As to Lord Carthew, he was enraptured by the alteration for the better in his lovely bride’s appearance. The strange restlessness of her glances he attributed to her natural nervousness, which caused her also to whisper and mumble the necessary responses in the service with even less than the ordinary bride’s accuracy. Sir Philip, watching his daughter closely, felt every moment more convinced that the girl’s brain and memory were momentarily clouded. She stared about her without reverence, but with evident curiosity, during the service, to which she paid not the slightest attention, and her bridegroom especially she continually regarded with a kind of amused wonder, as some specimen of humanity the like of whom she had never seen before. But no one else seemed to heed her irreverent behavior or to note that strange look as of suppressed laughter in her dancing eyes, and Sir Philip drew a deep sigh of relief when the ceremony was over, and the signing of the book followed.
Here again a strange thing happened. The newly made Lady Carthew, after receiving with an odd little laugh the congratulatory kisses of her grandfather, the Duke, and the Countess, her mother-in-law, murmured that her hand shook so badly she could not hold a pen, and was with difficulty persuaded to scrawl “Stella Cranstoun,” in an almost undecipherable hand, on the page before her. Strange fears and fancies filled Sir Philip’s mind. Was her feverish color, her strange behavior, due to a partially paralyzed brain and nerves, he wondered. Still, she was Lady Carthew, and he had triumphed; but that strange likeness to her dead mother, which seemed so much stronger to-day than it had ever been before, troubled him, and that incomprehensible laugh in her eyes.
“I wish Carthew joy of his bargain,” was Sir Philip’s mental comment. “But, in any case, she is in his charge now, and safely off my hands, so that there is no chance of that senseless old gypsy prophecy being realized.”
CHAPTER XVIII.
THE WEDDING JOURNEY.
“Go to Grayling Station, and get into the two o’clock Portsmouth train with Lord C. and me.”
Such was the message, scrawled in a shaky handwriting, on the scrap of paper thrust by the bride into Stephen Lee’s hand.
It perplexed him beyond measure, but it seemed to him that her will was law, and he must obey. For more than five years he had cherished a dog-like devotion, of which she had been apparently quite unconscious. Yet now she wanted him, and he could not choose but obey her orders. First, however, he must contrive to show the paper to old Sarah, and this he succeeded in doing while the bridal party were leaving the church, at which time the crowd had eyes for none but the chief actors in the ceremony.
Quickly running her eye over the bit of paper he had slipped into her hand, for the old woman’s sight was excellent in spite of her years, Sarah grinned in intense and evident amusement as she thrust it back upon him. Stephen was angry with her for her inexplicable merriment, but there was no time for controversy now; and abruptly leaving the group about the doors, he strode away in the direction of Grayling.
“Your daughter’s a handsome girl, sir,” the Duke observed to Sir Philip Cranstoun, as he and his host, with Lady Northborough and her son, sat in the vast and gloomy dining-hall of the Chase, facing that sardonic gray portrait in armor which had so greatly interested Lord Carthew on the occasion of his first visit to the house—“a very fine girl indeed. And I don’t wonder that Carthew here had his head turned. Can’t think where she gets her looks from. You’re not a beauty yourself, Cranstoun, and we Douglases have never been good-looking. Only known her a month, eh, Carthew? Well, well, marry in haste and repent at leisure, you know!”
“Now, Duke, you are just too cruel!” exclaimed Lady Northborough, as the old gentleman wheezed with elderly laughter over his own humor. “Stella is quite too lovely, and would certainly have been the most beautiful débutante at the Drawing-Room this year but for her unhappy mourning. Now mind, Claud, dear, that you get her quite well at Northborough Castle, and on the yacht. Though, really, she doesn’t look a bit ill now; but that’s on account of her lovely complexion.”