‘I shall bid you good-night then, my good girl,’ said the stranger, and held out his hand once again.
A minute later he plunged down the dark old stair. ‘What is it like? going down thus into darkness?’ he said to himself; but he did not reply to the question.
CHAPTER II
The young man Richard Meadowes found a coach waiting for him round the corner of Yard’s Entry; he jumped in and bade the coachman drive home to St. James’ Square: a long drive, but Meadowes did not find it so, his thoughts were amply occupied. When he reached home he went in and sat down in a chair beside the fire, apparently in a brown study. What was he thinking about so intently all the time? About a lie: for the whole story of Sebastian Shepley’s marriage had been invented by Richard Meadowes on the spur of the moment, as he stood stammering and hesitating before Anne Champion.
Meadowes had known Sebastian Shepley from his childhood. They had been born and brought up in the same little country village of Wynford, where Meadowes’ father had owned the Manor House and the wide lands appertaining to it, while Shepley’s father was the village apothecary. Then they both went to the wars; Meadowes to fight, Shepley to heal; now, tired of campaigning, which had never been to his mind, Meadowes had left the service and returned to England, where, since his parents’ death, he had inherited, together with the Manor House of Fairmeadowes, this house in St. James’ Square and enough of money to ruin most men.
But Richard Meadowes was neither idle nor without interests. The whole of life appealed vividly to him, every day was crowded with incident and amusement, his difficulty was to select between his pleasures: now of a sudden he had brought himself into a curious place. It had been from the easy pleasantness of his nature that Meadowes had offered, when leaving Flanders, to carry any letters home to Wynford for Dr. Sebastian Shepley. The young surgeon had hesitated for a moment before asking if, instead of bearing a letter to Wynford, Meadowes would deliver one in London.
‘With all my heart—a dozen an’ you please,’ said Meadowes kindly; for he liked the young man with his steady blue eyes, who came moreover from Wynford like himself.
So Sebastian Shepley had intrusted a bulky letter to his care, and along with it a package containing, said he, some amber beads for ‘Annie,’ ‘as yellow as her hair.’ These were to be given to his sweetheart by Meadowes’ own hand.
Now, like most men who are good at making pleasant promises, Meadowes was not quite so good at keeping them. He forgot all about Sebastian Shepley’s love-letter for several weeks, and lost the amber beads, so that when at last he set out to deliver the letter, he had determined to make such apologies as he might for the loss of the beads.
But when first his eyes rested on Anne Champion he thought only of her beauty. He stood and stammered before her, and then there came a whisper: Shepley was in Flanders . . . might never return . . . might have forgotten Anne when he did . . . why could he not supplant him in the meantime?