‘The captain knows too well on which side his bread is buttered,’ pronounced the gaunt house-maid-in-chief, an invaluable female, lynx-eyed for spiders’ webs, and vigilant as to the minutest details of bedroom duty.
Opinions at Carbery Chase were very much divided as to the new-comer’s exact status and claims to consideration. There were those who invidiously described her as ‘Sir Sykes’s charity child,’ and appeared to regard her as a species of genteel mendicant most foolishly invited down to Devonshire. There were others who were not sorry for the arrival of any one considered capable of lending animation to a house where the regular routine of every-day life ran on with somewhat sluggish flow. And there were a few philosophers in plush or white aprons, much flouted by the rest, who held that Sir Sykes was himself the best judge as to what guests, permanent or temporary, should be allowed to share the shelter of his roof at Carbery.
That there was enough and to spare in that opulent mansion which acknowledged Sir Sykes Denzil for its master, was patent to all. Large as was Sir Sykes’s household and handsome his expenditure (for how many baronets chronicled in the gilt-edged volumes of Messrs Dod and Debrett, can afford themselves the luxury of a third and fourth footman, a French chef like high-salaried M. Cornichon, and a groom of the chambers?), he was known to live within his income; and was rumoured by his inferiors to be guilty of the offence, never mentioned otherwise than with a resentful reverence, of ‘putting by.’ Sir Sykes’s men and maids were probably not students of Dean Swift’s ironical advice to their order; but we may rely on it that the servants of Dives himself had strongly defined ideas as to the proportion of high feasting that should accompany the purple and fine linen of their patron.
Meanwhile, in spite of the early training which is supposed to make an Englishman of Sir Sykes Denzil’s degree as outwardly impassive as a Red Indian, no one at Carbery appeared to think so much about the arrival of Miss Willis as did the baronet himself. Her coming did not now at anyrate partake of the character of a surprise, for weeks had naturally elapsed between the incoming of the late and that of the new mail, and there had been time enough for preparations, if such were necessary. Sir Sykes, however, on the morning of his ward’s arrival could not avoid, not merely the being nervous and anxious, but the exhibiting to all who cared to look of his inexplicable nervousness and unreasonable anxiety. He went and came at frequent and irregular intervals between his own traditional apartment the library, and that morning-room where his daughters usually sat over their sketches and lacework and china-painting, and all those laborious trifles on which young ladies employ their taper fingers.
That their father was undignified in his apparently uncalled-for agitation as to the Indian orphan’s arrival, was too evident not to be recognised by even the most dutiful of daughters. But both Blanche and Lucy willingly accounted for the baronet’s restlessness on the ground of the revival of early associations, acting on the nerves of one whose health was no longer robust.
‘Let her only come here and quietly drop into her place among us,’ said the elder sister to the younger; ‘and depend upon it, papa will find her presence at Carbery as unexciting as though she were a supplementary daughter returning “for good,” as the girls call it, from a boarding-school.’
Jasper could, had it so pleased him, have considerably enlightened the ignorance of his unsuspecting sisters. But the captain prudently said nothing, and did not ostensibly keep watch upon his father’s actions, or deviate much from his own habit of indolently hanging about the stables, the kennels wherein sleek pointers and shaggy retrievers howled and rattled their chains, the billiard-room, and other resorts of ingenuous youth. The baronet’s nervousness was not in itself surprising to him, in whose memory was fresh the conversation which he had overheard while lurking in the mean garden of The Traveller’s Rest; but he could only conjecture what might be the hidden springs that prompted a course of conduct difficult to reconcile with a clean conscience and a secure worldly position.
‘I never,’ said Jasper to himself musingly, as he knocked about the balls on the billiard-table, ‘heard a word against the governor. He was awfully needy and that sort of thing once, of course; but I never knew there to be a whisper of any sharp practice either at écarté or with the bones. Had there been such, some good-natured fellow or other about the clubs would have let fall a hint of it before now in my hearing, or some servant would have tattled, when I wore a jacket and was Master Jasper. He’s not much liked, my father, but respected he is. I doubt if many, who fluked by a lucky chance upon a great fortune, get so civilly spoken of behind their backs.’
Jasper was not one to have cherished those tender recollections of infantine joys and sorrows, which with some men remain green and fresh to the last. He had, to use his own expression, to ‘hark back’ with painful effort and purpose, ere he could reproduce before his mental vision the long past of his early boyhood. ‘I have a vague notion,’ said he, after an interval of this appeal to memory, ‘that my mother gave me more sweetmeats than were good for me, and that she, and I too, seemed to stand in awe of my father. I’m sure I don’t know why, unless it were because he was serious and silent—a grave Spanish Don, as I used to think. But she said too that he had been of a livelier mood once, and something about his high spirits having deserted him just when the world began to smile. My old nurse—what was her name, I wonder?—Wiggins, Priggins—all nurses are named something of the sort, and all combine to dote over the little wretches that torment them—used to talk about the governor’s sad looks dating from the loss of that young sister of mine. She would have been younger than Lucy, older than Blanche, I take it. But why, in the name of common-sense, a man of the world should never forget the loss of a chit in the nursery—that is, if it was all on the square—but then, again, the motive!’ And the captain’s arching eyebrows and the compression of his thin lips were very expressive of his readiness to believe the very worst that could be believed as to his nearest and dearest, if only a plausible reason for such villainy could be alleged. ‘If it had been myself now,’ he muttered, as he sent the red ball, with a mechanical precision that proved him a dexterous pool-player, into pocket after pocket of the green table; ‘but even then the governor, who had Apollyon’s own luck, did not need to cut off the entail by illegal methods. He’s no life-tenant of Carbery, as he makes me feel whenever our views don’t exactly coincide; could leave it to my sisters; or back again, if he chose, to the De Vere lot; and so, what interest he could have had in spiriting away little Mabel Denzil, is a question that I defy Œdipus, or a modern racing prophet, to answer.’ Having said which, the captain rang the bell for something to drink, drank that something, and immersed his fine faculties in the delightful study of a sporting newspaper.
Jasper had not had leisure to thread his way very far through the labyrinth of darkling vaticinations, so dear to men who like himself are of the horse, horsey, as to probable or certain winners of important events to come off, or to discriminate with sufficient nicety between the inherent truth or falsehood of the reports that made the barometer of the betting world oscillate so wildly between panic and exultation, before the grinding of wheels on the smooth gravel announced the arrival of the carriage, and that Sir Sykes’s ward was at the threshold of Carbery Court, her future home.