An open verdict
Date: 2022-01-23T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: English fiction -- 19th century

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Title: An open verdict
a novel, volume 1 (of 3)

Author: M. E. Braddon

Release date: January 23, 2022 [eBook #67237]

Language: English

Original publication: United Kingdom: John Maxwell and Co

Credits: David Edwards, Eleni Christofaki and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AN OPEN VERDICT ***

Transcriber’s note

Variable spelling and hyphenation have been retained. Minor punctuation inconsistencies have been silently repaired. A list of the changes made can be found at the end of the book.

AN OPEN VERDICT
VOL. I.

AN OPEN VERDICT

A Novel

BY THE AUTHOR OF
‘LADY AUDLEY’S SECRET’
ETC. ETC. ETC.

IN THREE VOLUMES

VOL. I.

LONDON:
JOHN MAXWELL AND CO.
4, SHOE LANE, FLEET STREET,
1878
[All rights reserved.]

CONTENTS TO VOL. I.

CHAP. | | PAGE
I. | Mrs. Dulcimer has her Views | 1
II. | Sword and Gown | 18
III. | In the Parish Church | 31
IV. | ‘Dower’d with our Curse, and Stranger’d with our Oath’ | 54
V. | His Italian Wife | 73
VI. | Christian Harefield’s Answer | 101
VII. | Mrs. Dulcimer means Business | 120
VIII. | The Scratchells at Home | 133
IX. | A Flinty-hearted Father | 153
X. | Two Love Letters | 166
XI. | Bella in Search of a Mission | 180
XII. | ‘Oh, think’st thou we shall ever meet again?’ | 197
XIII. | Sir Kenrick’s Ancestral Home | 210
XIV. | Bella Overhears a Conversation | 219
XV. | Mr. Namby’s Prescription | 245
XVI. | Bella goes on a Visit | 262
XVII. | Mrs. Piper’s Troubles | 272
XVIII. | A Witness from the Grave | 299

AN OPEN VERDICT.

CHAPTER I.

MRS. DULCIMER HAS HER VIEWS.

‘Sir Kenrick would be a splendid match for her’, said the Vicar’s wife.

‘As poor as Job, and as proud as Lucifer,’ retorted the Vicar, without lifting his eyes from a volume of his favourite Bishop Berkeley.

It was the Vicar’s way in these tête-à-tête conversations by the domestic hearth. He read, and his wife talked to him. He could keep his attention on the most intricate chain of argument, and yet never answer Mrs. Dulcimer’s speculative assertions or vague questionings away from the purpose. This was the happy result of long habit. The Vicar loved his books, and his wife loved the exercise of her tongue. His morning hours were sacred. He studied or read as he pleased till dinner-time, secure from feminine interruption. But the evening was a privileged time for Mrs. Dulcimer. She brought a big workbasket, like an inverted beehive, into the library directly after dinner, and established herself in the arm-chair opposite the Vicar’s, ready for a comfortable chat. A comfortable chat meant a vivacious monologue, with an occasional remark from Mr. Dulcimer, who came in now and then like a chorus. He had his open book on the reading easel attached to his chair, and turned the leaves with a languid air, sometimes as if out of mere absence of mind; but he was deep in philosophy, or metaphysics, or theology, or antiquarianism, for the greater part of his time; and his inward ear was listening to the mystic voices of the dead, while his outward ear gave respectful attention to Mrs. Dulcimer’s critical observations upon the living.

‘As poor as Job, and as proud as Lucifer,’ repeated the Vicar, with his eye upon a stiffish passage in Berkeley.

‘I call it a proper pride,’ said Mrs. Dulcimer. ‘And as for poverty, she would have money enough for both. And then he has the estate.’

‘Mortgaged up to the hilt.’

‘And the title.’

‘Now do you really believe, Selina, that those three letters of the alphabet, S I R, prefixed to a man’s name, can give him the smallest possible distinction in the estimate of any of his fellow-creatures not lunatic?’

‘What is the use of talking in that high and mighty way, Clement? I know that Mary Turner, an insignificant little thing with red hair and a speckly skin, who was at school with me at the Misses Turk’s, at Great Yafford, was very much looked up to by all the girls because her uncle was a baronet. He lived a long way off, and he never took any notice of her, that we could find out; but he was a baronet, and we all felt as if there was a difference in her on that account. I don’t pretend to say that we were not very ridiculous for thinking so, but still you know a school is only the world in little—and the world sets a high value on titles. I should like to see Beatrix mistress of Culverhouse Castle.’

‘Her father’s money would be convenient for paying off the mortgages, no doubt, provided Mr. Harefield approved of the marriage. Rather a difficult old gentleman, I fancy.’

‘Difficult!’ cried Mrs. Dulcimer; ‘he’s detestable! a wicked old tyrant. If it were not for our friendship Beatrix’s life would be unendurable.’

‘Do you really think we are any good to her?’ inquired the Vicar, in his dreamily uncertain way, as of a man who was too doubtful about the groundwork of existence to feel any certainty about its minor details.

This was his Bishop Berkeley mood, his mind varying in hue and tone according to the book he was reading. Just now he felt that mind was paramount over matter, and was hardly disposed to interest himself warmly in a young woman who might have no existence except in his own idea of her.

‘My dear, our house is the only notion of home the poor child has,—the only place where she meets pleasant people, or hears and sees pleasant things. How can we fail to improve and develop her? I am sure, without egotism, I may say that I have been a God-send to that motherless girl. Think how farouche she was when she first came to us.’

‘Yes, she was a wild, untamed kind of creature,’ assented the Vicar. ‘Beautiful as a portrait by Rembrandt though, with that tawny skin of hers. I call her la belle sauvage. She always reminds me of Pocahontas.’

‘Now wouldn’t it be a blessing, Clement, if we could see her well married—married to a man of position, you know—and an honourable-minded man, like Kenrick? You know you always said he was honourable. You could always believe him.’

‘True, my love. Kenrick had his good qualities. He was not a lad that my heart ever warmed to, but I believe he did his work honestly, and he never told me a lie.’

‘Then don’t you think,’ urged the enthusiastic Selina, ‘that he would make Beatrix Harefield an excellent husband?’

‘My dear,’ said the Vicar, gravely, ‘you are the best natured of women; but I am afraid you do a great deal of harm.’

‘Clement!’

‘Yes, my love. Good-nature in the abstract is undoubtedly beautiful; but an active good-nature, always on the alert to do some service to its fellow-creatures, is of all attributes the most dangerous. Even the attempt of this good man, Bishop Berkeley, to found a college in the Bermudas resulted in waste of time and money. He would have done better had he stayed at his Irish Deanery. The man who does least harm in the world is your calmly selfish person who goes through life by the narrow path of a rational self-indulgence, and never turns aside to benefit or interfere with the rest of the human race.’

‘One of your dreadful paradoxes, Clement. How does that agree with St. Paul’s definition of charity?’

‘My love, St. Paul’s charity is a supremely passive virtue. It suffereth long, is not easily provoked, is not puffed up, thinketh no evil—all which qualities are compatible with strict neutrality as to one’s fellow-creatures’ affairs.’

‘Suffereth long—and is kind, you left that out, Clement.’

‘Kindness there I take to imply a mental state, and not a pushing, exacting benevolence,’ replied the Vicar. ‘Charity poketh not its nose into its neighbour’s business—maketh not matches—busieth not itself with the conduct of other people’s lives—and never doeth any harm. Good-nature does no end of mischief—in a perfectly well-meaning way.’

The Vicar spoke with some soreness. Poor Mrs. Dulcimer’s good-nature, and sometimes misdirected energy, had been getting her into trouble for the last twenty years. Everybody liked her; everybody dreaded and abhorred her good-nature. She had no children of her own, and was always full of good advice for the mothers of her acquaintance. She knew when babies ought to be weaned, and when they were sickening for the measles. She tried to heal family quarrels, and invariably made the breach wider. She loved match-making, but her matches, when brought to the triumphant conclusion of licence or wedding cake, seldom stood the test of a few years’ matrimony. She was so eager to do the best for the young men and women of her acquaintance, that she generally brought ill-assorted people together, taking too broad a view of the fitness of things, on the ground of income, family, age, and such vulgar qualifications, and ignoring those subtle differences which set an eternal mark of separation upon certain members of the human family.

‘I think, Selina, if I were you, I would leave Beatrix to find a husband for herself,’ said the Vicar, stretching out his legs comfortably before the wide hearth. ‘She is young—there is plenty of time. Let her come here as often as she pleases. I like to see that Rembrandt face of hers. But let things take their own course.

“There’s a divinity that shapes our ends,

Rough hew them as we will.”

Don’t you think it is almost an impertinence towards that ever active Providence for us poor worms to be always taking one another’s lives under our petty protection, and trying to shape them our way?’

‘Clement!’ exclaimed Mrs. Dulcimer, ruffling her plumes a little. She wore a good deal of lace frilling and muslin puffing about her neck and breast, and these adornments were subject to an occasional agitation, like the feathers of an excited Dorking, or one of the Vicar’s golden-pencilled Hamburgs. ‘Clement,’ cried Mrs. Dulcimer, ‘you have a beautiful temper, but I’m afraid you are selfish.’

The Vicar laid down his book with a smile of satisfaction. He saw the opportunity for a paradox.

‘My love, did you ever know a good-tempered man who wasn’t selfish? or rather, did you ever know a thoroughly selfish person who wasn’t good-tempered? Your wisely selfish man knows his own interest too well to fret and fume about trifles. He knows that, after five-and-twenty years of age, the supreme good in this life is repose, and that he can never enjoy it unless he cultivates an easy temper.’

‘Selfishness is a vice, Clement.’

‘That depends upon what we call selfishness. If a strict neutrality as to my neighbour’s business means selfishness, assuredly I am the most selfish of men.’

‘The Gospel tells us we are to love our neighbour as ourselves, Clement.’

‘I obey that divine precept implicitly. I never worry myself. I never worry my neighbour.’

The Vicar might have gone a step further, and said that he liked to feed his neighbour as well as he liked to feed himself—for, in that one quality of caring for the body as well as for the souls of other people, Clement Dulcimer was a faithful follower of his Divine Master.

‘And I’m afraid you allow things in your parish that oughtn’t to be, Clement, sometimes,’ ventured Mrs. Dulcimer.

‘My dear, God allows them. They are done under the All-seeing Eye. If He cannot make men better, do you suppose I can?’

‘You might lead them to Him, dear.’

‘I try my best to do that, Selina; but I don’t drive them. That’s where I fall short, I admit. Cyril is trying his hand at the driving process. He’s young and energetic. We shall see how it answers, and how long he sticks at it.’

‘Cyril is the most earnest young man you’ve ever had as a curate.’

‘I taught him myself, and I know what he’s made of,’ murmured the Vicar.

‘And there’s no denying that he has done good already, Clement. The schools are better attended, and there are more poor people at church on a Sunday evening.’

‘Since you have such a high opinion of Cyril, how is it that you have never thought of him as a husband for Beatrix? A clergyman ought to marry a fortune if he marries at all. He can put the money out to higher interest than any one else. He keeps a deposit account in heaven.’

‘But, Clement, the title!’ exclaimed Mrs. Dulcimer, ‘and Culverhouse Castle. Such a position for dear Beatrix.’

‘Ah, to be sure, the position! I suppose a girl thinks more about that now-a-days than of her lover’s mind or person. But certainly Cyril is both handsomer and cleverer than his cousin Kenrick. I should like a curate with a large income, it would be so good for the parish. And then we might rub on without the weekly offertory Cyril is always plaguing me to institute, and which I am convinced will set my congregation against me. Fancy me going up to my pulpit as a beggar every Sunday, and my people expecting value for their money out of my sermon. Imagine their remarks at the church door: “Not much there for sixpence,” “A very poor shilling’s worth,” and so forth.’

‘Clement,’ cried Mrs. Dulcimer, thoroughly scandalized this time, and with all her frills in motion, ‘you ought never to have been a clergyman.’

‘My love, I freely admit that some easier walk in life might have suited me better. A sub-librarian’s place, now, in some antique library, like the Cheetham Institution at Manchester. I should have had my books round me, and my superior to tell me what to do. No responsibilities, and leisure for self-culture. But if I am a poor creature as a parson, you supplement me so well, Selina, that, between us, I think we do our duty to the parish. That last batch of soup was excellent. I tasted it yesterday at old dame Hardy’s. The clear soup we get at Lord Highflyer’s state dinners is mere pot-liquor compared with it. Indeed, I think,’ pursued the Vicar, dreamily, as if he were meditating a proposition of Berkeley’s, ‘that all clear soups are more or less a mistake—tasting only of sherry and burnt sugar.’

‘Always thinking of temporal blessings, Clement.’

‘They are the only blessings we can fully realize while on this side of eternity, my dear. We may be excused if we sometimes set an undue value on them.’

Mrs. Dulcimer sighed, and opened her workbasket. There were little shirts and flannel swathings to be made for new-comers into this world of troubles—heirs apparent to a life of labour, with a reversionary interest in the workhouse. The Vicar’s wife spread her piece of linen on the table, and began a series of problems with a parallelogram in stiff brown paper, in order to find out how she might get the maximum of baby-shirts out of the minimum of linen. It vexed her that her husband should take life so lightly, and be troubled about a few things, when she was troubled about so many. She had no doubt that he was in the wrong, and that she and Cyril Culverhouse understood the real meaning of their duties a great deal better than the Vicar.

Clement Dulcimer was the living embodiment of an idea which at this time had not yet been put before the world by Mr. Matthew Arnold. He was all sweetness and light. He believed in culture as the highest good. He lived among his books, and upon his books; and those books were of the best that the elect of this world have written. He sought no happiness beyond his library, save in his garden and poultry yard, which afforded his senses the gratification of colour and sweet scents, sunshine and balmy air. He had travelled little, and sighed but faintly for a pleasure which he found impossible. His books and his poor absorbed all his spare cash. There was none left for foreign travel—so Mr. Dulcimer was content to enjoy Greece in the pages of Thucydides, or Childe Harold—to stand on the threshold of the sacred grove with Antigone—to know Cithæron only on the lips of Œdipus—to see the sandy plain of Marathon, or the walls of Thebes, with his mind’s eye alone.

‘I dare say I should be disappointed if I saw the reality,’ he murmured placidly. ‘Realities are so disenchanting. Or I might be taken by brigands, and poor Selina would have to sell her great-grand-father’s silver tea-kettle to ransom me.’

The living at Little Yafford was a good one, and the parish was small. It was altogether one of those exceptional cures which are reserved for the more fortunate sons of the Church. Mr. Dulcimer had obtained it while he was still a young man, the living being in the gift of his uncle, Sir Philip Dulcimer, of Hawtree Hall and Yafford Park. Yafford Park was rather a dreary place, with an unwieldly barrack of the Georgian era in the middle of it, and Sir Philip had been very glad to grant a large lease of park and mansion to Mr. Piper, the Great Yafford cotton-spinner, who spent a great deal more money in little Yafford than Sir Philip would have done, but who was looked down upon by his neighbours on principle. Great Yafford, the manufacturing town five miles off, was as Radical a place as you would care to find, but Little Yafford was essentially aristocratic, ignored the commercial element altogether, and thought it an affliction to be so near the tall chimney shafts of the busy town.

Little Yafford had perhaps some right to give itself airs, on the strength of being one of the prettiest villages in Yorkshire. It was like a spoiled beauty, and felt that nothing could be too good for it. Great bleak hills rose up between it and the bitter east winds, a river wound in and out of the village like a shining serpent, and licked its green meadows and garden boundaries. The long low stone bridge was as old as the Romans. There was not an ugly house in the place—except that big barrack of Sir Philip’s, and that was hidden behind the fine old elms and oaks of the park. There was not a neglected garden, or an objectionable pigsty. The gentry were all well-to-do people, who bestowed money and care upon the beautification of their homes; while the poorer parishioners were under the influence of Mr. Dulcimer’s sweetness and light, and Mrs. Dulcimer’s active good-nature, and laboured industriously to make their cottages lovely.

To come from stony, noisy, smoky, crowded Great Yafford to pastoral Little Yafford, was like coming from purgatory to paradise—an earthly paradise of rustic beauty and placid repose, content, and harmony. Yet Mr. Dulcimer’s last new curate, Cyril Culverhouse, breathed many a thoughtful sigh over the ignorances and even vice which he discovered in this smiling village. Coming out of some cottage door, over which the roses and honeysuckle hung in unpruned luxuriance, his lips would often involuntarily ejaculate the familiar words of the evening collect—‘Lighten our darkness, we beseech Thee, O Lord.’

CHAPTER II.

SWORD AND GOWN.

At various periods of his tranquil career the Rev. Clement Dulcimer had found it convenient to add to his income by taking a private pupil or two. He could not have endured what he called a herd of young men, meaning half a dozen, but he rather liked to have a couple of intelligent young fellows following him about through the dawdling progress of his out-of-door life, or hanging upon his words in the comfortable quietude of his study. He was an excellent master for classics and theology—mathematics he frankly abhorred—and he taught conscientiously in his own unconventional way. The men he coached generally came out well; but in after life there was a tinge of eccentricity in them—a strain imparted by Clement Dulcimer unawares—and which in one or two cases took the unhappy form of latitudinarianism. Spinoza on the brain, some people called it.

The two pupils who had stayed longest at the Vicarage, and occupied the most important position in the minds of the Vicar and his wife, were Kenrick Culverhouse and his first cousin Cyril. Old Sir Kenrick and the Vicar had been at Oxford together, and it seemed the most natural thing that the baronet should send his only son and his orphan nephew to his old chum, more especially as he could nowhere else educate them so well or so cheaply. Culverhouse Castle was a fine historical place in Hampshire, which tourists went out of their way to see, but which the late Sir Kenrick did not regard with any enthusiasm. He had been more or less under a cloud of money difficulties ever since he could remember, and preferred lodgings in St. James’s to his feudal birthplace. The moat was all very well, and so was the massive old keep, on the top of which the gardener had made a kitchen-garden for gooseberries and strawberry beds; but Sir Kenrick liked Jermyn Street and the clubs a great deal better; and, if a man must have a castle, the King’s Bench, in which he had spent some of the liveliest days of his youth, was much pleasanter to his mind than Culverhouse. Lady Culverhouse was fond of the castle, no doubt—or at any rate she stayed there, and it was a tradition in the family that no other air suited her, and that she was quite rooted to the spot; a tradition which was all the more firmly established because nobody had ever proposed taking her anywhere else. Old Sir Kenrick and his wife had gone to join the family ashes in the vault under Culverhouse Church, and young Sir Kenrick reigned in his father’s stead. All the quicksilver in the Culverhouse veins seemed to have run out with the last baronet. Young Kenrick was steady and thoughtful, and the mortgages weighed upon his spirits like a nightmare. He was always thinking what the estate would be if those mortgages could but be paid off.

It seemed to him an Eldorado. But there were only he and his cousin and heir presumptive to accomplish this great work. And how were two young men, moderately gifted, to earn fifty thousand pounds between them?

‘Unless one of us were to break out into a Walter Scott, or discover a new motive power to supersede steam, I don’t see how it’s to be done,’ Kenrick said to Mrs. Dulcimer, in one of his confidential talks with that good-natured lady, who knew all that he could tell her about the mortgages and the property. ‘The army won’t do it—and the church won’t do it—and the law wouldn’t do it under thirty years’ work. Engineering might do it, perhaps, if we could blossom into Brunels, and get contracts for railways and things; but, you see, neither of us has a turn for engineering.’

‘You ought both to marry heiresses,’ suggested Mrs. Dulcimer.

‘Oh no, that’s horrid. We couldn’t do that,’ cried Kenrick. ‘That’s too contemptible.’

This was how Kenrick had talked at seventeen, when he was in his state of tutelage. He was more reticent about himself and his prospects now, at nine-and-twenty, but Mrs. Dulcimer had forgotten nothing, and when Kenrick looked grave, she always thought he was brooding upon the mortgages.

‘I know that the dearest wish of his heart is to redeem the family position,’ she said, and this was what set her thinking about a marriage between Sir Kenrick and old Mr. Harefield’s only daughter and heiress.

Cyril had gone into the church. He loved his profession for its own sake, and thought very little of the loaves and fishes. He would like to be a bishop, no doubt, when his time came; but it was for the sake of having a great influence and doing things in his own way, not for social status or income, that he would have desired a mitre. Doing things in his own way—that was Cyril’s idea of a perfect life. To make his church beautiful, according to his idea of beauty, to have good music, and a strict adherence to the rubrics in Edward the Sixth’s Prayer-book, to infuse something of the poetry of old traditions into the prosaic expression of a reformed faith—to train his flock in his own way of thinking—to create for himself an enthusiastic and fervent congregation. These were the things which Cyril Culverhouse believed he had been sent into the world to do—rather than to help his cousin to pay off the mortgages, which mattered very little, so long as poor Ken had money enough to live upon.

Kenrick had chosen the army for his profession. A military career offered a poor prospect of paying off the mortgages, but it was at least a gentleman-like line of life, and the four or five hundred a year which could be squeezed out of the burdened estate enabled Kenrick to live like a gentleman among his brother officers. Honour and wealth might come to him together, perhaps, in the distant future; and when he was growing old, and had lost the zest of life, he might be able to do something for Culverhouse Castle. Cyril would be a bishop, most likely, by that time, and they would sit over their port and filberts in the wainscoted parlour at Culverhouse, wagging their grey heads deprecatingly at the shortcomings of the rising generation, condemning new guns and novel doctrines, new lights of all kinds in camp or temple.

Kenrick had served in India, and was home on leave. He was very fond of his cousin, for they had been brought up together, and nothing could be pleasanter to him than to spend his holiday fishing and shooting, reading or idling round about Little Yafford. He had liked the neighbourhood as a lad. He loved it now for the sake of those boyish days which were so delightful to look back upon—all the lights in the picture remembered, all the shadows forgotten. He had an almost filial affection for Mr. and Mrs. Dulcimer—and the hills and moors and wandering streams of Yorkshire had a charm for him which was second only to his delight in his native Hampshire.

The two young men were sitting by Cyril’s hearth on this autumn evening, talking confidentially over pipe and cigar. They had spent the day apart, Kenrick tramping over the moors with his gun, Cyril engaged in his parish work.

They were talking of Christian Harefield, the owner of the Water House, one of the most important places in Little Yafford, after the Park, and the father of that Beatrix whom Mrs. Dulcimer was so anxious to dispose of matrimonially.

‘One of the most disagreeable men I ever met in my life,’ said Kenrick. ‘Miss Harefield was driving him in her basket pony carriage—he looked about as suitable an occupant of a pony carriage as Mephistopheles for a go-cart—and I met them at the bottom of the hill, going up that wild road to the moor. I wonder whether he was going to gather the samolus, left-handed and fasting, or to cut mistletoe with a golden sickle? Upon my word, he looked as grim and ancient as a Druid. Beatrix stopped the pony when she saw me, and introduced me to her father. “This is Sir Kenrick Culverhouse, papa,” she said, whereat the Druid grunted. “Are you going far up the hill?” I asked, with the originality which distinguishes these casual conversations; “I’m afraid it will be dark before you come back.” “Oh, we don’t mind that,” she said, “Puck and I know our way so well.” So they went up into the thickening mist, and I saw no more of them. I dare say they are up there still. Do you know if the old gentleman is quite right in his mind?’

‘Yes, his mind is clear enough, so far as I have been able to discover; he is eccentric.’

‘And grumpy.’

‘Of a gloomy turn, no doubt. He goes nowhere, and receives no one, except Mr. Scratchell, his lawyer and agent. He seems like a man whose whole nature has been soured by a great sorrow. People say that his wife’s death broke his heart.’

‘One would hardly suppose such a being could ever have had a wife—much less that he could have been fond of her. When did the lady die?’

‘Don’t you remember? She died while we were at the Vicarage—about eleven years ago. There was a good deal of talk about it at the time. Mr. Harefield and his wife were travelling in Italy. Beatrix and her governess were with them—she was a child then, you know,—and Mrs. Harefield died very suddenly—after a few hours’ illness. It was a case of Asiatic cholera, I believe. People who know Mr. Harefield, or rather who knew him before that time—for he holds himself aloof from every one now—say that he has been a changed man since the shock of his wife’s death.’

‘A melancholy story,’ said Kenrick. ‘I forgive him the discourteous grunt which was his sole recognition of my existence. Poor Beatrix! A sad beginning for her life.’

‘Yes,’ answered Cyril, with warm interest. ‘Motherless so early—with so strange and gloomy a father. You cannot wonder that she is somewhat different from other girls.’

‘Somewhat different from other girls,’ echoed Kenrick. ‘She is a queen compared with other girls. That is the difference. She is worth twenty other girls—a hundred—for she has a character of her own.’

Cyril looked at him curiously.

“‘Praise from Sir Hubert Stanley!’” he exclaimed, ‘You are not often so enthusiastic, Ken.’

‘Because I seldom see anything to praise—in a woman. Don’t be frightened, Cyril. I do admire Beatrix, but only as I admire anything else in nature that is noble and rare; and I know that you admire her with quite another kind of admiration, though you have not honoured me by communicating your ideas upon the subject.’

Cyril knocked the ashes out of his pipe on the old-fashioned hob, and said not a word until he had filled it again, slowly and thoughtfully.

Clement Dulcimer was right when he called Cyril the handsomer of the two cousins. His pale clear-cut face was essentially noble. Yet it was by no means essentially attractive. That steadfast look and unchangeable gravity were unpleasing to many; but, on the other hand, Cyril’s rare smile was beautiful in all eyes. It was the sudden light of mind brightening the whole countenance; not a mechanical contraction of the lips revealing a fine set of teeth, and wrinkling the eyelids agreeably. It was a smile that meant sympathy, regard, beneficence—a smile that comforted and cheered. The miserable among his flock knew it well; society saw it seldom.

Cyril’s eyes were gray, and had that steady look which passes for severity; his nose was slightly aquiline, his mouth beautiful, his brow broad and high, with hair of neutral brown cut close to the well-shaped head, and curling crisply—hair like a gladiator’s, said Kenrick, who rather prided himself upon the lighter auburn of his own locks, as he also did upon the finer line of his nose, which inclined to the Grecian, and accorded with his low straight brow and expressionless eyes, whose pupils seemed to have no more life and colour than the sculptor’s dint in the marble orb.

Kenrick had what is called an aristocratic look, and rather flattered himself upon those evidences of blue blood supposed to exist in an attenuated but open nostril, a tapering hand, and an arched instep. These peculiarities, he imagined, declared as plainly as Domesday Book or title-deeds that the Culverhouses were great people on the other side of the Channel before they honoured England by coming across the sea with Norman William to appropriate some portion of it.

‘She is a noble creature,’ said Cyril, with conviction, when he had pressed the last shred of latakia into the well-filled bowl, ‘but she is Christian Harefield’s only child; and he is rich enough and suspicious enough to impute mercenary motives to any poor man who ventured to fall in love with his daughter.’

‘Fathers have flinty hearts,’ retorted Kenrick, lightly. ‘That’s an old saying, but sons and daughters generally contrive to follow their own inclinations in spite of paternal flintiness. I feel very sure that Beatrix will choose for herself, and marry the man she loves. She is just the kind of girl to dash herself blindly against the torrent of paternal wrath. It would be a grand thing for you, Cyril. You could have the Culverhouse living—a poor benefice, but on your native soil—and live at the Castle. I doubt if I shall ever be able to occupy it properly,’ he added, with a regretful sigh.

‘I would take her without a sixpence, and work for her and cherish her all the days of my life,’ said Cyril, in a deep-toned voice that trembled with strong feeling, ‘but I cannot teach her to rebel against her father. “Honour thy father and thy mother.” She hears me read that sublime command every other Sunday, and am I to be the first to teach her to set it at nought?’

‘How do you know that the old Druid would object to you?’

‘I do not know as much directly, but Beatrix tells me that he will oppose any choice of hers.’

‘Obnoxious ancient Briton! Well, Cyril, all I can say is, if I were in love with a girl, I should think no more of her father than Romeo did of old Capulet, and I should sink the fifth commandment till after I’d married her—and then she could honour her father with a cock robin and holly bush card at Christmas, or a pair of muffettees on New Year’s Day, or a sugar egg at Easter.’

CHAPTER III.

IN THE PARISH CHURCH.

The Sunday evening service at Little Yafford parish church was as fashionable in its own particular way as an Italian opera in June. Everybody met everybody else there. The psalms were chanted very fairly, the anthem was always a feature, the prettiest hymns were sung, and the sermon, whether preached by the vicar or curate, seemed to have a peculiar life and fervour in it that harmonized with the more exalted feelings of the flock. The cold realism of Sunday morning gave place on Sunday evening to a vague enthusiasm, a spiritualized ardour. Of course there were people for whom that lofty liturgy soared too high—uncultured souls which demanded to be fed on coarser diet,—but these were outside the pale, and generally wore a style of bonnet which would have been a blot on the subdued beauty of the parish church, with its noble nave, long narrow aisles, carved rood screen, and waggon roof. These barbarians worshipped in a queer little chapel in High Street, to which they descended a step or two from the level of the pavement, and in which tabernacle they might be heard singing their own particular hymns with the utmost strength of their untrained voices, as the Church of England people went by, the Dissenters assembling half an hour earlier than their conforming brethren, and generally prolonging their service half an hour later.

It was a pretty scene, that parish church of Little Yafford, in the late October evening. The clusters of wax candles in the brazen branches threw just enough light on column and arch to leave the greater part of the building in shadow. The rich colouring about the altar made a glow of splendour at the end of the gray stone chancel. The old oak pews, with their quaintly carved doors, reflected the light redly on bosses that took every shape, from the graceful fleur-de-lys to the dog-faced demon or blunt-nosed cherub. The font in its distant corner gleamed whitely below a cover of crimson cloth. Crimson cushions in many of the pews, and the dark green and gold adornment of pulpit and reading desk, the old brass lectern, the new brass candelabra, brightened the sombre stone and dark brown oak, and made up in some wise for the loss of the stained glories of the chancel window, dull and dead at this hour.

The people came in quietly by twos and threes, and took their places with the usual hushed and solemn air; then the throng thickened, and the pews began to fill; and then the bells rang more slowly, and there came a plaintive strain of melody from the organ, soft and subdued as a whisper. This swelled presently into a voluntary, and became a triumphant peal as the vestry door opened and the surpliced choir entered the chancel, two and two, the small boys first, and the rather clumsy-looking men bringing up the rear. After these followed Cyril Culverhouse, looking tall in his white raiment and crimson hood, and lastly the Vicar, a broad and dignified figure that seemed to have been intended for lawn sleeves and a bishop’s gown.

A girl in one of the pews directly facing the chancel looked up from her open book as Cyril took his place in the reading desk, and then looked quickly down again, as if the sight were too terrible. That swift shy look, and sudden fall of the eyelids told a secret old as Time himself. Mr. Culverhouse was something more than the curate of Little Yafford to that one member of his congregation. She was a girl of striking appearance, richly but carelessly dressed in velvet and silk, with feathers in her bonnet, according to the fashion for that year made and provided. She had one of those brilliant Southern complexions—that rich mingling of carnation and palest olive—which are alone sufficient for good looks; but in her case this charm was heightened by the splendour of dark Italian eyes, and the warm brown of rippling hair. Her brow was broad but low, her nose nondescript, her lips firmly moulded, her teeth faultless, her eyebrows strongly marked, and of a darker brown than her hair.

‘I am always afraid of Trix’s eyebrows,’ Isabella Scratchell, the young lady’s bosom friend, used to say. ‘They remind me of thundery weather.’

Miss Scratchell was sitting next her friend in the Harefield pew to-night. She was a small slim person, distinguished by a pink and white complexion, and insignificant blunt features of the Dresden china type. There was a Scratchell pew in one of the aisles, but Beatrix liked to have her friend with her, and the Water House pew was in the more aristocratic and fashionable situation, advantages peculiarly agreeable to Isabella Scratchell.

Mr. Harefield assisted at the Sunday morning service half a dozen times or so in a quarter, just often enough to escape the stigma of absolute indifference or infidelity. His handsome Italian wife had been a Roman Catholic, and there was a feeling among the more bigoted section of society in Little Yafford that Mr. Harefield was generally lax in his ideas, like the Romans when they began to import foreign gods, and that he would not have minded worshipping Isis and Osiris if those deities had come in his way.

‘He has travelled so much, you know, my dear,’ said Mrs. Piper, of the Park, to Mrs. Dulcimer, ‘and having married a foreigner, you see, one can hardly expect him to be quite correct in his ideas. A sad education for that poor girl. I am told he has taught her Greek, and hasn’t allowed her to learn music. But I think that can hardly be true.’

‘It is actually true about the music,’ cried Mrs. Dulcimer, reflecting her friend’s look of horror. ‘He hates the piano, and he had Mrs. Harefield’s old-fashioned Broadwood sent up to the lumber-room in the tower. But there is no use in thwarting a natural gift. That poor child has taught herself by ear, and plays and sings very sweetly. She spends hours up in that old turret room—in the coldest weather—wrapped in a shawl, picking out our church music. Mrs. Harefield had an extraordinary gift, you know.’

‘I never saw Mrs. Harefield. She died before Ebenezer took the Park.’

‘Yes, of course. I ought to have remembered. She was a lovely woman; and I believe that Christian Harefield was passionately fond of her, in his way; but it was not a happy marriage; there were quarrels. I did my best, but not successfully. There is an unconquerable severity and coldness in that man’s nature; and his wife had one of those ardent, impetuous dispositions,—you know what I mean.’

‘Exactly,’ chimed in the visitor, whose mind had wandered a little, and who was wondering when the Dulcimers would have a new drawing-room carpet. The present one was threadbare, and had been ingeniously turned and pieced, like a puzzle, odd bits of brighter colour fitting in here and there rather too obviously. That foolish Mr. Dulcimer spent all his money on books, and never improved his furniture, whereas in Mrs. Piper’s ideal house there was no litter of books and pamphlets, but the last fashion in carpets and tapestry table-covers, cabriole chairs and sofas, and the newest kinds of antimacassars.

Although Mr. Harefield was not often to be seen in the parish church himself, he had no objection to his daughter’s frequent attendance there; and the church and the vicarage afforded the only variety in the dullest life that a well-born heiress ever led. The music was a delight to her sensitive ear; for the organist was a fine musician, and the organ was a noble instrument, which had been presented to Little Yafford in the reign of William the Third, by a city merchant who had been born in the village, and who came back there to die after having made his fortune in hides and tallow. His monument, in coloured and gilded marbles, after the florid style of the period, adorned the chancel, and recorded his public and private virtues, and his munificent gift of the organ, in a long Latin epitaph, with a great many adjectives ending in issimus.

The Scratchells had a comfortable old house in the village, but Miss Harefield was not allowed to visit there, although Isabella was her only friend and companion. Isabella might come to the Water House as often as she liked, but it was an understood thing that Beatrix was not to go to Mr. Scratchell’s, a distinction which Mrs. Scratchell and Isabella’s brothers and sisters resented as invidious.

‘We are not good enough for the heiress,’ said Clementina Scratchell, sarcastically.

‘She’s the most stuck-up young woman I ever saw,’ said Bertie, the eldest son, a sandy-complexioned, pug-nosed youth, who had been christened Herbert, but who had more the air of a Samuel or a Thomas.

Such remarks as these, if overheard, always brought down the paternal wrath upon the utterer. Even Mrs. Scratchell would remark mildly that poor people must not quarrel with their bread and butter, and that Mr. Harefield was a very good client to father, and that it was very kind of Miss Harefield to be so fond of Bella, although she did look down upon the others, which might be a little wounding to one’s feelings, but poor people must not be proud.

This fact of their poverty had always been kept before the eyes of the young Scratchells. It encountered them at every turn. If the boys tore the knees of their trousers in forbidden climbing of trees, they were reminded mournfully by a desponding mother that their parents were hard-working people, and that these destructive habits were a direct wrong to those toil-worn bread-winners.

‘It isn’t as if your father began life with a fortune, Bertie,’ Mrs. Scratchell would say. ‘He has to work for every sixpence, and you ought to have thought of that before you climbed the mulberry tree.’

It was in all things alike. The Scratchells were never permitted to make any mistake as to their place in the social scale. It was to be a subordinate place always. They were to work for their bread, as their father had done before them, as their mother worked daily, from sunrise to sunset, in homely drudgery that made no effect or impression upon the world, and left nothing behind when life was done, not so much as an embroidered chair cover, or a thin volume of indifferent verses, to be admired by the next generation. They were to work, these young Scratchells. Their education was not given to them for its own sake—on the sweetness and light principle—but as a preparation for a laborious career. Herbert was to be apprenticed to Mr. Pontorson, the surveyor at Great Yafford. Adolphus—poor Mrs. Scratchell had insisted upon giving her children the cheap luxury of fine names—was promised a clerkship in a factory. Isabella was already earning a salary as morning governess to the little Pipers at Yafford Park. It was not an onerous engagement, and left her afternoons free. Mr. Scratchell thought she ought to get another engagement to fill up her afternoons, but as yet Isabella had contrived to avoid this double labour. She was her father’s favourite, and was believed to have great influence over him. It was she who was always charged with the task of imparting any disagreeable intelligence to him, such as the kitchen boiler having cracked, the supply of coals being nearly run out, or Adolphus having broken ‘another window.’ The previous fracture on this wretched youth’s part was always so recent as to exaggerate the iniquity of the present offence.

It was scarcely strange, perhaps, if from this Spartan training the little Scratchells grew up with the idea that poverty was life’s chief evil. Just as the Stoics believed virtue to be the only good, the young Scratchells believed want of money to be the only ill.

‘Ah, my dears, a fat sorrow is better than a lean sorrow,’ Mrs. Scratchell remarked, plaintively, when she heard of the afflictions of her wealthier neighbours.

She could not bring herself even to pity her husband’s patron, Mr. Harefield, who was supposed to have had his heart broken by the untimely death of his handsome wife. It seemed to her impossible that so rich a man, surrounded with all the good things of this life, could be an object for compassion.

This close acquaintance with necessity had not endeared that stern goddess’s countenance to Isabella. She had a secret hankering after the good things of this life; and to her mind Beatrix Harefield, whose solitary existence was for most people a subject of pity, was a person to be envied. Had she not a fine old house to live in, every room in which was like a picture, horses and carriages at her disposal, servants to wait upon her, and an unlimited supply of pocket-money? It was a dull life, of course, but Mr. Harefield would die before very long, no doubt, and take his gloominess to a more appropriate habitation, and then Beatrix would be the richest woman in the neighbourhood, free to drain the cup of pleasure to the lees.

Ten years ago, when Beatrix was a tall, thin-legged child in a short black frock, recovering slowly from a severe attack of whooping-cough, the family doctor ventured to call attention to the exceeding solitariness of her life, and to suggest that some juvenile companionship should be procured for her. It was less than a year after Mrs. Harefield’s death, and the master of the Water House wore an air of settled gloom which made him, in the minds of his fellow-men, somewhat unapproachable. The doctor made his suggestion timidly. He was only the family practitioner of Little Yafford, and was much humbler in his manners and pretensions than the bakers and butchers of that settlement; for those traders knew that people must have bread and meat always, while epidemics, accidents, and chronic diseases were subject to periods of dulness, sorely depressing to the faculty. If he had been Dr. Fawcus, the consulting physician of Great Yafford, he would have ordered playfellows for Miss Harefield with as off-hand an air as he ordered boiled chicken and barley water. But Mr. Namby made the suggestion tentatively, quite prepared to withdraw it if it were ill received.

‘The child seems dull, certainly,’ said Mr. Harefield. ‘She doesn’t run, or skip, or scream, like the general run of children. I have thought it an advantage; but I suppose, as you say, it is a sign of feebleness of constitution.’

‘I think that anything which would enliven her spirits might conduce to her recovery,’ replied the doctor. ‘She doesn’t gain strength as fast as I should wish.’

‘Really!’ said Mr. Harefield, with a far-off look, as if he were talking of somebody at the Antipodes. ‘Well, if you think it wise, we must get her a playfellow. I have received no visitors, as you know, since my wife’s death. In my best days I always considered society more or less a bore, and I could not endure to have people about me now. But we must get a playfellow for the child. Have you a girl that would do?’

The surgeon blushed. What an opening it might have been for his daughter, had she been old enough! Unhappily she was still in her cradle. He explained this to Mr. Harefield.

‘My agent, Scratchell, has a little girl, I believe.’

‘He has several.’

‘One is quite enough,’ said Mr. Harefield. ‘I’ll tell him to send one of his girls to play with Beatrix.’

Writing to his agent on some business matter that evening, Christian Harefield added this postscript,—

‘Oblige me by sending the quietest of your girls to play with my daughter every afternoon at three.’

The request was somewhat curtly put, but the Scratchells saw in it the opening of a shining path that led to the temple of fortune. From that hour Isabella was exalted above all her sisters and brothers. She was like Joseph with his coat of many colours. All the other sheaves bowed down to her sheaf. She had better raiment than the others, that she might be presentable at the Water House. She never had her boots mended more than once. After the second mending they were passed on to Clementina, whether they fitted or not. Clementina protested piteously.

Beatrix received her new companion, and absolutely her first playfellow, with open arms, and a heart overflowing with love that had run more or less to waste hitherto, or had been squandered on ponies, dogs, and guinea-pigs. Miss Scales, the governess, was not lovable. One might as well have tried to love the Druid stones on the moor above Little Yafford. Christian Harefield wrapped himself in gloom as in a mantle, and lived apart from all the world. So Isabella’s coming was like the beginning of a new life for Beatrix. She was enraptured with this little fair-haired girl, who knew how to play at all manner of nice games which Beatrix had never heard of, and which Miss Scales condemned as vulgar. Happily Isabella had been so well drilled in the needy, careful home, that she behaved with a propriety in which even Miss Scales could find no flaw. When questioned by Mr. Harefield, the governess reported favourably, though with a certain condescending reserve, of the young guest, and, from coming for an hour or two every afternoon, Isabella came almost to live at the Water House, and to receive a share of Miss Scales valuable instructions, that lady’s acquirements being of a solid and unornamental character which Mr. Harefield approved.

‘I shall have your girl carefully educated,’ said Christian Harefield to his man of business. ‘I am bound to make some return for her services as my daughter’s companion. But if you want her taught music and dancing, you’ll have to get that done elsewhere. My girl learns neither.’

As well as these educational advantages Isabella received other benefits which her youthful mind better appreciated, in the occasional gift of a silk frock or a warm winter jacket, purchased for her by Miss Scales at Mr. Harefield’s desire; and when Beatrix grew up and had plenty of pocket-money, she was always giving Bella presents.

‘It’s like having a fairy godmother,’ said Flora, the third of the Scratchell daughters, with a pang of envy.

There sat the two girls in the Water House pew this October evening, everybody in the parish church knowing their history, and thinking it a very pretty trait of character in Mr. Harefield’s daughter that she should be so fond of her humble friend Bella; for it must be understood that Mr. Scratchell, never having been able to struggle out of the morass of poverty or to keep more than one maid-servant, hardly took his full professional rank in the village, or was even regarded as a gentleman by Act of Parliament.

It was a recognised fact that without Mr. Harefield’s business, the collection of rents, and drawing up of leases, and ejection of troublesome tenants, and so on, the Scratchells could hardly have gone on existing, outside the workhouse, the solicitor’s practice, over and above this agency, being of the pettiest and most desultory order.

Bella’s pretty little Dresden china face was bent over her book as the choir and clergy came filing in. But though Bella’s head was gracefully bent, she gave a little upward glance under her auburn eyelashes, and contrived to see that look in Beatrix’s face which was in itself the beginning of a history. And then the service began, and both girls seemed absorbed in their devotions, while Mrs. Dulcimer, contemplating them benignantly from the vicarage pew, thought what a pretty pair they made, and wondered whom she could pitch upon as a husband for Bella. The poor little thing ought to be married. She was not a great heiress like Beatrix, but it was not the less incumbent upon some good-natured friend to find her a husband—nay, it was a Christian duty to do so. Matrimony would be the poor child’s only escape from straitened circumstances and a life of toil. Everybody knew what a struggle these poor Scratchells had to make for the bare privilege of living.

‘She’s rather pretty, and certainly graceful,’ mused Mrs. Dulcimer, while one of the wicked kings of Israel was misconducting himself.

Even a clergyman’s wife’s mind will occasionally wander, though her husband may be reading the lesson.

‘I wish I could think of some one to suit her,’ said Mrs. Dulcimer to herself.

And then it chanced that her glance roamed absently to the reading-desk, where Cyril’s crisp brown hair and strongly marked brow showed above the open Prayer-book.

‘The very man!’ Mrs. Dulcimer ejaculated inwardly, in an ecstasy of good nature.

It is so delightful to feel one’s self the providence of one’s neighbours. Poor Mrs. Dulcimer’s mind was distracted during the rest of the service. This notion about Cyril was one of those splendid ideas which take hold of the female mind with over-mastering power, like a brilliant scheme for turning a silk dress, or making up last year’s exploded bonnet into the latest fashionable shape for this year. Vainly did the busy soul try to pin her mind to the Prayer-book. She could not get her thoughts away from the suitability of a match between Cyril and Bella. There was a remarkable fitness about it. Neither of them had any money of their own. That made it so nice. They couldn’t feel under any obligation to each other. Cyril would, of course, get on well in the church. People always did who were as earnest and well connected as Cyril Culverhouse. And then what an admirable wife Bella would make for a poor man—a girl who had been brought up to pinch, and contrive, and deny herself, and make sixpence do the work of a shilling! It never occurred to Mrs. Dulcimer that this long apprenticeship to self-denial might have induced in Bella a craving for the good things of this life, and an ardent desire for the opportunity of self-indulgence.

By the time Cyril went up into the pulpit to preach his sermon, Mrs. Dulcimer had married him to Isabella, and settled them in a modest but comfortable living, with the prettiest and most rustic of vicarages, where the housemaid’s pantry would afford ample scope for Isabella’s domestic talents, while the ignorance of an agricultural parish would give full play to Cyril’s energy and earnestness.

Cyril Culverhouse preached an admirable sermon. He had that gift of clear and concise language, short sentences, bold and distinct expression, appropriate metaphor, and strong colouring, which makes certain books in the English language stand out from all other writing with a force and power that command the admiration alike of the cultured and uncultured reader. He had not the subtlety, finesse, and erudition of his Vicar, who preached for the most part to please his own fancy, and very often over the heads of his congregation. Cyril’s earnestness made every sermon an exhortation, a call to repentance and holy living. It was hardly possible to hear him and not be moved by him. It would have been sheer stony-heartedness in his hearers to sit there and listen to him and make no resolve to live better, and be touched by no pang of compunction for past errors.

Beatrix listened with all her soul in her eyes. Once and once only Cyril’s large gaze, sweeping the mass of faces, caught that upward look of the dark eyes. It seemed to him to take away his breath for a moment, and checked the progress of a vigorous peroration. He faltered, substituted a word, recovered himself in an instant, and went on; and no one knew how that one little look had moved him.

The clock struck eight as the congregation came trooping out of the church, with much greeting of neighbours in the darkness just outside the old stone porch. Mrs. Dulcimer seized upon the two girls, as they were going away, with a sober-looking man-servant, in a dark livery, in attendance on the heiress.

‘You are not going home, Trix,’ cried the Vicar’s wife. ‘You and Bella must come to the Vicarage to supper. It’s an age since I’ve seen you.’

‘Dear Mrs. Dulcimer, I spent the day with you only last Tuesday! I am quite ashamed of coming so often!’

‘You foolish child, you know it is my delight to have you. And Bella must come to-night. I insist on Bella’s coming too.’

This was said with unconscious condescension. It was, of course, a grand thing for Miss Scratchell to be asked to supper at the Vicarage.

‘Papa expects me to go straight home,’ said Beatrix, evidently anxious to accept the invitation.

‘My love, you know your papa never expects anything from you. You are quite your own mistress. Parker,’ said Mrs. Dulcimer, wheeling suddenly and addressing herself to the footman, ‘you will be good enough to tell your master, with my compliments, that I am taking Miss Harefield to the Vicarage for supper, and that you are to come for her at ten o’clock. You understand, Parker, at ten; and you can take a glass of ale in the Vicarage kitchen while Miss Harefield puts on her bonnet.’

Mrs. Dulcimer always went into details, and overflowed in small acts of good nature to the inferior classes.

CHAPTER IV.

‘DOWER’D WITH OUR CURSE, AND STRANGER’D WITH OUR OATH.’

There was no pleasanter house in Little Yafford or its neighbourhood to visit on a Sunday evening than the shabby old Vicarage, in which Mr. and Mrs. Dulcimer had lived happily for the last twenty years. It was an old house—and had never been a grand house even in its best days; indeed, there was a legend in Little Yafford that it had once belonged to a farm, and there was a certain homely substantiality and solidity about it which favoured that idea. Severe critics declared that there was not a single good room in the house, and it must be admitted that all the rooms were low, and that the chimneys projected into them in a way which modern architecture disallows, leaving a deep recess on each side to be filled up with books, old china or such miscellaneous goods as Mrs. Piper, of the Park, denounced comprehensively as rubbish. The windows were casements, with leaden lattices, and admitted as little light as was consistent with their obvious functions. Heavy beams supported the low ceilings, big old grates devoured incalculable quantities of fuel, but happily coals—pronounced for the most part as a dissyllable—co-als—were cheap at Little Yafford.

The furniture was in keeping with the house, for it was all ancient and shabby, and had a wonderful individuality about it, which, in Clement Dulcimer’s opinion, quite atoned for its shabbiness. Almost all those old chairs and tables, and sofas, and brass-mounted sideboards, and Indian cabinets, and Queen Anne whatnots, had come to the Vicar by inheritance, and it was to him as if he saw the friendly faces of dead and gone kindred smiling at him from the three-cornered bureau, or the Japanese escritoire, or the walnut-wood chest of drawers. He even got into the way of calling the furniture after the testators who had left it to him, and would tell his wife to fetch him the packet of sermon-paper out of Aunt Tabitha, or that he had left his spectacles on Uncle Joseph.

The dining-room on this autumnal Sunday evening had a look of homely comfort which was cheering to a heart not given wholly over to spiritual things. It was a long low room, with three square casements on the southern side, and a wide old fireplace, bordered with blue and white Dutch tiles, at the end. On each side of the fireplace was the deep recess before mentioned, filled with old oak shelves, on which were ranged the odds and ends of porcelain and delf which had, as it were, dropped from various branches of the family tree into Clement Dulcimer’s lap. Aunt Tabitha’s Swansea tea set, with its sprawling red roses on a cream-coloured ground; uncle Timothy’s quaint Lowestoft jugs; cousin Simeon’s Bow punchbowl; grandmamma’s Oriental dessert-plates; a Chelsea shepherdess minus an arm, a Chelsea shepherd piping to a headless sheep. There was a good deal of rubbish, no doubt, as Mrs. Piper declared, amidst that heterogeneous collection; but there was a great deal more value in those cups and plates than Clement Dulcimer suspected, or he would have been sorely tempted to exchange them for books.

At the end of the room facing the fireplace stood that fine old sideboard of the Chippendale period, familiarly known as Uncle Joseph. Facing the windows there was a curtained archway communicating with the library.

To-night a big fire burned in the capacious grate, a log of the old poplar that was blown down in the last high wind blazing merrily at the top of the coals, as if the stout old tree felt glad to make so jovial an end. The supper table shone and glittered with old silver and heavy diamond-cut glass, with here and there a tall-stemmed beaker, or an engraved flask, as old as the pictures of Teniers or Breughel. A bowl of chrysanthemums, a ham, a game pie, a sirloin, and a salad made a glow of colour, and promised a substantial repast. Everybody knew that what the Vicar gave was of the best, no cheap champagnes or doubtful moselles, but sound claret, and the finest beer that was brewed on this side of York.

The supper-hour was supposed to be nine o’clock, and on returning from church the gentlemen had come straight to the dining-room. Mrs. Dulcimer and the two girls found them there when they came downstairs after taking off their bonnets.

The Vicar was standing in front of the fire, caressing his favourite tabby cat with his foot, as that privileged animal rolled upon the hearth-rug. Sir Kenrick sat in cousin Simeon’s arm-chair, a deep velvet-covered chair, almost as large as a small house. Cyril stood looking dreamily down at the fire.

‘Welcome, young ladies!’ exclaimed the Vicar, cheerily. ‘I thought Mrs. Dulcimer was never going to give us our supper. Come, Beatrix, this is your place, at my right hand.’

‘And Sir Kenrick will sit next Beatrix,’ cried Mrs. Dulcimer, on manœuvring intent. ‘Bella, my love, you next the Vicar, and Cyril must sit by me. I want to ask him about the next missionary meeting.’

They were all seated after good-natured Mrs. Dulcimer’s desire,—Kenrick by the side of Beatrix, gravely contemplative of the fine face with its rich un-English colouring; Cyril looking a little distrait as lively Miss Scratchell discussed his sermon in her bright appreciative way, and with an air of being quite as well read in theology as he was. A wonderful girl, Miss Scratchell, with a knack of picking up stray facts, and educating herself with the crumbs that fell from other people’s tables, just as her father’s poultry picked up their nourishment in the open street and in other people’s stable yards.

‘How did you like the sermon, Sir Kenrick?’ asked Bella, smiling across the chrysanthemums, and offering to the baronet’s contemplation an insignificant prettiness, all dimples and pale pink roses.

‘As much as I like any sermons, except the Vicar’s,’ answered Kenrick, coolly. ‘I like to hear Mr. Dulcimer preach, because he makes me think. I sit on tenter-hooks all the time, longing to stand up and argue the point with him. But as for Cyril’s moral battering-rams and catapults, and all the artillery which he brings to bear against my sinful soul, I’m afraid their chief effect is to make me drowsy.’

‘They do other people good though,’ said Bella. ‘Mrs. Piper told me she never felt awakened till she heard Mr. Culverhouse’s Lent sermons.’

‘Praise from Mrs. Piper is praise indeed,’ remarked the Vicar.

‘Oh, but she really does know a good deal about sermons,’ said Bella. ‘She is very fond of what she calls serious reading; she reads a sermon every morning before she goes to her cook to order the dinners.’

‘And then she goes to the larder and looks at the joints to see if there have been “followers” overnight,’ suggested Kenrick; ‘and according to her theological reading is the keenness of her eye and the acidity of her temper. If she has been reading Jeremy Taylor she takes a liberal view of the sirloin, and orders a hot joint for the servants’ hall; if she has been reading old Latimer she is humorous and caustic, and declares cold meat too good for domestic sinners. But if her pious meditations have been directed by Baxter or Charnock I pity the cook. There will be short commons in the servants’ hall that day.’

Bella laughed heartily. She had a pretty laugh, and she made it a rule to laugh at any sally of Sir Kenrick’s. It is something for a penniless village lawyer’s daughter to be on familiar terms with a baronet, even though his estate be ever so heavily mortgaged. Bella felt that her intimacy with the Vicarage and its surroundings lifted her above the rest of the Scratchells. Her younger sisters used to ask her what Sir Kenrick was like, and if he wore thick-soled boots like common people, and ever drank anything so vulgar as beer.

The supper went on merrily. The Vicar talked of men and of books, the younger men joining in just enough to sustain the conversation. Supper at the Vicarage, substantial as the meal was, seemed more or less an excuse for sitting at a table talking, for a couple of hours at a stretch. Long after the sirloin had been carried off to do duty in the kitchen, Mr. Dulcimer sat in the carver’s seat, sipping his claret and talking of men and books. Beatrix could not imagine anything more delightful than those Sunday evening discourses.

But now came a message from the footman in the kitchen to remind his mistress that it was half-past ten. The rule at the Water House was for every door to be locked and bolted when the clock struck eleven. Beatrix started up, like Cinderella at the ball.

‘Oh, Mrs. Dulcimer, I had no idea it was so late.’

‘A tribute to my conversation, or a proof of your patience, my dear,’ said the Vicar. ‘Cyril, you’ll see Miss Harefield home. Jane, run and get Miss Harefield’s bonnet.’

‘Kenrick can see Beatrix home while Cyril tells us about the missionary meeting,’ said that artful Mrs. Dulcimer.

‘My dear Mrs. Dulcimer, I can tell you about the missionary meeting this minute,’ said Cyril. ‘I have had a letter from Mr. Vickerman, and he will be very happy to preach in the morning this day three weeks, and to give a lecture in the schoolroom in the evening.’

The neat little parlourmaid came back laden with jackets and bonnets, and Beatrix and Isabella equipped themselves quickly for their walk.

‘We really don’t want any one,’ remarked Beatrix, blushing, as the two young men followed them into the hall. ‘Parker is here to take care of us.’

Parker pulled his forelock assentingly.

‘But I am going with you all the same,’ said Cyril, with gentle firmness, and he had the audacity to offer Beatrix his arm before Sir Kenrick could seize his opportunity.

Naturally Sir Kenrick gave his arm to Miss Scratchell.

‘What will they say at home when I tell them this?’ thought Bella.

She liked Cyril best, and admired him as the first among men, but Sir Kenrick’s title made him the more important person in her mind.

All the stars were shining out of the dark calm heaven—constellations and variable stars looking down at them from that unutterable remoteness beyond the planet Neptune. The walk was not long, but the way was full of beauty under that starry sky—a road that led downhill into the watery valley which made the chief loveliness of Little Yafford. It was a lonely road, leading away from the town—a road bordered on one side by a narrow wood of Scotch firs, on the other by a stretch of somewhat marshy common, and so down into the valley where the Water House rose, with black old tower, ivy-shrouded, above the winding river. There was an old Roman bridge across the river, and then came the gate of the Water House, under an ancient archway.

Cyril walked away with Beatrix’s hand under his arm, the footman following at a respectful distance. Mr. Culverhouse forgot—or ignored—the fact of Miss Scratchell’s residence lying exactly the other way, and left Bella to be disposed of by his cousin. Beatrix also seemed to forget all about her friend. She did not run back to bid Bella good night. They would meet to-morrow, no doubt, and Bella, who was the soul of amiability, would forgive her.

They walked on in silence, that thrilling silence which tells of deepest feeling. These are the moments which women remember and look back upon in the gray sober hours of afterlife. It is not some girlish triumph—the glory of ball-room or court—which the faded beauty recalls and meditates upon with that sense of sad sweetness which hangs round the memories of long ago. No; it is such a moment as this, when her hand hung tremulous upon her lover’s arm, and words would not come from lips that were faint with a great joy.

‘Have you thought of what I said yesterday, Beatrix?’ Cyril asked at last, in those grave tones of his which to her ear seemed the most exquisite music.

‘Did not you say it? What should I do but think of it? When do I ever think of anything except you and your words?’ she exclaimed, with a kind of impatience.

‘And you have spoken to your father, or you have made up your mind to let me speak to him?’

‘I have done neither. What is the use of my speaking, or of your speaking, unless you want my father to separate us for ever? Do you think that he will be civil to you when he knows that I love you? Do you think he would let me marry the man I love? No, that would be showing me too much kindness. If we lived in the good old fairy tale days he would send out a herald to invite the ugliest and most hateful men in the kingdom to come and compete for his daughter’s hand, and the ugliest and vilest should have the prize. That’s how my father would treat me if the age we live in would allow him, and as he can’t do quite so much as that, he will wait quietly till some detestable person comes in his way, and then order me to marry him.’

‘Beatrix, do you think it is right and just to talk like this?’

‘I can’t pronounce upon the rightness of it, but I know it is not unjust. I am saying nothing but the truth. Ah, Cyril, I may seem wicked and bitter and unwomanly when I talk like this; yes, I am all those bad things—a woman unworthy to be loved by you, except that I am so much to be pitied. But who has made me what I am? If you knew how I used to try to make my father love me! If you could have seen me when I was a little thin sickly child creeping into his study and crouching at his knee, to be repulsed just a little more harshly than he would have sent away a dog! I went on trying against every discouragement. Who else was there for me to love?—who else was there to love me? My mother was gone; my governess told me that it was natural for a father to love his child—an only child—a motherless child most of all. So I went on trying. And I think the more I tried to win his love the more hateful I became to him. And now, though we meet two or three times a day and speak civilly to each other, we live quite apart. When he was dangerously ill last winter, I used to sit in the corridor outside his bedroom day and night, fearing that he was going to die, and thinking that perhaps at the last he might relent, and remember that I was his daughter, and stretch out his feeble arms to me and take me to his heart. But though death came very near him—awfully near—there was no relenting.’

‘My darling, life has been very hard for you,’ said Cyril, with deepest pity.

She shocked him by her vehemence—but she moved him to compassion by the depth of bygone misery her present indignation revealed.

‘My father has been hard to me, and he has hardened me,’ she said. ‘He turned my heart to stone. It was cold and hard as stone, Cyril, till you melted it.’

‘My dearest, there are many duties involved in that great duty of honouring your father,’ pleaded Cyril, ‘and perhaps the chief of all is patience. You must be patient, love; the hour of relenting will come at last. Duty and filial love will win their reward. But you must never again speak of your father as you have spoken to-night. It is my duty to forbid this great sin. I could not see you kneeling at the altar rails—and put the sacred cup into your hands—knowing you cherished such a spirit as this.’

‘I will not disobey you,’ she answered, with a grave humility. ‘I will not speak of my father at all.’

‘And you will endeavour to think of him with kindness, as you used in the days when you were trying to win his love?’

‘In those days I used to think of him with fear,’ said Beatrix. ‘The sound of his voice or his footstep always made me shiver. But I had this saying in my mind, “It is natural for a father to love his motherless child,” and I did try very hard, very patiently, to make him love me.’

‘Go on trying, dearest, and the love will come at last. Remember the parable of the unjust judge. Human love, like heavenly love, is to be won by many prayers. And if I am to be your lover, and your husband, Beatrix, I can only be so with your father’s knowledge and approval. Dearly, deeply as I love you, I will not stoop to win you by deceit and suppression. I would not so dishonour you, I could not so dishonour myself.’

‘Let me go then,’ cried the girl, passionately. ‘Throw me away as you would throw a withered rose into that river,’ pointing to the dark stream under the Roman arch—shadowy waters on which the distant stars shone dimly,—‘you will never win me with his consent. He will not believe in your love for me. He will misjudge and insult you, for he believes in no man’s truth or honour. He has made for himself a religion of hatred and suspicion. Why should we make him the ruler of our lives—why should we accept misery because he wills us to be miserable? You are quite sure that you love me, Cyril—it is really love and not pity that you feel for me?’ she asked, suddenly, with a gush of womanliness.

‘The truest, fondest, deepest love man ever felt. Will that content you?’

‘It does more than content me—it makes me exquisitely happy. Then, since you love me, Cyril, and really choose me above all other women—so many of them worthy to be so chosen—for your wife, you must stoop a little. You must be content to take me without my father’s consent, or blessing, and without his money. But we do not care for that, do we, either of us?’

‘Not a jot, Beatrix. The money is a millstone round your neck. Let that go, with all my heart. But if you and I were to be quietly married some day at the old parish church, darling, and were to walk away together arm in arm into a happy, smiling, useful future, as we might do,—can you guess what the world would say of your husband?’

‘No—unless it said he was foolish to choose so faulty a wife.’

‘The world would say that the penniless curate played a crafty game, and that, knowing Christian Harefield would never consent beforehand to receive him as a son-in-law, he had hazarded his chances on a clandestine marriage, counting upon Mr. Harefield’s being won over to receive him and forgive his daughter afterwards. That is what the world would say of any man, Beatrix, who married under such circumstances; and that is what the world shall not say of me.’

‘Then you value the world’s opinion more than you value me,’ said Beatrix.

‘“I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not honour more,”’

answered her lover. ‘I shall call upon your father to-morrow.’

The church clock and the stable clock at the Water House began to strike eleven.

‘Good night, Cyril, you must be the manager of our destiny, but I’m afraid you will bring about nothing but sorrow and parting.’

‘I will do what is right, my dear. I will trust in Him who rules and governs all hearts—even your father’s when he seems hardest to you.’

‘Good night, Cyril.’

‘Good night, my best and dearest.’

He would not take her to his heart, or kiss the proud lips that were so near his own as they stood side by side in the shadow of the wide archway, though the discreet Parker kept his distance. He only took her hand and pressed it gently, and, with a murmured blessing, left her, just as the little low door in the archway opened, and the light shone faintly from within, making a kind of aureole round the bald head of the old gardener who lived in the mediæval gateway.

CHAPTER V.

HIS ITALIAN WIFE.

That deep shadow of gloom which had fallen upon Christian Harefield’s life seemed to have descended also upon the house he lived in. The house—with its low ceilings, narrow corridors, strange ins and outs, odd corners, and black oak panelling—had doubtless been more or less gloomy of aspect for the last two hundred years. But an old world gloom like this contrasts pleasantly with the movement and bustle of glad domestic life—the flashes of sudden colour—the glow of many hearths—winter’s yule log and summer’s wealth of flowers—the fresh shrill voices of young children—the hospitalities of eventide, the passing in and out of many figures, varied yet recurrent as the combinations of a kaleidoscope.

For the last fifty years the Water House had been known to all Little Yafford, and within a radius of twenty miles, as a grave and sober mansion, where high jinks of any kind were as little to be expected as a reappearance of white-robed, oak-crowned Druids in that stony circle on the moor which had once reeked with the blood of human victims.

Old Christian Harefield, the father of the present owner of the estate, had been distinguished for various eccentricities, the chief of which was love of money. He did not love it too well to spend it on himself, but he loved it too well to waste it upon his fellow-creatures, whom he did not love. He was a born man-hater. No youthful disappointments, no wrong-doing of a familiar friend, no inconstancy of a woman, had soured his temper, or changed the current of his life. In his nursery he had regarded outside humanity with a cold distrust, and had been selfish in the transactions of his babyhood. At Eton he was known as the most respectable of lads, and was universally detested. There was a legend of his having given a boy he disliked the scarlatina, deliberately and of malice aforethought; and this was the only thing he had ever been known to give away. At the University he took care of himself, made his rooms the prettiest in his quad, rode good horses, read diligently and took his degree with ease, but he refused all invitations to wine parties, rather than incur the expense of returning hospitality, and he was remembered among his contemporaries as Stingy Harefield. When the time came for him to marry he made no attempt to escape that ordeal, as it presented itself to him in the form of an alliance with a certain Jane Pynsent, a young lady whose personal attractions were not startling, but whose father had enriched himself by commerce, and had recently acquired a large tract of land in Lincolnshire. The young lady and the tract of land went in one lot, and Christian married her, without feeling himself guilty of that kind of sentimental folly called ‘falling in love;’ a weakness which offended his reason in those inferior animals whom stern necessity obliged him to acknowledge as his fellow-creatures. From this alliance of the mercantile classes and the landed gentry sprang an only child, Christian the second. In his boyhood and youth he gave indications of a nobler and wider nature than his father’s. He was careless of money—had his attachments among his schoolfellows and companions at the University—gave wine parties on a larger scale than any undergraduate of his year—read hard—rode hard—was at once dissipated and a student—came through his examinations with flying colours, and left behind him a reputation which caused at least half a dozen freshmen to ruin themselves in the endeavour to imitate ‘Alcibiades Harefield,’ that being the name which Christian the second had won for himself.

There were hard words between father and son when the young man went back to the Water House with a B.A. degree, and a sheaf of bills on a more tremendous scale than usual. His mother’s estate had been settled upon Christian the younger, and beyond those paternal reproaches, he suffered very little from his extravagance. His majority, which had been wisely, or unwisely, deferred to his twenty-fifth birthday, would make him independent. He stayed a month or so at the Water House—shot on the moors—read late of nights in the sombre library—dined out very often, and saw as little of his father as was consistent with occupation of the same house. After this brief experience of domestic life he went off to the Continent, and remained there roaming from city to city, for the next ten years of his life, his father living on quietly at the Water House all the time, eating and sleeping and riding his steady cob, and generally taking care of himself in an eminently respectable and gentleman-like manner. In the tenth year of his son’s absence the father died suddenly of apoplexy—a catastrophe which seemed to most people in Little Yafford the natural close of a selfish, self-indulgent life. Christian appeared at the Water House in time for the funeral, after travelling day and night for a week. He saw his father buried, he examined his father’s papers in Mr. Scratchell’s presence, and he perused his father’s will drawn by Scratchell, and leaving everything to ‘my only son, Christian Harefield.’ The will had been made directly after Mrs. Harefield’s death, when Christian the younger was still at Eton; and although the father and son had not got on particularly well together afterwards, Christian the elder had not troubled himself to alter his bequest. He was too essentially selfish to leave a shilling away from his own flesh and blood. Christian had not treated him well, but Christian was in some wise a part of himself; and although he did not care much for Christian, there was nobody else for whom he cared at all.

Christian Harefield, now lord of the double estates, went back to the Continent, where he was heard of no more for the next five years, at the end of which time there came a report of his marriage with a very handsome Italian girl; but as everybody in Little Yafford remarked, ‘there had been no advertisement in the Times, which made the whole thing seem rather odd and irregular.’ A year or two later Mr. Harefield was heard of as living near Florence with the lovely Italian wife and a baby, and nine years after his father’s death he came suddenly home to the Water House, bringing the lovely wife, and a little girl of three years old, home with him. He was now a man of middle age, very grave of aspect, but courteous and not inaccessible. Aged people at Little Yafford began to speculate upon a change at the Water House. It would be as it had been when the late Christian Harefield was a child, and old Mr. and Mrs. Harefield gave hunting breakfasts and dinners, and the old place was kept up altogether as it ought to be—with a great deal of company in the dining-room, and plenty of waste and riot in the kitchen and servants’ hall.

Christian Harefield did not quite realize those hopes which memory had evoked in the hearts of the oldest inhabitants of Little Yafford; but he was not unsocial. The Water House resumed something of its ancient splendour: there was a large household liberally conducted—a fine stud of horses filled the roomy old stables. Mr. Harefield received his neighbours cordially, and gave dinners enough to satisfy the most exacting among his friends.

There had been a great many stories, for the most part purely the work of invention; or of that gradual cohesion of casual particles floating in space, which is the root of all scandal. Some people had heard, as a certain fact, that the beautiful Italian had been a flower girl, and that Mr. Harefield had seen her selling violets in the streets of Florence. Others were equally certain that she had been an opera singer. Others were assured that ballet-dancing had been her profession at the time she attracted her wealthy lover’s attention. The more scandalous hinted darkly that she was somebody else’s runaway wife, and that Christian Harefield’s marriage was no marriage at all.

But after Mr. and Mrs. Harefield had been living at the Water House three months, the slightest allusion to one of these once favourite scandals would have been about as great a solecism as any one in Little Yafford could be guilty of. The ancient slanders were sunk in the Red Sea of oblivion. Those who had been most active in disseminating these rumours forgot all about them—could not have taxed their memory with the slightest detail, would have looked quite puzzled if any underbred intruder in polite society had questioned them on the subject, or recalled former assertions. There was a dignity about Christian Harefield, a subdued elegance about his lovely wife, which made such stories as Little Yafford had formerly believed in obviously and distinctly impossible. He marry a ballet-girl dancer, the proudest of men! She sell penny bunches of violets, the most aristocratic of women! All the best people of Little Yafford visited the Water House, and swore by Mrs. Harefield.

She was not a woman to make her influence widely felt even in that quiet circle. Beauty and elegance were her chief gifts. She was passionately fond of music—played exquisitely, in a style which was poetic rather than brilliant—sang sweetly—but not with the power of voice or splendour of execution which would have justified the story of her having been a prima donna. She had graceful manners, and distinction of bearing; but the leading spirits in Little Yafford—Mrs. Dulcimer, Lady Jane Gowry, and an old Mrs. Dunraven—decided that she had not much mind.

‘She can only look lovely, my dear, and curtsey in that foreign way of hers, which reminds me of my young days, when ladies behaved like ladies, and good manners had not begun to get obsolete,’ said Lady Jane to her dear Mrs. Dulcimer. ‘She can only look elegant, and sit at her piano, and suffer us to admire her, just as we should if she were the Venus de Milo in the Louvre. I don’t think she has much more feeling or passion than that one-armed statue; but she is quite as lovely, and I suppose that is enough for Mr. Harefield.’

Everybody agreed that Christian Harefield was devoted to his wife, and that it was a happy marriage. But for his little girl he had evidently no very warm regard. As time went on, and no second baby appeared, the father began to feel himself personally injured by the sex of his only child. She ought to have been a son. Here was the great Harefield property in danger of travelling out of the direct line, and belonging to some spurious Harefield, who should only assume that good old name by Royal Letters Patent. And it seemed to Christian—large-minded and cosmopolitan as he considered himself—that it would be a loss to English society if real Harefields should become extinct in the land. This idea that his daughter was a mistake grew upon him, and by slow degrees began to go hand in hand with another idea—of a far more injurious and dangerous nature—and that was the fancy that his wife loved the child better than she loved him. Those tender maternal caresses which the gentle Italian lavished on her little girl galled her husband almost as much as if he had seen them given to a rival. This was the first arising of that sombre passion which was afterwards to turn all his life to poison. He first learnt the meaning of jealousy when he sat by his own fireside watching the lovely face opposite him smiling down upon Beatrix. He had never cared for children in the abstract, never had perceived any special poetry or beauty in young lives and small round rosy faces, and he could see nothing to love or admire in Beatrix, who, at this stage of her existence, was small and sallow, ‘a little yellow thing, all eyes and mouth,’ as he himself described her. It was a constant irritation to him to see such blind unreasoning affection squandered upon so unlovely an object.

He spent one winter and a spring at the Water House, and then carried his wife away with him to Baden, and from Baden went to Florence for the winter, leaving Beatrix in charge of a conscientious and elderly governess at Little Yafford. The child was almost heart-broken at the loss of that loving mother, but no one except Miss Scales, the governess, knew anything about it, and Miss Scales wrote Mrs. Harefield cheery letters, telling her that dear little Trix was getting tall and strong, and had just gone into words of two syllables.

Mr. and Mrs. Harefield came back to the Water House, and spent the summer and autumn at home, and gave parties and made themselves generally agreeable. Then came winter and a migration to the South, Beatrix staying behind with Miss Scales as before. This winter she went into words of three syllables, and made small excursions into various foreign grammars, taking to Italian naturally, as a duck hatched by a hen takes to the water.

This kind of life went on till Beatrix was ten, Mr. and Mrs. Harefield’s sojourn at the Water House growing briefer each year, and by degrees there arose a feeling in Little Yafford that Mr. and Mrs. Harefield were not quite the happiest couple in the world, that there were more clouds than sunshine in that small home circle. These things make themselves known somehow. It was hinted that there were quarrels. Mrs. Harefield had a distressed look sometimes. Beatrix was rarely found in the drawing-room with her mother when people called. Good-natured Mrs. Dulcimer discovered that the little girl was always cooped up in the schoolroom, or sent out for dreary walks with her governess, and felt herself called upon to interfere and draw Mrs. Harefield’s attention to this neglect of maternal duty; but Mrs. Harefield, mildly graceful as she was at all times, received the remonstrance with a placid dignity which rebuked the good-natured busybody.

There was trouble of some kind evidently at the Water House, but no one in Little Yafford could ever get face to face with the skeleton. Italian friends of Mrs. Harefield’s appeared upon the scene, but Little Yafford was not invited to meet these foreigners. Then came autumn, and another migration to warmer lands, and this time Miss Scales and Beatrix went with the travellers.

‘That is more as it should be,’ said Mrs. Dulcimer, triumphantly. ‘So you see, after all, Clement, my remonstrance had some effect.’

‘If ever I find that any act of interference with other people’s conduct of their own affairs has a good effect, I will reverse the whole theory of morals which I have made for myself in relation to my neighbour,’ answered Mr. Dulcimer, with unaccustomed energy.

This last journey was fatal. Six weeks after the travellers left the Water House, Little Yafford was startled by the tidings of Mrs. Harefield’s death. She had died suddenly, at a little roadside inn in the Apennines, the loneliest spot of earth she could well have found for life’s closing scene. She had gone there alone with her husband on their way from Venice to Rome, leaving Beatrix and her governess at Venice. Mr. Harefield was distracted, and had gone off to wander no one knew where, after sending his child and the governess home to the Water House. Little Beatrix appeared there by and by, a silent and almost ghost-like child, whose small face looked unnaturally white above the dense blackness of her frock.

‘It’s absolutely heart-rending to see a Christian gentleman’s child look so like one’s idea of a vampire,’ exclaimed compassionate Mrs. Dulcimer, and she tried to lure the little girl to the Vicarage with a view to petting and making her happy; but Miss Scales guarded her pupil as jealously as if she had been a griffin in a fairy tale keeping watch and ward over an enchanted princess.

It was the universal opinion in Little Yafford—a kind of foregone conclusion—that Mr. Harefield would wander for years, and return to the Water House after a decade or two, with long gray hair and a bent backbone, and the general appearance of a pilgrim. He disappointed everybody’s expectations by coming back early in the spring and taking up his abode permanently in the grave old house, which now put on that mantle of silence and gloom which had never been lifted from it since.

Under this shadow of gloom, encircled by this perpetual silence and monotony, Beatrix had grown from childhood to womanhood. You could hear the dropping of the light wood ashes in a distant room as you stood in the hall at the Water House, or the chirping of a winter robin in the garden outside the windows, or the ticking of the dining-room clock, but of human voice or motion there was hardly anything to be heard. The kitchens and offices were remote, and the servants knew the value of good wages and a comfortable home too well to let any token of their existence reach Mr. Harefield’s ears. The master of that silent house sat in his library at the end of the low corridor, and read, or smoked, or mused, or wrote in solitude. Sometimes he took his daily ride or walk in all weathers, for months at a stretch; at other times he would remain for several weeks without leaving the house. He received no guests—he visited no one, having taken the trouble, immediately after his return, to let people know that he had come to the Water House in search of solitude, and not sympathy.

Scratchell, his lawyer and agent, and Mr. Namby, the family doctor, were the only two men freely admitted to his presence, and of these he saw as little as possible. He allowed Bella Scratchell to be with his daughter as much as Beatrix pleased to have her, but, save on Sundays, he never sat at meals with them or honoured them with his society. His hours were different from theirs, and they had Miss Scales to take care of them. What could they want more?

One day, when Beatrix was between sixteen and seventeen, Mrs. Dulcimer met the misanthrope in one of his solitary walks on the Druids’ moor, and ventured, not without inward fear and trembling, to attack him on the subject of his daughter’s solitary life.

‘It must be very dull for Beatrix at the Water House,’ she said.

‘I dare say it is, madam,’ answered Christian Harefield, with austere civility, ‘but I don’t mind that. Dulness is good for young women, in my opinion.’

‘Oh, but, dear Mr. Harefield,’ cried the Vicar’s wife, emboldened by his politeness, ‘there you differ from all the rest of the world.’

‘I have not generally found the rest of the world so wise, my dear madam, as to distress myself because its opinions and mine happen to be at variance,’ Mr. Harefield answered coldly.

Mrs. Dulcimer felt herself baffled. This stony urbanity was too much for her. But she remembered Beatrix’s pale joyless face as she had seen it in the chancel pew last Sunday, and made one more heroic effort.

‘Mr. Harefield, I am not going to ask you to change your own habits——’

‘That would be wasted labour, madam——’

‘Or to ask people to the Water House——’

‘I would not do my friends so great a wrong——’

‘But you might at least let Beatrix come to me. We are very quiet people at the Vicarage,—Clement is absorbed in his books—I in my workbasket. There would be no gaiety for her, but there would be the change from one house to another, and we lie higher. You must be damp at the Water House. I know Beatrix has suffered from neuralgia——’

‘A new fashion among young ladies, like the shape of their bonnets. I never heard of it when I was young——’

‘Oh, it was called toothache then, but it was just as excruciating. Then you really will let her come?’ pursued Mrs. Dulcimer, pretending to make sure of his consent.

‘Clement Dulcimer is a gentleman I greatly respect, and you are the most amiable of women. I cannot see why I should forbid my daughter coming to you if you like to be troubled with her. But I must make it a condition that you do not take her anywhere else—that she is to come to your house and yours alone.’

‘Most assuredly. I shall consider your wishes upon that point sacred,’ protested Mrs. Dulcimer, delighted with her success.

She called on Beatrix the next day, and carried her off to the Vicarage. The girl had been carefully educated by conscientious Miss Scales, and knew everything that a girl of her age is supposed to know, except the theory of music. She could have enlightened the Vicar about latitude and longitude, and the subjunctive mood in various languages. But she had all the deficiencies and peculiarities of a girl whose life had been lonely. She was proud and shy—what the Vicar called farouche—and it was a long time before her new friends could set her at ease. But when she did expand they grew very fond of her, and that new life at the Vicarage was like the beginning of her youth. She had never felt herself young before. Miss Scales’ prim perfection had been like a band of iron about her life. Her father’s gloom and hardness had weighed upon her like an actual burden. She had waked in the night sobbing, startled from some dim strange dream of an impossible happiness, by the recollection that she had a father who had never loved her, who never would love her.

This hardness of her father’s had gradually hardened her feelings towards him. She had left off hoping for any change in him, and with the cessation of hope came a stream of bitterness which overwhelmed every sweet and filial sentiment. As she grew from child to woman, her memories of the past took a new shape. Well-remembered scenes acted themselves over again before her mental vision under a new and more vivid light. She began to see that there had been unhappiness in her mother’s life, and that her father had been the cause of it, that the cloud had always come from him.

Brief episodes of that bygone life flashed back upon her with a cruel distinctness. She remembered herself leaning on her mother’s shoulder one evening as Mrs. Harefield sat at the drawing-room piano weaving the sweet tangle of Italian melody she loved so well. It was a summer twilight, and the windows were all open, the garden was full of roses, the river was shining under the setting sun.

She remembered her father’s coming in suddenly, and walking up to the piano. He took her by the wrist with a hard strong hand that hurt her a little.

‘Go to your governess,’ he said. ‘I want to talk to your mother.’

And then, before she could reach the door, she heard him say,—

‘So you have seen Antonio again.’

Those words haunted her curiously now that she was growing a woman. Who was Antonio? She could remember no one in the history of her life to whom that name belonged. It was an Italian name—the name of one of those Italian friends of her mother’s who came and went in those memory pictures, like figures in a dream. She could not distinguish one from the other. They had all pale dark faces, like ivory that had been long shut from the light, and dark gleaming eyes, and hair like the shining wings of the rooks in the tall old elm tops yonder. But she could not recall any one of them who had impressed her, a wondering child of seven, more than the rest.

Yes, there was one—the one who sang so beautifully. She could remember sitting on her mother’s lap one evening before dinner, the room dimly lighted, no one present but her mother and the Italian gentleman. She remembered his sitting at the piano and singing church music—music that thrilled her till, in a nervous ecstasy, she burst into tears, and her mother soothed her and carried her away, saying something to the strange gentleman in Italian as she went towards the door, and he got up from the piano and came to them and stopped on the threshold to bend down and kiss her, as she had never been kissed before in all her life. She could remember the kiss now, though it was ten years ago.

And he spoke to her mother in Italian, a few hurried words that seemed half sorrow and half anger.

Was that Antonio?

Her mother’s rooms had never been opened by any one but Christian Harefield since his return to the Water House after that last fatal journey. There was something ghostly in the idea of those three rooms facing the river, those three locked doors in the long oak gallery. Beatrix passed those sealed doors always with a thrill of pain. If her mother had but lived, how different life would have been for her! There would have been sorrow perhaps, for she knew there had been sorrow in the last year of her mother’s life, but they two would have shared it. They would have clung to each other closer, loved each other more fondly because of the husband and father’s unkindness.

‘What would papa matter to me if I had mamma?’ she thought. ‘He would be only a gloomy person coming in and out, like the dark brief night which comes in and out among the summer days. We should not have minded him. We should have accepted him as a part of nature, the shadow that made our sunshine brighter.’

Often and often she sat upon a bench on the river terrace, leaning back with her arms folded above her head, looking up at those seven blank windows, darkly shuttered, three windows for the spacious old bedroom, one for the narrow dressing closet, three for the pretty morning-room which she remembered dimly, a white panelled room, with pale blue curtains all worked with birds and flowers in many coloured silks, black and gold Japanese cabinets, a tall chimney-piece with a curious old looking-glass above it, let into the wall, pictures, and red and blue china jars, a faint odour of pot pourri, a piano, a frame for Berlin woolwork, with a group of unfinished roses that never seemed to grow any bigger.

‘Dear room,’ she said, ‘to think that I should live so near you, pass your door every day, and yet remember you so faintly, as if you were a dream!’

Once a curious fancy flashed upon her as she sat in the evening glow, looking up at those windows.

‘Perhaps Antonio’s picture is in that room.’

She could just recollect a miniature in a velvet case, which she had opened one day, the picture of a gentleman. She had only glanced at it, when her mother took the case from her and put it away. The complexion was more beautiful than Antonio’s, supposing the gentleman who sang the church music to have been Antonio; but people’s complexions in portraits are generally superior to the reality.

Kind as her friends at the Vicarage were, Beatrix never talked of these old memories. The past was a sealed book. Not for worlds could she have spoken of it—not even to Bella, with whom she conversed as freely, in a general way, as a little girl talks to her doll.

The new home life at the Vicarage brightened her wonderfully. Her reserve wore off as she grew accustomed to that friendly household. She was enraptured with Mr. Dulcimer’s library. Here, on the Vicar’s well-stocked shelves, she found those Italian poets her mother must have loved—prose writers too—quaint old romances, bound in white vellum, on curious ribbed paper, printed at Venice two hundred years ago. She spent many an hour sitting on a hassock in the sunny bow-window, with a pile of those old Italian books on the floor beside her, while the Vicar sat at his big table annotating Berkeley, or making excursions into the world of science.

Here she read the Bridgewater Treatises, and got her first grand idea of the universe. Here her young mind soared away from the narrow track along which Miss Scales had conducted it, and entered the regions of poetry and delight. And here—in this sunny old room, with its walls of hooks—young Love took her by the hand, and led her across the threshold of his wonder-world. Here she first met Cyril Culverhouse, and learnt how fair a thing piety may seem in a bright young soul, eager to do some good in its generation. Religion hitherto, as interpreted by Miss Scales, had appeared to her a hard and difficult business, which no one could take to except under severest pressure—a system of punishments and penances invented for the torment of mankind. But in Cyril’s teaching how different it all seemed! Religion became a sentiment to live or die for. Without it happiness or peace of mind seemed impossible.

‘Your mother belonged to the old faith, perhaps,’ he said, one day, when they were talking of High and Low Church.

Beatrix gave a faint shiver.

‘I don’t know,’ she answered, sadly. ‘Mamma never talked to me about religion. I was too young, perhaps.’

Cyril found her curiously ignorant of all that was most vital in religion, and his first interest in her arose from this very ignorance of hers. He was so glad to set her right—to get her out of the narrow Scales track, Miss Scales being essentially Low Church, and scenting Roman encroachment in an anthem or a surplice. The interest soon deepened, but he could hardly have told when it first grew into love. Perhaps that might never have come, if Beatrix’s fresh young soul had not gone out to meet his unawares, so that ere he knew himself a lover he found himself beloved.

The thought was full of rapture, for at this stage of their friendship she seemed to him the most perfect among women—the lovely embodiment of youth and innocence, and noble yearnings, truthfulness, purity, all things fair and holy. But the consideration that she was Christian Harefield’s heiress dashed his joy. He saw himself in advance—branded in the sight of men—as the clerical adventurer who, under the guise of religion, had pushed his own fortune.

Then it was—while it was still a new thing for them to talk of their mutual love—that he told Beatrix her father must be informed of their attachment.

CHAPTER VI.

CHRISTIAN HAREFIELD’S ANSWER.

The Monday after that Sunday evening supper at the Vicarage dragged more heavily than any day Beatrix could remember since that never-to-be forgotten awful day when—a little child in a strange city—she was told of her mother’s death. To-day she felt that a blow was impending—a stroke that must shatter the rosy chain that bound her to her bright new life. The strictness of Miss Scales’ rule had been relaxed since Beatrix’s eighteenth birthday. The lady was now rather companion and duenna than governess; but Miss Scales was conscientious, and did not care to take her salary without earning it, so she had urged upon Beatrix that a young lady of eighteen was in duty bound to go on improving her mind, and Beatrix had consented to two hours’ daily reading, on a rigid system. English history one day—Roman another—Grecian another—Travels on the fourth day—Belles-lettres, represented by the dullest books in the English language, on the fifth—and French, as exemplified in an intensely proper novel, on the sixth. And all this reading was to be carefully done, with a good deal of reference to the best authorities—all obsolete, and improved upon by the newest lights to be obtained from the last discoveries published a year or two before the battle of Waterloo. That her favourite authorities could be superseded was a possibility beyond Miss Scales’ mental grasp. She had learned out of those books, and would continue to teach out of them to her dying day.

Upon this particular Monday the English historians hung somewhat heavily. Hume was dull—and Rapin furnished no improvement upon him.

‘Really, Miss Scales dear,’ said Beatrix at last, with a stifled yawn, ‘I don’t think I am appreciating Joan of Arc at all properly this morning. She was much too good a person to be yawned over like this; and if she really was burnt at Rouen, and did not get out of that cruel Beaufort’s clutches, and marry and have ever so many children afterwards——’

‘Joan of Arc—married—and the mother of a family! Beatrix, what are you dreaming of?’ cried the scandalized Miss Scales, her little gray ringlets quivering with indignation.

‘Mr. Dulcimer says she did, and that there are documents to prove it.’

‘Mr. Dulcimer is a horrid person to tell you such stories; and after this I shouldn’t be at all surprised at his going over to Rome.’

‘Would you much mind my putting up the books, Miss Scales love?’ asked Beatrix, in the coaxing way in which she was wont to address her duenna. ‘My mind isn’t equal to grasping such heroism as Joan’s to-day.’

‘You have been looking absent-minded all the morning, certainly.’

‘I do feel rather head-achy.’

‘Then you’d better take a seidlitz powder—and be sure you put in the blue paper first——’

‘No, thank you, dear, I’m really not ill. But I think a turn in the garden would do me good. I’ll read ever so much to-morrow, if you’ll let me.’

‘If I’ll let you, Beatrix! When have I ever stood between you and the improvement of your mind? But I hope you won’t get hold of Mr. Dulcimer’s crotchets. Joan of Arc not burned at Rouen, indeed! What is the world coming to? And Archbishop Whately has written a pamphlet to prove that there was no such person as Napoleon, though my father saw him—with his own eyes—on board the Bellerophon, in Plymouth roads.’

Beatrix waited for no further permission to put the dingy old books back upon their shelves, and go out bare-headed into the autumnal garden. It was a good old garden at all times—a wide stretch of lawn following the bend of the river—a broad gravelled walk with moss-grown old stone vases at intervals—and a stone bench here and there—flowers in profusion, but of the old-fashioned sort—rare shrubs and trees—plane and tulip, and Spanish chestnut that had been growing for centuries—one grand cedar stretching wide his limbs over the close-shorn sward—a stone sundial with a blatantly false inscription to the effect that it recorded only happy hours—and for prospect, the Roman one-arched bridge, with the deep narrow river flowing swiftly under it,—these in the foreground; and in the distance across the river the heterogeneous roofs, chimneys, and gables of Little Yafford, with the good old square church tower rising up in their midst, and behind this little settlement the purple moor sloping far up towards the calm grey sky.

It was a scene so familiar to Beatrix that she scarcely felt its great beauty, as she walked up and down the river terrace, thinking of Cyril and the interview that was to take place to-day. She was not hopeful as to the result of that interview. There were hard thoughts in her mind about her father.

‘He has never given me his love,’ she said to herself. ‘Will he be cruel enough to take this love from me—this love that makes life a new thing?’

While Beatrix was pacing slowly to and fro along the quiet river-side walk, Cyril was coming down the sloping road to the Roman bridge, thinking of what he had to do. It was not a pleasant mission by any means. He was going to beard the lion in his den—to offer himself as a husband for the richest heiress in the neighbourhood. He, Cyril Culverhouse, who had not a sixpence beyond his stipend, and who yet came of too good a family to be called an adventurer. He had never spoken to Mr. Harefield, and he was going to him to ask for his daughter’s hand. The position was difficult, but Cyril did not shrink from facing it.

He went under the archway into the grassy quadrangle, where the low stone mullioned windows faced him with their dull blank look, as of windows out of which no one ever looked. There was a low door in a corner, studded with iron nails—and a bell that would have been loud enough for a means of communication with a house a quarter of a mile away. This noisy bell clanged out unmercifully in the afternoon quiet.

‘He will never forgive me for ringing such a peal as that,’ thought Cyril.

The staid old butler looked at him wonderingly when he asked if Mr. Harefield was at home. Visitors were rare at the Water House.

‘He is at home,’ answered the butler, dubiously, as much as to say, ‘but he won’t see you.’

‘Will you say that I wish to see him—upon particular business?’

The butler led the way to the drawing-room, without a word. He had heard Mr. Culverhouse preach, at odd times, though himself a member of the Little Yafford Baptists, and had too much respect for his cloth to express his opinion as to the uselessness of this proceeding. He led the way to the drawing-room and left Cyril there.

It was a pretty room, despite the gloom that had fallen upon it. A long old room, with oak panelling, a richly carved cornice, and a low ceiling, a few good Italian pictures, a tall pillared marble chimney-piece, broad Tudor windows looking towards the river, deep recesses filled with books, and chairs and sofas of the Louis Seize period, covered with Gobelins tapestry.

But there was no sign of occupation—no open piano—not a book out of its place—not a newspaper or pamphlet on the tables. Everything was in perfect order, as in a house that is shown and not lived in.

This was the first time Cyril had been under the roof that sheltered Beatrix. He looked around him for some trace of her presence, but he saw no such trace. Did she inhabit this room? No, it was evidently a room in which no one lived.

He went to one of the windows and looked out. He could just see the lonely figure at the end of the river walk, bare-headed under the sunless sky—a figure full of grace and dignity, to his eye, as it moved slowly along, the face turned towards the bridge.

‘Poor child, she is watching for me, perhaps,’ he thought with tender sadness, ‘waiting and fearing.’

‘My master will be pleased to see you, sir,’ said the voice in the doorway, and Cyril turned to follow the butler.

He followed him down a corridor that went the whole length of the house. The butler opened a deep-set oak door, thick enough for a gaol, and gravely announced the visitor. It was a very solemn thing altogether, Cyril felt.

He found himself in a large low room, lined from floor to ceiling with books on carved oak shelves. A sombre brownness prevailed throughout the room. All that was not brown leather was brown oak.

Three low windows looked into a courtyard. A pile of damp logs smouldered on the wide stone hearth. Cyril had never entered a more gloomy room.

The master of the Water House stood before the hearth, ready to receive his visitor—a tall, powerfully built man, in a long cloth dressing-gown, like a monk’s habit, which made him look taller than he really was. The hard, stern face would have done for one of Cromwell’s Ironsides; the grizzled black hair worn somewhat long, the large nostrils, iron mouth and jaw, dark deep-set eyes, and heavily lined forehead were full of character; but it was character that was calculated to repel rather than to invite sympathy.

‘You have asked to see me on particular business, Mr. Culverhouse,’ said Christian Harefield, with a wave of his hand which might or might not mean an invitation to be seated. He remained standing himself. ‘If it is any question of church restoration, Mr. Dulcimer ought to know that my cheque-book is at his command. I take no personal interest in these things, but I like to do what is right.’

‘It is no question of church restoration, Mr. Harefield.’

‘Some of your poor people burned out, or washed out, or down with fever, perhaps? I hear you are very active in good works. My purse is at your disposal. Pray do not scruple to make use of it. I do so little good myself, that I am glad to practise a little vicarious benevolence.’

He seated himself at a large oak table covered with books and papers, and opened his cheque-book.

‘How much shall it be?’ he asked, in a business-like tone.

Cyril was looking at him thoughtfully. There was something noble in that iron-gray head, surely—a grand intelligence at least, if not the highest type of moral good.

‘Pardon me, Mr. Harefield,’ said the curate, ‘you are altogether mistaken in the purpose of my visit. I came to ask no favour for others. I am here as a suppliant for myself alone. I know and love your daughter, and I have her permission to tell you that she loves me, and only waits your approval to accept me as her future husband.’

Christian Harefield started to his feet, and turned upon the suppliant.

‘What, it has come already!’ he cried. ‘I knew that it was inevitable; but I did not think it would come quite so soon. My daughter is not nineteen, I believe, and she is already a prey for the first gentlemanly adventurer who crosses her path——’

‘Mr. Harefield!’

‘Mr. Culverhouse, I was married for my money. My daughter shall escape that misery if any power of mine can shield her from it. We will not bandy hard words. You profess to love her—a raw, uncultured girl whom you have known at most six months—I will give you credit for being sincere, if you like—for believing that you do love her—and I can only say that I am sorry your fancy should have taken so inopportune a direction. My daughter shall marry no man who is not so entirely her equal in wealth and position that I can feel very sure he takes her for her own sake.’

‘I expected something of this kind from you, Mr. Harefield.’

‘You can never know my justification for this line of conduct,’ replied Mr. Harefield. ‘I marked out this course for myself long ago, when my daughter was a child. I will spare her a deception that turned my life to gall. I will spare her disillusions that broke my heart. I am speaking openly to you, Mr. Culverhouse, more freely than I have spoken to any man, and I beg that all I have said may be sacred.’

‘It shall be so,’ answered Cyril. ‘You think you can protect your daughter from the possibility of a sorrow like that which has darkened your own life. But do you not think that Providence is stronger to guard and save than you can be, and that it might be wiser to let her obey the instinct of her own heart?’

‘As I did,’ cried Christian Harefield, with a laugh. ‘Sir, Providence did not guard or save me. I was a man—of mature years—and thought I knew mankind by heart. Yet I walked blindfold into the trap. Would you have me trust my daughter’s instinct at eighteen, when my own reason at thirty could so betray me? No, I shall take my own course. If I can save a silly girl from a future of ruined hopes and broken dreams, I will so save her, against her own will. I have never played the tender father, but perhaps in this my sternness may serve my daughter better than a more loving father’s softness. If Beatrix marries without my approval she will be a pauper.’

‘I would gladly so take her,’ cried Cyril.

‘And teach her to disobey her father! you, who read the commandments to her in church every other Sunday, would teach her to set one of them at nought!’

It was Cyril’s own argument. He blushed as he heard it.

‘Must you withhold your love because you withhold your money?’ he asked. ‘You say that your own marriage was unhappy because you were a rich man. Let the weight of riches be lifted from your daughter’s life. She does not value them—nor do I.’

‘What, a Culverhouse—the son of a spendthrift father—a parson, too! You can afford to despise riches?’

‘Yes, because I look round me and see how rarely money can bring happiness. Perhaps there is not much real and perfect happiness upon earth; but I am very sure that what little there is has never been bought with gold. Leave your estate away from your daughter—leave it where you please—devote it to some great work. Let me have Beatrix without a sixpence—let me be your son—and if it is possible for affection to brighten your later life you shall not find it wanting.’

‘It is not possible,’ answered Harefield, coldly. ‘I never desired affection except from one source—and it was not given me. I cannot open my heart again—its doors are sealed.’

‘Against your only child?’

‘Against all flesh and blood.’

‘Then, if you withhold your love from Beatrix, it would be only right and reasonable to withhold your fortune, and leave her free to accept the love which may in some measure atone for the loss of yours.’

‘You must have a monstrous good opinion of yourself, Mr. Culverhouse, when you set your own value above that of one of the finest estates in this part of Yorkshire.’

‘I have no exalted opinion of my own value, but I have a very low estimate of the blessings of wealth. For such a woman as Beatrix a great estate can only be a great burthen. She has been brought up in solitude, she will never be a woman of the world. She does not value money.’

‘Because she has never had to do without it, and because she has seen very little of what it can do. Launch her in the world to-morrow, and in one year she will have learned the full value of wealth. No, Mr. Culverhouse, I cannot accept your judgment in this matter. If I have withheld my affection from my daughter, so much the more reason that I should give her the estate which, as my only child, she is entitled to inherit. And it shall be my business to obtain for her such an alliance as will place her husband above the suspicion of mercenary motives.’

‘And in arriving at this decision you put your daughter’s feelings out of the question. You do not even take the trouble to make yourself acquainted with her sentiments.’

‘No. I trust to time. I regret that she should have been so soon exposed to a peril which I had not apprehended for her just yet. If I had, I should have been more on my guard. I must request you, as a man of honour, to hold no further communication—either personally or by letter—with my daughter, and I shall be under the painful necessity of forbidding any more visiting at the Vicarage.’

‘You are asking too much, Mr. Harefield. No man with common sense would submit to such an exaction as that. I will do more than most men in my position would be willing to do. Your daughter is young and impulsive, unversed in worldly knowledge. I will promise to wait for her till she is of age, and to hold no communication with her in the interval. Two years hence, if your wishes have conquered, I will submit to my fate. I will make no claim. But if she still thinks as she thinks to-day, I shall claim my right to address her on equal terms. But it is my duty to remind you that your daughter has some strength of will—that she is a creature of impulse, not easily to be dragooned into subservience to the ideas and plans of another—even though that other be her father.’

‘I shall know how to govern her impulses, sir, and to bring a stronger will than her own to bear upon her follies. I have no more to say—except that I rely upon your promise, and consider your acquaintance with my daughter at an end from this hour.’

Cyril had hardly expected anything better than this, yet the actual discomfiture was no less difficult to bear. To be told that he must see Beatrix no more, knowing as he did that the girl he loved returned his love with fullest measure, and was willing to fling every tie to the winds for his sake! And then her ties were at best so feeble. The father she was ready to defy for his sake was a father who had never loved her, who freely confessed his lack of affection for her. Not much, perhaps, to forfeit such a father’s favour for the sake of a lover who loved her with all the strength of his strong nature.

Cyril could not bring himself to say, Disobey your father, fling fortune to the winds, and be my wife. Duty forbade him, and consideration for Beatrix was on the side of duty. The day might come when she would upbraid him with the loss of her father’s cold liking, and her loss of fortune. He saw himself, far away in the future, a disappointed man—a failure—high hopes unrealized, labours unsuccessful, aspirations blighted; saw himself struggling single-handed against misfortune, and with Beatrix by his side. Might she not—if life went badly with him—repent her choice? And what was the bitterness of the present—the loss involved in doing right—compared with that sharper bitterness, that greater loss, which might follow in the future upon doing wrong?

‘My first and last visit to the Water House, I dare say,’ he thought, as he paused for a minute in the quadrangle, to look up at the ivy-clad walls, the massive stone mullions and Tudor gables. A fine old house if its associations had been bright and pleasant, but, looked at as the dungeon of unloved youth, it appeared dismal as an Egyptian tomb.

He saw an open door in the cloistered side wall—a door leading to the garden, and thought how natural it would be for him to go there in search of Beatrix—thought how happily he would have gone to seek her if Mr. Harefield’s decision had favoured their love—if he had given them ever so little encouragement, ever so small a right to look hopefully towards the future. Now all was blank—a dull, dead despair.

He went under the archway, and the outer door shut behind him with a hollow clang in the twilight.

CHAPTER VII.

MRS. DULCIMER MEANS BUSINESS.

When a benevolent idea entered the mind of the good-natured Mrs. Dulcimer, there immediately began a process of incubation or hatching, as of a patient maternal hen intent on the development of her eggs. Like that domestic fowl, Mrs. Dulcimer gave her whole mind to the task, and, for the time being, thought of nothing else.

The notion of a marriage between Cyril Culverhouse and Bella Scratchell was now incubating. Bella, of whom Mrs. Dulcimer had not thought much hitherto, was now taken under her wing, a protégée whose provision in life was an actual duty.

Mrs. Dulcimer talked about her to the parlourmaid, while she was dusting the drawing-room china. The servants at the Vicarage were all old retainers, who by faithful service had become interwoven in the very fabric of the family life. The Vicar and his wife could hardly have believed that home was home with strange faces round them. Crisp, the man of all work, and Rebecca, the confidential maid, were as much an integral part of life as the dark ridge of moorland, and the gray church tower, the winding river, the Vicar’s library, and the faithful old pointer, Ponto, which had not stood to a bird for the last seven years, but held the position of friend and familiar, and lived in a land overflowing with milk and honey.

‘What a nice young lady Miss Scratchell is, Rebecca!’ said Mrs. Dulcimer, as she flecked a grain of dust off a Chelsea shepherdess with her feather-brush. The Vicar’s wife was rarely seen between breakfast and noon without a feather-brush in her hand. ‘Have you remarked it?’

‘She ain’t so handsome as Miss Harefield,’ answered Rebecca, frankly, ‘but she’s a deal affabler. They give her a very good character at the Park—always punkshall, and a great favourite with the children.’

‘She is just the sort of girl to do well in life, Rebecca. She ought to get a good husband.’

Rebecca gave a loud sniff, scenting mischief.

‘That’s as Providence pleases, ma’am,’ she retorted, rubbing the fender with her chamois leather; ‘marriages is made in heaven.’

‘Perhaps, Rebecca. But a poor man’s daughter like Bella Scratchell has a very poor chance of meeting an eligible person. Unless it is in this house, I don’t think she sees any one worth speaking of.’

‘There’s the Park, ma’am,’ suggested Rebecca, rubbing the fender almost savagely.

‘Oh! at the Park she is only a dependant—quite looked down upon, you may be sure; for though Mrs. Piper is a good creature, she is a thorough parvenue. Miss Scratchell never sees any of the Park visitors, you may be sure. She only lunches at the children’s dinners. They don’t even ask her to play the piano at their parties. They have a man from Great Yafford. Now don’t you think, Rebecca, that Mr. Culverhouse would be a nice match for Miss Scratchell?’

Rebecca wheeled round upon her knees and confronted her mistress.

‘Oh, ma’am, I wouldn’t if I was you!’ she exclaimed, energetically. ‘I wouldn’t have act or part in it. You won’t get no thanks for it. You never do. Nobody’s never thanked for that kind of thing. You didn’t get no thanks from Mr. Parker and Miss Morison, and look at the trouble you took about them. There isn’t an unhappier couple in Little Yafford, if all folks say is true, and I believe every time they quarrel your name comes up between ’em. “If it hadn’t been for Mrs. Dulcimer I shouldn’t have been such a fool as to marry you,” says he. “My wretchedness is all Mrs. Dulcimer’s doing,” says she, “and I wish I was dead.” That’s a dreadful thing to have on your conscience, ma’am, after taking no end of trouble to bring it about.’

‘Nonsense, Rebecca! Is it my fault the Parkers are quarrelsome? Mary Morison would have quarrelled with any husband.’

‘Then she ought never to have had one,’ ejaculated Rebecca, renewing her savage treatment of the fender. ‘But I recollect when you thought her perfection.’

‘I allow that I was deceived in Miss Morison, Rebecca,’ replied the Vicar’s wife, meekly. She was very fond of Rebecca, and not a little afraid of her. ‘But you see Miss Scratchell is quite another sort of person.’

‘Company manners,’ said Rebecca, scornfully. ‘They’ve all got ’em. It’s the outside crust. You can’t tell what’s inside the pie.’

‘I am sure Miss Scratchell is a good girl. See how she has been brought up. The Scratchells have to study every sixpence.’

‘Does that make people good?’ inquired Rebecca, speculatively, gathering up her brushes and leathers into her box. ‘I don’t think it would improve my disposition. I like the sixpences to come and go, without my thinking about ’em.’

‘Ah, but, Rebecca, consider what a good wife a girl brought up like that would make for a poor man. Mr. Culverhouse has nothing but his curacy, you know.’

‘I should ha’ thought a rich young woman would ha’ suited him better. There’s Miss Harefield, with her large fortune, would be just the thing.’

‘Nonsense, Rebecca! Mr. Harefield would never consent to such a marriage. Sir Kenrick is the proper husband for Miss Harefield; he can make her mistress of one of the finest places in Hampshire.’

‘Oh, that’s it, is it?’ said Rebecca, with something approaching a groan. ‘Sir Kenrick and Miss Harefield, and Mr. Culverhouse and Miss Scratchell! Ladies’ chain and set to partners—like the first figure in a quadrille. You’ve got your hands full, ma’am, and I suppose it’s no use my talking; but if you wasn’t too wise a lady to take a fool’s advice, I should say don’t have nothink to do with it.’

And with this oracular speech Rebecca took up her box, with all her implements of war, and left the drawing-room.

‘Rebecca is a good creature, and an original, but dull,’ thought Mrs. Dulcimer. ‘I never can make her see things in a proper light.’

After the early dinner, and the Vicar’s departure for his daily round among his parishioners—a sauntering, easy-going visitation at all times—Mrs. Dulcimer set out in her best bonnet and sable-bordered mantle to make some calls. The sable mantle was well known in Little Yafford as a kind of insignia of office. When Mrs. Dulcimer wore it she meant business, and business with Mrs. Dulcimer meant the business of other people. Her bonnets were known also, with their different grades of merit. She had a bonnet for the landed gentry, and a second best bonnet for the tradespeople, and last year’s bonnet, done up by Rebecca, for her visits amongst the poor.

To-day she wore her landed gentry bonnet, and her first visit was to the Park.

Whether a man who has made his money in trade, and has taken somebody else’s mansion and park, can be considered to belong to the landed gentry, is an open question; but Little Yafford gave Mr. Piper the benefit of the doubt, and as there were not many rich people in the village, he ranked high.

Mrs. Piper was at home, and delighted to see her dear Mrs. Dulcimer. There is no more lively companion than a good-natured busybody, except an ill-natured one. Mrs. Dulcimer’s conversation lacked the pungency and acidity, the cayenne and lemon with which your cynical gossip flavours his discourse, but she was always well posted in facts, and, if too much given to pity and deplore, had at least plenty to tell.

The two matrons had the drawing-room all to themselves—a large and splendid apartment, furnished in the ugliest style of the later Georges, but glorified by the Piper family with Berlin woolwork and beaded cushions, ormolu inkstands, Parian statuettes, Bohemian vases, malachite envelope-boxes, and mother-o’-pearl albums in great profusion.

Mrs. Piper was a devoted mother, and, on the children being inquired for, began a string of praises.

‘Elizabeth is getting on splendidly with her music,’ she said; ‘you’ll be quite surprised. She and Mary play the overture to “Zamper.” You’d be delighted.’

‘Miss Scratchell taught them, I suppose?’

‘Oh dear no! Miss Scratchell superintends their practice; but they have a master from Great Yafford, Mr. Jackson, the organist—a very fine musician. Isabella is a very nice player,’ said Mrs. Piper, with a patronizing air. She had never got beyond ‘Buy a Broom’ and ‘The Bird Waltz’ in her own day, but was severely critical now. ‘But I couldn’t think of having my girls taught by a lady. They don’t get the touch, or the style, or the execution.’

‘What a sweet girl Bella is!’ exclaimed Mrs. Dulcimer, who had come to the Park on purpose to talk about Miss Scratchell.

She was not going to work blindly this time, or to lay herself open to such reproaches as Rebecca had assailed her with on account of the Parker and Morison marriage. She would find out all about Bella before she set to work; and who so well able to inform her as Bella’s employer?

‘Yes,’ replied Mrs. Piper, ‘I am very well satisfied with Bella Scratchell. She’s the first governess I’ve had that has given me satisfaction—and I’ve had seven since we’ve lived at Little Yafford. She’s very young for such a position—with clever girls like mine, who are much beyond their years, especially; and when Mr. Scratchell first applied for the situation I felt I couldn’t entertain his proposal. “Give her a trial, Mrs. Piper,” he said, “you don’t know how she’s been educated. She’s had all the advantages Miss Harefield has had, and she’s known a great deal better how to value them.” So I thought it over, and I agreed to give Bella a trial. She couldn’t well be worse than the others had been, I considered, and I gave her the chance. Of course it would be a great opening in life for her to come here. Not that we make our governess one of the family. I don’t hold with that, no more does Piper. Miss Scratchell comes and goes quietly, and keeps her place. She is very useful and domesticated, and when I’ve been ill I’ve found her a great comfort in looking after the servants for me, and helping me to go over the tradesmen’s books; for you know what poor health I’ve had of late years, Mrs. Dulcimer, and what trouble I’ve had with my servants.’

Mrs. Dulcimer sighed a sympathetic assent.

‘If I’m alone she stops to luncheon with me; if I’m not, Bella superintends the children’s dinner, and after that she can go home as soon as she likes. The rest of the day is her own.’

‘It must be rather dull for a young girl like her, never seeing any society,’ suggested Mrs. Dulcimer.

‘I shouldn’t think Mr. Scratchell had brought up his daughters to expect society, if you mean parties and that sort of thing,’ replied Mrs. Piper, severely. ‘My children ought to be society enough for a young woman in Bella’s position.’

‘Of course. She would naturally be very fond of them,’ assented the Vicar’s wife. ‘But I was thinking with regard to her marrying; a girl who has nothing to expect from her father ought to marry.’

Mrs. Piper was averse from match-making. She had married well herself, and was rather inclined to regard matrimony as a luxury intended for the favoured few—like a cockade on a coachman’s hat, or a range of glass houses in one’s garden.

‘I hope Bella is not thinking of a husband,’ she said, disapprovingly. ‘For my part, when a young woman begins husband-hunting, I always think her useless for everything else. I should be very sorry to have Elizabeth taught by a governess who was thinking of husbands. The dear child would get ideas, and, with her intelligence——’

Mrs. Dulcimer’s good nature took fright immediately.

‘Oh, I do not believe Bella has ever given a thought to such a thing,’ she exclaimed. ‘She is quite wrapped up in her teaching, and so fond of your dear girls. But I rather think that Mr. Culverhouse admires her very much, and you must allow that it would be a suitable match.’

‘I should have thought Mr. Culverhouse had more sense. Why, he could no more afford to marry than his brother can afford to live at Culverhouse Castle.’

‘He has talent and energy, and is sure to succeed, and with such a well-trained economical wife as Bella——’

‘Well, I am sorry to find that Bella has got marriage and love-making into her head. I shall expect to see a difference in her with the children——’

‘Oh, but I assure you——’

In vain did poor Mrs. Dulcimer protest. Mrs. Piper had a fixed idea that a governess ought to have nothing to do with the tender passion. Had she not turned away Miss Green for no other reason than because that unfortunate young person wrote long letters to a young man in New Zealand, to whom she had been engaged for seven years, and to whom she expected to be engaged for seven years more, before he would be rich enough to marry her?

‘It was such a distraction to her mind, you see, my dear,’ Mrs. Piper told her intimate friends. ‘I couldn’t possibly allow it.’

Mrs. Dulcimer left the Park, after having done her protégée some injury, with the best intentions. From the Park she went to the village, and stopped at Mr. Scratchell’s door.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE SCRATCHELLS AT HOME.

Mr. Scratchell occupied a large red brick house at the beginning of the village street, a house that had once been one of the best, if not the best in Little Yafford, but which, in its present degenerated state, looked a very shabby habitation as compared with the smart Gothic villas of the Great Yafford professional men and tradesmen who had retired into gentility at Little Yafford. It had been built by a wealthy brewer, and still adjoined a thriving brewery. But as the age grew more civilized, the brewer removed his domestic life from the immediate vicinity of his vats and casks to a stuccoed mansion in fifteen acres of meadow land, par excellence Park. There was a good garden behind the substantial roomy old house, and more outbuildings than the Scratchells had any worthy use for—but which made a wilderness or playground for the children, and for Mrs. Scratchell’s poor little family of fowls, which always had a shabby uncombed look, as of neglected poultry, but which laid more eggs than Mrs. Piper’s pampered Dorkings and Cochin Chinas.

Here the Scratchells had lived for the last twenty years, Mr. Scratchell holding his tenement upon a repairing lease, which seemed to mean that he was to grub on in the best way he could in dilapidated premises, and never ask his landlord to do anything for him. Perhaps when the lease ran out there would be complications; but Mr. Scratchell hoped that, being a lawyer himself, he should be a match for any lawyer his landlord might set upon him, and that he should find a loophole whereby to escape the question of dilapidations.

It was a gaunt, dreary-looking house in its present state of decay. The garden was all at the back, and the front of the house came straight upon the village street, an advantage in the eyes of the younger Scratchells, as the few passers-by who enlivened the scene came within half a yard of their inquisitive young noses, which were generally glued against the window-panes in all intervals of leisure.

The Scratchell girls did not go to school. That was a luxury which their father’s limited means could not afford them. They were educated at home by their mother, in that desultory and somewhat spasmodic form which maternal education, where the poor house-mother has a multitude of other duties, is apt to assume.

Taking all things into consideration, it must be allowed that Mrs. Scratchell did her work very well. She turned the four girls into the shabby old schoolroom at eleven o’clock every morning—after they had helped her to make the beds, dust the rooms, and wash the breakfast-things. She set them down to their French exercises or their ciphering, their maps or their English analysis, while she went to the kitchen to see after the dinner, which generally meant to cook it, and at twelve she came into the schoolroom with her huge motherly workbasket—full of stockings to be darned, and under garments to be pieced—some of them arrived at a stage when piecing seemed little short of the miraculous—and sat down to hear her children read history or polite literature in their shrill monotonous voices, while the busy needle never ceased from its labour.

Pinnock’s Goldsmith and darning cotton must have been curiously interwoven in poor Mrs. Scratchell’s mind, and it must have been a little difficult for her to dissociate the embarrassments of Telemachus from the intricacies of her domestic patchwork.

In this wise, however, the young Scratchell girls contrived to get educated, perhaps pretty nearly as well as the general run of girls, at home or abroad. The humble and old-fashioned education which Mrs. Scratchell had received herself she handed down to her daughters. She could not teach them German, or Italian, for she had never learnt those languages. She could not ground them in the Latin tongue, for in her day Latin had been considered an exclusively masculine accomplishment. She could not teach them the use of the globes, for she had no globes; nor natural science, for she scarcely knew what it meant. But she made them plough laboriously through Noel and Chapsal’s French grammar, until they knew it thoroughly. She taught them English, and Roman, and Grecian history till they could have set you right upon the dates and details of any great event you could mention. She made them very familiar with the geography of this globe, and the manners and customs of its inhabitants; and she taught them a good deal about common things, which might or might not be useful to them in after life.

Upon this particular afternoon Mrs. Scratchell and her five daughters were assembled in the schoolroom busied with a task of all-absorbing interest. They were making their winter dresses, and the threadbare carpet was strewed with shreds and patches of dark blue merino, while the somewhat stuffy atmosphere was odorous with glazed lining.

It was a shabby old panelled room, from whose wainscot almost all the paint had been worn and scrubbed away in the progress of years. But though the paint was mostly gone a general drabness remained. Narrow drab moreen curtains hung beside the straight windows—an oblong mahogany table, with those treacherous contrivances called flaps, occupied the centre of the room, and was now covered with bodices, and sleeves, and pockets, and skirts, in various stages of being. There was an old horsehair sofa against the wall, loaded with books, slates, and desks which had been thrust aside to make room for the more agreeable pursuit of dressmaking. There were a dozen chairs of various shapes and make, the odds and ends of a sale-room or a broker’s shop. No ornament or beautification of any kind had ever been attempted in the schoolroom. The apartment was unpretendingly hideous; and yet the Scratchell children were fond of it, and looked back to it in after years as the dearest room in the world. Perhaps the only thing that could be called good in it was the wide old fireplace, with its blue and white Dutch tiles, basket grate, and capacious hobs, which were so convenient for cooking toffy or roasting chestnuts.

Bella was at work with her mother and sisters. She had a natural gift for dressmaking, as she had for many things, and was the general cutter out and contriver, and the family arbiter upon fashion. It was she who decided how the sleeves were to be made, and whether the skirts were to be plain or flounced.

She sat among them this afternoon, her busy scissors crunching and grinding over the table, cutting and slashing with quite a professional ease and audacity.

‘What a correct eye and what a steady hand you have, Bella!’ said her mother, admiringly. ‘It’s quite wonderful.’

‘I’d need have something, mother,’ sighed Bella, ‘as I’ve no money.’

‘True, my dear. There’s a great deal wanted to make up for the loss of that. One feels it every day.’

‘Every day,’ echoed Bella. ‘Why not say every hour, every moment? When doesn’t one feel it? It is a steady gnawing pain, like toothache.’

‘But Providence has made you so bright and clever, dear. That’s a great consolation. There’s Miss Harefield now, I don’t suppose she could make herself a dress.’

‘I doubt if she could thread a needle,’ said Bella. ‘But I’d change places with her any day.’

‘What, Bella! and be almost alone in the world? Without a mother—or sisters—or brothers!’

Bella did not say whether she would have borne this latter loss, but she looked at the four lanky girls in shabby frocks and grubby holland pinafores, dubiously, as if her mind was not quite made up as to their value in the sum of life.

Just then there came a sharp double knock at the street door, and the four girls rushed to the window and glued their noses against the panes, like four small jelly-fishes holding on by suction.

Bella ran across the room and pushed her four sisters on to the floor in a tumbled heap of brown holland and faded green merino.

‘You horrid vulgar creatures!’ she exclaimed to these blessings. ‘Don’t you know that a visitor can see you? Gracious!’ she exclaimed, ‘it’s Mrs. Dulcimer, and in her best bonnet. Run up and change your gown, mother, and do your hair up better. I can go and receive her. I’m tidy.’

Bella was more than tidy. She would have been presentable anywhere, with her shining plaits of fair hair, her fresh pink and white complexion, perfectly fitting black silk dress, and neat collar and ribbon. Bella was a young woman who would have moved heaven and earth for the sake of a good gown, and who knew how to take care of her clothes and make them last twice as long as other people’s—an invaluable wife for a poor curate, surely, as Mrs. Dulcimer thought.

Bella went smiling into the best parlour. It was a very shabby old room to be called best, but it was always kept clean and tidy, and Bella had taken a good deal of pains with it, and had even spent a little of her hardly-earned money to brighten it. The faded chintz was enlivened with starched muslin antimacassars. There was a rustic basket of ferns and flowers in each of the windows, there were a few little bits of Oriental china, the relics of bygone prosperity, on the narrow mantelpiece, there were some water-colour fruit and flower pieces of Bella’s on the walls, neatly framed, and hung with smart blue ribbons, instead of the commonplace picture cord.

Mrs. Dulcimer had taken an approving survey of everything, while waiting for Bella’s appearance.

‘Mamma will be down in a minute,’ said Bella, when they had shaken hands. ‘She has been working at our blue merino dresses, and her hands were all over dye. She is so pleased at the idea of your coming to see her.’

‘It is such a time since I have called on her. I feel quite ashamed. But I have so many calls to make.’

‘Yes, and you are so good to every one. Mamma is so grateful for your kindness to me.’

‘It is nothing, Bella. I only wish I could be kinder. You are such a good industrious girl. I wish I could see you comfortably settled in life.’

Bella blushed and smiled. Mrs. Dulcimer’s mania for match-making was notorious. It was an amiable propensity, but did not always work well.

‘Don’t worry yourself about me, dear Mrs. Dulcimer. I have no wish to get settled. I should be sorry to leave poor mamma. I can help her in so many little ways, you know.’

‘Yes, my dear, I know what an excellent daughter you are. A good daughter will always make a good wife. But in a large family like yours the sooner a girl marries the better. Let me see, now, how many sisters have you?’

‘Four.’

‘Four! good gracious! Five girls in one family! That’s quite dreadful! I can’t see where five husbands are to come from. Not out of Little Yafford, I am afraid.’

‘But, dear Mrs. Dulcimer, we are not all obliged to marry.’

‘My poor child, what else are you to do? There is nothing between that and being governesses.’

‘Then we must all be governesses. I had rather be a tolerably contented governess than a miserable wife.’

‘But you might be a very happy wife—if you marry the man who loves you.’

Bella blushed again, and this time more deeply. Did Mrs. Dulcimer know or suspect anything? Bella’s heart thrilled strangely. To be loved, how sweet it sounded! To have her life all at once transformed to something new and strange, lifted out of this dull level of poverty-stricken monotony, in which it had crept on for all the years she could remember!

‘I must wait till the true lover appears, Mrs. Dulcimer,’ she answered quietly, though the beating of her heart had quickened. ‘I have never met him yet.’

‘Haven’t you, Bella? You may have met him without knowing it. I have an idea that Cyril Culverhouse is very fond of you.’

Now if Bella had heard Mrs. Dulcimer express such an idea in relation to any one but herself, she would have given the notion exactly its just value, which would have been nothing—for it was Mrs. Dulcimer’s peculiar faculty to evolve ideas of this kind from her inner consciousness—but, applied to herself, the notion had a startling effect upon Bella’s nerves and brain.

Could it be? Cyril—her ideal preacher—the man whose earnest eyes had made her tremble strangely, at odd times, when her own eyes met them suddenly. Cyril, the only being who had ever made her feel the littleness of her own views and aspirations, and that, despite all her gifts, she was a very poor creature. That Cyril could care for her—value her—love her—it was too bright a dream! She forgot that he was little better off than herself—that he could do nothing to lift her out of her dull life of aching poverty. She forgot everything, except that it would be the sweetest thing in the world to be loved by him.

‘Indeed, Mrs. Dulcimer, you must be mistaken’, she said, her voice trembling a little. ‘Mr. Culverhouse has not given me a thought—he has never said one word that——’

‘My dear, he is too honourable to say anything until he felt himself in a position to speak plainly, and that would hardly be till he has got a living. But the Church will not be such slow work for him as it is for most young men, you may depend. He has great gifts.’

‘He has indeed,’ sighed Bella.

This idea of a living opened quite a delicious picture before the eye of fancy. Bella saw herself a vicar’s wife—a person of importance in the village—like Mrs. Dulcimer—inhabiting some pretty vicarage, full of old china, and modern furniture, surrounded with smiling lawns and flower-beds, instead of the gooseberry bushes, cabbage rows, and general utilitarianism and untidiness of the Scratchell garden. And with Cyril—her Cyril—for the companion of her days. Imagination could paint no fairer life.

‘I don’t say that anything has been said, my love, even to me,’ said Mrs. Dulcimer. ‘But I am long-sighted in these matters. I can see very far ahead.’

This was true, for Mrs. Dulcimer’s apprehension had often been so far in advance of fact that she had seen inclinations and nascent loves that had never existed—and had sometimes worried the victims of these fancied affections into ill-advised matrimony. Most of Mrs. Dulcimer’s happy couples began, like Benedick and Beatrice, with a little aversion.

Mrs. Scratchell now appeared, smooth as to her hair and shiny as to her complexion, and with an unmistakable appearance of having just changed her gown. She saluted the Vicar’s wife with the old-fashioned curtsey which had been taught her in her boarding-school days, and seemed almost overcome when Mrs. Dulcimer shook hands with her.

‘I’m sure I don’t know how I can thank you for all your goodness to Bella,’ said the grateful mother.

‘Indeed, I want no thanks, Mrs. Scratchell. We are all very fond of Bella at the Vicarage. She is so bright and clever. What a help she must be to you!’

‘She is indeed. I don’t know what we should do without her. She’s the only one of us that can manage her father when he’s out of temper.’

‘What a good wife she would make for a man of limited means!’

‘She would know how to make the most of things,’ answered Mrs. Scratchell, with a sigh; ‘but I really think I’d rather my daughters kept single all their lives than that they should have to cut and contrive as I have had. I’ve not a word to say against poor Scratchell. Poverty tries all our tempers, and his has been more tried than most men’s. He’s a good father, and a good husband, and I’ve as good children as any woman need wish to have; but, for all that, I’d rather my daughters should never marry than that they should marry like me.’

‘Oh, Mrs. Scratchell,’ cried the Vicar’s wife, shocked at this slander against her favourite institution. ‘Surely now, as a wife and mother, you have fulfilled woman’s noblest mission. You ought to be proud of having brought up such a nice family and managed things respectably upon so little.’

‘Perhaps I ought,’ sighed Mrs. Scratchell. ‘But I don’t feel anything, except very tired. I was forty-one last birthday, but I feel as if I were eighty.’

Mrs. Dulcimer did not know what to say. Life had been so easy for her. All good things had fallen unsolicited into her lap. She had never known an ungratified want, except her yearning for a new drawing-room carpet. This glimpse of a pinched, overworked existence came upon her like a revelation.

‘But you must be so proud of your fine family,’ said Mrs. Dulcimer, bent on being cheerful; ‘so many of them—and all well and thriving.’

‘Yes,’ sighed the house-mother, ‘they grow very fast, and they have fine healthy appetites. It’s better to pay the baker than the doctor, as I always say to Mr. Scratchell when he complains, but the bills are very heavy.’

‘Now mind, Bella, I shall expect to see you often at the Vicarage,’ said Mrs. Dulcimer, with her sweetest smile. ‘You are not to wait for Miss Harefield to bring you, but you are to come and see me, you know, in a friendly way—and bring your work. I know you are clever at fancy work.’

‘She is clever at everything,’ said the mother, with a doleful pride. ‘I never knew such hands as Bella’s. She can turn them to anything.’

‘Bring your work of an afternoon then, Bella, when your mother can spare you, and come and sit with me. Mr. Culverhouse often drops in after tea.’

And then with much hand-shaking and cordiality, kindly Mrs. Dulcimer took her leave, and went home happy, her mind glowing with triumphant benevolence, feeling that she had employed her afternoon in a manner that St. Paul himself must have approved.

‘It’s all very well for Clement to talk about charity being a passive virtue,’ she reflected. ‘Passive good nature would never get that girl comfortably married. Five daughters, and the father without a sixpence to give them! Poor dear girls! Husbands must be found for them somehow.’

Bella Scratchell felt curiously fluttered after the Vicar’s wife was gone. The noise of the home tea-table, those rough boys, those boisterous unkempt girls, with hair like horses’ manes, and an uncomfortable habit of stretching across the table for everything they wanted, seemed a shade more trying than usual.

‘Now then, Greedy,’ cried Adolphus, the second boy, to his sister Flora. ‘I would scrape the pot if I was you. Yah!’ looking into an empty marmalade pot. ‘Not a vestige left. I say, Bella, you might stand a pot of marmalade now and then.’

The boys were in the habit of making random demands upon Bella’s private means, but were not often successful.

‘I’m sure you want no temptation to eat bread and butter,’ she said. ‘It would be sheer cruelty to ma.’

What bliss to be away from them all! This noisy circle—the odour of Dorset butter—the poor mother’s worried looks, and frequent getting up to see after this and that—the scolding and disputing—the domestic turmoil.

A lonely old bachelor, looking in through the window at the firelit room, might perchance have envied Mr. Scratchell his healthy young family might have thought that this circle of eager faces, and buzz of voices, meant happiness; yet for Bella home meant anything but happiness. She was heartily tired of it all.

She pictured herself in that ideal vicarage, with the only man she had ever admired for her husband. She was thinking of him all through the confusion of tea-time—the clinking of tea-spoons and rattling of cups—the spilling of tea—an inevitable feature in every Scratchell tea party—the fuss about the kettle, with much argumentation between Mrs. Scratchell and the maid of all work as to whether it boiled or did not boil—the scrambling for crusts, and general squabbling—through all she was thinking of Cyril’s earnest face—hearing his thrilling voice close at her ear.

‘Can it be true?’ she asked herself. ‘Can it be true that he cares for me—ever so little even? Oh, it would be too much—it would be heaven!’

Here Bertie’s cup of hot tea came into collision with his sister’s elbow, foundered and went down, amidst a storm of shrill young voices and maternal expostulation.

CHAPTER IX.

A FLINTY-HEARTED FATHER.

Beatrix walked up and down by the river, till the gray day grew darker and duller, and the first shadows of evening began to show blue behind the gables and chimney stacks and square church tower of Little Yafford. Her heart beat faster as the time went on. Every minute might bring her a summons to the library to hear her father’s decision. Or Cyril would come into the garden to seek her, perhaps. But the light grew grayer—evening was at hand, and there was still no summons.

‘Can he have gone away without seeing me? Cruel,’ she thought.

Miss Scales came running out, with her shawl over her head, full of reproaches about the risk of evening air.

‘Do you know if papa has had any visitors, Miss Scales, sweet?’ asked Beatrix, taking her governess’s arm affectionately.

‘My dear, when does your papa ever have visitors?’

‘Then there hasn’t been any one.’

‘I have been in my own room all the afternoon!’

‘Then you couldn’t have seen any one if they had come,’ said Beatrix. ‘Why didn’t you say so before?’

‘My dear Beatrix, you have not your usual amenity of manner,’ remonstrated the governess.

‘I beg your pardon, dear, but I have such a frightful headache.’

‘If you would only try a seidlitz——’

‘No, it will be better by and by. Let us go in——’

‘You shall have a cup of tea, dear.’

They went in together, and Beatrix pleaded exemption from the formality of dinner, on account of her headache. She went to her room, and threw herself on her sofa, and took up the first book that her hand lighted on, amidst a litter of books and papers on the old-fashioned writing-table.

It was Dante. That melodious language which had been her mother’s native tongue had always been dear to Beatrix, though it was only Miss Scales’ English lips from which she had learned it. Her mother had rarely spoken Italian in her presence. She had tried her best to become an Englishwoman.

She turned over the familiar pages of the ‘Inferno’ till she came to the story of Paolo and Francesca.

‘Perhaps my mother’s history was like that,’ she said. ‘She may never have loved my father. Poor Francesca! And Dante had known her when she was a happy, innocent child. No wonder that he should write of her with infinite pity.’

Her thoughts wandered back to that dream-like time of childhood, in which her mother had been the chief figure in the picture of life. Poor mother! There was some deep sorrow—some inexpressible grief and mystery mixed up with those early years.

Miss Scales brought her some tea, and was full of affectionate fussiness.

‘Dearest, kindest Miss Scales, if you would only go and have your dinner, and leave me quite alone,’ Beatrix entreated. ‘I know that perfect quiet will cure my headache.’

‘I’ll only stop till you have finished your tea, my dear. Oh, by-the-bye, your papa did have a visitor this afternoon. Quite an event, is it not? Mr. Culverhouse called, and was in the library for the best part of an hour, Peacock tells me. I suppose it was about the schools, or the church, or something.’

‘I suppose so,’ said Beatrix.

Thank Heaven, Miss Scales did not suspect anything. Beatrix could bear anything better than people’s sympathy. There was much of her father’s reserve in her nature. She had never made a confidante of Isabella Scratchell, of whom she was so fond.

Miss Scales went away to eat her lonely dinner. That meal was served for the governess and her pupil at half-past five o’clock in the cedar parlour—a pretty old room looking into the garden. Except on Sundays, when there was a dreary make-believe family dinner, Mr. Harefield dined alone at seven o’clock in the spacious dining-room.

It would not be good for his daughter to dine so late, he said; and he could not dine earlier. On this pretext he contrived to secure to himself the solitude which his gloomy soul loved. He was a man who took no pleasure in eating or drinking. He consumed his food in an absent-minded manner, for the most part with an open book beside his plate, and could not have told any one what he had had for dinner half an hour after he had dined.

Left to herself Beatrix lay upon the sofa, broad awake, with her arms folded above her head, still as a statue—waiting for her doom. That hung in some measure upon her father’s decision of to-day. But it was a resolute young soul which stood thus face to face with destiny—a soul capable of desperate things. Every line in the girl’s face told of decision. The firm lips were closely locked, the large dark eyes looked steadfastly forward, as if looking into the future and facing its worst issues.

At eight o’clock there came a gentle tapping at the door.

‘Oh, if you please, miss,’ said the housemaid, ‘master wishes to see you in the library.’

‘It has come,’ thought Beatrix, rising from the sofa. She paused for an instant as she passed the cheval glass to survey herself from head to foot. She was dressed in dark blue cloth, plainly made, fitting her like a riding habit—a close linen collar clasped with a gold button. The tall, full figure had more of womanly pride than girlish grace.

‘Yes,’ she said to herself, ‘I am like my mother. Perhaps that is why he hates me. And yet, if he had not loved her better than anything on earth, why should he be so miserable?’

This was a problem that Beatrix had often tried to solve. The loss which had blighted her father’s life must have been the loss of one deeply loved. Yet Beatrix’s memory of her mother’s last year on earth could recall no evidence of a husband’s love.

Her father was standing with his back to the fire, when she went into the library, just in the same attitude as that in which he had awaited Cyril Culverhouse. He had changed his long gray dressing-gown for a frock coat. That was the only alteration.

There was but one lamp in the room—a large reading lamp with a crimson velvet shade which threw all the light on Mr. Harefield’s table. The rest of the room was in semi-darkness, fitfully illuminated by the wood fire.

Mr. Harefield did not waste time upon any ceremonious preamble.

‘I have had an application for your hand,’ he said, his daughter standing before him, facing him steadily.

‘Yes, papa.’

‘You know of it, I suppose?’

‘Yes, papa.’

‘And you approve of it?’

She hesitated for a moment, remembering her last conversation with Cyril.

‘I am deeply attached to Mr. Culverhouse,’ she said, her voice trembling a little at the daring confession, ‘and he is the only man I will ever marry.’

‘Indeed! That is coming to the point. How old are you, Beatrix?’

‘Nineteen.’

‘And you have made up your mind already that there is but one man upon earth you can love—that you will marry him, and no other?’

‘Yes, papa,’ she answered, looking at him with those dark intense eyes of hers—so like other eyes, long since quenched in eternal night.

‘Yes, papa, I am very sure of that. Fate may be too strong for me—I feel sometimes as if I were born for an evil destiny. I may not marry Cyril, perhaps; but I will never marry any one else.’

‘Do you know that when I am dead—if you do not offend me—you will be a very rich woman?’

‘I have never thought about it, papa.’

‘Think about it now, then. If you marry to please me you will have an estate large enough to make you an important personage in the world. If you marry Cyril Culverhouse you will not have sixpence. I will leave all I have in the world to found an asylum for——’

A coarse word was on his lips, but he checked himself and substituted a euphuism,—

‘An asylum for nameless children.’

‘Papa, I should be sorry to offend you,’ said Beatrix, with a quiet resoluteness that took him by surprise, ‘but the consideration of your wealth would not influence me in the least. I have seen that money cannot bring happiness,’ she went on, unconsciously repeating Cyril’s argument, ‘and I can let the chance of being rich slip by me without a pang. I have quite made up my mind to marry Cyril—to share his poverty, and be his patient, hard-working wife—if he will have me.’

‘You deliberately announce your intention to disobey me!’ cried Mr. Harefield, pale with indignation.

‘You have never given me love. Cyril loves me. Can you expect me to obey you at the sacrifice of that love? Do you think it is reasonable, father?’

‘Ah!’ sighed Christian Harefield, ‘it is in the blood—it is in the blood! It would not be natural for her to love me.’

He paced the room two or three times, through the sombre shadows, leaving Beatrix standing by the hearth. Then he came slowly back, and seated himself in the large arm-chair beside the fire.

He bent over the logs and stirred them into a blaze. The broad yellow light leaped up and filled the room with brightness. The grinning faces in the carved bookcases came to life, the tarnished gilding of the books seemed new again.

‘Now listen to me, Beatrix,’ he said, without looking up from the fire. ‘You complain that I have given you no love. Well, perhaps your complaint is not baseless. The fountain of my affections was poisoned at its spring—years ago. If I had loved you my love would have been baneful. Better that I should lock my heart against you, that you should grow up at my side almost as a stranger, near and yet far off. You have so grown up, and, according to my lights, I have done my duty to you as a father. Now comes the question of obedience. You repudiate my claim to that. I will put the question in another way. I appeal to your self-interest. Mr. Culverhouse loves you, you think. Very probably he does. You are young, handsome, and considering it to his advantage to fall in love with you, he may have found the task easy. But be assured that he loves the heiress better than he loves the woman—that he looks to your fortune as a stepping-stone to his advancement. He is ambitious, no doubt. All these Churchmen are. They assume the religion of humility, and yet languish for power. Every country vicar is at heart a Pope, and believes in his own infallibility. Mr. Culverhouse knows that a rich wife is the shortest cut to a deanery.’

‘Put him to the test,’ cried Beatrix. ‘Let him take me without a sixpence.’

‘Yes, he would do that, believing that time would take the edge off my anger, and that I should end by leaving you mistress of my estates. He would speculate upon the chances of the future, and then when I died and left you nothing, you would have to pay for his disappointment. A life of poverty and complaint, discontent, and upbraiding. Be reasonable, Beatrix. Let the bitter experience of my life govern yours. Great inequality of fortune between husband and wife means that one of the two is dupe or victim. Wait till a suitor approaches you who has advantages to offer equal to those you can give. You are tired of this gloomy home—you want to spread your wings and fly. Be patient for a little while. For your sake I will come out of my shell. I will take you to great cities. You shall see the world, and make your own choice, but make it wisely. This first choice of yours is only a girl’s fancy, and means nothing.’

‘It means life or death, papa,’ she answered, firmly. ‘I shall never change.’

‘And you deliberately refuse to obey me?’

‘Yes, I refuse to sacrifice my happiness at your bidding. If you had loved me it would have been different. Your love would have filled my heart. But my heart was as empty as a desert. I had nothing but the memory of my mother, and that was full of sorrow——’

‘Hush!’ said Christian Harefield. ‘Do not speak of your mother.’

‘Why should I not?’ exclaimed Beatrix, haughtily. ‘She was good, and pure, and noble. My heart tells me that. Nothing you could say against her would shake my faith in her. I love her memory better—better than anything upon this earth—except Cyril.’

She said this softly, and for the first time since she had entered her father’s presence a maidenly blush dyed her face.

‘Go,’ said Christian Harefield, ‘you and I are as likely to agree as fire and water. Go. I have no more to say to you. Take your own course.’

She went to the door without a word, but, with her hand upon the lock, paused, faltered, and came slowly back to the hearth. Unconsciously she repeated the conduct of Desdemona after her rebellious marriage. She knelt at her father’s feet, took his hand, and kissed it.

‘Forgive me for disobeying you,’ she pleaded. ‘The sacrifice you require is too great.’

He answered not a word, but when she had reached the door he said, ‘So long as you are in my house, and under age, I shall insist upon obedience. You are to go no more to the Vicarage—understand that.’

‘Very well, papa.’

CHAPTER X.

TWO LOVE LETTERS.

Proudly as Beatrix had carried herself while she was face to face with her father, her firmness gave way all at once when she left him, and she burst into a flood of tears.

She went upstairs, intending to go straight to her own room. She did not want to exhibit her grief before kindly Miss Scales. She shrank from her governess’s sympathy—would not for worlds have told her secret, or bared her wounds, or allowed Cyril’s affection to be canvassed or criticised. She wanted no one’s sympathy or advice, and had fully made up her mind as to her future course.

‘If he will be steadfast to me I will be true to him,’ she said within herself. ‘I laugh at the thought of poverty if it is to be shared with him.’

In the dimly lighted corridor she stopped suddenly, with a start of surprise. Something had happened which she had never known to occur before. The key was in the lock of her mother’s room,—that sealed chamber, the picture of which was more dimly painted on her memory than a dream of past years—the room she had so languished to see.

Without a thought of whether it were right or wrong she ran to her room at the other end of the corridor, fetched a candle, and went back to her mother’s door.

The door was unlocked. She took out the key, went in, and locked the door inside, to secure herself from interruption.

‘Dear room,’ she said, looking round in the dim light. ‘Yes, I remember it better now—and mamma sitting there in that low chair by the fire—and I lying on that white rug with my toys scattered about. Ah, what happy days! The soft fleecy whiteness used to remind me of snow. And then when I was tired of play mamma used to take me into her lap and sing to me. Oh, how I loved her! No, there is no love like that—no love so sweet, so strong, so holy! Mother, if you could come back to me for a few short years I would give up Cyril. I would sacrifice that newer love for the old one—for the old love was dearer, sweeter, closer, better.’

She flung herself on her knees beside the empty chair, and sobbed out her passionate grief. It seemed to her almost as if there were sympathy in that contact—a kind of sympathy which comforted her soul. To these dumb things which breathed of her mother’s presence she could pour out her sorrow, she could lay bare her heart. No pride restrained her here.

So she remained for a long time, till her passion had almost worn itself out in weeping. Then she rose and looked round the room, and then slowly examined each once familiar object, candle in hand. The dust lay white upon everything, and the spider had spun his gauzy draperies from curtain to curtain.

Yes. Everything was as she had faintly remembered it. There stood the Japanese cabinets, with their rich raised work representing dragons, and birds, and fishes, and golden trees, and golden bridges, and golden temples, all golden on a shining black ground. How often she had stood before one of those cabinets, admiring the strange creatures!

‘Are they all gold when they are alive, mamma?’ she had asked once, ‘and do they swim in black water?’

There stood the frame, with the Berlin wool roses which she had watched slowly creeping into life under her mother’s white hands. She lifted the tissue-paper covering, and looked at the flowers, with awe-stricken eyes. All these empty years had scarcely faded them—and yet the hands that had wrought them were dust.

The centre table was covered with books, and desks, and dainty workbaskets, all the trifles of a woman’s daily life—just as Mrs. Harefield had left them.

Beatrix opened a blotting-book. There was a letter begun in a woman’s hand—her mother’s doubtless. The sight of it thrilled her, for it was the first scrap of her mother’s writing she had seen since she was old enough to distinguish one style of penmanship from another.

The letter was dated in the year of her mother’s death.

‘The Water House, September 10th, 1840.

‘Dear Mrs. Dulcimer,

‘We should have been very pleased to come to you on the 22nd, but Mr. Harefield has made up his mind to leave for Italy on the 18th, so you see it would be impossible. Thanks for your kind advice about little Trix. I agree with you that she is far from strong, and I am happy to tell you that Mr. Harefield has consented to my taking her with me this year. A winter in the South will——’

Here the letter broke off. Mrs. Dulcimer had called, perhaps, and rendered its completion unnecessary. Beatrix could just remember that Mrs. Dulcimer used to call rather often in those days.

The key was in one of the Japanese cabinets. Beatrix unlocked it, and looked inside. There were two rows of shallow drawers, with tarnished silver handles. In the first she opened there was a velvet covered miniature case which Beatrix recognised with a start. It was the one which her mother had taken out of her hand one day.

She opened it and looked at the pictured face exquisitely painted on ivory. It was such a face as one sees in the pictures of the old Italian masters—darkly beautiful—the lips proud and firm—the nostrils exquisitely chiselled—the eyes Italian.

‘Was this Antonio?’ Beatrix asked herself, ‘and who was he? And why was his influence evil in my mother’s life?’

She pursued her examination of the room. What was this small brass inlaid casket on a table between the windows? It was a neat little medicine chest with stoppered bottles. She took them out one by one. They were for the most part empty. But one, labelled laudanum, poison, was three parts full. She put them back into their places and shut down the lid. ‘I wonder whether mamma used to take laudanum, as I have done sometimes, to kill pain?’ she said to herself.

The morning-room opened into the dressing-room, which communicated with the bedroom.

But the door between the morning-room and dressing-room was locked. Beatrix could explore no further.

She unlocked the door, restored the key to its place on the other side, and returned to her own room. She looked at her watch, and found that it was half-past ten. She had been an hour in that chamber of the dead.

She locked the door of her own room, just in time to escape a visitation from Miss Scales, whose gentle tapping sounded on the panel five minutes afterwards.

‘Are you going to bed, dear?’ inquired the duenna.

‘Yes, Miss Scales, love. Good night.’

‘Good night, dear.’

Beatrix stirred the fire. The autumn nights were getting chill and shivery. It seemed as if the river became an embodied dampness at this time of the year, and stole into the house after nightfall, like a spectre.

She took out her desk, and in that firm and almost masculine hand of hers began a letter to Cyril.

‘Dearest,’ she began.

No other name was needed. He was her dearest and only dear.

‘Dearest,—My father has told me his decision. It is just as I said it would be. He will bestow no blessing upon our love. He has sworn to disinherit me if I marry you. He is quite resolute, and will never change his mind, he assures me. Nothing you or I could do would soften him. If you marry me you will marry a pauper. I am to be penniless.

‘Is your mind made up, Cyril? Are you true and steadfast? If so you will find me firm as rock. Poverty has no terrors for me. I would marry you, dearest, if you were a farm labourer with a dozen shillings a week. I would work, drudge, and wash and mend, and be your happy wife. I have told my father as much as this. I have told him that I renounce his money and his lands—that I am ready to be your wife whenever you choose to claim me—that the loss of all he has to leave cannot make me swerve by one hair’s breadth from my purpose.

‘Do you think me bold, Cyril, or unwomanly, for writing thus frankly? If you do please pardon me, as Romeo pardoned Juliet, because I have not “more cunning to be strange.” Write to me, dearest. I am forbidden to go to the Vicarage any more while I remain under my father’s roof; so I have little hope of seeing you. Write and tell me what you wish.

‘Your ever affectionate

‘Beatrix.’

What was Cyril Culverhouse to do on receiving such a letter as this of Beatrix Harefield’s, after his promise to her father that he would hold no further communication with her? To leave such a letter unanswered was impossible to any man. To break his word and answer it in an underhand manner was impossible to Cyril Culverhouse.

The woman he loved declared herself all his own. She held the sacrifice of fortune as a feather weighed against his love. She was ready to be his wife, unfettered, unburdened by the wealth which had never entered into his views or desires. The loss of that wealth would weigh as lightly with him as it did with her. But could he be so selfish as to take this impetuous girl at her word? Could he say to her, ‘Sacrifice all things for my sake, fortune and duty, your father’s estate and your father’s regard. Disobey and defy your father at my bidding?’ Could he, whose mission it was to teach others their duty, so far violate his own?

Cyril told himself that he could not do this thing. He was a man who had built his life upon principle, and though, in this case, passion urged him strongly to do wrong, principle was stronger, and insisted upon his doing right.

He asked advice from no one—not even from his cousin Kenrick, who had found out the secret of his heart.

This is what he wrote to Beatrix within three hours of the delivery of her letter, hours which he had given to deepest thought:—

‘My Best and Dearest,—How can I thank you enough for your noble letter, and for its dear assurance that fortune ranks no higher in your esteem than it does in mine? How can I answer you conscientiously, and with a strict adherence to the hard path of duty—and not seem to answer coldly?

‘If I could answer you as my heart prompts I should say, “Let us begin our life journey at once.” I have no fear of the issue. Were I a fatalist, I should feel myself strong enough to conquer adverse fate, with you by my side. Believing as I do in a Divine goodness governing and guiding all things, I can survey the future with infinite reliance, feeling certain that all things will be well for us if we only cleave to the right.

‘It would not be right, dearest, for me to profit by the impulse of your warm heart, which prompts you to make so large a sacrifice for my sake. You are but just emerging from childhood into womanhood, and you can hardly measure the losses you are at this moment willing to incur. Let us wait a few years, love, and if time and experience confirm your present purpose, most proudly and gladly will I take my darling to my heart, free from the splendid burden of wealth. Let us wait at least till you are of age, and then, if you are still true to your purpose of to-day, you will be justified in choosing for yourself. No father has the right to impose his wishes upon a child where a life’s happiness or misery is at stake, but he has the right to do his uttermost to prevent an unwise choice. Your father has done me the injustice to think me a fortune-hunter. He might be justified in thinking me something less than an honourable man, if I were to take advantage of your guileless nature, which knows not worldly prudence or the thought of change.

‘Love, I dare not write more than this. I dare not let my heart go out to you, as it would, in fondest words. I want to write soberly, wisely, if possible. Wait, dear love, for two little years, and, with God’s help, I shall have won a better position in my profession, a home which, although humble compared with your father’s house, may be not unworthy of a true and loving wife.

‘During those two years of waiting we shall have to live apart. I have promised your father that I will make no attempt to see or communicate with you till after your twenty-first birthday. Even to convey this letter to you I shall have to appeal to his generosity. I shall not break that promise. Dear as my work in Little Yafford has become to me, I shall leave this place as soon as I can hear of an eligible curacy elsewhere. Hitherto my work has been only a labour of love. Henceforward I am a man anxious to succeed in my profession. I do not mean that I am going to sacrifice my Divine calling to the desire to win a home for my sweet wife,—only that I shall, so far as may be justifiable, seek to improve my position.

‘Farewell, dearest. Remember that while I hold myself bound to you, I leave you free; and, if the future should show you a fairer life than that which I can give you, you have but to send me one line, “Cyril, the dream is ended,” and I will submit, as to the will of God.

‘Yours till death,

‘Cyril Culverhouse.’

This letter Cyril enclosed in an envelope, addressed to Mr. Harefield, with the following note:—

‘Dear Sir,—I promised not to write to your daughter until after her twenty-first birthday. She has written to me, and I cannot leave her letter unanswered. I must appeal to your kindness therefore to give her the enclosed letter, read or unread, as it may please you. There is not a word in it that I should blush for you to read, yet I shall be grateful if you deliver the letter unread. I cannot think that you will refuse to make this concession, as, if you do so, you will place me in the position of having received a noble and self-sacrificing letter from your daughter, and of leaving it wholly unacknowledged.

‘Your obedient servant,

‘Cyril Culverhouse.’

CHAPTER XI.

BELLA IN SEARCH OF A MISSION.

While taking charge of Bella Scratchell’s destiny, Mrs. Dulcimer’s busy mind had not forgotten the interests of her older protégé, Sir Kenrick Culverhouse, whose mortgaged estate was to be set free by means of Beatrix Harefield’s fortune. She was quite pleased with herself for the brilliant idea of disposing comfortably of Cyril by handing him over to Miss Scratchell, and thus leaving Sir Kenrick without a rival in the field.

‘That foolish husband of mine would have been trying to make a match between Beatrix and his favourite Cyril,’ she said to herself. ‘But if I can put it into Cyril’s head that Bella Scratchell is very fond of him, he is almost sure to fall over head and ears in love with her. Men always do. I have not forgotten Benedick and Beatrice.’

All Mrs. Dulcimer’s good intents with regard to Sir Kenrick and the mortgages were suddenly frustrated by a letter from Beatrix, which at once surprised and puzzled her.

‘Dearest Mrs. Dulcimer,—My father has forbidden me to visit your pleasant house any more. I am to have no more happy hours in dear Mr. Dulcimer’s library, or with you in your pretty garden. I cannot tell you the reason of his harsh conduct. It is nothing that concerns you or Mr. Dulcimer. It is for a fault of my own that I am henceforward denied the happiness I found in your friendship and society.

‘Pray think of me kindly, and remember that I shall be always, as long as I live,

‘Your grateful and affectionate

‘Beatrix.’

Here was a dead lock. Poor Kenrick’s hopes were nipped in the bud. Happily Kenrick himself had not yet begun to hope. It was Mrs. Dulcimer who was disappointed. She would have abandoned herself to despair if she had not been provided with that other scheme in favour of Cyril and Bella,—a smaller business, but one that served to occupy her mind. After Mrs. Dulcimer’s visit to the Scratchell domicile, Bella came very often to the Vicarage, carrying her neat little leather work-bag, and spending the afternoon in a friendly way. If she did not come of her own accord, Mrs. Dulcimer would even go the length of sending Rebecca, or that useful lad who was a boot, knife, and garden boy in the morning, and a page in the afternoon, to fetch her. The Vicar’s wife was glad to have a companion who appreciated her conversation better than the absent-minded Vicar, whose eyes were always on his books, and whose answers were too obviously mechanical. So it happened that, through this skilful contriving of Mrs. Dulcimer’s, Bella found herself very often in Cyril’s society. Cyril was very fond of Mr. Dulcimer, and had a good deal of parish work to discuss with him. This brought him to the Vicarage nearly every evening. He used to drop in at the fag end of the tea—a substantial meal which was tea and supper combined—and take his place by Mrs. Dulcimer, at a corner of the tray, just in time for the last decent cup of tea, as the Vicar’s wife would remark plaintively.

‘Why don’t you come at seven o’clock, and sit down with us in a sociable manner,’ she complained, ‘instead of coming in when the teapot is just exhausted? Bella has been quite anxious about you. “I’m sure Mr. Culverhouse over-fatigues himself in his devotion to his parish work,” she said just now.’

Bella blushed, and turned her pretty blue eyes shyly upon the curate.

‘And I am sure you do,’ she said. ‘It’s quite dreadful. You will have a fever or something. You are so careless about your health.’

Cyril saw neither the blush nor the shy look in the soft blue eyes. Bella’s eyes wore always that soft look in company, but they could harden and assume a much keener gaze during the everyday business of life.

‘I never was ill in my life,’ said Cyril, in a provokingly matter-of-fact tone, not in the least touched by this feminine interest in his welfare.

It was very aggravating, but Benedick was so at first, Mrs. Dulcimer remembered.

‘How much I miss Beatrix Harefield!’ said the Vicar. ‘There is something original about that girl which always interested me—and then she has such a mind to appreciate books. I never saw so young a creature fasten as she does on a great book. She seems to have an instinct which always leads her to the best.’

‘She is a noble creature,’ said Cyril, quietly.

‘What a wife she would have made for your cousin!’ exclaimed Mrs. Dulcimer, too eager to be able to mask her batteries altogether.

‘She would make a noble wife—for any man,’ assented Cyril.

‘Of course, but she and your cousin seemed so peculiarly suited to each other. There is something about both of them so much above the common herd—a je ne sais quoi—a patrician air—an aristocratic way of thinking. And then, with such a fortune as Miss Harefield’s, your cousin’s position——’

‘Pray do not let Miss Harefield’s fortune enter into the question,’ cried Cyril, impatiently. ‘Kenrick is not a fortune-hunter, and Miss Harefield is far too noble a woman for one to tolerate the idea of her being married for her money.’

‘My dear Cyril, I never had such an idea. You need not take me up so sharply. Kenrick a fortune-hunter!—of course not. But where these things combine——However we need not dispute about it. That wretched Mr. Harefield is resolved to immure his daughter in that dreary old house of his. She is as badly off as a princess in a fairy tale.’

‘Worse,’ said Bella, ‘for there are no adventurous princes in these degenerate days.’

‘How does she bear this cruel treatment?’ asked Cyril, looking at Bella for the first time, since he had shaken hands with her on arriving. ‘You see her often, don’t you, Miss Scratchell?’

‘Two or three times a week. But she is so reserved—even with me, though we are such old friends. I never quite know what she thinks or feels. She is all that is nice—and I am devotedly attached to her—but she never treats me with the same frankness I show to her. She has looked unhappy since Mr. Harefield put a stop to her visits here—but she never complains.’

‘I should call at the Water House,’ said Mrs. Dulcimer, ‘for I long to see the dear girl; but I really cannot face that dreadful Mr. Harefield; and, as he has forbidden Beatrix to come here, I dare say he would not allow her to see me. I wonder you are allowed to visit her, Bella.’

‘Oh,’ said Bella, ‘I don’t count. I am only admitted as a humble companion. Mr. Harefield thinks no more of me than of one of the servants.’

Tea was over by this time, and the family had retired to the library, which was Mr. Dulcimer’s favourite evening room. There he had his pet chair, his reading table and lamp, and could take up a book, or lay it down as he pleased. Even the backs of his books were dear to him. In his idler moments he would lean back in his chair and gaze at them dreamily, in a rapture of content. To him those bindings of various hues, some sober, some gorgeous, were as familiar faces. There was Burton yonder, in calf antique, the Oxford edition—there Southey’s ‘Doctor,’ in crimson morocco—there the old dramatists in brown and gold. Anon came a solid block of histories, from Herodotus to Guizot.

Mrs. Dulcimer established herself at her work table, with Bella by her side. The curate seated himself by his Vicar and began to talk of the parish. In her heart Bella hated that parish talk—the rheumatic old women—the sick children—men who were out of work or down with fever—the sufferers—the sinners—the cases of all kinds that needed help.

‘If I were a man I would rather be a chimneysweep than a clergyman,’ she thought. ‘One might get to like sooty chimneys, in time; but I am sure I could never get to like poor people.’

And yet at that moment Bella was contemplating a step which would bring her into very close contact with the poor of Little Yafford.

It was a quiet humdrum evening, enlivened only by Mrs. Dulcimer’s small talk about her neighbours or her needlework, and the indistinct murmurs of those two men on the other side of the wide old hearth. But to Bella it was infinitely more agreeable than the noisy evenings at home—the father’s grumblings and growlings—the squabblings and snappings of boys and girls—the house-mother’s moaning about the maid-of-all-work’s misdoings. It was pleasant to sit in this pretty room, lined with many-coloured volumes, all kept with an exquisite neatness, which was a feature in Mr. Dulcimer’s love of books. The glow of the fire, the subdued radiance of the lamps, the rich dark red of the curtains, made a warm brightness unknown in those bare rooms at home. And every now and then Bella’s blue eyes shot a glance at the curate’s earnest face—or, when he was most occupied, dwelt upon it admiringly for a few moments.

‘Ten o’clock,’ exclaimed Mrs. Dulcimer, as the skeleton clock on the chimney-piece chimed the hour. ‘I wouldn’t make your poor mother uneasy for the world, Bella dear—Cyril, I know you’ll be kind enough to see Bella safe home. You pass her door, you know.’

Mr. Culverhouse knew it perfectly.

‘I shall be very happy,’ he said kindly.

He looked with favour on Bella—as a harmless little thing, and Beatrix’s friend.

Bella slipped away, beaming with smiles, to put on her bonnet. ‘That girl contrives to look well in everything she wears,’ said Mrs. Dulcimer. ‘Isn’t she pretty?’

As this was directly addressed to Cyril, he felt himself compelled to answer.

‘Well, yes,’ he deliberated. ‘I suppose she is the kind of little person usually called pretty. Pink and white prettiness.’

‘Pink and white!’ cried Mrs. Dulcimer, ‘you might say as much as that of a wax doll. Bella’s complexion is as delicate as Dresden china.’

‘Don’t be angry with me, Mrs. Dulcimer, but I must confess I hate Dresden china,’ said Cyril, laughing. ‘But I like Miss Scratchell,’ he added hastily, ‘because she seems good and amiable. She must have a hard life with all those brothers and sisters.’

‘A hard life,’ echoed Mrs. Dulcimer. ‘Ah, you don’t know what an angel that girl is in her mother’s house. She does everything—cuts out her sisters dresses even—and with such an eye for fashion.’

‘I can’t fancy an angel cutting out dresses, or having an eye for fashion.’

‘For shame, Cyril! You young men can’t appreciate domestic virtues. You would think more of her if I told you that she wanted to go into a convent, or to chop somebody’s head off, like Judith. That girl will make a perfect wife.’

‘I have no doubt she will. And I dare say you have already decided on the happy man who is to be her husband,’ replied Cyril, innocently.

Mrs. Dulcimer actually blushed.

Bella came back in her neat little bonnet, and comfortable shepherd’s plaid shawl. Those were days in which women still wore bonnets and shawls. She looked the picture of sweetness and innocence in that cottage bonnet, tied under her pretty little chin, and surrounding her face like a halo.

‘I am so sorry to trouble you,’ she said, as she walked away from the Vicarage, with her hand on Cyril’s arm.

‘It is not the least trouble, but a pleasure to be of use to you.’

‘You are much too good. But I am going to be really troublesome. I want to make you my father confessor.’

‘About the husband Mrs. Dulcimer has in view,’ thought Cyril, expecting to be made adviser in a love affair.

‘Indeed,’ he said kindly. ‘I am sure you can have nothing very appalling to confess. And if my advice can be of any use to you it is entirely at your service.’

‘How kind you are!’ exclaimed Bella. ‘I wonder sometimes that you can find so much kindness for every one—that you can sympathize with so many—that you are never worn out or impatient, or——’

‘I should be very unworthy of my vocation if I could be so easily wearied,’ said Cyril, stopping this discursive gush of laudation. ‘But I am waiting to hear your confession.’

‘I hardly know how to begin,’ faltered Bella. ‘But—yes. I must say so. Your sermons have awakened my conscience. I think it must have been cold and dead till you came to us. But you have taught me to consider things more deeply. I see what an empty and useless life I am leading——’

‘Why, Mrs. Dulcimer has just been praising your usefulness,’ said Cyril, kindly, a kindness that fluttered Bella’s heart with baseless hopes. ‘She has been telling me how much you do for your mother and sisters.’

‘Oh yes,’ replied Bella, carelessly, ‘of course I try to be useful at home. I work for my own family. But that is such an obvious duty, and there is a pleasure in doing those things that is almost self-indulgence.’

What a different story Adolphus and Bertie could have told about Bella’s black looks when she had to sew on buttons for them!

‘What I should like would be to do some good for the poor, those wretched creatures for whom you do so much. My mornings are all occupied in teaching—but I have my afternoons to myself,—and I think I could spare three afternoons a week, if you would show me how I could be useful—in visiting and reading, or teaching the children.’

‘You are very good,’ said Cyril, thoughtfully, ‘and I like you for having such a thought. But I really don’t know what to say. I have several kind ladies who help me.’

‘Who run after you, you should say,’ thought Bella, savagely. ‘Forward minxes.’

‘And really I hesitate at the idea of withdrawing you from a home in which you are so useful. For after all, your mother, with her numerous family, has as much need of sympathy——’

‘As those horrid rheumatic old women,’ thought Bella. ‘I should think so, indeed.’

‘In short, my dear Miss Scratchell, your present life seems to me so usefully and wisely employed, that I can hardly bring myself to propose any alteration.’

‘Perhaps you think that I should be of no use in the parish work,’ suggested Bella.

‘Believe me, no. Indeed, I think, with your taste and handiness, and industrious habits, you might be of much use. The poor are often sadly deficient in taste and neatness, and the power to make the best of things. If you could go among the younger people, and show them how to be neat and tasteful in their homes, and in their dress, to make the best of their small resources, to cultivate the beauty of cleanliness and tidiness—if you could show them how much beauty there is to be got out of the simplest things—in a word, if you could elevate their taste——’ said Mr. Culverhouse, with vague yearnings after sweetness and light. ‘Yes, I am sure you could be useful, as an apostle of the beautiful.’

Bella’s face crimsoned with a happy blush. Her whole being thrilled with triumph. She took this as a compliment to herself. He thought her beautiful. Mrs. Dulcimer was right. He loved her, and in good time would tell her of his love.

‘Tell me where to go, and what to do,’ she said, in a voice that trembled with joyful feeling.

‘I will make out a list of people. I shall not send you among the very poor, or to those who would pester you for money. I will send you into homes where there are young people, where sympathy and kindly interest in small things will be of use.’

‘A thousand thanks,’ cried Bella; ‘I shall feel so much happier when I know that I have some small share in the work you do so nobly. Here we are at home. Will you come in and see papa?’

She devoutly hoped that he would decline, knowing too well the general untidiness of home at this hour.

‘Not to-night; it is too late. But I will call in a day or two.’

Bertie opened the door, keeping himself wedged behind it, as if it had been opened by a supernatural power.

‘Good night,’ said Bella.

‘Good night,’ said the curate, with a kindness which Bella mistook for affection.

‘Why, Bella, what have you been painting your cheeks with?’ cried Adolphus, when Miss Scratchell entered the family parlour, where the solicitor was sitting by the fire, reading one of the county papers—about the only literature with which he ever recreated his mind—while poor Mrs. Scratchell sighed over a basket of stockings, mostly past mending, or requiring a miracle of ingenuity in the mender. It was a miserable home to come back to, Bella thought; and again that vision of an ideal parsonage arose before her mental eye—a paradise of roses and rosebud chintz, Venetian blinds, and a pony chaise. The fulfilment of that dream seemed nearer to her to-night than when first Mrs. Dulcimer conjured up the delightful picture.

‘He seemed pleased with my offer to visit his tiresome poor people,’ thought Bella, as she brushed her soft auburn locks. ‘It will bring us more together, perhaps; and, if he really cares for me, that will please him.’

CHAPTER XII.

‘OH, THINK’ST THOU WE SHALL EVER MEET AGAIN?’

Bella’s hopes were realized insomuch that her offer to visit his cottagers certainly did bring her more directly in contact with Mr. Culverhouse than she had ever been yet. From that hour Cyril became friendly and confidential—he had found some one besides the Vicar and Mrs. Dulcimer to whom he could talk about his poor parishioners, their wants, their virtues, and their vices. He found Bella full of sympathy. She took up her new work with ardour. She made friends wherever she went. His people were full of her praises. Perhaps, if Cyril’s heart had been free, he might have obliged Mrs. Dulcimer by falling in love with her latest protégée. There was something so nice about Bella Scratchell—a winning softness, a gentle submission to other people, a kittenish sleekness and grace, accompanied with all a petted kitten’s caressing ways.

‘That girl has really a remarkable sweetness of character,’ said Cyril, who, like most young men fresh from the university, fancied he understood mankind.

He praised Isabella warmly to Mrs. Dulcimer, and thereby stimulated that lady’s efforts.

‘How clever it was of you to propose to visit the poor!’ said the Vicar’s wife to Bella, approvingly. ‘Just the very thing to please him.’

‘Oh, dear Mrs. Dulcimer, I hope you don’t think I did it on that account,’ cried Bella, with a shocked look. ‘It is a real pleasure to me to be of some little use. When I see how good you and Mr. Dulcimer are——’

‘Oh, my dear, I’m afraid I don’t go among the poor as much as I ought. Anxious as I am to do good, I don’t get on with them as well as Clement does. I can’t help telling them when I see things going wrong, and trying to set them in the right way. And they resent that. One must look on and smile as if everything was right—dirt—muddle—extravagance—everything. It is too trying for any one with an energetic temper. I’m sure only the other day I said to Maria Bowes—whom I’ve known all my life—“If I were you, Maria, I’d try to have your keeping-room a little neater—and a few flowers in the window—and the hearth always swept up. It would be so much nicer for Bowes when he comes home from his work.” “I dare say I should have it so if I’d three women-servants, and a boy to clean up after them,” she answered, quite impertinently, “and, if my keeping-room wasn’t kitchen and chamber too.” “Do you mean to say that I keep too many servants, Maria?” I said. “No, ma’am,” she answered, “but I mean that gentlefolks can’t tell how difficult poor folks find it to cook a bit of victuals, and keep their children from getting ragged, without fiddle-faddling with cleaning up a place that’s no sooner cleaned than it’s mucked again.”’

‘I can pity her, poor wretch,’ said Bella, ‘for it’s like that with us at home, though we make believe to think ourselves gentlefolks. It’s as much as mother can do to keep things together anyhow; and every Saturday night is a struggle to get the children’s clothes decent for Sunday. Mother and I often sit up till after twelve o’clock, sewing on buttons, and darning stockings.’

‘Ah, what a wife you will make, Bella!’ exclaimed Mrs. Dulcimer, as if a wife’s one duty were the repair of her husband’s garments.

The woods were growing browner, the moorland grayer. The mists of chill November crept up from the valley, and hung upon the hill-side. The river was half hidden under a silvery veil, on those dim November afternoons. An autumnal tranquillity hung over the sombre old Water House. The dahlias and hollyhocks were dead, the chrysanthemums were fading—autumn primroses showed pale in quiet nooks of the garden, and along by the old-fashioned borders stole the welcome odour of late violets.

How often Cyril Culverhouse lingered on the old Roman bridge to look at the house which held the one woman he loved! The entrance tower and a couple of fine old yew trees hid the river walk from him, or he might have seen Beatrix pacing slowly up and down in melancholy solitude.

She had not answered his letter, but he had received a brief note from Mr. Harefield.

‘Sir,—I have delivered your letter to my daughter unread. I hope the next two years will bring her wisdom.

‘Yours obediently,

‘Christian Harefield.’

Cyril had questioned Bella Scratchell more than once about her friend, without betraying the warmth of his interest in Beatrix.

‘Yes, she is very dull, poor thing,’ said Bella. ‘I am more sorry for her than I can say. I go there as often as I can, and do what I can to cheer her. But Beatrix was never a cheerful girl, you know, and she gets graver and more silent every day. Miss Scales is quite anxious about her, and wants her to take bark.’

‘I doubt if bark is a cure for an unhappy home,’ said Cyril.

‘No—if you call her home unhappy. But really she has everything a girl could wish. Handsome old rooms to herself—no disorder—no noisy brothers upsetting things. She has her books—and a governess who adores her—a fine old garden beautifully kept—a pony carriage—a horse to ride.’

‘Unfortunately those things won’t make youth happy,’ answered the curate: ‘they might be sufficient for happiness at the end of life; they are not enough for it at the beginning.’

‘I know that life is a very different thing without them,’ sighed Bella.

‘Would you change places with Miss Harefield?’ asked Cyril.

Bella blushed and cast down her eyes.

‘No,’ she said softly.

She meant that she would not barter her hope of Cyril’s love for the advantages of Beatrix Harefield’s position, though she had envied those advantages ever since the childish days in which she first became Miss Harefield’s playfellow.

One afternoon, towards the close of November, Cyril was returning from a tramp across the moor. He had been to a distant village to see the ailing married daughter of one of his parishioners, who had fancied that a visit from the kind curate would do her sick daughter more good than ‘doctor’s stuff.’ It was a clear afternoon, a yellow sunset brightening the western horizon. This long lonely walk had given him much time for thought, and he had been thinking of Beatrix all the way. She was so much in his thoughts that, although he had had no hope of meeting her, it seemed scarcely strange to him when he heard the muffled sound of hoofs upon the short grass, and looking round saw her riding towards him at a fast canter.

What was he to do? He had promised to hold himself aloof from her. He was neither to see nor write to her during the two years of probation. He had made up his mind that she would pass him at that flying pace, that he would see the slim figure—erect in the saddle, firmly seated as an Arab on his loosely held courser—flash by him like a vision of pride and beauty, and be gone. He stood bare-headed to see her pass, expecting to receive no more notice than a bow, or doubtful even whether she would see him, when she pulled her horse almost on his haunches, wheeled round, and met him face to face.

‘How lucky!’ she cried, flushing with delight. ‘I have been dying to see you. I thought I could not be mistaken, when I saw your figure in the distance, and I rode after you.’

She slipped lightly out of the saddle, and stood beside him, bridle in hand, the petted horse rubbing his velvet nose against her shoulder.

‘William is half a mile behind,’ she said. ‘He’s on one of papa’s old hunters. Don’t you hear him?’

A distant noise, like the puffing of a steam-engine, announced the groom’s approach.

‘Cyril,’ cried Beatrix, ‘are you as glad to see me as I am to see you?’

‘It is more than gladness that I feel, dear,’ he answered, clasping her hands and looking earnestly at the expressive face, which had faded to a sickly pallor after the flush of joy, ‘but, my dearest, how ill you are looking, how changed——’

‘Oh, I have been miserable,’ she said, impetuously, ‘simply miserable. I miss you every day in the week, every hour in the day. I did not see you very often, did I? And yet, now that I am forbidden to go to the Vicarage, it seems as if my life had been spent in your society. Oh, you have work to do, you have noble ideas to fill your mind! How can you tell the blankness of a woman’s life, parted from all she loves?’

‘My darling, it is not for life; it is only for a little while.’

‘A little while!’ she cried, impatiently. ‘A day is an age when one is miserable. I wake every morning, oh so early! and see the dreary gray light, and say to myself, “What does it matter? Night and day are alike to me. I shall not see him.” Cyril, why did you write me that cruel letter?’

The groom had ridden up by this time on his roaring hunter, and was standing at a respectful distance, wondering what his young mistress could have to say to the curate, and why she had dismounted in order to say it.

‘My own love, how could I write otherwise? I promised your father that for two years I would respect his desires, that I would counsel you to no act of disobedience till you were old enough to take the full measure of your acts—till time had changed impulse into conviction. How could I have written otherwise than as I did?’

‘You could have said, “Defy your father as I do, laugh to scorn the loss of fortune, as I do. Be my wife. We shall be very poor, perhaps, for the first few years. But Heaven will take care of us as the ravens cared for Elijah.” That is how you ought to have written to me.’

He was sorely tempted by her—tempted to take her to his heart that moment, to rain kisses on the sweet pale face that he had never kissed—to mount her on her lively young bay horse, and steal the groom’s hunter for himself, and ride off to the Scottish border with her, and be married by the unlearned priest of Gretna, who was still plying his profitable trade. Never was man more tempted. But he had given his promise, and meant to keep it.

‘Two years hence, my dearest, please God, I will have a home for you that shall not mean absolute poverty. I cannot break my word, love. We must wait till you are one-and-twenty. It is not a long time.’

‘It would not seem long if my father had been reasonable—if he had not forbidden me to see you, or write to you. Cyril,’ she said, looking at him with sudden intensity, ‘is it a sin to wish for the death of any one?’

‘My dear one, you must know that it is—a deadly sin: “Whosoever hateth his brother is a murderer.”’

‘I do not hate my father; but sometimes I find myself thinking of what would happen if he were to die. I should be free—rich. I could give you my fortune—you could lavish it all on acts of charity and beneficence. We would live like poor people. We would devote our lives to doing good. We would show the world how a parish priest and his wife ought to live.’

‘Beatrix, pray continually against wicked thoughts. There could be no deadlier sin than to desire your father’s death. God forbid that you should fall into it! I have never sighed for wealth—nor do I believe that a man’s opportunities of doing good depend upon the length of his purse. For one man who will find will and energy, patience and perseverance, to help his fellow-men, there are a hundred ready to give their money. No, dear love, we can be happy without your father’s wealth. We should be no happier for his death. We have but to be true to each other, and all will be well.’

The groom came up to remind his mistress that the short day was closing, and that the moorland road was dangerous after dark.

‘God bless you, dearest, and good-bye,’ said Cyril.

‘Oh, why are you in such haste to get rid of me?’ she cried, impatiently, in French, the groom standing close by, ready to lift her on to her horse. ‘It may be ages before we meet again. You talked in that cruel letter of leaving Little Yafford. When is that to be?’

‘I have taken no step yet. This place is dear to me. But I shall leave soon after Christmas, if I can do so without inconvenience to the Vicar.’

‘I shall feel just a shade more miserable when you are gone,’ said Beatrix.

She put her slim foot upon William’s broad palm, and sprang lightly into her saddle.

Cyril watched her as she rode slowly down the hill, looking back at him now and then, forlornly, as from the vessel that was carrying her into exile. His heart bled for her, but the idea that she had calculated the possibilities that hung upon her father’s death—that she had even sinned so deeply as to wish him dead—haunted him painfully.

Was there a strain of hardness in this impetuous nature—a flaw in this gem which he had hitherto counted peerless? Well, she was not perfect, perhaps. His creed taught him that there was no soul so pure but on its virgin whiteness showed some dark spot of sin. And she had been hardly treated—held at arm’s length by her father’s coldness. She had been reared in a home unsanctified by affection.

He pleaded for her, and excused her in his own mind, and was full of sorrow for her.

But for him, as she had said, life was full of interest and action. For him two years seemed a little while.

CHAPTER XIII.

SIR KENRICK’S ANCESTRAL HOME.

Sir Kenrick Culverhouse had gone to Hampshire to look at the old domain. He had plenty of friends in the neighbourhood of Culverhouse, who would have been glad to give him hospitality, but he preferred the less luxurious accommodation of his own house, which was maintained by a couple of faithful old servants, very much in the style of the Master of Ravenswood’s immortal ménage at Wolf’s Craig. The old butler was not so amusing or so enthusiastic as Caleb Balderstone; but he was every whit as faithful, and preferred his board wages and bacon dumplings, in the halls of the good old race, to those fleshpots of Egypt which he might perchance have found in the service of some mushroom gentleman or commercial magnate newly established in the neighbourhood.

People had told Kenrick that he ought to let Culverhouse Castle, and that he might add considerably to his income by so doing. But Kenrick repudiated the idea of an income so obtained. To allow purse-proud city people to come and criticise those old familiar rooms, and make rude remarks upon the shabbiness of the furniture—to have some newly-made country squire, whose beginnings were on the Stock Exchange, airing his unaccustomed grandeur in the rooms where meek Lady Culverhouse had lived her tranquil unoffending life—no; Kenrick would have starved rather than sanction such a desecration. His mother’s gentle shadow still occupied the rooms she had loved. He would not have that peaceful ghost scared away by horsey young ladies or billiard-playing young men.

At a cost of about a hundred and fifty pounds a year—nearly half his small income—Kenrick contrived to have the place kept decently; the gardens free from weeds and ruin; the empty stables protected from wind and rain; the house preserved from actual decay. And the place was ready to receive him when he was able to come home, were it but for a single night. This, in Kenrick’s mind, was much.

Love of his birthplace, and pride of his race, were the strongest points in Kenrick’s character; and Culverhouse was assuredly a home which a man with any sense of the beautiful might be pardoned for loving to enthusiasm. It had been a fortress in those early days when the Danish invader was marking his conquering course along the south-western coast with the blaze of burning villages. It had been an abbey before the Reformation, and much that belonged to its monastic period still remained. Some portions had been converted to secular uses, other parts had been preserved in what might be called a state of substantial ruin. And this mixture of ecclesiastical ruins and Tudor dwelling-house made a most picturesque and romantic whole. The massive outer wall of the cloistered quadrangle still remained, but where the cloisters had been was now the rose garden—a fair expanse of velvet turf, intersected with alleys of roses. The chapel door stood in all its early English purity of line and moulding, but the chapel had given place to a sunny enclosure, bounded by hedges of honeysuckle and sweet-briar, a garden in which old-fashioned flowers grew luxuriantly in prim box-edged beds.

The house was one of the handsomest in the county. Much too good for a decayed race, old Sir Kenrick had always said; but young Sir Kenrick held it as in no wise too good for him. He would not have sold it for half a million, had he been free to sell it. The situation was perfect. It stood in a fertile green valley, on the bank of a river which, insignificant elsewhere, widened here to a noble reach of water, and curved lovingly round the velvet slopes of the lawn. A long wooden bridge spanned the river just beyond the old Gothic gateway of the castle, and communicated with the village of Culverhouse, in which a population of a hundred and eighty souls fancied itself a world. Kenrick loved the place—castle, village, river—low-lying water meadows—ancient avenues—fair green field where the foundations of the abbey had been marked out with rows of stones—a stone for each pillar in nave and aisles—chancel and apse—he loved all these things with a love that was almost a passion. His heart thrilled within him when he came back to the familiar scene after a year or more of exile. His nature, not too warm elsewhere, warmed to the old goodies and gaffers of Culverhouse village with an unalterable tenderness. Poor as he was, he had always stray sixpences and shillings in his waistcoat pocket to give these ancient rustics, for beer, or tea, or snuff. He could listen to their stories of rheumatics and other afflictions with infinite patience. Their very dialect was dear to him.

If Kenrick had lived in the Middle Ages, and been exposed to visible contact with the powers of darkness, Mephistopheles would have assuredly baited his hook with the Culverhouse estate.

‘Here are the money-bags,’ he would have said; ‘sign me this bond, and Culverhouse is yours, free of the mortgages that now degrade and humiliate your race. For twenty years you may reign securely in the halls of your ancestors—and then——’

Perhaps Kenrick might have had the force of mind to refuse so frankly diabolical a bargain, but when Mephistopheles assumed the amiable countenance of Selina Dulcimer, and whispered in his ear, ‘Marry Beatrix Harefield, and let her fortune revive the glory of your race,’ the young man was sorely tempted.

He had promised his cousin Cyril that he would not attempt to become his rival, but he did not know how far Cyril’s love affair had gone. He had no idea that Beatrix had already made her choice, irrevocably, and was ready to sacrifice fortune and her father’s favour for her lover.

Kenrick was not in love with Beatrix Harefield, in spite of all those hints and innuendos wherewith Mrs. Dulcimer had artfully striven to kindle the fire of passion in his heart. He was not in love with her, but he admired her beyond any woman he had ever met, and he could but remember that her fortune would give him the desire of his heart. He was above the meanness of marrying for money. He would not have sold himself to a woman he disliked or despised, any more than he would have sold himself to Satan. He would have accounted one bargain as base as the other. But he would have been very glad to marry a woman with money, provided he could think her the first of women, and worthy to rule in the halls of his race. That he should love her was a secondary necessity. Sir Kenrick was not a young man who considered loving and being beloved essential to the happiness of life. Nature had made him of colder stuff than his cousin Cyril. He could do very well without love, but existence could hardly be tolerable to him without Culverhouse Castle.

He thought of Beatrix Harefield as he paced the long tapestried saloon on the evening of his arrival. He had ordered a fire to be lighted here, though old Mrs. Mopson, the major-domo’s wife, had strongly recommended him to sit in the library, or his mother’s morning-room.

‘You’ll be a deal snuggerer than in that there big room, Sir Kenrick,’ she urged. ‘I don’t say it’s damp, for I opens the windows every fine morning—but it’s awful chill, and it’d take a’most a stack of logs to warm it.’

‘Never mind the chilliness, Betty,’ said Kenrick, ‘I want to sit in the saloon. It’s a treat to see the dear old room again after three years’ absence.’

‘Ah,’ said Betty, ‘there ain’t another room in Hampshire ekal to it,’ firmly convinced that Hampshire was the world, or at any rate all the world that was civilized and worth living in. Once, when somebody asked Betty Mopson if she had ever been so far as London, she replied, ‘No, thank God, I’m no furriner.’

So Betty lighted a pile of logs on the open hearth, and put a pair of candles on the table near the fire, and wheeled a tapestried arm-chair beside it, and placed Sir Kenrick’s slippers comfortably in front of the fender—so that in spite of its long disuse the room had a homelike aspect when he came to it after his homely dinner. By this dim light the room looked lovely—all its shabbiness hidden—all its beauties of form and colour intensified—the figures in the fine old tapestry standing out in life-like roundness. Theseus and Ariadne—Ariadne deserted—the coming of Bacchus—hymeneal festival—nymphs and satyrs frisking against a background of blue sea.

Kenrick thought of Beatrix Harefield as he walked slowly up and down. How well her stately beauty would become the room! how well the room would become her! She was just the wife for the master of such a place as Culverhouse. It seemed a hard thing that honour forbade his putting himself forward as her suitor.

‘How do I know that she cares for Cyril?’ he asked himself; ‘and if she does not, why should not I have my chance? Cyril is such a close fellow. I don’t know how far things have gone between them. She may not care a straw for him. And I may go back to India, and leave her to be snapped up by some adventurer. I must have the matter placed on a plainer footing when I go back to Little Yafford. If Cyril does not mean to go in and win the prize, I must have my innings. It will be only fair.’

CHAPTER XIV.

BELLA OVERHEARS A CONVERSATION.

Never in her life had Isabella Scratchell been so happy as she was in those winter days which Beatrix spent in her solitary home, or in long lonely rides or drives across the moor. Isabella, whose time had seldom been given to idleness, now worked day and night. She could not altogether withdraw her help from the overtaxed house-mother, so she sat up for an hour or two nightly, when the rest of the family had gone to bed, mending and making for the insatiable brood.

‘Never mind, ma,’ she would say when Mrs. Scratchell was on the verge of distraction about a skirt, or a ‘waist,’ a pair of impracticable socks, or trousers that were gone at the knee; ‘leave your basket, and I’ll make it right when you’re gone to bed.’

‘But, Bella, my dear,’ sighed the mother, ‘it’s so bad for your health to sit up ever so long after twelve. Working so hard as you do all the day, too. I wish you had never taken that district visiting into your head.’

‘District fiddlesticks!’ growled Mr. Scratchell from behind his newspaper. He was inconveniently quick of hearing, like the generality of fathers. ‘District stuff and nonsense! Visiting the poor means running after curates.’

‘It’s a great shame to say such a thing, pa,’ cried Bella, crimsoning. ‘I’m sure I try hard enough to be useful at home, and I give mother the best part of my salary towards the housekeeping. I ought to be free to do a little good abroad, if it makes me happy.’

‘A little fiddle-faddle,’ retorted the father, not taking the trouble to lower his newspaper. ‘A deal of good you can do, going simpering and smirking into cottages, as much as to say, “Ain’t I pretty? How do you like my bonnet?” And then I suppose you inquire after the state of their souls, and ask why they don’t teach their children to blow their noses, and quote Scripture, and talk as if you’d got a freehold estate in heaven. I hate such humbug. Stay at home and help your mother. That’s what I call Christianity.’

Like most men who never go to church or read their Bibles, Mr. Scratchell had his own idea of Christianity, and was quite as ready to assert and defend it as the most learned Churchman. He laid down the law as arrogantly upon this Christian code of his as if he had received a revelation all to himself, and was in a position to put the Established Church right, if it had been worth his while to do so.

Bella Scratchell went on devoting three afternoons a week to parish visiting, in spite of paternal opposition. In fact, that paternal opposition gave a new zest to her work, and she felt herself in her small way a martyr.

She told Cyril about her father’s unkindness one afternoon as he was walking home with her, after an accidental meeting in one of the cottages.

‘Papa is so cruel,’ she said; ‘he declares that I can do no good—that I am too insignificant and silly to be of the least use.’

‘You are neither insignificant nor silly,’ answered Cyril, warmly; ‘and the people like you. That is the grand point. They will generally take advice from a person they like. And they like bright young faces, and pleasant friendly manners. You have done good already. I have seen it in more than one case.’

‘I am so glad!’ cried Bella, in a voice that actually trembled with delight. ‘Are you really pleased with me?’

‘I am very much pleased.’

‘Then I will go on. Papa may be as unkind as he likes. I am amply rewarded.’

‘My praise is a very small reward,’ replied Cyril, smiling. ‘The satisfaction of your own conscience is the real good. You know that your life now is all usefulness.’

Bella lived in a fool’s paradise, from this time forward. Mrs. Dulcimer was always telling her how Cyril had praised her. She met him continually in the cottages, or at the Vicarage. Her life was full of delight. She only went to the Water House once or twice a week, though she had hitherto gone almost every day. She told Beatrix about her district visiting.

‘Of course I like being here with you much better than going among those poor things,’ she said, affectionately; ‘but I felt it a duty to do something, my life seemed so useless.’

‘What is mine, then?’ sighed Beatrix.

‘Oh dear, with you it is different. With your means you can always be doing good indirectly. See how much you have done for me. I owe you and Mr. Harefield my education, my good clothes, my power to help poor mamma. But I have only my time to give, and I am very happy to devote some of that to the poor, under Mr. Culverhouse’s guidance.’

‘He is kind to you?’ interrogated Beatrix; ‘you like him?’

‘He is more than kind to me. He is my master, my teacher, my guide! I cannot use such a poor word as liking to describe my feelings for him. I reverence—I almost worship him.’

‘He is worthy of your esteem,’ said Beatrix, wondering a little at this gush of feeling from Bella.

Mrs. Dulcimer felt that things were working round delightfully towards the realization of her matrimonial scheme.

‘I look upon it as quite a settled matter, Rebecca,’ she said one morning, when the all-important factotum was polishing the old sideboard, familiarly known as Uncle John.

‘Having the chimneys swept again before Christmas? yes, mum,’ replied Rebecca, driving her leather vigorously backwards and forwards across the shining wood. ‘They’ll want it. We begun fires extra early this year, and master do pile up the wood and coals, as if he wanted to keep himself in mind of Bloody Mary’s martyrs at Smiffell, and show his thankfulness that God made him a Protestant.’

‘I wasn’t talking of the chimneys, Rebecca. I was thinking of Mr. Culverhouse and Miss Scratchell. He’s getting fonder of her every day.’

‘He ought to be,’ retorted the maid, snappishly. ‘She runs after him hard enough. But if I was you, ‘um, I’d leave him to find out his own feelings. Forced affections are like forced rhubarb, sour and watery. Uncle John’s in the sulks this morning. I can’t get him to shine nohow. It’s the damp weather, I suppose. It always makes him dull.’

‘Well, Rebecca,’ said Mrs. Dulcimer, complacently, ‘if this marriage takes place soon, as I believe it will, I shall feel that I’ve been the salvation of Bella Scratchell. If you could see her wretched home——’

‘I’ve seen the maid-of-all-work,’ replied Rebecca, curtly, ‘that’s enough for me. I’ve no call to see inside the house.’

Hopefully as things were progressing in Mrs. Dulcimer’s estimation, the active beneficence of that amiable woman urged her to take some step which should place matters on a more decided footing. It was more than a month since she had taken Cyril and Bella under her protection, and she felt that it was time the gentleman should declare himself. He had received every encouragement to speak; he had evidently been touched by Bella’s efforts for the good of her species. He admired Bella’s taste and industry, her neatness of attire and amiable manners. What more could he want?

‘It’s positively ridiculous of him to hang back in this way,’ thought Mrs. Dulcimer, impatient for action. ‘But I have no doubt his silence is the result of shyness. Those reserved men are always shy. One gives them credit for pride, and they are suffering agonies of self-distrust all the time.’

It is generally some combination of trifles which determines the great events of life. Mrs. Dulcimer was hurried into a line of conduct more impetuous than sagacious by such a combination.

First it was a wet afternoon, which fact prevented the Vicar’s wife going on a round of ceremonious calls, in her best bonnet. She might have trusted her own body out in the wet, leaving the accident of a cold in the head to be dealt with by Rebecca, who was a wonderful hand at domestic medicine, and made gruel that was almost a luxury; but she could not risk the destruction of her new velvet bonnet and bird of Paradise. Secondly, Mr. Dulcimer had gone to Great Yafford for a day’s leisurely prowl among the second-hand book-shops, a recreation his soul loved. His absence made the Vicarage seem empty, and the day longer than usual. Mrs. Dulcimer ate her early dinner alone, and felt miserable.

After dinner she sent the boy to ask Bella Scratchell to come and spend the afternoon, and to bring her work. The fire was lighted in the library, so that the room might be warm and cheerful on the Vicar’s return; but Mrs. Dulcimer preferred her snug corner by the dining-room hearth, where she had a comfortable Rockingham chair, and a delightful little Chippendale table. She opened her charity basket, took out her pile of baby clothes, and felt that, with Bella to talk to, she could spend an agreeable afternoon, despite the incessant rain, which came down with a dismal drip, drip, on the sodden lawn, where the blackbirds were luxuriating in the unusual accessibility of the worm family.

Bella’s rapid fingers were wont to be helpful too, with the charity basket. She would lay aside her dainty strip of embroidery, and devote herself to herring-boning flannel, or stitching in gussets, with the most amiable alacrity.

‘You dear girl, to come through this abominable rain and enliven me!’ exclaimed Mrs. Dulcimer, when Bella came in, looking very bright and pretty after her rainy walk.

‘I think I would come through fire as well as water to see you, dear Mrs. Dulcimer,’ replied Bella, affectionately. ‘I was going to sit with poor Mary Smithers this afternoon,—she is in a decline, you know, and so patient. Mr. Culverhouse is deeply interested in her. But of course I would rather come here——’

‘You dear unselfish girl! And does Mr. Culverhouse seem pleased with what you are doing for his people?’

‘Very much. His face quite lights up when he comes into a cottage and finds me there.’

‘Ah!’ said Mrs. Dulcimer, significantly. ‘We all know what that means.’

Bella sighed and looked at the fire. Her fool’s paradise was a sweet place to dwell in, but there were times when the suspicion that it was only a fool’s paradise, after all, crept like an ugly snake into the Eden of her mind.

‘Dear Mrs. Dulcimer,’ she began thoughtfully, after an interval of silence, in which the Vicar’s wife had been trying to accomplish some manœuvre, almost as difficult as squaring the circle, with a brown paper pattern and an awkward bit of flannel. ‘You are too good to be so much interested in my welfare; but, do you know, sometimes I fancy you are altogether mistaken—as to—as to—Mr. Culverhouse’s feelings. He is all that is kind to me—he approves of my poor efforts to be useful—he praises me—he seems always glad to see me—yet he has never said a word that would imply——’

‘That will come all at once, all in a moment,’ cried Mrs. Dulcimer, decisively. ‘It did with Clement. I hadn’t the least idea that he was in love with me. My father was a bookworm, you know, like Mr. Dulcimer; and Clement used to come to our house a great deal, and they were always talking of first editions and second editions, and black-letter books, and incunabula, and a lot more stuff, of which I hardly knew the meaning. And one day Clement suddenly asked me to marry him. I never felt so surprised in my life. I felt sure that my father must have suggested it to him, but the idea did not offend me. These things ought to be suggested. There are men who would go down to their graves miserable old bachelors for want of some one to give them a judicious hint.’

‘And you really think Mr. Culverhouse likes me?’ faltered Bella.

It was growing every day—nay, every hour—more and more a question of life or death with her. The old home seemed daily more hateful, the ideal existence to be shared with Cyril more paradisaic. Suspense gnawed her heart like a serpent’s tooth. She knew, and felt, that it was unwomanly to discuss such a question, even with friendly Mrs. Dulcimer, but she could not help seeking the comfort to be obtained from such a discussion.

‘My love, I am sure of it,’ said the Vicar’s wife, with conviction. ‘I have seen it in a thousand ways.’

Bella did not ask her to name one of the thousand, though she would have been very glad to get more detailed information.

Again Bella’s eyes sought the fire, and again she gave a little depressed sigh. Her father had been especially disagreeable lately; there had been difficulties about bills and taxes—life at home was at such times a perpetual warfare. Mrs. Piper had been ailing for the last fortnight; her temper had been ailing too. The Piper children were stupid and insolent. Existence was altogether a trial. Bella thought of Beatrix Harefield’s smooth life in the beautiful old Water House, with its lights and shadows, its old world comfort, its retinue of well-trained servants. A dull life, no doubt, but a paradise of rest. As a child, Bella had been envious of her playfellow; but, since both girls had grown to womanhood, envy had assumed a deeper hue, black as the juice of the cuttle-fish, which darkens all it touches.

‘Let me herring-bone those flannels for you, dear Mrs. Dulcimer,’ Bella said at last, rousing herself from her reverie, and presently the needle was flying swiftly backwards and forwards, as Miss Scratchell’s fair head bent over her work.

She tried to be lively, feeling it incumbent on her to amuse her kind patroness; and the two women prattled on about servants, and gowns, and bonnets, and the usual feminine subjects, till four o’clock, when it was too dark for any more work, and they could only talk on by the red glow of the fire, till it pleased the omnipotent Rebecca to bring lamps and candles.

The Vicarage dining-room was charming by this light. The blocks of books, the shelves of old china, Uncle John’s portly sideboard, standing out with a look of human corpulence in the ruddy glow, shining with a polish that did credit to Rebecca, Aunt Tabitha’s mahogany bureau glittering with brassy ornamentation, the sombre crimson of the well-worn curtains giving depth of tone to the picture. Yes it was a good old room in this changeful and uncertain light, and to Bella, after the discords and disorders of home, it seemed an exquisite haven of repose. There had been old-fashioned folding-doors between the dining-room and library, but these Mr. Dulcimer had removed, replacing them with thick cloth curtains, which made it easier for him to pass from room to room.

The clock had struck four, and Mrs. Dulcimer was beginning to feel sleepy, when a ring at the house door put her on the alert.

‘I wonder who it is?’ she said in an undertone, as if the visitor might hear her outside the hall door. ‘It isn’t Clement, for he has his key. And it couldn’t be any ordinary caller on such an afternoon. I dare say it is Mr. Culverhouse come on parish business.’

Bella had made the same speculation, and her heart was beating painfully fast.

‘If it is I’ll draw him out,’ whispered the Vicar’s wife.

‘Oh, pray, pray, dear Mrs. Dulcimer, don’t dream of such a thing——’

‘Sh, my dear,’ whispered Mrs. Dulcimer, ‘don’t you be frightened. I am not going to compromise you. I hope I have more tact than to do such a thing as that. But I shall draw him out. I won’t have him trifle with you any longer. He shall be made to speak his mind.’

‘Dear Mrs. Dulcimer, I beg——’

‘Mr. Culverhouse, ‘um,’ announced Rebecca. ‘He wanted to see master, but he says you’ll do. I’ve shown him into the libery.’

Mrs. Dulcimer rose without a word, squeezed Bella’s hand, put her finger on her lip mysteriously, and passed through into the next room, dropping the curtains behind her. Bella grew pale, and trembled a little as she crept towards the curtains.

‘I think she must mean me to listen,’ she said to herself, and she took her stand just by the central line where the two curtains met.

Mr. Culverhouse had come to beg help for some of his poor people. Widow Watson’s little boy had fallen into the fire, while his mother was out getting her little bit of washing passed through a neighbour’s mangle, and there was old linen wanted to dress his wounds, and a little wine, as he was very weak from the shock. Good-natured Mrs. Dulcimer ran off to hunt for the linen, and to get the wine from Rebecca, and Cyril was left alone in the library.

Bella stole back to her chair by the fire. He might come in, perhaps, and find her there. He was quite at home in the house. She felt that she would look innocent enough, sitting there by the little work-table. She might even simulate a gentle slumber. She was wise enough to know that girlhood is never prettier than in sleep.

Cyril did not come into the dining-room. She heard him walking slowly up and down the library, deep in thought, no doubt.

‘If Mrs. Dulcimer is right, he must be thinking of me,’ said Bella. ‘I think of him all day long. He shuts everything else out of my thoughts.’

Presently Mrs. Dulcimer came back.

‘I have sent off a parcel of linen and some sherry,’ she said.

‘A thousand thanks for your prompt kindness. It is really a sad case—the poor mother is almost heartbroken——’

‘Poor thing,’ said Mrs. Dulcimer. ‘I cannot think how they do manage to set themselves on fire so often. It’s quite an epidemic.’

‘Their rooms are so small,’ suggested Cyril.

‘True. That may have something to do with it. How tired you must be this wet day! You’ll stop to tea, of course. Clement has been book-hunting at Great Yafford, and will be home soon. I have got a brace of pheasants for him. He’ll want something nice after such a wretched day. How is Mary Smithers?’

Mary Smithers was the girl Bella had talked of visiting.

‘No better, poor soul,’ said Cyril. ‘There is only one change for her now.’

‘Ah!’ sighed Mrs. Dulcimer, ‘and that is a blessed one for a girl in her position.’

Her tone implied that heaven was a desirable refuge for the destitute, a supernal almshouse, with easier terms of election than those common to earthly asylums.

‘Have you seen much of poor Mary since she has been ill?’ asked Mrs. Dulcimer, artfully leading up to her subject.

‘I see her as often as I can, but not so often as I wish. But she has been well looked after.’

‘Indeed.’

‘Your little favourite, Miss Scratchell, has been quite devoted to her, and fortunately poor Mary has taken a strong fancy to Miss Scratchell.’

How fast Bella’s heart was beating now! and how close her ear was to the narrow line between the curtains!

‘Your little favourite.’ The careless kindness of his tone had a chilling sound in Bella’s ear.

‘I am delighted to hear you say so,’ replied Mrs. Dulcimer. ‘Bella is indeed a dear girl—clever, accomplished, useful; a treasure at home—beloved wherever she goes. What a wife she will make!’

‘A capital one,’ said the curate. ‘I should be very pleased to marry her——’

Bella’s heart gave a leap.

‘To some thoroughly good fellow who could give her a happy home.’

Bella’s heart sank as heavily as a lump of lead.

‘And no doubt she will marry well,’ pursued the curate, in the same cheerful tone. ‘She is a very attractive girl as well as a good girl.’

Mrs. Dulcimer began to feel uncomfortable. Could she have been mistaken after all? Could she have misled poor Bella? It was not the first time in her life that her judgment had gone astray—but this time she had felt particularly sure of her facts, and she had been more than usually anxious for the success of her scheme. Bella’s home was so uncomfortable. It was absolutely incumbent on Mrs. Dulcimer, as an active Christian, to get the poor girl married. Match-making here was not an amusement, but a stringent duty.

There was a pause, and for some moments Mrs. Dulcimer thought of abandoning her idea of drawing Cyril out. The attempt might be premature. And there was poor Bella listening intently, no doubt, and having her young hopes blighted by the indifference of the curate’s tone. Curiosity got the better of discretion, however, and Mrs. Dulcimer pursued her theme.

‘She is a sweet pretty girl,’ she said, ‘I really think she grows prettier every day. I wonder you can talk so cheerfully of marrying her to somebody else. What a charming wife she would make for you!’

‘I dare say she would, if I wanted just that kind of wife, and if she wanted such a person as me for a husband. But I dare say I am as far from her ideal of a husband as she is from my ideal of a wife.’

Bella’s knees gave way under her at this point, and she sank into a languid heap upon the floor by the curtains. She did not faint, but she felt as if there were no more power or life in her limbs, as if she had sunk upon that spot never to rise any more, as if the best thing that could happen to her would be to lie there and feel life ebbing gently away, light slowly fading to eternal darkness.

‘You astonish me,’ cried Mrs. Dulcimer, more indignant at the downfall of this last cherished scheme than she had ever felt at any previous failure. ‘What more could you want in a wife? Beauty—cleverness—industry—good management.’

‘Dante found only one Beatrice,’ said Cyril, gravely, ‘yet I have no doubt there were plenty of women in Florence who could sew on shirt buttons and make soup. I have found my Beatrice. I may never marry her, perhaps. But I am fixed for life. I shall never marry any one else.’

A new life returned to Bella’s limbs now. It was as if the blood that had just now flowed so sluggishly through her veins was suddenly changed to quicksilver. She rose to her feet again, and stood, white as a corpse, with her hands tightly clenched, her lips drawn together till they made only a thin line of pallid violet. The pretty Dresden china face was hardly recognisable.

A sudden conviction had darted into her mind with Cyril’s utterance of that name—Beatrice. It was as if a flash of lightning had revealed things close at hand but wrapped in darkness till this moment.

‘I never was more surprised in my life—or disappointed,’ faltered Mrs. Dulcimer, quite overcome by this failure. ‘I am so fond of you, Cyril—and so fond of Bella, and I thought you would make such a nice couple—that it would be a delightful arrangement in every way.’

‘My dear friend, there is a higher Power who rules these things. I am a believer in the old saying that marriages are made in heaven, and I have not much faith in the wisdom of earthly match-making.’

‘But this was in every way so suitable,’ harped Mrs. Dulcimer. ‘Bella is such a good girl—a model wife for a man who has to make his way in the world.’

‘Heaven defend me from a model wife chosen for me by my friends,’ ejaculated Cyril.

‘And you have paid her so much attention—you have been so warmly interested in her parish work.’

‘Not more than I should be in any good work done by any good woman. I trust,’ pursued Cyril with a sudden look of alarm, ‘that I have done nothing to mislead Miss Scratchell on this subject. I should hate myself if I thought it were possible. I can confidently say that I have never uttered a word that could be misunderstood by the most romantic young lady. Our conversation has always been perfectly matter of fact—about other people—never about ourselves. I would as soon take to writing sonnets as indulge in the sentimental twaddle some curates cultivate.’

‘Pray don’t alarm yourself,’ cried Mrs. Dulcimer, remembering her promise to Bella. ‘Miss Scratchell hasn’t an idea upon the subject. I know that she admires—reveres—esteems you—’ she added, thinking it just possible to turn the tide of his feelings by the warm south wind of flattery; ‘but beyond that—no—Bella has too much modesty, I am sure she has not a thought about being married. It is only I who am anxious to see her comfortably settled. Of course I cannot blame you for my having been deceived about your feelings. But I really do think, Cyril, that when a young man is engaged he ought to let his intimate friends know all about it. It would prevent misunderstandings.’

‘There are reasons why I should not talk about my engagement. It has not been ratified by the consent of the lady’s family. It may be long before I can marry.’

‘Ah!’ thought Mrs. Dulcimer, ‘some artful girl he met at Oxford, I daresay. A university town is a regular man-trap.’

She was seriously concerned about Bella. The poor girl would fret perhaps, would lay her sorrow at Mrs. Dulcimer’s door; and for once in her life the Vicar’s wife felt herself to blame. In the active exercise of her charity she had done more harm than if she had loved her neighbour a little less intensely, and left other people’s business alone.

‘Poor Bella!’ she thought, and she felt almost afraid to face her victim; yet she was bound to go and console her, so, after a little desultory talk with Cyril about nothing particular, she excused herself, on the pretext of looking after the tea, and left the curate to amuse himself with the books and periodicals heaped on Mr. Dulcimer’s table, the sober drab Quarterly, the Edinburgh in yellow and blue, the philosophical Westminster, lurking among his more orthodox brethren, like a snake in the grass.

The dining-room was empty when Mrs. Dulcimer returned to it. Bella had carried her crushed heart out of the house, into the gray rainy night, which seemed in harmony with her desolation. She had crept quietly from the room, directly the conversation between Cyril and Mrs. Dulcimer had changed to general topics, and had gone upstairs to put on her bonnet and shawl.

On Mrs. Dulcimer’s dressing-table she left a brief pencilled note.

‘I could not stay after what has happened, dear friend. We have both been foolish. Pray think no more about it.’

Mrs. Dulcimer found this little note, presently, when she went upstairs to arrange her cap, and re-adjust the frilling and puffings about her neck and shoulders.

The little note gave her unspeakable relief.

‘Noble girl!’ she exclaimed, ‘how heroically she takes it. Yet I am sure she is fond of him. And how good of her not to feel angry with me for having misled her.’

Mrs. Dulcimer would not have been quite so satisfied with the result of her good-natured manœuvring, could she have seen the figure lying prone upon the floor of Bella Scratchell’s barely-furnished bedroom—the dishevelled hair—the clenched hands—the convulsed movements of the thin bloodless lips: and, perhaps, she might have been for ever cured of her passion for match-making, could she have heard the curses which those pallid lips called down upon her matronly head.

CHAPTER XV.

MR. NAMBY’S PRESCRIPTION.

In the dark days of December, Mr. Namby, the family practitioner and parish doctor of Little Yafford, was agreeably surprised by a summons to the Water House. His patients there had been inconveniently well for the greater part of the year, and he had been looking somewhat dolefully at the blank leaf in his diary which told him that he should have no account worth speaking of to send in to Mr. Harefield at Christmas. He was much too benevolent a man to desire the misfortune of his fellow creatures; but he thought that those favoured ones of this world, whom Providence has exempted from all the cares of the impecunious majority, ought at least to be troubled with such small nervous disorders as would keep the faculty employed. An obscure case of hysteria, now, was the sort of thing one might look for at the Water House, and which, without doing vital harm to the patient, would necessitate a great many attendances from the doctor.

He plucked up his spirits, therefore, and decapitated his breakfast egg with an unusual air of sprightliness, on hearing that James from the Water House had just called, to request that Mr. Namby would be so good as to look in to see Miss Harefield, during his morning round.

‘Poor girl! neuralgic, I daresay,’ he murmured cheerfully. ‘The Water House must be damp, but of course one cannot say anything to frighten away patients. She is a sweet girl. I shall try the new treatment.’

‘If it’s the stuff you gave me, William, it made me worse,’ said Mrs. Namby. ‘Nothing did me so much good as that cask of double stout you ordered from the brewer at Great Yafford.’

Mr. Namby’s countenance expressed ineffable disgust.

‘Do you think your constitution would have been in a condition to profit by that stout if I had not prescribed the new treatment for you first?’ he exclaimed, and Mrs. Namby, being a wise little woman, went on cutting bread and butter for her children in a sagacious silence.

Mr. Namby was shown straight to the study, where Miss Harefield was accustomed to read history and other erudite works to her governess. The histories were all dull old fashioned chronicles, which had been religiously believed when Miss Scales was a little girl, but whereof most of the facts had faded into mere phantasmagoria, before the fierce light of nineteenth century research, and the revelations of the Record Office.

Beatrix was not reading history on this particular morning. She was sitting by one of the deep set windows, with her folded arms resting on the broad oaken ledge, and her heavy eyes watching the drifting clouds in the windy sky—or the bare black elm-branches tossing against the gray.

She looked round listlessly when Mr. Namby came in, and gave him her hand with a mechanical air, which he often saw in small patients who were told to shake hands with the doctor.

‘Dear, dear, this is very bad,’ he said, in his fatherly way. ‘We are looking quite sadly this morning.’

Then came the usual ordeal. The doctor held the slight wrist between his fingers, and consulted a pale faced watch, with a surreptitious air.

‘Quick, and irregular,’ he said, ‘and weak. We must do something to set you right, my dear young lady. Have you been over exerting yourself lately?’

‘She has,’ exclaimed Miss Scales, in an aggrieved tone. ‘She’s been riding and driving far too much—too much even for the horses, Jarvis told me, so you may imagine it was too much for her.’

‘My dear Miss Scales, you forget that the horse had the greater share of the labour,’ interposed Beatrix.

‘I repeat, Beatrix,’ protested Miss Scales, severely, ‘that if it was too much for the horse it must have been infinitely worse for you. You have not the constitution of a horse, or the endurance of a horse, or the strength of a horse. Don’t talk nonsense.’

The doctor asked a string of questions. Did she eat well—sleep well?

Beatrix was obliged to confess that she did neither.

‘She eats hardly anything,’ said Miss Scales, ‘and I know by her candle that she reads half the night.’

‘What can I do but read,’ exclaimed Beatrix. ‘I have no pleasant thoughts of my own. I am obliged to find them in books.’

‘Oh, dear, dear,’ cried the doctor, ‘why a young lady like you ought to have her mind full of pleasant thoughts.’

Beatrix sighed.

‘I see what it is—the nervous power over-tasked—a slight tendency to insomnia. We must not allow this to go on, my dear Miss Harefield. The riding and driving are all very well, but in moderation. In medio tutissimus ibis, as they used to teach us at school. And a nice quiet walk with Miss Scales, now, would be a beneficial alternation with the equestrian exercise. Walk one day, ride the next. If it were a different time of year I might suggest change of air. Filey—or Harrogate—but just now of course that is out of the question. Do you remember what I prescribed for you after the whooping cough?’

‘Yes,’ answered Beatrix. ‘You gave me a playfellow.’

‘To be sure I did. Well, now, I say again you must have youthful society. A companion of your own age. I thought Miss Scratchell and you were inseparable.’

‘We used to be—but, since she has gone out as a daily governess, we have seen much less of each other—and lately she has been particularly busy. She is very good.’

‘And you are fond of her.’

‘Yes, I like her very much.’

‘Then you must have more of her company. I must talk to papa about it.’

‘Oh, pray do not trouble my father,’ exclaimed Beatrix, anxiously.

‘But he must be troubled. You must have youthful society. I know that Miss Scales is all kindness, and her conversation most improving.’ Miss Scales acknowledged the compliment with a stiffish bow. ‘But you must have a young companion with whom you can unbend, and talk a little nonsense now and then, not about the Greeks and Romans, you know, but about your new frocks and your beaux.’

Miss Scales looked an image of disgust.

‘For my own part I believe if Beatrix would employ her mind there would be none of this repining,’ she remarked severely. ‘Low spirits with young people generally mean idleness.’

‘My dear Miss Scales, I have not been repining,’ remonstrated Beatrix, wounded by this accusation. ‘I don’t want any one to be troubled about me. I only wish to be let alone.’

She turned from them both with a proud movement of head and throat, and went on looking out of the window; but her fixed gaze saw very little of the gray landscape under the gray sky, the dark shoulder of the moor, tinged with a gleam of livid winter light upon its western edge.

Mr. Namby looked at her curiously as she stood there with averted face, palpably, by her very attitude, refusing all sympathy or solicitude from him or her governess. He was not a profound psychologist. He had, indeed, given his attention too completely to the management of other people’s bodies to have had much leisure for the study of the mind, but he felt instinctively that here was a case of supreme misery—a proud young soul at war with life—a girl, capable of all girlhood’s warmest affections, confined to the dry-as-dust companionship of a human machine for grinding grammar and geography, histories and ologies. A reasonable amount of this grinding would have been good for Beatrix, no doubt, thought the village surgeon, who was no enemy to education; but there must be something brighter than these things in the life of a girl, or she will languish like a woodland bird newly caged.

Mr. Namby went down stairs, and asked to see Mr. Harefield—an awful thing to him always, but duty compelled him to beard the lion in his den.

He was shown into the library where Christian Harefield sat among his books, as usual, brown leather-bound folios and quartos piled upon the floor on each side of his chair, more books on his desk, and a general appearance of profound study. What he read, or to what end he read, no one had ever discovered. He filled commonplace books with extracts, copied in a neat fine hand, almost as close as print, and he wrote a good deal of original matter. But he had never given a line to the world, not so much as a paragraph in Notes and Queries; nor had he ever confided the nature of his studies to friend or acquaintance. He lived among his books, and in his books, and for the last ten years he had cared for no life outside them.

‘Well, Namby, what’s the matter with my daughter?’ he asked, without looking up from a volume of Plutarch’s ‘Moralia.’

‘You have been anxious about her.’

‘I have not been anxious. Her governess took it into her head to be anxious, and wished that you should be sent for. There’s nothing amiss, I conclude.’

‘There is very much amiss. Your daughter’s lonely life is killing her. She must have livelier company than Miss Scales—and change of air and scene directly the weather is milder.’

‘But there is nothing actually wrong, nothing organic?’

‘Nothing that I can discover at present. But there is sleeplessness—one of the worst foes to life—there is loss of appetite—there is want of vigour. She must be roused, interested, amused.’

‘Do you mean that she should be taken to London and carried about to balls and theatres?’ inquired Mr. Harefield.

‘She is not in a condition for balls and theatres, even if you were inclined to indulge her so far. No, she wants to be made happier, that is all.’

‘All!’ exclaimed Mr. Harefield. ‘You are moderate in your demands. Do you suppose that I have a recipe for making young women happy? It would be almost as miraculous as the wand with which the wicked fairy used to transform a contumacious prince into a blue bird or a white poodle. I have let my daughter have her own way in all the minor details of life, and I have put no limit upon her pocket-money. I can imagine no other way of making her happy.’

‘I think you will be obliged to find some other way,’ answered Mr. Namby, tremulous at his own audacity; but the lion was unusually mild this morning, and the doctor felt heroic, ‘unless you want to lose her.’

‘Lose her!’ cried Mr. Harefield. ‘Oh, she will last my time, depend upon it. My lease has not long to run, and then she will be mistress of her fate, and be happy in her own way.’

‘My dear sir, with your noble constitution——’

‘Length of days does not depend entirely on constitution. A man must have the inclination to live. But tell me what I am to do for my daughter.’

‘Let her have her young friend Miss Scratchell to come and stay with her, and when the spring comes send them both to the sea-side.’

‘I have no objection. I will write to Scratchell immediately. His daughter has been employed at the Park lately, but, as that can only be a question of remuneration, I can arrange it with Scratchell.’

‘I do not think you can do any more at present. I shall send Miss Harefield a tonic. Good morning.’

The village surgeon retired, delighted at getting off so easily. Mr. Harefield wrote at once to his agent:—

‘Dear Scratchell,

‘My daughter is ill, and wants pleasant company. Please let your girl come and stay with her. If there is any loss involved in your daughter being away from home, I shall be happy to send you a cheque for whatever amount you may consider sufficient.’

‘Yours truly, C. H.’

This happened about a fortnight before Christmas, and at a time when Miss Scratchell’s duties at the Park were in a considerable degree suspended. She would not have been wanted there at all, under ordinary circumstances, for the young Pipers, who had a frank detestation of all kinds of learning, claimed a holiday at this season, and had their claim allowed. But Mrs. Piper was ill, so ill as to be confined to her own room; and in this juncture she found Isabella’s domestic talents of use to her, and, without any extra remuneration, contrived to occupy a good deal of Isabella’s time.

A little while ago, when she was living in her fool’s paradise, believing herself loved by Cyril Culverhouse, this encroachment upon her leisure would have been aggravating in the extreme to Bella Scratchell. But just now it was rather a relief than otherwise, for it gave her an excuse for neglecting her cottagers. She went among them still, now and then, and was sweet and sympathetic as of old, reading favourite chapters of St. John to the consumptive dressmaker, or carrying a bunch of wintry flowers to the wheelwright’s bed-ridden daughter, a patient victim to spinal complaint; but, so far as it was possible, she avoided meeting Cyril. There was too keen a shame, too fierce an agony in the thought of her delusion. In this innocent seeming Dresden china beauty there existed a capacity for passionate feeling, unsuspected by her kindred or friends. From love to vindictiveness was only a step in this intense nature. She hated Mrs. Dulcimer for having entrapped her—she hated herself for having fallen so easily into so petty a snare. She hated Cyril for not loving her—she hated him still more for loving somebody else—and she hated Beatrix Harefield most of all for being the object of his love.

‘Has she not enough of the good things of this life without taking him from me?’ she thought savagely, forgetting that as Cyril had never belonged to her, Beatrix could hardly be charged with robbery.

‘He would have cared for me if he had never seen her,’ argued Bella. ‘She is handsomer than I am—grand and noble looking—while I am small and mean.’

Vanity and self-esteem were alike crushed by Cyril’s indifference. She had been vain of her pink and white prettiness hitherto. Now she looked at herself in the glass, and scorned her trivial beauty—the blue eyes and light brown lashes—the indefinite eyebrows, the blunt inoffensive little nose—the rose-bud mouth, and coquettish dimples. A beauty to catch fools perhaps; but of no value in the eyes of a man of character, like Cyril Culverhouse.

She bore her burden quietly, being very proud, after her small manner, and no one in that noisy home circle of Mr. Scratchell’s discovered that there was anything amiss in the eldest daughter of the house.

Mrs. Dulcimer wrote an affectionate and sympathetic letter to her dear Bella, and insisted that she should spend a long day at the Vicarage; as if a long day in Mrs. Dulcimer’s society were a balm that must heal the sharpest wound. Bella answered the letter in person, being too wise to commit herself to pen and ink upon so humiliating a subject, and she received Mrs. Dulcimer’s apologies with an unalterable placidity which convinced the worthy matchmaker that there was no harm done.

‘Let us think of the whole affair as a good joke, dear Mrs. Dulcimer,’ said Bella; ‘but let us keep it to ourselves. I hope you have not talked about it to Rebecca.’

Everybody in Little Yafford knew that Rebecca was Mrs. Dulcimer’s confidante, and that she had a vivacious tongue.

The vicar’s wife blushed, and trifled nervously with her lace rufflings.

‘My love, you cannot suppose that I should say a word about you that ought not to be said,’ she murmured, affectionately.

And then Bella knew that Rebecca had been told everything.

‘It is so nice of you to take it in such a sweet-tempered way,’ said Mrs. Dulcimer; ‘and it only confirms my good opinion of you; but I am more angry with him than I can say. You would have suited each other exactly.’

‘Ah, but you see he does not think so,’ replied Bella, with inward bitterness. ‘I am not his style. He has chosen some one quite different. You have no idea, I suppose, who the lady is?’

‘Some one he met at Oxford, I don’t doubt. He will live to regret his choice, I daresay. I am almost wicked enough to hope he may. And now, Bella, when will you come and spend a long quiet day with me?’ demanded Mrs. Dulcimer, anxious to administer her balsam.

‘I am hardly ever free now, dear Mrs. Dulcimer. Since Mrs. Piper has been ill she has asked me to help her a little with the housekeeping. She is so unfortunate in her servants, you know, always changing, and that makes her distrustful.’

‘My dear, Mrs. Piper doesn’t make her servants happy,’ said Mrs. Dulcimer. ‘Servants are like other people; they want to be happy, and nobody can be happy who is being found fault with from morning till night.’

‘I am afraid it is so,’ assented Bella; ‘poor Mrs. Piper means well, but she is too particular.’

‘My dear, if I were to find fault with Rebecca three times in a week, she would give me warning; and yet she’s almost like my own flesh and blood. Now, mind, I shall expect you to come and spend a long day with me the first time you find yourself free.’

‘I shall only be too happy,’ murmured Bella.

‘And I’ll take care you don’t meet Cyril.’

‘You are so thoughtful.’

‘Well, dear, I think we were sent into the world to think of other people as well as of ourselves,’ replied the vicar’s wife, with a self-satisfied air.

CHAPTER XVI.

BELLA GOES ON A VISIT.

‘Here’s a fine chance for Bella!’ exclaimed Mr. Scratchell, after reading his patron’s curt epistle. ‘She is to go and spend Christmas at the Water House.’

‘My word, won’t she have a blow out of mince pies,’ exclaimed the youthful Adolphus, who, from being somewhat restricted as to the good things of this life, was apt to take a material view of pleasure.

‘Bella doesn’t care twopence for mince pies,’ said Clementina. ‘She likes dresses and bonnets. She would live on bread and water for a month for the sake of a pretty dress.’

Bella herself was not enthusiastic about the invitation to the Water House.

‘I don’t see how I can go, papa,’ she said. ‘Mrs. Piper wants me to look after the housekeeping, and to see to the children’s early dinner. Mr. Piper hates carving for so many.’

‘Mrs. Piper must do without you. She’ll know your value all the better if she loses your services for a week or two.’

‘You ought not to refuse such an invitation, Bella,’ said Mrs. Scratchell. ‘Christmas time and all—Mr. Harefield will be sure to give you a handsome present.’

‘I might run across to the Park every morning, perhaps, even if I were staying at the Water House,’ Bella suggested presently. She had been thinking deeply for the last few minutes.

‘Of course, you might,’ answered her father. ‘It’s not ten minutes’ walk, through the fields.’

So Mr. Harefield’s letter was answered to the effect that Bella would be delighted to stay with her dear Miss Harefield, and would be with her that evening. And all day long there was a grand starching and ironing of cuffs, collars, and petticoats, at which the younger Miss Scratchells assisted.

‘I shall find out all about Cyril,’ thought Bella. ‘What a secret nature Beatrix must have to be able to hide every thing from me so long. I have seen her look shy and strange when she met him, and have half-suspected—but I could not think that if she really cared for him she would hide it from me.’

Bella and her worldly goods arrived at the Water House after dark on that December evening—Bella walking, under the escort of her brother Herbert, the worldly goods accompanying her in a wheelbarrow.

Bella found Beatrix alone in the upstairs sitting-room, which had been called the schoolroom ever since Miss Scales had been paramount at the Water House. It was a large panelled room, with old oak furniture of the Dutch school that had been there since the days of William and Mary; old blue and white Delft jars, and old pictures that nobody ever looked at; a high carved oak mantel piece, with a shelf just wide enough to carry the tiny teacups of the Queen Anne period; an old-fashioned fireplace, set round with blue and white tiles; a sombre Turkey carpet, with a good deal of yellow in it; and thick woollen curtains of a curious flowered stuff. To Bella it was simply one of the handsomest rooms in the world, and she felt angry with Beatrix for her want of gratitude to a Providence that had set her in the midst of such surroundings.

Beatrix received her old playfellow affectionately. She was more cheerful this evening than she had been since her father had forbidden her visits to the vicarage.

‘A most wonderful thing has happened, Bella,’ she said, when they had kissed. Bella had taken off her hat, and was comfortably seated in an arm chair by the fire. ‘Miss Scales has gone for a fortnight’s holiday, and you and I are to be our own mistresses all Christmas time.’

‘How nice!’ cried Bella.

‘Isn’t it? My father did not at all like it, I believe. But an old aunt of Miss Scales—an aunt who is supposed to have money—has been so kind as to get dangerously ill, and Miss Scales has been sent for to attend her sick bed. She lives in some unknown corner of Devonshire, quite at the other end of the map, so less than a fortnight’s leave of absence would hardly have been any use, and papa was compelled to give it. I am to pay no visits, but I may drive where I like in the pony carriage on fine days—and ride as often as Jarvis will let me.’

Jarvis was the groom who had taught Beatrix to ride her pony ten years ago, when Mr. Namby had suggested riding as a healthy exercise for the pale and puny child.

‘It will be very nice,’ said Bella.

‘Very nice for me. But I’m afraid it will be a dreadfully dull Christmas for you, Bella. You will wish yourself at home. Christmas must be so cheerful in a large family.’

‘I can endure the loss of a home Christmas with exemplary resignation,’ replied Bella, with a graceful little shrug of her pretty shoulders. ‘I think if there is one time more trying than another in our house, it is Christmas. The children have a vague idea that they are going to enjoy themselves—and it shows a wonderful gift of blind faith that they can have such an idea after so many disappointments. They make the parlours uncomfortable with holly and laurel, and club together for a bunch of mistletoe to hang in the passage—they make poor ma promise them snapdragon and hot elder wine—and then on Christmas Eve one of the boys contrives to break a window—or to upset papa’s office inkstand, which holds about a quart, and then the whole family are in disgrace. Papa and mamma have words—the beef is underdone on Christmas day, and papa uses awful language about the housekeeping—the boys go out for an afternoon walk to avoid the storm indoors, and perhaps get caught in the rain out of doors and spoil their best clothes. After tea pa and ma have a long talk by the fire, while we young ones squabble over ‘vingt et un’ at the table, and we know by their faces that they are talking about the new year’s bills, and then we all go to bed feeling miserable, without exactly knowing why.’

‘Poor Bella,’ said Beatrix compassionately. ‘It does seem very hard that some people should have more money than they know what to do with, and others so much too little. It’s quite puzzling. The trees and flowers have everything equally, sun and rain, and dew and frost.’

‘No, they don’t,’ said Bella. ‘The trees see life from different aspects. Some have all the southern sun, and others all the northern blasts. You are like a carefully trained peach tree on a south wall, and I am a poor little shrub in a gloomy corner facing the north.’

‘Bella,’ cried Beatrix, ‘do you seriously believe that there is much sunshine in my life?’

‘Plenty,’ answered Bella. ‘You have never known the want of money.’

‘But money cannot make happiness.’

‘Perhaps not, but it can make a very good imitation; and I know that the want of money can make very real unhappiness.’

‘Poor Bella!’ sighed Beatrix again.

‘Oh! as for me,’ said Bella, ‘I am very well off, since I’ve been at the Pipers. And then you have always been so kind to me. I am the favoured one of the family. But it is trying to see how my poor mother is worried, and how she worries every one else, in the struggle to make both ends meet. And now tell me about yourself, Beatrix. Papa said you had been ill.’

‘Miss Scales and Mr. Namby have made up their minds that I am ill,’ answered Beatrix indifferently, ‘but except that I can’t sleep, I don’t think there’s much the matter.’

‘But that is very dreadful,’ exclaimed Bella. ‘Do you mean to say that you are not able to sleep at all?’

‘Very little. Sometimes I lie awake all night—sometimes I get up and walk about my room, and stare out of the window at the moor and the river. They look so strange and ghostlike in the dead of the night—not a bit like the moor and river we know by day. Sometimes I light my candle and read.’

‘And you never sleep?’

‘Towards the morning I sometimes drop off into a doze, but I always wake with a start, just as if the surprise of finding myself asleep had awakened me.’

‘And hasn’t Mr. Namby given you anything to make you sleep?’ asked Bella.

‘No. He is giving me tonics, and he says when I get strong the sleeplessness will leave me. He has refused to give me an opiate, though I begged very hard for something that would send me to sleep.’

‘That seems cruel,’ said Bella, ‘but I suppose he is right. I think he is a very clever little man. Mrs. Piper has more confidence in him than in Dr. Armytage, who has a big fee every time he comes over from Great Yafford, and who never seems to do anything but approve of what Mr. Namby is doing. Or perhaps he makes some slight alteration in the diet—recommends sago instead of tapioca—or madeira instead of sherry.’

‘Is Mrs. Piper very ill?’

‘Dreadfully ill, poor thing. It is an internal complaint that is killing her. She struggles against it, but I think she knows that it must be fatal.’

‘How sad for her children.’

‘Yes, poor little things. She is a very good mother—perhaps a little too strict, but most careful of her children. They will miss her dreadfully. I’m afraid Mr. Piper is the sort of man to marry again.’

‘Oh, surely not?’ cried Beatrix, ‘that fat red-faced man—with a figure like a barrel. Who would marry him.’

‘Who would refuse him—and his money?’

‘Oh, Bella! Now surely you would not marry such a man as that—for all the money in the world?’

‘I would not, well as I know the value of money. But I have no doubt there are plenty of girls who would. And now, Beatrix, tell me why you never go to the Vicarage now.’

‘Simply because my father has forbidden me.’

‘How unkind! But he must have some reason for such a step.’

‘He has his reasons no doubt.’

‘And has he not told you what they are?’

‘Don’t let us talk about it, please, Bella dear. I had rather speak of anything else.’

‘Of course,’ thought Bella, ‘the whole thing is quite clear.’

CHAPTER XVII.

MRS. PIPER’S TROUBLES.

Beatrix Harefield’s spirits improved in the society of her friend. She was fond of Bella, and believed in Bella’s faithfulness and affection. Her reticence on the subject of Cyril Culverhouse had not arisen from distrust, but from a reserve natural in a girl reared in solitude, and with a mind lofty and ardent enough to make first love sacred as religion.

But when Bella, with every evidence of fondness, entreated to be taken into her friend’s confidence, Beatrix was not so stoical as to refuse the comfort of sympathy.

‘I know you are hiding something from me, Beatrix,’ said Bella, as they were walking in the wintry garden on the first morning of her visit. ‘There is a reason for your father’s forbidding your visits to the Vicarage—and a reason for your pale cheeks and sleepless nights. Why are you afraid to trust me?’

‘I am not afraid to trust you. But there are things one does not care to talk about.’

‘Does not one? What are those things, dear? Do you mean that you don’t care to talk about Mr. Culverhouse?’

Beatrix started, and flushed crimson.

‘How do you know—did any one tell you?’

‘My dear Beatrix, I have eyes and ears, and they told me. I have seen you together. I have heard him speak of you.’

‘And you found out——’

‘That you adore each other.’

‘It is true, Bella. I love him with all my heart and soul—and we are to be married as soon as I am of age.’

‘With your father’s consent?’

‘With or without it. That matters very little to me.’

‘But if you offend him he may leave his estate to a hospital,’ suggested Bella, who knew a great deal more about Mr. Harefield’s property than Beatrix.

‘He may do what he likes with it. Cyril will not marry me for my fortune.’

‘Of course not, but fortune is a very good thing, and Mr. Culverhouse, who is poor, must think so.’

This arrow glanced aside from the armour of Beatrix’s faith. No one could have made her believe that her lover had any lurking greed of wealth.

‘Then it is all settled,’ said Bella, cheerfully. ‘You will be of age in two years, and then you are to be married, whether Mr. Harefield likes or not. I really can’t see why you should be unhappy.’

‘I am not to see Cyril, or hear from him, for two years. He is going to leave this place in the spring. He might be ill—dying—and I should know nothing, till I took up the Times some morning and saw the advertisement of his death.’

‘He is young and strong,’ replied Bella. ‘There is nothing less likely than that he should die. I don’t think you need make yourself unhappy in advance about that.’

Her cold hard tone wounded Beatrix, who had expected more sympathy.

‘Don’t let us talk about him, Bella,’ she said.

But Bella was determined to talk about him till she had found out all that there was for her to know. She assumed a more sympathetic tone, and Beatrix was induced to tell of Cyril’s interview with her father, and of the letter which her lover wrote to her after that interview.

The clocks struck eleven a few minutes after this conversation was ended.

‘And now I must run to the Park and spend an hour with poor Mrs. Piper,’ said Bella. ‘I promised to go over every day to make myself useful. She is so wretched about her servants, if there is no one to look after them.’

‘How painful to have servants that require to be looked after!’ said Beatrix, who was accustomed to a household that went as if by clockwork, conducted by a butler and housekeeper who were trusted implicitly.

‘It is rather dreadful,’ replied Bella. ‘I think I would sooner have our maid-of-all-work, with her sooty face and red elbows, than poor Mrs. Piper’s staff of smart young women, who study nothing but their own comfort, and come and go as if the Park were an hotel; for our poor Sarah is at least faithful, and would no more think of leaving us than of going to the moon. Good-bye, darling, I shall be back before luncheon.’

Beatrix went back to her quiet room, and her books. Her mind had been much widened by her intercourse with Mr. Dulcimer and his library, and good books were a consolation and delight to her. She had marked out a line of serious study, which she fancied might make her fitter to be Cyril’s wife, and was resolved not to be led astray by any flowers of literature. Hard reading was a little difficult sometimes, for her thoughts would wander to the lover from whom cruel fate had parted her; but she persevered bravely, and astonished Miss Scales by the severity of her self-discipline.

Bella tripped briskly across the fields to Little Yafford Park, which was about half a mile from the village, and only a little less distant from the Water House. It was Saturday morning, and she knew that Mrs. Piper would be worried about the weekly bills, which had an unvarying tendency to be heavier than she expected to find them.

Mrs. Piper was propped up with pillows in her easy chair by the fire, while all the youthful Pipers—including a couple of apple-cheeked ungainly boys from an expensive boarding-school—were making havoc of her handsomely furnished morning-room—a process eminently calculated to shorten the brief remnant of her days.

‘Cobbett, if you don’t leave that malachite blotting book alone directly, I’ll ring for your pa,’ exclaimed the invalid, as Bella entered.

Mr. Piper was a man who had read books in his time—not many, perhaps, but he remembered them all the better on that account. He was a man who boasted of thinking for himself; which meant that he asserted second-hand opinions so forcibly as to make them pass for new, and put down other people’s arguments with the high hand of a self-conscious capitalist.

He had christened his two elder boys Cobbett and Bentham. The chubby little plague in pinafores was Horne Tooke, the bony boy in knickerbockers was Brougham. The two girls were living memorials of Elizabeth Fry and Mary Wolstencroft. His ambition was to see these children all educated up to the highest modern standard, and able to occupy an intellectual eminence from which they could look down upon everybody else.

‘Money and dulness are sometimes supposed to go hand in hand,’ said Mr. Piper. ‘I shall take care that my children may be able to exhibit the pleasing spectacle of capital allied with intelligence.’

Unhappily the young Pipers did not take to education quite so kindly as their father expected them to do. They had no thirst for the Pierian spring, and, instead of drinking deeply, imbibed the sacred waters in reluctant sips, as if the fount had been some nauseous sulphur spring offered to them medicinally. Poor Bella had laboured almost hopelessly for the last year to drag Brougham through that Slough of Despond, Dr. Somebody’s first Latin grammar, and had toiled valorously in the vain effort to familiarize Horne Tooke with words of one syllable. Elizabeth Fry, whom her mother designed for greatness in the musical world, had not yet mastered the mysteries of a common chord, or learned the difference between a major and minor scale. Mary Wolstencroft was a sullen young person of eleven, who put her chubby fingers in her mouth at the least provocation, and stubbornly refused to learn anything.

‘Oh, my dear, I am very glad you have come,’ cried Mrs. Piper. ‘These children are positively maddening. I like to have them with me, because it’s a mother’s duty, and I hope I shall do my duty to the last hour of my life. But they are very trying. Bentham has spilt the ink on the patchwork table-cover, and Mary has been pulling the Angola’s tail most cruelly.’

The animal which Mrs. Piper insisted on calling the ‘Angola’ was a magnificent white Angora cat, and really the handsomest living creature in the Piper household; indeed the Piper children seemed to have been invented as a foil to the grace and beauty of the cat, to which they were inferior in every attribute, except the gift of speech, a privilege they systematically abused.

Bella examined the injured table-cover, and stroked the offended cat, and then sat down by Mrs. Piper’s sofa.

‘I dare say the children are tiresome, dear Mrs. Piper,’ she said, whereupon Bentham secretly put out his tongue at her, ‘but it must be a comfort to you to see them all in such good health.’

‘Yes, my dear, it is. But I really think there never were such boisterous children. I am sure when they were all down with the measles the house was like ‘eaven. The way they use the furniture is enough to provoke a saint. I sometimes wish Piper hadn’t bought so many ‘andsome ornaments for my boodwar.’

And Mrs. Piper gave a heavy sigh, inwardly lamenting the ten-roomed villa in the broad high road outside Great Yafford—the best parlour which no one was allowed to enter—save on special occasions and under most restrictive conditions—and the everyday parlour, in which the shabby old furniture could hardly be the worse for ill-usage.

‘And now, Bella, we’ll go to the books,’ said Mrs. Piper, ‘they’re something awful this week. There’s fine goings on downstairs now that I can’t get about.’

‘The boys being home from school must make a difference,’ suggested Bella.

‘After allowing amply for the boys, the bills are awful. Look at the baker’s book, Bella. It will freeze your blood.’

Bella looked, and was not actually frozen, though the amount was startling. The household expenses seemed to have been upon an ascending scale from the beginning of Mrs. Piper’s illness. That careful housewife’s seclusion had certainly relaxed the stringent economy by which larder and kitchen had been hitherto regulated.

The tradesmen’s books were gone through one by one, Mrs. Piper lamenting much, and doubtful of almost every item. Why so much lard and butter, why so many eggs? There were mysterious birds in the poulterer’s book, inexplicable fish in the fishmonger’s. When they came to the butcher’s book things grew desperate, and the cook was summoned to render an account of her doings.

Cook was a plausible young woman in a smart cap, and she proved too much for Mrs. Piper. She had an explanation for every pound of meat in the book, and her mistress dared not push inquiry to the verge of accusation, lest this smart young woman should take advantage of the impending season and resign her situation then and there, leaving Mrs. Piper to get her Christmas dinner cooked as she might. Piper was particular about his dinner. It was the one sensual weakness of a great mind, and if his meals fell in any way short of his requirements and expectations, his family circle suffered. The simoom in the desert was not more sudden or devastating than the whirlwind of Mr. Piper’s wrath in the dining-room, when the fish was sodden and sloppy, or the joint presented an interior stratum of rawness under an outer crust of scorched flesh.

‘Piper is so particular,’ his wife would remark piteously, ‘and good cooks are so hard to get.’

The fact of the case was that no good cook would endure Mrs. Piper’s watchfulness and suspicion, and those scathing denunciations which Mr. Piper sent out by the parlour-maid when the dishes were not to his liking.

‘I might have borne Mrs. Piper’s petty prying ways,’ remarked one of the Park cooks, after giving her mistress warning, ‘or I might have put up with Mr. Piper’s tempers; but I couldn’t stand him and her together. That was too much for Christian flesh and blood.’

The cook was dismissed, with inward groanings on the part of Mrs. Piper, and the money for the tradesmen was entrusted to Bella, who was to pay the bills on her way through the village, and to make divers complaints and objections which the cook might have omitted to deliver.

‘I never let a servant pay my bills if I can help it,’ said Mrs. Piper, ‘it gives them too much power.’

And Mrs. Piper gave another sigh for the days of old, when her villa in the Great Yafford Road had been kept as neat as a pin by two servants, and those two servants had been completely under their mistress’s thumb, when she herself had given her orders by word of mouth to the tradespeople, and not so much as a half-quartern loaf had come into the house without her knowledge and consent. The transition from the tight economies of mediocre comfort to the larger splendour of unlimited wealth had been a sore trial to Mrs. Piper. The change had come too late in her life. She could not reconcile herself to the cost of her grandeur, although her husband assured her that he was not spending half his income.

‘It may be so now, Piper,’ she replied, dubiously, ‘but when the children grow up you’ll find yourself spending more money. They’ll eat more, and their boots will come dearer. I feel the difference every year.’

‘When I find myself with less than fifty thousand surplus capital, I shall begin to grumble, Moggie,’ said Mr. Piper, ‘but I ain’t going to make a poor mouth till then.’

‘Well, Piper, of course it’s nice to live in a big place like this, and to feel oneself looked up to, and that the best of everything is hardly good enough for us; but still there are times when I feel as if you and me had been sent into the world to feed a pack of extravagant servants.’

‘We can’t help that, my dear,’ answered Piper, cheerily. ‘Dukes and duchesses are the same.’

‘Ah, but then you see dukes and duchesses are born to it. They’ve not been used to have their housekeeping in their own hands, as I have. I suppose it’s when I’m a little low that it preys upon me,’ mused Mrs. Piper, ‘but I do feel it very trying sometimes. When I think of the butter and lard that are used in this house it seems to me as if we must come to the workhouse. No fortune could be big enough to stand against it.’

‘Don’t be a fool, Moggie,’ retorted the manufacturer, unmoved by this pathetic suggestion. ‘When I was in business I’ve lost five thousand pounds in a morning by the turn of the market, and I’ve come home and eat my dinner and never said a word to you about it. What’s your butter and lard against that?’

‘Oh, Piper, I wonder you ever lived through it.’

‘I wasn’t a fool,’ answered Piper, ‘and I knew that where there’s big gains there must be big losses, now and again. A man that’s afraid to lose a few odd thousands will never come out a millionaire.’

Ebenezer Piper had a high opinion of his children’s governess. He had heard Bella grinding Latin verbs with Brougham, and admired her tact and patience. He liked to see pretty faces about him, as he acknowledged with a noble candour, and Bella’s face seemed to him particularly agreeable. That pink and white prettiness was entirely to his taste. Something soft and fresh and peachy. The kind of woman who seemed created to acknowledge and submit to the superiority of man. Mrs. Piper had been a very fair sample of this pink and white order of beauty, when the rising manufacturer married her; but time and ill-health and a natural fretfulness had destroyed good looks which consisted chiefly of a fine complexion and a plump figure, and the Mrs. Piper of the present was far from lovely. Her Ebenezer was not the less devoted to her on that account. He bought her fine dresses, and every possible combination of ormolu and malachite, mother-o’-pearl and tortoiseshell, for her boudoir and drawing-room; and he told everybody that she had been a good wife to him, and a pretty woman in her time, ‘though nobody would believe it to look at her now.’

On her way from Mrs. Piper’s boudoir to the hall Miss Scratchell encountered the master of the house, coming out of the billiard-room, where he had been knocking the balls about in a thoughtful solitude.

‘How did you find the missus?’ he asked, after saluting Bella with a friendly nod.

‘Pretty much the same as usual, Mr. Piper. I’m afraid there is no change for the better. She looks worn and worried.’

‘She will worry herself when there ain’t no call,’ said Piper. ‘She’s been bothering over those tradesmen’s books this morning, I’ll warrant, just as she used fifteen years ago when I allowed her five pounds a week for the housekeeping. She never did take kindly to a large establishment. She’s been wearing her life out about fiddle-faddle ever since we came here—and yet she had set her heart on being a great lady. She’s a good little woman, and I’m uncommonly fond of her, but she’s narrer-minded. I ain’t so blind but what I can see that.’

‘She is all that is kind and good,’ said Bella, who had always a large balance of affection at call for anybody who was likely to be useful to her.

‘So she is,’ assented Ebenezer, ‘and you’re very fond of her, ain’t you? She’s fond of you, too. She thinks you are one of the cleverest girls out. And so you are. You’ve had a hard job with Brougham’s Latin. He don’t take to learning as I did. I was a self-taught man, Miss Scratchell. I bought a Latin grammar at a bookstall, when I was a factory hand, and used to sit up of a night puzzling over it till I taught myself as much Latin as many a chap knows that’s cost his parents no end of money. My education never cost anybody anything, except myself—and it cost me about a pound, first and last, for books. I don’t know many books, you know, but them I do know I know thoroughly. The Vicar himself couldn’t beat me at an argument, when it comes to the subjects I’m up in. But I don’t pretend to know everything. I ain’t a many-sided man. I couldn’t tell you what breed of tomcats was ranked highest in Egypt, or where’s the likeliest spot in the sky to look for a new planet.’

‘Everybody knows that you are very clever,’ said Bella, safely.

‘Well, I hope nobody has ever found me very stupid. But I want my children to know a deal more than me. They must be able to hold their own against all comers. I should like ’em to read off the monuments in Egypt as pat as I can read the newspaper. Like that French fellow Shampoleon, we heard so much of when I was a young man. Come and have a look at the conservatory, and take home some flowers for your mar.’

‘You are very kind, Mr. Piper; but I’m rather in a hurry. I am not going home. I am on a visit to the Water House.’

‘The deuce you are!’ exclaimed Mr. Piper. ‘There’s not many visitors there, I take it. You must be uncommon dull.’

‘Other people might find it dull, perhaps; but I am very happy there. I am very fond of Beatrix Harefield.’

‘Ah! she’s a fine grown young woman; but she ain’t my style. Looks as if there was a spice of the devil in her. Come and have a look at the conservatory. You can take Miss Harefield some flowers.’

The conservatory opened out of the hall, to which they had descended by this time. Bella could not refuse to go in and look at Mr. Piper’s expensive collection of tropical plants, with long Latin names. His conservatory was an object of interest to him in his present comparatively idle life. He knew all the Latin names, and the habits of all the plants. He cut off some of the blossoms that were on the wane, and presented them to Bella, talking about himself and his wife and children all the while. She had a hard struggle to get away, for Mr. Piper approved of her, just as Dr. Johnson approved of Kitty Clive, as a nice little thing to sit beside one, or, in other words, a good listener.

Bella got back to the Water House in time for luncheon, a meal which the two girls took together in a snug breakfast parlour on the ground floor. The dining-room was much too large for the possibility of cheerfulness.

‘You have hardly eaten anything, Beatrix,’ remarked Bella, when they had finished; ‘and you had only a cup of tea at breakfast time. No wonder you are ill.’

‘I dare say if I could sleep better I should eat more,’ answered Beatrix, listlessly, ‘but the nights are so long—when day comes I feel too worn out to be hungry.’

‘It is all very bad and very foolish,’ said Bella. ‘Why should you have these sleepless nights? It can’t be grief. You have nothing to grieve about. Your way lies clear before you. It is only a question of time.’

‘I suppose so,’ assented Beatrix; ‘but I can’t see myself happy in the future. I can’t believe in it. I feel as if all my life was to be spent in this loveless home—my father holding himself aloof from me—Cyril parted from me. How can I be sure that he will always love me—that I shall be the same to him two years hence that I am now? It is a long time.’

‘A long time to be parted without even the privilege of writing to each other, certainly,’ said Bella; ‘but there is no fear of any change in Mr. Culverhouse’s feelings. Think what a splendid match you are for a poor curate.’

‘Why do you harp upon that string, Bella?’ cried Beatrix, angrily. ‘You know that if I marry Cyril I shall forfeit my father’s fortune. Cyril knows it too. It is a settled thing. I shall go to him penniless.’

‘Oh, no, you won’t, dear! Things will never go so far as that. Your father will get reconciled to the idea of your marrying Mr. Culverhouse. You must both look forward to that.’

‘We neither of us look forward to it. There is no question of fortune between us. Never speak of such a thing again, Bella, unless you wish to offend me. And now I am going to drive you to Great Yafford, to do some shopping. We must buy some Christmas presents for your mamma and brothers and sisters.’

‘Oh, Beatrix, you are too good.’

Puck, the pony, was one of the finest specimens of his race, a thick-necked, stout-limbed animal, and a splendid goer. He would have dragged his mistress all round England, and never asked for a day’s rest. He never was sick nor sorry, as the old coachman said approvingly, when summing up Puck’s qualifications. On the other hand, he had a temper of his own, and if he was offended he kicked. He would have destroyed a carriage once a week if he had got into bad hands. But he understood Beatrix, and Beatrix understood him, and everything went smoothly between them.

Great Yafford on a December afternoon was about as ugly a town as one need care to see; but it was busy and prosperous, and seemed to take an honest pride in its ugliness, so stoutly did its vestry and corporation oppose any movement in the direction of beauty. There was one street of ample breadth and length, intersected by a great many narrow streets. There was a grimy looking canal, along which still grimier coal barges crept stealthily under the dull gray sky. There were great piles of buildings devoted to the purposes of commerce; factories, warehouses, gas works, dye works, oil works, soap works, bone works, all vying with one another in hideousness, and in the production of unsavoury odours.

Ugly as Great Yafford was, however, there was nothing Bella Scratchell enjoyed so much as a visit to Tower Gate, the broad street above-named, and a leisurely contemplation of the well-furnished shop windows, where the fashions, as that morning received from Paris, were to be seen gratis by the penniless gazer. Banbury and Banburys’, the chief drapers, afforded Bella as much delight as a lover of pictures derives from a noble gallery. She would have seen the Venus of Milo for the first time with less excitement than she felt on beholding ‘our latest novelties in Paris mantles,’ or ‘our large importation of silks from the great Lyons houses.’

‘Drive slowly, please, Beatrix,’ said Bella, as they entered Tower Gate; ‘I should like to have a look at Banburys’, though it can’t make any difference to me, for I have bought my winter things.’

‘You can look as long as you like, Bella. I am going in to buy some gloves, and a few little things. Perhaps you would like to go in with me.’

‘I should very much, dear. They have always such lovely things inside.’

Puck was given over to the care of the groom, while the two young ladies went into Banburys’. It was a very busy time just now. ‘Our latest novelties’ were being scrutinized and pulled about by an eager throng of buyers, and the patience of Banburys’ young men was tried to the verge of martyrdom by ladies who hadn’t quite made up their minds what they wanted, or whether they wanted anything at all. An ordinary individual would have had ample time to study the humours of Banburys’ before being served; but Miss Harefield was known as an excellent customer, and the shop-walker was in a fever till he had found a young man to attend upon her. He was a pale young man, in whose face all the colour had run into pimples, and he had a wild and worried look, which was not unnatural in a youth whose mind had been tortured by all kinds of fanciful objections to, and criticisms upon Banburys’ stock, from nine o’clock that morning, and who had run to and fro over the face of Banburys’, like a new Orestes driven by the Furies, in search of articles that never answered the requirements of his customers, proving always just a little too dear, or too common, too thick or too thin, too dark or too light, too silky or too woolly for the fair buyer. To this tormented youth Beatrix seemed an angel of light, so easily was she pleased, so quickly did she decide upon her purchases. She bought a dozen pairs of gloves, a pile of ribbons, laces, and other trifles in the time that an elderly female in black, a little lower down the counter, devoted to the thrilling question of which particular piece out of a pile of lavender printed cotton would best survive the ordeal of the washtub.

‘What is your sister Clementina’s size?’ inquired Beatrix, looking over a box of gloves.

‘Oh, Beatrix, you mustn’t buy any for her,’ whispered Bella.

‘Yes, I must. And you must tell me her number.’

‘Six and three-quarters.’

‘The same as yours. I’ll take a dozen of the six and three-quarters.’

A large Honiton collar and cuffs, after the fashion of the period—a dark age in which rufflings and fichus and all the varieties of modern decorative art were unknown—were chosen for Miss Scales—neck ribbons for the women servants—warm clothing for certain goodies in the village—a noble parcel altogether. The pale and haggard youth felt that he need not quail before the awful eye of Banbury when the day’s takings came to be summed up.

After leaving Banburys’, Miss Harefield drove to a chemist’s, and got out alone to make her purchases.

‘I couldn’t get what I wanted there,’ she said, and then drove into one of the narrow streets and pulled up at another chemist’s.

She went in this way to no less than six chemists’ shops, entering each alone, and remaining for about five minutes in each. She had a good many little daintily sealed white parcels by the time she had finished this round.

‘Are you going to set up as a doctor?’ Bella asked, laughing.

‘I have got what I wanted at last,’ Beatrix answered evasively.

‘What can you have in all those little parcels?’

‘Perfumery—in most of them. And now I am going to the Repository to buy something for your small brothers and sisters.’

The Repository was a kind of bazaar in Tower Gate, where there was a large selection of useless articles at any price from sixpence to a guinea. Beatrix loaded herself with popular parlour games, Conversation Cards, Royal Geographical Games, and Kings of England—games which no one but a drivelling idiot could play more than once without being conscious of a tendency to softening of the brain—for the young Scratchells. She bought a handsome workbasket for the industrious house-mother. She bought scent bottles and thimble cases for the girls, knives and pocket-books for the boys.

‘Upon my word, Beatrix, you are too good,’ exclaimed Bella, when she heard the destination of these objects.

‘Do you suppose that money can give me any better pleasure than to make other people happy with it, if I can?’ answered Beatrix. ‘It will never make me happy.’

CHAPTER XVIII.

A WITNESS FROM THE GRAVE.

The two girls at the Water House lived their solitary life all through the dark week before Christmas. They read a great deal; Bella confining herself to the novels from the Great Yafford library, Beatrix reading those books which she believed were to fit her for companionship with Cyril Culverhouse in the days to come. They did not find so much to say to each other as friends of such long standing might have been expected to find. But Beatrix was by nature reserved about those things nearest her heart, and her cloistered life gave her little else to talk about. On the dusky winter afternoons they went up to the lumber-room, and had a feast of music at the old piano; Bella singing prettily in a clear soprano voice—thin but not unmelodious—Beatrix playing church music with the touch of a player in whom music was a natural expression of thought and feeling, and not a laboriously acquired art. Very rarely could Beatrix be persuaded to sing, but when she did uplift her fresh young voice, the rich contralto tones were like the sound of an organ, and even Bella’s shallow soul was moved by the simple melodies of the Psalter of those days.

‘As pants the hart for cooling streams,

When heated in the chase.’

Or,

‘With one consent let all the earth

To God their cheerful voices raise.’

‘Has Mr. Culverhouse ever heard you sing?’ inquired Bella.

‘Never. Where should he hear me? I never sing anywhere but in this room.’

‘And in church.’

‘Yes, of course, in church. But I do not think even Cyril could distinguish my voice out of a whole congregation.’

‘He might,’ said Bella, ‘all the rest sing through their noses.’

For fine days there was the garden, and for variety Puck and the pony carriage. Miss Harefield took her friend for long drives across the moor. Once they met Cyril in one of the lanes, and passed him with a distant recognition. Bella saw Beatrix’s cheek grow pale as he came in sight.

‘How white you turned just now,’ she said, when Puck had carried them ever so far away from the curate of Little Yafford.

‘Did I?’ asked Beatrix. ‘I don’t think I can be as pale as you. That was sympathy, I suppose. You felt how hard it was for me to pass him by.’

‘Yes,’ answered Bella in her quiet little way, ‘that was what I felt.’

Bella had been staying at the Water House a week and during that time had seen Mr. Harefield about half a dozen times. He was in the habit of dining with his daughter and her governess on Sundays. It was not a pleasant change in his hermit-like life, but he made this sacrifice to paternal duty. Every Sunday at four o’clock he sat down to dinner with his daughter and Miss Scales. Now that Miss Scales was away he sat down alone with the two girls, and looked at them curiously, when he found himself face to face with them at the board, as if they had been a new species in zoology which he had never before had the opportunity of scrutinizing.

He looked from one to the other thoughtfully while he unfolded his napkin, as if he were not quite clear as to which was his daughter, and then, having made up his mind on that point, addressed himself with a slight turn of the head to Beatrix.

‘Your friend has grown very much,’ he said.

‘Do you really think so, Mr. Harefield?’ inquired Bella, with a gratified simper. It was something to be spoken of in any wise by this modern Timon.

Mr. Harefield went on helping the soup without a word. He had quite forgotten his own remark, and had not heard Bella’s. They got half-way through the dinner in absolute silence. Then a tart and a pudding appeared, and the tart, being set down rather suddenly before Mr. Harefield, seemed to disturb him in the midst of a waking dream.

‘Have you heard from Miss Scales?’ he asked his daughter abruptly.

‘Yes, papa. I have had two letters. Her aunt is very ill. Miss Scales is afraid she will die.’

‘She hopes it, you mean. Can you suppose such a sensible person as Miss Scales would wish a tiresome old woman’s life prolonged when she will get a legacy by her death?’

‘Miss Scales is a good woman, papa. She would not be so wicked as to wish for any one’s death.’

‘Would she not? I’m afraid there are a great many good people on this earth wishing as hard as they can in the same line. Expectant heirs, expectant heiresses—waiting to wrench purse and power from a dead man’s gripe.’

After this pleasant speech the master of the house relapsed into silence. The old butler moved quietly to and fro. There was a gentle jingle of glass and silver now and then, like the ringing of distant sleigh-bells. The wood ashes fell softly from the wide old grate. The clock ticked in the hall outside. Time halted like a cripple. Bella began to think that even a home Sunday—with Mr. Scratchell swearing at the cooking and Mrs. Scratchell in tears—was better than this. It was at least open misery, and the storm generally blew over as rapidly as it arose. Here there was a suppressed and solemn gloom, as of a tempest always impending and never coming. What a waste of wealth and luxury it seemed to sit in a fine old room like this, surrounded by all good things, and to be obstinately wretched!

When dinner was over, and certain dried fruits and pale half-ripened oranges had been carried round by the butler’s subordinate, the butler himself following solemnly with decanters and claret jug, and nobody taking anything, the two girls rose, at a look from Beatrix, and left Mr. Harefield alone.

‘Will you come up to my room and have some tea, papa?’ Beatrix asked at the door.

‘Not to-night, my dear. I have a new number of the Westminster to read. You and Miss Scratchell can amuse yourselves. Good-night.’

No paternal kiss was offered or asked.

‘Good-night, papa,’ said Beatrix, and she and Bella went away.

It was a long evening. Bella did not like to open a novel, and did not care for Bishop Ken, whose ‘Practice of Divine Love’ formed the last stage in Miss Harefield’s self-culture. The only piano in the house was ever so far away in the lumber-room, and the lumber-room after dark was suggestive of ghosts and goblins, or at any rate of rats and mice.

Sunday evening at the parish church was gayer than this, Bella thought, as she sat by the fire stifling her frequent yawns, and watched Beatrix’s thoughtful face bending over Bishop Ken.

‘Yes, she is much handsomer than I am,’ reflected Bella, with a pang of envy. ‘How can I wonder that he likes her best! She is like one of those old prints Mr. Dulcimer showed us one evening—by Albert Durer, I think. Grave dark faces of Saints and Madonnas. She is like a poem or a picture made alive. And he is full of romance and poetry. No wonder he loves her. It is not for the sake of her fortune. He really does love her.’

And then came the question which in Bella’s mind was unanswerable. ‘Why should she have everything and I so little?’

Beatrix read on, absorbed in her book. The clock ticked, the gray wood ashes dropped upon the hearth, just as they had done in the dining-room. Outside the deep casement windows the night winds were blowing, the ragged tree-tops swaying against a cold gray sky. Bella shivered as she sat by the fire. This was the dreariest Sunday evening she had ever spent.

Presently a shrill bell pealed loudly through the house, a startling sound amidst a silence which seemed to have lasted for ages, nay, to be a normal condition of one’s existence. Bella gave a little jump, and sat up in her chair alert and eager.

‘Could it be Cyril Culverhouse? No, of course not.’

His image filled so large a place in her life that even the sudden ringing of a bell suggested his approach, till reason came to check the vagaries of fancy.

The same thought darted into Beatrix’s mind. For a woman deeply in love, earth holds only one man—her lover. Was it Cyril who came to claim her; to trample down the barrier of paternal authority, and to claim her by the right of their mutual love? This idea being, at the first flash of reason, utterly untenable, lasted no longer with Beatrix than it had done with Bella.

‘It must be Miss Scales,’ she said, going to the door. ‘And yet I should not have thought she would travel on a Sunday. She is so very particular about Sunday.’

Miss Scales belonged to a sect with whom God’s day of rest means a day of penance; a day upon which mankind holds itself in an apologetic attitude towards its Maker, as if deprecating the Divine wrath for its audacity in having taken the liberty to be born.

The two girls went out into the corridor, and from the corridor to the square open gallery in the middle of the house, from which the broad staircase descended. Here, leaning upon the oaken balustrade, they looked down into the hall.

It was empty when they first looked, a vacant expanse of black and white marble. Then there came another peal of the bell, and the butler walked slowly across to the door, and opened it just wide enough to reconnoitre the visitor.

Here there was a brief parley, the drift of which the girls could not distinguish. They only heard a murmur of masculine voices.

‘It can’t be Miss Scales,’ whispered Beatrix. ‘They would have brought in her portmanteau before this.’

The parley ceased all at once, the butler threw open the door, and a gentleman came in out of the windy night, bringing a blast of cold air with him. He took off his hat, and stood in the centre of the hall, looking about him, while the butler carried his card to Mr. Harefield. The stranger was a man of about fifty, tall and spare of figure, but with a certain nobility of bearing, as of one accustomed to command. The finely shaped head was beautifully set upon the shoulders, the chest was broad and deep. As he looked upwards the two girls drew back into the shadow, still watching him.

It was a beautiful head, a grand Italian face full of tranquillity and power, like a portrait by Moroni. The eyes were dark, the skin was a pale olive, the hair ‘a sable silvered.’ A thrill went through Beatrix’s heart as she looked at him.

Yes, she remembered, she knew. This was Antonio. This was the Italian with the pathetic voice, who sat in the twilight, singing church music, that summer evening long ago. This was the man whose face memory associated with the face of her dead mother. She had seen them looking at her together in those days of early childhood, whose faint memories are like a reminiscence of some anterior state of being, a world known before earth.

The butler came back.

‘My master will see you, sir.’

The stranger followed him out of the hall. Beatrix and Bella could hear the footsteps travelling slowly along the passage to the library.

‘Who can he be?’ exclaimed Miss Scratchell, full of curiosity. ‘Perhaps he is a relation of your papa’s,’ she added, speculatively, Beatrix having ignored her first remark.

Beatrix remained silent. She was thinking of the miniature in her mother’s room, the youthful likeness of the face she had seen to-night. Who was this man? Her mother’s kinsman, perhaps? But why had his presence brought sorrow and severance between husband and wife? Little as she knew of the hard facts that made up the history of her mother’s life, there was that in Beatrix’s memory which told her this man had been the cause of evil.

She roused herself with an effort, and went back to her room, followed by Bella, who had broken out into fresh yawns on finding that the advent of the stranger promised no relief to the dulness of the evening.

‘Eight o’clock,’ she said, as the old clock in the hall announced that fact, embellishing a plain truth with a little burst of old-fashioned melody. ‘They are coming out of church by this time. I wonder whether Mr. Culverhouse has preached one of his awakening sermons? I am sure we should be the better for a little awakening, shouldn’t we, Beatrix? I really wish you would talk a little, dear. You look as if you were walking in your sleep.’

‘Do I?’ said Beatrix. ‘Here comes the tea-tray. Perhaps a cup of tea may enliven us.’

‘Well, the urn is company at any rate,’ assented Bella, as the servant set down the oblong silver tray, with its buff and gold Bristol cups and saucers, and the massive old urn, dimly suggestive of sisterly affection in the person of Electra, or needing only a napkin neatly draped across it to recall the sculptured monuments of a modern cemetery.

‘Now, really,’ pursued Bella, while Beatrix was making tea, ‘have you no idea who that foreign-looking gentleman is?’

‘Why should I trouble myself about him? He comes to see papa, not me.’

‘Yes, but one can’t help being curious so long as one is human. By the time my inquisitiveness is worn out I shall be an angel. Your papa has so few visitors; and this one has such a distinguished appearance. I feel sure he is some one of importance.’

‘Very likely.’

‘My dear Beatrix, this lonely life of yours is making you dreadfully stoical,’ remonstrated Bella.

‘I should be glad to become stoical. This stranger’s visit cannot make any difference to me. It will not make my father love me any better, or feel more kindly disposed towards Cyril. It may make him a little worse perhaps. It may stir up old bitterness.’

‘Why?’ cried Bella, eagerly, her bright blue eyes becoming unbeauteously round in her excitement.

‘Don’t talk to me about him any more, please, Bella. I do not know who he is, or what he is, or whence or why he comes. He will go as he came, no doubt, leaving no trace of his presence behind him.’

But here Beatrix was wrong. This was not to be. In the library the two men were standing face to face—men who had not met for more than ten years, who had parted in anger too deep for words.

Christian Harefield contemplated his visitor calmly, or with that stony quietude which is passion’s best assumption of calm.

‘Has the end of the world come,’ he asked, ‘that you come to me?’

‘You are surprised that I should come?’ responded the Italian, in very good English.

‘I am surprised at two things—your folly and your audacity.’

‘I shall not praise my own wisdom. I have done a foolish thing, perhaps, in coming to England on purpose to do you a service. But I deny the audacity. There is no act in my past life that should forbid my entrance to this house.’

‘We will not re-open old wounds,’ answered Christian Harefield. ‘You are a villain; you acted like a villain. You are a coward; you acted like a coward in flying from the man you had wronged, when he pursued you in his just and righteous wrath.’

‘My career of the last ten years best answers your charge of cowardice,’ replied the other. ‘My name will be remembered in Italy with the five days of Milan. I never fled from you; I never knew that you pursued me.’

‘I spent half a year of my life in hunting you. I would have given the remnant of an unprofitable life then to have met you face to face in your lawless country, as we are meeting to-night in this room. But now the chance comes too late. I have outlived even the thirst for revenge.’

‘Again I tell you that I never wronged you, unless it was a wrong against you to enter this house.’

‘It was, and you know it. You, my wife’s former lover—the only man she ever loved—you to creep into my house, as the serpent crept into Eden, under the guise of friendship and good-will, and poison my peace for ever.’

‘It was your own groundless jealousy that made the poison. From first to last your wife was the purest and noblest of women.’

‘From first to last!’ exclaimed Christian Harefield, with exceeding bitterness. ‘First, when she introduced you, the lover of her youth, to her husband’s house, last when she fled from that husband with you for her companion. Assuredly the purest and noblest among women, judged by your Italian ethics.’

‘With me!’ cried the Italian, ‘with me! Your wife fled with me! You say that—say it in good faith.’

‘I say that which I know to be the truth. When she left me that night at the inn on the mountain road above Borgo Pace, after a quarrel that had been just a trifle more bitter than our customary quarrels, you were waiting for her with a carriage a quarter of a mile from the inn. You were seen there; she was seen to enter the carriage with you. Tolerably direct evidence, I fancy. For my daughter’s sake—to save my own pride and honour—I gave out that my wife had died suddenly at that lonely inn in the Apennines. Her father was dead, her brother sunk in the gulf of Parisian dissipation. There was no one interested in making any inquiries as to the details of her death or burial. The fiction passed unquestioned. For me it was a truth. She died to me in the hour she abandoned and dishonoured me; and all trust in my fellow-men, all love for my race, died within me at the same time.’

‘You are a man to be pitied,’ said Antonio, gravely. ‘You have borne the burden of an imaginary dishonour. You have wronged your wife, you have wronged me; but you have wronged yourself most of all. Did you get no letter from the Convent of Santa Cecilia?’

‘What letter? No. I had no letter. I left the inn at daybreak on the morning after my wife’s flight, followed on the track of your carriage—traced you as far as Citta di Castello—there lost you—caught the trail again at Perugia, followed you to Narni, and there again missed you.’

‘And you believed that your wife was my companion in that journey?’

‘What else should I believe? It was the truth. I heard everywhere that you were accompanied by a lady—a lady whose description answered to my wife.’

‘Possibly. A tavern-keeper’s description is somewhat vague. The lady was my sister, whom I was taking from the convent of the Sacred Heart at Urbino, where she had been educated, to meet her betrothed in Rome, where she was to be married. Your wife took refuge at the convent of Santa Cecilia on the night she left you. My sister and I went there with her—left her in the charge of the Reverend Mother, who promised her an asylum there as long as she chose to remain. She was to write to you immediately, explaining her conduct, and telling you that your violence had compelled her to this course, and that she could only return to you under certain conditions. I heard the Reverend Mother promise that a messenger should be despatched to the inn with the letter as soon as it was daylight.’

‘I was on the road at the first streak of dawn,’ exclaimed Mr. Harefield. ‘I never had that letter. How do I know that it is not all a lie? How do I know that you have not come here with a deep-laid plot to cheat and cajole me? I have lived all these years believing my wife false, accursed, abominable, a woman whose very existence was a disgrace to me and to her child. And you come now with this fable about a convent—a sudden flight from an intolerable life—ay, it was bitter enough in those last days, I confess—a pure and spotless life, cloistered, unknown. She is living still, I suppose—a professed nun—hiding that calm face under the shadow of a sable hood?’

‘She died within a year of her entrance into the convent, died, as she had lived, a guest, receiving protection and hospitality from the sisterhood, among them but not one of them. As your wife the church could not have received her. The nuns loved her for her gentleness, her piety, and her sorrow. I have come from her grave. Till within the last few months I have been a wanderer on the face of my country—every thought of my brain, every desire of my heart given to the cause of Italian independence. Only last week I found myself again a traveller on the mountain road between Urbino and Perugia, and master of my time. I went to visit the grave of her I had last seen a sorrowful fugitive from a husband whose very love had been so mixed with bitterness that it had resulted in mutual misery. The fact that you had never visited the convent, or communicated in any way with the nuns during all these years made me suspect some misunderstanding—and in justice to her whom I loved when life was young and full of fair hopes—and whose memory I love and honour now my hair is gray, I am here to tell you that your wife died worthy of your regret, that it is you who have need of pardon—not she.’

‘And I am to take your word for this?’

‘No, I knew too well your hatred and distrust to come to you without some confirmation of my story. At my request, knowing all the circumstances of the case, the Reverend Mother drew up a full account of your wife’s reception at the convent, her last illness, and her death, which came unexpectedly though she had long been ill. My chief purpose in coming to England was to give you this paper.’ He laid a large sealed envelope upon the table before Mr. Harefield. ‘Having done this, my mission is ended. I have no more to say.’

The Italian bowed gravely, and left the room, Mr. Harefield mechanically ringing the bell for the butler to show him out.

The door closed upon the departing guest, and Christian Harefield stood looking straight before him with fixed eyes—looking into empty air and seeing—what?

A pale pained face, white to the lips, framed in darkest hair, dark eyes gazing at him with a strained agonized gaze—hands clasped in a convulsion of grief and anger.

He heard a voice half choked with sobs.

‘Husband, you are too cruel—groundless accusations—vilest suspicions—I will not, I cannot bear this persecution any longer. I will leave you this very night.’

‘Yes,’ he answered, ‘your lover is waiting for you. It was his carriage that passed us on the road—and you know it.’

‘I do,’ she exclaimed with flashing eyes, ‘and I thank God that I have a friend and defender so near.’

And then she left him, to go to her own room as he fancied. He took her talk of flight as an empty threat. She had threatened him in this same way more than once in her passion. Their quarrel to-night had been a little more violent than usual. That was all. His jealousy had been aroused by the sight of a face he hated, looking out of a travelling carriage that whirled by them in a cloud of white dust on the sunny mountain road. He had given free rein to his violence afterwards, when they were alone at the inn—and had spoken words that no woman could forgive or forget.

Late that night he found her gone, and on inquiry discovered that a carriage had been seen waiting not far from the inn, and a lady, muffled in a mantle, had been seen to enter it. He heard this some hours after the event. He had no clue to assist him in discovering the way the carriage had taken, but he concluded that it had gone on to Citta di Castello. He had no doubt as to the face he had seen looking out of the window, athwart that blinding cloud of dust, as the bells jingled on the ragged old harness, and the driver lashed his jaded horses.

The outer door of the Water House shut with a prolonged reverberation, like the door of an empty church. Antonio was gone. Christian Harefield sank down in his accustomed seat, and sat staring at the fire, with hollow eyes, his arms hanging loosely across the oaken arms of the chair, his long thin hands falling idly, his lips moving faintly, now and then, but making no sound, as if repeating dumbly some conversation of the past—the ghosts of words long dead.

Those haggard eyes, which seemed to be staring at the red logs, were indeed looking along the corridor of slow dull years to that one point in the past when life was fresh and vivid, and all this earth flushed with colour and alive with light.

He was thinking of the evening when he first saw the girl who was afterwards his wife.

It was at a party in Florence—at the house of an Italian Countess—literary—artistic—dilettante—a party at which the rooms were crowded, and people went in and out and complained of the heat, while large and splendid Italian matrons—with eyes that one would hardly hope to see, save on the canvas of Guido, sat in indolent grace on the broad crimson divans, languidly fanning themselves, and murmuring soft scandals under cover of the music. There was much music at the Countess Circignani’s, and that night a young novice—the daughter of a Colonel in the Italian army—was led to the piano by the fair hand of the Countess herself, who entreated silence for her protégée. And then the sweet round voice arose, full of youth and freshness, in a joyous melody of Rossini’s—an air as full of trills and bright spontaneous cadences as a skylark’s song.

He, Christian Harefield, the travelling Englishman, stood among the crowd and watched the fair face of the singer. He was struck with its beauty and sweetness; but his was not a nature prone to sudden passions. This was to be no new instance of love kindled by a single glance, swift as fire from a burning glass. Before the evening was ended, Mr. Harefield had been presented to Colonel Murano, and by the Colonel to the fair singer. The soldier was a patriot, burning for the release of his country from the Austrian yoke—full of grand ideas of unification, glorious hopes that pointed to Rome as the capital of a united Italy. He found the Englishman interested in the Italian question, if not enthusiastic. He was known to be rich, and therefore worthy to be cultivated. Colonel Murano cultivated him assiduously, gave him the entrance to his shabby but patriotic salon, where Mr. Harefield listened courteously while patriots with long hair, and patriots with short hair, discussed the future of Italy.

The Colonel was a widower with a son and daughter—the girl newly released from the convent of an educational order, where her musical gifts had been cultivated to the uttermost—the son an incipient profligate, without the means of gratifying his taste for low pleasures. There was a nephew, a soldier and an enthusiast like his uncle, who spent all his evenings in the Colonel’s salon, singing with Beatrix Murano, or listening while she sang.

From the hour in which he first loved Beatrix, Christian Harefield hated this cousin, with the grave, dark face, sympathetic manners, and exquisite tenor voice. In him the Englishman saw his only rival.

Later, this young soldier, Antonio Murano, left Florence on military duty. The coast was clear, Mr. Harefield offered himself to the Colonel as a husband for his daughter—the Colonel responded warmly. He could wish no happier alliance for his only girl. She was young—her heart had never been touched. She could scarcely fail to reciprocate an attachment which did her so much honour.

‘Are you sure of that?’ asked Christian Harefield. ‘I have fancied sometimes that there is something more than cousinly regard between the Signora and Captain Murano.’

The Colonel laughed at the idea. The cousins had been brought up together like brother and sister—both were enthusiasts in music and love of country. There was sympathy—an ardent sympathy between them—nothing more.

Christian Harefield’s jealous temper was not to be satisfied so easily. He kept his opinion; but passion was stronger than prudence, and a week after he had made his offer to the father he proposed to the daughter. She accepted him with a pretty submission that charmed him—but which meant that she had learnt her lesson. She had been told that to refuse this chance of fortune was to inflict a deliberate and cruel injury upon those she loved—her father, for whom life had been a hard-fought battle, unblest by a single victory—her brother, who was on the threshold of life, and who needed to be put in the right road by a friend as powerful as Christian Harefield. The girl accepted her English suitor, loving that absent one fondly all the while, and believing she was doing her duty.

Then followed a union which might have been calm and peaceful, nay, even happy, had fate and Christian Harefield willed it. His wife’s health rendered a winter in England impossible. The doctors ordered her southward as soon as autumn began. What more natural than that her own wishes should point to her native city, the lovely and civilized Florence? Her husband, at first doting, though always suspicious, indulged this reasonable desire. At Florence they met the soldier cousin. He and Mrs. Harefield’s father both belonged to the patriot party. Both believed that the hour for casting off the Austrian yoke was close at hand. Colonel Murano’s salon was the rendezvous of all the Carbonari in the city. It was a political club. Mrs. Harefield shared the enthusiasm of her father and her cousin, and even her husband’s stern nature was moved to sympathy with a cause so noble. Then, by a slow and gradual growth, jealousy took root in the husband’s heart, and strangled every better feeling. He began to see in his wife’s love for Florence a secret hankering after an old lover. He set himself to watch, and the man who watches always sees something to suspect. His own eyes create the monster. By and by, Antonio Murano came to England on a secret mission to an exiled chief of the patriot party, and naturally went northward to visit his cousin. He was received with outward friendship but inward distrust. Then came scenes of suppressed bitterness between husband and wife—a sleepless watchfulness that imagined evil in every look and word, and saw guilt in actions the most innocent. A life that was verily hell upon earth. Later there followed positive accusations—the open charge of infidelity; and, in the indignation kindled by groundless allegations, Christian Harefield’s wife confessed that she had never loved him, that she had sacrificed her own inclinations for the benefit of her family. She confessed further that she had loved Antonio Murano; but declared at the same time, with tears of mingled anger and shame, that no word had ever been spoken by either of them since her marriage which her husband could blame.

‘You have seen him. He has been your chosen companion and friend,’ cried Christian Harefield. ‘If you had meant to be true to me you would never have seen his face after your marriage. Had you been honest and loyal I would have forgiven you for not loving me. I will never forgive you for deceiving me.’

From that hour there was no longer even the semblance of love between them. On Mr. Harefield’s part there was an ill-concealed aversion which extended even to his child. Finally came that last Italian journey—necessitated by the wife’s fast failing health—and with that journey the end. They went this time not to Florence, Mrs. Harefield’s beloved home, but to Venice, where she was a stranger. From Venice they were to go to Rome for the winter, and it was while they were travelling towards Rome that the catastrophe came. Christian Harefield believed that his wife had left him with her cousin—that the whole thing had been deliberately planned between them, Captain Murano following them southward from Venice.

This was the bitter past upon which Christian Harefield looked back as he sat before his solitary hearth that wintry night. The story of his wedded life passed before him like a series of pictures. He might have made it better, perhaps, if he had been wiser, he told himself; but he could not have made his wife love him, and he had loved her too passionately to be satisfied with less than her love. They were doomed to be miserable.

It was long before he read the Reverend Mother’s statement. The clock had struck more than once. His servant had come in for the last time, bringing a fresh supply of wood. The doors had been locked and barred. The household had gone to bed. It was the dead of night before Mr. Harefield aroused himself from that long reverie, and opened the sealed paper which was to confirm Antonio Murano’s story.

He read it slowly and thoughtfully, and believed it. What motive could any one have for deceiving him, now, after all these years, when the griefs and passions of the past were dead things—like a handful of gray dust in a funeral urn?

He rose and paced the room for a long time, deep in thought, holding the Superior’s letter in his hand. Then, as if moved by a sudden resolution, he seated himself at his table, and began to write a letter. It was brief—but he was long in writing it, and when it was done he sat for some time with the letter lying before him—and his eyes fixed—as if his mind had gone astray into deep thickets and jungles of conflicting thought. Then, as if again influenced by a sudden determination, he folded his letter and put it, with the Reverend Mother’s statement, into a large envelope.

This he addressed curiously, thus:—

‘For my daughter Beatrix.’

Then, leaving this letter on the table, he lighted a candle and went upstairs to the long passage out of which his wife’s rooms opened. He unlocked the door of her sitting-room and went in.

END OF VOL. I.

J. AND W. RIDER, PRINTERS, LONDON.

Corrections

Pages 15-16, which were misplaced in the original, have been restored. The first line indicates the original, the second the correction.

p. 163

- Let the bitter experience of my live govern yours.

- Let the bitter experience of my life govern yours.

p. 215

- in spite of all those hints and inuendoes

- in spite of all those hints and innuendos

p. 227

- Mrs. Dulcimer eat her early dinner alone,

- Mrs. Dulcimer ate her early dinner alone,

p. 245

- parish doctor of Little Yafford, was agreeable surprised

- parish doctor of Little Yafford, was agreeably surprised

p. 248

- Have your been over exerting yourself lately?

- Have you been over exerting yourself lately?

- ‘She been riding and driving far too much

- ‘She’s been riding and driving far too much

p. 250

- lately she has been particular busy

- lately she has been particularly busy

p. 254

- have her own way in all the minor detals of life

- have her own way in all the minor details of life

p. 262

- She like dresses and bonnets.

- She likes dresses and bonnets.

p. 307

- in having taken the librety to be born.

- in having taken the liberty to be born.

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Table of Contents

- Transcriber’s note

- AN OPEN VERDICT VOL. I.

- CONTENTS TO VOL. I.

- CHAPTER I.

- CHAPTER II.

- CHAPTER III.

- CHAPTER IV.

- CHAPTER V.

- CHAPTER VI.

- CHAPTER VII.

- CHAPTER VIII.

- CHAPTER IX.

- CHAPTER X.

- CHAPTER XI.

- CHAPTER XII.

- CHAPTER XIII.

- CHAPTER XIV.

- CHAPTER XV.

- CHAPTER XVI.

- CHAPTER XVII.

- CHAPTER XVIII.

- Corrections

- THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE