Strange as it may seem, the companionship so essential to my character was found more thoroughly in the father than the child. He never wearied of teaching, and I never remember to have become tired of learning. My appreciation of all his arguments—and they were vast—was perfect. My love for him was more than that of a daughter for her parent.
From the time I first entered his house, I felt a conviction that, in some way, the love that I bore for these two persons would be brought into powerful action—that I should be called upon to support them in great troubles, and that my own destiny was in some mystical way bound up in them. Thus time passed happily enough, till I reached my eleventh year. Lord Clare was still abroad in the far east, it was said, and I had begun to think of him as one dwells upon the characters in a history. The name had become familiar now, and I ceased to feel any extraordinary interest in it such as had first impressed me.
Certainly I knew something of his history. Mr. Clarke had told me of the sudden and singular death which had overtaken Lady Clare on the night of her marriage, and of the great probability that the earl would never marry again, in which case his sister, and through her his nephew, the Etonian, would come in possession of the title and several large estates entailed with it.
One thing, I remember, interested me a good deal, for I was at the time informing myself regarding the hereditary privileges of the British nobility, and it was fixed upon my memory that this particular title, and its estates, descended alike to male or female heirs, as they happened to fall in succession, while a large property, acquired by Lord Clare’s marriage, might be disposed of by deed or will.
CHAPTER XXIX.
MY STRANGE ACQUAINTANCE.
I still possessed Jupiter, my beautiful black pony, and frequently rode him to the parsonage, taking a canter over the park before returning home. Greenhurst remained unoccupied, except by a servant or two, and my freedom in this respect was unchecked, because Turner supposed it to be without danger of any kind.
One day—I think this was a month after I entered upon my twelfth year—I took a fine free gallop toward a portion of the park which has been mentioned as commanding a view of Marston Court.
I checked my pony on a ridge of upland, and was looking toward this house which, from the first, had contained a mysterious interest to me, when a man came suddenly from behind a clump of trees at my right, and walking up to Jupiter, threw his arm over the animal’s neck.
I was not terrified, but this abrupt movement filled me with surprise, and, without speaking a word, I bent my gaze searchingly on his face and figure.
He was a man of middle age, spare and muscular, of swarthy complexion, and with eyes so black and burning in their glance, that mine sunk under them as if they had come in sudden contact with fire.