"What power has this--your husband, over him?"
"God alone knows--I do not," she replied, clasping her hands; "but Mr. Sharpus quails like a criminal under the eye of Hawkesby Guilfoyle, who seems also to possess some strange power over Lady Naseby, I think."
Could such really be? It seemed impossible; everything appeared to forbid it; and yet I was not insensible to a conviction that the dowager countess was rather pleased with, than influenced by, him. Could he have acted in secret the part of lover to her, and so flattered her weakness by adulation? Old women and old men, too, are at times absurd enough for anything; and now the words of Caradoc, on the night he lost money to Guilfoyle at billiards, recurred to me, when in his blunt way he averred they had all some secret understanding, adding, "By Jove! I can't make it out at all." My mind was a kind of chaos as I walked onward with my new friend, and leading my horse by the bridle we entered Whitchurch together. In the dusk I left her at the inn door, promising to visit her on the morrow, and consult with her on the means for farther exposing her husband; for although her story--for all I knew to the contrary--might be an entire fabrication, I was not then in a mood of mind to view it as such. As I bade her adieu, a dog-cart, driven by a servant,--whose livery was familiar to me, passed quickly. Two women were in it, one of whom mentioned my name. I looked up and recognised Mademoiselle Babette Pompon, Lady Naseby's soubrette, who had evidently been shopping; and a natural dread that she, out of a love of gossip, or the malevolence peculiar to her class, might mention having seen me at the inn porch with a fair friend, was now added to the annoyance caused by the episode at the lane end--an episode to which the said parting would seem but an addendum or sequel; and I galloped home to my quarters in a frame of thought far from enviable, and one which neither brandy nor seltzer at the mess-house could allay.
[CHAPTER XXII.--GEORGETTE FRANKLIN'S STORY.]
Next day I heard the stranger's story, and it was a sad one. Georgette Franklin--for such was her unmarried name--was the last surviving child of George Franklin, a decayed gentleman, who dwelt in Salop, near the Welsh border--we need not precisely say where, but within view of the green hills of Denbigh; for the swelling undulations of the beautiful Clwydian range formed the background to the prospect from the windows of that quaint old house which was nearly all that survived of his hereditary patrimony. Stoke Franklin--so named as it occupied the site of a timber dwelling of the Saxon times, coeval perhaps with Offa's Dyke--was still surrounded by a defensive ditch or moat, where now no water lay, but where, in the season, the primroses grew in golden sheets on the emerald turf. It was an isolated edifice, built of dark-red brick, with stone corners, stone mullions to its quaint old sunken windows, and ogee pediments or gables above them, also of stone. From foundation to chimneys it was quaint in style, ancient in date, and picturesque in aspect. Long lines of elms, and in some places pollard willows, marked the boundaries of what had been the demesne of the Franklins; but piecemeal it had passed away to more careful neighbours, and now little remained to George Franklin but the ground whereon the old mansion-house stood, and that sombre green patch in God's-acre, the neighbouring churchyard, where his wife and their four children lay, near the ancient yew, the greenery of which had decorated the altar in the yule feasts of centuries ago, and whose sturdy branches had furnished bow-staves for the archers who shot under his ancestors at Bosworth, at Shrewsbury, and Flodden Field.
George Franklin was not a misanthrope; far from it; but he lived very much alone in the old house. His oaken library, so solemnly tranquil, with its heavy dark draperies and book-hidden walls, when the evening sun stole through the deep mullions of the lozenged and painted windows, was his favourite resort. And a cozy room it proved in winter, when the adjacent meres were frozen, and the scalp of Moel Fammau was powdered with snow. There he was wont to sit, with Georgette by his knee, he reading and she working; a bright-faced, brown-haired, and lively girl, whose golden canaries and green love-birds hung in every window; for the house was quite alive with her feathered pets, and was as full of sound as an aviary with their voices in summer. One warm evening in autumn, when Georgette was verging on her eighteenth year, she and her father were seated near the house-door, under a shady chestnut-tree. The sunshine lay bright on the greensward, and on the wilderness of flowers and shrubs that grew close to the massive red walls of the old mansion. Mr. Franklin was idly lingering over a book and sipping a glass of some dark and full-bodied old port--almost the last bottle that remained in his now but ill-replenished cellar. And a very perfect picture the old man made. His thin but stately figure; his features so patrician in profile; his dress somewhat old in fashion; his hands, though faded, so shapely, with a diamond ring on one finger, the diamond ring of which we have heard so much lately; and the handsome girl who hovered about him, attending to his little wants, varying her kind offices with playful caresses, while her white neck and her golden-brown hair glittered in the sunshine--all this seemed to harmonise well with the old house that formed the background to the picture. The evening was quiet and still. The voices of Georgette's birds, her caged canaries and piping bullfinches, came through the open windows; but there were no other sounds, save once or twice when the notes of a distant hunting-horn, prolonged and sad, came on the passing wind, and then the old man would raise his head, and his clear eye would sparkle,
"As he thought of the days that had long since gone by,
When his spirit was bold and his courage was high;"
and when he, too, had followed that sound, and ridden across the stiffest country, neck and neck with the best horsemen in Salop and Cheshire.
Suddenly there came a shout, and a huntsman in red, minus his black velvet cap, was seen to clear a beech-hedge on the border of the lawn; and ere an exclamation of annoyance or indignation could escape old George Franklin, that his privacy should be invaded, even by a sportsman, in this unwonted manner, a cry of terror escaped Georgette; for it was evident that the gentleman's horse had become quite unmanageable, as the bridle-rein had given way; and after its terrible leap, it came tearing at a mad pace straight towards the house, and dashing itself head foremost against a tree, hurled the rider senseless on the ground. He rolled to the very feet of Georgette and her father, both of whom were full of pity and compassion, the former all the more so that the stranger was undoubtedly a handsome man, and barely yet in the prime of life. Aid was promptly summoned, and the village doctor, anxious to serve, for a time at least, one whom he deemed a wealthy patient, earnestly seconded, and even enforced, the suggestion of the hospitable George Franklin, that the sufferer, whose head was contused, and whose shoulder-blade had narrowly escaped fracture, should neither be removed nor disturbed. Hence he was at once assigned a room in the old mansion, with Georgette's old Welsh nurse, now the housekeeper, to attend him. He was a man, however, of a strong constitution, "one of those fellows who are hard to kill," as he phrased it; thus, on the third morning after the accident, he was well enough to make his way to the breakfast room.
Georgette, attired in a most becoming muslin dress, and looking fresh, rosy, and innocent, as a young girl can only look who has left her couch after a healthy slumber to greet the sunny morning, was standing on a chair in an oriel, attending to the wants of one of her feathered pets; suddenly the chair slipped, and she was about to fall, when a strong arm, in the sleeve of a scarlet hunting-coat, encircled and supported her. This little contretemps made both parties at once at home, and on easy terms.