Lesbia's presentation was over, and had realised all Lady Kirkbank's expectations. The Society papers were unanimous in pronouncing Lord Maulevrier's sister the prettiest débutante of the season. They praised her classical features, the admirable poise of her head, her peerless complexion. They described her dress at the drawing-room; they described her 'frocks' in the Park and at Sandown. They expatiated on the impression she had made at great assemblies. They hinted at even Royal admiration. All this, frivolous fribble though it might be, Lady Maulevrier read with delight, and she was still more gratified by Lesbia's own account of her successes. But as the season advanced Lesbia's letters to her grandmother grew briefer—mere hurried scrawls dashed off while the carriage was at the door, or while her maid was brushing her hair. Lady Maulevrier divined, with the keen instinct of love, that she counted for very little in Lesbia's life, now that the whirligig of society, the fret and fever of fashion, had begun.
One afternoon in May, at that hour when Hyde Park is fullest, and the carriages move slowly in triple rank along the Lady's Mile, and the mounted constables jog up and down with a business-like air which sets every one on the alert for the advent of the Princess of Wales, just at that hour when Lesbia sat in Lady Kirkbank's barouche, and distributed gracious bows and enthralling smiles to her numerous acquaintance, Mary rode slowly down the Fell, after a rambling ride on the safest and most venerable of mountain ponies. The pony was grey, and Mary was grey, for she wore a neat little homespun habit made by the local tailor, and a neat little felt hat with a ptarmigan's feather.
All was very quiet at Fellside as she went in at the stable gate. There was not an underling stirring in the large old stable-yard which had remained almost unaltered for a century and a half; for Lady Maulevrier, whilst spending thousands on the new part of the house, had deemed the existing stables good enough for her stud. They were spacious old stables, built as solidly as a Norman castle, and with all the virtues and all the vices of their age.
Mary looked round her with a sigh. The stillness of the place was oppressive, and within doors she knew there would be the same stillness, made still more oppressive by the society of the Fräulein, who grew duller and duller every day, as it seemed to Mary.
She took her pony into the dusky old stable, where four other ponies began rattling their halters in the gloom, by way of greeting. A bundle of purple tares lay ready in a corner for Mary to feed her favourites; and for the next ten minutes or so she was happily employed going from stall to stall, and gratifying that inordinate appetite for green meat which seems natural to all horses.
Not a groom or stable-boy appeared while she was in the stable; and she was just going away, when her attention was caught by a flood of sunshine streaming into an old disused harness-room at the end of the stable—a room with one small window facing the Fell.
Whence could that glow of western light come? Assuredly not from the low-latticed window which faced eastward, and was generally obscured by a screen of cobwebs. The room was only used as a storehouse for lumber, and it was nobody's business to clean the window.
Mary looked in, curious to solve the riddle. A door which she had often noticed, but never seen opened, now stood wide open, and the old quadrangular garden, which was James Steadman's particular care, smiled at her in the golden evening light. Seen thus, this little old Dutch garden seemed to Mary the prettiest thing she had ever looked upon. There were beds of tulips and hyacinths, ranunculus, narcissus, tuberose, making a blaze of colour against the old box borders, a foot high. The crumbling old brick walls of the outbuildings, and that dungeon-like wall which formed the back of the new house, were clothed with clematis and wistaria, woodbine and magnolia. All that loving labour could do had been done day by day for the last forty years to make this confined space a thing of beauty. Mary went out of the dark stable into the sunny garden, and looked round her, full of admiration for James Steadman's work.
'If ever Jack and I can afford to have a garden, I hope we shall be able to make it like this,' she thought. 'It is such a comfort to know that so small a garden can be pretty: for of course any garden we could afford must be small.'
Lady Mary had no idea that this quadrangle was spacious as compared with the narrow strip allotted to many a suburban villa calling itself 'an eligible residence.'