“DEAR BEAUMONT,—I have been thinking things over a lot since I started for my holidays, and I’ve come to the conclusion to try to stand on my own bottom, like any other tub. I know by the terms of our agreement you are entitled to six months’ notice of dissolution, but I’ve no doubt you’ll waive that, for it would be pleasant for neither you nor me for me to continue in the office, as it were, with one foot in it and the other out. What say you? My plans for the future are very vague. Hope things are going on smoothly at your end. Wretched weather here.
Yours,
S. S.”
“Pretty cool,” reflected Edward, as he re-perused this missive. “Anyway, I’m not going to beg him to stop on to please me. He can cut the painter now if he likes, and I’ll write and say so. It’s a nuisance that I must be in Stafford to-morrow night, and I wish more than I can say I’d never gone into that electioneering campaign. However, I’m in it and it can’t be helped. In for a penny, in for a pound. I feel very much like having put out my leg further than I can stride, and it’s time for the proverbial silver lining to the cloud.”
CHAPTER VIII.
There stands, or some years ago there stood, in a noble park some five miles to the south of the ancient town of Stafford, a large and imposing edifice, built of a dull red brick, grown russet-hued with age, a house, one judged, reared in the days when Anne was queen. The outer door, stout almost as the portal of a jail, opened into a spacious hall, cheered by the fire of a commodious grate, its walls adorned, or one had perhaps better say furnished, by gloomy portraits of departed worthies and their beloved spouses. Dining-room and breakfast or morning-room opened right and left into the hall, whilst a noble staircase of oak, dark with age, with broad, shallow steps, worn by the feet of many generations, led to the upper storeys. In a room, on the second floor, snug, cosy, but somewhat severely furnished, sat in the early gloom of a wintry afternoon two maidens, both passing fair and good to look upon, and yet of a fairness how unlike—the one dark, tall, queenly of port and mien, and the other of slenderer form, of a gentler aspect, of a softer gaze, the one born to sway imperious, the other to win by the soft persuasion of tender look and soft appeal. The house is the home of Mrs. Jane Fairfax, relict of a former burgess and mayor of the town, whose trade—the townsfolk proudly boast—is trodden under foot by all the world—and it is the home also of her niece, ward, and heiress, Gertrude Fairfax.
Gertrude Fairfax and her old schoolfellow, Eleanor St. Clair, the proud and imperious beauty who, as a girl, had ruled her classmates and sorely tried the patience of her teachers, and to whom the gentler maiden had yielded a ready and adoring submission when both were in short frocks and wore their hair in a pig-tail, were in the intimate converse of afternoon tea.
“My dearest Eleanor,” the younger girl is saying, as she hands cake and tea to her friend reclined in the deep, soft-cushioned basket chair, “I cannot tell you how delighted I am to see you after all these years. Why, you had almost ceased to write, and, lo! when I could not have dreamed of such a pleasure, with just one day’s warning, you drop, as it were, out of the clouds. And how beautiful you are, Eleanor. Oh! how beautiful. But you always were. Don’t you remember how we used to call you Lady Macbeth, and vow you would wed at least an earl. You were born to move resplendent in imperial courts, waited upon by adoring slaves, laying their coronets at your feet.”
Eleanor laughed complacently.
“Well, if I was so born, I’m not going to fulfil my destiny. I don’t know that courts will know much of me, unless they are some horrid, low, fusty, musty law courts. Heigho! I shudder at the thought of them. No! destiny’s out of it this time for me. But you, Gertrude, you, if you like, are fulfilling your destiny. Didn’t we call you Saint Cecilia, and the Puritan maiden, and Miss Prim, and all that? And there you sit, I declare, dressed in a plain serge, with a plain linen collar and cuffs, your hair confined as tight and brushed as smooth as its inherent rebelliousness will permit, without a ribbon or a ring, and just a cheap jet brooch at a neck you hide as though you were ashamed of it. You might be a nun, or what is it you remind me of? I have it. You only want a poke bonnet and a tambourine and you’re the picture of a Salvation Army lass; but sure the prettiest and the sweetest Salvation Army lass that ever travestied religion.”