Jane Oglander

by Marie Belloc Lowndes

He had first met Miss Oglander at a moment when he had just come through a terrible secret crisis, one which had left him free of all the familiar moorings of his early life.

He had touched pitch, and to his own conscience and imagination he had been most vilely defiled. And yet circumstances had made it imperative that he should not only pretend to be clean, but also that he should affect complete ignorance of the pitch he had touched. Jane Oglander, then a young, clear-eyed girl, with a certain tender gaiety, a straightforward simplicity of nature which had strongly appealed to his own more complex character, had helped him and indeed made it possible for him to do this.

Then had come Jack Oglander's mad act and its awful consequences, and even this had helped Dick Wantele further to obliterate the memory of his own ignominious secret. He had thrown himself, with his cousin, Richard Maule's, full assent, into the whole terrible business, and Jane Oglander had found his dry sense and quiet, efficient help an untold comfort. No wonder the ties of confidence and friendship between them had grown ever closer and closer, seeming to justify the young man in the hope that the time must come when Jane would become his wife.

To-night the news flung at him by Athena Maule wiped out the immediate peaceful past, and phantoms which he believed himself to have banished for ever sprang into being—dread reminders that no man can ever hope to escape wholly from his past.

At last, with a feeling of lassitude and relief he came to a broad low gate. The gate was locked, but he climbed over it, as he had often done before. The path went on still under trees and among underwood till it widened and became merged in a clearing, in the middle of which stood a long low building still called by its old name of the Small Farm, and now the home of one to whom Wantele often made his way in moments of depression and revolt.

When Dick Wantele had first made Mabel Digby's acquaintance, she had been a plain, observant, self-reliant little girl of nine, whose most striking features were bright brown eyes set in a fair freckled face, and masses of light yellow hair worn by her in two long pigtails. The only child of a certain Colonel Digby, whose death had taken place when she was sixteen, Mabel Digby had elected to go on living in the place where her father had brought her motherless, seven years before, and Dick Wantele had been largely instrumental in her settlement in the old farmhouse which was on the edge of the Rede Place estate.

At first the governess who had brought her up, and who had educated her in the old-fashioned, thorough, and perhaps rather limited way more usual forty years ago than now, had lived with her; but when Mabel was nineteen this lady had had to go back to her own people, and she had had no successor.

To the scandal rather than to the surprise of the neighbourhood, Miss Digby decided that henceforth she would live alone. She was well aware, though those about her were not, that her father's old soldier servant and his wife were really more efficient and vigilant chaperons than the kind, gentle governess had been.

With Wantele the relations of Mabel Digby had always been of a singularly close and sexless nature. She had naturally begun by looking at him with her father's, the old Indian Mutiny veteran's eyes; that is, she had been gently tolerant of his fads, while neither understanding nor sharing them.

Then, as she grew older, as she read the books that he lent her and talked over with her, she had moved some way from her father's—the simple-minded soldier's—position, and she judged Dick Wantele rather hardly, half despising him for having so contentedly, or so she thought, sunk into the position of adopted son to his wealthy cousin. When she had become aware that he desired to marry Jane Oglander, a fact of which she had possessed herself by asking him the direct question, and receiving an equally direct answer, she had at once decided that he was not nearly good enough for the lady on whom he had fixed his affection, and time had in no sense modified her first view.