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