Two ladies were the occupants of the room, both young and both pretty, though each of them had that likeness to Jasper (her only brother) which we so constantly trace in members of the same family. Lucy it is true was dark-haired and dark-eyed; while Blanche, the younger and taller of the two, was delicately—perhaps too delicately—fair of complexion, and had hair of the palest gold. Sir Sykes had been for several years a widower; and all the Denzil family, with the exception of the baronet himself, were now present in that room, through the French windows of which came stealing in the fresh scent of roses.
‘I saw you, Jasper, from the pheasantry, as you came up the park; but you did not see me,’ said Miss Denzil, smiling. ‘You did not stay, then, to see the finish of the Pebworth cricket-match?’
‘I—no!’ answered Jasper with a yawn. ‘Cricket is amusing, I daresay, to those who knock the ball about, or to those who run to pick it up again, as the French countess said of our noble national game; but it is slow—fearfully slow.’ And the captain yawned again.
‘Most things are, I am afraid, at Carbery,’ said Blanche gently.—‘We have tried to amuse him—have we not, Lucy?—by dragging him with us to such primitive merry-makings as lay within driving distance, archery-meetings, flower-shows’——
‘Yes, and all manner of Arcadian entertainments of the same species,’ interrupted Jasper, drumming with his ringed fingers on the glass of the open window near which he was standing. ‘I believe I had a narrow escape from what they called a sillabub party at that old woman's (Lady Di Horner's) house at Ottery St Luke's, with a cow on the lawn and the rest of it. The natives, I suppose, like that kind of thing; I don't.’ There was a half-peevish lassitude in his tone, in his attitude, as he spoke, which added emphasis to words that were, if ungracious, perhaps not unkindly meant. But his sisters were not in the least offended that their brother should shew so unaffectedly how little pleasure he took in their society, and how complete was his distaste for their simple pleasures and homely occupations. A grown-up brother is, in the eyes of good girls, a hero by right of birth, and with Lucy and Blanche the captain was a privileged person, not to be judged by the standards of ordinary ethics.
‘If the governor,’ said Jasper, after a pause, ‘would ask people down here—I mean of course after town is empty—a houseful of people of the right sort, why then, one might get through the autumn and winter without being moped to death.’
Lucy shook her head. ‘There is no chance, brother,’ she said, ‘that papa should fill his house with what you would consider people of the right sort. The Vanes will come of course, and the Henshaws, and’——
‘Never mind the rest of the names,’ broke in the captain with a lazy brusqueness; ‘heavy county members, who know more of the points of a bullock than they do of those of a horse; and their fat wives and starched daughters. What have I done, to be buried alive in this way!’
Women have this merit, that they seldom retort, as they might sometimes do with crushing effect, upon a man who bewails his hard lot, be his self-pity ever so unreasonable. Lucy and Blanche Denzil knew, or guessed, with tolerable accuracy that it was due to Jasper's own extravagance that he no longer wore the gay trappings of a captain of Lancers, and that the soles of his varnished boots were no longer familiar with the Pall-Mall pavement.
‘I'll go in and see my father; he's in the library, I suppose?’ said Jasper, and without waiting for an answer, he sauntered off.