Time hung more heavily than ever on the captain’s hands since his accident had cut him off from his ordinary habits of life. Of intellectual resources he had few indeed, being one of those men (and they are numerous amongst us) to whom reading is a weariness of spirit, and thinking a laborious mental process, and who undergo tortures of boredom when thrown helpless into that worst of all company—their own. His sisters’ affection, his sisters’ innocent anxiety to anticipate his wishes and soothe his pain, bored him more than it touched him. He was not of a tender moral fibre, and barely tolerated at best those of his own blood and name. He would very much have preferred as a nurse bluff Jack Prodgers, to Blanche and Lucy. With Prodgers he had topics and interests in common; the minds of the two captains ran nearly in identical grooves; whereas his sisters did not fathom his nature or partake his tastes. So dreary was the existence to which this once brilliant cavalry officer was now condemned, that he had actually come to look forward with a sort of languid excitement to the professional visits of little Dr Aulfus from Pebworth, whose gig, to the great disgust of Mr Lancetter, the High Tor surgeon, was daily to be seen traversing the carriage-drive of Carbery Chase. With his father, Jasper’s dealings were coldly decorous, no fondness and no trust existing on either side. Sir Sykes had announced to Jasper that his debts—of which the baronet, through a chance interview with Mr Wilkins the attorney from London, had been made aware—had been paid in full.
‘I must ask you, Jasper,’ Sir Sykes had said, ‘for two assurances: one to the effect that no more secret liabilities exist to start up at unexpected moments; and the other, that you will never again ride a steeplechase.’
‘For my own sake, sir, I’ll promise you that last willingly enough,’ said Jasper, with a sickly smile. ‘I didn’t use to mind that kind of thing; but I suppose I am not so young in constitution as I was, and don’t come up to time so readily. And as for more snakes in the grass, such as those which that impudent cur Wilkins wheedled me into signing, for his own benefit and that of his worthy allies, I give you my word there’s not one. Some fresh tailor or liveryman may send a bill in one day. A gentleman can’t always be quite sure as to how many new coats and hired broughams may be totted up against him by those harpies at the West End; but that is all. I should have won a hatful of money the other day if anybody but Hanger had been on The Smasher’s back, when that savage brute rushed at the wall; but I don’t owe any, except a hundred and fifty which Prodgers lent me, and every farthing of which I paid to the bookmakers before the race, in hope of receiving it back with a tidy sum to boot.’
Sir Sykes had forthwith inclosed a cheque for a hundred and fifty pounds to Captain Prodgers, with a very frigid acknowledgment of the accommodation offered to his son.
‘I could wish that you had other friends, other pursuits too,’ he said coldly to Jasper. ‘However, I will not lecture. You are of an age to select your own associates.’
Captain Denzil then, being on terms of chilling civility with his father, and an uncongenial companion for his sisters, yielded himself the more readily to the singular fascination which Ruth Willis could, when she chose, exert. Sir Sykes’s ward had a remarkable power of pleasing when it suited her to please. She had at the first conciliated the servants at Carbery—no slight feat, considering the dull weight of stolid prejudice which she had to encounter—and had won the regard of the baronet’s two daughters. Then Lucy and Blanche had felt the ardour of their early girlish friendship for the Indian orphan cool perceptibly, perhaps because the latter no longer gave herself the same pains to win their suffrages. And now she laid herself out to be agreeable to Jasper. Nothing could be more natural or befitting than that a young lady, under deep obligations to the master of the house, should shew her gratitude by doing little acts of kindness to her guardian’s son when a prisoner; and without any apparent effort or design, Ruth seemed to appropriate the invalid as her own. She talked to him—she was by far better informed than the average of her sex and age, and had a rare tact which taught her when to speak, and of what—and she read to him. A more fastidious listener than Jasper might have been charmed with that sweet untiring voice, so admirably modulated that it assumed the tone most suited to the subject-matter, be it what it might. The captain, whose boast it was, that with the exception of racing calendars and cavalry manuals, he had not opened a book since he left school, cared for nothing but newspapers, and especially newspapers of a sporting turn, and such literature is not generally very inviting to a feminine student; but Miss Willis shewed no symptoms of weariness as she retailed to her hearer the cream of the turf intelligence.
‘I don’t half like her. There are times when I could almost say, I hate her!’ thought Jasper to himself once and again; ‘but she’s clever, and has something about her which I don’t understand, for she never bores a fellow.’
It was a burning day in early August. The windows of the White Room were open, and the heavy hum of the bees, as they loaded themselves with the plunder of the blossoms that clustered so thickly without, had in itself a drowsy potency. Jasper, overcome by heat and lassitude, had fallen asleep among his cushions, and Ruth Willis, who had been reading to him, laid down the paper and slipped softly from the room, closing the door behind her. She met no one, either on her way to her own chamber or as, having donned her garden hat and jacket, she descended the stairs. It was her practice on most fine days to leave the house for a solitary ramble either in the park or among the woods that sloped down to the river.
It was Ruth’s custom, when thus she sallied forth alone, to take with her a book, which she could read when seated on some granite boulder against which the swift stream chafed in vain, or amidst the gnarled roots of the ancient trees in the Chase. Nor did she, like the majority of young ladies, consider nothing worth her study save the contents of the last green box of novels from a London circulating library, preferring often the perusal of the quaint pretty old books that are usually allowed to sleep unmolested on their shelves, here the verses of a forgotten poet, there perhaps some idyl unsurpassed in its simple sweetness of thought and diction.
With works of this description, well chosen once but now voted obsolete, the library at Carbery Chase was richly stored; and Sir Sykes had willingly given to his ward the permission which she asked, to have free access to its treasures. He himself spent most of his time while within doors in this same library, and there Ruth fully expected to find him, when she entered it, accoutred for her walk. She had in her hand a tiny tome, bound in tawny leather, and with a faded coat of arms, on which might still be deciphered the De Vere wyverns stamped upon the cover. To replace this and to select another volume, she should have to pass Sir Sykes’s writing-table, in front of the great stained glass window; but he would merely look up with a nod and smile as the small slender form of his ward flitted by.