Nothing happened of any importance before their return to Eaton Square. Markham, hopping about with a queer sidelong motion he had, his little eyes screwed up with humorous meaning, seemed to Frances to recover his spirits after the Winterbourn episode was over, which was the subject—though that, of course, she did not know—of half the voluminous correspondence of all the ladies and gentlemen in the house, whose letters were so important a part of their existence. Before a week was over, all Society was aware of the fact that Ralph Winterbourn had been nearly dying at Markham Priory; that Lady Markham was in “a state” which baffled description, and Markham himself so changed as to be scarcely recognisable; but that, fortunately, the crisis had been tided over, and everything was still problematical. But the problem was so interesting, that one perfumed epistle after another carried it to curious wits all over the country, and a new light upon the subject was warmly welcomed in a hundred Easter meetings. What would Markham do? What would Nelly do? Would their friendship end in the vulgar way, in a marriage? Would they venture, in face of all prognostications, to keep it up as a friendship, when there was no longer any reason why it should not ripen into love? Or would they, frightened by all the inevitable comments which they would have to encounter, stop short altogether, and fly from each other?

Such a “case” is a delightful thing to speculate upon. At the Priory, it could only be discussed in secret conclave; and though no doubt the experienced persons chiefly concerned were quite conscious of the subject which occupied their friends’ thoughts, there was no further reference made to it between them, and everything went on as it had always done. The night before their return to town, Markham, in the solitude of the house, from which all the guests had just departed, called Frances outside to bear him company while he smoked his cigarette. He was walking up and down on the lawn in the grey stillness of a cloudy warm evening, when there was no light to speak of anywhere, and yet a good deal to be seen through the wavering greyness of sky and sea. A few stars, very mild and indistinct, looked out at the edges of the clouds here and there; the great water-line widened and cleared towards the horizon; and in the far distance, where a deeper greyness showed the mainland, the gleam of a lighthouse surprised the dark by slow continual revolutions. There was no moon: something softer, more seductive than even the moon, was in this absence of light.

“Well—now they’re gone, what do you think of them, Fan? They’re very good specimens of the English country-house party—all kinds: the respectable family, the sturdy old fogy, the rich young man without health, and the muscular young man without money.” There had been, it is needless to say, various other members of the party, who, being quite unimportant to this history, need not be mentioned here. “What do you think of them, little un? You have your own way of seeing things.”

“I—like them all well enough, Markham,” without enthusiasm Frances replied.

“That is comprehensive at least. So do I, my dear. It would not have occurred to me to say it; but it is just the right thing to say. They pull you to pieces almost before your face; but they are not ill-natured. They tell all sorts of stories about each other——”

“No, Markham; I don’t think that is just.”

“——Without meaning any harm,” he went on. “Fan, in countries where conversation is cultivated, perhaps people don’t talk scandal—I only say perhaps—but here we are forced to take to it for want of anything else to say. What did your Giovannis and Giacomos talk of in your village out yonder?” Markham pointed towards the clear blue-grey line of the horizon, beyond which lay America, if anything; but he meant distance, and that was enough.

“They talked—about the olives, how they were looking, and if it was going to be a bad or an indifferent year.”

“And then?”

“About the forestieri, if many were coming, and whether it would be a good season for the hotels; and about tying up the palms, to make them ready for Easter,” said Frances, resuming, with a smile about her lips. “And about how old Pietro’s son had got such a good appointment in the post-office, and had bought little Nina a pair of earrings as long as your finger; for he was to marry Nina, you know.”

“Oh, was he? Go on. I am very much interested. Didn’t they say Mr Whatever-his-name-is wanted to get out of it, and that there never would have been any engagement, had not Miss Nina’s mother——?”

“Oh Markham,” cried Frances in surprise, “how could you possibly know?”

“I was reasoning from analogy, Fan. Yes, I suppose they do it all the world over. And it is odd—isn’t it?—that, knowing what they are sure to say, we ask them to our houses, and put the keys of all our skeleton cupboards into their hands.”

“Do you think that is true, that dreadful idea about the skeleton? I am sure——”

“What are you sure of, my little dear?”

“I was going to say, oh Markham, that I was sure, at home, we had no skeleton; and then I remembered——”

“I understand,” he said kindly. “It was not a skeleton to speak of, Fan. There is nothing particularly bad about it. If you had met it out walking, you would not have known it for a skeleton. Let us say a mystery, which is not such a mouth-filling word.”

“Sir Thomas told me,” said Frances, with some timidity; “but I am not sure that I understood. Markham! what was it really about?”

Her voice was low and diffident, and at first he only shook his head. “About nothing,” he said; “about—me. Yes, more than anything else, about me. That is how—— No, it isn’t,” he added, correcting himself. “I always must have cared for my mother more than for any woman. She has always been my greatest friend, ever since I can remember anything. We seem to have been children together, and to have grown up together. I was everything to her for a dozen years, and then—your father came between us. He hated me—and I tormented him.”

“He could not hate you, Markham. Oh no, no!”

“My little Fan, how can a child like you understand? Neither did I understand, when I was doing all the mischief. Between twelve and eighteen I was an imp of mischief, a little demon. It was fun to me to bait that thin-skinned man, that jumped at everything. The explosion was fun to me too. I was a little beast. And then I got the mother to myself again. Don’t kill me, my dear. I am scarcely sorry now. We have had very good times since, I with my parent, you with yours—till that day,” he added, flinging away the end of his cigarette, “when mischief again prompted me to let Con know where he was, which started us all again.”

“Did you always know where we were?” she asked. Strangely enough, this story did not give her any angry feeling towards Markham. It was so far off, and the previous relations of her long-separated father and mother were as a fairy tale to her, confusing and almost incredible, which she did not take into account as matter of fact at all. Markham had delivered these confessions slowly, as they turned and re-turned up and down the lawn. There was not light enough for either to see the expression in the other’s face, and the veil of the darkness added to the softening effect. The words came out in short sentences, interrupted by that little business of puffing at the cigarette, letting it go out, stopping to strike a fusee and relight it, which so often forms the byplay of an important conversation, and sometimes breaks the force of painful revelations. Frances followed everything with an absorbed but yet half-dreamy attention, as if the red glow of the light, the exclamation of impatience when the cigarette was found to have gone out, the very perfume of the fusee in the air, were part and parcel of it. And the question she asked was almost mechanical, a part of the business too, striking naturally from the last thing he had said as sparks flew from the perfumed light.

“Not where,” he said. “But I might have known, had I made any attempt to know. The mother sent her letters through the lawyer, and of course we could have found out. It was thrust upon me at last by one of those meddling fools that go everywhere. And then my old demon got possession of me, and I told Con.” Here he gave a low chuckle, which seemed to escape him in spite of himself. “I am laughing,” he said—“pay attention, Fan—at myself. Of course I have learned to be sorry for—some things—the imp has put me up to; but I can’t get the better of that little demon—or of this little beggar, if you like it better. It’s queer phraseology, I suppose; but I prefer the other form.”

“And what,” said Frances in the same dreamy way, drawn on, she was not conscious how, by something in the air, by some current of thought which she was not aware of—“what do you mean to do now?”

He started from her side as if she had given him a blow. “Do now?” he cried, with something in his voice that shook off the spell of the situation, and aroused the girl at once to the reality of things. She had no guidance of his looks, for, as has been said, she could not see them; but there was a curious thrill in his voice of present alarm and consciousness, as if her innocent question struck sharply against some fact of very different solidity and force from those far-off shadowy facts which he had been telling her. “Do now? What makes you think I am going to do anything at all?”

His voice fell away in a sort of quaver at the end of these words.

“I do not think it; I—I—don’t think anything, Markham; I—don’t—know anything.”

“You ask very pat questions all the same, my little Fan. And you have got a pair of very good eyes of your own in that little head. And if you have got any light to throw upon the subject, my dear, produce it; for I’ll be bothered if I know.”

Just then, a window opened in the gloom. “Children,” said Lady Markham’s voice, “are you there? I think I see something like you, though it is so dark. Bring your little sister in, Markham. She must not catch cold on the eve of going back to town.”

“Here is the little thing, mammy. Shall I hand her in to you by the window? It makes me feel very frisky to hear myself addressed as children,” he cried, with his chuckle of easy laughter. “Here, Fan; run in, my little dear, and be put to bed.”

But he did not go in with her. He kept outside in the quiet cool and freshness of the night, illuminating the dim atmosphere now and then with the momentary glow of another fusee. Frances from her room, to which she had shortly retired, heard the sound, and saw from her windows the sudden ruddy light a great many times before she went to sleep. Markham let his cigar go out oftener than she could reckon. He was too full of thought to remember his cigar.

They arrived in town when everybody was arriving, when even to Frances, in her inexperience, the rising tide was visible in the streets, and the air of a new world beginning, which always marks the commencement of the season. No doubt it is a new world to many virgin souls, though so stale and weary to most of those who tread its endless round. To Frances everything was new; and a sense of the many wonderful things that awaited her got into the girl’s head like ethereal wine, in spite of all the grave matters of which she was conscious, which lay under the surface, and were, if not skeletons in the closet, at least very serious drawbacks to anything bright that life could bring. Her knowledge of these drawbacks had been acquired so suddenly, and was so little dulled by habit, that it dwelt upon her mind much more than family mysteries usually dwell upon a mind of eighteen. But yet in the rush and exhilaration of new thoughts and anticipations, always so much more delicately bright than any reality, she forgot that all was not as natural, as pleasant, as happy as it seemed. If Lady Markham had any consuming cares, she kept them shut away under that smiling countenance, which was as bright and peaceful as the morning. If Markham, on his side, was perplexed and doubtful, he came out and in with the same little chuckle of fun, the same humorous twinkle in his eyes. When these signs of tranquillity are so apparent, the young and ignorant can easily make up their minds that all is well. And Frances was to be “presented”—a thought which made her heart beat. She was to be put into a court-train and feathers,—she who as yet had never worn anything but the simple frock which she had so pleased herself to think was purely English in its unobtrusiveness and modesty. She was not quite sure that she liked the prospect; but it excited her all the same.

It was early in May, and the train and the court plumes were ready, when, going out one morning upon some small errand of her own, Frances met some one whom she recognised, walking slowly along the long line of Eaton Square. She started at the sight of him, though he did not see her. He was going along with a strange air of reluctance, yet anxiety, glancing up at the houses, no doubt looking for Lady Markham’s house, so absorbed that he neither saw Frances nor was disturbed by the startled movement she made, which must have caught a less preoccupied eye. She smiled to herself, after the first start, to see how entirely bent he was upon finding the house, and how little attention he had to spare for anything else. He was even more worn and pale, or rather grey, than he had been when he returned from India, she thought; and there was in him a slackness, a letting-go of himself, a weary look in his step and carriage, which proved, Frances thought, that the Riviera had done George Gaunt little good.

For it was certainly George Gaunt, still in his loose grey Indian clothes, looking like a man dropped from another hemisphere, investigating the numbers on the doors as if he but vaguely comprehended the meaning of them. But that there was in him that unmistakable air of soldier which no mufti can quite disguise, he might have been the Ancient Mariner in person, looking for the man whose fate it is to leave all the wedding-feasts of the world in order to hear that tale. What tale could young Gaunt have to tell? For a moment it flashed across the mind of Frances that he might be bringing bad news, that “something might have happened,”—that rapid conclusion to which the imagination is so ready to jump. An accident to her father or Constance? so bad, so terrible, that it could not be trusted to a letter, that he had been sent to break the news to them?

She had passed him by this time, being shy, in her surprise, of addressing the stranger all at once; but now she paused, and turned with a momentary intention of running after him and entreating him to tell her the worst. But then Frances recollected that this was impossible; that with the telegraph in active operation, no one would employ such a lingering way of conveying news; and went on again, with her heart beating quicker, with a heightened colour, and a restrained impatience and eagerness of which she was half ashamed. No, she would not turn back before she had done her little business. She did not want either the stranger himself or any one else to divine the flutter of pleasant emotion, the desire she had to see and speak with the son of her old friends. Yes, she said to herself, the son of her old friends—he who was the youngest, whom Mrs Gaunt used to talk of for hours, whose praises she was never weary of singing.

Frances smiled and blushed to herself as she hurried—perceptibly hurried—about her little affairs. Kind Mrs Gaunt had always had a secret longing to bring these two together. Frances would not turn back; but she quickened her pace, almost running—as near running as was decorous in London—to the lace-shop, to give the instructions which she had been charged with. No doubt, she said to herself, she would find him there when she got back. She had forgotten, perhaps, the fact that George Gaunt had given very little of his regard to her when he met her, though she was his mother’s favourite, and had no eyes but for Constance. This was not a thing to dwell in the mind of a girl who had no jealousy in her, and who never supposed herself to be half as worthy of anybody’s attention as Constance was. But, anyhow, she forgot it altogether, forgot to ask herself what in this respect might have happened in the meantime; and with her heart beating full of innocent eagerness, pleasure, and excitement, full of the hope of hearing about everybody, of seeing again through his eyes the dear little well-known world, which seemed to lie so far behind her, hastened through her errands, and turned quickly home.

To her great surprise, as she came back, turning round the corner into the long line of pavement, she saw young Gaunt once more approaching her. He looked even more listless and languid now, like a man who had tried to do some duty and failed, and was escaping, glad to be out of the way of it. This was a great deal to read in a man’s face; but Frances was highly sympathetic, and divined it, knowing in herself many of those devices of shy people, which shy persons divine. Fortunately she saw him some way off, and had time to overcome her own shyness and take the initiative. She went up to him fresh as the May morning, blushing and smiling, and put out her hand. “Captain Gaunt?” she said. “I knew I could not be mistaken. Oh, have you just come from Bordighera? I am so glad to see any one from home!”

“Do you call it home, Miss Waring? Yes, I have just come. I—I—have a number of messages, and some parcels, and—— But I thought you might perhaps be out of town, or busy, and that it would be best to send them.”

“Is that why you are turning your back on my mother’s house? or did you not know the number? I saw you before, looking—but I did not like to speak.”

“I—thought you might be out of town,” he repeated, taking no notice of her question; “and that perhaps the post——”

“Oh no,” cried Frances, whose shyness was of the cordial kind. “Now you must come back and see mamma. She will want to hear all about Constance. Are they all well, Captain Gaunt? Of course you must have seen them constantly—and Constance. Mamma will want to hear everything.”

“Miss Waring is very well,” he said with a blank countenance, from which he had done his best to dismiss all expression.

“And papa? and dear Mrs Gaunt, and the colonel, and everybody? Oh, there is so much that letters can’t tell. Come back now with me. My mother will be so glad to see you, and Markham; you know Markham already.”

Young Gaunt made a feeble momentary resistance. He murmured something about an engagement, about his time being very short; but as he did so, turned round languidly and went with her, obeying, as it seemed, the eager impulse of Frances rather than any will of his own.

END OF THE SECOND VOLUME.
PRINTED BY WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS