LONDON:
BRADBURY, EVANS, AND CO., PRINTERS, WHITEFRIARS.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I.
ENTER THE RIGHT HONOURABLE THE EARL OF VERNER.
So swiftly did one incident of change crowd upon another at this period of the lives which we fear we are but faintly sketching, that it seemed as if Fortune had arranged all the concomitant circumstances that were culminating in these few eventful days of autumn.
Fortune, “the great commandress of the world,” had already played strange pranks with those two charming girls at Barton. Until lately their destinies had flowed on smoothly and in peace. They had grown up side by side,—one the mistress, the other the companion and friend,—and until now there had been no jealousy on either hand—until now Amy Somerton had been content with her lot. She had brooded over her lowly birth, in those hours when she had loved and dreamed about her love for Mr. Hammerton, but she had only seemed to look up the higher to her love. She had seen him as miners see the sky, far above her, and with hardly a beam of hope animating the thought that some day he might take her hand and raise her up, as the king selected the beggar maid in the poem.
In those sunny days of doubt and hope and maiden admiration, she had been happy in her own quiet, dreamy fashion, contented with Lionel’s kind words and delicate attentions. He had never, perhaps, told her in so many words that he loved her, but there was that in his voice and manner, when he addressed her, which led her to believe that he took delight in her own undisguised admiration. He had signified his pleasure in her society in a thousand different ways, and for the time being this was enough to satisfy the heart-craving of Amy; but content to be humble, her pride nevertheless rose up against attack, with all the fierceness of injury. On that morning when she learnt that Lionel had left the country without one word at parting, she knew as if by instinct that her love was cast off. He must have known some time before he left that he was going, and yet he had not even deigned to say so. She knew how weak she had been; she knew how little she had striven to hide her love. Lionel Hammerton knew that she had loved him with all her heart and soul. She had not cared to disguise her feelings. She would have given up all the world for him, even like Goethe’s Marguerite. There was no sacrifice she would not have made, if sacrifice had been needed, at the feet of Lionel Hammerton; yet he had treated herself and her love with contempt and indifference.
You have seen how her spirit rebelled against the slight which she imagined was the assertion of rank and fortune over lowly birth. Her whole nature seemed to have undergone a change—a change in which pride took such full possession of her heart, that there was no more room left for love. She who had sat and simpered over Tennyson like a love-sick, romantic girl, dreaming of Cophetua, and Camelot, and A. H. H., now thought of nothing but schemes of revenge and ambition. If she were only in Phœbe Tallant’s place, what would she not do to assert the rights of lowly birth and beauty! She envied her friend at the moment with a hot and a bitter envy, and hated her own more lowly origin.
It was the morning after her return from London. She sat at her bedroom window at the farm, commanding a long reach of the carriage-drive to Barton Hall. The park trees were standing in golden circles of leaves; the great elms were shaking down their last autumnal tributes to mother earth; the old roots were wrapped in soft carpet-like coverings of red and brown and gold; the long carriage-drive was fringed with the same remnants of the dying year, and anon a gust of wind would sweep along the road and carry the leaves high up into the air, like flocks of birds sporting in the sunshine.
But Amy saw only desolation in the scene; she saw all her best and holiest aspirations tossed about the world like the fallen leaves. Whilst she sat there musing and fretting by the window, there entered the drive a carriage drawn by four horses; as it gradually approached, she saw that there were footmen behind, and that the equipage was splendid.