ireland, and Scotland, accompanied by a troupeof distinguished talent, superintended by Mr. Munns himself, who would lend all the resources of the justly-celebrated band and répertoireof the Grand Scandinavian Opera-house to the success of the design.

Gilbert Lloyd, who had felt his colour ebb when he first saw his wife's name, read through the advertisement carefully, but said, nothing as he laid the paper down.

"Have you read it?" asked Lord Ticehurst.

"I have."

"And what do you think of it?"

"Think of it! What should I think of it, except that it will probably be a profitable speculation for--for Miss Lambert, and certainly a profitable one for Munns?"

"Well but, I say, look here! It mustn't come off."

"What mustn't?"

"Why, this what's-its-name--tour!"

"Then it will be a bad thing for Munns. But, seriously, Etchingham, what on earth do you mean? What are you talking about?"

"Well, I mean that--that young lady, Miss Lambert, mustn't go flitting about the country."

"Why not? What have you to do with it?"

"Why, haven't I told you--don't you recollect, before Ascot and all that?--only you're so deuced dull, and think of nothing but--well, never mind. Don't you recollect my saying I intended to ask Miss Lambert to be my wife?" And Lord Ticehurst, whom the avowal and the unusual flux of words rendered a bright peony colour, glared at his Mentor in nervous trepidation.

Gilbert looked at him very calmly. The corners of his mouth twitched for an instant as he began to speak, but he was otherwise perfectly composed as he said, "I had forgotten; you must forgive me; the stable takes up so much of my time that I have scarcely leisure to look after your other amusements. O, you intend to propose for this young lady! Do you think she will accept you?"

"That's a devilish nice question to ask a fellow, that is. 'Pon my soul, I don't think there's another fellow in the world that would have had the--well, the kindness--to ask that. I suppose it will be all right; if I didn't, I shouldn't--"

"Shouldn't ask, eh? Well, I suppose not, and it was indiscreet in me to suggest anything different. What do you propose to do now?"

"Well, what do you think? Perhaps I'd better go up to town--deuced odd town will look at this time of year, won't it?--and see Miss Lambert, and make it all straight with her; and then go off and see old Munns, and tell him he'll have to give up his notion of the what's-its-name--the tour. He'll want to be squared, of course, and we must do it for him; but I shall leave you to arrange that with him."

"Of course; that will not be a difficult matter." Gilbert Lloyd waited a minute before he added, "But there is no necessity for you to go to London on this portentous matter. Miss Lambert is much nearer to you than you imagine."

"Much nearer! What the deuce do you, mean?" asked Lord Ticehurst, looking round as if he expected to see Gertrude entering the room.

"Exactly what I say. I had a letter this morning from Hanbury; he's staying at Hardriggs, old Sir Giles Belwether's place, not a dozen miles from here; and he mentioned that Miss Lambert was a guest there too. Wait a minute; I'll read you what he says. No, never mind, it's only some nonsense about Lady Belwether's insisting on old Bel having a Dean to stay in the house at the same time to counteract the effect of the stage, and--"

"D--d impertinence!" muttered Lord Ticehurst. "I always did hate that Hanbury--sneering beast! O, about twelve miles from here, eh? Might drive over to luncheon? What do you say, Gil? Do us good, eh?"

"Do yougood, very likely, Etchingham! At all events, if you have made up your mind to this course, it's the best and the most honourable way to bring it to an issue at once. And I'm not sure that this is not an excellent opportunity. You will find the lady unfettered by business, free from the lot of fribbles who are always butterflying about her in town, and have only to make your running. I can't go; I've got letters to write, and things to do, and must stop here."

Within half an hour Lord Ticehurst's phaeton came spinning round to the door of the hotel, and Gilbert, stepping out on to the balcony, saw him--got up to the highest pitch of sporting négligé--drive off amid the unsuppressed admiration of the bystanders. Then Lloyd walked back into the room and flung himself on a sofa, and lit a fresh cigar, and as he puffed at it, soliloquised, "What was that I saw on a seal the other day? Quo Fata ducunt.. What a wonderful thing that they should have led to this; that they should have led me to being the most intimate friend of a man who is now gone off to propose to my wife! My wife! I, wonder when I shall make up my mind as to what my real feelings are towards her. After years of indifference, of absolute forgetfulness, I see her, and fall madly in love with her again--so madly that I pursue her, plainly seeing it is against her will, and, like an idiot, give her the chance of saying that to me which makes me hate her worse than ever--worse even than when we parted, and I did hate her then. But I've a feeling now which I had not during all that long interval of our separation. Then I did not care where she was, or what she did. Now, by the Lord, if I were to think that she cared for any man--or not that, I know she does, curse him! I know she does care for that man--I mean, if she were to give any man the position that was mine--that was? that is, when I choose to claim it--he and I would have to settle accounts. That poor fool has no chance. Gertrude has no ambition--that's a fault I always found in her; if she had had, we might have risen together; but she was nothing when she was not sentimentally spoony; and she would throw over my lord, who really loves her in a way that I never thought him capable of, the title, money, and position, for the beaux yeuxand the soft speeches of my sweet brother. What will be the end of that, I wonder? By heavens, if I saw thatculminating--if I thought that she was going to claim the freedom we agreed upon for the sake of bestowing herself on him, I'd stand the whole racket, run the whole risk, declare myself and my position openly, and let her do her worst!" He rose from the sofa and walked to the window, where he stood looking out for a few moments, then returned to his old position. "The worst, eh? How I hate that cursed sea, and the glare of the sun on the cliffs! It always reminds me of that infernal time. Do her worst! She's the most determined woman I ever saw. I shall never forget the look of her face that night, nor the tone of her voice as she whispered behind her fan. Well, sufficient for the day, &c. That's to be met when it comes. It hasn't come yet. I may be perfectly certain what reply will be given to my dear young friend Etchingham, who has just started on his precious fool's-errand; and as for the other man--well, he's not staying at Hardriggs, or Hanbury would have mentioned him. There will be this country tour to fill up the winter; and by the time next season arrives, he may be off it, or she may be off it, or a thousand things may have happened, which are now not worth speculating about, but which will serve my turn as they come." And Gilbert Lloyd turned to his writing-desk, and plunged into calculations and accounts with perfectly clear brains, in the working of which the thoughts of the previous half-hour had not the smallest share.

Meanwhile, Lord Ticehurst sat upright in his mail-phaeton, driving the pair of roans which were the cynosure of the Park during the season, and the envy of all horsey men always, through some of the loveliest scenery in Sussex. Not that scenery, except Grieve's or Beverley's, made much impression on his lordship. Constant variety of hill and dale merely brought out the special qualities and paces of the roans; wooded uplands suggested good cover-shooting; broad expanse of heath looked very like rabbits. To such a thorough sportsman thoughts like these occurred involuntarily; but he had plenty beside to fix what he called his mind. Though he had made as light as possible to his henchman of the expedition on which he was engaged, and given himself the airs of a conquering hero, he was by no means so well satisfied of his chances of success, or of his chances of happiness, were success finally achieved. His chances of success occupied him first. Well, he did not know--you could never tell about women, at least he couldn't, whether they meant it, or whether they didn't. He didn't know; she was always very friendly, and that kind of thing; but with women that went for nothing. They'd draw you on, until you thought nothing could be more straight; and then throw you over, and leave you nowhere. N-no; he couldn't recollect anything particular that Miss Lambert had ever said to induce him to hope: she'd admired the roans as the groom moved them up and down in front of her windows; and she'd said more than once that she was glad some song of hers had pleased him, and that was all. Not much indeed; but then he was an earl; and the grand, undying spirit of British flunkydom had led him to believe, as indeed it leads every person of his degree to believe, that "all thoughts, all passions, all delights, whatever stirs this mortal frame," are at the command of anyone named in Debrett, or eulogised by Sir Bernard Burke: "Ticehurst, Earl of, Viscount Etchingham, b. 1831, succeeded his father the 3d Earl in," &c. &c. What was the use of that, if people were not to bow down in the dust before him, and he were not to have everything he wished? Heaps of fellows had been floating round her all the season, but no such large fish as he had risen at the bait; and though she had not particularly distinguished him, still he had only to go in and win the prize. What was it that Gilbert Lloyd had let drop about some rival in the field? O, that man Challoner! Yes, he had himself noticed that there had been a good deal of attention paid in that quarter, and by no means unwillingly received. Queer customer that old Gil! sees everything, by Jove! fancy his spotting that! Good-looking chap, Challoner, and quite enough to say for himself; but, Lord, when it came to the choice between him and the Earl of Ticehurst!

Lord Ticehurst smiled quite pleasantly to himself as this alternative rose in his mind, and flicked his whip in the air over the heads of the roans, causing that spirited pair to plunge in a manner which made the groom (a middle-aged, sober man, with a regard for his neck, and a horror of his master's wild driving) look over the head of the phaeton in fear and trembling. As the horses quieted down and settled into their paces, Lord Ticehurst's spirits sunk simultaneously. Suppose it were all right with the lady, what about the rest of the people? Not his following--not Bardolph, Nym, and Pistol, and the rest of the crew. Lord Ticehurst might not be a clever man, but he had sufficiently "reckoned up" his clientèle, and he knew, whatever they might think, none of their tongues would wag. But the outsiders--the "society" people--what would they say to his bringing a lady from the boards of the opera to sit at the head of his table at home, and demand all the respect due to her rank abroad? They wouldn't like it; he knew that fast enough. O yes, of course they'd say that he was not the first who'd done it, and it had always been a great success hitherto, and so on; but still he had to look to his own position and hers, and--by Jove, Lady Carabas! she'd make it pleasant for them, and no mistake! Her ladyship liked her protégée, liked to flaunt her in the eyes of rival lion-hunters, gloried in the success she achieved, and the excitement she created; but her nephew knew well enough what her feelings would be if she had to acknowledge the brilliant prima donnaof the opera-house as a relation; if she had to endure the congratulations of her female friends on the distinguished addition to the family circle which her kindness and tact had brought about.

What the deuce did it matter to him! The roans were then pulling well and steadily together, and the phaeton bowled merrily along the level turnpike-road. What the deuce did it matter to him! Was not he the Earl of Ticehurst, and was he not to be his own master? and was not he old enough, and rich enough, and big swell enough to do what he pleased, and to take a sight at the world's odd looks, and pooh-pooh the world's odd remarks? He was, and he intended to prove it; and after all, he would like to see one of them to compare with his pretty Grace. Why, who had they made a fuss about last season? Alice Farquhar, an insipid-looking, boiled-veal kind of girl, with her pale freckled face and her red hair; and Constance Brand, with her big black eyebrows, and her flashing eyes, and her hook-nose--talk about tragedy queens, well, there was Constance Brand cut out for that to a T! Everybody said what a charming thing it was when Alice Farquhar married old Haremarch, and how, ever since, he had been clothed and in his right mind; and as for Constance Brand--well, everyone knew she had saved the family credit by marrying young Klootz, who now called himself Cloote, and who only suffered himself to be reminded by his income that he was lineally descended from old Jacob Klootz, the banker and money-lender of Frankfurt-am-Main. Neither of these girls was to be compared to Miss Lambert, and he was determined that--Lord Ticehurst's spirits sunk again just at this juncture, as the gates of the Hardriggs avenue came within sight.

The Belwethers were very pleasant old-fashioned people, who lived the same life year after year without ever getting tired of it. They were at Hardriggs, their very pleasant ancestral seat, from August until the end of March, and at their very pleasant town-house in Brook-street from April till the end of July. When in the country, old Sir Giles shot, fished, and attended the Quarter-sessions, the Conservative demonstrations, and the Volunteer reviews of his county. When in town, he slept a good deal at the Carlton, and rode a clever cob about the Park between twelve and two, distinguished for the bottle-green cutaway coat with velvet-collar, and the high muslin checked cravat of sixty years ago. Lady Belwether's character was well summed up in the phrase "kind old goose," which a particular friend applied to her. A madness for music was the only marked feature of her disposition; at home she visited all the old women, and helped the curate, and gave largely to the Flannel Club, and looked after the schools, and worried the doctor, and played the harmonium in the village-church on Sunday; and in town, what with the opera three nights a-week, and the Monday Popular Concerts, and the matinéesand soirées musicalesof distinguished creatures, with a dash of Exeter Hall oratorio, and a soupçonof Philharmonic, the old lady's life was one whirl of delight. Lady Belwether had fallen in love with Gertrude at first sight. She was by no means a gushing old lady, nor, though so devoted to music, had she ever made the acquaintance of any professional. Hitherto she had always stood on her dignity when such a proposition had been made to her. She had no doubt, she used to say, that the artists in question were pleasant people in their way, but that was not her way. However, the first glance at Miss Lambert made the old lady wild to know her: there never was such a sweet face--so interesting, so classical---yes, the old lady might say, so holy; "and her voice, my dear, it gives me the notion of an angel singing." So, worthy old Lady Belwether having ascertained that Miss Lambert was perfectly "correct" and ladylike, procured an introduction to her, and commenced heaping upon her a series of kindnesses which culminated in the invitation to Hardriggs. This invitation was accepted principally by the advice of Lord Sandilands, who had known the Belwethers all his life, and who felt that Gertrude could not enjoy the quiet and fresh air requisite after her London season with more thoroughly respectable people.

It was after the invitation had been given and accepted that Lady Belwether began to feel a little nervous and uncomfortable about what she had done. For in the pride of her heart and the warmth of her admiration for Gertrude, she told everybody that dear Miss Lambert was coming to them at Hardriggs in the autumn. Among others, she mentioned the fact to Miss Belwether, Sir Giles's sister, a dreadful old woman who lived in a boarding-house at Brighton, in order to be in the closest proximity to her "pastor," the Reverend Mr. Tophet, and who uttered a yelp of horror at the announcement. "I have said nothing, Maria," said this horrible old person, "to your gaddings-about and the frivolous style of your existence, but I must lift up my voice when you tell me you are about to receive a stage-player as your guest." "Stage-player" is an awkward word to be thrown at the head of a leader of county society, and it hit home, and rather staggered dear old Lady Belwether; not that the gallant old lady for an instant entertained the notion of giving up her intended guest, or suffered herself to appear the least abashed in the eyes of her antagonist. "It's a mere matter of taste, my dear Martha," she replied; "for my own part, I would sooner associate with a lady who, though a singer, is undoubtedly a lady, than with man who calls himself a minister, who was a shoemaker, and who always must be a vulgar boor." Having fired which raking shot at the Reverend Tophet, the old lady sailed away and closed the conversation.

But she felt that it would be a great advantage if she could have someone staying in the house at the same time with Miss Lambert, whose presence would prove an effectual check on the ridiculous gossip likely to be prevalent in the county. The lay element would be excellently represented in the respectably dull and decorous people who were coming; but there was wanting an infusion of the clerical element, which could best be met by inviting Sir Giles's old friend the Dean of Burwash. Henry Asprey, Dean of Burwash, had been known as "Felix" Asprey at school and college, from his uninterrupted run of luck. The son of a poor solicitor, a good-looking idle lad, of capital manners and address, but with very little real talent, he had won an exhibition from his school, a scholarship, a fellowship, and a double-second at the University, no one knew how. He had taken orders, and travelled as tutor to the then Premier's son through Egypt and the Holy Land; on his return had published a little book of very weak poems, under the title Palm-leaves and Dates, which, with his usual luck, happened to hit the very bad taste of the day, and went through several editions. His friend the Premier gave him a good living, and he had scarcely been inducted into it when he won the heart of a very rich widow, whom he married, and whom, with his usual luck, within the course of four years he buried, inheriting her fortune of three thousand a-year. It was to console him in his deep affliction that his friend the Premier, just then quitting office for the third and last time, bestowed upon him the Deanery of Burwash. He was now some fifty years old, tall, thin, and eminently aristocratic-looking; had a long transparent hand, which was generally clasping his chin, and a soft persuasive voice. He liked music and poetry, and good dinners; was found at private views of picture-exhibitions; belonged to the Athenaeum Club; and liked to be seen there conversing with professional literary men. People said he would be a Bishop some day, and he thought so himself--he did not see why not; he would have looked well in his robes, spoken well in the House of Lords, and never committed himself by the utterance of any extreme opinion. That was a thing he had avoided all his life, and to it much of the secret of his success might be ascribed. His sermons were eloquent--his friends said "sound," his enemies "empty;" he deplored the division in the Church with sympathetic face and elegant gesture; but he never gave adhesion to either side, and showed more skill in parrying home-questions than in any other action of his life.

Such was Dean Asprey, to whom Lady Belwether wrote an invitation to Hardriggs, telling him frankly that Miss Grace Lambert would be one of the guests, and asking if he had any objection to meet her. The Dean's reply, written in the neatest hand on the thickest cream-laid notepaper, arrived by return of post. He accepted the invitation as heartily as it was given ("Genial creature!" said dear old Lady Belwether); he fully appreciated dear Lady Belwether's frankness about her guest, for he was aware how could he fail to be?--of the censoriousness of the world towards persons of his calling. He had, however, made it his rule through life, and he intended to pursue the same course until the end, to shape his conduct according to the dictates of that still small voice of his conscience rather than at the bidding of the world. ("The dear!" said Lady Belwether.) He should therefore have the greatest pleasure in making the acquaintance of Miss Grace Lambert, of whom he had already heard the most favourable accounts, not merely as regarded her great genius, but her exemplary conduct. And he was, with kindest regards to Giles, his dear Lady Belwether's most sincere friend, Henry Asprey. "A Christian gentleman," said the old lady, with tears of delight standing in her eyes as she finished the letter; "and Martha to talk of her stage-players and Tophets indeed, when a man like that does not mind!"

The Belwethers were rather astonished when, just after the party had sat down to luncheon, they heard Lord Ticehurst announced. For though there was a certain similarity of sporting tastes between him and Sir Giles, the disparity of age caused them to move in widely different sets; while Lady Belwether knew his lordship as the nephew and one of the principal attendants on, and abettors of, Lady Carabas, whom the old lady held in great aversion. "One of the new style of ladies, my dear," she used to say with a sniff of disdain; "finds women's society too dull for her, must live amongst men, talks slang, and I daresay smokes, if one only knew." However, they both received the young nobleman with considerable empressement; and Lord Ticehurst, on taking his seat at the luncheon-table, found that he knew most of the assembled party. The Dean was almost the only one with whom he had not a previous acquaintance; and Lord Ticehurst had scarcely whispered to Lady Belwether a request to know who was the clerical party on his left, when the Dean turned round and introduced himself as an old friend of the late Lord Ticehurst's. "I used to meet your father at Lady Walsingham's receptions when Lord Walsingham was Premier, and he allowed me to call him my very good friend. We had certain tastes in common which bound us together--geology and mineralogy, for instance. You are not a geologist, I believe, my lord?"

"Well, no," said Lord Ticehurst frankly; "that ain't my line."

"N-no," said the Dean. "Well, we all have our different tastes--tot homines, quot sententiæ.. Your father was a man who was passionately fond of science; indeed, I often used to wonder how a man absorbed as he was in what generally proves to ethers the all-engrossing study of politics could find time for the discussion of scientific propositions, and for the attendance at the lectures of the Royal Institution. But your father was a man of no ordinary calibre; he was--"

"O yes, he was a great gun at science and electricity, and all that kind of thing, at least so I've been told. Excuse me for half a minute; I want to get some of that ham I see on the sideboard." And Lord Ticehurst rose from the seat, to which he did not return after he had helped himself, preferring a vacant place at the other end of the table, by the aide of Sir Giles Belwether, whose conversation about hunting and racing proved far more entertaining to his lordship. Moreover, from his new position he could keep a better view of Miss Lambert, who did not, he was pleased to observe, seem particularly gratified or amused at the rapid fire of conversation kept up by the young men on either side of her.

When luncheon was over, and the party rose and dispersed, Lord Ticehurst was seized upon by Sir Giles, who took him to the stables, expatiating lengthily and wearily on the merits of his cattle; and it was not until late in the afternoon that the visitor could make his escape from his host. He thought that he would have had his journey for nothing, seeing no chance of getting a private interview with Miss Lambert, when on his return to the house to see if he could find Lady Belwether, to whom he intended making his adieux, he heard the sound of a piano, and recognised the prelude of a favourite ballad of Gertrude's. Before the song could begin, Lord Ticehurst had entered the room, and found Miss Lambert, as he expected, alone at the piano. Gertrude looked round at the opening of the door, and when she saw who it was, half rose from her seat.

"Pray don't move, Miss Lambert," said Lord Ticehurst, approaching her; "pray don't let me disturb you."

"You don't disturb me in the least, Lord Ticehurst," said Gertrude, sitting down again. "I was merely amusing myself. I had not even the business excuse of being 'at practice.'"

"Don't let me interfere, then. Amuse yourself and me at the same time. Do now, it will be a charity; 'pon my word it will."

"No, no, no; I'm not so cruel as that. I know the terrible infliction music is to you in London. I've watched too often the martyr-like manner in which you've suffered under long classical pieces, and the self-denying way in which you have applauded at the end of them, without deliberately exposing you to more torture in the country."

"Assure you you're wrong, Miss Lambert; but I'm too happy to think you've done me the honour to watch me at all, to go into the question. No, please don't go. If you won't sing to me, may I speak to you?"

Gertrude, who had again half-risen, turned round to him with a look of wonder in her eyes. "May you speak to me, Lord Ticehurst? Why, of course!"

The answer was so manifestly simple and genuine, that it quite took Lord Ticehurst aback, and there was a moment's pause before he said, "Thanks, yes--you're very good. I wanted to speak to you--wanted to say something rather particular to you, in point of fact."

The hesitation in his manner, an odd conscious look in his face, had revealed the object of his visit. Gertrude knew what he was about to say, but she remained perfectly calm and unembarrassed, merely saying,

"Fray speak, Lord Ticehurst; I am quite at your service."

"Thanks very much--kind of you to say so, I'm sure. Fact of the matter is, Miss Lambert, ever since I've had the pleasure of knowing you I've been completely stumped, don't you know?--bowled over, and that kind of thing. I suppose you've noticed it; fellows at the club chaff most awfully, you know, and I can't stand it any longer; and, in short, I've come to ask you if--if you'll marry me, and that kind of thing."

"You do me great honour, Lord Ticehurst," commenced Gertrude; "very great honour--"

"O," interrupted his lordship, "don't you think about that; that's what they said at White's, but I said that was all d--d stuff--I beg your pardon, Miss Lambert; all nonsense I mean--about honour, and all that. Why," he went on to say, having worked himself up into a state of excitement, "of course I know I'm an earl, and that kind of thing. I can't help knowing about my--my station in life, and you'd think me a great ass if I pretended I didn't; but when you're my wife, you'll be--I mean to say you'll grace it and adorn it--and--and there's not one in the whole list fit to be named along with you, or to hold a candle to you."

"I cannot thank you sufficiently for this expression of kind feeling towards me, Lord Ticehurst," said Gertrude. "No, hear me for one minute;" as he endeavoured again to interrupt her. "Ever since you have known me you have treated me with the utmost courtesy and kindness, and you have now done me the greatest possible honour. You may judge, then, how painful it is to me--" Lord Ticehurst's jaw and hat here dropped simultaneously--"how painful it is to me to be compelled to decline that honour."

"To--to decline it?"

"To decline it."

"To say no!"

"To say no."

"Then you refuse me! Case of chalks, by Jove! Miss Lambert, I--I'm sorry I've troubled you," said Lord Ticehurst, picking up his hat and making for the door. "I hope you won't think anything of it, I--good-morning!--Damme if I know whether I'm on my head or my heels," he added when he got outside, and was alone.

Lord Ticehurst was so completely bouleverséthat he scarcely knew how he got to his phaeton, or how he tooled the roans, who were additionally frisky after the Belwether oats, down the avenue. He knew nothing until he got to the gate, on the other side of which was an open fly. He looked vacantly at its occupants, but started as he recognised Lord Sandilands and Miles Challoner.

"O, that's it, is it?" said his lordship to himself. "Damme, old Gil was right again!"

[CHAPTER IX.]

Dieu dispose.

The effect of Miles Challoner's startling communication upon Lord Sandilands was very great; but the long-cultivated habit of self-command enabled him to conceal its extent and somewhat of its nature from his younger friend. It was fortunate that Miles was just then so much engrossed with his love, so full of the hope of the success of his suit, so relieved and encouraged by discovering that Lord Sandilands did not attempt to dissuade him from a project in which he had felt very doubtful whether he should have the support of a man of the world--and though nothing would have induced him to abandon that project, Lord Sandilands' acquiescence made a wonderful difference to him in the present, and would, he felt, be of weighty importance in the future,--that he was not keenly observant of the old nobleman. As soon as it was possible, Lord Sandilands got rid of Miles, but not until he had received from the young man a grateful acknowledgment of his kindness, and until they had finally agreed on the expedition to Hardriggs for the following day.

When he was quite alone, the familiar friend of Miles Challoner's father gave way to the feelings with which this revelation had filled him. This, then, was the explanation of the instinctive aversion he had felt towards Gilbert Lloyd--fate had brought him in contact with the man whose story he alone of living men knew, and under circumstances which might have terrible import. The one hope of his dead friend--that the brothers might never meet had been defeated; the fear which had troubled him in his later days had been fulfilled. If Miles Challoner's impression concerning this man should be correct--if indeed he was or intended to become a suitor to Gertrude, a fresh complication of an extremely dangerous nature--knowing what he knew, he could well appreciate that danger might arise. The skeleton was wearing flesh again, and stalking very close by the old man now. Hitherto only the strong sympathy which had united him with Miles Challoner and his father--his friendship for the latter had been one of the strongest and deepest feelings of a life which had, on the whole, been superficial--made the fate of the outcast son and brother a subject of any interest to Lord Sandilands. He might have turned up at any time, and this unfortunate meeting and recognition between the brothers have taken place, and beyond the unpleasantness of the occurrence, and the necessity he should have recognised for impressing upon Miles as stringently as possible the importance of observing his father's prohibition, he would not have felt himself personally concerned. But Gertrude! the girl whom he had come to love with such true fatherly feeling and solicitude--the girl who had brought into his superficial life such mingled feelings of pain and pleasure--what if she were about to be involved in this family mystery and misery? Very seldom in the course of his existence had Lord Sandilands experienced such acute pain, such a sensation of helpless terror, as this supposition inspired. Supposing that Miles Challoner was right in the dread which Gilbert Lloyd's manner with regard to Gertrude had awakened in him,--and the eyes of a lover not sure of his own position, and anxiously on the lookout for possible rivals, were likely to be more acute and more accurate than those of an old gentleman much out of practice in the subtleties of the tender passion, and without the spur to his perceptions of suspicion,--supposing he was really in love with Gertrude, and that by any horrible chance Gertrude should prefer him to Miles! Very unpleasant physical symptoms of disturbance manifested themselves after Lord Sandilands had fully taken this terrible hypothesis into consideration, and for a time the old gentleman felt that whether it was gout or apoplexy which was about to claim him for its own was a mere question of detail. He had lived so long without requiring to test the strength of his nerves, without having any very strong or urgent demand made upon him for the exercise of his feelings, that anything of the kind now decidedly disagreed with him, and he went to bed in a rueful state of mind, and a shaky condition of body. The night brought him calmness and counsel, and the symptoms of illness passed off sufficiently for him to resolve on keeping the engagement he had made with Miles for the following day. "The sooner his mind is at ease, the sooner will mine be, on his account and my own." Thus ran Lord Sandilands' thoughts as he lay awake, listening against his will to the splash of the sea, and inclined to blame its monotonous murmur for the nervousness which had him in its grip. "I suppose it's not the right thing for me to help Miles to marry Gertrude--my old friend would not have liked the notion of his son and heir's marrying my natural daughter; but what can I do? The young fellow is not like other men of his age and position; in fact, he isn't, strictly speaking, I suppose, a 'young' fellow at all. If he were, and resembled the young men of the day a little more, I fancy he never would have thought of marrying her. And then there's an awful blot upon the Challoners, too--and she is such a charming girl, no tongue has ever dared to wag against her. Suppose I did not encourage it, that I set myself against it, what could I do? I have literally no right in Miles's case, and none that I can acknowledge in Gertrude's, and I should only make them both dislike me, without preventing the marriage in the least. I wish--because of what poor old Mark would have thought--that they had never met; but I can't go beyond that--no, I can't. But if she cares for that wretch, good heavens! what shall I do?" The old man put his shrunken hands up to his bald temples, and twisted his head about on his pillow, and groaned in his solitude and perplexity. "Must I threaten him with exposure, and so drive him out of the country? or must I tell her the truth about herself, and ask her to believe, on the faith of my unexplained assertion, that the man is one whom she must never think of marrying?"

The position was one of indisputable difficulty; the "pleasant vice"--that long-ago story of a dead woman, deceived indeed, but with no extraordinary cruelty, a story which had not troubled Lord Sandilands' conscience very much--had manufactured itself finally into a whip of stout dimensions and stinging quality, and he was getting a very sufficient taste of it just now.

Miles must try his luck. That was the only conclusion which could be immediately reached. If he could sleep a little, he might feel all right in the morning, and be able to accompany him to Hardriggs. If he were not well enough, Miles mast go all the same. If the young man should feel surprise and curiosity at finding his old friend so impatient, it could not be helped; it must pass as a vagary of an old man's. But Miles would not remark anything; the vagary was sufficiently cognate to his own humour and his own purposes to pass unnoticed.

When Lord Sandilands and Miles Challoner arrived at Hardriggs on the following day, a close observer would have discerned that they were both under a strong impression of some kind. Lord Sandilands was not feeling well by any means, but he had assured Miles the drive would do him good, and he had found his indisposition so far useful, that it explained and excused his being very silent on the way. Neither was Miles much inclined to talk. He was of an earnest nature, never at any time voluble, and when under the influence of strong feeling silence was congenial to him. He well understood that the revelation he had made to Lord Sandilands on the preceding day had produced a startling and disagreeable effect; and having perceived plainly, beyond the possibility of doubt, that the secret which he so earnestly desired to know was in Lord Sandilands' possession, and was of a darker and direr nature than he had ever guessed at, but was, at the same time, quite as securely beyond his reach as ever, he made up his mind to let the subject drop. Unless this man had cut him out, or was likely to cut him out with Grace Lambert, he had no power to harm him. The truth was, Miles Challoner was very sincerely and heartily in love, and he had as little power, as inclination to occupy his thoughts for long at a time with anyone but Grace, with any speculation but his chance of success with her. Luckily, Sir Giles and Lady Belwether were the least observant of human beings. Sir Giles was stupid to an extent which is not to be realised except by those who understand the bucolic gentry of our favoured land, and Lady Belwether was--though superior, as we have seen, to her baronet in intelligence, and distinguished by a taste for music--very shortsighted. Close observers were therefore not "on hand," when Lord Sandilands and Miles arrived at Hardriggs. Sir Giles was contemplating the turnips at a distant point of his "pretty little place;" Miss Lambert had gone out into the garden, or the lime-walk, the servants said, some time before; and Lady Belwether and Mrs. Bloxam were in the morning-room.

Lord Sandilands did not lose much time in arranging the situation as he wished it to be arranged, so far as Miles was concerned--his consummate ease of manner, which Miles admired to the point of envy, rendered any little disposition of affairs of that kind a very simple proceeding to him. Miles was despatched in search of Sir Giles, Mrs. Bloxam was begged on no account to interfere with Miss Lambert's saunter in the garden--they might join her presently, perhaps--and Lady Belwether was engaged in a discussion upon the comparative merits of "our" native composers, within a space of time whose brevity would have been surprising to anyone unacquainted with the rapid action of a fixed purpose combined with good manners. Mrs. Bloxam had directed one searching glance at Lord Sandilands on his entrance, and, as she withdrew her eyes, she said to herself, "Something has happened. He wants to speak to me; but I had rather he did not, so he sha'n't." And strange to say, though he made a protracted visit to Hardriggs that day, Lord Sandilands did not succeed in getting an opportunity of speaking a word to Mrs. Bloxam. This annoyed him a good deal. "Confound the woman!" he said to himself; "either Mrs. Bloxam is too stupid to see that I want to speak to her, or Lady Belwether is too clever to leave off talking!" In his capacity of gooseberry-picker, Lord Sandilands was led on this occasion into anything but pleasant pastures.

The shortest way to the turnips, just then occupying the mind and demanding the presence of Sir Giles Belwether, fortunately lay through the garden, otherwise Miles Challoner might not have profited so readily and unsuspected by the strategy of his clever old friend. Through a side-gate of the garden the lime-walk was to be gained, and as Miles closed that gate behind him he caught sight of Grace Lambert. She was walking slowly along in the shadow of the trees, her head bent down in a thoughtful attitude. Miles went quickly towards her, and she looked up and recognised him with a slight start and a vivid blush; in fact, with the kind of recognition which takes place when the person who intrudes upon a reverie happens to be its subject. Gertrude had been thinking of Miles--she thought of him very often now; and the interview which had taken place between herself and Lord Ticehurst had made her think of him more seriously than ever. She loved him. She did not deny the truth, or palter with it, or fail to recognise its consequences. She had mistaken pleased and excited fancy and flattered vanity for love once, but this was nothing of the kind. She knew this was true love, because she thought of him, not of herself; because she did not hope, but feared he loved her. How would she have listened to such an avowal from Miles's lips as that which, made by Lord Ticehurst, had produced mere contempt, and a desire to get rid of it and him as quickly as possible? Gertrude had accepted her position in such perfect good faith, that its difficulties never presented themselves in a practical form at all; and she pondered this matter now in her heart, as if she were really the free unmarried girl she seemed to the world. If he should come to her and tell her a love-tale, what should she say to him? She had asked herself the question many times and had not found the answer, when, raising her eyes at the sound of steps, she met those of Miles Challoner, and saw in them what he had come to say.

There was manifest embarrassment on both sides, and each was distinctly conscious of its cause. Why could they not meet to-day as they had met so often before? Why were the ordinary commonplaces so hard to think of and so incoherently said? Gertrude was the first to recover her composure. She asked Miles if Lord Sandilands had come with him, and on his saying he had, and was then in the house, she turned in that direction, and said something about going in to see him. But Miles checked her steps by standing still.

"Don't go into the house," he said; "he does not expect you. Let us walk this way; let me speak to you." She glanced at him, and silently complied. She knew it all now, and she began to feel what it was that she must say, and what it would cost her to say it. She felt his eyes upon her, and the delicate colour faded away from her face.

Neither she nor Miles Challoner could have told afterwards, or even exactly recalled in their thoughts, the words then spoken between them. He told her how he had loved her from the first--he who had never loved before--and how fear and hope had alternated in his heart until now, when hope was the stronger, and he had determined to tell her how all his happiness, all his life, was in her hands. He spoke with the frank manliness of his nature, and Gertrude's heart thrilled as she listened to him with intense pain, with keen delight. At least he loved her well and worthily; nothing could deprive her of that exquisite knowledge. She would, she must, put away the wine of life offered to her parched lips, but she knew its sweetness, had seen the splendour and the sparkle of it.

A thousand thoughts, innumerable emotions, crowded upon her, as she listened to the words of Miles; but when he prayed her to speak and let him know his fate, prayed her with eagerness and passion, but with hope that was almost confidence, then she put them all down with her strong will, and addressed herself to her task. She drew the hand which he had taken away from his hold, and told him in one short sentence that she could not give him the answer he desired.

"You cannot, Grace? You refuse me!" he said hoarsely. "You tell me, then, that I have deceived myself?"

"No," she said, "I do not. Let us sit here awhile"--she seated herself on a bench under a lime-tree as she spoke--"and let me speak frankly and freely to you, as you deserve."

Miles obeyed her with bewilderment. What was she going to say? She would not marry him, and yet he had not deceived himself! She was deadly pale, and he might have heard the beating of her heart; but she was quite firm, and she turned her steady eyes upon him unfalteringly.

"There is only one thing you can say to me," he said, "if you persevere in forbidding me to hope--that is, to send me out of your sight for ever."

"Perhaps," was her reply; "but listen. I have said you don't deceive yourself, and I mean it. I know you love me; I know what perfect sincerity there is in you--hush! let me speak--and I--I do love you--you have not mistaken me, I have not misled you."

"Then what does anything else matter?" said Miles, and he caught her hands and kissed them unresisted, unrebuked. "With that assurance, Grace, surely you will not refuse me?"

"I must," she answered. "Have patience with me. I will tell you why. It is for your own sake."

"My own sake!" he exclaimed passionately; "you deprive me of all hope and happiness for my own sake! I shall need patience indeed to understand that."

"It is true, nevertheless. I could not many you, Miles Challoner, without doing you a great injury; and I love you too well, much more and better than myself, to do that. Take that assurance, and believe that nothing can shake my determination. My fate is decided, my way of life is quite fixed. I shall never be your wife, never, never, never!"--his face was hidden in his hands, he did not see the suffering which broke all control and showed itself plainly in her every feature--"but I shall never love you less, or anyone but you." The low distinct tones of her voice thrilled him with a horrid sense of hopelessness. She spoke as one who had taken an irrevocable resolution.

"What do you mean?" he said. "You must tell me more than this. What do you mean by doing me an injury? I protest I have not the faintest notion of your meaning. It cannot be--" He hesitated, and she took up his words.

"Because you are a gentleman of old name and a responsible position in society, and I am a singer, an actress a woman with no name and no station, you would say. Yes, it is precisely for this cause, which you think impossible. I know you don't regard any of these things, but the world does; and the man I love shall never be censured by the world for me."

How well it was, she thought, how fortunate, that such a real genuine difficulty did exist; that she could give some explanation which he might be induced to receive.

"Then you would make me wretched for the sake of the world, even if what you say of my position and your own were true? And it is not. Is your genius nothing? Is your fame nothing? I speak now as reasonably as yourself; not as a man who holds you peerless, far removed above all the world, but as one discussing a question open to argument. What am I in comparison to the men who would be proud to offer you rank and wealth? What have I to give you that others could not give a thousandfold?"

"You give me all I value, all I care for," she said; "but I must not take it. You must not, you shall not, deceive yourself. My genius, as you call it, my fame, are real things in their way and in their sphere, but they are not of any account in yours. Ask your friend Lord Sandilands; he is a kind friend to me also, and a man who knows the world thoroughly; and he will tell you I am right."

"No, he won't!" said Miles triumphantly, "No, he won't! He will tell you, on the contrary, that you are quite wrong; he will tell you that he knows I love you, and have dared to hope, to believe that you love me. He will tell you that I have told him what is my dearest hope, and that he shares it; and more, Grace, more than that, he will tell you that he came here with me to-day on purpose that I might learn my fate, and be no longer in suspense; and that he is on duty at this moment, keeping the old ladies in talk, just to give me this precious opportunity. Now, where are all your arguments? where are my wise friends? where is this terrible world to whom we are to be sacrificed? You have nothing more to say, Grace; your 'never, never, never!' cannot hurt me any more."

For one brief moment he triumphed. For one moment his arm was around her, and his lips, were pressed to hers. But the next she had started from his embrace, and stood pale and breathless before him.

"Is this really true?" she said; "does Lord Sandilands approve?" She asked him only to gain a moment's time for thought; she was terribly disconcerted by this complication, it increased her difficulties immensely. But Miles saw in the question only a symptom of yielding, only a proof of his victory.

"Yes; yes," he said eagerly, "it is true; it is indeed! He is the only real friend I have in the world; the only man whose opinion I care for, and he is on my side. Now, Grace, you must yield; you cannot refuse me."

She stood for a moment motionless and silent. Then her nerves; generally so strong, so completely under control, gave way. The violence of the struggle, the intensity of the pain she was suffering, that overwhelming remembrance of the past, the agonising sense of what might have been, but was now quite impossible, the feebleness of the only weapon which she could venture to use in this battle in which her own heart was her adversary,--all these overcame her, and she sunk upon the bench in a helpless agony of tears.

Terrified by her distress; Miles Challoner knelt before her, and implored her to explain the cause of this sudden grief. But all his prayers were vain. She wept convulsively for many minutes and was literally unable to speak. When at last she conquered the passion of tears, she felt and looked so very ill that he became alarmed on a fresh score.

"You are ill," he said; "shall I go for Mrs. Bloxam? Shall I take you to the house?"

She made a sign with her hand that he should not speak, then leaned her head against the bench, and closed her eyes. He stood by, awkward and silent, watching her. After a little while she sat up, and said faintly:

"Will you leave me? Go away from me for the present--I am ill; but it is only from agitation. Let me be alone for a while; you shall see me again when I am able."

"Of course I will leave you, if you wish it," said Miles, with all the timidity and embarrassment of a man in the presence of feminine weakness and suffering; "but I am afraid you are not fit to be left alone."

"I am indeed," she urged, and her face grew whiter as she spoke; "I shall recover myself, if I am left alone. Don't fear for me. Go to the house, and do not say you have seen me. Go by the lime-walk into the avenue; I will go by the garden. No one will see me; and if I can get to my room and lie down for a little, I shall be quite well. Pray, pray go."

She put her hands before her face, and Miles saw a quick shudder pass over her from head to foot. He was afraid to go, afraid to stay; at length he obeyed her, and took the way towards the house which she had indicated, feeling bewildered and alarmed.

When Miles Challoner reëntered the drawing-room at Hardriggs he found Lord Sandilands still there, held in durance by Lady Belwether and Mrs. Bloxam. Lord Sandilands had found his hostess immovable, and no other afternoon callers had had the kindness to come and partially release him. Mrs. Bloxam kept her eyes and her fingers steadily and unremittingly engaged with her fancy-work, and Lady Belwether persisted in discoursing on music and religion. With his accustomed philosophy Lord Sandilands accepted the situation, consoling himself by the reflection that a day or two could not make any difference in what he had to say to Mrs. Bloxam, and that the chief object of his present exertions had at least been secured, for he entertained a satisfactory conviction that Miles and Gertrude had met "somewhere about." Miles returned too soon, in one sense, for the old gentleman's wishes; he would rather have found him utterly oblivious of time; in that case, and if no consideration of anybody's convenience had occurred to Miles, Lord Sandilands would have felt confidence in the prospering of the suit. But Miles came in looking as little like a successful and happy lover as he could look, and Lord Sandilands perceived in an instant that things had gone wrong. He did not give Miles time to speak before he rose, and saying, "You have clear ideas of time, Miles; we ought to be back before now.--Business, Lady Belwether, business--you don't understand its claims, happily for you.--Goodbye, Mrs. Bloxam; tell Miss Lambert I am sorry not to have seen her;" he got himself and his melancholy, and indeed frightened-looking, companion out of the room and out of the house.

"Now tell me all about it," said Lord Sandilands to Miles when they were in the carriage; "what has happened? You have seen her, of course?"

"Yes," said Miles ruefully, and then with much embarrassment he told Lord Sandilands what had occurred.

The narrative perplexed and distressed the listener. He understood Gertrude's feelings up to a certain point, but no farther; he could not understand why Miles's representations of his advocacy of his suit had had no effect in moderating her apprehensions of the world's view of such a marriage. He could say little or nothing to console Miles, but he told him he did not regard Miss Lambert's decision as final, or the nervous attack which had so alarmed him as of any import.

"I will see her, and have it out with her," said Lord Sandilands to himself; "and if it is necessary for her happiness's sake and that of Miles, I will tell her the truth."