“Oh, no,—please. I'll feed it—I will, really. I couldn't let you drown it. Now, what are their names to be?”
“There's Melpomeen, Miss Percival, and Melody, and Melchior, and Melchizedek. That's for the bitches.”
She quizzed him. “No, Frodsham, really that won't do. I'm not quite sure about Melchizedek; but Melchior was a man—he was a king—a king of the East. And I believe Melchizedek was an angel.”
Frodsham rubbed his chin. “May be you are right, Miss Percival. An angel, was he now? Wings to him? 'Tis a name for a bird, then. If we kept the hawks the old Squire used to love—there's a name for a peregrine! Melchizedek—a fair mouthful.”
“A Priest for ever,” mused Jacobs, a wizened elder, the kennel man, who yet bowed to the coachman in his own yard. “We may put him among the dogs, I believe. We've Proteus, and Prophet; but no Priest.”
Frodsham looked to Sanchia for direction, ignoring Jacobs. She flashed him a name. “Melisande, Frodsham. Call her Melisande, and save her life; and she shall be mine. I'll look after her. Please do.” He owned to the spell of her eyes, of the sun upon her hair. “Melisande she shall be, Miss Percival, and your own,” he said. “The Missus shall rear her if the old bitch won't. She's had six of her own, and knows what it is.”
Regretfully, one by one, she put the striving blind things down; then rose and went her way into the gardens about the house. Slowly through the kitchen gardens she passed. Glyde, thinning walled peach-trees, saw her, felt her go. She shed her benediction upon him—“Good morning, Struan,”—and went on. He watched her for a while, then turned fiercely to his affair. Through dense shrubberies, over drenched lawns her way was; it led her to the lily-pond, which lay hidden within rhododendron walls, with a narrow cincture of grass path all about it. Dark-brown, still and translucent like an onyx it lay before her. It was her haunt of election when she was troubled, as now she was, when she gave herself time to remember it.
She stood, her hands clasped before her, close to the water's brim, and looked over the shining surface. She had never yet squarely faced her difficulties. Her sceptre was slipping from her; her realm, usurped at first, hers by sufferance first, but then by love of them she ruled, could hold her but a little while more. The shadow of coming eclipse made her eyes grow sombre. Doubt of the unknown made lax her lips.
If Nevile's wife, with all her sins clotted on her, was dead, what was she herself going to do, or allow to be done? She had yielded to love—her first love and her last; but that had been long ago. Love, the fire, the trembling and the music in her heart; pride, the trust, the loyalty, the bliss of service; the wonder, the swooning, the glory like a sun upon her—all gone, burned out, or worked out. Why, how long had it lasted her? Her lips stretched to a bleak smile to think of it. Three months joy in herself, three months joy of him; then work, incessant and absorbing; and then the growth of a new pride, the pride of mind (for she found that she had a brain), and of a new love—for she found that she loved the creatures more than man. Education indeed! To draw from a child caught unawares the force and the brooding love of an Earth-Goddess.
In the beginning, she could have told herself (but never did), she was to be pitied, not blamed. Reticent among her free-speaking sisters, shy, what the maids call “a deep one,” rarely a talker, keeping always her own counsel, she had first been moved to utter herself by the extreme carelessness of Ingram whether she did so or not. The blame—if it is to be laid—must be upon her mother when she, knowing Ingram's story of miserable marriage and separation, allowed the man to continue a friend of the house, be much with her girl, and unfold himself under her clear young eyes. What she was about—that masterful, self-absorbed woman—there's no saying. It was always supposed that, with five beautiful daughters to market, she had pushed Welbore Percival—Thomas Welbore Percival, East India merchant of The Poultry—into lavish entertainment of his friends and acquaintance. Ingram, a squire and son of squires, was perhaps a shade above her degree; she may have required him to give a tone. This, considering that wretched marriage of his—a month's engagement in defiance of head-shaking, a blazing Hanover Square wedding, a year's bickering, one month's acrimony (done by letter) and Ingram's unquenchable hatred of the woman—this, I say, you may well doubt. But I can give no other explanation. He came, he talked in his high-voiced, querulous, bitter-humoured way, he saw and sought the grave young Sanchia, and he won her pitying heart directly he had engrossed her watching eyes.