The Great House

by Stanley John Weyman

“Well, Miss, it’s his lordship’s seat,” Etruria answered naïvely; “what he wishes has always been done in Riddsley. And he’s for Mr. Mottisfont.”

Mary walked to a window and looked out. “Oh,” she said, “I did not know that. But you’d better go now, Etruria, and change your shoes. Your feet must be wet.”

Etruria went, and Mary continued to gaze through the window. What strange news! And what a strange situation! The lover whom she had rejected and the lover whom she had taken, pitted against one another! And her words—she could hardly doubt it—the spur which had brought Basset to the post!

So thinking, so pondering, she grew more and more ill at ease. Her sympathies should have been wholly with her betrothed, but they were not. She should have resented Basset’s action. She did not. Instead she thought of his shaking hand and his pale face, and of the courage that had grown firmer in the face of opposition; and she found something fine in that, something that appealed to her. And the cause he had adopted? It was the cause to which she naturally inclined. She might be wrong, he might be wrong. Lord Audley knew so much more of these things and looked at them from so enlightened a standpoint, that they must be wrong. And yet—her heart warmed to that cause.

She turned from the window in some trouble, wondering if she were disloyal, wondering why she felt as she did; wondering a little, too, why she had lost the first rapture of her love, and was less happy in it than she had been.

True, she had not seen her lover again, and that might account for it. He had been detained at Lord Seabourne’s, and in London; he had been occupied for days together with the crisis. But she had had three letters from him, busy as he was; three amusing letters, full of gossip and sprinkled with anecdotes of the great world. She had opened the first in something of a tremor; but her fingers had soon grown steady, and if she had blushed it had been for her expectation of a vulgar love-letter such as milkmaids prize. She had been silly to suppose that he would write in that strain.

And yet she had felt a degree of disappointment. He might have written with less reserve, she thought; he might have discussed their plans and hopes, he might have let the fire peep somewhere through the chinks. But there, again, what a poor thing she was if her love must be fed with sweetmeats. How weak her trust, how poor her affection, if she could not bear a three weeks’ parting! He had come to her, he had chosen her, what more did she want? Did she expect him to put aside the calls and the duties of his station, that he might hang on her apron-strings?

Still, she was not in good spirits, and she felt her loneliness. The house, this gray evening, with the shadows gathering in the corners, weighed on her. Mrs. Toft was far away in her cosey kitchen, Etruria also had gone thither. Toft was with Mr. Audley in the other wing—he had been much with his master of late. So Mary was alone. She was not nervous, but she was depressed. The cold stairs, the austere parlor with its dim portraits, the matted hall, the fireless library—all struck a chill. She remembered other times and other evenings; cosey evenings, when the glow of the wood-fire had vied with the shaded lights, when the three heads had bent over the three tables, when the rustle of turning pages had blended with the snoring of the old hound, when the pursuit of some trifle had sped the pleasant hours. Alas, those evenings were gone, as if they had never been. The house was dull and melancholy.

She might have gone to her uncle, but during the afternoon he had told her that he wished to be alone; he should go to bed betimes. So about seven o’clock she took her meal by herself, and when it was done she felt more at a loss than ever. Presently her thoughts went again to John Audley.

Had she neglected him of late? Had she left him too much to Toft, and let her secret, which she hated to keep secret, come between them? Why should she not, even now, see him before he slept? She could take him the news of Mr. Basset’s enterprise. It would serve for an excuse.