CHAPTER XXI.—ETHEL FINDS A FRIEND.

‘It was all one property once,’ said Lady Maud, as she sat by Ethel’s side in the open window of the school-room, while Ethel’s pupil, Lady Alice, was busily engaged in copying a sketch. The window commanded across the park a view of Carbery, with its Elizabethan gables and vanes glinting back the sun. Lady Maud was fond of spending her spare hours in the society of the new governess, and she and Ethel were, in spite of the difference of their position, fast friends.

‘It is seldom,’ said Ethel Gray, ‘that two such grand houses are so close together.’

‘They belonged, as I said, to one owner,’ returned Lady Maud; ‘and the builder of Carbery was a De Vere and lived at High Tor, long ago. He was an ancestor of ours; but I don’t know exactly how it was that the properties came to be divided. I do know how Sir Sykes came to be master of the Chase; and if you like, I will tell you the story. It is no secret. I wonder that none of the village gossips have been beforehand with me.’

‘I always imagined Sir Sykes to be a relation of yours,’ said Ethel, with another glance at the stately mansion, gleaming in the mellow sunshine.

‘No more than you are, dear,’ answered Lady Maud; ‘and indeed he never could have expected to be the owner of that fine place, when he was a boy. He was poor enough. His father, old Sir Harbottle, had been a sad spendthrift, and died abroad; and when Sir Sykes, then a captain of infantry, came back from India, he had nothing to inherit but the baronetcy. They are Yorkshire people, the Denzils, not Devonshire; but there was a connection by marriage between Sir Sykes and old Lord Harrogate, who had married Sir Harbottle’s sister.

‘This old Lord Harrogate was the master of Carbery Chase, and a kinsman of ours, and head of all the De Veres; but how, I cannot exactly tell you, for we titled people I suspect often remember as little of our pedigree as if our names were Jones or Robinson. I only know that he was a rich, lonely, furious-tempered old man, a widower without any children or nephews, and had quarrelled with all his relations, with Papa most of all, about some tiresome election business. They say lords are forbidden by law to meddle with elections, but they do meddle; and the Earl went on one side, and old Lord Harrogate, who was of different politics, on the other. The end of it was that Sir Sykes was sent for, and that Lord Harrogate made his will, giving every acre to his wife’s nephew; just, as he said, that no De Vere should be the better for his death.

‘What was the oddest thing of all,’ pursued Lady Maud, ‘was that the old lord did not like Sir Sykes at all, and told him so, they say; but made him his heir exactly because he thought it would be gall and wormwood to his own kith and kin. And it was supposed that Lord Harrogate’s anger and violent emotions brought on the fatal fit of apoplexy by which he was carried off. At anyrate he died suddenly only a few hours after the signing of the will; and that was how Sir Sykes became master of Carbery.’

‘I should not think it could have made him very happy,’ said Ethel thoughtfully.

‘I am sure I don’t know why it should not,’ said the more practical Lady Maud. ‘It was no fault of his, after all, that Lord Harrogate had the whim to will it away as he did; and Papa owed him no grudge for it; and we have always been on neighbourly terms, if not very intimate. But it did not make him happy. Sir Sykes,’ she added laughingly, ‘had, you must know, a most romantic love-affair in his youth, unlikely as such a thing seems to those who see him now.’

Ethel Gray asked, with more interest than before, if it were Sir Sykes Denzil’s love-affair which had prevented his enjoying the material prosperity which was his.

‘I have always thought so,’ said Lady Maud confidently; ‘though people ascribe his sad looks and retired life to a different cause. But there is no doubt that he was very much in love with a certain Miss De Vere, an exceedingly pretty girl, whom Papa and Mamma always speak of as Cousin Clare, and whose picture I will shew you this evening, if you like, in the Green Room. Cousin Clare was an orphan, with no money, and she lived in Papa’s house when he was first married; and poor as she was, she was to be Lady Harrogate when the old lord died.’

‘I thought your brother’—— said Ethel wonderingly.

‘O yes; it has come to us now, the title,’ said Lady Maud, smiling. ‘But Miss Clare De Vere, who was a distant cousin, came next in succession, and was to have the Barony, and be a peeress in her own right, when the old lord died. Harrogate is one of the oldest English titles, and goes, as they call it, to heirs-female; so that it was a standing joke that poor Miss De Vere would be a peeress without income enough to pay her milliner; only every one hoped she would marry well, since she was very lovely, as I told you. Now Sir Sykes was desperately in love with her; but the Earl did not approve of his suit, nor did Mamma, for he was badly off and in debt, and had been married before.’

‘I did not know that. I noticed Lady Denzil’s monument in the church only a month ago,’ rejoined Ethel.

‘That was the second wife,’ said Lady Maud. ‘Jasper and the girls were not her children. No. Sir Sykes married very young, when a subaltern in India, and there his wife died; and when he came home a widower, he had these three children to provide for, and scarcely any means at all. He was a handsome man—that I think one can see. But Cousin Clare did not like him; still she was of a gentle yielding nature, and when Sir Sykes became owner of Carbery, and a very good match indeed, and Papa thought Clare had better accept him, somehow she allowed herself to be talked into an engagement. Well, the baronet was very urgent, and he had got the Earl and Countess on his side; and poor Cousin Clare I’m afraid was not very strong-minded, so she promised to marry Sir Sykes; though the man she really cared for was a needy cousin of hers and ours, Colonel Edward De Vere of the Guards; and the wedding things were all got ready, and the lawyers had drawn the settlements; when, to the surprise of all, Cousin Clare was missing. She had eloped with her cousin Edward, and was married to him in Scotland.’

‘Sir Sykes must have felt that very much?’ said Ethel, looking across the park towards the distant mansion of Carbery.

‘He did,’ returned Lady Maud. ‘But I don’t pity him, because, as you shall hear, he behaved very ill. It was Papa who broke the news to him; and I have heard the Earl say that the passion of uncontrolled rage with which he received it was absolutely horrible. Some anger was natural of course; but he was more like a fiend than a man. He swore that he would be revenged; that he would never rest until he had found some means of stabbing Clare’s heart, as she had stabbed his, and of making her bitterly rue the day when she had cast him off. He was, in fact, dreadfully violent, and it seemed the more shocking in a polite smooth-spoken man like him; but of course people excused him on account of the excitement of his feelings.

‘Men who are jilted do odd things, they say. In half a year after Clare’s elopement, Sir Sykes married a Manchester heiress with a large fortune; and three years later the second Lady Denzil died at Tunbridge Wells; and soon after, her only child, a little girl of about three years old, died too. From that time it was that Sir Sykes’s melancholy was supposed to date. It was supposed that he never got over the loss of this baby daughter, and that was the odder, because he seemed the very last man to mourn always over a little child. It was not the loss of his wife; he cared very little for her. And he never seemed a devoted father to his surviving children. Yet since that tiny mite of a girl was buried, he never held up his head as he had been used to do.’

‘And Miss Clare, Miss De Vere?’ asked Ethel, with a feminine interest in the heroine of the story.

‘Ah! poor Cousin Clare!’ said Lady Maud seriously: ‘she suffered enough, poor thing, to expiate her breach of faith to Sir Sykes tenfold. Very, very short was her time of happy married life before’——

‘I wish, Maud, please, you would look at this sketch for me, and help me with the foreground. I’ve made the figures too big, I’m afraid, and can’t get in the rest of it,’ said young Lady Alice, from amid her pencils and colour-boxes.

‘I will; I’ll come and try what I can make of it, as soon as I have told Miss Gray the rest of the story—the saddest part of it, I am sorry to say,’ said good-natured Lady Maud. ‘Sir Sykes’s vengeance was realised, terribly realised, without his having to stir a finger in the matter, for little more than three years after Cousin Clare’s marriage, her husband, whom she almost idolised, was brought home to the house a corpse. He had, like many other heroes both in romance and reality, been thrown from his horse in the hunting-field and killed on the spot.

‘The young Baroness Harrogate—I have already told you that Clare was heir-female to the title at the death of the old lord—was all but killed too, as I have heard, by the shock of her husband’s death; but for the sake of her child, the only earthly consolation left to her, the poor thing bore up under her great affliction. Yet Papa said that when he went to see her, her mournful eyes quite haunted him for weeks and months afterwards, and that, beautiful as she still was, she looked but the ghost of her former self. Then, when the next summer came round—— I hardly like to tell it!’ said Lady Maud, as the tears rose thickly in her eyes.

‘Do not tell me any more,’ said Ethel gently, ‘if it gives you pain.’

‘No; I was foolish,’ returned her friend, smiling; ‘for what I am speaking of happened long, long ago, when you and I were in the nursery, and I have heard it related very often, though I never told it until to-day. Well, the young widow lived on in the house she had inhabited since the first days of her marriage, a pretty cottage beside the Thames, and there she dwelt alone with her child, a sweet little creature, a girl of three years of age, who promised to be nearly as beautiful as her beautiful mother. And then this last hope was snatched away.’

‘Did the child die?’ asked Ethel falteringly.

‘It was worse than that,’ answered Lady Maud, whose lip trembled as she spoke. ‘She had been with the child in the garden, which bordered the river. Little Helena—that was her name—was playing among the flowers when her mother was called away, and as she was entering the house, she heard a faint cry or scream, in what seemed to be the child’s voice. She ran back to the garden, and to the grassy terrace where she had left her young treasure; but the child was not to be seen. She called; but there was no answer. Trembling, she neared the water’s edge, and there she saw the child’s tiny straw-hat with its broad black ribbon, floating down the river; but of the body—for no one could doubt but that the poor little lamb had been drowned—there were no signs; and when aid was summoned and a search begun, it proved fruitless.’

‘Was the poor little child never found then?’ asked Ethel, more moved than she had expected to be by these details.

‘Never found,’ replied Lady Maud. ‘No rewards, no entreaties availed, though men examined every creek and shoal of the river. No trace of the lost one was ever discovered except the little straw-hat. With that the miserable young mother never would part. On her own death-bed—and she died very soon after, utterly broken down by this double bereavement—it was the last object on which her dying eyes looked as her feeble fingers clung to it, that little hat of the child’s. We talk lightly of broken hearts. And yet, such things can be. Poor Cousin Clare died of one. Hers was a sad, sad story.’

Both Lady Maud and Ethel were weeping now. The former was the first to dry her eyes.

‘We are very silly,’ she said, trying to smile, ‘to cry in this way over an old history concerning people that we never, to our knowledge, saw; for though I was alive when Cousin Clare married, I don’t remember her at all. I was too young for that. Only it struck me often that Sir Sykes Denzil’s sadness may have more to do with the desertion of his betrothed bride and her brief career and early ending, than with the cause to which it is generally assigned. Don’t you think so too?’

Ethel did think so; but she did not speak for a moment, and then she said: ‘I pity Sir Sykes too. How bitterly his own cruel words, as to the revenge he threatened, must have come back to his memory when he heard the news of that great misfortune—of the child’s being drowned.’

‘Idle threats, dear! Perhaps he hardly remembered having spoken so foolishly in his excitement,’ answered Lady Maud indifferently. ‘It was after all about that time that he lost his own little daughter. Cousin Clare’s title came to Papa, and our brother Harrogate bears it by courtesy, as you know. There was no property. The poor little child, had she lived, would have been Helena, Lady Harrogate.’

‘The body was never found at all?’ asked Ethel.

‘Never found!’ said Lady Maud.—‘Now Alice, I’ll help you with your drawing.’ And the conversation ceased.

CHAPTER XXII.—ARCADES AMBO.

Hot, dusty, and conventionally empty as London now was, and stifling as was the confined air of St Nicholas Poultney, Mr Enoch Wilkins was in gay good-humour. He shewed it by the urbanity with which he was dismissing a shabby-genteel man of middle age, to whose remonstrances he had listened with a bland semi-serious patience unusual to him.

‘Now, really, Mr Greening, really we must have no more of this,’ he said, shewing his white front teeth in an affable smile. ‘“Can’t pay” and “Won’t pay” are, I fancy, convertible phrases. The Loan Office cannot afford to do business on sentimental principles. And it’s all very well to say that you only had in cash nine seven eleven, as consideration for your notes of hand, amounting to—let me see.’ And the solicitor glanced at a bundle of papers on the table.

‘To twenty-eight pounds six and fourpence,’ said the debtor piteously; ‘two-thirds of which are for interest and commission.’

‘But that,’ pursued the solicitor, ‘by no means affects the legal aspect of the case. The bill of sale over your furniture is none the less valid. I didn’t quite catch your last remark.—Ah! to sell you up would be to you sheer ruin? Then, my good Mr Greening, I advise you to stave off the ruin by prompt payment, to escape the very heavy expenses to which you will otherwise be put. Good-day to you.—Now,’ he added to his clerk, ‘I will see this Mr Hold.’ And as the impecunious Greening took his melancholy leave, the sunburnt countenance of Richard Hold became visible in the doorway.

‘From abroad, I presume?’ said Mr Wilkins affably, as his observant eye noted the seafaring aspect of his visitor and the bronze on his cheek, which might well have become a successful Australian digger, fresh with his dust and nuggets from the gold-fields.

‘Well—I have been abroad; I have knocked about the world a goodish bit,’ answered Hold slowly, ‘but just latterly I’ve stayed ashore.’

Mr Wilkins picked up the office penknife and tapped the table with the buckhorn handle of it somewhat impatiently. He did not entertain quite so high an opinion of the swarthy stranger as before. The first glance had suggested damages in a running-down case at sea; the second, some claim for salvage; the third, an investment of savings earned, according to the picturesque phrase, ‘where the gold grows.’ But the solicitor knew life well enough to be aware that those who have knocked, in Hold’s words, about the world, are rolling stones whereon seldom grows the moss of profit.

‘What, Mr Hold, may be your business with me?’ he asked curtly.

Richard Hold was not in the least nettled at this chilling reception. His dark roving eyes made their survey of the lawyer’s surroundings, from the heavy silver inkstand to the prints on the walls, and then settled on the face of Mr Enoch Wilkins himself.

‘That depends,’ said Hold, with a lazy good-humour, as he leaned against the door-post nearest to him, ‘on what you call business, skipper!’

Mr Wilkins frowned; but the words, sharp and peremptory, that rose to his lips, remained unspoken. His first idea had been that this was the saucy freak of an ill-conditioned sailor, and that a word to his clerk and a summons to the policeman on his beat hard by, would rid him of the intruder. But the man was quite sober. There must be some reason for his singular tone and bearing. Wherefore, when Mr Wilkins spoke again, it was urbanely enough: ‘If I can be of use to you professionally, sir, you may command me; at least I shall be glad to hear what you have got to say. Perhaps you feel somewhat strange in a lawyer’s office?’

‘I haven’t seen the inside of one since six years ago I was in trouble at Singapore about—never mind what!’ returned Hold, checking his too communicative flow of words, and then added: ‘Now I hail from Devonshire—Dartmoor way—Carbery Chase way, not to mince matters.’

Mr Wilkins started. ‘Have you a message for me—from Sir Sykes, I mean?’ he inquired, in an altered voice.

‘No!’ replied Hold, in a dubious tone, and coughing expressively behind his broad brown hand; ‘not exactly that.’

The lawyer looked keenly at his visitor. Hold’s bold eyes met his. The man’s unabashed confident air was not lost on so shrewd an observer of human nature as was Enoch Wilkins. ‘Take a chair, I beg, Mr Hold,’ he said civilly; and Hold took a chair, placed it sideways, and seating himself upon it in a careless informal attitude, rested one elbow on the chair-back, and contemplated the lawyer with serene scrutiny.

‘You come from Sir Sykes, however, although you do not bring a message?’ asked Mr Wilkins.

‘Take your affidavy of that, squire!’ returned Hold, in an assured tone. ‘We ought to be friends, you and I,’ he added, with what was meant for an engaging smile, ‘for we are both, I reckon, in the same boat.’

‘In the same boat, hey?’ repeated Mr Wilkins cautiously. ‘How’s that?’

‘I mean,’ said Hold, knitting his black brows, ‘that we are both pretty much on the same lay—that we know a thing or two about a rich party that shall be nameless, and about certain old scores, and a certain young lady, and—— Why should I do all the chat, master? Is this Greek to you, or do you catch my meaning?’

Mr Wilkins, whose eyes had opened very widely as he listened, here started as though he had been electrified. ‘I understand you to imply,’ he said smoothly, ‘that our interests are identical?’

‘Well, I guess they are,’ responded Hold, in the blunt fashion that was natural to him. ‘We both, I suppose, want as many of Sir Sykes Denzil’s yellow coins as we can conjure out of his pocket; and both need no teaching to turn the screw pretty smartly when we see our way to it; eh, mister?’

Enoch Wilkins, gentleman, winced before this over-candid home-thrust. It is indeed one thing to be guilty of a particular act and another to hear it defined with unmannerly plainness of speech. And he did not quite like the being bracketed, as to his motives and position, with a piratical-looking fellow, such as he saw Hold to be. But to take offence was not his cue; so he laughed softly, as at the sallies of some rough humorist, and rattled his watch-guard to and fro, as he warily made answer: ‘All men, I believe, are supposed to take care of Number One. I do not profess to be a bit more disinterested than my neighbours, and if I did, you are too wide awake to believe me.’

‘Right you are!’ responded Richard with a mollified grin and an amicable snap of the ends of his hard fingers. ‘I never cruised in company with a philanderer’ (meaning probably a philanthropist) ‘but once, and he made off with my kit and gold-dust while I was taking my turn down shaft at Flathead Creek, in California there. My notion is that there are pickings for both. Why should we two fall out so long as Sir Sykes Denzil, Baronet, is good for this kind of thing?’ And the ruffian imitated, in expressive pantomime, the action of squeezing a sponge.

Again the lawyer laughed. ‘No need,’ he said with well-feigned admiration for the other’s astuteness, ‘to send your wits to the whetstone, Mr—or perhaps I should say Captain—Hold.’

‘Well, I don’t dislike the handle to my name; and I’ve a fairish right to it, since I’ve had my own cuddy and my own quarter-deck,’ rejoined Hold boastfully. ‘And now, squire, I’d like to hear your views a little more explicit out than I have had the pleasure.’

It was the attorney’s turn to cough now, as he replied, still swaying his watch-guard to and fro: ‘There you push me, my good sir, into a corner. Every profession has its point of honour, you know; and we lawyers are shy of talking over the affairs of an absent client unless’——

‘Client, you call him, do you?’ broke in Hold. ‘Maybe you’re correct there, since you’ve brought the Bart. to throw Pounce and Pontifex overboard, and make you first-officer over his tenants; but he warn’t a client before yesterday.’

The astonishment written in Mr Wilkins’s face was very genuine. Of all the extraordinary confidants whom Sir Sykes could have selected, surely this coarse fierce adventurer was the most unlikely. And yet how, save from Sir Sykes himself, could the fellow have acquired his knowledge of the truth?

‘I was not prepared’—— stammered out the lawyer.

‘Not prepared,’ interrupted Hold coolly, ‘to find a rough diamond like yours to command, so deep in the Bart.’s little secrets. Perhaps not. Mind ye, I don’t want to quarrel. Live and let live. But it’s good sometimes to fire a shotted gun athwart a stranger’s bows, d’ ye see?’

‘You and Sir Sykes are old acquaintances?’ said the lawyer, feeling his way.

‘Pretty well for that. Years too have gone by a few since you and he first came within hailing distance,’ replied Hold with assumed carelessness.

‘We were younger men, that’s certain,’ returned the lawyer with a jolly laugh and a twinkling eye. That anybody should try to extract from him—from him, Enoch Wilkins, information that he desired to keep to himself—to pump him, in homely phraseology, seemed to the attorney of St Nicholas Poultney, in the light of an exquisitely subtle joke. Hold, in spite of his confidence in his own shrewdness, began to entertain vague doubts as to whether in a fair field he was quite a match for the London solicitor. Fortune, however, had dealt him a handful of court-cards, and he proceeded to improve the occasion.

‘Now, squire,’ said Hold impressively, and laying one brawny hand, as if to enforce the argument, on the table as he spoke, ‘I could, if I chose, clap a match to the powder-magazine and blow the whole concern sky-high. Suppose I weren’t well used among ye? Suppose I began to meet cold looks and buttoned-up pockets? What easier than to make a clean breast of what it no longer pays to keep secret, stand the consequences—I’ve stood worse on the Antipodes side of the world—and get another sniff of blue water. That would spoil your market, squire!’

Mr Wilkins muttered something about edge-tools; but his seafaring guest answered the remark by a short laugh of scorn. ‘You know a thing or two,’ he said incisively; ‘so do I. Are we or are we not to act in concert? If not, up with your colours and fire a broadside. Anyhow, friend or enemy, I’ll thank you to speak out.’

All Mr Wilkins’s liveliness vanished in an instant, and he seemed strongly and soberly in earnest as he said: ‘I will speak out, as you call it. I should very much prefer to be on good terms with you. I should like us, as far as we prudently can, to co-operate. But you have not as yet told me what you would have me do.’

‘I’ll tell you,’ said Hold confidentially, edging his chair nearer to the lawyer’s. ‘When you go down to Carbery——You mean to go, don’t you?’ he added abruptly.

‘Certainly,’ said the lawyer, touching a spring in the table by which he sat, and producing from a concealed drawer, that flew open at his touch, a letter, which he unfolded and handed to his visitor. ‘You know so much, captain, that I need not keep back this from you. It is from Sir Sykes, as you see. The contents are probably not strange to you.’

‘Not likely,’ returned the seaman, throwing his eyes, with ill-dissembled eagerness, on the letter. ‘He asks you to come down then, and names an early day. The rents will be passing through your hands before long, Mister. ’Tain’t that, though, I want to speak of. You’ll find when you get to the Chase, a young lady there.’

‘I understood that Sir Sykes had two daughters,’ said the attorney innocently.

‘He had three, if you come to that,’ was Hold’s rough answer. ‘But this is no daughter. Maybe she’ll be a daughter-in-law, some fine day.’

‘Oho!’ said Mr Wilkins, arching his eyebrows. ‘Young lady on a visit, I presume?’

‘On a very long visit,’ answered Hold. ‘A ward she is of the Bart., orphan daughter of an old Indian brother-officer. Name of Willis; Christian name Ruth.’

‘Ruth!’ Trained and practised as the sharp London man of business was in the incessant struggle of wits and jarring interests, he could not repress the exclamation. ‘Bless me—Ruth!’ he added breathlessly, and grew red and pale by turns. There seemed to be some magic in the sound of that apparently simple name which affected those who heard it.

‘Name of Willis; Christian name Ruth,’ repeated Hold. ‘Like one of themselves she is now. Shouldn’t wonder if she were to change her name, first to Mrs Captain Denzil, afterwards to Lady Denzil when Sir Jasper that will be comes into title and property. You’ve known Sir Jasper that will be, squire; you’ve had dealings with him. Now, mark me! The sooner that young dandy makes up his mind to place a gold ring on Miss Ruth’s pretty finger, the better for him and for the Bart. and for you too Mr Wilkins. “A nod’s as good as a wink”—you know the rest of the proverb.’ And throwing on the table a card, on which were legibly pencilled the words ‘Captain Hold. Inquire at Plugger’s Boarding-house;’ and promising, ominously, to see Mr Wilkins again, in London or at Carbery, the seaman took his leave.

Left alone, the lawyer’s features relaxed into a smile of satisfaction. ‘A cleverish fellow and vain of his cleverness, this Hold, but very communicative. It would surprise you, my good captain, if you knew how very much you have been kind enough to tell me, during our late interview.’