CHAPTER XXX.—MAN PROPOSES.
‘Harrogate is going, you know, to leave us so very soon,’ Lady Maud De Vere had said, in her kindly matter-of-fact way, in the course of conversation with Ethel Gray; and Ethel had turned away her face instinctively, lest the burning blush which rose there unbidden should betray her secret to her pupil’s sister and her own friend. Poor Ethel had communed with her heart in the still hours of more than one night since the evening that had witnessed her release from the Hunger Hole, and she could not but acknowledge to herself that she loved Lord Harrogate.
It was not a welcome conviction that forced itself gradually upon Ethel Gray. The attachment, hopeless as it perforce was, was a thing to be deplored, a misfortune; not a source of joy. Lord Harrogate could be nothing to her. He was almost as remote from her humble sphere of life as a Prince of the blood-royal would have been. There are girls who know, where their own personal vanity is at stake, no distinction of ranks, and would set their caps without compunction at an Emperor. Ethel was none of these. To fall in love, even with an object as hopelessly out of reach as one of the fixed stars would be, is a forlorn privilege which has been claimed in every age by very humble persons of either sex. But to Ethel’s proud, maidenly heart it was pain, not pleasure, to know that the future Earl, the future master of High Tor, had grown to be dearer to her than was well for her peace of mind. That she was in his eyes merely Miss Gray, his sister’s governess, was to her thinking a certainty. And she did not even wish that it were otherwise. Why should there be two persons unhappy, on such a subject, instead of one? It was much better as it was. She had begun to love him before, in that desolate cavern on the moor, he had appeared as the harbinger of safety. But she had not admitted to herself that this was so, until the whirl of strong feelings consequent on the danger and the deliverance had taught her to read her own heart, and to learn that his image was garnered in its innermost core. And now he was going away, going very soon. Well, it was better so. A young man such as he was could not always be expected to linger in a country-house. He was going, and she should see him no more. Doubtless it was for the best.
She was in the garden, and alone. A governess is seldom alone. But lessons were over for the day; and Lady Alice her pupil was up-stairs finishing a sketch, and Ethel had strayed out into what, from some household tradition of a foreign florist who had been invoked, when Anne was Queen, to shape and stock the flower-beds and to trim the luxuriant holly-hedge into Netherlandish neatness, was called the Dutch garden. A pleasant spot it was, with its wealth of fragrant old-fashioned roses and gorgeous display of variegated tulips, screened by the immemorial holly-hedge from the rude north-east wind.
Quite suddenly, as she reached the other end of the holly-hedge, Ethel looked up at the rustle of the crisp green leaves, against which some one or something had brushed in passing, and her eyes met those of Lord Harrogate. The latter lifted his hat, but did not immediately speak, while Ethel neither spoke nor stirred. When the thoughts have been busy in conjuring up the image of a particular person, and the original of the air-drawn portrait appears, a kind of dreamy appreciativeness, which is of all sensations the most unlike to surprise, is apt to result. It was so in this case; and for a few brief instants Ethel looked at Lord Harrogate as she would have looked at his picture on the wall.
‘I thought I might find you here,’ said Lord Harrogate, dissolving the spell by the sound of his voice. ‘I hoped I should,’ he added, in a lower and more meaning tone. Ethel murmured something, stooping as she did so to lift the drooping tendril of a standard rose-tree beaten down by the heavy rain of yesterday. ‘Can you guess at all, Miss Gray,’ continued the young man, with an evident effort to speak carelessly and confidently, ‘why I wanted to find you here—and alone?’
It was not quite a fair question. Ethel, in her simple honesty, not caring to enter on a course of that verbal fencing which comes so naturally to a woman whose heart has not yet learned to speak, made no reply. Her colour deepened, and she became very intent indeed upon the bruised trail of the rose-tree.
‘I am going away, as you know, and that very soon. My plans for the winter are quite undecided. I may not be back at High Tor for a good while,’ said the heir to that mansion.
Now there were to be certain autumn manœuvres in the open country near Aldershot Camp, in which that regiment of militia in which Lord Harrogate was a captain, and towards the perfection of whose drill and discipline he was thought to have contributed more than most militia officers find it convenient to do, had been selected to figure among the auxiliary forces on that occasion.
‘Some friends want me,’ explained Lord Harrogate, ‘when our amateur soldiering is over, to go with them on a yacht-cruise in the Mediterranean, and so on to Egypt, and perhaps farther. What I choose will very much depend on you, Miss Gray.’
‘On me!’ She could not avoid answering this time, and her tone was one of genuine surprise. ‘On me, Lord Harrogate!’
‘On you. I should like all my plans to have some reference to you—Ethel!’ said the young man, trying to get a full view of the beautiful blushing face that was half averted. ‘I say again, can you guess why?’
‘Do not ask me to guess,’ returned Ethel, with a trembling lip. She was very much frightened. She had not the least experience in that science of flirtation in which the modern young lady graduates so early. But she divined that words had been said which rendered it necessary that other words should be spoken, and with what result! Could it be that the end of the interview would be the dashing down of the half-idolised image that her fancy had set up as the emblem of pure chivalry?
‘Only because I love you—love you very dearly, Ethel!’ said the heir of High Tor; and as he spoke he took her unresisting hand in his and drew her towards him. For a moment Ethel was spellbound, her whole faculties absorbed in the one fact that he had told her that he loved her. Come what might, those words—those dear delicious words had sunk into her ear, and the memory of them must remain to the end of what would very likely be a lonely, loveless life; a treasure, her very own, of which none could rob her! But in the next minute Ethel drew her hand away from the hand that held it, and the crimson of indignant anger mounted to her cheek.
‘My lord,’ she said, in a voice that all her wish to speak and act calmly could not render quite steady, ‘you should not have done this. I could not have believed it of you. It is not generous. It is not like yourself.’
‘Why not?’ Lord Harrogate blundered out the words awkwardly enough; but Ethel misunderstood him.
‘Because,’ she said firmly, ‘my position beneath your mother’s roof, in its very lowliness, ought to have been my protection from insult, which’——
‘Insult!’ flashed out Lord Harrogate, reddening too, and breaking almost roughly in on the girl’s half-uttered speech. ‘Can you deem that I mean to insult you when I tell you of my love—that I speak insolently, Miss Gray, when I ask you to be my wife?’
Ethel quivered from head to foot as her half-incredulous ears drank in the words. ‘You meant—that is’—— she faltered out feebly.
‘I meant this,’ said Lord Harrogate earnestly. ‘Miss Gray—Ethel, darling, I have learned during the time that I have known you, to love you with a true and honest love. I am a clumsy wooer, I daresay, but surely you cannot have deemed that I had any other thought than that of asking you, for weal and woe, to share my fortunes?’
He tried to take her hand; but she eluded his grasp, and covering her face, sobbed aloud.
‘Come, Ethel, come, my love! Let it be mine to dry those tears!’ said the young man, passing his arm round her waist; but gently and firmly she released herself.
‘You have made me very happy and very miserable all at once, my lord,’ she said, turning round and facing him; ‘but believe me, there must be no more of this. I thank you from my heart for the very great compliment of your preference for a girl so humbly born, without fortune or kindred. But I am your sister’s governess; and it shall never be said that Ethel Gray brought disunion and sorrow upon the noble family that had received her with so kindly a welcome. I have my own ideas of right and wrong, Lord Harrogate, and I know that I should be mean and base, even in my own eyes, were I to avail myself of—your great goodness.’
He was taken by surprise. He had made up his mind, and reckoned the difficulties of the step which he proposed to take. That he would meet with some opposition on the part of his family, he was of course aware. It might take much time and much persuasion to bring his parents, and especially the Countess, to consent to a match so little calculated to advance his worldly prospects. But he was no shallow boy to cry for his toy, and then forget the bauble that had been withheld from him. His offer of marriage would no doubt render Ethel’s position at High Tor for a time untenable. He had thought the matter over. There were relatives of the De Veres who, without being partisans of the match, would willingly offer a temporary home to such a girl as Ethel Gray, while his mother and Lady Gladys were in process of being converted to see the matter as he saw it.
Ethel’s unlooked-for opposition disconcerted all these projects. She was very grateful, gentle, and almost submissive in her bearing; but she was as steadfast as adamant on the point that it behoved her to return a respectful refusal to Lord Harrogate’s proposals.
‘Do not tempt me,’ she said more than once; ‘do not urge me to forfeit my self-respect, or be false to those who have put trust in me. I am no fit match for the future master of High Tor, the future Earl of Wolverhampton. Would the kind Countess have received me here, would Lady Maud have given me her friendship, had they dreamed of this?’
She was very firm. She let him infer, if he chose, that he was not indifferent to her; but to none of his instances would she yield her steady conviction that duty forbade her to say ‘Yes’ to his entreaties. He became—small blame to him for being so—almost angry, and tried if reproach would succeed where prayer and argument had failed. In vain. His reproaches brought the tears to Ethel’s eyes, but she never faltered in her resolve.
If he pressed her unduly on this point, she said simply that she must go away. Let him forget her, or learn, as she hoped he would, to regard her as a friend, and then she need not leave High Tor. And then——
And then Lady Alice, Ethel’s pupil, made her appearance, and there was no more opportunity for private conversation; and two days later, Lord Harrogate started for Aldershot.
(To be continued.)