CHAPTER XXV.—AT THE PHEASANTRY.

‘I have letters to write—one to the Lord-lieutenant in particular, on county business,’ said the Earl, smiling, and addressing himself to Captain Denzil; ‘otherwise I daresay that I too should have been able to find something worth the showing you out of doors. As it is, you young people must go without me.’

Jasper, who had a lazy man’s horror of improved implements, Dutch dairies, new patent draining-tiles, and cattle-food, and who knew the Earl’s passion for farming, felt inwardly grateful to the Lord-lieutenant for detaining his noble host within doors. The Countess had not the slightest intention of accompanying her guests in their visit to the pheasantry. Except in a carriage, or in dry weather among the well-rolled paths of the rose-garden, Lady Wolverhampton scarcely ever left the house. Her age, though she looked younger, was within a year or two of that of her lord, and he was by far the stronger of the two. Indeed it was mainly due to her declining health and growing incapacity for exertion that the High Tor family had for this year foregone what most persons of their rank regard less as a pleasure than as a duty, the passing of at least a portion of the season in London.

The party from Carbery Chase had been very cordially received. People can afford yet to cultivate the old-fashioned quality of cordiality in rural retirement, where it answers to detect hidden merits and to see in the best light the things and persons in the midst of which and whom our lives have to be passed.

‘I am glad,’ said the Countess, ‘that Captain Denzil was able to come over with you to-day, my dears.’

With Sir Sykes’s two daughters the mistress of High Tor was on sufficiently familiar terms; but their brother’s character was not quite so much esteemed by the De Vere family as were theirs. Still, in the country, a young man and an elder son is per se a being of some importance, and to Jasper, with his arm yet in the black silken sling, there attached somewhat of romance, on account of his late accident and the adventurous way in which he had incurred it. He had not been expected, and his presence at High Tor was taken as a compliment.

Scarcely had the Ladies Maud and Gladys De Vere had time to don the pretty hats that so well set off the comeliness of the one and the bright beauty of the other, before their brother came into the room. Lord Harrogate had a riding-whip in his hand, and a long ride over the purple moorlands in prospect; but he was easily induced to defer it, and to make one of the party, that presently sauntered across the park towards a sunny sandy nook, screened from cold north winds by a friendly belt of fir and pine, where the new pheasantry had been established.

Near to the place where a footpath led to a sequestered dell, the new governess Miss Gray and her pupil met the group of advancing sight-seers. Ethel would have passed on with a quiet graceful bow of recognition; but Lady Alice had no notion of being thus shelved.

‘You are going to look at the pheasants,’ she said; ‘and we have just seen them. They seem rather frightened, but so very pretty!’

The words which young Lady Alice had employed when speaking of the exotic birds would have been singularly appropriate to Ethel Gray. The new governess looked timid and something more than pretty during the general hand-shaking and interchange of civil conventional phrases which now ensued. Jasper, whose acquaintance with Ethel was of the slightest, had contented himself with lifting his hat; but he had stared at her beautiful face with as cool a steadiness of gaze as though she had been a picture or a statue. Why Lord Harrogate should have resented this, it would have been no easy matter for his lordship to explain; but there was scorn, and anger too, in the glance which he shot at unconscious Jasper; while it was not without some embarrassment that he addressed a word or two of polite commonplace to Miss Gray. Then the governess and her pupil pursued their way to the house, and the rest of the party strolled on towards the pheasantry.

‘How handsome she is!’ exclaimed honest Lucy Denzil, looking back after the angular form of Lady Alice, and the graceful figure that contrasted so strongly with the bony awkwardness of the school-girl; and Lady Maud echoed the praise, and Lady Gladys smiled approval. The Earl’s second daughter was, as has been said, very lovely, and her golden hair and blue eyes had produced the usual effect of fascinating for the time being Jasper’s fickle fancy. It is quite possible to be very hard and at the same time very weak where women are concerned; and Captain Denzil, wary man of the world as he boasted himself to be, and selfish as he certainly was, could not at the moment resist the spell of the enchantress.

‘Cripple as I am,’ said Jasper, glancing at his injured arm, ‘you see that I could not resist the temptation to come when you asked me.’

‘They are not my pheasants; they are Maud’s, you know,’ returned Lady Gladys, as though wilfully misunderstanding him.

‘Fortunate birds!—that is if you condescend to take an interest in them,’ said the captain, nonchalant as ever, but contriving to throw into his tone and look a something of suppressed tenderness, that was not perhaps wholly feigned. Ruth Willis saw the look, although she was not near enough to overhear the words, and her eyes flashed and her white teeth closed sharply, almost savagely, on her pouting lip. She felt the mortification which an angler might feel did he see the half-hooked salmon, the silvery patriarch of the pool, desert his bait, and leap provokingly at the artificial fly of some rival disciple of Piscator. She could not forget how, an hour or two ago, the heir of Carbery had deigned to devote to her service those very tricks of manner—in her anger she mentally called them so—which now before her very eyes he was practising for the benefit of another. She did not care for him; but he piqued her, by the very effrontery of his fickleness, into attaching to him a value which in calmer moments she would never have set on one so intrinsically base as Jasper Denzil.

In spite of world-old experience and sage aphorisms, each sex remains to some extent a standing problem to the other. So Ruth Willis, nettled, baffled, wrathful, still did not fathom the depths of Jasper’s worthless nature one half so clearly as she would have done had her keen powers of observation been exercised at the expense of a woman. She even felt angry with Lady Gladys, though most unreasonably, for the proud beauty wore her most glacial armour of chilling haughtiness when she perceived that Jasper was disposed to pay her what is popularly known as ‘marked attentions.’

The innocent pheasants, the ostensible end and object of this expedition, were duly inspected, and lavishly fed with the millet and barley, the chopped eggs and crushed maize, which young pheasants love. They were fair enough to look upon, these shy pretty captives, still timorous and bewildered by their close confinement in the darksome baskets wherein they had been crammed by the irreverent poultry-merchant who had consigned them to High Tor; and not yet quite at home in their new abode, which had been so freshly decorated for their reception that the paint on the wood and the lacquer on the wires were barely dry. Golden pheasants there were, and white or silver pheasants, and pencilled pheasants, worthy descendants of a feathered ancestry that had pecked and strutted in the gardens of coral-buttoned mandarins, in far-off China.

The curious thing was, that except by their mistress Lady Maud and the elder of the two Denzil girls, who was a kindred spirit, the pheasants were scarcely looked at with regardful eyes. Is it not always so? At launch or military review or polo-match, or when a princely trowel of pure gold condescendingly applies a dab of sublime mortar to a glorified foundation-stone of some new building, how very, very few of the nominal spectators concentrate their thoughts and their vision on the show, which the reporters will presently describe with such graphic power! Private affairs, hopes, fears, interests, are all of them petty magnets sufficient to neutralise the great avowed attraction of the hour.

There was Ruth Willis, her whole attention stealthily concentrating itself upon Captain Denzil at the side of the Earl’s second daughter; there was Jasper, vainly trying to thaw the ice of Lady Gladys’ disdain; and Lord Harrogate, whose thoughts seemed at times to wander away from the present scene and company. Add to these Blanche Denzil, sorrowfully conscious that Lord Harrogate himself, in whose eyes she would have given much to find favour, was thinking of anything rather than of her preference for him, and it will be seen that the real amateurs of fancy pheasants were but in a narrow minority.

A good girl who loves a man worthy of her esteem, yet who is constrained by maiden modesty and the rules of good-breeding to hide away the sentiment as though it were a sin, deserves more pity than often falls to her lot. It is never Leap-year for her. She cannot be the first to speak. And if there be one point upon which men are exceptionally blind, it is to the perception that their merits may be highly appreciated by some young lady to whom they never give a thought when absent from her. Poor Blanche had trouble enough now and then to keep down the rising tears that welled up to her eyes as she noted twenty signs of the painful fact that Lord Harrogate regarded her with that amicable indifference which cannot readily ripen, as dislike sometimes can, into love. But Blanche was too gentle to grow bitter over a disappointment, as did Ruth Willis, although for her too the pleasure of the day was damped and dulled.

The visitors from Carbery would not, on getting back to the broad gravelled drive where the basket-carriage awaited them, re-enter the house. They had taken leave of the Earl and Countess, and declined all hospitable proffers of luncheon beforehand. There was some kissing among the girls and a good deal of hand-shaking, and then the ‘double basket’ again received its living load, and ‘good-bye’ was said, and off dashed the mettled Exmoor ponies under Lucy Denzil’s guidance.

Two of the party from the Chase carried back with them to Carbery hearts that were heavier than when they had first set out for the projected visit to the pheasantry at High Tor. Sir Sykes’s ward, so talkative two hours ago, had become sullenly mute. Ruth Willis was smarting under her defeat, for she had measured herself with Lady Gladys, and could not but acknowledge to herself that her own elfish piquancy was quite thrown into the shade by the superior charms of the Earl’s daughter. Blanche was sad and thoughtful. Jasper, twisting his well-waxed moustache, seemed unaware, in the preoccupation of his own mind, that Ruth was resentful and Blanche melancholy, while Miss Denzil frankly wondered why conversation languished as it did. Excellent Lucy had had no by-play to distract her attention from the object of the expedition; she had seen the birds and chatted with her friend, and was mildly gratified with her outing. Nevertheless it was but a silent party that the Exmoor ponies whisked back along the well-kept road that led to Carbery Chase.

CHAPTER XXVI.—THE NEW BROOM.

‘Clever enough, and too clever! It’s your look-out, sir, of course, and not mine; but I can’t help thinking that to give my friend Mr Wilkins an estate to manage is uncommonly like turning a fox into a poultry-yard to take care of the chickens.’

Such was Jasper Denzil’s remonstrance with his father, on hearing the baronet’s announcement of his intention to transfer the reins of local government to the willing hands of the City solicitor, vice Pounce and Pontifex superseded. Privately, Sir Sykes was of much the same opinion as his son; but as he was merely seeking to put a good face on what he felt to be really a surrender to a demand imperiously urged, he shook his head, saying: ‘You are prejudiced against this person, Jasper, and perhaps not unnaturally so. His manners, I admit, are not prepossessing, and his moral code has probably been shaped in a rough school of ethics; but I consider him to be one of those men whom it is pleasanter to have for a friend than for an enemy.’

Jasper’s expressive upper lip wore a curl of disgust. It was to him very disagreeable that Mr Wilkins, who had got the better of him, as he resentfully felt, in many an encounter of wits, should be often at Carbery, and right-hand man to its owner. He resolved on one more attempt to dislodge the intruder.

‘I would not, were I you, sir,’ said he, ‘either trust Wilkins a yard farther than I could see him, or be guided by his advice as to the management of the estate. You yourself heard the fellow say, at luncheon to-day, that he should not know turnips when he saw them unless there were boiled mutton in the middle of them. Wilkins only meant to raise a laugh when he hashed up that old joke against the Cockney sportsmen who ride to hounds, but he was nearer the truth than he was aware of.’

‘Ah, well,’ returned the baronet blandly, ‘I daresay his agricultural knowledge is after all pretty much on a par with that of Messrs Pounce and Pontifex.’

And then Jasper shrugged up his shoulders and was silent, for he perceived that it was hopeless to deprecate a foregone conclusion. For good or for ill, Sir Sykes had made up his mind to convert Mr Wilkins into a grand-vizier over the broad acres that lay within the circuit of his wide-stretching ring-fence.

Enoch Wilkins, gentleman, had on that morning reached Carbery Chase, and was in a fair way of earning for himself any rather than golden opinions from its inmates. Mr Wilkins, as he often and not untruly boasted, knew the world, that is to say he had a minute and almost microscopic acquaintance with one or two sections of the shady side of it. He understood turf-men, as a smart prison-governor understands convicts, and knew the natural history of the fast-living and embarrassed young officer as well as some lecturer on entomology knows the ways of beetle and butterfly. In a lower social grade, he was deeply versed in the arcana of Loan Societies, and could apply the thumbscrew of the County Court in nicely calculated proportions to a struggling debtor. Of what he called swell society Mr Wilkins had but a limited experience. He had shared, as the purveyors of welcome cash often do share, in the costly banquets given at Greenwich or Richmond hotels by wild young gentlemen of blood and fashion. He had even, at the instance of some needy man about town who curried favour with any dispenser of ready-money, received a card which entitled him, now and again, to be crushed and jostled and trodden upon by distinguished company at the maddening ‘At Home’ of some berouged and bewigged old peeress.

There was, as Mr Wilkins felt with some inward misgivings, a difference between forming part of a mob at Macbeth House or at the Baratarian Embassy, and mixing on intimate terms with such a family as were the Denzils. Yet, as the French idiomatically twist the phrase, he paid it off with audacity, being greasily familiar with Sir Sykes; on terms of brotherly frankness where Jasper was concerned; and for the benefit of the young ladies, assuming the character of the facetious and agreeable rattle, as he conceived incumbent on a regular Londoner and a bachelor to boot, when on a visit in the country.

Blanche and Lucy Denzil scarcely knew whether to let amusement or dislike predominate in their minds as Mr Wilkins rattled on, pouring out miscellaneous anecdotes and jokes that, if worn threadbare in the metropolis, would, he was convinced, retain enough of their original gloss and sparkle to pass muster in the country. That the man was coarse, pushing, and unscrupulous, was evident even to critics so lenient as the baronet’s daughters; while Sir Sykes, behind his urbane smile, suffered martyrdom from his new agent’s deportment.

There was one member of the family circle at Carbery whom Mr Wilkins eyed with quite an exceptional interest. He rarely addressed himself in conversation to the Indian orphan, Sir Sykes’s ward, but he watched her narrowly, and the more he saw of her the harder he found it to adhere to his original hypothesis as regarded the young lady whom Richard Hold, master mariner, had recommended to his good offices.

‘If that demure manner and those downcast eyes do not belong to as sly a puss as ever lived, write me down a greenhorn!’ was the mental reflection of Enoch Wilkins, of St Nicholas Poultney, in the City of London, gentleman. ‘That she sets her cap at the captain, Sir Sykes Denzil’s hopeful heir, I take for granted. Her communicative friend, the pirate fellow, implied as much. The Lancer does not seem, however, disposed to come forward in a satisfactory style, and play Philemon to her Baucis.’

And it was a fact that since the morning which had witnessed the drive to High Tor and the visit to the pheasantry, the snares of Miss Ruth Willis had been vainly set for the capture of that bird of dubious feather, Jasper Denzil.

Why Jasper, who had so much to gain by the match on which his father’s mind was inexplicably bent, should hang back and prove recalcitrant, it was hard to say. His was not an independent soul. He was free from any trammels of a too scrupulous delicacy, and would have fingered any money got through the grimiest channels, without fear of soiling those white useless hands of his, the manliest work of which had hitherto been to grasp a bridle-rein. Yet Jasper had been very remiss of late in his attentions towards Ruth Willis, and apparently indifferent to the bribe of an income and establishment to be earned by marrying her.

‘Now look here, Sir Sykes!’ said the lawyer after dinner, as he edged his chair nearer to that of his host, refilled his glass, and assumed a tone of waggish confidence—‘look here, Sir Sykes! You want brushing up down here at Carbery, you do indeed; ay and a little fresh air let in upon you. In an old estate like this, and under such management as those of Pounce and Proser—beg his pardon; I mean Pontifex; ha, ha, ha!’—pursued Mr Wilkins, having his laugh out, without so much as a sympathetic titter from Jasper or a smile from Sir Sykes—‘in an estate of this kind matters are apt to stagnate, and all sorts of abuses and jobs to grow up, like the green duckweed on the surface of a pool. Your head-gamekeeper now, Sir Sykes, I never saw him, but I’m sure that he’s a rogue.’

‘Leathers is an old servant,’ answered Sir Sykes coldly; ‘I have had no reason to think ill of him.’

‘I’ll go bail that he’s a rogue, for all that,’ returned the unabashed lawyer, holding up his glass to the light, to admire the ruby claret before he swallowed it. ‘The head-keeper of an easy-going, moneyed gent of your standing—excuse me, Sir Sykes—must be a saint, if he’s not a sinner. Think of the temptations! Why, the rabbits alone must be a cool two hundred a year to the man; and then the pheasants, and the black-mail from the tenants for keeping the ground-game within reasonable numbers, and the percentage on watchers’ wages. I’ll get you a contract with a London poulterer, Sir Sykes, that shall stand you in something handsome, provide you with a keeper twice as useful as Leathers, and insure your having a hot corner for your friends at battue-time. I’m a new broom, and sweep clean.’

‘You promise well, at anyrate!’ said Jasper with a languid sneer.

‘And did you ever know me not ready to implement when I had once promised?’ briskly retorted the solicitor. ‘I merely mention the gamekeeper to shew that all’s fish that comes to my net, and that I am not above attending to such minor fry as a fellow in velveteen with a dog-whistle at his button-hole. We must go on commercial principles, Sir Sykes, if we want to manage an estate so as to make it pay, nowadays. All that feudal nonsense of an affectionate tenantry and a liberal lord of the manor is about as dead as Queen Anne. You should get a new steward as well as a new gamekeeper, Sir Sykes.’

The baronet stirred restlessly in his chair. He did not at all like this. Carbery, and the fair estate that went with it, had never yet been administered on commercial principles, especially when applied by so sweeping a reformer as Mr Wilkins of St Nicholas Poultney. ‘Mr Cornish keeps his accounts very correctly,’ he said in a hesitating tone. ‘Old Lord Harrogate gave him the stewardship, which his father had had before him, and his tenure of it has satisfied me.’

‘Because you can afford, or fancy you can, to be robbed right and left,’ said the lawyer, gulping down his wine. ‘It is your plausible hereditary steward, that has fattened and battened on the plunder of successive generations, who sucks the very marrow out of the land. Don’t tell me! I’ll overhaul Mr Cornish’s accounts in a way he’s little used to. But first you must introduce me to the farmers, Sir Sykes, and give me time to worm out of them what they pay, in kind or money, by way of fines, good-will, premium, and so forth, for the honour of tilling your under-rented acres. I’ll raise your rent-roll, never fear me, but not with a native chawbacon for prime-minister.’

‘So the steward must be flung overboard, it seems, as well as poor old Leathers the keeper,’ observed Jasper, half amused, but half annoyed.

‘And I’ve got another peg to fit into the vacant hole,’ said the lawyer, again addressing himself to the claret. ‘With your permission, Sir Sykes, to-morrow we’ll wire for him to run down from London for your approval. A sharp fellow is Abrahams. You won’t mind his persuasion? Jew as he is, he’s thoroughly at home in a farmhouse, counts every sheaf of wheat in the barn, and every house-lamb in the kitchen on frosty days, and wheedles out of the women what the husbands are too dogged to tell.—This is delicious claret, but no one except myself seems to drink it. Suppose we join the ladies?’

‘What has the governor done,’ groaned Jasper, as he lit his cigar, ‘to be under the thumb of such a man as this?’