CHAPTER XXIV.—A NEIGHBOURLY VISIT.

Jasper, as he walked with dawdling gait back to the morning-room—the ex-cavalry officer always did dawdle, except in the hunting-field or when race-horses were thundering past the judge’s chair—felt what in his case did duty for brains to be in a dizzy whirl. He could not grapple with the mystery which seemed to have chosen Carbery Chase for its headquarters. The captain was by no means, as has been said, one of those guileless youths, if such there be, who are slow to think evil. Shew him a plain, intelligible, sordid motive, and no one could be quicker in descrying it, no matter how fair a pretence of decorous honour might be kept up. But this was beyond him. ‘No kith or kin of mine after all!’ he muttered as he made his way along the thickly carpeted corridor. ‘I must have been wrong, absurdly wrong all the time. But why my father should press me so hard on this subject no fellow could understand. He’s in earnest though, about desiring the match.’

As he spoke he laid his grasp on the handle of the door of the morning-room, turned it, and entering, found with a complacent smile, that Ruth Willis was alone. Captain Denzil was on sufficiently good terms with himself, but even coxcombs are glad of the confirmatory suffrages of others; and Jasper felt as though he were under a sort of obligation to the baronet’s ward for having paid him the compliment of falling in love with him.

‘I thought,’ said Jasper, as if to apologise for his presence in that pretty room, where a man seemed incongruous with the surroundings, ‘that my sisters were here.’

‘Shall I call them?’ asked Ruth, with that sweet hypocrisy which girls only can exhibit, and half-rising from the tiny work-table as she spoke.

‘Pray don’t. I have nothing on earth to say to them, or indeed to anybody,’ said Jasper. ‘Life drags at Carbery like wheels on a mud-plastered road. Don’t you find it so too, Miss Willis?’

‘Indeed I do not,’ answered the Indian orphan, taking up the cudgels gracefully in defence of her guardian’s home. ‘I should be very ungrateful if I did. It is not every day that a lonely little thing like myself is taken into the house of a kind dear family of new-old friends, who cherish and protect, and pet and spoil her, as your good father and sisters have done, Captain Denzil, to poor little Ruth Willis.’

She said this so well, did Ruth, in a voice that was slightly tremulous and with eyes that swam in tears, that Jasper was for the moment fairly taken in. There was uncommonly little sentiment in his own composition, but such men as he was, still like women to be softer-hearted than themselves, and then Miss Willis looked very pretty and delicate and helpless as she glanced up at him from under the screen of her dark eyelashes.

‘I can’t stand it, indeed I can’t, if you cry, Miss Willis!’ he said, drawing a chair up to the tiny work-table. ‘You have found me a sad bore and a sad plague, I am afraid, since I was stupid enough to do this at Pebworth races.’

As he spoke he looked down at his arm, which still reposed in its silken sling, and assumed a melancholy air, although in truth he felt all but well again. Ruth, from beneath her eyelashes, scanned him more narrowly than he was aware of.

‘Is he amusing himself at my expense?’ thus ran her quick thoughts. ‘Or has he been applying thus early in the day to the cherry-brandy in his hunting-flask, or the contents of the decanters? No; he seems sober, and civil too. This is a puzzle.’

Miss Willis was justified in her perplexity, for this attention on Jasper’s part was something new. The captain was not one of those men, of whom there are no lack, who in a country-house flirt to pass the time away, as naturally and with as little ulterior design as they smoke a cigar during their early stroll about the stables or the Home Farm. He had accepted, as an Eastern despot accepts the homage of his courtiers, fifty petty kindnesses at Ruth’s hands during his illness, and had preferred her company to that of Lucy and Blanche simply because she was cleverer than they, and had the tact not to weary him.

‘I was sorry to see you so much in pain, Captain Denzil, and glad when I could be of any use,’ answered Ruth, plying her needle with that demure industry which can be intermitted or resumed with such skilful effect in the course of a conversation.

‘Yes; and I was bear enough never to thank you, Miss Ruth. May I call you Ruth?’ said Jasper, as he bent forward and took the girl’s slender little hand in his. It was the first time that he had ever touched the hand of Miss Willis, save in the ceremonial salute with which members of a household meet for the day or part for the night.

‘I like to be called Ruth by my friends,’ returned the baronet’s ward. ‘Dear Blanche and Lucy always call me by my Christian name, and that pleases me, for I think it proves that they do not any longer regard me as a stranger. And that is much to me.’

There was a sweet simplicity, a touching pathos in Ruth’s tone not wholly thrown away on Jasper. He could not quite distinguish whether or not she were playing a part; but if this were acting, he owned that it was, of its kind, excellent.

‘I hope you count me among your friends?’ he said, still keeping captive the little hand that he held.

‘I shall be very pleased to do so,’ returned Ruth, with a downward droop of her silken eyelashes.

‘I wish I did know how to please you. It’s a lesson I should like to learn,’ said the captain, with a warmth that surprised himself; but before Miss Willis could return an appropriate answer, the door opened so quickly that she had barely time to snatch away her hand from Jasper’s grasp before his two sisters were in the room. Blanche Denzil had an open note in her hand, and both girls wore an expression more animated than usual. Lucy was the first to speak.

‘We want you, Jasper, to drive up with us to High Tor, if you feel strong enough this morning. Maud has written to Blanche, as she promised, you know, to let us know when her silver pheasants arrived from the dealer’s in London; and this note’—and Lucy indicated the letter in her sister’s hand—‘has just come, begging us to go round and see the birds made comfortable in their new abode. The day is charming. You must come with us, indeed.’

‘Pheasants before the First of October gives one leave to shoot them, are not much in my line,’ said Jasper carelessly. ‘What are your plans for this morning, Miss Willis?’

Ruth with becoming modesty replied that Captain Denzil was only too good to inquire as to the proceedings of so insignificant a person as she was. ‘I try to be useful,’ she said. ‘Sometimes Sir Sykes allows me to read aloud to him the newspapers or a book. If nobody wants me, I think I shall stroll down to the quiet cool path in the woods beside the river. It is a favourite haunt of mine.’

‘Well, I’ll walk down there with you, if you don’t mind my cigar, Miss Willis,’ replied the captain languidly. ‘I don’t want particularly to go to High Tor, or to go into ecstasies over the fine feathers of a lot of fancy poultry cooped in a pen and called pheasants.’

‘No, no,’ said Blanche and Lucy with one accord; ‘we are not going to allow you to play truant to-day. You must come, and so must Ruth. We never thought of leaving her behind’ (this by-the-bye was the whitest of white fibs, for up to that moment Ruth’s companionship on the projected expedition had never once crossed the mind of either of the sisters); ‘and there is plenty of room for all in the double basket-carriage.’

‘I shall be bored, and shew it. The De Veres are not a bit in my line. Harrogate, for instance, I can’t get on with for five minutes—my fault, I daresay. But he knows nothing and cares nothing about the things that interest me; and I trouble my head just as little about his model cottages and reclamation of waste lands and militia drill. The one subject we have in common is fox-hunting, and even on that we take somewhat different views.’ This was a long speech for Jasper; but the concession which it somewhat ungraciously implied was readily accepted by his jubilant sisters.

‘You forget Lady Gladys,’ said Blanche archly; ‘she would never forgive us if we appeared without you.’

The double basket-carriage, one of those convenient, roomy, and perhaps to male eyes ugly vehicles, that do so much good service in country places, came round in due course, drawn by its pair of strong and spirited Exmoor ponies, coblike, sturdy little animals, well fitted to make light of the steep Devonshire roads, yet shewing some of the fire and fleetness due to their dash of Arab blood. The ‘clothes-basket on wheels,’ as Jasper irreverently styled it, received its human freight; Miss Willis, in spite of Blanche’s instances, seating herself meekly with her back to the horses, and the captain of course beside her. Lucy took the reins; the smart boy in livery who had been standing at the ponies’ heads, let go the bridles and sprang deftly to his perch behind as the light carriage bowled merrily away along the smooth park road.

Never yet, since first she made her appearance at Carbery Chase, had Ruth looked one half so attractive, in her quaint elfish way, as she did then, as flashing and animated, her dark eyes saying far more than did her lips, she conversed with Jasper on the outward drive.

‘I declare,’ thought the captain to himself, ‘if the governor had been a little more explicit, I wouldn’t mind speaking out. With three thousand a year, or four—ay, it would require to be four—the thing might be managed.’