CHAPTER XXIV.—A NEIGHBOURLY VISIT.
Jasper, as he walked with dawdling gait back to the morning-room—the ex-cavalry officer always did dawdle, except in the hunting-field or when race-horses were thundering past the judge’s chair—felt what in his case did duty for brains to be in a dizzy whirl. He could not grapple with the mystery which seemed to have chosen Carbery Chase for its headquarters. The captain was by no means, as has been said, one of those guileless youths, if such there be, who are slow to think evil. Shew him a plain, intelligible, sordid motive, and no one could be quicker in descrying it, no matter how fair a pretence of decorous honour might be kept up. But this was beyond him. ‘No kith or kin of mine after all!’ he muttered as he made his way along the thickly carpeted corridor. ‘I must have been wrong, absurdly wrong all the time. But why my father should press me so hard on this subject no fellow could understand. He’s in earnest though, about desiring the match.’
As he spoke he laid his grasp on the handle of the door of the morning-room, turned it, and entering, found with a complacent smile, that Ruth Willis was alone. Captain Denzil was on sufficiently good terms with himself, but even coxcombs are glad of the confirmatory suffrages of others; and Jasper felt as though he were under a sort of obligation to the baronet’s ward for having paid him the compliment of falling in love with him.
‘I thought,’ said Jasper, as if to apologise for his presence in that pretty room, where a man seemed incongruous with the surroundings, ‘that my sisters were here.’
‘Shall I call them?’ asked Ruth, with that sweet hypocrisy which girls only can exhibit, and half-rising from the tiny work-table as she spoke.
‘Pray don’t. I have nothing on earth to say to them, or indeed to anybody,’ said Jasper. ‘Life drags at Carbery like wheels on a mud-plastered road. Don’t you find it so too, Miss Willis?’
‘Indeed I do not,’ answered the Indian orphan, taking up the cudgels gracefully in defence of her guardian’s home. ‘I should be very ungrateful if I did. It is not every day that a lonely little thing like myself is taken into the house of a kind dear family of new-old friends, who cherish and protect, and pet and spoil her, as your good father and sisters have done, Captain Denzil, to poor little Ruth Willis.’
She said this so well, did Ruth, in a voice that was slightly tremulous and with eyes that swam in tears, that Jasper was for the moment fairly taken in. There was uncommonly little sentiment in his own composition, but such men as he was, still like women to be softer-hearted than themselves, and then Miss Willis looked very pretty and delicate and helpless as she glanced up at him from under the screen of her dark eyelashes.
‘I can’t stand it, indeed I can’t, if you cry, Miss Willis!’ he said, drawing a chair up to the tiny work-table. ‘You have found me a sad bore and a sad plague, I am afraid, since I was stupid enough to do this at Pebworth races.’
As he spoke he looked down at his arm, which still reposed in its silken sling, and assumed a melancholy air, although in truth he felt all but well again. Ruth, from beneath her eyelashes, scanned him more narrowly than he was aware of.