"Of course not. I'll follow you round before you go, to say good-bye. You won't start for half an hour." And Gwen returned to the old soul, who presently said to her—to account to her for knowing how to say "my lord" and "your lordship"—"When I first married, my husband's great friend was Lord Pouralot. But I very soon called him Jack." This was a reminiscence of her interim between her victimisation and loneliness, which of course her innocence thought of as marriage. But was this early lordship's really a ladyship, if such a one appeared, we wonder? Very likely she was only another dupe, like Maisie. Possibly less fortunate, in one way. For, owing to the high price of women, in the land of Maisie's destiny, she—poor girl—never knew she was not a good one, until she found she was not a widow, although her worthless love of a lifetime was dead.
Oh, the difference Law's sanctions make! For a woman shall be the same in thought and word and deed through all her sojourn on Earth, yet vary as saint and sinner with the hall-mark of Lincoln's Inn.
Gwen followed the Earl very shortly, and left old Maisie to dream away the time until, somewhile after the final departure of her parents, she was free to return. When she did so she found the old woman sitting where she had left her, to all seeming quite contented. The day had died a sudden death intestate, and the flickering firelight meant to have its say unmolested, till candletime. The intrusion of artificial light was intercepted by Gwen, who liked to sit and talk to Mrs. Picture in the twilight, thank you, Mrs. Masham! Take it away!
Where had the old mind wandered in that two hours' interval? Had the actual meeting with her sister—utterly incredible even had she known its claims to belief—taken any hold on it that bore comparison with that of Farmer Jones's Bull, for instance, or the visit of a real live Earl? Certainly not the former, while as for the latter it was at best a half-way grip between the two; perhaps farther, if anything, from the supreme Bull, the great enthralling interest that was to be vested in her letter to Dave, to be written at the next favourable climax of strength, nourished by repose. Some time in the morning—to-day she was far too tired to think of it.
How she dwelt upon that appalling quadruped, and his savage breast—have bulls breasts?—soothed by the charms of music! How she phrased the various best ways of describing the mountain he was pleased to call his neck, with its half-hundredweight of dewlap; the merciless strength of his horns; the blast of steam from his nostrils into the chill of the October day; the deep-seated objection to everybody in his lurid eyes, attesting the unclubableness of his disposition! How she hesitated between this way and that of expressing to the full his murderousness and the beautiful pliancy of his soul, if got at the right way; showing, as the pseudo-Browning has it, that "we never should think good impossible"!
One thing she made up her mind to. She would not tell that dear boy, that this bull—which was in a sense his bull, or Sapps Court's, according as you look at it—had ever had to succumb on a fair field of battle. For Gwen had told her, as they rode home, and she had roused herself to hear it, how one summer morning, so early that even rangers were still abed and asleep, they were waked by terrific bellowings from a distant glade in the parklands, and, sallying out to find the cause, were only just in time to save the valued life of this same bull—even Jones's. For he had broken down a gate and vanished overnight, and wandered into the sacred precincts of the villosi terga bisontes, the still-wild denizens of the last league of the British woodlands Cæsar found; and Bos Taurus had risen in his wrath, and showed that an ancient race was not to be trifled with, with impunity. Even Jones's Bull went down in the end—though, mind you, evidence went to show that he made an hour's stand!—before the overwhelming rush and the terrible horns of the forest monarch. And the victor only gave back before a wall of brandished torch and blazing ferns, that the unsportsmanlike spirit of the keepers did not scruple to resort to. No—she would not admit that Dave's bull had ever met his match. She would say how he had killed a man, which Gwen had told her also; but to save the boy from too much commiseration for this man, she would lay stress upon the brutality of the latter to his wife, and even point out that Farmer Jones's Bull might be honestly unconscious of the consequences that too often result when one gores or tramples on an object of one's righteous indignation.
Strides Cottage played a very small part in the memories of the day. Some interest certainly attached to the older woman who had emerged from it to interview the carriage, but it was an interest apt to die down when once its object had been ascertained to resemble any other handsome old village octogenarian. Any peculiarity or deformity might have intensified it, or at least kept it alive; mere good looks and upright carriage, and strict conformity with the part of an ancient dependent of a great local potentate, neither fed nor quenched the mild fires of her rival granny's jealousy. Old Mrs. Picture had looked upon Granny Marrable, and was none the wiser. That Granny had at least seen her way to moralising on the way appearances might dupe us, and how sad it would be if, after all, such a respectable-looking old person should be an associate o£ thieves, a misleader of youth, and a fraud. But Mrs. Picture found little to say to herself, and nothing to say to anybody else, about Strides Cottage.
Rather, she fell back, as soon as Jones's Bull flagged, on her long record of an unforgotten past. That wind that was growing with the nightfall no longer moaned for her in the chimney, five centuries old, of the strange great house strange Fate had brought her to, but through the shrouds of a ship on the watch for what the light of sunrise might show at any moment. She could hear the rush and ripple of the cloven waters under the prow, just as a girl who leaned upon the gunwale, intent for the first sight of land, heard it in the dawn over fifty years ago. She could seem to look back at the girl—who was, if you please, herself—and a man who leaned on the same timber, some few feet away, intent on the horizon or his neighbour, as might be; for he stood aft, and her face was turned away from him. And she could seem to hear his words too, for all the time that came between:—"Say the word, mistress, and I'll be yours for life. I would give all I have to give, and all I may live to get, but to call you mine for an hour." And how his petition seemed empty sound, that she could answer with a curt denial, so bent was her heart on another man in the land she hoped to see so soon. Yet he was a nice fellow, too, thought old Mrs. Prichard as she sat before Mrs. Masham's fire at the Towers; and she forgave him the lawlessness of his impulse for its warmth, bred in the narrow limits of a ship on the seas for three long months!—how could he help it? Such a common story on shipboard, and ... such an uncommon ending! Ask the captains of passenger ships what they think, even now that ships steam twenty knots an hour. One's fellow-creatures are so human, you see.
Then a terrible dream of a second voyage, from Sydney to Port Macquarie, that almost made her wish she had accepted this man's offer to see her safe into the arms of her lawful owner, out on leave and growing prosperous in Van Diemen's Land. Need she have said him nay so firmly? Could she not have trusted to his chivalry? Or was the question she asked herself not rather, could she have trusted her own heart, if that chivalry had stood as gold in the furnace.