She should be painted just so for the Academy, he was telling himself, seated at her harp, with one little hand showing off the supple wrist, slim fingers, and rosy nails, as it strayed over the strings. But what painter could reproduce her charm, the purity of her eyes and lips, the girlish grace of her form, and especially that light shining round her dilated pupils? Would Millais understand her temperament, and do her justice? Hardly. Sargent might. Yes, it must be painted by Sargent, this picture of a young girl in simple white silk dinner-dress, playing a harp before a hazy background; and the name of the picture should be “Portrait of Viscountess Carthew.”
Meanwhile, he was telling her that so far from boring, her talk had interested him greatly.
“I am honored by what you say,” he said, “when you tell me I do not seem wholly a stranger to you. It is the more amiable of you to treat me with such gracious cordiality as I am not at all in your own sphere of life, but just what is now called a ‘gentleman farmer,’ and in the old days before the term gentleman was invented, was simply yeoman, a name quite good enough for me. Altogether, a poor, struggling, and undistinguished person, whose parents denied themselves every luxury to give him a college education, by which he had not the wits to profit; just capable of those simple and ineffective qualities of gratitude, affection, and loyalty, and capable of very little else, believe me.”
She turned her sweetest smile upon him.
“Do you know,” she said, nodding confidentially towards him, “that I believe that is just the reason why I feel as if we were already friends? All my life I have had the value of birth and rank exaggerated to me. I have been taught to consider myself made of too fine a stuff to associate with any one in the neighborhood. I have never been allowed to play with other children, and when I was a baby child my nurses were constantly changed lest I should get too fond of any one so low and common as a nurse. I have been given the ‘Peerage,’ and the ‘County Families of England,’ and ‘Tales of Aristocratic Families,’ and ‘Legends of Ancestral Houses,’ and similar books, to amuse myself with ever since I could read; my German master was a decayed baron, and my French tutor the son of a marquis. I have always been forbidden to speak to the servants, except to give orders, and they also are very frequently changed. This is particularly so in the case of the lady’s maid who waits upon mamma and me; she never remains longer than a year, usually only a few months, just long enough to learn our ways and suit us. And do you know what the consequence of all this has been? As soon as I could be free from the presence of my nursery-governess—a very stiff person of over fifty, who could not forget she had once been in a duke’s family—I used to run away to my great, bare nursery, and dressing my dolls in rags, would pretend they were peasants, and hop-pickers, and beggars. And especially,” she added, her face lighting up with a mischievous gleam, “I loved making my dolls into poachers and tramps, and, best of all, gypsies. This was sheer naughtiness, I know, because Margaret had once told me that Sir Philip particularly detested gypsies, and that I was never on any account to mention them before him. I used to get up a little play in which a gypsy was unjustly accused of stealing and tried for it before my father, who was represented by a black-faced doll in a red coat. My father would try the gypsy and condemn him to be hanged, and then, just as the sentence was being carried out, a gallant young gentleman doll would come riding up on the shaft of an old wheelbarrow and cut him down. There was no game I enjoyed playing so much as that.”
Lord Carthew laughed with her, but was a good deal touched at the same time. The picture of the lonely child, snubbed and repressed and deprived of all healthy young companionship, secretly planning revolutionary dramas with her dolls, struck him as being equally original and pathetic. Stella Cranstoun’s utter dissimilarity from the young ladies of his acquaintance was a source of great delight to him. Her perfectly clear and distinct enunciation and sweet-toned voice came as a blessed relief after the fashionable high key and slipshod speech in vogue in London at that time, which had been aptly aped by the pretty Braithwaite girls. Stella’s somewhat old-fashioned method of speech, which was that of a well-educated girl who had heard little but read much, and her entire ignorance of slang and absence of self-consciousness, were equally charming to him, The one desire of fashionable women, as he knew well, is to speak, move, dress, and behave in precisely the same style as the known leaders of society. But Stella had no idea that it behooved her to mould herself on some one else’s model; she was consequently altogether modest, natural, and unaffected, and unlike any woman he had ever met before.
As to her strong natural sympathy with the poorer classes, the result, as he imagined, of the repressive system on which she had been reared, he himself affected and believed that he possessed the same quality. Theoretically, he looked upon a costermonger as a man and a brother, and failed to see the use of the House of Lords; practically, he regarded the lower orders as interesting curiosities, and strongly resented the admission of brewers into the peerage. Stella’s republican sympathies would impel her, no doubt, in the direction of soup-kitchens and schools when she became Lady Carthew, and soup-kitchens and schools were very desirable outlets for the generous instincts of a future countess. For under her gentle, graceful manner, it was impossible for any one unacquainted with her earliest history to detect an absolute hatred of aristocratic proclivities; in the granddaughter of a Duke her unconventional sentiments were piquant and interesting, and in no way suggestive of the fierce blood dormant in the veins of the daughter of a gypsy.
Stella herself had not the least suspicion of her Romany descent. Not a servant remaining at the Chase had seen the first Lady Cranstoun, or knew aught of her beyond a brief record in the local papers of her death, eighteen years ago, with the one exception of Margaret. And even Margaret knew very little. Only that on the thirteenth day of December, eighteen years ago, Dr. Ernest Netherbridge and two women had arrived at the Chase, immediately after a farmer’s cart had carried thither a certain bundle, from which feeble cries proceeded. For fully an hour the visitors were closeted with Sir Philip in his study, after which time they left in the carriage and were driven to Grayling railway station, where the two women entered a train for London. Three months later, at St. George’s, Hanover Square, Sir Philip Cranstoun was married to the Lady Gwendolen Douglas, daughter of the Duke of Lanark, a woman of no particular beauty and rather over thirty years of age. The following Christmas the second Lady Cranstoun gave birth to a girl, a weakly creature who, after a few days of wailing remonstrance, faded out of this life altogether. The mind of Lady Cranstoun, never of the strongest order, gave way under the strain; in the care of nurses she was taken by her husband to London, whence she returned in a few months’ time with a lovely dark-haired and blue-eyed baby girl whom she persisted in regarding as her own, in which belief was upheld by her husband, and by all those about her.
Thus the infant child of Clare Carewe the gypsy made her second entry into the house of her ancestors, having been adopted in order to save her stepmother’s wandering wits. For years Sir Philip, after his wife’s complete recovery, hoped against hope that she might yet bring him an heir; but fate was against him, and the gypsy’s child was the only descendant he might now hope to possess.
Against this daughter, lovely and intelligent as she proved herself to be, the Lord of Cranstoun Chase cherished a deep-rooted and immovable dislike, which showed itself in every glance that he directed toward her. The resemblance which she undoubtedly bore to the woman who had defied him and fled from him intensified this feeling a hundredfold, and the girl’s proud if silent rebellion against his harshness and unkindness was a perpetual reminder of the untamable spirit which she had inherited from her Romany ancestors.