She drew her chair nearer his and took his strong, broad hand in both her own. In her eyes he was all that youth and manhood should be. She was proud of him already, though he had done nothing for fame. She was proud of his height and strength, proud of his good looks, courage, good temper, of all those qualities which go to make an English gentleman.
“Proud of me,” he echoed. “Poor mother!” He drew his hand away, remembering that it was stained with the blood of his fellow-man.
CHAPTER III.
“FAIRIES!”
Nearly three years had gone by since that fatal night in Venice. It was mid-winter, only a few days after Christmas, and Mrs. Vansittart and her son were spending their Christmas holidays within twenty miles of Merewood.
Maud Vansittart had become Maud Hartley, but before bestowing herself upon her adoring lover she had insisted that he should buy a place within reasonable distance of the house in which she had been born and reared, the home in which she could so vividly recall the image of a beloved father, and where all her happy years of girlhood had been spent with the mother she fondly loved. Sir Hubert had a fine place in the wild Yorkshire hills, half an hour’s journey from Sheffield, a solid red-brick manor house in the Georgian style, built by his great-grandfather; but to that house as a home Maud would not consent to go. Her lover being rich enough to buy a second country seat as easily as some men buy a second horse, there had only remained the trouble of choosing a home that Maud could approve.
A house was found, neither too old nor too new, upon the side of Blackdown, in that rich and picturesque country between Petworth and Haslemere—Redwold Towers, a roomy, well-built mansion, with just land enough to satisfy Hubert Hartley’s idea of a home-farm, with out diverting his capital from that wider domain of Hartley Manor, where he had fields and pastures of a hundred acres each, and where he grew prize oxen and cart-horses worth their weight in gold, as it seemed to Maud, when she heard of six or seven hundred pounds being given for one of these creatures.
Merewood, John Vansittart’s patrimonial estate, was near Liss, in Hampshire, a long, low, capacious house, on a ridge of pineclad hill, and fronting a wild valley, which grew very little of a profitable nature for man or beast, but where the perfume of the pine woods and the gold and purple of gorse and heather were worth all that the fattest soils can produce. Fertile pastures and spacious cornfields were not wanting to the estate, but those lay behind the crest of the hill.
Maud had been married nearly two years, and there was a short-coated baby in the nursery at Redwold, albeit Sir Hubert would rather the eyes of his firstborn had opened upon the light that shone into the family bed-chamber at Hartley Manor, the patriarchal bed-chamber with its patriarchal bed, birth chamber and death chamber, room in which the good old great-grandsire’s eyes had closed peacefully, verily “falling on sleep,” after a life of ninety years, and after having enriched the world with many useful inventions, and established a wealthy progeny. Unhappily, Maud hated Hartley Manor House, and only went there for a month in the shooting season as a concession to the best of husbands.
“Of course, I always meant to marry him,” she told her brother, “and he is the only man for whom I ever cared a straw; but I wanted to have my fling in London; and I liked being talked about as the pretty Miss Vansittart. I was, you know, Jack. You needn’t laugh at me. And I liked making other young men miserable, by leading them on a little, meaning nothing all the time.”