The Mating of Lydia

by Mrs. Humphry Ward

Meanwhile the whole story of Mrs. Melrose and her daughter had spread rapidly through the neighbourhood. The local papers, now teeming with attacks on Melrose, and the management of the Melrose property, had fastened with avidity on the news of their arrival. "Mrs. Edmund Melrose and her daughter, after an absence of twenty years have arrived in Cumbria. They are now staying at Duddon Castle with Countess Tatham. Mr. Claude Faversham is at Threlfall Tower." These few sentences served as symbols of a dramatic situation which was being discussed in every house of the district, in the farms and cottages no less eagerly than by the Andovers and the Bartons. The heiress of Threlfall was not dead! After twenty years she and her mother had returned to claim their rights from the Ogre; and Duddon Castle, the headquarters of all that was powerful and respected in the county, had taken up their cause. Meanwhile the little heiress had been, it seemed, supplanted. Claude Faversham was in possession at Threlfall, and was being treated as the heir. Mr. Melrose had flatly refused even to see his wife and daughter whom he had left in poverty and starvation for twenty years.

Upon these facts the twin spirit of romance and hatred swooped vulturelike. Any story of inheritance, especially when charm and youth are mixed up with it, kindles the popular mind. It was soon known that Miss Melrose was pretty, and small; though, said report, worn to a skeleton by paternal ill-usage. Romance likes its heroines small. The countryside adopted the unconscious Felicia, and promptly married her to Harry Tatham. What could be more appropriate? Duddon could afford to risk a dowry; and what maiden in distress could wish for a better Perseus than the splendid young man who was the general favourite of the neighbourhood?

As to the hatred of Melrose which gave zest to the tale of his daughter, it was becoming a fury. The whole Mainstairs village had now been ejected, by the help of a large body of police requisitioned from Carlisle for the purpose. Of the able-bodied, some had migrated to the neighbouring towns, some were camped on Duddon land, in some wood and iron huts hastily run up for their accommodation. And thus a village which might be traced in Doomsday Book had been wiped out. For the sick Tatham had offered a vacant farmhouse as a hospital; and Victoria, Mrs. Andover, and other ladies had furnished and equipped it. Some twenty cases of enteric and diphtheria, were housed there, a few of them doomed beyond hope. Melrose had been peremptorily asked for a subscription to the fund raised, and had replied in his own handwriting that owing to the heavy expenses he had been put to by the behaviour of his Mainstairs tenants, as reported to him by his agent, Mr. Faversham, he must respectfully decline. The letter was published in the two local papers with appropriate comments, and a week later an indignation meeting to protest against the state of the Threlfall property, and to petition the Local Government Board to hold an inquiry on the spot, was held in Carlisle, with Tatham in the chair. And everywhere the public indignation which could not get at Melrose, who now, except for railway journeys, never showed himself outside the wall of his park, was beginning to fall upon the "adventurer" who was his tool and accomplice, and had become the supplanter of his young and helpless daughter. Men who four months before had been eager to welcome Faversham to his new office now passed him in the street without recognition. At the County Club to which he had been easily elected, Colonel Barton proposing him, he was conspicuously cut by Barton himself, Squire Andover and many others following suit. "An impostor, and a cad!" said Barton fiercely to Undershaw. "He took me in—and I can't forgive him. He is doing all Melrose's dirty work for him, better than Melrose could do it himself. His letters, for instance, to our Council Committee about the allotments we are trying to get out of the old villain have been devilish clever, and devilish impudent! Melrose couldn't have written them. And now this business of the girl!—and the fortune!—sickening!"

"He is a queer chap," said Undershaw thoughtfully. "I've been as mad with him as anybody—but somehow—don't know. Suppose we wait a bit. Melrose's life is a bad one."

But Barton refused to wait, and went off storming.
The facts, he vowed, were more than enough.

The weeks passed on. Duddon knew no longer what Green Cottage was doing. Victoria, at any rate, was ignorant, and forbore to ask—by word of mouth; though her thoughts were one long interrogation on the subject of Lydia, both as to the present and the past. Was she still in correspondence with Faversham, as Victoria now understood from Tatham she had been all the summer? Was she still defending him? Perhaps engaged to him? For a fair-minded and sensible woman, Victoria fell into strange bogs of prejudice and injustice in the course of these ponderings.

In her drives and walks at this time, Victoria generally avoided the neighbourhood of the cottage. But one afternoon at the very end of October, she overtook—walking—a slight, muffled figure in the Whitebeck road, and recognized Susy Penfold. A constrained greeting passed between them, and Lady Tatham learnt that Lydia was away—had been away, indeed, since the day following her last interview with Harry. The very next morning she and her mother had been summoned to London by the grave illness of Mrs. Penfold's elder sister. And there they were still; though Lydia was expected home shortly.

Victoria walked on, with relieved feelings, she scarcely knew why. At any rate there had been no personal contact between Faversham and a charming though foolish girl, during these weeks of popular indignation.

By what shabby arts had the mean and grasping fellow now installed at Threlfall ever succeeded in obtaining a hold over a being so refined, so fastidious and—to all appearances—so high-minded, as Lydia Penfold? To refuse Harry and decline on Claude Faversham! Victoria acknowledged indeed a certain pseudo-Byronic charm in the man. She could not forget the handsome head as she had seen it last at the door of Melrose's library; or the melodramatic black and white of the face, of the small, peaked beard, the dark brows, pale lantern cheeks, and heavy-lidded eyes. All the picturesque adventurers of the world betray something, she thought, of a common stamp.

At last one evening, when Tatham was away on county business, and Felicia had gone to bed, Victoria suddenly unburdened herself to Cyril Boden, as they sat one on either side of a November fire, while a southwesterly gale from the high fells blustered and raged outside.