WHEN it was known that the old house at Birrenshead had been taken by a gentleman for shooting quarters, the astonishment of the neighbourhood was great. The house was known to be in a most dilapidated condition, and the rooms had not been occupied in the memory of man. The village took the most anxious interest in the rash gentleman, and inquired, with much solicitude, “what motive” he could have for burying himself in such a place? Was it for the sake of Lydia Joscelyn? But then he had been much nearer Lydia Joscelyn at the White House, where the family no doubt would gladly have kept him had he wished it; or was it on the other hand to get away from Lydia, who had been devoting herself too unreasonably to him? Both these opinions had their supporters; but as it was impossible to prove either, the question remained a burning question for half of the time that young Brotherton lived at Birrenshead, where he soon became well-known. He was quite a gentleman, there could be no doubt of that. He had a couple of horses and a man, and money did not seem to be wanting with him. The neighbours soon found out all that was to be found, which was not saying much—that he was Sir John Brotherton’s son, and a great friend of Lord Eldred, the second son at the Castle; and that he was actually, on his own showing, second cousin to Mrs. Joscelyn. Had she said it the neighbourhood might have doubted; but he said it himself; and he was constantly at the White House. Scarcely a day elapsed that he was not there on one pretence or another, and sometimes Lord Eldred would go with him, having his dinner there, the gossips said, and sometimes tea, and conducting himself as if the Joscelyns were his equals. This opened a new and exciting question, which was discussed warmly by the different sides, each maintaining its own view. What would the Duchess do? She had excluded the Joscelyns from the list of county gentry when they were first married, asking, with a contempt for blood, which was most unbecoming in the local head of society (and the Joscelyns had blood—it was the one thing that could not be denied to them), “Why should I call upon people who have nothing to recommend them but that their grandfathers were gentlemen?” This leaving out of the family altogether had been very marked; when you consider that the Selbys, who were nobodies, had cards from the Duchess because the old Doctor was their father! Mrs. Joscelyn had not said anything about it, but she had felt the sting all her life. And she was not less interested than the rest of the world in the question—What would the Duchess now do? This problem was not solved for several weeks; but at last, just before the great ball which absorbed the whole county in consideration of what to wear, and how to appear to the best advantage, the village was convulsed by the appearance of the ducal liveries. It was an October day, with frost in the air, so clear that you could see to any distance, from one end of the dale to the other. The Selbys, called to their windows by the roll of wheels and the jingle of the horses’ feet and furniture, and the flood of blue and yellow in the air, rushed to the vicarage to rouse their friends to the seriousness of the crisis. “The Duchess is going to call,” they cried, rushing in open-mouthed. “The Duchess has called,” cried the others, who were all grouped round a telescope which they had brought to bear on the door of the White House. There the carriage was undoubtedly standing, delayed an unreasonable time at the door—which both the families felt, whatever reason they might have, showed bad taste on the part of the Joscelyns. Then the footman, a splendid apparition all plush and powder, was seen to make his way a second time up the narrow path, between the two grass plots, bordered all round with chrysanthemums. The watchers had a moral certainty that Mrs. Joscelyn was not out. Had she denied herself to the Duchess? A thrill of sensation passed through the minds of the observers—of mingled stupefaction and excitement. To say “not at home” was a moral offence upon which people were hard in that primitive community; but to have the courage to say it, was something which overawed them. And to the Duchess! Imagination could scarcely go further.

When Mrs. Joscelyn perceived, with a sudden rush of blood from her heart to her head, that the honour she had been looking for all her life had actually happened to her, she rose up precipitately and fled, throwing a shawl over her head. This was partly fright, and partly resentment, and partly it was a wise impulse. The family parlour and Betty in her white apron to open the door, were not accessories which would impress the Duchess, and Mrs. Joscelyn had not much confidence in the refinement of her own appearance. She was not so bold a sinner, however, as to sit still and instruct her innocent maid to say, “Not at home,” a task to which Betty, knowing it was not true, would not have been equal. So she went out, meeting Betty trembling with excitement, tying on her clean apron as she came. “It’s the Duchess, missis!” Betty said, overwhelmed. “You will say, Not at home,” said Mrs. Joscelyn breathless. “I am going out, you see.” “Going out! Missis! and the Duchess at the door.” Betty thought it was incredible. Mrs. Joscelyn, however, deaf to remonstrance, though herself trembling with excitement, ran out upon the Fell side, and enjoyed the spectacle. She was an Englishwoman, and it is not to be supposed that the sight of the blue and yellow liveries, and the carriage with a Duchess in it, did not touch the highest feelings in her nature; and to have spoken to that Duchess, to have realised the full glory of the event, would have been sweet—but it would have been alarming too, and discretion is the better part of valour. She stood upon the rising ground with her heart beating, and gazed at the wonderful sight, visions rising before her of the ball, and the invitation for Lydia which would be sure to follow, and the ball dress, and all the excitement of so great an occasion. She breathed more freely when the great lady drove away, and she was delivered from the fear of being sent for, and compelled to come back by some dreadful mistake on Betty’s part. But Betty too had risen to the occasion. She had said trembling, but resolute, “Not at home, Sir,” to the fine footman—arguing with herself that it was quite true that Missis wasn’t at home, for hadn’t she seen her, with her own eyes, go out? Betty went out too to ease her Mistress’s mind, when the incident was over, carrying the cards in her apron. She did not like to touch them with her hands, though she had scrubbed those hands crimson only a few minutes before. “T’ gentleman said as Her Grace was sorry,” said Betty, her eyes almost out of her head with staring. “T’ gentleman” was the biggest part of the event to her; she had never in her life seen anything so grand so near. Her ruddy cheeks were crimson, and her liberal bosom palpitated. And Mrs. Joscelyn could not herself restrain a tremor when she took these sacred bits of pasteboard in her hand.

The excitement about the ball, however, was not all pleasurable. The invitation came a few days after, and at first Lydia, who had a great spirit, altogether refused to avail herself of it. She was in the parlour with her mother, arranging bunches of the ruddy leaves and rowan berries which made the country gay, in the big old-fashioned china vases which stood on the mantel-piece, and which were worth their weight in silver, though nobody was aware of it. Lionel Brotherton had come in on his way back from a short day’s shooting. He had brought some game, which lay in a shallow basket on the table, the mingled colours of the plumage harmonizing well with the warm autumnal tints of leaves and fruit. The whole culminated in the girl’s glowing and animated countenance as she stood by the table, twisting her garlands of leaves and throwing them about with a freshness of gesture and energy which only a touch of indignation could have given. She had put a cluster of the red berries into her hair, with a few long serrated leaves, marked with brilliant red upon the green; and thus crowned was like an autumnal nymph, not mature enough for a Ceres, but yet warm with the northern glow of colour and life. “Why should I go?” she was saying. “What is it to me, mother? If the Duchess chooses to fling an invitation at us after all these years, are you and I to seize upon it as if we cared? I don’t care. I don’t want it. I should not like to go—Of course I may be forced,” cried Lydia. “I may have to do it, for all the several reasons which people always bring up; but listen, mother, this is the truth, I should not like to go.”

“My dearest,” said her mother, joining her hands in that instinctive movement of entreaty which was her natural attitude. Nobody could admire Liddy as her mother did, not even the young man who sat a little apart gazing at her, and thinking all kinds of foolish thoughts. Mrs. Joscelyn saw in her the perfection of herself, the accomplished ideal to which she had been striving all her life. She herself would never have had the strength of mind to look so, and speak so—but Liddy had; and even while she remonstrated and entreated, she approved. “My pet, that is just your fancy. Why shouldn’t you like it? You have never been at a ball.”

“That is just the reason,” cried Lydia; “when I do go I want to enjoy it. I want to be as good as anybody there. I want people to think as much of me as anyone, and ask me to dance, and think my dress pretty, and like me altogether. I won’t go anywhere unless I can be sure of that.”

“And so you will, my darling,” Mrs. Joscelyn said. Brotherton did not venture to speak, but he put a great deal into his eyes. Lydia indeed did not look at him, and so could not perceive this, but perhaps she had some notion of it all the same. Her colour increased the least in the world, taking a glow from the red leaves in her hands and the red berries in her hair.

“No, mother, I know how it will be. We shall come in at the end with the Selbys, and the Armstrongs and the Pilgrims, and—oh, a great many more. There will not be any want of companions in distress. We will all keep together at one end of the room, and our hearts will all beat if anybody comes near us. If it is an officer from Carlisle, or if it is Mr. Brotherton, or still more if it should happen to be Lord Eldred. Oh my!” cried Lydia with momentary mimicry, clasping her hands, “We shall look at him as if we could eat him, and almost hold out our hands like the children at school, and cry, me, me! If you think that is nice for nice girls to have to do, mother, I don’t,” said Lydia with a sudden vivid flush. “So I don’t want to go.”

“But that is impossible,” Brotherton cried.

“No, not at all impossible; it is just what happens, when people ask you because they cannot help it; of course they don’t take any trouble about you; and of course the gentlemen prefer to dance with girls they know, and who belong to their own class, instead of seeking out poor little Miss Selbys and Miss Armstrongs, and Miss Jos—No,” said Liddy vehemently, “a Miss Joscelyn has never been in it, and, mother, if you please, never will be. I don’t say,” she added, calming down, “that it is anyone’s fault. I feel quite sure for one that you would ask me to dance, Mr. Brotherton.”

“Do you really—think so? The time has come,” said the young man, hurried and nervous, but with a laugh of excitement, “to set one matter to rights. Mr. Brotherton will certainly not ask you to dance, Miss Joscelyn. I have a right to be Cousin Lionel, and I will be so. I am not to be defrauded of my birthright any longer. You talk of the Duchess, but you are far more haughty than the Duchess. Take the beam out of your own eye, Cousin Lydia, and then you will see more clearly to take the mote out of the Duchess’s. Mrs. Joscelyn, am I not right?”

Mrs. Joscelyn looked at them both with a pleasure that almost went the length of tears. In the sudden union which her glance from one to another made between them, the young man and the young woman blushed—blushed for nothing at all, for sympathy, for fellow-feeling, and a little for pleasure. “Yes, yes, my dear,” Mrs. Joscelyn said, “yes, yes, I think he is right; and your cousin—your cousin would make a difference. And then, my darling, if you do not go, people will never know that you were invited, Liddy; and that means—”

“That we are not county people; and we are not county people. We need not keep up any pretences before—before Cousin Lionel,” said Lydia with a blush and a smile, and a curtsey to the young man, who looked on with a sense of enchantment. “Uncle Henry was one of them; but not we. We are Joscelyns, however,” she cried, tossing her head upwards with a proud movement, “and if blood means anything, that means something better than her Grace.”

“But why do you say if blood means anything, Liddy?” said her mother, “of course it means everything, my love.”

Then Lydia looked straight at the two people before her; both so admiring, the one more foolish than the other—and the meaning changed in her face. She sighed; her pretty head, crowned with the glowing red berries and brilliant leaves, drooped a little. “Because I don’t believe it does,” she said.

Then there was an outcry, “Oh, Liddy, Liddy!” of horror and alarm from her mother, who had borne everything else, poor soul, but who could not bear any attack upon her last stronghold, her pride of family. It had always been a comfort to her in all her troubles, and specially in those social ones which her greater neighbours had made her suffer—that, to everybody who knew, the Joscelyns were far superior even to her Grace, who had been nobody. To hear her favourite child express this scepticism was terrible. Even Brotherton sustained a slight shock of disappointment. He would have preferred on the whole that Lydia should have felt a romantic certainty of the claims of “blood;” but since it was not so, he made a virtue out of her incredulity, and looked at her with a smile and little nod of sympathy. Lydia, however, was wise enough to make no answer to her mother’s exclamation of horror.

“If I went,” she said with great decision, “you would have to go too; I will not go with anybody but you.”

“Me, Liddy?” Mrs. Joscelyn cried in alarm.

“And my father. I will go with you both, or not at all,” Lydia gave out as her final deliverance; and then she went out of the room, carrying the remains of her autumnal wreaths, and paying no attention to the pathos of her mother’s protestations. Mrs. Joscelyn could do nothing but turn to her young kinsman, and appeal to his impartial judgment.

“What should I do among all those fine people? I have not been out in the evening nor worn a low dress (in those days ‘low dresses’ were exacted even from old ladies by the stern fiat of fashion) since that child was born. You must speak to her, you must speak to her, Mr. Brotherton—I mean Lionel. Oh, yes, I want her to go; but me! and Ralph. Ralph has never gone among them, I think he has done himself injustice; but it is too late to change now. You must tell her it would never do.”

“But you would not like her to go with the Selbys or the Pilgrims—people not fit to be in the same room with her. I should not like that,” young Brotherton said. And Mrs. Joscelyn’s pale countenance coloured with pleasure to think that her child should be so determined, and her young cousin so approving. This sudden appreciation of herself was late, but yet it was pleasant, though also embarrassing. And after this there were continual remonstrances and arguments, Liddy holding to her point, her mother fighting desperately against it. As for Ralph Joscelyn, he separated himself at once from the feminine part of his household. “Go to what tomfoolery you like,” he said, with his usual courtesy, “but don’t ask me; I’ve nought to do with such nonsense.” Mrs. Joscelyn was then driven to the end of her forces. She was disturbed too about Lydia’s ball-dress, which Joan would fain have gone to Carlisle for and been “done with,” in her energetic way; but the mother had no confidence in Joan’s taste. And for her part, though Joan had behaved generously it cannot be denied that she felt her exclusion from the splendour which ought to have belonged to her as the eldest Miss Joscelyn, but which her husband’s position excluded her from. The other Selbys even, who went on sufferance as the Doctor’s family, made it more hard for Joan.

“My husband is a deal better a man than Raaf Selby will ever be,” she said with some indignation to Brotherton, who heard the complaints on all sides, “and nobody that knows them would ever hesitate between them. But Heatonshaw is only a little place, and we’ve nothing at all to do with the great folks at the Castle. Of course it is me Liddy ought to go with; and it is a joke to think that Raaf Selby’s family should all be going, and not me. But I will never forgive mother if she sends Liddy with them, and does not go herself to take care of the child. Mother’s a strange woman. She was never happy till the Duchess called, and now she has got her desire she’ll not hear any more of it. I like consistency. Now I don’t care a snap of my fingers for the Duchess; but if she invited me,” said Joan, magnanimously, “I’d go.” Here she paused, but a minute or two after resumed with great gravity. “A woman takes her husband’s rank, whatever that may be. I am not ashamed of my husband because he does not take her Grace’s eye.” And here Joan laughed again, but with an uneasy laughter. She was sore on the subject, and perhaps if she had been entrusted with the buying of the dress the result might have been disastrous. Mrs. Joscelyn would not trust Joan, but in her own timid person hesitated and doubted what to do, when Brotherton, the confidant of all their troubles, came to her aid. He proposed that his mother, who was in town (much the best place for everything of the kind; the place where fashion reigned, and ball-dresses were much more plentiful than blackberries), should get the dress.

“Which will be of no use,” said Lydia, sternly, “without a dress for my mother too.” At this Mrs. Joscelyn was ready to cry, not knowing what else to do. Her hands stole towards each other with the nervous gesture of old, when Brotherton again whispered in her ear a message of hope.

“My mother is coming—leave it to me,” he said. She had almost thrown her arms round his neck in her intense relief and thankfulness.

And this was how it was that Lydia Joscelyn made such a sensation at the ball. Had she gone with the Selbys, all would have happened precisely as she predicted. She would have stood among them, in a white gown bought at Carlisle, at the bottom of the room, surrounded by a little crowd of other obscure young ladies, left out in the cold, tremulously eager to secure partners, and taken notice of by nobody. There she would have stayed, pretending to be amused, till old Mrs. Selby gave the signal, and gathered her little flock around her, tired with standing, sick with waiting, cross, and humiliated and mortified, consoled only by the thought that the ball at the Castle would be a thing to talk of long after people had forgotten to ask, “Did you dance much?” But for Lydia was reserved a more splendid fate. She had a dress which everybody at the White House thought would have been fit for a princess, and she went with Lady Brotherton, with whom she stayed at the Wyburgh Hotel afterwards, and whose presence introduced her into the selectest circle, and the company of all the first people. Lady Althea went so far as to admire her dress, and Lord Eldred danced with her so often that his mother was alarmed, but yet could not do anything but smile upon the stranger whom Lady Brotherton patronised and introduced as “my young cousin.” Lady Brotherton was a fanciful and romantic woman, and she seized at once upon the idea that Lydia was the object of a romantic attachment on the part of Lord Eldred. Perhaps had she known that her own son was in any danger from the same quarter, it might have checked her enthusiasm. But Lionel did not feel bound in honour to give her any information on that point. She was seized with an enthusiastic friendship for Liddy before they had been half an hour together, and as she was a graceful, sentimental woman, with very tender and engaging manners, Lydia was not wanting in her response. Then Sir John, who was much older than his wife, added his contribution to the rising warmth of the relationship by vowing continually that this was the Cousin Lydia of his youth over again. The fact was that he had seen his cousin Lydia only once or twice in her youth, but he was old enough to have forgotten that, and nobody knew it was a mistake. So all things concurred in the growth of this sudden devotion, and before Lydia returned to her mother she was invited to accompany the Brothertons abroad, and had become, so to speak, one of the family.

“I will come and see your mother,” Lady Brotherton said, “and I will take no denial;” while Sir John patted her on the shoulder, and told her with his toothless jaws, that she was “sh’image of” her mother. Lydia came home with her head turned, but faithful, among all these new crotchets of other people’s, to her own.

“You are not to say no, mother dear; but I know you will never do that. You are to put up with the loneliness, and manage without me the best you can; for I am going to find Harry,” Lydia cried. This new piece of excitement obliterated the ball, which was quite an inferior event. Mrs. Joscelyn cried, and clung to her child in a kind of despair, yet hope.

“Oh, my darling, what shall I do without you? and how are you to find him?” she said; then wept and wrung her hands. “And how am I to make sure that your new friends will be kind to you? Oh, yes, they are kind now; but it is different now and when you have nobody else; and what, oh what, if you were unhappy, my pet, when you were away.”

“Well,” said Lydia, who was a young person of much strength of mind, “even in that case there could be nothing desperate about it, for I should come back. They could not lock me up in my room and feed me on bread and water. If I was not happy I should come home.”

“But oh, my pet, think,” cried Mrs. Joscelyn, with a fresh outbreak, “if you should be left like that to travel alone.”

“And why not?” said Liddy. “Nobody would meddle with me if I behaved myself; and I hope I should always behave myself. But they will not be unkind to me. Do you think there is anything unkind about—Cousin Lionel.” She pronounced his name always with a little hesitation, which, to the foolish young man himself, made it very sweet.

“No, no, Liddy; but then he is only a man—only a young man, and admires you. His mother will not be like that. A lady is different; a lady is not carried away.”

“A lady is—much more easily satisfied,” said Liddy. “She took to me in a moment, mother. They said they never saw her take so quickly to anyone; and Sir John says I am like you.”

“Like me! I don’t think he ever saw me.”

“Never mind, never mind, mother; they are not a den of robbers. They cannot do me any harm. And I shall find Harry,” Lydia said.