[CHAPTER IV.]
AN UNKNOWN VISITOR.
"Ah! what a little Time to Love is lent,
Yet half that time is in unkindness spent."
As Sir Geoffrey proceeded up the avenue, at the end of which stood Fanshawe Manor--an ancient house that for years had belonged to a family bearing the same name as itself, and had then passed into the hands of that family's kinsmen, the Thornes--he looked ahead of him, expecting to see the light dress of Ariadne on the verandah; the spot where, whenever she knew he was coming from Portsmouth to visit her, she placed herself.
But to-night, very much to his disappointment as well as to his astonishment--she was not there. This disconcerted him a little, since it was the first time that he had ever known her to be absent from that point of observation. The first time! and this on the evening when, of all other evenings, he had encountered that grimacing, pranked-up fop who had spoken as though, forsooth, he had some intimate knowledge of her and her doings. What did it mean? he asked himself in consequence. What? Was it possible that she, his modest, winsome Ariadne, in whose eyes truth shone, in whose every accent truth was proclaimed, could be--a--a coquette! Was it possible, too, that she, who knew that he was riding from Portsmouth on that very evening to pass an hour with her, had been whiling away the previous hour with that fellow--that creature whom he believed was what they called, in their London jargon, a macaroni--a swaggerer--a beau!
If so--but no! He could never believe that!
He had resolved at first, after quitting his unknown antagonist, that he would tell Ariadne all and make her laugh at his description of the man, and especially at the encounter they had had, as well as its result; but, now--would it not be best to say nothing whatever on the subject--to see, instead, what she would say to him? Surely the stranger must have been there to visit her, and, equally surely, if such were the case, she would tell him all about it.
So he went on towards the house, yet with, he knew not why, his feelings a little dashed--his heart a little sore, in spite of his certainty in Ariadne's truth and honour.
These two had known each other almost from boy and girl, and from that time, notwithstanding he was ten years older than she, had loved each other, the love not being, however, spoken of openly until a year or so ago. They had known each other from the time when his father, the late Sir Geoffrey Barry, had returned to his mortgaged, encumbered estate near Alverstoke, "a battered and shattered man," as he had frankly, and without shame, described himself to be.
"Foregad!" the late baronet used to say, he never having ceased to use the quaint expressions of his earlier days of nearly fifty years ago; those days of Queen Anne and the first George--which now seemed so far off--when he had wassailed and drunk deep at Locket's, Pontack's, and Rummer's, amidst such company as Vanbrugh, Nokes, and gentle George Farquhar. "Foregad, what would you have? Why should I not be battered, broken? I'fags, I have laced myself with claret all my days, and done other things as well, equally dashing to one's constitution. Wherefore, behold the result. A broken, ruined old man; a beggar, where once I owned every acre I could see from my blue saloon window. And with nothing to leave poor little Geoff--nothing. Not a stiver!"