LESLIE'S LOYALTY

CHAPTER I.

LESLIE LISLE.

Nobody ever goes to Portmaris; that is to say, nobody who is anybody. It lies—but no matter, ours shall not be the hand to ruin its simplicity by advertising its beauties and advantages, and directing the madding crowd to its sylvan retreat. At present the golden sands which line the bay are innocent of the negro troupe, the peripatetic conjurer, and the monster in human form who pesters you to purchase hideous objects manufactured from shells and cardboard.

A time may come when Portmaris will develop into an Eastbourne or a Brighton, a Scarborough or a Hastings; but, Heaven be praised, that time is not yet, and Portmaris, like an unconscious village beauty, goes on its way as yet ignorant of its loveliness.

At present there are about a dozen houses, most of them fishermen's cottages; a church, hidden in a hollow a mile away from the restless sea; and an inn which is satisfied with being an inn, and has not yet learned to call itself a hotel.

Two or three of the fisherfolk let lodgings, to which come those fortunate individuals who have quite by chance stumbled upon this out-of-the-way spot; and in the sitting-room of the prettiest of these unpretentious cottages was a young girl.

Her name was Leslie Lisle. She was nineteen, slim, graceful, and more than pretty. There is a type of beauty which, with more or less truth, is generally described as Irish. It has dark hair, blue eyes with long black lashes, a clear and colorless complexion of creamy ivory, and a chin that would seem pointed but for the exquisite fullness of the lips. It is a type which is more fascinating than the severe Greek, more "holding" than the voluptuous Spanish, more spirituel than the vivacious French; in short, it is a kind of beauty before which most men go down completely and forever vanquished, and this because the wonderful gray-blue eyes are capable of an infinity of expressions, can be grave one moment and brimming over with fun the next; because there lurks, even when they are most quiescent, a world of possibilities in the way of wit in the corners of the red lips; because the face, as you watch it, can in the course of a few minutes flash with spirit, melt with tenderness, and all the while remain the face of a pure, innocent, healthy, light-hearted girl.

The young men who crossed Leslie Lisle's path underwent a sad experience.

At first they were attracted by her beauty; in a few hours or days, as the case might be, they began to find the attraction lying somewhat deeper than the face; then they grew restless, unhappy, lost their appetites, got to lying awake of nights, and lastly went to pieces completely, and if they possessed sufficient courage, flung themselves perfectly wretched and overcome at the small feet of the slim, girlish figure which had become to them even that of the one woman in the world. And to do Leslie justice, she was not only always surprised, but distressed. She had said nothing, and what is more, looked nothing, to encourage them. She had been just herself, a frank yet modest English girl, with an Irish face, and that indescribable sweetness which draws men's hearts from their bosoms before they know what has happened to them.

She was seated at the piano in the sitting-room of the cottage which the fisherman who owned it had christened Sea View, and she was amusing herself and a particularly silent and morose parrot by singing some of the old songs and ballads which she had found in a rickety music-stand in the corner; and for all the parrot glanced at her disapprovingly with his glassy eye, she had a sufficiently sweet voice, and sang with more than the usual amount of feeling.

While she was in the middle of that famous but slightly monotonous composition, "Robin Grey," the door opened, and a tall, thin man entered.

This was Francis Lisle, her father. He was a man this side of fifty, but looked older in consequence, perhaps, of his hair, which was gray and scanty, a faded face, with a dreamy far away look in the faint blue eyes, and a somewhat bent form and dragging gait. He carried a portable easel in one hand, and held a canvas under his arm.

As he entered he looked round the room as if he had never seen it before, then set the easel up in a corner, placed the canvas on it upside down, and crossing his hands behind his back, stood with bent head gazing at it for some moments in silence. Then he said, in a voice which matched the dreamy face:

"Leslie, come here."

Leslie stopped short in the middle of the most heart-rending line of the cheerful ballad, and walked—no; glided? scarcely; it is difficult to describe how the girl got across the small room, so full of grace, so characteristic was her mode of progression, and putting both hands on his shoulders, leaned her cheek against his head.

"Back already, dear?" she said, and the tone fully indicated the position in which she stood toward her parent. "I thought you were going to make a long day of it."

"Yes, yes," he said, without taking his eyes from the sketch. "I did intend doing so. I started full of my subject and—er—inspired with hope, and I don't think I have altogether failed. It is difficult—very. The tone of that sky would fill a careless amateur with despair, but—but I am not careless. Whatever I may be I am not that. The secrets of art which she hides from the unthinking and—er—irreverent she confides to her true worshipers. Now, Leslie, look at that sky. Look at it carefully, critically, and tell me—do you not think I have caught that half tone, that delicious mingling of the chrome and the ultramarine? There is a wealth of form and color in that right hand corner, and I—yes, I think it is the best, by far the best and truest thing I have as yet done."

Leslie leaned forward, and softly, swiftly, placed the picture right side up.

It had not very much improved by the transposition. It was—well, to put it bluntly, a daub of the most awful description. Never since the world began had there ever, in nature, been anything like it. The average schoolboy libeling nature with a shilling box of colors could not have sinned more deeply. The sea was a brilliant washerwoman's blue, the hills were heaps of muddy ochre, the fishing vessels looked like blackbeetles struggling on their backs, there was a cow in the meadow in the foreground which would have wrung tears from any one who had ever set eyes on that harmless but necessary animal, and the bit of sky in the corner was utterly and completely indescribable.

Leslie looked at it with a sad little expression in her eyes, the pitying look one sees in the face of a woman whose life is spent in humoring the weakness of a beloved one; then she said, gently:

"It is very striking, papa."

"Striking!" repeated Francis Lisle. "Striking! I like that word. You, too, are an artist, my dear Leslie, though you never touch a brush. How well you know how to use the exact expression. I flatter myself that it is striking. I think I may say, without egotism, that no one, no real critic could look at that sketch—for it is a mere sketch—without being struck!"

"Yes, papa," she murmured, soothingly.

He shaded his eyes with his thin white hands in the orthodox fashion, and peered at the monstrosity.

"There is, if I may say so, an—er—originality in the treatment which would alone make the sketch interesting and valuable. Tell me, now, Leslie, what it is in it that catches your fancy most."

Leslie looked at it carefully.

"I—I think that heap of sea-weed nicely painted, papa," she said, putting her arm round his neck.

"Heap of sea-weed?" his brows knitted. "Heap of sea-weed? I don't see anything of the kind."

"There, papa," she said, pointing.

"My dear Leslie, I have always suspected that your sight was not perfect, that there was some defect in its range power; that is not a heap of sea-weed, but a fisherwoman mending her nets!"

"Of course! How stupid of me!" she said, quickly. "I'm afraid I am near-sighted, dear. But don't you think you have done enough for to-day? Why not put it away until to-morrow?"

"There is no to-morrow, Leslie," he said, gravely, as he got out his palette. "'Art is long and life is fleeting.' Never forget that, my dear. No, I can stipple on a little. I intend finishing this sketch, and making a miniature—a cabinet picture. It shall be worthy of a place among those exquisite studies of Foster's. And yet——," he sighed and pushed the hair from his forehead, "and yet I'll be bound that if I tried to sell it, I should not find a dealer to give me a few paltry pounds for it. So blind and prejudiced! No, they would not buy it, and possibly the Academy would refuse to exhibit it. Prejudice, prejudice! But art has its own rewards, thank Heaven! I paint because I must. Fame has no attraction. I am content to wait. Yes, though the recognition which is my due may come too late! It is often thus!"

The girl bent her beautiful head—she stood taller than the drooping figure of her father—and kissed, ah! how tenderly, pityingly, the gray hair.

Francis Lisle, Esquire, the younger son of an old Irish family, had been a dreamer from his youth up. He had started with a good education and a handsome little fortune; he had dreamed away the education, dreamed away the small fortune, dreamed away nearly all his life, and his great dream was that he was an artist. He couldn't draw a haystack, and certainly could not have colored it correctly even if by chance he had drawn it; but he was persuaded that he was a great artist, and he fancied that his hand transferred to the canvas the scenes which he attempted to paint.

And he was not unhappy. His wife had died when Leslie was a mite of a thing, and how he had managed to get on until Leslie was old enough to take care of him can never even be surmised; but she began to play the mother, the guardian, and protector to this visionary father of hers, at an extremely early age. She managed everything, almost fed and clothed him, and kept from him all those petty ills and worries which make life such a burden for most people.

They had no settled home, but wandered about, sometimes on the Continent, but mostly in England, and Francis Lisle had hundreds of sketches which were like nothing under heaven, but were supposed to be "ideas" for larger pictures, of places they had visited.

They had been at Portmaris a couple of months when we find them, and though Francis Lisle was just beginning to get tired of it, and restlessly anxious to be on the move again, Leslie was loth to leave. She had grown fond of the golden sands, the strip of pebbly beach, the narrow street broken by its wind-twisted trees, the green lanes leading to the country beyond, and still more fond of the simple-hearted fisher folk, who always welcomed her with a smile, and had already learned to call her Miss Leslie.

Indeed, Miss Lisle was a dangerous young woman, and the hearts of young and old, gentle and simple, went down before a glance of her gray-blue eyes, a smile from the mobile lips, a word from her voice which thrilled with a melody few could resist.

Francis Lisle went on daubing, his head on one side, a rapt, contented look on his pale, aristocratic face.

"Yes, this is going to be one of my best efforts," he said, with placid complacency. "Go and sing something, Leslie. I can always work better while you are singing. Music and painting are twin sisters. I adore them both."

Leslie went back to the piano with that peculiarly graceful motion of hers, and touched a note or two.

"Were there no letters this morning, dear?" she asked.

"Letters?" Lisle put his hand to his forehead as if rudely called back to earth from the empyrean. "Letters? No. Yes, I forgot. There was one. It was from Ralph Duncombe."

Leslie turned her head slightly, and the rather thick brows which helped the eyes in all their unconscious mischief straightened.

"From Ralph? What does he say?"

"I don't know," replied Lisle, placidly. "I can never read his letters; he writes so terribly plain a hand; its hardness jars upon me. I have it—somewhere?"

He searched his pockets reluctantly.

"No, I must have lost it. Does it matter very much?"

Leslie laughed softly.

"I don't know; but one generally likes to know what is in a letter."

"Well, then, I wish I could find it. I told the postman when he gave it to me that I should probably lose it, and that he had better bring it on to the house; but—well, I don't think he understood me. I often think that we speak an unknown language to these country people."

"Perhaps he did not hear you," said Leslie. "Sometimes, you know, dear, you think you have spoken when you have not uttered a word, but only thought."

"I dare say," he assented, dreamily. "Now I come to think of it, I fancy Duncombe said he was coming down here——."

The slender white hands which had been touching the keys caressingly stopped.

"Coming here, papa!"

"Yes. I think so. I'm not sure. Now, what could I have done with that letter?"

He made another search, failed to find it, shook his head as if dismissing the subject, and resumed his "work."

Leslie struck a chord, and opened her lips to sing, when the sound of the wheels belonging to the one fly in the place came down the uneven street. She paused to listen, then leaned sideways and looked through the window.

"The station fly!" she said. "And it has stopped at Marine Villa, papa. It must be another visitor. Fancy two visitors at the same time in Portmaris! It will go wild with excitement."

The cranky vehicle had pulled up at the opposite cottage, and Leslie, with mild, very mild, curiosity, got up from the piano and went to the window.

As she did so a man dressed in soft tweed got down from beside the driver, opened the fly-door, and gave his arm to a young man whose appearance filled Leslie's heart with pity; for he was a cripple. His back was bent, his face pale and gentle as a woman's, marked with lines which were eloquent of weary days, and still more weary nights; and in the dark eyes was that peculiar expression of sadness which a life of pain and suffering patiently borne sets as a seal.

The young fellow leaned on his stick and the man's arm, and looked round him, and his eye, dark and full of a soft penetration, fell upon the lovely face at the opposite window.

Leslie drew back, when it was too late, and breathed an exclamation of regret.

"Oh, papa!"

"What is the matter?" asked Lisle, vacantly.

"I am sorry!" she said. "He will think I was staring at him—and so I was. And that will seem so cruel to him, poor fellow."

"What is cruel? which poor fellow?" demanded Lisle with feeble impatience.

"Some one who has just got out of the fly, dear; a cripple, poor fellow; and he saw me watching him." And she sighed again.

"Eh?" said Lisle, as if he were trying to recollect something. "Ah, yes, I remember. Mrs. Whiting told me that he was expected some time to-day; they had a telegram saying he was coming."

"He? Who?" said Leslie, going back to the piano.

"Who?" repeated Lisle, as if he were heartily sorry he had continued the subject. "Why, this young man. Dear me, I forget his name and title——."

"Title? Poor fellow! Is he a nobleman, papa? That makes it seem so much worse, doesn't it?"

Lisle looked round at her helplessly.

"Upon my word, my dear," he said, "I do not wish to appear dense, but I haven't the least idea of what you are talking about, and——," he went on more quietly, as if he feared she were going to explain, "it doesn't matter. Pray sing something, and—and do not let us worry about things which do not concern us."

Leslie began to sing without another word.