In most houses of sufficient dignity to own a special letter-bag, the temporary office of post-master is publicly discharged. The old Earl of Wolverhampton, for instance, found it pleasant to sort and classify the motley mass of correspondence which came daily to High Tor; but he would almost as soon have opened a servant’s letter as have opened the bag otherwise than in the presence of guests and kindred. Carbery Chase, however, was not High Tor, and Sir Sykes Denzil was a very different family chief from his noble neighbour. The baronet was an early riser, as are many men who have spent much of their lives in India; and he chose that the post-bag should be brought to him in the library an hour or so before the usual assembling for breakfast. Jasper, who was of a suspicious temper, resented this exercise of parental authority; but he was wrong. There may have been passages in Sir Sykes’s life which would not, if published, have redounded to his credit, but tampering with letters was not congenial to him. He never gave a second glance to any envelope addressed to Captain Denzil or the captain’s sisters, and was as loyal a custodian of the family correspondence as any gentleman in the whole county of Devon. There was this advantage in the baronet’s habit as regarded the post-bag, that nobody could tell what letters Sir Sykes received or when he did receive them. There are many of us, and those not the least loved or esteemed, whose letters are as it were public property, and with whom reticence on the subject of a missive newly received by the post would diffuse disquiet and perhaps dismay through the domestic circle. Sir Sykes had never been one of those who wear their hearts, metaphorically, on their sleeves; he told those around him as much as he wished them to know, and no more.
There was quite a flutter of pleasurable excitement among the Denzil girls at the prospect of a new member of the household, a new face at Carbery. They were sorry for this poor Miss Willis, sorrier for her by far than for the many orphans whose bereavement is notified to us every day by a grim list of deaths dryly chronicled in the newspaper. And they felt doubly disposed to welcome her and be good to her in that she was lonely and sad, and that her presence would introduce a new element into Carbery. They made no sacrifice in giving a cheerful acquiescence to their father’s suggestion that his ward should be received beneath his roof. In such a house the maintenance of an extra inmate was of no moment at all. But had Sir Sykes been living in furnished lodgings, and forced to look twice at half-a-crown, those honest girls would still not have grudged a share of their hashed mutton and scanty house-room to the daughter of an old friend of their father’s.
‘I don’t think, sir, that I remember to have heard you mention the Major’s name,’ said Jasper, stolidly buttering his toast, but furtively eyeing his father from beneath his pale eyelashes.
‘I think you have heard it,’ answered Sir Sykes, with a self-possession that all but staggered Jasper’s unbelief. ‘We were quartered together for years at Allahabad, Cawnpore, and Lahore. There were Reynolds and L’Estrange, and Moreton who is living yet, and this poor fellow Willis; the old set, with whom I was intimate. I don’t often bore listeners who have never been in India, with the details of my eastern experiences, else I think that the name of Major–or Captain–George Willis would be tolerably familiar here.’
That the girls, in their newly awakened interest, should ask questions was but natural. But their father had not very much beyond the substance of his original announcement to communicate. He had, he said, but a vague recollection of Mrs Willis, his friend’s wife, a bride when Sir Sykes returned to Europe, and who had now been dead for some years. She was a quiet domestic little person, from Wales or Ireland, the baronet did not know which; and she had some pittance of annual income, which would no doubt go to her child at the husband’s decease. Major Willis had no private means, at least so Sir Sykes thought. There was a London lawyer, however, who knew all about the financial affairs of the orphan, and who would of course render a proper statement to the baronet’s solicitors. Miss Willis would be entitled, as the child of an Indian officer, to no pension, being, as Sir Sykes understood, over the age of twenty-one; but of that again he was not sure, not being certain of the exact age of his friend’s daughter. She had no very near relatives, and had never, to Sir Sykes’s knowledge, been in England before.
‘It was the chaplain of the military station who wrote,’ continued Sir Sykes, ‘inclosing in his letter that which poor Willis had left for myself; and unless I telegraph to veto the arrangement, you are likely to see Miss Ruth–did I say that her name was Ruth–very soon, since she is to start by the next mail from Bombay.’
‘Well,’ muttered Jasper to himself, as some time later in the morning he sauntered through the plantations, the path across which made a short cut from Carbery Chase to Lord Wolverhampton’s park at High Tor, ‘I have seen some cool hands; but–– Well, well! It was neatly done, very neatly. If the governor had not had the rare luck to come into a fortune, he would have been as fit to make one as any man I ever came across.’
The young man, whose preference for crooked ways was congenital, and who knew of no road to Fortune’s temple save miry and devious ones, began really to feel an admiration for his father’s abilities, since he had discovered to what profound depths of dissimulation the baronet could descend. His own craft had enabled him to lift a corner of the fair seeming mask which Sir Sykes wore before the world, but as yet his knowledge was too imperfect to enable its possessor to make capital of the secret. Could he once––
‘Why, Captain Denzil!’ exclaimed a ringing girlish voice, ‘I could almost give you credit for poetic reveries, so complete is your unconsciousness of the mere commonplace world around you. You had all but passed us without a word or a bow.’
Jasper could not repress a slight start, as he found himself in presence of the three Ladies De Vere and of their brother Lord Harrogate, in the main avenue of the park. The young man’s moody countenance brightened at once.