The letter of a man, Gavin said to himself when he read it. He liked it best because there was no gilt-edge of money upon it. The Earl's prodigious wealth had been the one blot hitherto upon the fair panorama of his desires. "There will be a host of flunkies in red breeches," he had thought, "and every one of them will look the question, 'How much is he good for?'" He knew that the present Master of Melbourne Hall had come to the estate and the title almost by accident late in life, and after an adventurous career which men spoke of openly in clubs, but rarely in private life. A wild man who had been everything from a discredited attaché at Bukharest to an equally unsuccessful miner in Australia—this was the third Earl of Melbourne.
*****
And what of his daughter, the Lady Evelyn?
There were but wild fables spoken about this unknown girl and the secluded life her father compelled her to live at the Manor House. Some said she was the daughter of a Roumanian gypsy whom the Earl had married after his disgrace at Bukharest. Others declared that her dead mother had been an actress who had enjoyed a brief spell of notoriety in Vienna and thence had been driven out by the infatuation of an archduke. None knew the truth, but there were many to suggest what the truth might be. Openly and scandalously, as the world will, idle tongues hinted that the Earl must have some good reason for his eccentric conduct. There were even stories that the Lady Evelyn was unmistakably a gypsy girl herself. "As brown as a walnut chiffonier," said little Backbiter at the Club. The fellow had never been within fifty miles of Melbourne Hall; and if he had met the Earl, he would have gone down on his marrow bones to him.
Gavin Ord recalled some of these stories as he followed the tortuous road and left the solitary village still farther behind him. They did not interest him. He had gone into Derbyshire to see not a woman but a house. Delight that he should be chosen for guardian of such a national treasure as Melbourne Hall went with him upon his way. He must be now, he thought, but a mile from the Manor gates. The road had become narrow and closely bordered by leafy elms. No longer could he see the moonlit heights or the twinkling lights in the valleys. There were no kindly beams to guide his steps. In weird darkness he followed the dusty track and pressed on toward the Manor. The rustling of leaves sounded almost like a human voice in his ears. He liked to think that Nature was still awake and speaking to him.
So it is evident that he possessed that quasi-divine attribute, imagination. His mood of thought responded instantly to any change, atmospheric, or of the light of the heavens. The sunshine could ever build temples of success for him; the twilight rarely failed to bring the question, what is the good of it all, of ambition and the stress and strife of arenas. In the night he would awake to remember that all men must die. In the daytime he would laugh at death and all the vain problems of the hereafter. That Melbourne Hall, approached in this gloom of a summer's night, should provoke no evil thoughts but only those of good omen, seemed a new witness to the pleasure with which he contemplated his stay there. He would accomplish something amid those ancient stones by which men should remember him. The aspiration quickened his step. A turn of the road revealed the lodge-gates, with a lighted window and a pleasant cottage. He entered Lord Melbourne's park and discerned the Hall, dim and stately and starred with lights, across the little river which stood for a moat before its walls.
This, then, was his goal, this superb fabric which the genius of the mediæval age had bequeathed to England and to posterity. No words could rightly have described the emotions which stirred his imagination as he stood to contemplate the jagged line of building and battlement, chapel, tower and stable, which his hand should snatch from the greedy hand of time. The very park, with its soft grasses, and deer in shadow pictures beneath the trees, could conjure up a vision of knights and pages and stately dames and all the witching pageantry of half-forgotten centuries. The great house itself might have been the house of a thousand mysteries, locked in banded coffers, enshrined in ghostly walls—crying aloud none the less to him who would listen to the tongue of their romance. Gavin Ord stood in an ecstasy of homage to worship at the gates of such a temple as this. And, standing so, he heard a woman's cry.
He had walked across the park with slow steps and come to the narrow bridge of five Roman arches which spanned the shallow river—shallow, save for one deep pool over which many a fisherman must have thrown a skilful fly. Standing by the balustrade to contemplate the picture, his delighted eyes traced every tower and pinnacle of Melbourne Hall with an artist's ecstasy—thence looked out over the moonlit park to glades of surpassing beauty and scenes which the centuries had hallowed. How inimitable it all was—the mighty yews about which Elizabeth's courtiers had grouped; the groves which had listened to many a child of Pampinea—the fearsome walls, what tragedies, what comedies, had been played within them! Even a dullard might contemplate the scene with awe. Gavin Ord was no dullard, and the spell it cast upon him was such as he had never known in all his life. So entirely did it claim his mind and will that when he heard a woman's low cry beneath the very bridge he stood upon, he scarcely turned his head or gave the matter a thought.
What had happened; whence came the sound? Being repeated, he could no longer ignore it. In truth, it awed him not a little; for it was not the voice of a woman in danger but of one asking his pity, his help, as it seemed, in a low whispering voice which he now heard more clearly than if a strong man had shouted at him. Taking one quick glance at the river, Gavin declared that the cry could not have come from there. Splashing and leaping over mossy boulders, a child might have waded across the stream, he thought. Then whence did the cry come? Turning about, to the right, to the left, he discovered himself to be still alone. It was the voice of imagination he began to say; and was about to quit the place when he heard it for the third time, and so unmistakably, that he no longer doubted it to be human.
Some one called to him from the river below the bridge.