Lady Wedderburn's wish, Vol. 1 (of 3) : A tale of the Crimean War

By James Grant

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Title: Lady Wedderburn's wish, Vol. 1 (of 3)
        A tale of the Crimean War

Author: James Grant


        
Release date: September 16, 2026 [eBook #79590]

Language: English

Original publication: London: Tinsley Brothers, 1870

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/79590

Credits: Al Haines


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LADY WEDDERBURN'S WISH, VOL. 1 (OF 3) ***






  LADY WEDDERBURN'S WISH.

  A Tale of the Crimean War.



  BY JAMES GRANT,

  AUTHOR OF "THE ROMANCE OF WAR," "FIRST LOVE AND LAST LOVE,"
  "THE GIRL HE MARRIED," ETC.



  IN THREE VOLUMES.

  VOL. I.



  LONDON:
  TINSLEY BROTHERS, 18, CATHERINE STREET, STRAND.
  1870.

  [_All rights of Translation and Reproduction are reserved._]




  LONDON:
  SAVILL, EDWARDS AND CO., PRINTERS, CHANDOS STREET,
  COVENT GARDEN.




  TO

  LIEUTENANT-GENERAL EGBERT LAW, K.H.

  COLONEL OF THE 71ST HIGHLAND LIGHT INFANTRY,

  THIS TALE OF THE CRIMEAN WAR

  Is Inscribed,

  AS A MEMORIAL OF REGARD, AND OF THE YEARS SPENT
  TOGETHER IN AMERICA LONG AGO.




PREFACE.

Some episodes which are facts have been woven up with the following
story of the War in the Crimea.

I may mention that the sorrowful adventure of Major Singleton is no
fiction, save so far as the names are concerned, as it happened to a
Scottish medical officer during one of our late wars in India.

The famous duel fought by De l'Lisle and De la Fosse occurred, as
narrated, in the days of the French Monarchy; and, by a letter which
I had the pleasure to receive from General Lord de Ros (who has
referred to it in a recent military work), he informs me that it was
first recorded in a volume entitled, "The Military Mentor," supposed
to be by General Burgoyne--of unfortunate memory--the same officer
whose army had to capitulate at Saratoga.

A gambling quarrel nearly similar to that of Major Chesters in the
troop-ship once occupied the attention of a court martial, and
suggested the idea of his exposure by the French Colonel as described
in the text.

Of the rest of the narrative the Author leaves his readers to judge
for themselves, as those parts which belong to history are
sufficiently apparent.

_September_, 1870.




  CONTENTS
  OF
  THE FIRST VOLUME.

  CHAP.

  I. THE DESPATCH BOX
  II. THE WILLOWDEAN
  III. LADY WEDDERBURN'S HOPE
  IV. LONEWOODLEE
  V. MARY LENNOX
  VI. TWO LOVERS
  VII. SUSPENSE AND DREAD
  VIII. MARY'S MISTAKE
  IX. A SNARE
  X. CHESTERHAUGH
  XI. CHESTERS' "MILD PLAY"
  XII. THE LAST OF THE BAY HUNTER
  XIII. GRIEF
  XIV. AN UNWELCOME VISITOR
  XV. THE SPRING EVENING
  XVI. A HAPPY WALK HOME
  XVII. COUSIN GWENNY
  XVIII. FIRST IMPRESSIONS
  XIX. SCHEMES
  XX. MY LADY EXPOSTULATES
  XXI. THE TRYST
  XXII. WHAT THE MORROW BROUGHT FORTH
  XXIII. THE DAWN OF LOVE
  XXIV. PARTED IN SORROW
  XXV. THE TELEGRAM
  XXVI. MARY'S NEW TERROR




LADY WEDDERBURN'S WISH.



CHAPTER I.

THE DESPATCH BOX.

"The Colonel has written to the effect, that the regiment has
received 'letters of readiness' for foreign service, and that the
route for the East may come at any moment."

"My dear boy, Cyril, and you will be leaving us."

"For old Gib or Malta in the first place, and the Crimea after,"
continued Cyril, glancing again at the letter he had just opened;
"but the Colonel adds, that until I am telegraphed for, my leave of
absence may remain intact--it is a little anomalous; but he is a
thorough good fellow, the Colonel!"

"And what of Horace?"

"There is no word of Horace, dear mother; but he will probably be
detailed for the depôt."

"My darling Cyril!" exclaimed the anxious mother, as her eyes filled
with tears, and her upper lip quivered.

The "darling" referred to was a handsome young fellow of five feet
ten or so, with a thick curly brown head of hair, shorn short to the
regimental pattern, and most unexceptionable whiskers; one who rather
considered himself as the model officer of the Royal Fusileers, in
which distinguished corps he--Cyril Wedderburn, then on leave of
absence--held the rank of Captain; and now having laid the Colonel's
letter beside his plate--for the family were at breakfast--he
forthwith, and with appetite unimpaired by the prospect of a speedy
and too surely perilous change of scene, attacked the drumstick of a
devilled turkey.

Gervase Asloane, the family butler--a portly individual, in an ample
white waistcoat and suit of black--had but a few minutes before
placed the Russia leather despatch box, with its brass plate, bearing
the family arms, &c., beside Sir John Wedderburn, who had unlocked
it, and distributed the contents among the party at table, which
consisted only of Lady Wedderburn, Miss Flora M'Caw, her companion, a
Highland maiden of doubtful age but undoubted pedigree; her two sons,
Cyril and Robert; her nephew.  Horace Ramornie, son of a deceased
sister, and who was junior lieutenant in Cyril's regiment; and a
visitor, Chesters of Chesterhaugh, a gentleman of whom the reader may
hear, perhaps, too much in future.

There were no missives for Miss M'Caw; there never were any, so she
had long since ceased even to affect that one might come.

"One letter for Horace," said Cyril, while decapitating an egg.
"Well, old fellow, what says your despatch--'to amount of account
rendered,' eh?"

"It is only some mess-room gossip from Probyn of ours."

"A kind fellow is Probyn."

"No word of the war as yet, Cyril, so our leaves are safe," added
Horace Ramornie.

"And our lives too, for a time--eh, mamma of mine!  A pink cocked hat
for Bob, or invitation, or a love letter, of course?  But what is up
with you, Chesters?  You look disturbed, as they say on the stage."

"Perhaps I do," whispered Chesters.  "I have again backed the wrong
horse, and lost a pot of money, at the last Liverpool Spring Meeting.
The rain fell in torrents."

"And the course was soft?"

"Soft as butter," replied Chesters, filling his mouth with toast to
check a rising malediction.

"How can you talk so gaily and so lightly, Cyril?" urged his mother,
reproachfully, with her fine eyes more full of tears than ever.

"Why, mother dearest, any way, both Horace and I must have had to
leave you soon; the spring drills, the bore of coaching up for the
half-yearly inspection, will soon begin, and then quit we should,
inevitably."

"In May?"

"Yes."

"And this is March: it is hard--very hard!  I had formed such
pleasant plans for you."

"Why don't you forward them to the Horse Guards--they might soften
the hearts of the Commander-in-Chief and Adjutant-General?" said
Cyril, laughing.  "Another cup of coffee, Miss M'Caw, at your
leisure," he added to that demure personage, who daily officiated at
the magnificent silver urn and Wedgwood breakfast equipage.

"My dear Sir John," exclaimed Lady Wedderburn, suddenly, as her eyes
now fell on her husband, who had remained perfectly silent, "what is
the matter?  You look quite pale, and--and--the letter you have read
is wafered with black!"

"And edged with black, too," added Robert Wedderburn, a thoughtless,
but rather pretty looking lad, about eighteen, with curly yellow hair
and dark grey eyes.  "What's up, papa--'whose mare is dead?'"

But the Baronet did not answer immediately; he permitted the hand
retainiug the letter to drop upon his knee, and his chin sank upon
his breast as his head drooped forward, and he seemed to become lost
in thought.  Then all eyes, including those of old Gervase, the
butler, were turned inquiringly towards him.

"Sir John Wedderburn, Bart, of Nova Scotia, and Willowdean, in the
Merse--creation, 1628," as the heralds have it, was a remarkably
good-looking man, and fully six feet in height, though he did stoop a
little now, being past his sixtieth year.  His features were cleanly
cut, and very noble in contour, and benign in expression, his eyes a
clear grey, and his white hair started in spouts from his forehead to
fall back wavily like a lion's mane.  His hands, though brown--for he
never wore gloves--the whip, the gun, the rod, or the weeder, seldom
being out of them--were well shaped and aristocratic in form, while
his costume--a suit of coarse grey tweed and long brown leather
leggings, as he sat at table, with a silver whistle at his
button-hole, and a dogwhip in his pocket, only required his old
wide-awake hat, with its row of flies and fish-hooks, to complete it;
but the aforesaid hat hung in the hall without.

"My letter contains most mournful and sudden news, Katharine," said
he, as a tear started to each of his eyes--an emotion all the more
painful, as he was a man quite unused to the melting mood.

"You will perhaps permit me, dear Wedderburn," said she; on which
Cyril took the letter from his father's passive fingers and handed it
to his mother, who lifted her gold eye-glass, and, after a pause,
read as follows; but not without great difficulty, as the handwriting
was tremulous, and in some places degenerated to an almost illegible
scrawl:--


"The Choultry, Madras.

"MY DEAR BROTHER JOHN,--My physician and old friend, of the
Palmacottah Light Infantry, worthy Doctor Chutnay, who has just left
me (and who will forward this to you), has told me that my hours are
numbered now.  Before this heavy fever fell upon me, I had fondly
hoped to be with you once again, to inhale the pure, cool breeze that
sweeps over the purple Lammermuir and all down bonnie Lauderdale; but
God has willed it otherwise.  I cannot live more than two or three
days at the utmost, and have only strength to write, that I bequeath
to you my most valuable possession on earth--my only child,
Gwendoleyne--whom I know that you and dearest Katharine will love and
cherish, even as your own boys, for the sake of her mother, who, to
the hour of her death, loved you all so well.

"The impulsive blood of her mother's old Welsh race is in my girl's
veins, and she is a warm and enthusiastic creature; so I pray you, as
one so soon to face his God as I, alone can pray, that you will be
her guide and protector.  She will be rich; see that she marries
worthily; guide and watch over her lonely steps, dear John, and
love--love to----but my head swims.  I cannot pen another line.  Be a
father to my little Gwenny, and believe me your affectionate brother,
"WILLIAM WEDDERBURN."


While all listened to this in respectful silence, and the letter was
passed between the brothers for re-perusal, Sir John had thrust aside
his breakfast, and with his chin resting on one hand, sat gazing into
the far vista of the sunny lawn, lost in sad thoughts; but Lady
Wedderburn very deliberately examined the letter in which it was
enclosed, and a document which came with it.

The letter was from the physician, Doctor Chutnay, and was dated from
the cantonments of the 3rd Madras N.I.  It stated that "the deceased
expired on the second day after the letter was written, and that his
daughter, Miss Gwendoleyne Wedderburn, would leave Madras for Europe
by the next P. and O. liner that came into the Roads, and that
herewith he begged to enclose a copy of her poor father's will."

William Wedderburn, the younger brother of Sir John--younger by six
or seven years at least--had spent half his life in the Indian Civil
Service, and had realized a handsome fortune by his lucky
speculations in the staple produce of India, such as cotton, indigo,
rice, and coffee; and by his will it would appear that, save a few
thousands bequeathed to Sir John, he left the bulk of his property,
more than three hundred thousand pounds, to his orphan daughter,
including a "garden-house" like an Oriental palace on the Choultry
Plain, shares in the Agra Bank, Indian Stock, and--Heaven only knew
all what more!

The contents of this letter affected all at the table in various
degrees.

Lady Wedderburn had scarcely--and her sons had never--seen, though
they had heard so much of this rich Indian uncle, who yearly sent
home such magnificent and graceful (because suitable) presents to the
family.  He had been a kind of myth to all, save Sir John; so
personally his death stirred no deep or tender chord in their hearts.

Her first idea was that the thousands now so suddenly bequeathed
would be a seasonable aid in pushing on Robert at college and
bringing him out for the bar; also in purchasing a majority for Cyril
in some regiment that was not going to the East; and then, if the
orphan cousin was handsome, who could say what might happen? the
Madras heiress would make an excellent wife for one of them.

Her next thoughts ran on the fashion and expense of mourning, for the
whole household, even to the lodge gatekeepers, would require to be
put in black.  Was a black hammer-cloth necessary for the carriage?
Gaiety, they could have none of it for a time--a confounded bore,
Robert thought, "when a fellow had so many invitations on hand and in
prospect."  Then as the little heiress would be here anon; which
rooms was she to have?  The best of course, after her own.  All these
ideas swept in quick succession through her busy brain.

Chesters of Chesterhaugh thought of the heiress's thousands and his
own ugly betting-book.  He played with his knife and fork; wondered
what she was like, and ventured to inquire her age.

"She will be eighteen in May.  Poor girl! and quite an orphan; but so
rich, Captain Chesters!"

The poor companion sighed, for she too had been long friendless; but
no lacs of rupees ever fell to the great Celtic line of the M'Caw.

Horace Ramornie remembered that eight years before this he too had
come an orphan to Willowdean, but "so poor;" and now he had no
thought or interest in the matter, save surprise to see tears falling
silently over the bronzed cheek of bluff and jolly Sir John
Wedderburn.  But the memory of the latter was wandering away into the
past, and he could recall the lithe, supple, and handsome figure of
that dead brother, a blue-eyed and golden-haired lad, as he went
forth to seek his fortune in the sunny East, with mingled hope and
sorrow in his heart, and their mother's tears and kisses lingering on
his cheek; and he could recall many a happy, happy hour they had
spent together under yonder old trees, under the roof of
Willowdean--days of nutting and bird-nesting in the summer woods, of
trouting in the Leader and Whitadder; or wandering, truant-like, by
many a harvest-field and lone burn-brae; of tricks they had played
upon their tutor; of depredations committed in the vineries and
hot-houses; and their awful fear of discovery, which was more than
half the charm of the whole adventure; of all their rides and
rambles, their boyish hopes and mutual aspirations; and now--now he
was dead and buried, far, far away in an Indian grave, an old,
shattered, fever-stricken man.

It seemed so difficult to think when he looked across the room to
where hung a portrait of the little Willie of the vanished years, a
laughing and golden-haired boy; and Sir John muttered, with something
between a sigh and a sob in his throat--

"Yes, Willie, I shall be a kind father to your orphan girl, whatever
betide!"

"Gwendoleyne is a pretty name," said Cyril, approvingly.

"I am so glad you like it," observed his mother, following her own
ambitious thoughts.

"Rather romantic though.  There is one I like that is more simple."

"Her mother was a Welsh lady--one of the Ap-Rhys of Llanchillwydd,"
added Lady Wedderburn, in an explanatory tone.  "But she died, poor
thing, at Madras, when Gwenny was about three years old, and I wonder
that uncle William did not send her home to Europe long ago; but then
she was his only child, and he would have missed her so much!"

As the conversation was now taking a domestic turn, and Sir John
Wedderburn was evidently disturbed by the tidings--for, instead of
his brother's death, his final return had been
anticipated,--Chesters, who hated the dark or gloomy side of
anything, thought he had better go, as he had only ridden over to see
a horse of Cyril's; yet he lingered for a time, smoking a cigar with
him and Robert on the terrace before the mansion, while Lady
Wedderburn was engaged in family council with her husband.




CHAPTER II.

THE WILLOWDEAN.

The manor house of Willowdean is situated in the Merse, which, with
Lauderdale and Lammermuir, forms one of the three great subdivisions
of Berwickshire, each of which possesses distinct natural features;
but the former has been long celebrated in Scottish annals for its
rich scenery, its industrious population, and plentiful harvests,
while the sterner Lauderdale is bold and rugged, and Lammermuir is
lone, bleak, and dreary, all purple morass or pastoral hill, being,
in fact, a vast sheepwalk.

Built on the site of an old Bastile-house, that had many a time been
burned or stormed, restored and stormed again, by English armies and
Warden raiders in the times of old; lastly, when the Bandes
Françaises under D'Esse d'Epainvilliers were in full retreat from
Haddington during the wars of Mary of Lorraine, Willowdean we may
describe as a handsome modern house, of aristocratic appearance, with
a peristyle of eight Ionic pillars, in the pediment above which were
the Wedderburn arms--a chevron between three mullets; while their
motto--_Fortiter et recte_--was carved in large Roman letters on the
frieze.  The rooms were lofty, the double drawing-room, when its
folding doors were slid into the wall, forming a stately salon for
dancing, when all its rich furniture was removed, and the Karl
Harrgs, Fosters, and Gilberts, that adorned its walls, were alone
left behind.

There was, of course, a noble billiard-room, where many a game was
played by Cyril and Chesters, not always to the advantage of the
former; and a great conservatory filled with the rarest exotics,
where more than one graceful acacia drooped over statues and
fountains, was lit at night with roses of gas made at the home farm.

The park had been under grass for centuries, if it was ever ploughed
at all.  Tradition said that Leslie's six thousand cavalry had
grassed there a night or two before the battle of Philiphaugh; and
there, as its vista stretched far away to where the purple Lammermuir
bounded the distance, far beyond the invisible fence that marked its
actual limits, the brown fallow deer might be seen in summer browsing
or lying under the ancient oaks and beeches, half hidden among the
green fern and pink foxglove; and that nothing might be wanting in
effect, some stately peacocks spread their spotted plumage over the
white balustrades of the terrace before the façade of the mansion, to
which the gravelled carriage-drive approached by a semicircular sweep
on each side, through the smooth and velvet grass.

Every comfort were there, and every luxury--ice-pit, vineries and
forcing-houses, stables and kennel--yet the means of the worthy
Baronet were far from adequate to his expenses in this aspiring age,
and in Willowdean, as in many a less pretentious dwelling, there was
too often a struggle to "keep up appearances."

Perhaps no part of the house was furnished more luxuriously and
elegantly than Lady Wedderburn's boudoir, the hangings and furniture
of which were blue satin and silver; but few objects there were more
treasured than certain Burmese idols, three-headed gods,
triple-trunked elephants, and other hideous little monsters, in
bronze and ivory, which her beloved Cyril had picked up amid the
"loot" at Moulmein, and brought home for "dear mamma," when he was a
boy ensign, in his first red coat.

And now for a little account of some of our _dramatis personæ_.

Captain Weddcrburn, though a frank, honest, and good-hearted young
fellow, was and ever had been a spoiled child of fortune.  Pronounced
by aunts and nurses "a love of an infant" when crowing and nestling
in his silk berceaunette, he had gone to Rugby a bold and beautiful
schoolboy, and left college to join his regiment a dangerously
handsome man.  He had been pretty successful in all the little
undertakings of the gay life he led--the career of a soldier in the
flirting times of peace.  The horse he backed was pretty sure to win;
he could keep his wicket against the prime bowler of the garrison,
and march off the field with his bat on his shoulder; he won the
prize at every pigeon match, rode straight to hounds, pulled a
capital stroke oar, and was deemed one of the best round-dancers in
the Royal Fusileers.  There was one thing he had never been able to
do, viz., to beat his acquaintance Chesters at cards or billiards,
"and thereby hangs a tale."  Few men among those distinguished
Fusileers had been more petted, spoiled, fallen-in-love-with, or so
lucky among the ladies as handsome Cyril Wedderburn, who became
rather fastidious in consequence.

A prime hand he was in arranging picnics, or a social "spread" on the
roof of a drag at race or review, and he affected to dabble in music
too, for he had a fine voice, and many a mysterious air he had bribed
the band-master to "fudge out of another," and dedicate to some
pretty girl about whom he dangled till the route came; and it was his
great--yet most ungrateful--boast, in mess-room parlance, that "no
bit of white muslin had ever hooked him yet."

There was one sweet, pale face, however--but of _that_ anon.

His cousin and brother-officer, Horace Ramornie, though nearly as
much petted and admired, was much less a man of pleasure than Cyril.
He was by no means so showy an officer or so fashionable a man, yet
he was a lad of very striking and interesting appearance, now in his
twenty-second year; slender, graceful, and gentle-mannered, with
nearly regular features, and skin of an olive tint; yet with bat and
foil he had held his own against the best at Sandhurst.  He had
wonderful dark hazel eyes, eyes that, as Cyril said, "were bright
enough and soft enough for a girl, and were quite thrown away upon a
fellow like Horace."

The lad had been a hard student, for he knew--and had perhaps been
taught to know from his boyhood--that he was dependent on the
Wedderburn family for his commission, in the first place, and for his
little yearly allowance in the second; therefore, he was chiefly vain
of having won a step in the regiment, that he was a lieutenant, and
that three letters, _p.s.c._, after his name in the Army List, showed
that he had already passed his final examination at the Staff
College, and was fit for any appointment the Commander-in-Chief might
bestow upon him.

Though amid the expense which their household and Cyril's
allowance--especially when on home service--entailed, together with
Robert's prospects, Lady Wedderburn did sometimes deem Horace
somewhat of "a drag," she could not forget that he was her dead
sister's only son; and as she doted on the tomes of Douglas, Burke,
and Debrett, she was vain of his direct descent from an old, old
Scottish line, that stretched far beyond the Wedderburns of the Merse
into remote antiquity; for the lad was descended from fierce Sir John
Ramornie, the audacious and implacable, the companion and false
friend of the helpless Duke of Rothesay, whom, as history tells us,
he seized near Strathtyrum, and starved to death in the Castle of St.
Andrew's in 1402, and from Alexander de Ramorgny, who had a free gift
of Pitglassie in Fife from Robert Duke of Albany, and so forth; so
Horace, though only a subaltern in Her Majesty's service, enjoyed an
historical name, one among the best of many of Scotland's "unlanded
gentry," though Pitglassie and all had gone in recent bank failures,
very little store he set thereon, as he walked to and fro on the
terrace on that breezy March morning, enjoying a pipe of Cavendish
and listening to Chesters, who was descanting most fluently on the
merits of certain horses and dogs, and on certain races that were on
the _tapis_, but descanting in vain, for Horace was not a betting man.

Ralph Rooke Chesters, of Chesterhaugh, a neighbouring proprietor,
whose lands were deeply dipped in debt, enjoyed the local rank of
Captain, having once been a cornet in a cavalry corps, which he had
left "somehow under a cloud," as the phrase went.  He was not without
a certain amount of good looks, and had undoubtedly a gentlemanly
exterior.  Yet he was a _blasé_ man, of some forty or five-and-forty
years, who had seen and known a vast deal of the world ere half that
time was past.  His nose was very red, his cheeks were blotchy, and
his sandy-coloured hair was already thickly seamed with grey.  There
was a perpetual sinister and watchful expression in his pale grey
eyes, and usually a compression about his thin, cruel lips, the
secret workings of which his sandy moustache, luckily for himself,
concealed.

On this morning he wore a rough suit of heather-coloured tweed, with
leather gaiters and baggy knickerbockers, a round jacket, scarlet
shirt, and Glengarry bonnet, the vile composite costume of the fast
Scotchman "of the period" whose limbs will not pass muster in the
kilt; and on the left side of the said Glengarry he wore a huge and
pretentious silver badge, the crest of the Chesters (a tower), to
whose line he certainly was no ornament; and Cyril Wedderburn, who
was very fastidious in his own toilette, disliked this style of dress
intensely, and even when shooting or fishing never adopted it.

His new horse--a fine bay hunter, with dark legs--had fully met
Chesters' approval.  The stables, the dog-kennel, and the loose box
had been duly visited; they had tried a stroke or two in the
billiard-room, with a glass of Madeira and a biscuit, ere the Captain
again announced his intention of going.

"I daresay, Wedderburn," said he, "you must feel it a thundering
bore, this death of an old uncle you scarcely ever saw?  It will
spoil all your fun, having to play propriety here till your leave is
up."

Cyril, like Robert, was perhaps thinking so, but had not the
coarseness to put his thoughts in words.

"Uncle William was my father's favourite brother," said he, evasively.

"Order my horse, Asloane," said Chesters, as the butler was leaving
the billiard-room with the salver and decanters.

"Are you going already?" asked Cyril, in a tone of equal indifference
and politeness.

"Yes, if you will allow me.  I am rather _de trop_ here--family
grief, house of mourning, and all that sort of thing," said Chesters,
smiling as much as he ever smiled; "but perhaps you will look me up
at Chesterhaugh to-morrow, and pot with me at six, and then we'll
have a little mild play; not extravagant, remember; only guinea
points."

"All right, I'll be there; thanks," replied Cyril, but in a tone of
more indifference than cordiality.

Cyril Wedderburn courteously accompanied Chesters to the nearest
gate-lodge on the verge of the park, and then he galloped off.

"That is not the way to Chesterhaugh," said Cyril to the lodgekeeper.

"No, Maister Cyril," replied that official, with a leer; "but the
Captain gangs as often by the road that leads to Lonewoodlee."

The man did not speak unthinkingly, for his tone and manner made the
brow of Cyril contract, and he felt his cheek flush with anger, for
the inference to be drawn from these simple words was far from being
a pleasant one to him.

"Chesters at Lonewoodlee!  By Heaven, I must look to this!" he
muttered, as he turned and walked slowly back to the house.




CHAPTER III.

LADY WEDDERBURN'S HOPE.

Dinner at Willowdean, even when only the family were present, was
rather a stately and cumbersome meal; yet Cyril and Horace,
accustomed latterly to the splendour and glitter of the regimental
mess, perhaps liked that it should be so.  A service of plate covered
the great walnut-wood sideboard.  The damask cloths, the elaborately
cut crystal, the blue and gold china with the Wedderburn arms--crest,
an eagle in full flight, with the motto, _Fortiter et recte_--which
figured on everything from the ice-pails to the salt-spoons, all
betokened taste, luxury, and moderate wealth; while candelabra lit
with gas shed a flood of brilliant light over all.  Save a few feet
of polished wainscot round the room, the floor was entirely covered
by a rich deep Turkey carpet.  Long and narrow, the apartment had
four lofty windows at one end; these opened towards the Lammermuir
Hills, but were now, at six P.M. in the month of March, shrouded by
heavy maroon-coloured hangings with broad gold binding.

The three servants in attendance were each a perfect "Jeames" of the
most approved order, so far as calves, whiskers, and livery went; for
the traditional good old-fashioned servants who lived and died in
their masters' household, and were as hereditary as the family
pictures and plate, like many other Scottish things of the best kind,
exist only in romance, and are gone with the past.

The party which assembled at table when Asloane rang the house-bell
at six, was of course somewhat reserved and taciturn for a time.
They conversed but little, or in low tones, till the cloth was
removed, and that little ran chiefly on the weather, or consisted of
the courtesies of the table, till Mr. Asloane had placed the
elaborately cut decanters in a row before his master, bowed, and
withdrawn.

Sir John, though grave and even sad in expression, had already been
able to think calmly over his "poor brother's" death, in conjunction
with certain long projected improvements on the property--more
particularly the erection of a new wing to the stable-court, and a
central clock tower; and yet ever and anon he would come forth with
some fond or kind reminiscence of Willie, for he seemed at times to
live in the past, and could scarcely realize the idea that he had
died an elderly man at last.

Cyril's thoughts rose chiefly upon what the gatekeeper had said so
casually; thus he was taciturn, almost morose, and fidgetted with his
cuffs and studs or whiskers, viciously cracking walnuts as if in the
shell of each he crushed an enemy.

His brother Robert was probably thinking that if their uncle William
had left him something out of his lacs of rupees, he might have cut
the Bar, for which he had no great fancy, and betaken himself to the
profession of a man of pleasure; while young Horace Ramornie had no
thoughts of the matter, for he was the least considered in that small
family circle, and so made, perhaps, a more substantial dinner than
any of them.

Lady Wedderburn (_née_ Katharine Douglas, daughter of a poor but
ancient family in one of the Wards of Lanarkshire) was no longer
young; she was past the prime even of middle age, but still had great
remains of beauty.  Her cast of features and the brilliance of her
dark grey eyes were unchanged, though wrinkles had taken the place of
dimples, and her once black hair was streaked with silvery white.

Her small and ladylike hands showed the minute wrinkles and blue
veins of time; yet they were well-shaped and beautiful hands still;
and though she had several rings on them, fully a half of these were
black enamel and pearls--the rings in memory of friends and relations
she had survived.

The great remains which she possessed of a high class of beauty
rendered her still pleasing, and Cyril, a very fastidious connoisseur
in fine faces, always admired his mother's more than that of any
other woman.  She was his model, yet men rarely fall in love with
their imaginary models.  Her dresses were always rich, the colours
well chosen, and in fashion adapted to her years, for she had the art
which so few possess--that of growing gracefully old.  A fall of rich
white lace pinned prettily over her stately head fell with lappets at
each side, finishing a coquettish demi-toilette that somehow became
her matronly character.

"Pass the wine, Cyril; you are very silent," said Sir John: "and let
us drink kindly to the memory of your poor uncle Willie."

"My dear Sir John," said Lady Wedderburn, still pursuing her own
secret thoughts, after this little ceremony was over, "on again
looking over our dear William's will, I observed that his property is
conveyed away to certain trustees, of whom you are the chief, for the
behoof of that darling child Gwenny, whom I already begin to
love--quite as a daughter, indeed."

A grave kind of smile spread over Sir John's face, and Cyril, after a
swift but furtive glance at his mother, proceeded to crack more nuts;
but no one replied.

"I do so long to see her," resumed Lady Wedderburn, toying the while
with some grapes, her head pensively on one side, and her eyes cast
down.  "If like her mother, she will be a very beautiful girl, Cyril."

"Indeed--I never saw her mother," replied Cyril, with provoking
indifference, as he played with his long whiskers.

"I don't think there were many girls who in the bloom of their
twentieth year surpassed Gwendoleyne Ap-Rhys!" observed his mother,
emphatically.

"Pass the port, Horace," said Cyril; "that Madeira is like our mess
tap, rather heady, but makes a capital 'whitewasher,' however."

"Makes a what?" asked Lady Wedderburn, with a tone of pique.  "But a
girl with three hundred thousand pounds will prove a serious
responsibility to us."

"Get her married offhand," said Robert, bluntly.

"That is the very kind of marriage to be guarded against," replied
his mother.  "Thus we must be careful whom we introduce to her.  She
will prove a great comfort to us, however, Wedderburn, when the dear
boys are back to their regiment and Robert is at College."

"I quite concur with you, Katharine, about the introductions," said
Sir John.  "One thing is clear, that after Cyril goes I shall not
have that person Chesters coming about Willowdean."

"He is no particular friend of mine," retorted Cyril, almost
haughtily, while he coloured with annoyance.  "I only met him at the
Lothian Racing Club: he knew Probyn and other fellows of ours, and so
we came to talk of horses, and turn a card or two, that is all."

"A card or two to your loss, as I am aware; but he is a bad style of
man, and not the kind of companion I wish you or Horace to make."

"My dear papa," replied Cyril, who, when in his father's presence,
never forgot the influences of boyhood, "after a fellow has been
eight years in the line, been round the Sand Heads at the mouth of
the Hooghly, and marched all through Central India, if he can't take
care of himself, he never will."

"I know that Chesters got into a scrape in his regiment, and then
into the hands of the 'Chosen People,'" said Horace, laughing.

"An easy matter to do so," added Sir John.  "Chesterhaugh, with its
rents, wont stand a stud of horses, a pack of harriers, a yacht on
the Clyde----"

"Besides a French _danseuse_," interrupted Cyril, under his breath
and with a swift glance at his cousin.

"He rooked that young French officer who was travelling here," said
Sir John--"what was his name?"

"The Captain De la Fosse," said Miss M'Caw, softly, for the
flatteries of the Frenchman were still deep and soft in her memory,
when he spent a week at Willowdean.

"Thank you--yes, De la Fosse.  He rooked him so completely that, but
for my assistance, he would have had serious difficulty in getting
home to France."

"Ah, well; don't let him marry cousin Gwenny," said Cyril, once more
applying himself to the port.  "But here is a chance for you young
fellows, Bob and Horace.  Why don't you toss up for who is to enter
stakes for the heiress?"

"Fie, Cyril!  How can you talk thus--how make a jest so unseemly at
such a time--of your own cousin, too?" exclaimed Lady Wedderburn,
with heightened colour and unusual asperity of tone.

"Why, mother dearest----" began Cyril, with surprise.

"You might give yourself the preference."

"The right of the first-born," added Robert, sententiously.

"Nay, nay, I am not a marrying man.  What the deuce should I do with
a wife, when the regiment has got its 'Letters of Readiness,' too?"
asked Cyril, again having recourse to the nuts, with a gloom in his
dark blue eyes.

"Or Horace either, if it comes to that," said Lady Wedderburn, a
little pointedly.  "But under all the circumstances, I do not see why
you should now go to the East at all, Cyril."

"Why now more than yesterday?" asked Cyril, who seemed to be in a
cynical mood of mind.  "I daresay you think me far too fine and
handsome a fellow to be shot or bayonetted by some filthy Russian
linesman, and then flung into a hole or a trench by the wayside, as
better men have been."

"Oh, Cyril, what a horrible idea!" exclaimed his mother, while tears
started to her eyes; "but there is our neighbour, Lady Juliana
Ernescleugh, on the first rumour of war she had her son, the Master,
transferred to the Scots Fusileer Guards, and I don't see why I
should be worse treated than she is."

Cyril and Horace laughed on hearing this, and the former said,
contemptuously--

"I do not think Lady Juliana made much by that move, as the Brigade
of Guards are also under orders for European Turkey."

"At all events, when Gwenny comes home--for this house is of course
her home, Sir John being her nearest kinsman and chief trustee--I
trust that you two boys will do all in your power to soothe and
console her after the terrible loss and affliction she has undergone."

Horace Ramornie coloured, for he felt himself omitted in this charge;
but then she was no relation of his.

"Of course," replied Cyril, who, after a pause, began now for the
first time to perceive how the current of these remarks tended; "but
our time for all that sort of thing--at least, mine and
Horace's--will be short, and a telegram from the Colonel may whisk us
off by the first train at any moment.  Gwenny--Gwendoleyne--the name
is pretty enough, smacks of Mudie's, and the novel in three volumes
octavo--we must leave the care and the reversion of her to you, Bob."

"She won't have any tinge of colour about her, I hope?" said that
personage, simply.

"What a griff you are!  Come out for the Scotch Bar; you would
certainly shine there, Bob, if nowhere else," said Cyril.

"Well, a Welsh girl," persisted Bob, who was at the age when most
young men are flippant; "she'll have black eyes, of course, with the
proverbial cheek bones of the Celt and the Cymri--a high-crowned hat,
and a scarlet handkerchief."

"A nice costume to wear at the Choultry, when the thermometer is at
108° in the shade.  Bob, you are the veriest griff I have met since I
left Chowringee."

"I am getting utterly provoked by this tone and the tenor of these
remarks.  Really the young men of the present day are becoming quite
insufferable!" said Lady Wedderburn, actually darting an angry glance
at poor Horace, who had scarcely spoken.  "Cyril, and you especially,
Robert, seem to forget that her mother was a lady of one of the best
families in Wales, and that her father was your uncle."

"Yes," added Sir John, stiffly; "Ap-Rhys of Llanchillwydd is a name
second to none in the annals of the old Principality."

"Then, papa," continued Bob, "when Gwenny comes home, we'll all have
to go in for Burke, Debrett, and pedigree?"

"Reared in India, and away from all home influences, the girl will
too probably place such things at their true value," said Cyril,
still more unwittingly shocking his aristocratic mother; "though of
course she may, if she please, go far beyond the Wedderburns up to
the first Prince of Wales, or Howel Dha, at least."

"Come, come; no quizzing," said Sir John, a little severely.
"Remember that she is an orphan."

"And so rich," added Lady Wedderburn, plaintively.  "Miss M'Caw," she
continued, with a bow understood by that lady, who, when no other was
present, always sat on Sir John's right hand; and then the four
gentlemen rose as ceremoniously as if they were all strangers, while
she retired to the drawing-room with her companion.

The latter, who had been pretty when young, was now well past her
fortieth year, and having a pedigree--as what Highlander has
not?--she had sighed with secret impatience and envy, perhaps
bitterness, while listening to much that we have recorded; for she
too, as well as the heiress, had come of an old Celtic line that had
furnished its patriotic victims for the field and scaffold; and among
her private _lares_ she treasured an old locket of red gold,
containing a lock of "the Prince's" golden hair, given by his own
hand, on the retreat from Derby, to her great-grandsire, the great
M'Caw of the '45, who died like a hero in the human shambles at
Carlisle.

She had resided some ten years of an aimless and hopeless life at
Willowdean, and had not been without secret thoughts on one or two
occasions of entangling Cyril in a matrimonial affair; but he had
seen too much of the world even as a boy, and was daily seeing too
many fresh young faces to be caught so easily--so all such hopes were
past and vanished now.

She was a calm, quiet person, who, under a tolerably ladylike
exterior, concealed much of that discontented pride, fawning, and
subservience, which are too often the leading characteristics of the
modern Celt.

"I do beg that you will not consider Ralph Chesters as in any way a
friend of mine," said Cyril, resuming a thread of the past
conversation, after his brother and Horace had betaken them to the
billiard-room; "for I fully agree with you that he is not the style
of man to meet ladies."

"Especially one who is such a monetary prize as your cousin," said
Sir John, pointedly.

"But he talks of going to the army of the East."

"In what capacity?"

"An officer of the Bashi Bozooks, or some such distinguished force,"
said Cyril, with a hearty fit of laughter.

"And a good riddance his absence will prove to the Merse," added Sir
John, as he rose to join Lady Wedderburn, leaving Cyril to smoke on
the terrace, where he walked to and fro in the clear, cold starlight,
with his eyes fixed on a dark spot that was barely distinguishable on
the hill side, two or three miles off.  It was a dense grove of
trees, which seemed to have a peculiar attraction for him, and its
outline became more distinct when the moon arose.

"Have you been talking to Cyril?" asked the lady, as her husband
entered her boudoir, and, not without some doubt and hesitation,
deposited his burly person in his rough tweed suit on one of her blue
and silver _fauteuils_.

"Yes," said he, rubbing his forehead with an air of perplexity.

"Seriously, I hope?"

"About Chesters--oh, yes."

"Tush!  I mean about Gwendoleyne."

"No; but it seems to me that you are already--even on the first day
our melancholy news has come--disposed to press your views or wishes
too plainly upon Cyril."

"How so?" asked Lady Wedderburn, curtly.

"In the choice of a wife, most men like to please themselves, not
other persons."

"But surely, Wedderburn, you would wish to see this alliance brought
about?" said she, earnestly.

"Undoubtedly; but Cyril is just the style of young fellow to run
rusty--to kick over the traces--if worried about the matter.  I know
that I should have done so."

"He can have no previous attachment, for never a letter comes here,
save from some of his regimental friends, and Horace and Robert see
them all."

"But, my dear Katharine," urged Sir John, gently, as he stirred his
cup of coffee, "we must consider also the girl's inclinations, her
tastes, her sympathies."

"What right has she to have any at her years?  I am sure I had none!"

"Complimentary, Kate, for you were just about her age when you
married me."

"Ah, but that was a very different thing.  I did not possess three
hundred thousand pounds."

"You possessed much that had far more value in the eyes of John
Wedderburn," said the old gentleman, as he stooped, kissed her
upturned forehead gallantly, and to end this matter, went forth to
have a look at his horses, and think over the proposed additions to
the already magnificent stable-court.




CHAPTER IV.

LONEWOODLEE.

Within a few miles of this splendid and luxurious modern mansion a
very different scene was passing in another dwelling.

In a bleaker part of the Merse, more immediately adjoining the
Lammermuir range of hills, was situated the house of Lonewoodlee, a
fine example of what a Scottish fortalice required to be in the
troublesome times of the sixteenth century.  "It grotesquely
associated with its rude strength the fantastic ornaments of a more
powerful and civilized people--a type of what the French alliance
must often have produced among the gentlemen of the age--the rugged
nature of the Scot, with the style and manners of the mercurial
Frank."

It was a small square tower, with round corbelled turrets at the
angles; but as it has changed hands since then, and been strangely
modernized within the last three years, the reader may look for it in
vain as we shall describe it.

Numerous loopholes, designed for arrows or arquebuses, were in the
angles of these four turrets, in the sills of the windows, and round
the floridly carved entrance-door, over which were the arms of the
family, with the legend, in quaint letters, in bold relief--

"_Yis tovr finished be Oliver Levenox, _10_th Aprile,_ 1560_, is ovr
inheritance_."


It was grey, gaunt, lichen spotted, and solitary, and was surrounded
by a grove of ancient trees on the pastoral slope, from whence it
took its most characteristic name of the Lonewoodlee.  It was more
immediately girt by a massive wall, which had once been for defence,
but was ruinous now, for the long-tufted grass and fragrant
wallflower flourished along its cope, and the iron gate had long
since fallen from its hinges, while the proud court was almost
covered by the grass that sprung up between the stones.

Even prior to the period of which we write, some fifteen years ago,
an attempt had been made to modernize the tower a little, by removing
the rusted iron gratings from the windows and enlarging them; but
still the dwelling was gloomy, in consequence of the enormous
thickness of the walls and the vaultings of the lower basement.

Among the wood around it were many trees that had sprung from
seedlings of the ancient ash, which, by the law of an early Scottish
king, every man who built even a cottage was bound to plant near his
dwelling for shafts, when the "spear, six Scottish ells in length,"
was required to bear back alike the Norman knights and Saxon infantry
of England.

Many a gloomy old Border legend was connected with the Tower of
Lonewoodlee, and like some other ancient families, the proprietors
had their warning when fate was nigh--an unpleasant, however
romantic, adjunct; for it was said that when a Lennox was to die, as
the moon rose above a certain quarter of the Lammermuir hills, the
shadow of a large human hand--the hand of Destiny--was cast on the
eastern wall, with the forefinger pointed at length; and the local
papers actually asserted that such a shadow was visible before Major
Lennox was killed at the battle of Waterloo.

Within all was gloomy, dilapidated, and darkened by time; the
furniture was fully forty years old, and some of it was still older.

In the dining-room, or hall, the sofas were square-elbowed, of
horsehair, and furnished with back-squabs; the chairs were of dark
blue leather, and in the corners were circular stands for curious
china, large shells, and so forth.  With cotton furniture, or
coloured calico, a meagre attempt had been made by a neat female hand
to render gay the apartment that passed as a drawing-room, where the
chiffounières of wood, painted white and gilded, the white marble
girandoles (minus half their crystal pendants), and everything else,
were old-fashioned, shabby, and worn, for they had been the new
furnishing of the mansion when George III. was King, and the mother
of the present proprietor had come home a blooming bride.

Here and there, in oval frames, or bordered only by black oak
mouldings, were portraits of a far older period than any of the
Georges, as the black wigs and breastplates of the subjects evinced.
Every way it was an old and worn-out establishment, where everything
looked mouldy and fading away.

On the same March evening when the maroon-coloured curtains were
drawn at Willowdean, and the pompous old butler was placing the row
of glittering decanters before Sir John Wedderburn, an old man was
seated in a high-backed leather chair, which was studded with rows of
brass-headed nails, seeking to warm his limbs at the fire, which
blazed cheerily enough in the great stone chimney of the dining-hall
at Lonewoodlee.  The grate was old-fashioned, like everything else
there; it was a mere iron basket, adorned with four brass knobs, and
placed upon two square stones, quite unsuited to the form of the
fireplace.  Thus the heat of the roaring pile of coals, turf, and
bog-oak roots, went all up the great tunnel-like vent, with a column
of sparks.

Oliver Lennox of Lonewoodlee looked much older than his years
warranted, for his wasted figure, clad in a well-worn Indian
dressing-gown, or _robe-de-chambre_ of the shawl pattern, tied by a
cord and tattered tassel, was bent severely, and his face was
furrowed by disease and the emotions of the mind, rather than time,
for he was not more, perhaps, than fifty-five years of age.

His right elbow rested on the arm of his chair; his chin was placed
in the hollow of his hand, and his keen, restless, yet clear blue
eyes were fixed dreamily on the ruddy flame that lighted up his sharp
aquiline features, and turned to threads of glittering silver his
thin white hair that had once been a rich dark brown.

Seated on a tabouret or little stool by his side, was his daughter
Mary, a girl not quite of twenty years; perhaps the only true friend
whom many reverses of fortune left him; his sole attendant, save a
couple of female domestics; others seldom remained long at the Tower,
as a querulous master and a gloomy house, which had moreover the
steady reputation of being haunted, rendered service unattractive at
Lonewoodlee.

Mary knew he was dying of some internal and mysterious disease with
which the doctors had totally failed to grapple--that, in spite of
her affection and their skill, of her prayers and their potions, he
was slowly and surely passing away from her; and she left nothing
unsaid or undone to soothe, by sweet devotedness, what she knew to be
too probably the few months of his last year on earth.

He had survived the winter, but might never live to see the summer
ripen into autumn, and the golden corn waving on the upland slopes
that were his own no more.

To God and herself alone were known the terrible thoughts of Mary
Lennox in the long, sleepless hours of the weary nights she passed;
yet unswerving in her filial duty, tenderly nursing and ministering
as only a woman--only a daughter or wife--can nurse or minister to
the wants of a querulous patient; springing from her pillow with
cheerful and affectionate alacrity, to anticipate his every wish, and
smiling to hide the sorrow that preyed upon her own heart.

Pale and sad usually, her face was beautiful; yet sadness had not
been its normal expression, but rather the result of local influence.
Her features were not quite regular, but there was a divine delicacy
about them; her finely lidded eyes were of that blue-grey which is
aptly termed violet colour, and her mouth and chin were beautifully
formed, so were her tiny ears and hands.  Her whole figure, which was
_petite_ rather, and the contour of her head, with its masses of rich
brown hair, were eminently lady-like and indicative of high breeding
and tender culture; and a charming picture she would have formed, as
she sat then, with her father's passive left hand locked caressingly
in hers, and her soft little face upturned to his, every feature
teeming with affectionate solicitude.

Her dress was plain, inexpensive, and simple, for their means could
not afford her many luxuries; but her starched cuffs and collar--made
and dressed by her own hands--and the tiny velvet riband around her
slender white neck, made it quite a pretty toilette, while, save an
old ring or two that had been her mother's, she was destitute of
ornament; and there the father and daughter sat long in silence,
while the blustering March wind soughed in the old wood without, and
the flood of red and wavering light from the capacious fireplace fell
upon their faces, and fitfully too upon the portraits of those
ancestors, who, if their exchequer had been as low as that of Oliver
Lennox, would have chosen just such a moonless night for a quiet ride
among the beeves on the southern side of the Border.

Oliver Lennox had once been a man of considerable influence in the
Merse, and had even contrived to shine, for a short season, in London
society.  But deep play, some unlucky bets at Newmarket, one or two
vexed law pleas with Sir John Wedderburn, in which he had been
nonsuited with great loss, domestic cares of many kinds, particularly
the deaths of his wife and several children, all combined to break
him down in health and spirit.

Much of his land had gone, piecemeal, to satisfy the creditors his
London career had raised around him, and now the little that remained
of Lonewoodlee was mortgaged to the utmost; and having but a bare
annuity, he knew too surely that when he died there would be neither
home nor shelter for his Mary.

He was a proud, fiery, and irritable man, who would brook neither the
pity of his friends nor the scorn of his enemies; and the knowledge
that his only child--his gentle and delicate daughter--would be left
to the mercy of the world, or to support herself by the
accomplishments she possessed, maddened him, so that there were times
when his mind wandered, and then it was that the soul of Mary Lennox
seemed to die within her with sorrow and terror!

"Shall I play to you, dear papa?" said she softly.

There was a wonderful chord in Mary's voice that made it very
seductive, but she had to repeat the offer three times before the
sense of it fell upon his drowsy ear.




CHAPTER V.

MARY LENNOX.

"Shall I play to you, dear papa?" she repeated for the third time.

"No, Mary, no," said he, peevishly.  "Your piano, child, is in that
shabby chintz-covered den you call a drawing-room."

"Oh, papa; what served poor mamma may very well do for me."

"And I fear we can't afford a fire there as well as here."

"But if I keep the doors open you could hear me.  The cold is not
great to-night," she urged.

"No--no, child, thank you; but I wish to think."

"To-morrow, papa, I shall have my poor old piano brought here, and
then I shall play to you some of the airs you love so well."

"Pet Mary--but music makes me sad."

"But it soothes you too, papa."

"Your voice, my darling, would soothe anything, even the rage of a
lion," said he, as he drew her head upon his knee and held it
caressing there between his tremulous hands; "but it sounds so like
your mother's, that--that--even while I love to listen my heart grows
sad and sick within me!  Music possesses such vast power, especially
over a shattered nervous system, and more than anything else can
conjure back the past, the lost, and the dead!  But," he added,
suddenly, with a louder tone and a strange gleam in his eye, "where
is your brother Harry; why is he not here to-night?"

Then a kind of wail escaped the lips of poor Mary, and the tears
started to her eyes, for she knew that his mind was wandering again.

"Oh, papa!" she moaned, and looked at him imploringly.

"Where is he?" demanded Mr. Lennox, impetuously, and his eyes flashed
in the red light of the fire; then he struck his hand upon his brow
as a gleam of memory came to his aid, and he said, in a choking
voice, "I forgot myself!  God help me--God help me!  True,
Mary--true; my boy is lying in his Indian grave, far, far away, where
the bones of the Briton and Sikh lie thick on the battle-field.  But
you must remember the night I saw him here--here, in this very room!"

"I was but a child of eight years when poor Harry died."

"Yes; and when I saw him."

"Oh, papa, that is a wild idea; as absurd as--as----"

"What, girl?"

"The shadowy hand."

"It is not so, and it was not so!  It is not impossible, Mary, when
death, more especially a violent one, strikes at a distance one who
is dear to us--dear as your brother Harry was to me--that some
intuition, some mysterious presentment announces the event.  How
often have I told you that as I sat here in the twilight of evening
in this chair, and on this very spot, reading the Gazette of the
killed and wounded on that disastrous Indian field, some secret
impulse made me glance towards the end of the room, and there I saw
the figure, the form, the face of your brother, regarding me
mournfully and tenderly for a moment, and then all faded away.  I was
terror-struck, but deemed it fancy!  Again I turned to the fatal
Gazette, and the next name that caught my eye among the killed--the
killed in action--was that of my own boy, Harry Lennox!"

"Hush, papa, oh hush!" said Mary, looking round anxiously; for it was
this story to which her father was fond of referring from time to
time, that had won the Tower, among the vulgar, the reputation of
being haunted, so that domestics were terrified to remain, though the
place was within a mile or two of the rail to Berwick.

After a long pause he drew a deep breath and spoke again.

"Did I not hear, or was it a dream--for I have strange dreams
sometimes--that Wedderburn's son buried him--buried my boy?" said he,
in a tremulous voice.

"Yes, papa;" said Mary, eagerly; "Cyril Wedderburn buried poor Harry,
and stood by his grave in that distant land.  He did more, papa: he
cut off a lock of his hair for--for you."

"I could bless him for that, but for his father's sake.  I hate that
elder Wedderburn.  I hate his flaunting wife," he continued, raising
his voice and his clenched hand.  "I hate the whole brood of them,
and shall never cease to curse----"

"Oh, dearest papa, do not--do not speak thus!" cried Mary,
imploringly, as she placed a hand upon his mouth, and saw with
growing terror the fire, as if of incipient insanity, flashing in his
eyes.

The paroxysm of rage into which he lashed himself when he thought of
his lost law suits, especially one in which Sir John Wedderburn
asserted and made good his right of pasturage upon a certain part of
the Lee, which the Lennox family had claimed as theirs alone for
several generations, weakened him so much that Mary was glad to give
him a soothing draught, and get him to his bedroom for the night.

After this he became more seriously ill, and there were more frequent
aberrations of intellect.  Sometimes he imagined himself in the
hunting-field, and then he would shout in a quavering and childish
treble--

"Tally ho! tally ho!  Hallo, my Lord Wemyss, what's up at the high
fence yonder?  By Jove, John Wedderburn's brown mare is at fault--her
off forefoot is caught in the wires--and over they go, nag and rider!
I hope the young scoundrel's neck is broke at least!"

And Mary wept as she heard the fierce wish, which referred to some
sporting adventure years ago, when her father and Sir John were much
younger men, but seemingly no better friends.

Next night she had her piano moved close to the drawing-room door, so
that she might play to him as he lay abed in his own room.  She had a
magnificent voice, and it had been highly cultivated.  She exerted
herself to the utmost to please, and played and sang him to sleep, as
one might do a fretful child.  Then when she was assured that his
slumber was sound, she kissed him softly, assumed her hat and veil,
her cloak and muff, and hastened from the Tower and its desolate
court, to where some one she well knew was awaiting her, at an angle
of the wood--but in this we are somewhat anticipating our story.

Two or three dreary days and nights followed his last outburst of
mental fury, and a certain revulsion of spirit and corresponding
bodily weakness followed it.  Then he became more calm and coherent,
after some opiates had been administered by his medical attendant,
the young parish doctor, whom the charm of Mary's presence rather
than her father's necessity, rendered a pretty regular visitor at
Lonewoodlee; but in the hours of her tearful watching, the querulous
old man unwittingly stuck many a barb in his daughter's heart.

"I feel weaker every day, Mary dear.  I won't be long a burden or a
trouble to you," he would say; "for something whispers to me that I
cannot last long now.  Old and weak--old and weak--half blind and
wellnigh toothless!"

"Papa," said she, imploringly, "do not talk thus!  You are not yet
sixty years of age."

"I know, darling; but the poor human machine is worn out for all
that.  Look at Wedderburn!  How hale and strong he is, for fortune
has ever favoured him and his family, child; while with me--with
me--oh, how is it with me?  Ah, truly says Ossian, that 'age is dark
and unlovely, and that the race of men are like the leaves of woody
Morven; they pass away in the rustling blast, and other leaves lift
their green heads on high.'  So--so shall I soon pass away, Mary; but
dearest, you are weary?"

"I am not, papa," sighed the girl.

"Your eyes are red and dim.  To bed, Mary--to bed.  Place the
sleeping draught at hand, then kiss me and leave me.  Good night."

Then she would slip away to her room, the door of which was always
left ajar, so that no sound might elude her ear in the night; and she
would pray and sigh herself to sleep.

A day came anon when her father was too weak to leave his bed, and
from thenceforward he became more than ever a confirmed invalid.

The sturdy but shambling old shooting pony, on whose broad back he
had been latterly able to take a little exercise by a trot to
Polwarth or Prestonhaugh, enjoyed a complete holiday; and time, as
marked by the old-fashioned repeater at Mr. Lennox's bed-head, passed
slowly indeed!

And as he lay there, day after day, and too often night after night,
wakeful, and filled with keen and anxious thoughts, he strove to
picture--to fashion out--the future of that lonely daughter whose
life was, he hoped, to extend far beyond his own.  He had plenty of
time for this profitless employment, for, save Captain Chesters or
perhaps the parish clergyman, no one ever dropped in to talk with or
enliven him now, for his ailments and complaints against friends and
fortune, his whims and fancies, rendered his society unpalatable to
all save poor Mary.

There was no rousing him to take an interest in anything; and news of
the coming war fell dull upon his ear.  In vain did Mary read to him
of our preparations for the Crimean war; that already the Russians
and Turks had come to blows, and the former been defeated at
Oltenitza, with the loss three thousand seven hundred killed and
wounded; that a Turkish squadron had been destroyed by the Russians,
and the town cruelly bombarded; and that the British fleet, under Sir
Charles Napier, had sailed for the Baltic from Spithead; that the
destruction of Cronstadt was confidently expected, and so forth.

Oliver Lennox deemed the worthy minister an utter bore, and viewed
his attempts to soothe or console him as simply impertinence, which
his proud and fiery spirit resented.

Of Chesters he felt doubtful, and knew enough of the world to fear
such a visitor and such a friend for his unprotected daughter.  He
knew his own debts and difficulties, his own poverty, and that the
annuity he possessed would die with himself, and then what would be
left for her--work--starvation--death!

It was horrible to lie there--helpless, fettered hand and foot as it
were, weak, powerless, and inert, weaving such dark, bitter, and
distracting fancies!  He writhed and wept on his pillow, and
muttering, "Mary--Mary! my daughter--my daughter!" would press his
thin, wan hands on his burning breast, as if to stifle thoughts that
would not be stifled.

"I have been rash, wasteful, and unfortunate," he would often say,
"but what have you done, my poor Mary, that you should be stripped of
your inheritance? for this Tower, built by Oliver Lennox, and all the
land around it, even to the Whitadder, form your inheritance; but it
must pass away to others--others--oh, my God! while such people as
those Wedderburns live on, surrounded by every earthly blessing!"

"Calm yourself, papa," said the hopeless girl, in a choking voice;
"all may yet be well.  Your health will revive with the warmth of
spring."

"The spring grass will be sprouting on the sod that wraps me, Mary;
and there I would lie in peace could I but see your future, child--if
God would only in His kindness lift the veil that hides it from me!
But, from the land of shadows, perhaps I may so see it--I may see it,
and be a guide and a watch over you."

Though Mary heard much of this querulous grief, she never became
accustomed to it; but seemed always to suffer the agony of his death
by anticipation when he spoke thus.

"Fear not, papa; fear not for me," she was wont to reply, while
caressing his head on her bosom.  "If I lose you, I must trust then
to God only."

"To God and yourself, darling; but there are times when I think with
fear that--that----"

"What, papa?"

"That Ralph Chesters seems to love you."

Mary trembled and grew pale as she said--

"Do not speak of this again, I implore you, dearest papa."

"I am glad you don't like him; but what brings him here so often?"

"To see you, of course, papa," said Mary, as her pale cheek reddened.

"An old man sick and ailing!  I don't believe it; but when was he
here last?"

"Three days ago."

"Did you see him?"

"No; when alone with him, his presence becomes intolerable to me."

"Why--how?" asked Lennox, eagerly, and half-raising himself in his
bed.

"There is an expression in his eye I do not like; moreover, I never
leave your room save when you are asleep."

"Thanks, my darling; that is kind and good; but beware of Chesters,
for he is a dog that bites but does not bark."

"Have no fear for me so far as he is concerned," said Mary,
emphatically.

"It is well.  Kiss me, child, and then I shall try to sleep."

The girl kissed him tenderly, restraining her tears as she did.  Then
with tremulous gentleness, her pretty, small hands adjusted the
pillow and coverlet, ere she glided noiselessly away.

Often had Mary pictured--for she was a sensitive creature and full of
imagination--how utter her helplessness and loneliness would be when
her father was gone; and, notwithstanding all the love which another
had succeeded in kindling in her heart, she longed and prayed that in
the hour her father was taken, she might be taken too!




CHAPTER VI.

TWO LOVERS.

"Been fishing to-day, Cyril?" asked Robert Wedderburn, with a
quizzical expression in his face, as his brother assumed his hat,
gloves, and whip in the hall prior to riding out.

"No," replied Cyril, curtly, and colouring with some reason, as he
had gone forth for four consecutive days with his rod, and returned
with his basket empty; the fishing was merely a pretext to be alone,
for he would have been clever indeed to have found trout or perch on
the upland slopes of the Lammermuir, where Horace and Robert had seen
him, while shooting hares and rabbits near Lonewoodlee.  "I dine with
Chesters to-day," he added.

"You go betimes?" said Robert, suspiciously.

"I want to give my new bay nag a breather--to have a few miles'
gallop ere I go to Chesterhaugh," replied Cyril, as he rode off.

It was one of those dull March evenings when the sun sets at six
o'clock, as Captain Wedderburn dashed on at a rapid pace towards
Lonewoodlee.  The more fertile part of the Merse was soon left
behind, and after a ride of three or four miles among heathy and
grassy slopes, striped here and there with bright green where the
track of the Lammas floods had run towards the Leader or the
Whitadder rivers, he saw the old grey Tower, whose four round
turrets, cope-house, and chimneys stood clearly defined against the
evening sky, overtopping even the ancient timber that grew around it.

Thatched cottages with whitewashed walls, and the ruddy firelight
glowing through their small square windows; hedgerows that were in
process of being lopped and trimmed; gardens where the fragrant earth
had been newly turned up, and where tufts of the white snowdrop and
rows of the yellow crocus or purple violets were appearing, had all
gradually vanished, and Cyril found himself amid a voiceless and
pastoral solitude, dotted only by black-faced sheep, or huge round
boulder-stones, and where here and there a sable gled or raven hung
aloft in mid air--a black speck amid the amber glory of the twilight
sky--as if on the outlook for the dead wedder or other carrion that
might be lying in some moss-hole or mountain burn.

"By Jove, this place is well named the Lonewoodlee, for it could not
well be lonelier!" thought Cyril, as he rode into the thicket of
trees.  There was no obstruction, for the enclosure or boundary, once
a dry stone dyke, had fallen down, and all the place was bare and
open.  He threw the bridle of his horse over a branch, and, as the
twilight deepened, he turned very deliberately towards the mansion on
foot, and as he did so, the rabbits and hares flitted before him from
among the deep rank grass.

In spite of the coldness--almost amounting to hostility--between
their families, Cyril Wedderburn and Mary Lennox loved each other
dearly.  He had met her from time to time at races and country balls,
occasionally in the houses of mutual friends.  These meetings had not
always been pleasant, for latterly they were at times the result of
contrivance, as Mr. Lennox, from the peculiarities of his temper,
would not have heard of this intimacy with patience.

On the other hand, Cyril was dependent on his father for his
allowance--no man can live on his pay in any regiment now, so least
of all was it possible in the Royal Fusileers;--and while her father
lived, Mary, under any circumstances, could not think of marriage,
and so some three years of a secret and undecided engagement between
these young people had slipped away at the period when this story
opens.

Cyril did not enter the desolate looking courtyard, lest he might be
seen by either of the two female domestics who now composed the
sorely reduced household of Oliver Lennox.  All was silent in the
empty stables and ruined coachhouse, and the entire place looked
gloomy in the extreme to the eyes of the young officer, accustomed to
his father's more spacious and magnificent mansion, with its great
oriels of plate-glass, and he sighed when he thought of Mary.

Suddenly, through an open window on the second story, there came the
swelling notes of a beautiful and tender soprano voice--a girl's--as
she sang the grand old Christmas hymn, accompanying herself upon a
piano, which, though a fine one, was nevertheless somewhat
old-fashioned and not exactly a grand trichord.

"Poor thing!  God bless her kind heart! she is singing to the old
man," said Cyril, while he listened intently, with his head reclined
against the wall, as if to absorb every sound.  "So my little fairy
sings in Latin!"

      "Adeste fideles,
      Læti triumphantes;
  Venite, venite in Bethlehem:
      Natum videte
      Regem angelorum:
      Venite adoremus,
      Venite adoremus,
  Venite adoremus Dominum."


It was a strange song for a young girl; but, in fancy, Cyril could
see the old man listening, and perhaps beating time with his fingers
on the coverlet or pillow of his bed, as he was soothed away to
sleep.  The notes pealed out on the calm evening air with a startling
effect, each one stirring a chord in the loving heart of the listener
without; for as his own soul--yea, and dearer than his own soul--did
he love the singer, who, after a pause, dashed into a plaintive
little Scottish song, and then, quite as suddenly, into the beautiful
solo, _Cujus animam_, from the "Stabat Mater" of Rossini.

At last she ceased.  He heard, or thought he heard, the piano closed
softly; and in a minute more, with her eyes beaming, her damask cheek
glowing with pleasure, as she threw up the veil of her smart little
hat, Mary Lennox glided round the corner of the Tower, with her cloak
on and her little hands in her muff.

"At last, my darling--at last we meet!" said Cyril, as he drew one of
her hands through his arm, and believing that no human eye saw or ear
heard them, led her into a denser and darker portion of the grove
that grew about her old paternal home.

"I have been singing to poor papa."

"So I thought, Mary; and he is now asleep?"

"Yes," replied Mary Lennox, with a bright smile; for her meetings
with Cyril, though stolen and hasty, were the only bright spots in
the usually dreary tenor of her life, and she looked up at her lover
admiringly and tenderly.  His rough suit of tweed, his grey round
felt hat, and scarlet shirt, very open at the neck, became his style
of manly beauty well, and showed that he belonged to the class of
society which can affect and afford so simple and careless a mode of
costume.

"There is no word of your leave being cancelled?"

"None, dearest."

"Thank God for that!" exclaimed the girl, as she clasped her hands.

"Four whole days have passed, my Mary, and yet I have not seen you!"
said Cyril, half reproachfully, while he drew her close to him,
gathering her fondly and gracefully to his breast.

"My poor papa has been so ill," she urged, as her eyes filled with
tears, and her head sank wearily, yet confidently, on his shoulder.

"I regret to hear it.  Poor old man!  I wonder if he will ever
receive me?"

"It would madden him, the very thought of doing so, Cecil."

"This sentiment is very foolish."

"He has neither forgotten nor forgiven that last unhappy dispute
about your claim of pasturage on the lower part of the Lee."

"Bother the Lee!  The basket of grapes and peaches I sent from the
hothouse----"

"They came; thanks, darling Cyril; but papa suspected some friend's
kindness--_pity_ he called it--and the fruit was thrown to the dog in
the yard."

"Folly again!"

"It is restless pride, Cecil; the pride that fights with poverty,"
pleaded Mary, with a sigh.

Cyril regarded her anxiously.  He could perceive that much of her
girlish simplicity was passing away; that there was a sadness in her
eyes, and about her whole demeanour a more womanly grace perhaps; but
she was growing paler and thinner in her battle with life--a life
that would have been utterly cold, hard, and cheerless, but for the
ray of light his love was shedding on it.

"Our households imagine us to be but cold and distant acquaintances,
if even so much as that.  Could they but peep in here and see us
_now_," said he, as he covered her little face with kisses; for Cyril
was merely supposed to lift his hat in the simplest courtesy to Mary,
if he passed her on the highway or at church, where she could go but
seldom now, in consequence of her father's ill-health, and as for
their carriage and horses, they had long become things of the past.

"Oh, it is a great horror to me, Cyril, to be separated as we are,"
she began.

"As we are supposed to be, you mean, Mary dear."

"And to meet as we do by stealth, practising such dissimulation."

"It is intensely absurd that I, a Captain in the Line, a fellow who
has been eight years in the service, should stoop to it."

"Unless for my sake, love?"

"True, Mary, true.  What would I not do for your sake, my sweet pet?"

"But it is degrading to us both, and where will it end?" she said,
plaintively.

"It shall end when we are married, darling.  Oh, Mary! nightly my
dreams are of you, and daily my thoughts.  You seem thus to be ever
near me, with me, and by me!"

"Oh, Cyril, it is very good of you to love me so."

"Who could help loving you?" was the enthusiastic response.

"Your mamma does not," said she, smiling; "and neither does Sir John;
so how much would they hate me did they really know all."

A gesture of impatience escaped Cyril.

"I must and shall end all this by declaring our engagement; and
should my allowance be cut off, which I can scarcely anticipate, I
can exchange into an Indian regiment, and maintain my wife as other
men do."

"But my poor papa?"

"True; and then, I am under orders now for the East!"

"We are very unfortunate," said Mary, while her tears fell fast.

"How unlucky that Mr. Lennox and Sir John have been at cross-purposes
so often, in courts of law, at public meetings, elections, and county
matters, actually about the very mode of hunting with the county
pack.  Never were two men more antagonistic; yet is it not strange
that--that----"

"We should love each other so tenderly.  Is that what you were about
to say, Cyril?"

"Yes, Mary darling."

"But what would they say if they knew of our meeting thus?"

"Why torment yourself by thinking of it?  Your father would storm
finely, I doubt not; mine be loftily indignant; and as for my lady
mother, it would be a case of hysterics and sal-volatile.  But I do
not see why their silly views should ruin our peace, Mary."

"Ah, did Sir John but know how weak and feeble my poor papa is now,
that his ebbing life is only a matter of time, he would surely come
over and forgive him all."

Cyril scarcely thought so, all the more when he remembered the rich
young cousin who was to arrive so shortly at Willowdean; but he
looked silently into Mary's eyes of violet-blue, they were brimming
with tears, and her face wore a sad and wistful expression.  Perhaps
she was marvelling how it would be with her when all was over--when
Cyril was before the enemy, and that parent, so beloved, had passed
away.

"Our engagement seems wrong without the consent of our parents," she
murmured, in a low voice; "and times there are, Cyril, when--when I
seek to school myself to the task of releasing you."

A dark and startled expression shot over the fine face of Captain
Wedderburn for a moment, for somehow he connected this innocent
speech with the idea of Chesters; but shrinking from putting his
thoughts in words, he merely said--

"Your father might well forgive me for loving you, Mary, if he would
remember how I carried off your brother's body in the face of the
enemy, after making a rally and charge with the bayonet at the head
of my own company, or rather the survivors of it, at a terrible risk
and under a fire of grape from the brass guns of the Sikhs.  He might
remember, too, how I laid the poor lad in his last home, a lonely
grave under a palm tree, near the banks of the Sutledge."

"Alas! he remembers nothing coherently; and there are periods when he
actually thinks that Harry yet lives, and in moaning terms he
entreats him to approach the bed and take his hand."

"And you have neither seen nor met any of my family during my last
absence with the regiment, Mary?"

"No; and it is better that I have not done so."

"Oh! why, Mary?"

"Fearing your return, I suppose, or that your brother Robert might
fall in love with me----"

"Why, Mary, Robert is a mere boy!"

"He is about nineteen; and boys of nineteen fall in love sometimes,"
said Mary, smiling.

"Well, darling, well?"

"Fearing the result of these contingencies, your mother has slighted
and put many an affront on me.  Pardon me for saying so, dearest
Cyril, but I cannot forget that my father, though poor, is Lennox of
Lonewoodlee."

Cyril Wedderburn struck his heel upon the ground angrily.

"My own Mary," said he, "this style of thing is utterly absurd; it is
like the romance of a family feud, Romeo and Juliet--Montague and
Capulet, reproduced by an irritable old gentleman and a match-making
woman who thinks no woman good enough for her eldest son.

"You don't know my papa," said Mary, plaintively, and yet resentfully.

"I do.  I know him to be rash, extravagant, fiery, and passionate;
but pardon me, dearest, I must not forget how dearly I love his
daughter."

"Cyril," said the girl, earnestly, "reared as you have happily been
amid the ease and affluence of your own family, you know not the
curse of being a poor gentleman."

"Don't I, by Jove! when bits of blue paper come back, protested or
unaccepted, and the Colonel and Paymaster look grave!"

"As I said before, I know not how all this will end.  I only know,
that irritated by losses, by poverty, and quarrels, how unforgiving
my poor papa has become; how implacable; and that without some
reconciliation with Sir John, I never could dare to speak of--of----"

"Of me?"

"Of that which is the only happiness of my life--our engagement; and
my heart bleeds and upbraids me for deceiving him, when lying thus on
what may prove his deathbed!"

Cyril did not reply, for his lips were pressed to those of Mary, and
her tears were mingled with their kisses.

"Situated as we are, Cyril, our engagement may be a long one; that I
don't mind, as I could never leave papa in his present state; but
then it may be a hopeless one for me--that is, papa and I are so
poor, so very poor!  You do not know the struggle we have with the
world, for all his land is gone, save the patch the old Tower stands
on."

"It _is_ a cruel and bitter world," said Cyril (though he, a
favourite of fortune, had not found it so), "and you, my tender Mary,
are a deuced deal too good for it."

"All are not bad or bitter though; there, even Chesters of
Chesterhaugh----"

"What of him?" asked Cyril, sharply.

"Finding me weeping one day about a bill of papa's that had become
due when we had not a shilling to meet it, he--he----"

"Took it up, I suppose?"

"Yes, Cyril; he lifted a load off my heart by doing so; but I dislike
being under an obligation to any one--to him least of all."

"And this bill, what was the amount?" asked Cyril, gloomily.

"A two hundred pounds bill, Cyril?"

"Why did you not write to me?"

"I did not like to do so," she replied, blushing.

"Had you not faith in me?" he asked, impetuously.

"Yes, love; but not in myself.  What sound is that?" she added,
starting from his arms.

"Only the hoofs of a horse on the highway," said he, and as they
listened the sound died rapidly away on the evening air.

They had been quite unaware, so absorbed were they in each other,
that in the twilight gloom and under the shadow of a great
larch-tree, a third person had been lurking and listening; one who,
when he saw their lips meet, had involuntarily raised his hand and
loaded hunting-whip, and with an unuttered malediction--all the
deeper for being voiceless, on his cruel white lips--had stolen away,
mounted his horse, which, like Cyril's, was concealed in the thicket,
and galloped off.

This lurker was no other than Ralph Rooke Chesters, who, intending to
visit Mary in passing homeward from the county town, had been
compelled to depart, with his heart full of jealousy and his head
scheming vengeance.

And now, after a few more tendernesses, Cyril bethought him of his
dinner engagement.

"I shall get that bill out of Chesters' hands, if I can," said he;
"one never can tell the use to which he may put such a document, and
now good-bye, my darling.  At noon to-morrow look for me here; and at
twelve to-night look at your ring and think of me, for at the same
moment of time I shall turn to mine and think of you."

They separated, and Mary lingered by the Tower-gate till the last
sound of the bay hunter's hoofs died away in the distance, and then
she stole on tiptoe back to the bedside of her sleeping father.  She
had been with Cyril barely an hour, and as if it had been five
minutes only, had that delightful hour sped away.

* * * * *

Punctually at twelve that night the girl looked at her ring and
murmured the name of her lover, while a beautiful smile spread over
her soft pale face, for she was full of romance and enthusiasm.

"The dear fellow; he is now thinking of me!" she whispered to
herself, as she laid her tiny watch on the table in the dressing
closet, one of the four little turrets, and proceeded to let down the
masses of her rich brown hair prior to arranging it for the night;
but ere the minute hand had gone many seconds beyond the hour of
twelve a distant sound came to her ear--a sound that rapidly grew
louder.

It was the clanking of hoofs, as a horse in mad career swept along
the hard beaten pathway near the Tower.  The heart of Mary beat
faster, she scarcely knew why; she threw open the little window of
the turret and looked out upon the starry but moonless night, and as
she did so the cry of a man in distress or terror came plainly upward
to her listening ear, and when dying away on the wind it sounded
strangely like the voice of Cyril Wedderburn.

But after a time she put aside that idea as too absurd!  Would he, a
finished horseman, ride like a madcap at that break-neck pace, and
utter a shout like a tipsy brawler on passing Lonewoodlee?

And yet, she knew not why, she felt unhappy about the circumstance;
and this anxiety increased when the following day passed, and the
subsequent evening; and yet she saw or heard nothing of Cyril
Wedderburn.




CHAPTER VII.

SUSPENSE AND DREAD.

At noon on the morrow, the time he had promised to come, she looked
for Cyril from the turret window of her room, which commanded an
extensive view of the road that wound through the grassy and pastoral
district.  From that turret window and along the same road had more
than one ancestress of Mary looked for her husband returning from the
Scottish wars, in the times of Cromwell, Montrose, and Dundee, and
looked in vain.

Through her lorgnette Mary studied every figure that approached on
foot or horseback; there were not many, perhaps three or four only,
during the entire day; but there was no appearance of Cyril
Wedderburn, either mounted on his favourite bay hunter or afoot with
rod and gun.

So for that day the thicket was unvisited; no fond whispers were
uttered under the old larch-tree, and when midnight came she looked
at her ring as on the preceding night in the vague hope that he might
be doing the same, and thinking of her, wherever he might be.

Three days--to Mary, long, anxious, and dreary days--passed away.
Knowing that his leave of absence from the Fusileers was so short,
she grudged every hour he spent with others, when he passed so few
with her, and now a new source of terror occurred.  Had the war
broken out suddenly, and Cyril's leave been cancelled?  But surely he
would have written, and however sudden his departure, should have
made an effort to see and to bid her farewell.

Was he ill?  That was not improbable, as for three days now the
parochial Sangrado, Doctor Squills, had not been near Lonewoodlee;
but then she knew that such rich folks as those at Willowdean would
depend more on the greater medical talent, for which they could
telegraph at any moment to the metropolis.

She was in an agony of suspense; their residence was not a cheerful
place, so visitors were few and far between, and she could learn no
tidings of the only other being whom, beside her father, she loved on
earth.

On the fourth day, one of her domestics, Alison Home, an elderly
woman, who had noticed her feverish anxiety without suspecting its
cause, announced that a person on horseback was approaching the
house--coming indeed at a gallop over the Lee.  Then Mary rushed to
her window, only to be disappointed, as she recognised at once, not
Cyril Wedderburn on his long-stepping hunter, but the rather awkward
figure of Doctor Squills, on his barrel-shaped Galloway cob.

The Doctor was a suave, well-meaning, fair, florid, and passably
good-looking man, about thirty-five or forty years of age, anxious to
please all, and to spread the practice in a district where the people
were so healthy, that, save for his parochial salary, and one or two
retired Bengalees with large livers and purses, he must have starved,
his patrons being as few as his patients.  Mr. Lennox was certainly a
permanent, but far from a lucrative one; yet the Doctor was kind and
attentive, all the more so that he had naturally a secret desire to
stand well in Mary's estimation, and whenever he visited Lonewoodlee,
he almost unconsciously made a more careful toilette than usual.

She received him with a genuine smile of welcome in the gloomy little
dining-room, with its deeply embayed windows, its dingy old family
portraits, the two great horsehair sofas and veteran chairs and
tables, of the shabbiness of which, by long use and wont, she had
ceased to be ashamed, though the pretentious coat-armorial of the
Lennoxes was carved in stone above the fireplace, at the richly
moulded jambs of which there still hung on each side those steel
chains by which the fireirons were secured in the good old Scottish
times, when guests would quarrel over their cups, and if their swords
were left in the hall, were wont to enforce their arguments with the
poker and shovel, if not thus secured to the wall.

"By that bright smile I augur well of my patient, Miss Lennox?" said
Doctor Squills, taking Mary's hand between his own, patting it the
while, and seeming very much disposed to retain it as he seated
himself, for it was a lovely little hand indeed.

"Thanks, Doctor Squills--papa has been singularly easy and free from
pain for three days past," replied Mary, making an effort to retain
her impatience for some news of the outer world.

"That is good--very good.  The composing draught taken as usual, I
suppose?"

"All according to your orders.  I am a good little nurse, I hope,"
said Mary, with a smile and a sigh.

There was a pause, and then the Doctor said,

"You have heard the great news, of course, Miss Lennox? but we'll
talk of it after I have seen your papa.  Is he awake just now?"

"Yes," said Mary, in a breathless voice, for the idea of "news"
terrified her, and she seemed as one frozen, while the Doctor, after
leisurely depositing his hat and gloves on the table, where with
trembling hands she was placing a decanter of wine, and cake of her
own making, from an antique buffet--with his bland smile of
professional sympathy and jaunty step, took the way which he knew so
well, to the bedchamber of Mr. Lennox.

What "news" had the Doctor? was it of war and peril, of hasty
departure, of sickness or sorrow, of joy and triumph, or what?  The
Doctor knew nothing of her interest in Cyril; so, could he be
referred to?

Poor girl! she was not left long in suspense, for the Doctor soon
came sidling in with the same jaunty air, saying--

"Pulse regular, head cool, breathing good.  Complaining of appetite
too; capital!  Give him any reasonable thing he may wish.  Strength
must be kept up at his years, you know, Miss Lennox--at his years
especially."

"And you think papa better to-day?"

"Indubitably so--beyond my expectations."

"Thank God for that!" said Mary, fervently.

It was only a brief rally before the great catastrophe; but the
good-hearted Doctor had not yet the courage to tell her so.

"You spoke of news, Doctor?" said she.

"Ah--sad--sad--very sad, indeed!  Those poor folks are greatly to be
pitied."

"Who--where?"

"The family at Willowdean."

"Pitied for what?" exclaimed Mary, starting as she grasped with a
white and trembling hand the arm of the sofa on which she sat.

"The awful loss which they have too evidently sustained," said the
Doctor, pouring out a glass of poor Mary's indifferent sherry, as he
remembered that he had a ten miles ride over the hills before him.

"What loss?  What has happened?  Oh, tell me, tell me, Doctor, for
the love of Heaven!"

"Is it possible that you have not heard what, now, all in the county
know?"

"No--no--no; I have heard nothing," said Mary, wringing her hands
piteously, while her dilated eyes, her blanched visage, and quivering
lip betrayed a depth of emotion for which the Doctor, who knew of the
coolness between the families, totally failed to account.  "What do
you mean?" she added.

"The disappearance--the death, no doubt--of young Captain Wedderburn,
Sir John's heir apparent, the heir to so fine a property, and a title
among the oldest of our Nova Scotian baronets--and with a rich wife
in prospect too--one we hear worth half a million of money.  It is a
great and unparalleled calamity, and his family are plunged, as you
may well suppose, in the profoundest affliction--the affliction of
the wealthy and noble is always profound, it would seem, to judge
from editorial sympathy--and to be in depth far beyond anything that
the middle class or poor folks can have any idea of," added the
Doctor, with a sigh, which was perhaps induced more by cynical
repining than pure sympathy, as he drank his sherry, and then turned
to Mary, and saw, with some amazement and alarm, her crushed and
wobegone aspect.

"Disappearance--death?" she thought.  "Oh, what does this mean?  Do I
hear aright?  Am I mad, asleep, or dreaming?"

"I see, my dear Miss Lennox, that your tender susceptibilities are
greatly shocked; but I can only tell you what I heard, and what the
local papers of this morning contain; but first, take a glass of
wine, and then listen to me.  Take it, pray--nay, you must," and the
kind Doctor forced her to swallow that which nearly choked her, and
then resumed in his chirruping, gossipy manner, "the terrible
catastrophe, happened thus--on Wednesday last--let me see, was it
Wednesday or Thursday?"

"Wednesday, I suppose.  Go on, in the name of mercy!" said Mary, in a
voice all unlike her own; the rich chord was gone, and a cracked
unearthly sound now remained.

"Yes, my dear Miss Lennox, it was on Wednesday, for the _Berwick
Warder_ has it so--Captain Wedderburn dined with that gay man of the
world (rather too gay he is), Captain Chesters, at the Haugh, but did
not return home.  His non-appearance at breakfast next
morning--though Mr. Asloane rang the great house-bell thrice--created
no alarm among the family, as it was supposed he had remained
overnight with his new sporting friend, and would probably turn up
about luncheon time; though as Chesters was only a recent
acquaintance, it excited a little surprise at Willowdean that Captain
Wedderburn would tax his hospitality.  _That_ I learned from Mr.
Asloane himself, as I had to ride over to see one of the
laundry-maids who had a whitlow, which I treated successfully by----"

"Oh, go on--go on, I implore you!"

"It was on her right thumb--well, you are impatient, I see.  After a
time, a whisper came of his having left Chesterhaugh before midnight
on Wednesday.  This was alarming.  If so, where had he been for these
twelve hours past?  The butler came to Lady Wedderburn at the usual
hour about orders for the carriage, or horses for riding; they were
both postponed, and the luncheon was delayed.  Master Robert, his
cousin, Lieutenant Ramornie, old Asloane, all the gamekeepers,
gardeners, and grooms; even Sir John, and the Master of Ernescleugh,
with all his people, proceeded to beat the woods, shrubberies, the
park, and all the roads, but did so in vain.  No traces of the
Captain were discovered until yesterday, when a hat--a grey felt
wide-awake, known to be his--was found at Buncle-edge, and his
silver-mounted whip at Falaknowe, about a mile further eastward.
There were no traces of blood, however.  Pardon me, for I seem to
shock you: but last night the darkest tidings of all came from Lady
Juliana Ernescleugh.  A horse known to be his, a fine bay hunter with
black fetlocks, which he had purchased from her son the Master, was
found by some of the Dunbar fishermen sorely bruised, battered, and
drowned, with saddle-girths reversed, beside the rocky cleugh or
beach, somewhere near Fast Castle.  So what has happened, how he has
perished or by what means, and as to where his body may be lying,
whether on the land or in the sea, we are as yet helplessly and
hopelessly in the dark.  It is a terrible and melancholy catastrophe,
and affects you deeply, I see, my dear young lady.  I know not
whether you ever saw Captain Wedderburn, but he was one of the finest
young men in the Merse."

As the Doctor concluded this harrowing story, calmly and quietly, but
unwittingly dealing death-stabs in her heart, poor Mary Lennox sank
quietly back with eyes closed into a recess of the sofa; she was icy
cold, and but for his presence and the means he took to recover her,
by forcing her to take more wine, she must have fainted.

A stupor or torpor seemed to come over her.  She became stunned,
blind, and almost deprived of the power of volition.  She knew not
what to think or believe, or what to do.  Aware of the stern
necessity for keeping up appearances and for preventing the secrets
of her heart from becoming patent to a stranger, she made a vehement
essay to start up and question the Doctor again, only to find that he
had been gone for nearly an hour and she had known it not.  Neither
she knew or cared what instructions regarding herself he had left
with her two startled and dismayed domestics.

She only knew and could only realize that her lover, her affianced
husband, the secret husband of her heart, had perished by some
miserable death, whether the result of foul play or some terrible
accident she might never know; and now she recalled with grief and
terror how she had heard a horse galloping madly past, when she
looked at her watch on that fatal Wednesday at midnight; and the wild
cry, the prompting, as it seemed, of fear or of despair, that came
upward to her ear; and how she had associated that cry with the voice
of Cyril Wedderburn!

And his horse had been found at Ernescleugh, near Fast Castle (the
Wolf's Craig of Scott's romance), and she knew how frightfully steep
the rocks are there!

Her kind, her handsome, and her loving Cyril!  Never again would his
strong arm caress her slender waist, or his love-lit eyes gaze
tenderly into hers; and now all his soft and loving ways came vividly
before her, mingled with a dreadful sense of calamity and loss, till
the very tears--tears which she longed to mingle with those of his
haughty mother--almost choked her as she lay on her bed, prostrate on
her face.

On Wednesday she had seen him last, and this was Sunday forenoon: she
could hear the bells for service ringing in the village church about
a mile distant to remind her of the fact, and that four days--four
days in this age of steam and telegraphy had elapsed without trace or
tidings of her lost one!

Then she became suddenly aware that her father was ringing his
hand-bell furiously, and was querulously, even peevishly, demanding
her presence for something.

Her tears, and the cause of them, she was alike compelled to conceal;
so, after bathing her eyes hurriedly, she tottered away to attend him
as usual.




CHAPTER VIII.

MARY'S MISTAKE.

She regretted that she had permitted her emotions to overpower her so
much in the presence of the Doctor, and that hence he had been
allowed to depart without further questioning when she had so many
inquiries to make.  From Alison Home and her other domestic she could
gather nothing, save that on the same Wednesday, at midnight, they
had both heard the swiftly-ridden horse pass along the roadway, and
also the strange cry of the rider.

Could it be possible, she was ever asking of herself, that they would
meet no more?  Never more in the thicket, never more at the stile in
the lane at the end of the Lee? that she should never again be
gathered to his breast so kindly and so tenderly?

Cyril's love had made her very happy; so much so that it often
inspired her with gratitude to God for blessing her so, and no shadow
had ever rested upon it, save the secrecy they were compelled to
practise, as they hoped, for a time only, and being both proudly
spirited, they had felt that necessity a degradation and source of
irritation.  Now all that and the love itself had passed away, and a
cloud of thought and gloom black as midnight, seemed to envelop the
pale girl as she sat alone in the little chamber, gazing listlessly
at the sunlit scenery, and with no sound in her ears save the beating
of her heart.

Oh, had her brother Harry been spared to her, thought she, Cyril's
friend and comrade in India, how differently might she have been
situated!  How she longed to rush to Willowdean and prosecute
inquiries there, but dared not even give expression to the thought!

Only lately she had been anticipating in dread the withdrawal or
expiry of his short leave of absence, and his departure to Turkey
with the proposed Allied Army.  Now she felt that to see him going
forth even to face the perils and chances of the threatened Russian
war would be a welcome exchange for the present doubt and horror she
endured.

All that day no food passed her lips, and as evening drew on the
dread of enduring another night without some further intelligence
proved too much for her grief and impatience; so the craving to go
forth and inquire personally--she could not trust to the discretion
of her servants, and shrunk instinctively from their morbid
surmises--became so strong, that on finding her father sleeping
calmly and peacefully after the slight repast he deemed a dinner, she
dressed herself in haste to go out--but for where and to whom were
her next thoughts?

The nearest house was Chesterhaugh; it was little more than four
miles distant, and though she shrunk from the idea of seeing or being
seen by Captain Chesters, she resolved, come what might, to question
his gatekeeper, as if casually, about the last he had seen of Cyril
Wedderburn; for as the coldness between the two families was pretty
well known in that secluded district, she felt assured that the man
would imagine her to be prompted by the merest curiosity.

As she set forth on foot, she sighed when passing the empty
coachhouse and the stables where the hoofs of horses and the rattle
of their stall collars were heard no more.  She was young, active,
and would walk the distance in an hour; yet not to repine a little
when she thought of all that should and might have been, was perhaps
impossible.

She did not anticipate that the gatekeeper could add much to the
alarming details already furnished by the Doctor, yet she longed to
see him as one who, however humble, had been the last who looked on
Cyril's winning face and heard his cheerful voice; moreover, the
utter solitude of her home had proved on this day intolerable.  She
dared not speak of the occurrence to her father, for he would be the
last perhaps to express genuine sympathy; so the desire to move
abroad, to speak to some one, to be doing anything but sitting still
and brooding, became an irresistible impulse.

Full of her own thoughts as she walked on, she did not perceive how
stormy clouds had enveloped the afternoon sun; that the dull grey
mist was rolling swiftly along the grassy glens and upward to the
slopes of the Lammermuirs, and with how melancholy a sound the wind
shook in gusts the leafless trees of the old wood near the Tower,
while on the hill sides the shepherds were driving fast their flocks
to the thatched _bughts_, or sheepfold in sheltered places.  Neither
was she aware that her chief domestic, old Alison Home, looked after
her with mingled admiration and compassion, as if reading something
of her secret, when she passed out upon the highway; for Mary Lennox,
though charming at times, was looking unusually handsome, graceful,
and compact in her smart velvet hat and plume--the wing of a golden
pheasant shot for her by Cyril--her cuffs and muff of grey Iceland
duck, her jacket of sealskin (imitation, we are sorry to say), her
veil drawn tightly over her pretty face and ears, and her skirts
looped up, less to show the scarlet petticoat, taper ankles, and
balmorals, than for activity, as she set forth.

Which of all those hoof-marks she could trace upon the road were
those of Cyril's fatal horse?  How often had she walked along that
road to church and to the nearest market town since they had lost
their carriage, but never with a heart so heavy, and with such a
sensation of being benumbed and stupefied with grief.

"Sorrow, misery, and horror!" she muttered from time to time.  "Oh
what a life is before me now!  Cyril, Cyril!" and at the sound of his
name, even on her own lips, the tears rolled forth beneath the
closely drawn veil, and the little hands were wrung convulsively
within her muff.

Every moment she thought that she must see him coming to meet her; it
seemed impossible that he could be thus blotted out of existence!
All appeared chaos and confusion to Mary as she walked on; the order
of events and the course of time seemed to be alike inverted.

It appeared as if years had elapsed since she had last seen
Cyril--last stood in his close embrace in yonder thicket, and heard
his loving voice, while the events of years ago seemed to have
happened yesterday; even his arrival from India, when she was much
younger, with her dead brother's sword and watch, his rings and lock
of hair, and the happy subsequent time when his and her secret
intimacy began.  How much had passed since then; they were lovers,
and engaged, so solemnly too--and now--the mass of unuttered thoughts
seemed to rend her heart!

Circumstances had given her few friends, and now she sorely felt the
want of one.

School companions, girls from town and elsewhere, with gay and happy
home circles, had occasionally broken the monotony of her life by
becoming her guests; but she grew painfully conscious that owing to
the dreary seclusion of the old Tower, where few sounds met the ear
save the bleating of sheep or the whistle of the curlew, and also
from her father's querulous eccentricity, they curtailed their
visits, and seldom or never came again.  Then, as he ailed so
frequently and aged so fast, she could not accept invitations in
return, even those given by neighbours so near as Lady Ernescleugh
and others, who were disposed to be kind to the lonely little
Chatelaine of Lonewoodlee.

Ere long she reached the handsome iron gate and grotesque little
lodge of Chesterhaugh, beyond which she could see the sweep of the
gravelled approach that led to the house.  The park was perfectly
bare and open now, as the thriftless Captain had long since converted
into cash every tree on the estate; and the park itself, once his
father's pride, was now let to a grazier of cattle.

Mary was flushed and breathless as she approached the gate.  She had
walked very quick that she might the sooner return, and she had not
been insensible to the fast increasing coldness of the temperature,
the howling of the March wind, and the gathering of dark masses of
cloud in the east, hastening, or anticipating by nearly an hour, the
shades of evening.

She was in the act of questioning old Tony Heron, the lodgekeeper,
who approached her respectfully with a hand at his hat, "if the
tidings were true that Captain Wedderburn"--how her voice faltered as
her quivering lips pronounced the name--"had really suffered by some
accident after leaving Chesterhaugh," when the sound of hoofs struck
her ear, and before the man could fully reply, Captain Chesters--in
nearly the same costume in which he had breakfasted at
Willowdean--dashed up, accompanied by his favourite and only groom,
Billy Trayner, to whom he at once threw the reins of his horse on
dismounting.

"Good morning, Miss Lennox," said he, lifting his hat with profound
courtesy.

"It is evening, rather," said Mary, covered with confusion and
annoyance by this unexpected _rencontre_, "and I must not delay, lest
poor papa----"

"Ah! to be sure; but the old gentleman was all right, fast asleep,
Alison told me, as I stopped for a moment at the Tower to inquire for
you in passing.  But to what good fairy is the humble house of
Chesterhaugh indebted for the honour of a visit from you, Miss
Lennox, and alone too?" he added, as he led her very deliberately
inside the gate, which the keeper shut; "and you have no demon of a
duenna or chaperon.  It beats cock-fighting, 'bangs Banagher,' as
O'Grady of ours used to say."

"You make me feel more and more the extreme awkwardness of my
situation by this banter, Captain Chesters," said Mary; "but--but----"

"Out with it.  You came to ask about young Wedderburn!" exclaimed
Chesters, bluntly.

"Yes, sir," said the lodgekeeper, officiously; "she was just asking
me when you rode up, and I was about to tell her----"

"That according to our old Scottish proverb, 'a fu' man and a fasting
horse go quickly home'--but, by Jove!  Cyril Wedderburn went rather
further than he quite reckoned on."

"I ask pardon, sir, but I think you are wrong," said the man,
touching his hat; "the Captain was not the worse of wine, though his
horse seemed mad."

"How the devil should you know anything about it?  Silence, Tony!"

"I let him out, and shut the gate."

"Then shut your mouth now, or speak only when you are spoken to,"
said the Captain, furiously, on which the man slunk into his lodge,
abashed.

"Poor Cyril Wedderburn!" said Mary, biting her nether lip to control
her emotion.

"He left Chesterhaugh quietly enough, but his horse was disposed to
be restive, straining hard on the curb, and so forth, and would seem
to have run away with him.  It is a very mysterious and melancholy
affair," added Chesters, drawing off one of his riding gloves; "but
if you will permit me to lead you into the house I shall then tell
you all about it, at least, all that I can pretend to know."

"Thanks, no, excuse me," replied Mary, hurriedly, as she was nearly
swept away by a sudden gust of wind, while hail and snow came on
suddenly with great force and density "Good Heavens!" she exclaimed,
"it is quite a storm.  I must take shelter here a few minutes, if you
will permit me."

"In my gate-lodge?  Impossible!  Absurd!  Come with me into the
house, and if the blast does not lull in a few minutes, I shall have
the pleasure of driving you over to Lonewoodlee."

Mary looked rather despairingly through the bars of the handsome iron
gate, and saw the bleak wide moorland waste she had traversed
whitening fast, and that the road was becoming more and more obscure,
as the snow covered and the darkness overshadowed it; and while her
tears and her repugnance to accept the invitation increased, she
said--

"Thank you, Captain Chesters; you are very kind.  I was most rash to
come; but I could scarcely walk back now, and alone too."

"To walk alone; the thing is not to be thought of.  And do not talk
of thanks, you owe me none.  Do permit me."  And taking her hand with
all the suavity he could assume--for Chesters was harassed in aspect,
having been questioned and cross-questioned by the Procurator Fiscal
and the constabulary till he was sickened by the name of Cyril
Wedderburn--he conducted Mary into the house of Chesterhaugh, where
she had not been for several years, since she was a little girl and
led by her father's hand.

Through the marble-floored and oak-panelled entrance-hall, which was
hung with spoils of the field and chase--trophies of arms brought by
Chesters from India, tiger skins, skulls and horns, with a multitude
of whips and spurs, cloaks and riding-boots; thence through a long
corridor, that in his father's time had been furnished by magnificent
cabinets of buhl and marqueterie, and hung with fine old paintings,
all of which had gone, like the trees of the park--he led her into a
handsome and well-appointed dining-room.

Though the assurance given by Chesters that he had left her father
asleep but a short time before was not strictly true, it tended to
soothe Mary's mind a little till the shower of hail that crashed on
the windows of the room disturbed her, all the more that the
closely-drawn curtains, and the twelve waxlights in the chandelier of
Florentine bronze, suggested ideas of nightfall, though the hour was
barely six o'clock.

Chesters courteously drew a chair for her near the fire, and led her
to it.

"Permit me to relieve you of your muff and hat.  Wont you even lift
your veil?" he entreated, as he leant, half caressingly, over her
chair; but Mary was determined to remain in all her walking gear, to
be ready for departure, and said--

"Captain Chesters, do kindly order Trayner to drive me home without
delay."

"Why such haste?"

"I perceive that you are just going to dine."

"And will you not share my poor bachelor fare, and by your presence
shed a light over my lonely board for an hour or so, and then I shall
drive you home in person?"

But Mary was resolute.  No food had passed her lips; but she had
dined, she said, long ago, by her papa's bedside.  Go she must, and
at once, she added, and was only pleased that her tears and her
blushes of irritation were hidden by her tightly drawn veil, as with
a very peculiar expression in his face, Captain Chesters languidly
rang the bell for Trayner.

Unlike her gloomy paternal residence, and unlike the more elegant and
modern mansion of Willowdean, the house of Chesterhaugh had been
built in the reign of George II., when art was at its lowest ebb in
Scotland, and taste was studied less than solid comfort.  It was a
great square block, three stories in height, with all its chimneys
clustered in the centre; the roof sloped down from them in the
pavilion form, and the outside walls were roughcast with gravel and
lime; and poor Mary thought sadly of her own older-fashioned and more
sordid home, and of the few comforts that surrounded the declining
days of her father, as she surveyed and contrasted with a rapid
glance all the details of the spacious and lofty dining-room of
Chesterhaugh--the walnut-wood furniture so elaborately carved, the
chairs of green morocco, the crimson damask window-curtains with
their gilded cornices, the many pictures in which horses seemed to
predominate in place of men; the brilliant plate console mirrors, in
which all these objects were reproduced in two endless perspectives;
the elegant ironstone dinner-service of pink and gold, laid for
Chesters; the massive plate; the claret airing near the fire--and she
marvelled how all this luxury was supported, when remembering that
the Captain had the reputation of being a spendthrift, a bankrupt,
and worse.

She little knew that Cyril Wedderburn, when last he had been in that
room, had sat in the very chair she now occupied; but Chesters
remembered the circumstance, and a disdainful smile crossed his face
as he did so.

Again and again he pressed her to take wine; but Mary steadily
declined; and at last, after being rung for thrice, Mr. Bill Trayner
appeared--a very good specimen of a smart but unscrupulous groom,
small in stature, with a long body and short bandy legs, a mean and
narrow forehead, sleek black hair, shorn short, with a circular lock
or curl plastered on each prominent cheek-bone, and with sharp,
cunning eyes.

Bill was a Scotchman of Newmarket growth, and to all the worst points
of the national character, added the roguery that may be so easily
gained in the atmosphere of the betting-house, the stable-yard, and
training-ground.  He kept a betting-book as well as his master, whom
he was always ready to second in mischief, and to betray, if it
suited his private interests to do so.

A perfect oracle on all matters pertaining to the turf, he knew by
heart or rote all the entries and engagements made at the various
race meetings throughout the country; and knew shrewdly which horses
were the best to back and which were likely to be scratched.

"How about the waggonette, Trayner?" said Chesters.  "You know I have
no other carriage, Miss Lennox," he added, parenthetically, to Mary.

"The waggonette, sir," repeated Trayner, trying to fathom the meaning
of a peculiar glance his master gave him.

"Yes, the waggonette with the patent springs," resumed Chesters, with
a remarkably knowing wink.

"The springs is broke, sir," replied Trayner, with a similar mode of
telegraph, when he glanced at Miss Lennox, and took in the whole
situation.

"Broken--the devil they are!"

"All to smash, sir."

"Then the waggonette won't be in working order for----"

"Not for ever so long, sir."

"Then I must walk, and at once!" said Mary, rising from her chair.
"I have not a moment to lose."

"Walk?  Listen to the rising blast and the crash of the hailstones,"
urged Chesters.

"Ah, there's more there than hailstones, Miss," said Trayner.  "It is
a regular feeding storm.  The snow is some inches deep already."

"Oh, my poor papa!" exclaimed Mary.  "If he is awake and calling for
me!  Surely the lodgekeeper will accompany me?"

"The two old women at Lonewoodlee will surely suffice as attendants
for a couple of hours."

"Hours!  Impossible, Captain Chesters!"

"That will do, Trayner.  You may go," said Chesters, and his _fidus
Achates_ vanished with a leer, which he conveyed to the servants in
the hall below, together with the information that "the master had
been and gone and done it again.  Here's a lark!  He's got that girl
of old Lennox's, and means to keep her in Chesterhaugh all night if
he can--only she seems spirited, and likely to kick over the traces."

Mary had seen something of the man's expression of face as he
retired, and she felt that in her anxiety and grief for Cyril
Wedderburn she had made a mistake it was too late to remedy now; but
it was destined to have a fatal effect upon her interests and
happiness at a future time.




CHAPTER IX.

A SNARE.

She rushed to the window and drew back the heavy damask curtains.
Snow--snow and hail on the bitter blustering wind of March had
whitened all the moorland waste, and was deepening fast there.

She permitted the curtain to drop from her tremulous hand, and
returned in a kind of despair to her seat; for although the distance
between her and home was short, the night was too wild for her to
venture forth alone.

"It will serve no purpose your taking this little delay so much to
heart," said Chesters.  "You must have patience.  Pray compose
yourself, and do lay aside your wraps."

"Excuse me, I cannot," replied Mary, in a choking voice.

"And so you came to ask about young Wedderburn?"

"Yes," faltered Mary; "but only of the gatekeeper as I was passing."

"That young muff, the Master of Ernescleugh, is making himself
excessively busy in the affair."

"But they are--alas! must we say were--neighbours--friends," urged
Mary, with surprise at his tone.

"That is no reason why he should have come to me thrice with the
people of the Procurator Fiscal in the prosecution of inquiries.  He
should join his regiment in London, or his papa, my Lord Ernescleugh,
at his government in the Ionian Isles, and leave Cyril Wedderburn and
his fate to the family and the local authorities; but he'll linger on
here no doubt, and enter stakes for the heiress."

"What heiress?"

"Haven't you heard about her?" asked Chesters, with a languid but
malevolent smile.

"No."

"Sir John Wedderburn's brother William has died lately at Madras, and
left his whole fortune, some three hundred thousand pounds at least,
with a palace in the Choultry, to his only daughter--a girl, who is
coming to Willowdean as her new home.  She is a great beauty, they
say; and Mamma Wedderburn," he added, a little spitefully, "had an
eye on her as a wife for Cyril."

"I know nothing of it," sighed Mary.

"Ah, but I do.  I was at breakfast with the family on the morning the
news came, and I read the whole intention in Lady Wedderburn's face
and manner; but now, as Cyril has gone, that legal prig Bob will very
likely have a chance of making her a prize."

Mary only answered these surmises so slangily expressed by her silent
tears; but while he spoke she remembered, as one in a dream--for she
had not slept since she heard them--the words of the Doctor about a
rich bride in prospect for her lost Cyril.

But the rumour excited neither jealousy nor fear.  Oh, what did it
matter now!

She looked so exquisitely lady-like as she sat with her little hands
folded in her tiny muff which rested on her knees, and her veiled
face upturned to Chesters, that he--no bad judge of breeding in women
or horses--thought what a creditable-looking wife she would make for
him or any man; but she was poor, and he was up to the ears in debt;
thus neither her poverty nor her beauty excited his pity, though they
gave quick suggestion to his worst passions.  He loved Mary in a
fashion of his own: but he knew that the wife for him must have
money, and poor Mary had none.

Full of grief as he saw she was for the terrible and mysterious
disappearance of Cyril Wedderburn, Captain Rooke Chesters was far too
judicious, or far too cunning, to press any suit of his own just
then.  He could wait his opportunity; but he thought that if by
luring or detaining her under any pretence in his own house for a few
hours, he could compromise, or place her in a false position, it
would achieve all he wanted at the time.

All that day, we have said, she had not taken food, yet he pressed
her in vain to join him at dinner.  She felt weak, ill, and giddy.
The room seemed to become larger and larger still; its further end
appeared to recede as if to a vast distance; all around her became
like a species of phantasmagoria, and only by a violent effort of her
own will did she resist the faintness that was stealing over her.

She was in an agony of mind as the hours of the stormy night wore on.

She pictured to herself her ailing and querulous father asking for
her, in an alarm that might prove detrimental to his shaken
system--missing the poor wan girl, who, in her faded dressing-gown,
was at all hours of the weary night ever at hand to give him the
medicines or soothing draughts prescribed for him by Doctor Squills;
ever ready to arrange the pillows; to caress him and bathe his hot
and tremulous hands or aching head with cold water, with Rimmel or
other aromatic vinegar; and she was here--_here_ at Chesterhaugh,
imprisoned by the darkness, the hail, and the snow!

Chesters had his own dark purpose to achieve, and as he forsook
champagne for claret, and idled over his walnuts, he viewed her
impatience and her mental agony with perfect composure, though
treating her with well-bred sympathy the while.

But, as the night wore on, Mary felt more and more the awkwardness,
the ultimate doubt and danger of her position, in being thus alone,
without a lady friend or chaperon, in the house of a bachelor; and
more than all, one who bore such a local reputation as Ralph Rooke
Chesters!  She was conscious that the very servant--he of the
inevitable calves and plush--who removed the dinner and brought in
maraschino and coffee, inspired by some of Mr. Bill Trayner's knowing
remarks and cruel inferences in the servants' hall below, regarded
her with curious eyes.

It has been said that "even bad men have some good traits in them,
and that selfish men are capable of _feeling_."

Perhaps it may be so; but Chesters was incapable of sensibility or
caring for any one but himself, and was destitute of a single good
trait or generous emotion; so even while watching Mary's
restlessness, agitation, and her evident dread of the detention she
was undergoing, he muttered, inwardly--

"Pshaw! women can't help loving those who love them; so I'll make a
bold attempt to cozen, if I cannot crush or win her!"

It was perhaps a little dangerous for Mary that, though she often
expressed and displayed a great aversion of Chesters, there were
_times_ when she did not altogether feel it; for few women can _hate_
a man who professes to love and consequently admire them: yet, seeing
the full sense of her false position, she began to hate and fear him
now.

Should the story get abroad that she had spent some hours in his
house, under any circumstances, it was a _contretemps_ that might
cost her dear; for how would the censorious world interpret her
conduct or acknowledge her reason?  That she had come to inquire
about the fate of Cyril Wedderburn, and been storm stayed, few would
believe, for what vital interest was she supposed to have in the lost
heir of Willowdean?

Alas, alas! for secret loves.

Secluded though her life had been at Lonewoodlee, she knew quite
enough of the world to be aware that a young lady could not, with
propriety, visit a gay young bachelor as she appeared to have
done--one to whom she was neither related nor engaged--and it was
this consciousness, together with the craving desire to be again by
her father's side, that made her so steadily resist taking any
refreshment, even coffee, or doffing any part of her costume, and
which made her writhe under the well-bred commonplaces uttered by
Chesters, such as that he "hoped she wouldn't fret.  What the deuce
was the good of it!  The storm must soon abate; indeed, it was
abating now.  It is very unfortunate, no doubt," and all that sort of
thing; adding, "but it is very stupid work this, and we should do
something to amuse each other."

Yet he could neither soothe nor amuse her; he could not leave her for
the smoking-room; neither could he smoke in her presence, and so
betook him to champagne dashed with brandy, a perilous mixture,
through the influence of which some very daring ideas began to form
in his cunning brain.

Bad, bold, and daring as he was, Rooke Chesters would scarcely have
ventured to trepan a girl of Mary Lennox's undoubted rank in the
county into a false position, but for his perfect knowledge of her
father's helplessness, his poverty, and the bill he possessed.
Moreover, the only man who would have protected her--the lover whose
arms he had seen around her in the thicket--was gone, no one knew
where or how.

"There is a climax in this life," says a writer, with stern truth, "a
climax in mental and bodily pain, after which we can feel no more,
and after it all other sources of emotion appear tame by comparison."
And this climax had poor Mary passed already.

Cyril was gone; her father she knew was dying; and when he went, who
would she have to care for, to study, or to love?  Hence for a time,
perhaps, she cared less what happened to herself, till the massive
black marble clock on the mantelpiece struck the alarming hour of
eleven.

"Eleven!  I have been here five whole hours!  Oh, I shall go afoot,
if I die on the moor!  I cannot and must not stay here another
moment!" she exclaimed, starting from her chair and moving towards
the door.  "Oh, papa--my own papa--how much you may have missed me!"

"Be not in such a hurry, pray.  I had a pleasant surprise for you,"
said he, laughing.

"How, Captain Chesters?"

"Trayner must have patched up the springs of the waggonette by this
time.  He is a clever fellow, Trayner, and if the horses are put to,
I shall take you over in a few minutes."

"Oh, thanks--a thousand times thanks!"

"No thanks are necessary."

Again he rang the bell, and said, with perfect calmness, to the
servant who answered the summons--

"Trayner to get out the waggonette, if it is ready; trace the horses,
and bring it round to the front door."

Without perceiving in the least the intelligent glance that passed
between Chesters and his domestic, Mary could know that she had been
deluded and drawn into a species of snare, the object of which she
did not then quite clearly comprehend.

In a few minutes more the tramp of horses' hoofs and the muffled
sound of wheels amid the snow without were heard, and Mary rose, her
face almost beaming with delight through her veil, as she took his
proffered arm to be led forth on her way home at last.

The waggonette, a very handsome "bang-up affair," as Chesters deemed
it, was drawn up close to the flight of steps which led to the
entrance door; and the long lines of radiance from its two silver
lamps shone far amid the white waste of snow in the now treeless
park.  The storm had ceased, the wind had passed away, and the clouds
were divided in Heaven overhead; the stars shone out with frosty
brilliance, and the night was calm and clear.  The steam from the
quivering nostrils of the impatient horses curled up in white wreaths
above their heads.

Chesters lifted Mary--somewhat lingeringly, even caressingly perhaps,
as he did so--upon the front seat, and carefully folded a warm
railway-rug over her shoulders; then buttoning the leather apron
across her knees as he took his seat beside her.  Mr. Bill Trayner
vaulted up behind, and away they went, yet it was close on the hour
of twelve (midnight) ere they were clear of the lodge-gates, the
drowsy keeper of which observed with surprise the lady who was still
his master's companion--Miss Lennox of Lonewoodlee!

As Chesters bent his face close to hers, he thought the time had come
when he might venture to say something tender, and the champagne he
had imbibed caused him to do it bluntly.

"Women, like men, may love many times in life; but none, Miss Lennox,
as I now love you--believe me, I speak from my heart."

"At this time I entreat you not to torment me in that way," said
Mary; "in Heaven's name, I implore you!" she continued.

"Ah, you think only of Cyril Wedderburn!" was the spiteful rejoinder.

"I do," said Mary, a dash of anger mingling with her grief, as her
tears fell fast again.

"I am a lover as well as he was."

"Of mine, do you mean?"

"Yes."

"No, sir--no," replied Mary, firmly.  "I cannot permit you to talk
thus, and take advantage of my situation."

"What the deuce do you mean?" he asked, bluntly.

"That you are no lover, though a love-maker."

"Are they not the same?" asked Chesters, with unaffected surprise.

"Nay, Captain Chesters, the difference between them is great."

"As you please," said he, biting his nether lip, while he lightly
touched the horses with the lash about the ears.

The lodge-gate had scarcely closed behind them when a mounted
gentleman, wearing an Inverness cape of rough material (which, like
his half-bullet hat, was well coated with snow), and long black
overalls, came up at a hard trot, accompanied by a diminutive groom.
On passing the waggonette, he curbed his horse abruptly back upon his
haunches, and half looking round, cried, cheerily--

"Hallo, Chesters, old fellow, where are you going?  A bitter night
for March!"

"Very.  Good night," replied Chesters, without stopping; for the
speaker was young Everard Home, the Master of Ernescleugh, who was
very much surprised to see a young lady leaving the gate of
Chesterhaugh at that time of night, and alone with Rooke Chesters!
But in a few minutes he was perfectly enlightened on the subject by
his groom, who rang the lodge-bell on pretence of wanting a light for
his cigar.

A terror seized Mary lest she might have been recognised by these
men.  She said nothing of it to Chesters, for the deduction was
humiliating; but her tears fell again, and she whispered in her
heart--

"Oh, what matter is it.  I have no Cyril now!"

She was soon deposited, with great politeness on the part of
Chesters, at her own door, and in her anxiety and irritation she
darted in and closed it, forgetting even to thank him for his escort.

Her father had slept soundly for hours; but now he was awake, and
calling alternately for her and his dead son Harry, upbraiding them
both for neglect, and threatening that he would break his own neck
when next he rode to the hounds, "even as he once hoped that fellow
Wedderburn had done;" and Mary's heart died within her, when she
found his intellect thus wandering.  But the brave girl cast aside
her wrappings, took his old head carefully in her tender arms, and
strove to forget, what might be nervous fancy only, that her two
drowsy domestics who had seen her arrive in Chesters' equipage,
looked somewhat oddly on her, and at each other.




CHAPTER X.

CHESTERHAUGH.

Let us now recur to a few nights ago, for the unravelling of much of
this mystery.

With the soft memory of a minute and delicate little face that had
been for nearly an hour so close to his own in the dark thicket, and
all unaware that he had been observed or watched, Cyril Wedderburn
rode at a hard gallop from Lonewoodlee, and ere long had reined up at
Chesterhaugh, tossed his bridle to the obsequious Bill Trayner, who
tugged his forelock as he led admiringly away the bay hunter, and
then Cyril was ushered into the same dining-room in which Mary Lennox
was afterwards to spend the weary and anxious hours we have described.

"Glad to see you, Wedderburn," said the host, taking his proffered
hand; "punctual to a minute nearly."

"Nay, scarcely.  I'm a quarter of an hour late," replied Cyril, who
was flushed by the rasping pace at which he had ridden the few miles
that lay between Chesterhaugh and Willowdean.

"The salmon won't be spoiled, I daresay," said Chesters, with an
imperceptible smile; "but it takes one some time to get round that
thicket at Lonewoodlee, if one's horse don't clear the stile.  After
your ride, have a B and S."

"Thanks; no.  I suppose you mean brandy and soda?" said Cyril, who
disliked slang, and who coloured a little at the reference to the
thicket at Lonewoodlee.

"A glass of Madeira then, or a nip of Rimmel?"

"Neither.  I have an excellent appetite, and don't wish it spoiled."

"Cautious!" muttered Chesters, under his moustache, as he eyed with
covert malevolence and suspicion the open and handsome countenance of
his guest, who sat in a lounging yet elegant attitude in one of the
soft elbow-chairs.

"Covers for two only, I perceive; so we dine alone?"

"Yes.  I wanted Home of Ernescleugh to join us; but he is engaged.
By-the-bye, I should have asked your cousin Ramornie, and your
brother Bob, but----"

"Robert is not a player, neither is Horace, and we meant to turn a
card to-night," said Cyril, coldly, and evidently disliking the
assumption of familiarity in the other, who was but a recent
acquaintance.

"I knew that--hence my omission."

The real reason was, that when Chesters played he disliked to have
spectators.

"And now let us to dinner," he added, as they seated themselves at
table.

The viands were all that could be desired, and the wines also were
unexceptionable.  Cyril was not a toper, so the suggestions of
Chesters to try various heady vintages fell flatly on his ear, as he
contented himself with pale dry sherry, an occasional glass of
Sauterne, and after dinner adhered rigidly to claret, greatly to the
disgust, apparently, of his entertainer.

Their conversation ran for a time on the topics of the day; the
increasing prospects of a war in the East; the departure of our fleet
for the Baltic, with hopes that "old Charlie Napier would knock
Cronstadt to pieces;" and the chances of the "sick man at Stamboul
being," as Chesters phrased it, "snuffed out by the Russians," unless
France, Britain, and Sardinia were prompt in succouring him.

Then came local matters, the pack of harriers, the master of the
foxhounds, and his new mode of hunting the country; race meetings and
sporting news of various kinds, till after the claret jug had
travelled pretty often between the two, Chesters, with his own secret
purposes and his own ends in view, began to talk on matters more
nearly concerning themselves; but not until the cloth had been
removed and the servants had withdrawn.

"When does your Indian cousin arrive?"

"Don't exactly know," replied Cyril, curtly.

"Ah! when you are in Turkey, Lady Wedderburn will have to play the
duenna closely with the heiress--three hundred thousand pounds, by
Jove!"

"Her fortune is said to exceed that."

"Fellows will swarm round her like flies round a honey-pot."

Cyril made no reply, but toyed with the embossed grape scissors.

"Will your family winter in Edinburgh or London?" asked Chesters.

"In London, of course; if they don't remain at Willowdean."

"Edinburgh is a seedy place, after all, with its legal prigs and
tradesmen's daughters--'merchants,' as Dr. Johnson laughingly said
they called themselves.  What would she do amid its 'upper ten
dozen?'  No suitable match would be there, and small amusement among
its dreary gaieties."

"You talk bitterly of the Athens of the North," said Cyril, smiling.

The truth was, that Chesters had been blackballed at one or two of
the clubs there; his proposal, that character was estimated at a low
figure indeed.  After a pause, he said, abruptly--

"Why don't you cut the service now----"

"On the eve of a war!" exclaimed Cyril.

"Yes; and cut in for the heiress.  I should if I were you, and I
think Lady Wedderburn would like it."

"I trust, Captain Chesters, and I doubt it not, that Lady Wedderburn
will leave me to choose for myself," said Cyril, with considerable
hauteur at what he justly deemed presumption in the other.

"Don't take it up that way, my dear fellow.  _Pardonnez moi_, and let
us say no more about it.  Will you try a glass of my port?  I have
some that has been thirty years in the cellar; it belonged to my
father when he was master of the foxhounds, and he was as good a
judge of wine as of horses."

"Thanks; no.  I'll adhere to the claret.  It is one of the curses
which attend the heir to a fortune or a title--even a baronetcy,"
resumed Cyril, with reference to Chesters' advice, and feeling
considerably ruffled, "to have his matrimonial views or intentions
made the subject of debate and speculation among aunts, matchmaking
mothers, and meddling friends.  This or that girl will be suggested
to him, and perpetually thrown in the way till he shudders at her
name; while the one he might prefer--the one whom perhaps he loves in
secret--is deemed unsuitable, and is sedulously kept from him.

"Ah, yes--very true," said Chesters; and as the voice of Cyril grew
gradually tremulous, the memory of the former recurred to the recent
scene in the thicket, and a pang of jealousy shot through his heart.

Chesters and Cyril alike loved the pure and simple-minded Mary, and
it was perhaps strange they should _both_ do so, as they were so
different in their habits, tastes, and nature.  The former was a man
without soul or heart--selfish and sensual.  The latter was innately
refined, so his love was as full of delicacy, tenderness, compassion,
and spirituality, as that of Chesters was mere earthly passion, amid
which he could calmly see with satisfaction that ere long death,
debt, difficulties, and utter friendlessness, with the loss of Cyril
by separation, would cast the hapless girl completely at his mercy!

The same image filled the minds of both these men at the same time,
but each viewed it from a very different point.

"You know Oliver Lennox of Lonewoodlee, I presume, being so near a
neighbour?" said Cyril.

"Of course; all in the Merse know him for a crotchety old pump."

"That is not what I mean; do you know him personally?" asked Cyril,
with marked annoyance.

"A little."

"You visit there, probably?"

"Well--no--I cannot be said to do so," drawled Chesters, while he
watched Cyril with half-closed eyes.  "Who the deuce would go there,
unless----"

"Unless what?"

"One went after the girl."

"Do you mean his daughter?" asked Cyril, swelling with secret anger.

"Certainly.  I don't mean either of his two old female domestics.
Pass the claret jug, please."

"I was a fool to accept this fellow's invitation," thought Cyril; "I
shall have a row with him yet, and I must forbid his visiting
Lonewoodlee at all hazards, even if I declare myself to the old
gentleman.  I must take care of Mary, and watch over her if he cannot
do so.  That bill, too--Chesters would never be so liberal as to take
it up without some ulterior purpose."

After a minute's silence, during which each had been covertly eyeing
the other.

"You took up a bill of old Mr. Lennox's, I have heard," said Cyril,
as if casually; "that was most kind and generous of you."

"Not at all--not at all; but who told you of it?"

"I forget--heard it incidentally somehow.  Have you destroyed it?"

"No," replied Chesters, as he stuck his glass in his right eye and
looked Cyril full in the face.  "I have it here," he added, drawing
from his breast pocket a handsome Russian leather case (girt with an
elastic band), wherein he kept various odds and ends, IOU's,
memoranda of races and coursing matches, with veterinary recipes,
&c.; and taking the fatal slip of blue paper, showed it to Cyril, and
replaced it in the pocket-book.

"It has been noted and protested!" exclaimed Cyril, as a flush
crossed his face.  "Why did you not destroy it--what piece of cunning
is this?"

"Come, come, Wedderburn, that is rather a harsh term.  I had it noted
and protested, because, although I took it, I cannot afford
ultimately to lose the money.  Have some more wine?"

Cyril Wedderburn shook his head.

"Come--one glass of Madeira, as a 'white-washer,' and then I ring for
coffee."

But Cyril rose from the table and would drink no more.  His mind had
become imbued by mistrust and suspicion; yet he felt a desire to
obtain that bill if possible, and he might do so amid the play he had
promised to have with Chesters; so after the bay hunter's good points
had been fully discussed, after the stables, the gun-room, the
billiard and smoking-rooms, had all been lounged through, in a snug
little parlour, with a box of cigars and some brandy-and-water beside
them, they sat down to cards--an act of folly on the part of Cyril
Wedderburn.

The monetary difficulties of Rooke Chesters were nearly as great as
those of the so-called "proprietor" of Lonewoodlee; but he possessed
the skill and the means of supplying his exchequer which the other
had not.  His carefully studied betting-book, his intimacy with most
of the horsey men on the turf, his means of getting secret
information, his sharp practice and dexterous hand with cards,
billiards, and dice, seldom failed to keep him in tolerable funds,
though most of his land was mortgaged, and he had more than once
sought the sanctuary of Holyrood when his difficulties had been
greatest; and it was with this clever schemer that Cyril Wedderburn
sat down to be regularly "plucked."




CHAPTER XI.

CHESTERS' "MILD PLAY."

Like many other apartments--even the bedrooms--at Chesterhaugh, the
little parlour was hung with pictures of lean, bony, gaunt horses,
with little particoloured jockies perched on them; and Cyril, as he
cast a glance at them, thought by contrast of the soft and tender
works by Greuze, the sombre Titians, the Raphaels, the Canalettis,
and Correggios, which adorned the walls of Willowdean, interspersed
with stately and creditable looking portraits of his forefathers, who
had been all good men and true in the times of old.

Several packs of new cards, a dice-box, &c.  were produced, and while
carefully selecting a cigar each, cutting the ends thereof, and so
forth, Cyril reverted to the subject of his favourite new horse.

"And so you like my bay hunter?"

"Amazingly! he has all the fine points of thoroughbred--an ample
chest, compact body, broad loins, a small head and thin neck, the
legs all bone and muscle; if with these he has the requisites of
courage and temper----"

"I am sure he has both, though I have never tried him yet; but what
the deuce shall I do with him if we go on foreign service?"

"You should have thought of that before buying him; but as the night
is so cold, I would give him a warm mash with some nitre in it."

"A warm mash--why?"

"You came here at a rasping pace, and the animal may cool too much.
I would have his eyes and nose spunged too, after your return."

"Do you think such necessary?" asked Cyril, with great simplicity.
"I know you are a judge."

"Rather."

"I am somewhat ignorant of horses."

"Shall I ring for Trayner?"

"If you please."

Chesters lit his cigar and rang the bell, but on hearing steps
approaching, he rose, and said--

"I'll speak to Trayner myself about it: excuse me for a moment," and
quitting the room he gave some instructions to the groom in an
undertone.  Cyril afterwards remembered hearing an expression of
surprise escape the man, but little suspecting the vile trickery to
which his horse and himself were about to be subjected; he began to
think, that could he reconcile or explain away the affair of the
bill, Chesters was perhaps "not such a bad style of fellow, after
all;" and no doubt the brandy-and-water he was imbibing went far to
strengthen this conclusion.

"I've made it all right about your nag," said Chesters, reseating
himself at the table and fixing his glass in his right eye; "and now
for a little mild play--what is it to be, écarté or casino, or
five-card cribbage?"

"What say you to écarté?"

"Well, Wedderburn, écarté be it--the regular gambler's game."

Chesters arranged the pack into thirty-two cards, withdrawing the
twos, threes, fours, fives, and sixes.

"How many points shall we have?" asked Chesters.

"Five.  Cut for the deal."

They did so, and it fell to Chesters.

"Take another jorum of the brandy-and-water.  Do you like those
cigars?  I could spare you a hundred or so.  Oh, no thanks at all:
they are quite at your service.  Three cards to you, and three to me."

While Chesters chatted thus, to throw the victim off his guard, the
latter played in a careless manner that was usual with him, talking
and smoking all the time, and quite unaware how the whole faculties
of Chesters were absorbed in the game, which is one of a nature
wherein foresight and nice calculation are of a necessity so
requisite, and thus he was no match for his host, who, after
permitting him to win two or three games at guinea points, proposed
to increase the stakes to five guineas.

Now flushed with play, Cyril rashly assented, and the game went on.

"I mark the king!" said he.  "By the way, that ring of yours,
Chesters, is a splendid one."

"An onyx."

"So I see.  Are those arms yours?"

"No; it belonged to that Frenchman, Louis De la Fosse, whom your
father befriended.  We played for it, and I won it."

"Did you actually take the poor fellow's ring?  A family relic,
perhaps!"

"Well, I might have lost mine but for my superior play.  Bravo! that
card plays out the four tricks."

"The world is apt to shake its head at such gaming as yours and his
was."

"Pass the decanter.  Deuce take the world and its head too; though it
shake till palsied, what is it to me!" cried Chesters, laughing
bitterly.

"But the world is censorious."

"So are all one's goodnatured friends--'d--d goodnatured friends,' as
Scott, I think, calls them.  The Frenchman, De la Fosse, lost some
thousands to me by backing no less than three losing horses at the
Derby."

Cyril found that he had rapidly lost nearly two hundred pounds, and
declined to play more.

"Not even to have your revenge?" asked Chesters, with feigned
surprise, in which something of disdain was mingled.

"No," was the curt reply.

"Why, man alive, what do you mean?" asked Chesters, in a slightly
bullying tone, with his glass shining in his eye.

"Simply that somehow, Captain Chesters, I do not like your mode of
playing."

"Then we'll drop this and try casino: it is a good game for two."

"Agreed--five guinea stakes, as before."

They cut for the deal, which fell to Cyril; but though he won several
games, which only served still further to flush and excite him, in
the end he found that he had no better luck than before; and ere
long, instead of getting up Mr. Lennox's bill, he rose from the table
minus two hundred and fifty pounds and had given his IOU for three
hundred more.  The time was close on midnight then, and he insisted
on having his horse brought from the stables; so once more the acute
Mr. William Trayner was summoned.

Already repenting deeply the extreme folly into which he had been
lured by a man for whom he felt at heart only contempt, and resolving
never more to pass the threshold of Chesterhaugh, Cyril--already
pondering whether he would get the money lost from Robert or his
doting mother--put on his riding gloves, took his whip, and descended
the steps to where his bay horse stood in the starlight, champing on
the bit and pawing the gravel with impatience.

Had he looked round at that moment, he might have detected a strange
and unfathomable smile on the face of Chesters.

The horse seemed very restive, swaying away when he put his foot in
the stirrup, so that he mounted with difficulty, and gathered up and
shortened the reins.

"Allow me, for a moment," said Chesters; "there is something wrong
about the curb chain, I think."

"The bridle's all right, sir," urged Trayner, who still held it in
his hand, while Chesters very deliberately lengthened the straps a
hole or two.  "You'll do now, Wedderburn.  Touch him with the spur.
Good night."

"Good night; thanks," cried Cyril, and away his horse went like the
wind; and he was barely clear of the lodge-gate before he found that
the animal was totally unmanageable, and moreover had got the bit
firmly between its teeth!




CHAPTER XII.

THE LAST OF THE BAY HUNTER.

"He is rightly named Rooke Chesters," muttered Cyril, as his horse
began to caracole sideways along the high road, "for he has rooked me
to some purpose.  By Jove!  I can never confess my folly to my
father, after all his warnings too.  Halloa, old nag, what is the
matter with you?"

He now became sensible that his horse was becoming extremely restive;
something was wrong with the bridle he knew, but the conduct of the
animal rapidly became so outrageous that he feared to dismount lest
it should kick him or run away, in which case he felt that he would
cut a ridiculous figure before his own household, by arriving on foot
and whip in hand without his nag.  His father and brother he knew
would quiz him unmercifully.  Dismount!  Pshaw! the idea was not to
be thought of.  So being a good horseman he kept his saddle, and
endeavoured by every means, first to soothe, and then by the whip to
control, the growing fury of the bay hunter, but strove in vain.

It was swelling, trembling, and panting with rage; its quivering ears
lay backward flat, its head was outstretched, and its bloodshot eyes
turned back, till at times he could see the white of them in the
darkness.

After plunging and rearing, and endeavouring by every means to throw
the rider, and after twice attempting to crush him against the park
wall of Chesterhaugh, he suddenly flung out his forefeet, and with a
fierce snort of rage, galloped at a terrible pace along the high
road.  The beautiful bay of which Cyril was so proud, as showing all
the best points of a fine English hunter, seemed now changed into a
tearing devil!

The curb chain was loose, the bit was clenched between its teeth, the
reins were powerless, and Cyril Wedderburn could no more control its
actions than he could rule a whirlwind.

Ploughed fields and gates, stackyards and farm steadings, houses and
cottages, all sunk in darkness, even as their inmates in sleep, were
all passed with frightful speed, and seeking only to keep his seat
till the animal became exhausted, Cyril trusted to his skill as a
rider, and let the hunter take its way.

The open waste of Lonewoodlee, the dark thicket, and the quaint old
Tower with its corner tourelles, were quickly at hand.  As he swept
past, Cyril saw the light in Mary's window: nay more, he saw her
figure for an instant, and then it was that the irrepressible cry
which Mary heard escaped him; for he had begun to fear that there was
more than the warm mash fermenting in the interior of his maddened
nag; that the animal had been drugged, as there were few "horsey"
tricks of which Ralph Rooke Chesters, and his man Bill Trayner, were
ignorant.

As this exasperating conviction forced itself upon him, he conceived
the idea of stunning the horse by a blow between the ears.

His riding whip had a ponderous silver handle, and with the thong
twisted round his right hand, he dealt upon the hunter's head a
downward stroke that might have felled an ox; but instead of finding
it sink beneath him, as he confidently expected, so that he might
leap from the saddle, a fresh gust of rage seemed to inspire the
horse, which actually bounded from the earth, and snorting, panting,
and quivering afresh, it went blindly and madly thundering onward in
its fierce career.

This was at Falaknowe, where the whip which had dropped from his hand
was afterwards found.

For a time he had thought that the horse might know its way home, and
stop at the park-gate of Willowdean; but gate and lodge had long been
left behind, the woods and house of Renton too; the rising ground
beyond was soon devoured by the rapid hoofs, and Cyril might have
said, with Mazeppa, as alarm gathered in his heart--

  "All behind was dark and drear,
  And all before was night and fear.
  How many hours of night or day
  In those suspended pangs I lay
  I could not tell; I scarcely knew
  If this were human breath I drew--"

for before him were the impending bluffs of a rocky shore, and the
dashing billows of the German Sea!

By stern use of his spurs, burying the sharp rowels in blood, he had
forced the animal to clear by a flying leap more than one closed
toll-gate; but the idea pressed upon him, that if he lost his seat or
was dashed on the hard road, to be found a bleeding mass of broken
bones, of what the emotions of the mother who doted on him, of his
tender Mary, of his ambitious father, and of all his friends would
be, if he were brought home to Willowdean an unsightly corpse; and
now, as death seemed close and nigh, innumerable episodes of his past
life--good, bad, and foolish--came thronging fast upon him, as he
rode this terrible race.  With these came a longing for vengeance
upon Chesters, and a loathing of the infuriated brute that bore him.
How he longed for a loaded pistol, that he might put a bullet through
its head.

Cyril was an excellent horseman, and had always been a little vain of
his riding; but now he was becoming worn out.

After a twenty miles run, the horse had now left the highway, and was
traversing one of those large fields (of some forty Scottish acres or
so) that are peculiar to the Merse and West Lothian.  It had been
recently ploughed, and as the hunter's small hoofs and slender
fetlocks sank deep amid the soft and loamy soil, while its panting
and breathing grew harder, Cyril hoped that it was weary and would
soon stop; but the hope was vain.

Cyril's fingers were powerless with grasping the twisted reins of the
useless bridle, and his arms ached and tingled to the shoulders with
the long strain upon them; his whole body trembled, and he felt that
little now would dismount him, so fast and furious had been the
career of his runaway steed, so many the leaps he had made over gates
and walls of turf and stone, over high hedges and deep water-courses;
a regular steeplechase over everything that came in his way.  The
roughest hurdle-race was as nothing compared with it; and now, we
have said, before him lay the sea.

He knew the ground well, and the whole locality; he had too often
rambled there birdnesting when a happy, heedless boy, and while
hunting or shooting in manhood; and he knew also every foot of that
terrible shore from Eymouth to the Bridge of Dunglass; and he was
aware that at the end of the field he traversed there was no
enclosure, no wall or hedge, no boundary but the giddy verge which
overhung the sea that foamed some forty feet below.  So now the time
had come when he must cast himself from his saddle or perish.

He released his right foot from the stirrup-iron, but somehow omitted
to clear the left so readily.  In a moment he was on his back among
the soft loamy furrows, and dragged furiously along; the next, he
felt himself shot fearfully through the air, which seemed to whiz
upward past him.

"God--oh, God save me!" escaped him, while his mother's face, and
Mary's too, flashed on his memory, with Mary's gentle voice and
tender eyes, as he fell through space; and ere he could again respire
he found himself headlong in the midnight sea, with the black water
closed above his head.

Panting he rose to the surface, but to sink again and again, for he
was weak, powerless, and breathless; yet being a good swimmer, when
he rose the third time he kept himself afloat and looked around.

He was free from the fatal bay hunter now.

High over him towered a ridge of those black, beetling rocks which
bound the shore and culminate in the cliffs of Fast Castle and those
of St. Abb, covered with sea fowl, and with the foam of the German
Ocean rolling against them.  The moon, which had been hitherto veiled
by a mass of clouds, now emerged from them, and as she was waning
from amid the ragged edges of the floating vapour, her light, cold,
pale, and ghastly, shone along the tossing sea.

Even if he could have protracted his existence by swimming, in the
end he must perish; for all along that shore no footing place or
sandy beach was nigh, and the waves, he feared too surely, would dash
him on the bluffs a battered corpse.

Already his horse, with true instinct, had turned to the shore and
swam through the billows, which dashed it again and again upon the
wall of rock, the slippery face of which it beat and pawed with its
hoofs in vain to find a footing.

A mass of weedy and isolated rock some yards from that perilous shore
caught the eye of Cyril in the moonlight.  The waves boiled and
seethed around but not over it.  There he would find footing he hoped
for a time, till daylight broke and his situation might be seen from
the land or the sea; and with a prayer of thankfulness to Heaven in
his heart and on his lips, he swam boldly and reached its slippery
apex by grasping the seaweed that covered it.

Cold and drenched he sat there with the white waves seething round
him; and he could remember that many a time when a boy he had
striven, by tossing stones from the cliff above, to hit this
identical rock which now afforded him a temporary place of safety.

Ere long he felt sensible that the water was rising, that the tide
was flowing inshore, and might in time, perhaps, cover the rock, in
which case he was certain to be washed off and drowned.

The moon soon disappeared behind that stupendous rock which is
crowned by the ruins of Fast Castle, and is inaccessible on all
sides, save by a narrow neck of land, and then a double gloom seemed
to fall upon the sea.  About a mile off he could see a solitary light
in the window of a house upon the shore, the light too probably of
some watcher by a sick bed; and wistfully and yearningly he regarded
it, as he sat, or crouched rather, on that isolated rock, perishing
miserably within a few miles of his splendid home.

There he knew that by this time all would be a-bed, after his father,
his brother, and Horace Ramornie had had a few amicable strokes at
billiards, and after his mother had grown weary of weaving out the
future of the coming heiress; and he knew that Gervase Asloane, the
old butler, would be sleepily awaiting his return from Chesterhaugh.

One other light was visible for a time; it was on board a large
steamer about eight miles distant in the offing, where gradually it
passed out of sight as she sped on her way to England or Holland.

To shout, Cyril knew was worse than useless; few craft ever ventured
near that iron shore, and there his voice would be heard by sea birds
only.

Poor Cyril Wedderburn!  He had not been much given to prayer since he
became a man of the world, or since he had last lisped his childish
orisons at his mother's knee; but now, in his hour of desperate need,
he invoked God earnestly for deliverance from a death so early and so
terrible as that which menaced him: and by some strange idiosyncrasy
of the human mind, amid these pious thoughts, and amid the
bewildering horrors of his situation, there occurred to his ear and
his memory scraps of mess-room songs, of frivolous banter, and
operatic airs, as if in grotesque mockery, till he feared he was
growing mad!

Suddenly a terrible cry--a cry that seemed to belong neither to
Heaven nor earth--a cry altogether dissimilar to any other sound he
had ever heard before, pierced his ears.  Its singularity of tone
made the pulses of his heart stand still.  Were the tales he had
heard of the water kelpy, and his shrieks of triumph over the
drowning, true after all?

No other sound followed but the monotonous dashing of the waves, the
hiss of the surf upon the rocks, and the voices of the now startled
sea birds as they were roused from their nests by that unearthly yell.

It was the death scream of his drowning horse; for a horse, when in
extremity of terror, can utter a dreadful cry at times; and now its
body floated passively in the eddy round a wave-beaten promontory,
the sport of the billows, and Cyril, with little regret certainly,
saw it tossed to and fro in the starlight, till it disappeared, and
that was the last he saw of his fatal bay hunter!

And now another deep invocation of God escaped him, for he became
assured that slowly, but steadily and terribly, the rising tide was
closing round him!




CHAPTER XIII.

GRIEF.

In his exciting conversation with Mary, worthy Squills, the village
doctor, had not over-rated the grief and consternation which the
great catastrophe excited among the bereaved family at Willowdean.
"There are days in some lives which are so full of pain that no term
of after years, no joy or peace of after-granting, can enable us to
think of them without a shudder, even to the last hour of existence."
So was it with Lady Wedderburn then, on that black fatal day, and for
many a day after, when memory went back to the terrible shock her
nervous system had received.

Accustomed from her infancy to all the perfect repose and care that
wealth, position, and prosperity so frequently inspire, this calamity
seemed beyond all her power of realization as a fact!

The absence of Cyril from the formal morning prayer read by Sir John
(the Wedderburns were rather High Church), and from breakfast,
excited no great surprise; and when it was reported from the
stable-yard that neither he nor his horse, the famous bay, had come
home last night, the natural conclusion of the family circle was that
he had been pressed to remain at Chesterhaugh, and would doubtless
ride home in time for the family luncheon; but Sir John, who disliked
some of Rooke Chesters' proclivities, particularly his proneness to
gamble, was surprised that his son (usually so careful and fastidious
in his acquaintanceships) should so far tax that person's hospitality.

When Lady Wedderburn, in her gay little dressing-room, was in deep
consultation with Miss Flora M'Caw about her style of mourning for
Uncle William, of Madras, and the proper sets of jewellery, jet,
silver, or gold, to be worn therewith, and also when the season for
second mourning arrived, the startling tidings came, in the form of a
vague rumour at first, that her son Cyril had left Chesterhaugh about
midnight, and had now been absent, unaccounted for, none knew where
or how, for twelve hours!

For one so extremely regular in all his habits and so temperate in
conduct, this seemed incomprehensible, and every hopeful, vague, and
wild surmise was indulged in only to culminate at last in the fear of
some terrible accident or outrage, and yet the people of the district
were peaceful and orderly.

Then, as the Doctor had related to Mary, Horace Ramornie, and all the
household, assisted by friends and neighbours, set forth to search
the country.  His hat was found at Buncle-edge, and his whip at
Falaknowe, five miles nearer the sea; but Lady Juliana Ernescleugh
sent her son, the Master, with the darkest tidings of all, that
Cyril's well-known bay hunter had been discovered drowned, and
fearfully bruised and battered, among the rocks eastward of Fast
Castle, and then the conviction that a dreadful calamity, the details
of which were incomprehensible, had taken place.

The Coastguard were set to work, the shore was searched, and, save
where the rocks were impassable or inaccessible, every creek and
cranny were examined between Broxmouth and the Redheugh shore; a
fleet of fisherboats dragged all the water in the vicinity, but all
their seeking was vain.

No further trace was found of Cyril.

The telegraphs were at work, with descriptions of his person and
clothing, and rewards were offered for information, with no better
success, and thus four days of agonizing suspense and horror were
passed by the family at Willowdean.

All the servants sorrowed for Cyril, the feminine portion especially;
he was so handsome, and always so smiling and suave; and old Gervase
Asloane, on whose back he had ridden many a time when a boy, wept for
him, and Miss Flora M'Caw wept too.  Solitary, and of a necessity
selfish though her life had been, she felt genuine grief for the loss
of so fine a young man, and recalled the secret hopes and tender
passion in which she had once ventured to indulge when the heir of
Willowdean was in his mere boyhood, in the time that seemed so long
past now.

Messages and cards of condolence poured in from friends and
neighbours; and among others came a black-edged note, per Mr. Bill
Trayner, from Rooke Chesters, expressing profound sorrow for the
untoward event, and enclosing Cyril's IOU for three hundred pounds,
which "he hoped Sir John Wedderburn would find it convenient to
liquidate, as he was just about to travel."

"Oh, detestable taste!" exclaimed Horace Ramornie, with a flush of
anger and contempt on his handsome face; but Sir John, though his
brown, manly hand trembled the while, signed a cheque for the amount,
and enclosed it to Chesters without a word of comment.

He then looked sadly at the IOU, the last words, no doubt, his son's
hand had traced, and with a sigh threw it into the fire.

When the second and third day passed, Lady Wedderburn was too ill to
leave her bed, and it required all the skill of Doctor Squills, and
all the solace of Miss M'Caw, with the aid of camphor, sal-volatile,
and Rimmel's vinegar, to save her from a succession of fainting fits.

Cyril was gone--gone for ever!

These words seemed ever in her heart and on her lips, and to be
written, as it were in letters of fire upon the wall, and this
feeling seemed to fill the air around her.  The stunning sense of her
bereavement was most keen in the wakeful hours of the night and of
the early morning.  Then it seemed to rush like a flood upon her.
Never more would her slender fingers run caressingly through his rich
dark hair; never more would his soft and beautiful, yet manly eyes,
turn affectionately to hers: never again would his voice, always so
sweetly modulated when addressing her, fall upon her listening ear.

A lonely girl at Lonewoodlee was full of exactly similar thoughts,
sorrows, and memories; yet those of the bereaved mother were perhaps
the deepest--the most keen and the hardest to bear.  Cyril was her
firstborn--the apple of her eye.  To her he was beautiful as Absalom
was to David, and as she thought of that, she repeated in her heart--

  "O, Absalom, my son, my Absalom,
  Would to God my life would ransom thine!"

Had Lady Wedderburn seen Mary Lennox then, and known the common cause
of their grief, she might have forgiven and even loved her; but she
had never yet connected the idea of Mary with her son.

When Cyril was absent with his regiment--the Fusileers--the sight of
his empty chair, his vacant place at table, always inspired her with
sadness; but she knew that he was no longer a boy, and could not be
kept for ever by her side.  Now his place would ever more be vacant,
or filled by a terrible shadow--an unseen presence only.  Even his
grave she would never look upon; and every relic of Cyril--the
portrait painted of him, as a cherry-cheeked boy ensign, in his first
red coat and epaulettes, with pipe-clayed belt and black bearskin;
the lock of his hair which had never left her bosom since he joined
his regiment, then warring on the banks of the Sutledge; his unused
books, his bed, the soft cambric pillow-case his cheek had touched,
his favourite meerschaum pipe, lying where he had last left it--all
became as something sacred in her eyes, and inspired her with bursts
of the most passionate grief.

The schemes she had been so fondly forming for his aggrandizement, by
marriage with his rich cousin who was coming home, were all forgotten
now; and in the bewilderment of her grief she almost forgot to pray.
Poor Lady Wedderburn was stupefied; and the snow of that sudden storm
which imprisoned Mary Lennox at Chesterhaugh added, while it lasted
on hill and moor, double desolation to her heart, for the gloom of
the weather adds keenly to the grief of the imaginative and
impressionable.

Where was now the future she had pictured, with Cyril's children
crowing and nestling upon her knee?  Robert, her younger son--the
future Baronet--yet was left to her; but at present all her sorrow,
tears, and regrets were for the lost one.




CHAPTER XIV.

AN UNWELCOME VISITOR.

"The fifth day, and no news of him yet--no trace, save the dead
horse!  By Jove! what can have happened?  I meant only to break a few
of his bones, or spoil his pretty face, perhaps, for Mary, and
nothing more.  Where the devil can he have drifted to--the coast of
Holland perhaps?  Handsome of the old boy to cash up the IOU.  Wish
it had been for six hundred, though!"

Thus thought Ralph Rooke Chesters, when on the afternoon of the fifth
day--the Monday--after the disappearance of Cyril he dismounted at
Lonewoodlee, under the door which bore the quaint legend, and
presenting his card, asked for Miss Lennox.

"Miss Lennox was at home," Alison said, and ere long she received him
in the gloomy apartment which passed for her drawing-room, with its
chintz-covered furniture, its chiffounières of painted wood, its
old-fashioned girandoles, and the meagre finery of her mother's
bridal days, to which her own eyes had become accustomed.  Her piano
stood open, for though her heart was full of grief, she had been
compelled to sing and play to amuse her father.

"To what do I owe the--the pleasure of this visit?" said Mary,
politely yet coldly, for the memory of yesterday's snare haunted her
unpleasantly, and secretly she resented it.

"My anxiety lest you should have suffered from the snow (now nearly
gone, by-the-bye) and the cold drive in an open waggonette," replied
Chesters, with as soft a smile as his face could assume.

"Thanks; I am well," said Mary, still more coldly, for there was
something in the manner of Chesters which inspired doubt and dislike.
Yet he placed his hat on the table, brushed a speck off his tweed
knickerbockers with his handkerchief, and quietly seated himself with
the air of a man who meant to remain.

"And the old gentleman.  How is he?"

"As usual," sighed Mary; "very weak and ailing.  I know not with
what; and I don't think that Doctor Squills knows either."

"Get some other skill than this cub of a parish doctor possesses.
Send to town--to London or Edinburgh."

But Mary shook her head and sighed again as she thought of their
slender means; and there was a pause, during which she hoped that he
would soon go, as she had to be at the railway station at a certain
hour to receive certain medicines which the Doctor had ordered from
Edinburgh for her father's use.

She was conscious that Chesters was regarding her earnestly; indeed,
he had been unable to get out of his evil mind the effect of her
pretty and ladylike little figure while she sat so many hours in his
dining-room last night; so he had come in the prosecution of his
nefarious suit; but old as he was in the ways of the world he lived
in, he felt an awkwardness in his mode of advancing it; for Mary
looked so provokingly calm and composed; and so exquisitely ladylike;
her beautifully dressed hair so gorgeous in colour and quantity, with
her plain but perfect toilette, and her only ornament, a simple
brooch, nestling at her pretty neck.

To Mary's eye he looked older to-day and less careful in his costume;
his nose was certainly redder, and the blotches on his cheeks were
deeper in colour; his watchful and sinister grey eyes were more
restless in expression, and it soon became evident that he had been
imbibing freely, though the day was yet young.  Wine, or something
worse, alone could have made him depart from his policy of yesterday
and blunder on as he did while the young girl's grief was so fresh
and keen.

He rose, and coming close to the chair in which she was seated, laid
his hand on the back of it, touching her rounded shoulder as he did
so; and lowering his voice, he said--

"Miss Lennox; or may I call you Mary?"

"Yes, if you choose.  You have known me since I was a mere child."

"I have served in India since then," said he, with an ill-concealed
grimace; for he winced at the remark, or what it inferred; and
oblivious of the tender scene he had witnessed in the thicket, and
the grief which filled her heart, he said--

"I am come to ask you if you will allow me to love you, Mary Lennox?"

"I can neither prevent people from loving or hating me," she replied,
evasively; for she remembered the bill which he possessed; the power
it gave him over her father, and she trembled in her heart.

"Ah, Mary, who could hate you?" he whispered, bending still nearer
her face.

"But I beg that you will not speak of love to me."

"Why?"

"For a reason I care not to give.  Pray let that suffice," urged
Mary, as she bit her lip and kept her pale face averted to hide the
tears with which her eyes were filled.

"Then you love another?" said Chesters, bluntly.

"That is my affair, sir."

"But you do; or shall I say, did?"

"As you please," replied the girl, wearily, shrugging her shoulders,
and her words seemed to come from her heart.

"At least, I have a kind of admission from your own lips," he
resumed, with a half-muttered imprecation under his sandy grey
moustache, and with a dangerous gloom in his false and sinister eyes.
"But do you know your own mind?"

"I trust that I do," was the gentle reply.

"You are right to speak doubtfully."

Mary changed her seat to the other side of the fireplace; for, as his
face came nearer hers, a kind of shiver passed over her.

"I do not understand you, Captain Chesters," said she, haughtily, as
she erected her pretty head, and looked at him intently and steadily.

"I say you are right to speak doubtfully, for at your years a girl
scarcely knows her own mind," he resumed more tenderly, again drawing
near her and attempting to take her hand.  "It is quite possible to
love one person at one time, and another much more at a future time;
and thus you might love me.  Who is the writer that says, 'we may
love with but a part of our nature--for the heart must love
something--until we chance upon a being our every nature sympathizes
with; one that will awaken new faculties to love with; one that we
can love with all the love we gave the first, with still more
added--a being made for us, and us alone.'"

Chesters poured out this quotation at a breath, for he was sensible
that his utterance was becoming thicker, and a smile of disdain
passed over Mary's face.

"I don't know who the writer is," said she, with growing irritation,
as she rang the bell, "but it all sounds very French--like some of
the maxims of Jean Jacques Rousseau.  One thing I am sure of, Captain
Chesters; my nature would never sympathize with yours, and I could
never--pardon me for saying so--marry a man old enough to be my
father."

Chesters ground his teeth at this reply, and a little hollow and
bitter laugh escaped him; for with all his open and secret admiration
of Mary, which was genuine enough--as the charms of her person and
manner were undeniable--a marriage with her formed no part of his
plans.  He was about to renew the subject, when old Alison appeared,
in answer to the summons of her young mistress, who said--

"Ask, please, if my papa feels well enough to see Captain Chesters."

"He has just been inquiring for him, Miss."

"Good.  Come with me, Captain Chesters, if you are so disposed.  Papa
sees so few, that your visit will be quite an event."

Now Chesters, with all his suavity and plausibility, when he had an
object in view, could rarely give much sympathy to any one or
anything, and above all, he hated the boredom of illness or sickness
in himself or others, felt just then only anger at the quick mode in
which Mary cut short his intrusive love-making; but he bowed, and
followed her into the room where poor Oliver Lennox lay in the bed
from which, it was too probable, he never would rise.  The oppressive
odour of the sick room in such a chill season, and in such a house,
where the walls were of such enormous thickness, was unpleasantly
perceptible to Chesters, and had the result of making his recent
potations more seriously affect his brain.

However, being withal a well-bred man, he shook the thin wan hand of
Mr. Lennox with apparent cordiality, made the usual polite but
conventional inquiries about his health, and received the same
unmeaning and querulous replies, which he had heard a score of times
in the same place.

Weak and worn though he was, could Oliver Lennox but have seen into
Chesters' heart, and read the plans he cherished there, he would have
smote him by his bedside!

Propped on pillows which his daughter's tender hand had arranged, Mr.
Lennox, looking twenty years older than his time of life warranted,
had been lying the whole forenoon with his clear blue restless eyes
bent on the muirland scene that stretched for miles away before his
window--the acres upon acres that were no longer his own; acres won
and held by his forefathers in the old stirring times of Scottish
raids and wars.

The snow of the unexpected storm had already disappeared; the day
really looked like one in spring; the sky a deep blue; the air soft
and ambient.  The bulb roots were expanding amid the prepared mould
in Mary's little garden on the southern side of the Tower; the
primroses and wild violets were cropping up beneath the sprouting
hedgerows; the grass looked greener on the lonely hill sides and in
the meadows, over which the shadows of the clouds were passing
quickly; and even the bleak Lammermuir looked less bleak than was its
wont; for the day was of a kind to make one feel content for the
present, hopeful for the future, and prayerful to God.

Oliver Lennox felt its genial influence in his own fatuous way; but
not so his daughter, for her heart was rent by anguish for the loss
of Cyril, and mortification for the annoyance which the suit of
Chesters occasioned her.

"How kind of you to come and see an old broken-down fellow such as I
am," said the invalid, turning his sharp aquiline face to his
visitor, and presenting his hand for a second time.

"Not at all, my good friend.  Glad to see you looking so well.  Egad!
I shouldn't wonder to see you in the saddle again, scouring across
the country--the leading man in the field."

But Mr. Lennox only shook his head and sighed despondingly, while
Mary felt disgust for the untrue sympathy of Chesters, who stood
sucking the ivory handle of his whip, while she rearranged with her
quick hands the pillows under her father's head.

"It was just on such a breezy March day as this I hunted last,
Chesters," said the invalid, with a sad smile.  "We all came at a
slapping pace through Oxendean, and round Buncle-edge, till, oddly
enough, a bed of sweet violets and primroses--only think of it!--in
Renton Wood quite threw the hounds off the scent, and the fox
escaped!  Since that day Oliver Lennox has never been in the hunting
field, or backed aught but an old Galloway cob."

"Take courage.  There is a good time coming, as the song has it."

"My Mary is the veritable 'Brownie' of Lonewoodlee, who cooks and
watches in the night, and all that, so I should not repine," said Mr.
Lennox, with a fond smile, as he played with her snowy and statuesque
fingers; "but her unwearying love, and all her tender kindness cannot
avert fate, or hide the out-stretching of the Shadowy Hand."

"Oh, papa, do not--do not pierce my heart!" implored the girl.

"How much more of life is there in this old grumbler yet?" thought
Chesters, as he actually gnawed the whip-handle with his teeth, while
watching admiringly the contour of Mary's bust, the taper form of her
white arms, and the high arch of her instep, as she hung about her
father's bed.

"You will be kind to her, Chesters, when I am gone," said Lennox, in
his usual querulous way; and the request was so much in unison with
Chesters' own thoughts, that the blotches deepened to scarlet in his
face.

"Kind to her, Mr. Lennox?" he faltered.

"Yes.  I leave so few friends behind me now, that Mary's future fills
my heart with intense anxiety."

"Papa dearest, fear not for me," said Mary becoming deeply agitated.

"Had your brother Harry but been spared--"

"Don't talk of poor Harry, papa," urged Mary, as her father's mind
was apt to wander then, and to confound the past and the present
together; "do not talk thus, papa, when strangers are present.  You
may live I hope and trust for many years to come.  'God alone decides
who shall live to suffer, or who shall suffer and die.'  I, perhaps,
may be one of the latter."

A scarcely perceptible gesture of impatience escaped Chesters; but
slight though it was, the quick eye of the invalid detected it.

"Well, I daresay I weary you.  Take Chesters into the dining-room,
Mary, and give him a glass of Madeira, or brandy-and-water, after the
ride.  I always took a horn after a gallop in my day--the day that
will never come again.  Lonewoodlee had ever a name for hospitality,
and it shall not lose it while I am above the turf, lassie."

"Thanks: then we shall adjourn to the dining-room," said Chesters,
and glad to escape from the sick chamber, he shook the hand of Oliver
Lennox, and ere long found himself in the sombre little dining-hall,
seated on one of the square-elbowed haircloth sofas, and looked down
upon by a few faded and gloomy portraits of the Lennoxes of past
times, in wigs, wide cuffs, and pasteboard skirts, or breastplates of
steel, just as Lely, Ramsay, or Medina had depicted them; and somehow
he thought that in all the faces of these dead men he could read
something of scorn and scrutiny, so his eye avoided them, and he
applied himself to mixing a stiff glass of brandy-and-water, while
Mary hovered irresolutely near.  She was all anxiety that he should
depart, for in an hour now the train would be in, and she wished to
receive in person the medicines that were coming for her father.  She
dreaded also to mention her errand or purpose, lest he might offer to
accompany her, and give the affliction of yet more of his society.

But Chesters found himself perfectly comfortable.  His dinner-time
was three hours distant yet; the brandy-and-water proved quite to his
taste--so, too, was Mary--thus he at once resumed the thread of their
conversation, but in a more jocular, or as Mary justly deemed it,
more insolent tone; for helplessness and friendlessness encouraged
this _vaurien_, while her rare beauty inspired his worst passion.

"Ah, Mary, we might be so jolly if you would only learn to love me a
little."  Then becoming maudlinly sentimental, he proceeded to quote
Shelley--

  "See the mountains kiss high Heaven,
    And the waves clasp one another;
  No sister flower will be forgiven,
    If it disdain its brother.
  And the sunbeams kiss the earth:
    And the moonbeams the sea.
  What are all those kissings worth,
    If thou kiss not me?"


"The order of that line should be reversed; but, by Jove, my voice is
getting quite feathery!"

He was becoming inarticulate, and almost tipsy.

"Captain Chesters," said Mary, gravely, "do not go on thus, I implore
you!  You would pity me if you knew all--the horror of living alone,
or nearly alone, in this dreary house; my sole occupation the sad,
sad one----"

"Of what?" said he, as tears choked her utterance.

"Soothing and amusing a dying father."

"Oh bosh! my dear girl," was the coarse response; "the old fellow may
live long enough yet; and I am sure that he would rather have me for
a son-in-law--I who know so thoroughly the points of a horse and the
secrets of the turf--a thoroughbred sportsman, who could take the
county pack in hand, and, had I the means, would hunt the Merse and
Lauderdale as they never were hunted before--than yonder mooning
fellow from whom you parted in the thicket on the night he
disappeared.  Ah, you sly puss, you little knew that I saw you there!"

Mary felt herself grow deadly pale, and then she flushed to the
temples with anger, as these rude and almost fiercely spoken remarks,
so wounding to her delicacy, fell on her sensitive ear.  Again her
hand went to the bell for the purpose of having Chesters shown to the
door at all hazards of the future, but ere she could ring Alison
Home's hard and wrinkled visage appeared, and she announced that
"Captain Chesters' servant, Trayner, wished to speak with him
immediately."

"Send him up then," said Chesters, sulkily.  "Most singular, this!
What the deuce can the fellow want with me?  I left him in the
stables."

"He says, sir, that he has something for your private ear," replied
the greyhaired domestic.

Now Chesters had so many strange involvements, and so many secrets to
keep, that he very palpably changed colour on hearing this, and felt
compelled to go to his servant, who had dismounted at the door, and
was now dressed in livery, with an orthodox cockade and brown leather
belt.

Mary only heard Chesters utter a fierce exclamation of astonishment
in reply to a communication made by Trayner, who was coolly smoking
one of his master's cigars, concerning "Willowdean and a telegram;"
and then, without the courtesy of returning to bid her adieu, or
making any explanation whatever, her unwelcome visitor rode off
towards Chesterhaugh, accompanied by his servant; and Mary could see
from her window that as they galloped along the road they were side
by side and in close and rapid conversation.

About what?




CHAPTER XV.

THE SPRING EVENING.

Ere the night fell and the moonlight paled out on the Lammermuirs and
on the sea, Mary was fated to hear what this secret communication was!

"What had happened at Willowdean--what was the nature of the
telegram?" she asked of her own heart and of Alison in vain; the
discovery of Cyril's body in the sea, or cast upon the shore perhaps,
and even she who loved him so, yea as her own soul, dared not ask
permission to look upon his pallid face again!

This conviction was a great, a bitter, and a mortifying grief!  Well,
well, if the world were going to pieces, she knew that she must
attend to the health and wants of her father, and on looking at her
watch, she found that she had not a moment to lose if she would be at
the station when the train from the North came in.  She tied on her
smart hat and veil, took her tiny muff, and set forth.

She might have sent Alison Home, but she had a craving to be a little
abroad in the open air, for the atmosphere of the house seemed to
stifle her, and there were times when the clamorous fluttering of her
heart amounted to agony, and when she felt as one in a dream--one
enduring sorrows not her own, but those of another.

She passed the thicket and the stile where she had been wont to meet
him in the evening, and she glanced at both wistfully.  No need was
there now to wait with anxious heart to watch the clock, or wonder
whether papa would be asleep, awake, or fretful when the time for
trysting came.  All was ended now! and yet as she looked at the rude
steps of the stone stile, grey and spotted with lichens, it seemed to
her as if she could, in her mind's eye, trace the outline of her
handsome and winning lover's figure, waiting for her as of old--as he
had waited only five days ago--her lost Cyril!

Never more!  Oh, how much of sadness, of bitterness, and
hopelessness, do these two words contain!

Save in a few hollow places on the hill sides, the snow of the
preceding night had totally disappeared.  The sunset deepened with a
warm and russet glow on the summits of the pastoral hills, the air
was balmy, and the chirping of the birds came clearly upon it, with
the voices of children from a distance.  The green buds were swelling
in the hedgerows, and near a cottage which had once been a lodge of
Lonewoodlee (now let to a cottar) she saw a group of rosy, barelegged
"bairns" peeping with wonder into the first bird's nest of the
season, which some unwary sparrow had built in the cleft of an open
bush.  The rooks were cawing aloft, the brown hares were gliding
among the glistening furrows of the freshly ploughed fields, or
"mains" as they are named in the Merse; there was a fragrance and
odour of verdure in the air, and though the month is usually a rude
and boisterous one, Mary, as she walked rapidly on, could not be
insensible of the genial influence of spring.

Pausing at times, she looked fondly and sadly back to the gloomy old
Tower, the tourelles, bartizan, and stone roof of which stood out so
darkly against the bright blue evening sky.  There, in the stirring
times of old, by the Border Laws, or _Leges Marchiarum_, her
forefathers had been compelled to keep a watch with alarm-bell and
fire-pan, to give warning to the North, to Soltra and Dunpender, when
the English crossed the Tweed or entered the Merse, and now their
descendants trembled at the approach of an angry creditor!  How long
would her dwelling be there, and where would be her home when--but
she thrust _that_ thought aside as too painful, and hastened on.

She passed ere long the handsome modern gate and Grecian lodge of
Willowdean, the pillared peristyle and white façade of which she
could see at a distance between the trees of the park (or chase, it
might be called in England), and an irrepressible sob escaped her for
one who would never more be under its roof; and thus, with the tears
welling but unseen beneath her closely tied veil, she entered the
market town of Willowdean, which owed its existence and prosperity to
the Wedderburns.

It is a quaint old Scottish Burgh of Barony, and was so long before
the union of the kingdoms, remaining very much unchanged for more
than a century after, and singularly so, as in Scotland nothing
stands, for there whatever fails to "go ahead" must decline and pass
away, like many of the burghs of Fife.  It has stood almost
unchanged, even by the railway, save for the erection of a few gayer
shops and taverns--unchanged in its general aspect since Queen Mary
made her famous ride to Hermitage, and from its aspect, its cross--a
slender shaft of stone surmounted by a mouldered unicorn--its kirk,
and crow-stepped gables abutting on the street, its quaint outshots
and turnpike stairs, one might expect to see the mailed knights of
Mary, or buff-coated troopers of Leslie, fresh from Marston Moor,
drinking at the market well, or "chaffing" the girls at the grated
windows of the houses, some of which still show the iron crosses of
St. John of Jerusalem.

The town once boasted of a castle, but after being burned by some
Northumberland raiders in the time of Charles II., it has dwindled
down to a few vaults and a green mound, the favourite resort of the
children for games and play.  Willowdean still boasts of a parochial
barn, called a kirk, where God is worshipped according to the cold
and stern form ordained in 1559 by the Lords of the Congregation,
when Mary of Guise was Regent of the realm, enlightened Scottish
lords who could barely make their mark like an Irish navvy, and who
(could such an investment have been made) would have sold their
fathers' skins to Queen Elizabeth.

This church had, however, attached to it the Gothic fragment of an
older fane, still called the Lennox Aisle, and there lay most of the
forefathers of her who now entered the street afoot, and sick and sad
at heart.

To many of the "burgh merchants" in that little town was her father
in debt, yet everywhere did Mary meet with respect; all touched their
hats to her, for the memory of her father's openhanded youth was a
popular one: and in a place so sequestered and out of the route of
the tourist, even in fast-changing and radical Scotland, some more
respect is paid at times to the representative of an old family than
might be accorded to a wealthy parvenu, and all the more readily when
the said representative is a lovely young girl like Mary Lennox.

In the middle of the street--the town has but one, with a few
thatched closes or alleys diverging therefrom--she encountered a
group of little children dancing hand-in-hand and singing in chorus
one of those local rhymes which are so peculiar to the Lowlands, as
they came merrily along, enumerating, to an air of their own, several
localities, thus--

  "Braw Bughtrig and braw Belchester,
    Leetholm and the Peel;
  The lad wha gets a wife frae there
    Will ever do weel;
  But better far in Willowdean,
    And bonnier will he see,
  If he'll ride further up the muir,
    Unto the Lonewoodlee."

Then, as they suddenly perceived and recognised Miss Lennox, the
little creatures blushed and curtseyed; and, but for the chronic
sadness of her heart, Mary could have smiled at the old rhyming
compliment to the alleged beauty of the ladies of her family.

At last she reached the railway station, of which no description is
necessary, as such edifices bear a strong family resemblance all over
Europe.  There were the same liveried porters loitering about that
one sees everywhere; passengers with labelled luggage awaiting the
up-train or the down-train; the book-stall, with its inevitable rows
of yellow, green, or red novels, Punch, and the _Illustrated News_.

Mary had not long to wait.  With a shrill and vicious whistle, the
train for England swept out of the tunnel, a long pennant of smoke
streaming behind, and its crimson lamps flaming like the eyeballs of
a demon in front, for the twilight had deepened to the gloaming now.
Clang went the bell, the engine "slowed," and, amid the bustle, the
opening and slamming of doors, the production and notching of
tickets, the choice of seats and stowal of luggage, the darting of
the thirsty into the refreshment-room, and so forth--for all had to
be adjusted and the train off in five minutes, if it would avoid the
express for Berwick--Mary looked in vain for the familiar face of the
friendly guard who frequently did her little services, and who was to
bring her the important packet from town.

The man on duty this evening was a total stranger to her.

"A packet for you, Miss?" said he, in reply to her inquiries.  "What
is the name?"

"For Mr. Lennox, of Lonewoodlee."

"It was given to a gentleman in the train; he offered to take charge
of it."

"By whom?"

"The other guard, to whom he seemed well known, and to whom he
offered in person to deliver it."

"Singular; a gentleman!" exclaimed Mary, in vague alarm that the
long-expected packet might be lost or stolen.

"Yes, Miss; a regular gentleman, for he gave me a crown when smoking
in the van."

"But where is he?"

"Yonder, on the platform, Miss.  Seats, gentlemen, seats!" and
cutting short the conversation, the bustling official hurried away,
touching the brass-lined peak of his cap.

Clang went the doors and the bell; the engine panted and screamed,
the train glided away, and Mary went towards the gentleman indicated
by the guard.  He was speaking in an animated manner to a few of the
loiterers on the platform, who had formed a group about him, and Mary
fancied that he had a small sealed packet in his hand.

Irresolute about addressing him, she lingered for a moment, till
something in his air and manner stirred a secret chord in her heart,
which vibrated painfully, and a low cry escaped her lips, when the
handsome face, with the well-known moustache and tender loving eyes
of the lost one, was turned towards her!

"Cyril!" she exclaimed, and would have fallen, but that his arm was
instantly around her.

"Mary--Mary Lennox!"

It was he, but looking paler and thinner, and strangely attired; and
they met thus abruptly amid a group of people on the open and most
prosaic of places--a railway platform!

Great though his excitement, Cyril Wedderburn had that horror of a
"scene" natural to every well-bred Briton, and rapidly recovering his
consciousness of the necessity for appearing calm and unmoved, he
lifted his hat, and said--

"Take my arm, Miss Lennox: allow me to see you out of this place.  I
have here the packet addressed to your father.  I hope to hear that
he is better.  Good evening, gentlemen and friends; thanks for all
your kind wishes and congratulations."

He drew Mary's arm through his, waved his hat to the people who had
recognised and crowded about him on the platform, welcoming his
return--resuscitation, what you will--with a genuine cheer that died
away in a buzz of speculation and wonder, for the Wedderburns were
deservedly popular in the district; and then he led away Mary, who
was in a state of intense bewilderment, for much of utter terror was
mingled with her joy, so that her steps tottered as they left the
station and proceeded through the street of Willowdean, where the
windows of the little shops were beginning to be lit with feeble gas,
or still more feeble candles, and from thence out upon the familiar
highway that stretched beyond.




CHAPTER XVI.

A HAPPY WALK HOME.

"Cyril," exclaimed Mary, in a low but piercing voice, while she clung
to her lover's arm; "in the name of mercy and for the love of blessed
Heaven, explain all this terrible mystery!"

"Oh, my darling, my darling, how pale and wan you look!" he
exclaimed, as he lifted her veil and kissed her tenderly.

"And you too, Cyril.  But speak of yourself, not me," she added,
dropping her head wearily on his breast, and giving way to a
passionate fit of weeping.  "What has happened to you, where have you
been, and how have you returned in so sudden and unexpected a manner,
from the grave--from the very grave, as it seems to me?  I have wept
and mourned for you as one who was numbered with the dead!  Oh, the
horror, the black, indescribable horror of those days and nights now
past!"

"My tender, loving Mary!"

"Oh, Cyril, hold me up.  I feel as if I could die just now--the shock
of joy is so, so great to see you again; to hear your voice, for the
sound of which I have longed in a species of silent, gasping
yearning, that no words can describe, and which God alone knows!"

"So have I longed for you, Mary," said he, in a broken accent, for
her words and the tone of her voice moved him deeply, as it had in it
that wonderful tremolo which added so much to its power.

Oh, was it real, and not a dream?--each asked of their hearts--this
clinging and gasping embrace in which they both indulged for a time,
in a happy, happy silence, too deep for words.

After a pause, Cyril said--

"I telegraphed to my brother Robert that I should arrive by this
train, and asked him or Horace Ramornie to meet me with the trap or
carriage, and drive me home; but there must have been some mistake,
for neither are here, which is lucky, as I shall have the unexpected
joy of a walk home with you, my darling Mary, my wee wifie, who,
strange to say, has been the first to greet me!"

So this must have been the telegram referred to by Trayner in his
rapid communication to Chesters, who, in the true spirit of jealousy,
fear, or malevolence, had ridden off, without mentioning it to her.

"Surely you would not have left me another night in grief and
suspense?" said Mary, plaintively.

"Not another hour!  I telegraphed to the family at Willowdean, first,
of my safety; and again that I was to be home by the evening train.
I meant to have gone to Lonewoodlee by the way, my excuse for doing
so being this packet, which I should have left for you, with a
sufficient message, if we had failed to meet.'"

"But the mystery, Cyril--the mystery of your story; tell me all!" she
implored, with a heart full of love and natural curiosity.

In a few words he rapidly sketched all the adventures of the night on
which he disappeared--adventures he would yet have to detail to many
a listener, but to few that would listen so lovingly and breathlessly
as poor Mary Lennox--horrors that were to come back in many a dream!
He told of his dining at Chesterhaugh; of the night spent in rash
gambling there; of his desire, but failure, to get possession of her
father's bill; and then how his horse had proved first restive and
afterwards mad, and completely ungovernable; of the fierce race by
Buncle-edge and Falaknowe--a ride like that of the Wild Huntsman of
German renown--till he was borne right into the sea; of the narrow
escape he had from being dashed to pieces; but how, by the aid of
kind Providence, he had reached the fragment of isolated rock, and
sat there in cold and misery, with the moon waning, the night
deepening, and the tide rising round him, while all hope of reaching
the land by swimming was futile, as the cliffs rose sheer like a wall
from the sea, which was rolling with a mighty force against them; and
Mary heard all this, with hands clasped upon his arm, with
exclamations of compassion and dismay, with her eyes full of tears,
and her parted lips revealing her closely set little teeth.

He described, that around him there wheeled nights of the snow-white
solan goose, the black guillemot, the grey gull, and other sea birds;
and that once there came a seal--a seadog, as the Scottish fishermen
name it--which swam in circles round the rock, with its bullet-shaped
head, black glittering eyes, and two fore-paws alone visible, as it
paddled about; and often the memory of that incident came back in
dreams, for he had envied the animal its amphibious nature, while the
rising tide flowed over his feet and legs; and often, in the same
visions of night, came back the sounds he had heard when there--the
gurgling, the hissing, and the surging of the sea, as the ridgy waves
succeeded each other in unvarying rage, round the rock on which he
sat and against the cliffs that beetled over him.

Mary shuddered and shed many a tear while she listened, though Cyril
appeared to speak somewhat lightly of the affair, as "a devil of a
spill--an awful mess--a narrow escape," and so forth.

The strange weird scream of his dying horse was ultimately the means
of saving him.  It had been heard to seaward on board of a small
fishing smack, the skipper of which lay to, and sent his little boat
in shore to discover whence that unearthly cry proceeded; and two men
who rowed it, and whose superstitious fears inspired them with the
utmost unwillingness for the duty, fortunately descried Cyril by the
starlight, and were just in time to save him.  He swam off towards
them, and was taken on board the smack, speechless with cold and
exhaustion.

The kind fishermen took every means in their limited power to restore
him; they placed him in one of the only two berths they possessed,
for the entire crew consisted but of five men, and of these three
were always on duty; they drew off his wet clothes, covered him
cosily up, and gave him the only medicine they knew of--a totfull of
hot stiff grog--and then he fell into a deep slumber.

When morning came, the smack was out at sea, on her homeward voyage
to the coast of Angus.  Cyril awoke feverish and ill.  The atmosphere
of the little den in which he lay was redolent of tar, stale
herrings, and coarse tobacco, and every way was not conducive to a
speedy recovery.  His head ached fearfully; his whole frame felt as
if bruised and battered; his senses wandered, and it was not until
the evening of the second day that his preservers learned who he was;
whence came the singular cry they had heard; how he chanced to be on
that isolated rock, and that they would be well rewarded for having
saved him.

The smack was light; they had sold their cargo of herrings to the
French at Dunbar, and were anxious now to haul up for their own
homes, somewhere about Montrose; but a head wind drove them into the
North Sea, and four days elapsed before they succeeded in landing him
at Lunan Bay, where he lost no time in telegraphing home, and
starting by the first train for the Merse; and this was the solution
of all that recent sorrow and mystery.

"Had my left foot not been freed from the stirrup in my fall, or had
my horse not uttered that remarkable cry which attracted the
attention of the fishermen, I had been lying now a drowned corpse in
yonder sea, Mary," said Cyril, in conclusion.

Mary still sobbed, as she was terribly excited by the whole
narrative; but joy made her face seem radiantly beautiful; and in a
burst of confidence that was perhaps not overwise, she told him of
Chesters' love-declaration to herself, and of his having been _en
perdue_ in the thicket on the night they had last met.  Cyril's eyes
sparkled with indignation; he knit his brows, gave his moustache a
fierce twirl, and said--

"I see it all, Mary.  His jealousy made me the victim of some foul
revengeful trickery, which I shall yet have unravelled and punished!"

Mary omitted to speak of her detention at Chesterhaugh; for now the
annoyance to which Chesters had subjected her more than ever by his
address; her repugnance of him; the mortification she had
occasionally felt as a high-spirited girl for the secresy of her love
affair with Cyril himself, and the plans and precautions they were
compelled to observe, were all forgotten in the joyous conviction of
his safety--the charm of his manner and presence.

What delight to lean again upon his arm; to feel her hand pressed
caressingly to his side; to look into his face and hear his voice;
and, ah! how different were his tone and bearing from those of
Chesters, when with genuine interest he asked about the health of her
father.  Was this evening walk not all a dream, a sudden madness?

"Oh, Cyril, you do not know my papa!" she exclaimed, in answer to
some remark.

"Save by sight, as mere neighbours, and not very friendly ones now;
but I wish I did know him."

"He is altering fast, and looking so fearfully wizened and pale, even
I, who see him hourly, can perceive that."

"Poor old man!"

At last they were close to Lonewoodlee, where the old Tower and its
dense thicket stood sharply defined in purple shadow against the last
flush of light that lingered in the amber tinted west.

Mary still clung to Cyril, loth to part from one so recently and so
suddenly restored to her, till he whispered softly in her ear--

"You forget, Mary dearest, that I have a fond mother at Willowdean,
longing to see me too."

"True.  I am most selfish in detaining you so long from all at home,
and I have to read or sing papa asleep; for he cannot read now, and
his nights are so dull and lonely.  Oh, Cyril, how I shall sing
to-night!"

"Would that I were there to hear you.  Good-night, my sweet Mary,
until the usual hour to-morrow.  Good-night."

Another moment and he was gone, and Mary lingered at the gate until
his rapid footsteps died away.

"Where was all this to end!" thought Cyril, as he walked hastily
homeward.  He felt, as a gentleman and man of honour, that this
secret love for Mary Lennox was unjust to her, and might peril her
good name; it was trifling with her undoubted position and with his
own, and he resolved that, come what might, he must ere long declare
it to his family, despite the mohurs, rupees, and thousands of cousin
Gwendoleyne, and the ambitious views of his father and mother, the
latter especially.

Mary had as yet but one thought, as she rushed with a happy heart
into her room and threw off her hat and sealskin jacket; that the
first kiss after his return had been on her cheek, even before that
of his mother.

Was this a little bit of the superstition or the selfishness which
exists with all love?  Perhaps so; but then she had barely a bowing
acquaintance with Lady Wedderburn, and situated as she was with her
son, the humiliation of that circumstance was somewhat galling to
Mary's pride.

But how wild was the joy of the impulsive girl!  How she sang and
played that night for hours, lost in happy, happy dreams!  He had
been restored to her again, her lover, the hope of her future life;
he who to her was "gallant and gay as the young Lochinvar;" and yet,
who in reality, was only a very good specimen of a gentlemanly
officer of the Line.  She forgot all about the tenor and brevity of
his leave of absence, and that he might be summoned away at a
moment's notice; she forgot all but that he had been restored to the
world and to her, and that he loved her, oh, so truly!  Of all fears
she was oblivious for a time, till other thoughts than joyous ones
stole gradually into her mind; and then her white fingers strayed
mechanically over the ivory keys of the piano, and her tremulous
voice, like the last faint notes, died away.

Alas! there can be no human happiness without some alloy!

She now recalled some of Rooke Chesters' malevolent hints and
speeches about the wealth and beauty of the expected cousin, and of
Lady Wedderburn's evident views concerning her and Cyril; though from
what precise source he drew those deductions was quite unknown,
unless the ready invention of a mind inflamed by jealousy.

When this Indian heiress came, rich and lovely--for Chesters had
assured Mary that she was lovely--would there be any change in their
destiny?  Oh, she must not think of that; Cyril could never change,
never forget all they had been to each other.

"Alas!" thought she, "this man--this Rooke Chesters, for whom I care
nothing--can come openly to see me, to talk, and even, if I permitted
him, to walk with me; while Cyril--Cyril Wedderburn, who is to be my
husband, whom I love so; love as Heaven alone knows--I see only by
stealth!  It is hard; very hard!  But this is not a night on which I
should repine," and she lifted up her hands and her soft eyes, while
her heart was full of prayerful thoughts and gratitude, to Heaven.

"Forsaking may be human, but betraying is the vice of devils;" and
Chesters only sought to betray, to lure, and destroy.  Yet Mary knew
not of that, though aware of his terrible character, for he had
actually, but somewhat jocularly, spoken of marriage; and Mary
shivered at the thought.

In her small turret-chamber that night--the same from the window of
which she had heard the wild cry and seen the galloping horse--she
shed happy tears, as she prayed beside her little couch; for the
gloom that once enveloped her soul had departed, and all the bitter
past seemed now a vanished dream!




CHAPTER XVII.

COUSIN GWENNY.

Great contentment and supreme happiness reigned at Willowdean, where
long consultations were held by the gentlemen concerning Chesters,
who had suddenly taken his departure to London.  They had doubts of
what to do, for suspicion was not proof, and Cyril had to conceal the
espionage practised on himself at Lonewoodlee, and that jealousy had
aught to do with the supposed treacherous trick played to his horse.
Hence the whole affair seemed inexplicable to his father, his
brother, and cousin, till in Cyril's mind there stole a kind of
cloudy doubt even of Chesters' guilt.

"Could it be possible," he asked of himself, "that he could conceive
and carry out a scheme so singularly infamous against an unsuspecting
guest?"

For the next day or two, Cyril found some difficulty in keeping his
appointments with Mary, for his doting mother could scarcely trust
her tall, curly-pated and heavily-moustached captain of Fusileers out
of her sight, she had so much to ask and to learn: and nobly were the
poor skipper of Angus and the four fishermen of his smack rewarded.
Cyril, however, wrote little notes to Mary, making his excuses, and
expressing his love for her; and such notes were a great solace to
her in her loneliness at home.

How trivial now seemed the adoption of mourning for Uncle William;
the suits of black for the family and servants, the note-paper and
cards with sable edges and crests, when compared with the gloom of
such preparations for the loss of the heir of Willowdean!

Cyril knew that of course he was his father's heir; and that if God
and the Russian bullets spared him in the expected war, he might in
time become the Baronet of Willowdean; but with all his interest,
personal and sentimental, in the old family estate, he felt bored
when his father talked to him, as country gentlemen will talk, of the
probable appearance of the crops and the face of the country, of the
farm and pasture land, of top dressing, subsoil, and tile drainage,
especially for the lower meadows and three great fields of the
home-farm; the weight of pigs.  "By Jove," Cyril would mentally
exclaim, "the weight of pigs!"

He could feel an interest when the county pack was on the _tapis_, or
when he heard that the covers would require looking to; the patent
powder to feed the pheasants; the rooting out of weasels and
foumarts; of the new stables, and so forth; but never in agriculture,
which, in all its branches, he viewed and voted as an unqualified
bore.  Hunting after a night poacher, who occasionally visited the
home-farm in "the glimpses of the moon," was more in Cyril's way than
the alternation of green or white crops, and so forth; but his
thoughts, if not with the regiment, were ever at Lonewoodlee.

Horace Ramornie felt some interest in Sir John's topics, for though
he had not an acre of land, he repined occasionally at the loss of
the old patrimonial estates of his family, and felt somewhat too
keenly his dependence on his uncle.

Lady Wedderburn was now intent apparently on the arrangements
necessary for the reception of the expected ward; but the chief
thought of her mind was obvious to all, and she could not avoid
recurring to it whenever she and Sir John were alone.

"I know that Cyril cannot quit his regiment with honour just now,
when it has got letters of readiness," said she, on one occasion;
"but, dear Sir John, I should so like him to sell out, and reside
quietly at home.  He is not obliged to pursue his career as a
soldier, like Horace, who is penniless."

"Quit!" repeated Wedderburn, testily, "I should think not.  Quit on
the eve of a war!  I would rather see the lad in his coffin than
taunted with showing the white feather."

"In three days Gwenny will be here, and if she is so handsome as
Doctor Chutnay of Madras assures us she is, she must be charming!
And if Cyril must go soon, I should wish--wish that he were married,
or at least, solemnly contracted to her.  You understand me,
Wedderburn?"

"Why such hasty hopes and plans, Kate?"

"Because, as I have already hinted, some one else may marry her, and
it would be an act of injustice to Cyril and ourselves to permit all
her wealth to pass out of the family.  Besides, our neighbour
Chesters, every way a bad style of man, may see and admire her, with
views of his own."

"If he ever should meet her, which after recent events I think barely
probable," said Sir John, somewhat angrily.

"Then there is the Master of Ernescleugh." "I don't envy your task as
_chaperon_," said Sir John, laughing; "you will be in dread of every
young fellow in the county!  But suppose that the girl may have been
foolish enough to fall in love with some enterprising subaltern on
the overland route home--we hear of such results every day--some
fellow in whose pleasant society she has been cast by sea and land
for a month or more?  She may come here engaged; married, perhaps!"

The bare suggestion of such a catastrophe filled Lady Wedderburn with
unutterable dismay; all the more easily, perhaps, that the same fear
had occurred to herself.

The three days glided away.  By the evening train Miss Gwendoleyne
Wedderburn was expected to arrive from London; and Cyril, who had not
seen Mary Lennox for four consecutive days, resolved to take
advantage of the incidental bustle at home to ride over to
Lonewoodlee for an hour after dinner; but just as Gervase Asloane was
removing the cloth, and placing the decanters before Sir John, Lady
Wedderburn said--

"You are aware, Cyril, that your cousin will be at the railway
station in two hours from this time?"

"Yes.  Does she travel alone?" asked Cyril, with provoking
indifference of manner.

"Alone.  No.  Could you imagine that she would do so?"

"How then--with whom?  Has old Chutnay come all the way from Madras
with her?"

"She travels with her maid.  You will, of course, go over with the
carriage to meet her, as your father has complained of a twinge or
two of gout."

"Can't Horace or Robert go?" asked the Captain, bluntly, as he filled
his glass with golden-coloured Château d'Yquem from a white crystal
bottle.

"If Sir John cannot go, you should and must, as his representative."

"Why must the whole house be under arms because a little Indo-Briton
is coming home?"

"Cyril!" she exclaimed, lifting up her plump white hands.

"Besides, mamma dear," said he, with something of his coaxing manner
when a boy, "the fact is, I have a particular engagement."

"With whom?"

The Captain coloured slightly, gave his moustache a twirl, and said--

"Oh, what does it signify?  To look at a horse I wish to take back
with me to the regiment."

"Not a bay hunter, I hope," said his brother Robert.

"I have had enough of bay hunters," replied Cyril, with a short
laugh; and then he added, "Horace, my man, as your superior officer,
I order you to go upon this tour of duty."

"With pleasure," replied Horace; but Lady Wedderburn struck in--

"If Cyril is not courteous enough to go for his cousin, let Robert
appear alone.  Why trouble poor Horace?"

"Why not, mamma?  What trouble can it be to look after a pretty girl?
Let Horace go, by all means."

"But _he_ is not her cousin!"

"What does that matter, Kate?  Let him go also," said Sir John, while
a droll but furtive smile was exchanged by Cyril and Horace Ramornie;
"the carriage will surely hold three.  I've known it come from a ball
with six.  Her maid may sit in the rumble with the servant--an
arrangement which perhaps may be agreeable to them both.  Asloane,
order the carriage to be here punctually at seven."

Determined to have his own way, and no longer grieve Mary by his
protracted absence, Cyril left the dinner-table early, while Lady
Wedderburn had serious misgivings about him; and punctually at the
hour ordered, the handsome family carriage, with its two bright
coloured bays, with plated harness; its two resplendent lamps, and a
pair of spotted Dalmatian dogs in attendance, departed with Robert
and Horace Ramornie for the railway station, from whence, in less
than an hour, it returned with the heiress and her half-caste Indian
maid, a tawny woman, whose dress, as yet, was a strange but ample
scarlet garment, enveloping her whole person; and the tall footmen
were immediately in requisition to carry in her bullock trunks,
portmanteaus, and a huge "overland," covered with black canvas and
bound with iron.

More than ever provoked and piqued by the unaccountable absence of
Cyril at this interesting juncture, Lady Wedderburn--though after her
late terror she felt she must forgive him everything--started forward
with all eagerness as the drawing-room door was thrown open by
Asloane, and a wonderfully handsome, and evidently highly-bred young
girl, attired in a fashionably accurate suit of deep mourning, and
all in the most exquisite taste, was led in by Horace and Robert, who
saw--as the latter afterwards said--his mother's "company smile"
brighten into one of genuine affection and sympathy, as she embraced
and kissed on both cheeks the young heiress, of whom she was now to
be the custodian and chaperon.

"Welcome to Willowdean, my dear, dear girl," said Sir John, taking
both her hands in his, and saluting her with great tenderness.  "I am
your old uncle Wedderburn; yet not perhaps so very old, after all,"
he added, with a smile, while she looked wistfully and earnestly in
his face, as if seeking to trace there a likeness to her dead father;
but though striving hard to do so, she failed, yet thought in her
heart--

"I shall always love him, because he is my papa's only brother.  And,
dear Aunt Wedderburn, these are my cousins?"

"One is your cousin Robert.  Cyril you shall see ere long, Gwenny."

"Doctor Chutnay, of Madras, who was so kind to poor papa and me, has
seen my cousin Cyril at Chatham Barracks, and says he is so handsome!"

"He is, indeed, Gwenny!" said Lady Wedderburn, greatly delighted by
this remark; "but now, dearest girl, you must be weary with your long
journey, though you would stop at York and Berwick, of course.
Permit me to see you to your room, or Miss M'Caw will do so, and take
off some of your things, if your maid is too weary."

And with a bow of acquiescence, and a bright pleasant smile, the
young lady, who had evidently made a most favourable impression on
all, retired to her own apartments; while Lady Wedderburn turned to
Sir John, and said--

"A delightful girl--so charming and winning!  How provoked I am by
Cyril's protracted absence--about a horse, too.  Who goes to buy
horses at night?"




CHAPTER XVIII.

FIRST IMPRESSIONS.

Fortunately for his mother's peace of mind, Cyril arrived even before
his cousin descended from her rooms, where her own maid, Zillah, and
Lady Wedderburn's abigail had begun to unpack the huge overland and
portmanteaus, which were filled with Indian marvels in the form of
Delhi needlework and Champac jewellery of miraculous fabric; Dacca
muslins, ivory fans and puzzle-balls; inlaid boxes of ivory and
silver from Bombay, for essences and perfumes; and now, with memory
of the sad and tender kiss of Mary Lennox lingering on his cheek--a
kiss all the sadder and perhaps foreboding, as she had heard of the
arrival of this terrible Indian heiress--he had to welcome and salute
his cousin, to whom he tendered many "apologies for an absence that
was so perfectly unavoidable;" and then came coffee, with a little
repast for the fair traveller, who, though conscious that she was an
object of undisguised interest, and as such, undergoing inspection,
never betrayed the slightest confusion; for the mode of life in
India, and the nearly total want of privacy peculiar to it, together
with the number of persons, faces, places, and scenes she had met on
the long route overland, rendered her perfectly self-possessed,
without, however, the least over-confidence.

Gwendoleyne Wedderburn was more than a pretty girl.  Though
colourless--even pale--she was in fact remarkably beautiful, with a
vast quantity of fine dark hair, and very dark hazel eyes, with long
black lashes, which she inherited from her Welsh mother, "Gwendoleyne
Ap-Rhys of Llanchillwydd," as Lady Wedderburn frequently reminded
her.  Her hands and feet were beautifully formed; she carried her
head perhaps a little too haughtily; but she was conscious of her own
appearance, and had been petted and treated with extreme deference in
the sunny land she had come from.  Her mouth was very perfectly
curved, and when in repose and not smiling--which was seldom--the
upper lip resembled a little Cupid's bow, while the under was like a
tiny cherry.

She formed, Cyril thought (and he was no bad judge), a perfect
picture, as she sat a little apart from all at a small tripod table,
with a little hastily-prepared dinner before her, served on Dresden
china.  Her figure, slight and graceful, clad in a crape dress, the
blackness of which contrasted so powerfully with the dazzling
whiteness of her shoulders as they gleamed in the light of the
gaselier which fell in a flood about her.  Her dress was cut low
about the neck and bust--Lady Wedderburn thought a little _too_ low,
especially when her black lace shawl fell off.  A necklet of jet
beads encircled her delicate and slender throat, and, save it and one
magnificent ring of pearls and diamonds, other ornament she had none
but her beautiful hair, which was dressed to perfection.

"Heavens! if that should be an engagement ring!" thought Lady
Wedderburn, as she glanced nervously at the girl's hand.

Her face was expressive of innocence and sweetness, just suggestive a
little of pride; and every moment she became more and more radiant as
she became more familiar with those about her, and jested and chatted
with her "three newly-found cousins," as she called them.  Her manner
and voice were sweet, and the girl was full of pretty ways; thus
every action of her head or hands was graceful.

"Suppose all these three young fellows fall in love with her, my Lady
Wedderburn will be in a nice dilemma then!  And what is more likely
to happen in a country house, where people have so little to do, and
are so much thrown together?" thought Sir John Wedderburn, who was
regarding her with a fond and fatherly smile, and seeking to trace
out some memory of his brother, the Willie of other days--the days of
rambling, riding, and bird-nesting in Renton Woods and
Willowdean--but save a phrase or two which escaped her, he found none
for a time.

Lady Wedderburn claimed nearly all the good points of Gwendoleyne, as
inherited from the Wedderburns; but Sir John saw that the girl was
more like what her beautiful Welsh mother had been when first she
came to Willowdean on her happy bridal tour, ere she went to India,
the land of splendid exile; and Cyril, while he hung over her chair,
while he conversed with her and looked into the bright depths of her
dark and liquid eyes, was thinking how different was the lot of this
wealthy and beautiful cousin as contrasted with that of the lonely
girl he had lately quitted, and who at that moment was probably
hanging about her father's sick bed; and he felt that his genuine and
growing admiration of Gwendoleyne's beauty was a species of treason
to Mary Lennox.

Will he always think so?  We shall see.

Though the death of her father was a recent event comparatively,
Gwenny was neither sad nor sorrowful now, save when she spoke of him,
and then would her voice become tremulous and her eyes suffuse with
tears, for she was soft and, by nature, impressionable.

Since leaving Madras, she had been nearly six weeks on the route
home, in a splendid Peninsular and Oriental liner, crowded with gay
cabin passengers, officers of the Queen's and East Indian armies,
Civil Service men, &c.--happy fellows, all coming home on leave or to
retire altogether, as the case might be.

She had seen many marvels that were even glories to her Indian eyes,
since she had watched with tears, from the lofty poop of the _Rajah_,
the low, flat, sandy shore of Madras, so long her home, with the
Castle of St. George and all the white minarets and gilded pagodas
sinking into the blue sea, as the vessel steamed out of the roads.
She had seen Aden, with its splintered rocks and arid shore of sand
and ashes, where, according to Mohammedan fable, once the rose-garden
of Irem bloomed; and she had seen the sun's rays shining like the
Scriptural column of fire through the Gate of Tears, as she sailed
past Perim into the Red Sea.  Then she spoke of Suez, with its
mosques and bazaars, and the exciting journey through the desert; and
she clasped her pretty hands at the memory of some of the scenes she
had witnessed there: its occasional horrors--camels, even men, lying
dead, partly decayed or wholly skeletons, and half buried in the
shifting sand, with the black vultures hovering over or perching on
them, and for a background to the whole, the Pyramids rising in the
distance, like purple cones against a sky of fire and amber.  And
then there was the awful thirst endured there--a thirst that rendered
bitter beer, potass, and sherry, veritable nectar, however homely
they may be deemed elsewhere.

Then came the Mediterranean, where she had encountered one of those
sudden storms peculiar to that sea, when its waves changed from dark
blue to pale green, and from thence to purple and silver, while the
rain descended as if the windows of Heaven had been opened again.
But old Gibraltar, its rock and town, its terraces and batteries, had
filled her with delight, and so did everything else.

By that time, most of her _compagnons du voyage_ were married ladies,
old officers, or invalids--a statement which soothed some of Lady
Wedderburn's fears--and so, chatting merrily, she told of all she had
seen; and, in the energy of her manner, and full of her narrative,
which, somehow, she addressed chiefly to Horace Ramornie--but then he
too had recently come home by the P. and O. route--when she laid,
quite involuntarily, her soft ungloved hand, with its white modelled
fingers, on his arm, the young man felt a thrill run through him,
though he was not "a cousin"--a circumstance on which their mutual
Aunt Wedderburn placed so much weight.

Did this new friend, this lovely girl, possess some magnetic power,
or what was it? for Horace felt himself grow giddy with delight
whenever she touched him.

She heard Cyril's thrilling story of his late terrible adventure,
which was so keenly fresh in his mind and in the minds of all the
household, but while she listened, it seemed to Lady Wedderburn, who
was nervously observant, that her eyes, "whose lids seemed to be
fringed with feathers from a bird's wing rather than with ordinary
lashes, so thick and soft lay their shadows on her cheek," from time
to time sought, not those of Cyril, but of Horace Ramornie.

Gwenny was soon found to be generous to a fault, and, by the suitable
presents she lavished on all sides, she made friends with all.  Her
poor papa's magnificent hookah, with its snaky coil of silk and gold,
and its pure amber mouthpiece, she had brought carefully home, with
many other mementos, for her uncle Wedderburn.  To Lady Wedderburn
she gave a beautiful diamond ring, and made poor little Miss Flora
M'Caw radiantly happy by a set of gold Champac ornaments, necklace,
rings, and bracelets, that the Begum Sumroo, or even the terrible
Queen of Delhi, might have worn with credit.

Three days saw her perfectly domesticated and at home in her new
abode; but many things there excited her surprise.

"How few servants you have, dear Auntie!" said she one day, "only the
Kitmutgar Asloane--such a droll name he has!--a few bheesties, syces,
and ayahs, a butler, coachman, two valets, and a few women.  How on
earth do you contrive to do with so few?  We had nearly fifty at our
house in the Choultry, besides six punka-wallahs."

"Fifty! where did you find beds for them all, Gwenny?"

"Oh, they slept on mats, everywhere or anywhere--on the stairs, in
the corridors, on the roof, or in the verandahs, when the rainy
season was over."

"Such arrangements would scarcely suit Willowdean," said her aunt,
laughing.

The fireplaces, the carpeted floors, the total absence of a great
dark punkah swaying noiselessly overhead, all filled her with a
wonder that was almost childish.  Horace and Cyril could both speak
with her of India, having served there; the former two years, and the
latter five.  Poor Bob knew nothing about it, so, as he was rather
ignored, he fumed a little in secret, and thought to himself, "when
those fellows' leave of absence is up, I shall have it all my own
way--patience till then."

All the ideas of the young heiress were odd for a time, being of
course those of an Indo-Briton.  The Indian summer had just ended
when she left Madras, and the Scottish spring had just begun when she
arrived at Willowdean, hence the verdure was not so great as she
might have found it in Devonshire.  The fruit and flowers in the
conservatory seemed all strange, puerile, and meagre to her eyes.
Luxury and splendour there appeared but little.  There was no state
kept, she thought, at Willowdean; no horde of half-nude native
servants, obsequious to slavery; no camels, with gorgeous housings;
no elephants, bearing gilded howdahs with silken curtains; no dhoolie
or palanquin bearers, singing gaily as they trotted along.  She woke
at unearthly hours in the morning, to the astonishment and annoyance
of the butler and house-maids, and wished to have a drive, as if she
were still at the Choultry of Madras; and then, the perpetual clouds,
and more than all the occasional mist from the German Sea--white,
dense, and palpable--filled her with wonder, accustomed as she had
been to the pure and deep blue sky of Hindostan.

She smiled, and even laughed with provoking playfulness, when Lady
Wedderburn, who was fond of "talking peerage," expatiated on the
historical and somewhat shady traditionary glories of the Welsh race
of Ap-Rhys of Llanchillwydd; on the famous Dafydd-ap-Gwilym-ap-Rhys,
who inherited all the virtues of Howel Dha, whose daughter had been
his great-great-grandmother, and gave him the blood of the
Pendragons.  All this sounded odd to Gwenny--very odd--for her papa
had been a man of the world, a thorough man of business, who stuck to
his ledgers and counting-house, always looking forward, setting
little store upon the past, and nothing at all upon a dead ancestry.

Gervase Asloane, the old housekeeper, and other domestics, she
somewhat shocked by using the piano on Sunday, and by yawning, more
than a young lady should, in church--the parochial barn--oh, good
heavens! how unlike it was to the lofty, airy, and white
chunam-coated cathedral of the Bishop of Madras!  Then there was no
organ, and, to her ears, the psalm-singing sounded but as a torrent
of dissonant strains.

Her conversation for a time naturally enough ran on memories of the
brilliant land she had left--the Choultry of Madras, with all its
stately palaces, the black and the white towns, and the catamarans
tossing amid the white and foaming surge, which there boils for ever
on the shore; of chowries and mosquito curtains; of punka-wallahs and
tattywetters; of bheesties and peons, and other persons and things
incomprehensible to Lady Wedderburn, who, however, was greatly
delighted that Cyril could talk with her on such mysterious matters,
and understood what she meant.  But then, unluckily, Horace Ramornie
knew all about them too, and had been in garrison at Vellore; still
Bob sulked, and when Sir John laughed, voted it all "a dreadful bore."

She was astonished to find that people slept in their beds, and not
merely on them: that blankets and broadcloth were used even in
summer; that the butter was neither poured out like cream nor
thickened with dead flies.  The state of the thermometer was a source
of perpetual wonder to her, and she said to Horace--

"Is it as cool always at Willowdean as on the Blue Mountains of
Madras in the wet season?"

But greater surprises were in store for her, when winter came with
its frost and snow, its skaters and curlers on loch and river.

With all her kindness and goodness of heart, Lady Wedderburn, in
pursuit of her secret wish, was singularly injudicious.

Gwenny had come among her relations, an orphan.  Horace Ramornie,
though now a soldier, a young lieutenant of the Line, could remember
the time when he, too, came to Willowdean in the days of his early
orphanage, and the lonely hours when he lay in his little bed at
night, seeing, in fancy, his parents' faces amid the darkness, and
longing, with all a childish longing and yearning, "for a touch of
the vanished hand, and the sound of a voice that was still;" and
these recollections made him very tender in his manner to Gwenny,
though Horace had ever a gentle and a winning way with all women, old
as well as young.

"Cousin Horace," said she, on one occasion, "and you have been an
orphan like myself; how strange!"

"Horace is not your cousin, but Cyril is," said Lady Wedderburn, in a
pointed manner, as she passed through the drawing-room into the
conservatory.

Her words conveyed a volume, for Gwenny blushed scarlet, and the
young man grew pale.

"I am not your cousin, Miss Wedderburn--would that I were," said he,
with a low sigh.

"Why, what difference would it make?"

"For then I might--might claim something more than mere friendship."

"Not my cousin?" queried Gwenny, her dark eyes dilating as she spoke.
"Oh, I know that you are not, though Lady Wedderburn is aunt to us
both; but why call me Miss--say Gwenny, as Cyril and Robert do."

"Gwenny then," said Horace, tremulously and softly, for the girl's
wonderful beauty bewildered, while her frank and candid manner
charmed and entranced him; but he felt a secret consciousness that,
before Lady Wedderburn, to call Gwenny by her abbreviated name would
be rather injudicious.

While shrinking from the idea of rivalling his cousin Cyril, and
earning thereby the anger of such benefactors as his uncle and aunt,
Horace Ramornie was in love with all the deep strength of a young
man's first and genuine passion.  The girl, as we have said, was
undoubtedly beautiful, and if love will _glorify_ all it looks on, to
his eyes the face and presence of Gwendoleyne became as something
divine, and Horace was intoxicated by her!

Night after night he lay awake for hours, feeding his soul with the
idea of Gwendoleyne; longing for and yet nervously dreading his
recall to the regiment, amid this strange and fresh emotion that had
grown in his heart, and which was alike his torment and delight.

He would sigh deeply and bitterly, clasping his hands in the dark, as
he thought of his cousin Cyril's greater chances of success, his
superior position, his attainments, and many genuine good qualities;
and also of his aunt's too perceptible opposition; and then he would
wring them like a love-sick girl, for Horace was by nature shy,
impressionable, and enthusiastic.

Another was wringing her hands at times in Lonewoodlee, and weeping
the silent tears of sad and bitter misgiving!




CHAPTER XIX.

SCHEMES.

Lady Ernescleugh, a large, showy, and fashionable-looking woman, had
driven to Willowdean with her son Everard, the Master of Ernescleugh,
who was a lieutenant in the Household Brigade, on hearing of the new
arrival; and though the future lord was so wealthy that money was no
particular object to him, the beauty of Gwenny, and the piquancy that
was in all she did and said, impressed him favourably; and now a
series of dinners, picnics, drives to various places of interest, and
even a pleasure excursion in his yacht, were schemed out; but, to
some of the former, and more especially the latter, Lady Wedderburn
was decidedly opposed; and the too recent death of Sir John's only
brother afforded her a good pretext for doing so, and keeping Gwenny
at home, while Cyril's leave of absence lasted, at least.

Lady Ernescleugh urged her to take Gwenny to London, and have her
presented at the very first Drawing Room next season; adding, that if
Lady Wedderburn cared not about going to town, she would herself only
be too happy to act as chaperon to a girl so beautiful and so certain
to make a sensation; but the watchful mother had no desire that the
wealthy heiress should be lost to her Cyril in the splendid whirlpool
of London society, while he, perhaps, was fighting the Russians.
Heaven alone knew when, for as yet the scene of the expected war was
vague indeed.

Her whole aim was to "bring the young people together," and in this
instance it was overdone.  Cyril saw through her scheme, though
Gwenny did not; and he was both amused and bored by it, for the
master-thought evinced itself in many trifling ways.

"Gwenny, my darling," said she, one evening in the drawing-room, "I
am sure your cousin longs to hear you sing and play.  Don't you,
Cyril?"

"Of course," replied Cyril, who had been furtively looking at the
French clock on the white marble mantelpiece, and thinking it was
almost time he was drawing near the stile at Lonewoodlee.  "Of
course, if she will so far favour us," he added, hastening to open
the piano, set up the music-frame, and adjust the stool; devoutly
hoping the while that the performance would be as short as possible.

"I play little, and sing less now," said Gwenny.

"Gwendoleyne!" exclaimed Lady Wedderburn, as she shook her lace
lappets and diamond pendants.

"Besides, dearest Aunt, Horace Ramornie is a critic, and I dislike to
play before critics."

"You played and sang to him yesterday," said Robert Wedderburn,
before Horace, who was about to deprecate being deemed a critic,
could speak.

"True; but he pressed me so," said Gwenny, with the faintest blush.

"Come, Horace, and press her again," urged Cyril, with a nonchalant
laugh.

"Will you, then, favour me--us, I mean," whispered Horace, leading
her to the piano, while his cheek reddened.

She seated herself at the instrument, spreading all her crape
flounces over the stool, and began at once the prelude to some little
air she had picked up abroad.  Her voice was sweet and tender; but
neither the words of the song nor her execution were brilliant; and
Cyril, while he listened, admiring the while her ivory neck and
pretty hands, was thinking of another whose fine voice, a glorious
soprano, could thrill his heart to the core.

Lady Wedderburn often found her eldest son and his cousin in the
conservatory--in the library, and even in the billiard-room; and
always left them discreetly, little thinking that Gwenny was in the
first instance merely expatiating on the superior flora of Madras and
the Carnatic; in the second, perhaps selecting a book or so by
Cyril's suggestion; and in the third, that he, so far from talking of
love when looking into the soft dark eyes of Gwendoleyne, was
discussing most learnedly, cue in hand, on the screw and side-twist;
of losing and winning hazards; of what a famous stroke Probyn of ours
was; of winning no end of scores off the red ball running; of pool
and pyramid; all of which were as Sanscrit and Oordoo to the fair
listener.

Busy with his steward or ground bailie, riding about one day, or
rambling the next, with weeder in hand, his sturdy legs cased in
brown leather gaiters, and his wide-awake garnished with hooks and
flies, Sir John spent most of his time out of doors, looking after
his estate, seeing where trees were to be cut down or others planted,
water courses to be changed, or little bridges to be built; and only
once did he speak to Cyril of Gwenny, and even then at Lady
Wedderburn's suggestion.

"If you mean to propose for your cousin, Cyril, you have my free
consent.  Do so, and do it at once.  You know our maxim in
hunting----"

"Never crane if you mean to take a leap?"

"Exactly.  And now I am off to see how the tile-draining gets on."

"Is she not handsome, Cyril?" said Lady Wedderburn on one occasion,
passing her arm through that of her son, as he stood, abstractedly,
looking from the library window on the gravelled terrace, where
Gwenny and Horace were feeding the peacocks with crumbs of biscuit.

"Of course she is handsome," replied Cyril, twirling his mustache;
"but----" and he paused.

"But what?"

"One sees so many handsome girls in every garrison town.  At such
places as Canterbury they are thick as blackberries."

"But few garrison hacks have three hundred thousand pounds."

"Few indeed," replied her gay Captain, laughing.  "And as for loving
them, fellows only go in for that, mother dear, till the route comes.
It is a very limited liability after all; and then we leave them
little pink notes--perhaps a lock of hair; or simply send our
servants with our august bits of pasteboard, scribbled P.P.C., for
Dublin or Delhi, Brighton or Beloochistan, as the case may be; the
mess plate is packed, the colours are cased, and away we go with the
band playing, 'Good-bye, sweetheart, good-bye.'"

"Cyril, you will drive Gwenny to Coldingham to-morrow, and show her
the ruins of the Priory."

"I don't think that a girl who has seen the vast rock-hewn temples of
the Buddhists and the Pyramids of Egypt will care much about our old
Priory.  Besides, she is to be driven there by Horace.  _He_ knows
all about these old places more than I do; and can tell her the whole
story of how Edgar, King of Scotland, built it in the eleventh
century, and gave it to the monks of Durham, and all that sort of
thing."

"Horace!  It is always Horace," said his mother, with undisguised
annoyance.

"Besides, I am engaged."

"How--where, and with whom?" she asked, while the gloom deepened on
her fair and open brow.

"Three questions, mother dear.  You worry me!  How am I engaged?  By
a previous arrangement.  Where?  At Ernescleugh to dinner.  With
whom?  The Master.  And now you have it all," said he, kissing her,
as he used to do in boyhood.

Still she was dissatisfied, and taking his hand in hers, led him into
her beautiful little boudoir--that toy chamber, with the blue satin
and silver hangings, where she kept all Cyril's Indian presents to
herself.

"Come," said she, as she closed the door, "I must speak with you
seriously on the subject that is nearest my heart."




CHAPTER XX.

MY LADY EXPOSTULATES.

Cyril's love for Mary Lennox was great; all the greater that his
heart was an honest one, and that so much of compassion was blended
with his love.  He knew that when he left her for the East she would
be alone--most terribly alone--if her father died; for with his life
her means would pass away.  So Cyril had been thinking seriously of a
secret marriage, and thus making for her such a provision or position
as would compel his family to support her honourably, if he fell in
action, or died of those diseases which follow an army into the field.

But he felt, on consideration, that proposing or effecting such a
measure would perhaps be an act of injustice both to Mary and his
family, placing her, perhaps, in a false position with them in
particular and the world in general.

Too well he knew that to announce openly his engagement, or a
resolution, to marry the poor and penniless Mary Lennox, the daughter
of a bankrupt and spendthrift, would excite the greatest
opposition--perhaps a quarrel with his father and mother, whom he
justly loved and respected.

On the strength of his opposition, Sir John might take very high
ground and cut off his allowance; without it, could he rejoin the
regiment? and if he failed to do so, on the eve of a war, where would
his honour be as a soldier and a man?  He felt sure that even his
brother Robert would open his eyes very wide with wonder at such a
matrimonial scheme; for he had studied law long enough to have
imbibed something of the caution peculiar to the legal tribe.

Cyril's monetary difficulties were not trivial.  He had come on leave
from an expensive regiment to retrench a little, and within a few
days he had lost the bay hunter, just after paying Ernescleugh for
him; and with what he had lost at cards with Chesters, this made over
a thousand pounds.  Then he had some gambling and other debts at
headquarters; but no IOU's were permitted to circulate in the Royal
Fusileers, by a mess regulation of that corps, where the word of a
brother officer was always deemed sufficient.

He felt worried on every hand, and once or twice his evil angel
whispered that, were Mary Lennox less winning, less sweet, and more
than all, less helpless, he might listen to his mother's suggestions;
but no sooner was the evil idea insinuated, than the honest fellow
crushed it in his heart.  He could never be false to his tender,
true, and secret love!

With his mind thus agitated by conflicting thoughts, it may be
imagined with what patience he listened to his mother, who still
retained his hand confidingly and caressingly in hers, as she seated
herself by his side on a blue satin _fauteuil_, and began thus
sententiously--

"The whole of this beautiful estate of Willowdean, when it comes to
you, as in the course of events it will, burdened as it is by sundry
old debts, and the allowances to your brother and Horace Ramornie,
will not yield----"

"And to you, mother dear."

"Don't talk of me; I have no wish to survive my dear husband.  Will
not yield, I was about to say, enough for one of your expensive
tastes and habits; therefore, a wealthy marriage is necessary."

"You flatter me; but I love to be independent."

"And like many independent men, may end by making a fool of
yourself," she added, with more bluntness of manner than was usual
with her.  "Pardon me, Cyril, but perhaps you have done so already."

"How?"

"By forming some unsuitable, if not unworthy, attachment."

Cyril's handsome face flushed and grew pale under her scrutiny.

"Mother dear," said he, gently, "you never spoke to me in this
strange tone before.  Oh, why adopt it now?  I know what you mean and
wish; but do not ask me now, at least."

"Then if you will not be so attentive to your cousin as I wish,
promise me one thing, Cyril."

"Twenty, if you choose, mother."

"That you form no hasty attachment elsewhere, and enter into no
engagement without consulting me?"

Again he coloured perceptibly, for he felt that the keen eyes of his
mother were watching him, while the earnest grasp of her soft white
hand tightened upon his; but he replied, evasively, and with a laugh--

"I shall engage the Russians only.  There, will that suffice you?  I
beg your pardon, dearest mother," he urged, "but do let us cease this
most unpleasant subject: and now I'll have a quiet weed in the
conservatory."

But Lady Wedderburn was not yet done with him, and said, with growing
excitement--

"Am I to conclude that you are a bad, or unnatural son, Cyril, who
would repay my love and anxiety with banter?"

"Because I won't propose to a woman--a girl I don't care for, and who
does not care for me?  By Jove! it is too absurd."

"Your interjections are not choice.  If Gwendoleyne is beautiful in
her eighteenth year, what will she be some time hence, in the full
development of womanhood?"

"Adorably lovely, I know; yet I am in no mood to marry."

"No mood to marry _her_, perhaps."  said Lady Wedderburn, with a
sudden flash in her eyes.  "Think of her wealth."

"I am ashamed to say that I have thought of it," said Cyril, with a
sigh; "all the more that I am pretty close run for money, both here
and at headquarters; but, for Heaven's sake, don't let us have a row
about Gwenny."

"A 'row!'  How can you talk in this slangy mode to me?  How dare you,
Cyril!" she added, rising.  "I thought that you rather boasted of
your good taste over such men as Chesters of Chesterhaugh."

"'Pon my soul, you go beyond old Colonel Bahawder, of the depôt
battalion!  But, my lady mother," said he, kissing her hand with
playful respect, and caressing the braids of her black hair, which
was now becoming seamed with white, "like some of the well-fed perch
in yonder pond, I am content to coquette with the sweets and crumbs
that come my way, even as Gwenny is now throwing them in; but as for
matrimony, that I leave to a sober-sided fellow like Robert, or a
melancholy-eyed Romeo like Horace: and now that I think of it, she
changes colour so visibly when Horace speaks to her, that I begin to
suspect----"

"That he is in love with her?"

"No."

"What then?"

"By Jove! that she is in love with _him_," replied Cyril, quietly
selecting a cigar from a handsome case (embroidered for him by some
confiding garrison beauty), and preparing it for smoking by carefully
biting off the end, and heedless that his mother's eyes were
sparkling with resentment.

"Are you aware that what I urge is also your father's wish?" she
asked.

"Likely enough," replied Cyril, with growing annoyance.  "There are
Baronets as well as Knights of the Golden Calf, and both are more
numerous than the Knights of the Golden Fleece."

"Go on, sir, go on; though I never before heard you sneer at your
good papa."

"How you pervert my words!  I do not sneer; but in all this matter
has poor Gwenny no right to be consulted?"

"Not much; she is so young, she is our ward, whom we are to see
properly bestowed in marriage; and where could she be given more
properly than to one whom we have known from his boyhood."

"And a little earlier," said Cyril, laughing outright.

"You may--nay, you _must_ win her, if you will only try, Cyril."

"But I don't want her.  By Jove! think of a fellow going in for
matrimony and the corps having got its letters of readiness.  I might
be telegraphed away from the very altar--have to make a halt of it, a
half-married man.  There would be a little melodrama for you!  The
whole thing is absurd, mother."

"Well, when you return?"

"Who can count on returning?  There are such things as shot and
shell, shipwreck, camp-fever, frost and starvation, and so forth,"
was the gloomy response.  "I may be taken prisoner by the Russians,
and never heard of again."

"Do not talk so, Cyril, I implore you.  Marry Gwenny and get on the
staff.  If you will still soldier, let it be at home."

"If I do, may I be--cashiered, that is all!"

Usually, Lady Wedderburn's manner had all the perfect serenity and
unruffled calmness peculiar to good and gentle breeding, but now her
brow, wont to be so smooth, became clouded over; wrinkles actually
appeared where none had been visible before; her fine mouth became
compressed, and an expression, almost of baleful spite, stole into
her clear, dark grey eyes, as she drew herself up to her full height,
and said, with half-averted face--

"I know to whom I am indebted for this steady opposition to my
wishes."

"To whom, mother?"

"That artful girl at Lonewoodlee.  Ah! servants will talk, and local
gossips too!" and with a scornful sweep of her skirts, she glided
from the boudoir, even as she did so repenting that she should leave
in wrath the Absalom she had so nearly lost by a terrible fate!

"So, so, it's out at last!  Local gossips have been busy with Mary's
name--curse them!" muttered Cyril.  "Mamma has opened the trenches
with a vengeance!  Well, I am not a boy, though she seems disposed to
treat me as such.  What is to be done now?  See my poor Mary about
it, at all hazards."

As he glanced round his mother's luxurious boudoir, with its blue
satin and silver hangings, its Aubusson carpet of pale green studded
with beautiful bouquets, its marble busts and alabaster vases, and
tiny tables glittering with a crowd of handsome and elegant trifles,
and thought of Mary's gloomy home, his heart felt sick and sore; he
sighed deeply, and entering the lofty and stately conservatory, lit
his cigar, and threw himself on a sofa, to think over his plans for
the future.




CHAPTER XXI.

THE TRYST.

At the close of a recent chapter, it is mentioned that Mary Lennox
had been shedding silent tears, and had not been without secret
misgivings or forebodings of coming sorrow.

Situated as she was with regard to Cyril, it was scarcely possible
that she should feel otherwise than restless when the absence of her
lover, and the circumstance of his having unavoidably broken some
appointments with her, were coupled with the hints of Chesters, and
the stories told her by her two gossiping old domestics, of the
wealth and undoubted beauty of the new resident at Willowdean.

Without absolutely cutting her--for that was a solecism in good
breeding of which she would be loth to be guilty--Lady Wedderburn had
too plainly held aloof from Mary Lennox in the few public places
where they met; and Mary had tolerated much of that "tabooing," but
with a bursting heart, for she could not forget that the haughty
offender was the mother of Cyril; though how little could that
scheming matron then know what Cyril was to Mary--what they were to
each other!

Though Mary mourned in her loneliness when he was absent with his
regiment, and moving then, as she knew, in a gay and fashionable
circle, his letters were a constant solace to her; and now that he
was at home, though she trusted him--or strove to do so--to see him
riding, driving, talking, and laughing with his cousin and other
ladies, while he could only accord her a furtive smile or a polite
bow, fretted, galled, and humilitated her; for she could not forget
much of her father's teaching, or that she was a lady whose
forefathers had a name among the Scottish Border Barons long before
the Wedderburns had an acre of land in the Merse.

She began to recall, perhaps too much, the artful insinuations of
Chesters, and to brood over them till they sank deep into her heart.
She began also to repine and fear a little when she heard of all
those things--of such gaieties at Willowdean as the season of
conventional mourning permitted; and when she knew that he was
constantly thrown in the society of this perilous beauty--when he was
away for days with her and other ladies at race meetings and other
places; and now, through Doctor Squills and the Minister's wife,
almost her only other visitors, came a rumour that he and she were to
have quite a little cruise in the Master of Ernescleugh's yacht, to
the Isle of May, to Coquetmouth, to Lindisfarne Abbey, and other
places.  So when she thought of all the advantages of propinquity,
and remembered all she had heard and read of the pleasant intercourse
that cousinship permitted, and how much more a recently known cousin
might be likely to impress him than one long known from infancy like
a sister, her poor little heart trembled within her!

One day, however, she was made happy by Lady Wedderburn bowing to her
pleasantly, and even stopping the carriage to ask for Mr. Lennox, but
that was in the fulness of her heart after the restoration of her son.

"So your mamma is coming round to me by degrees, at least, Cyril,"
said Mary, with a hopeful smile.

But Cyril knew too well what his mother's secret aspirations were,
and answered only with a sigh.

Three days after this, gossips had been at work, and when Lady
Wedderburn saw her in the little street of Willowdean she looked
straight at the ears of her horses as the handsome carriage bowled
away on the Ernescleugh road, without according a glance of
recognition to Mary, who felt crushed and hurt keenly, all the more
so that she saw the dark eyes of Gwendoleyne remarking her with an
expression of interest; and Mary could judge for herself how great
was the girl's beauty.

Mary knew that it was tradition in her family that two ladies of it,
both sisters, had died as nuns among the Cistertians at Lennel, and
somehow, now she often thought of those two women, their reasons for
becoming recluses, and wondered if they had found within their cells
the peace she feared she would not find in the world.  Then she
smiled a bitter smile, as she thought that nothing lasted for ever;
that all things passed away; that even Lennel was a shattered ruin,
and its cemetery, where the sisters lay, had been swept away by the
Tweed into the sea.

All unaware of the gloomy misgivings of her he loved, in the evening
after the long and unpleasant conversation with his mother, Cyril,
after riding from one of the gates of Willowdean as if going towards
Greenlaw, the county town, turned off abruptly by a narrow bye way,
and took that for Lonewoodlee, for he was to meet Mary at the stile,
which quite as often as the coppice formed their place of tryst.

He was full of perplexing thoughts, and permitting the reins to drop
on his horse's neck, let the animal proceed at a slow walk along the
path which led only towards the residence of Mr. Lennox.

He felt that some explanation, some more open and more decided
arrangement, were imperatively due to a girl of Mary's position and
character; but, as already stated, he dreaded the opposition of his
whole family; he dreaded the debts he had contracted in his folly,
and to marry on his pay--if his father in his indignation reduced him
to that--a pittance which barely paid for his messing, glazed boots
and cigars--would be the act of a madman, even if Mary would consent
to it; but then he knew that Mary, even were she as rich as his
cousin Gwendoleyne, would not do so at present, as she was chained by
filial love and duty to her father's sick-bed.

Well, that necessity freed him from one item of responsibility in the
awkward position of their affairs.

Cyril drew from his portemonnaie a ring; it was a plain hoop, and so
like a wedding one that it might have passed as such, but for a
single diamond of great value that was set therein, and this altered
its character.  It was a tiny ring too, and he trusted it would fit
the dear finger for which he intended it.  With a fond smile he
replaced it in his purse, and dismounting at the stile, threw the
bridle of his horse over his arm, and looked around him.

The stile was old and well worn by the footsteps of many a wayfarer.
It was simply formed by three great stones, projecting from an
ancient wall, and stood in a sequestered place, secret and lonesome,
where the pink and white hawthorn usually bloomed and scented the air
ere the end of May; where the pendant cups of the bright foxglove and
the blue-bell mingled with the brown autumn fern, among which the
hare and rabbit lurked, and where hardy little thistles grew in every
cleft, while over all towered the triple arms of a gigantic thorn of
vast age, whereon many a Scottish outlaw and English moss-trooper had
been hung "in his boots," as the phrase went, in the foraying times
of old; for the whole Borderland is full of such dark memories.

Around the pastoral hills stood up grim and silent against the red
sunset sky.  As Cyril looked on all these objects, so long familiar
to his eyes, he pondered on what other scenery they might be resting
ere long, and where that day month might find him; too probably far
away at sea, on board a transport crowded with troops, longing to be
ashore and in front of the enemy.

And Mary too had often surveyed their meeting-place with wistful eyes
and boding heart, thinking how lonely it would be when he should come
no more, and how terribly desolate it seemed when he was supposed to
be lost to her and all the world; and how often had she shuddered at
the story of the midnight race, the plunge, and the narrow
escape--the rescue of her Cyril from a terrible death!

His mother's taunt was yet tingling in his ears; and now, lest
watchful eyes might be upon them, he almost dreaded to meet Mary at
the accustomed stile or in the coppice; for had not Chesters basely
condescended to spy upon their meeting there?

"Ah!" thought Cyril, "had I but known of such a circumstance on that
terrible night, instead of sharing his sham hospitality, my
hunting-whip and Rooke Chesters' shoulders had made an intimate and
not to be forgotten acquaintance."

Cyril had but a minute or two to wait, when the slight figure of
Mary, so lithe, graceful, and so compact, from her little round hat
and feather to her brass-heeled Balmorals, came tripping down the
pathway between two fields, and ascended the stile, from whence his
ready hand now helped her down.

"Cyril, dearest Cyril, I have kept you waiting," said she, looking
upward with a strange and earnest expression in her violet-blue eyes.
Secure as she had been of his love, and familiar with it, there had
always been a charming shyness in Mary's manner when with Cyril; now
it was sad and gloomy, though visibly she sought to conceal it,
affecting to smile, and with her tightly-gloved hand to twirl,
nervously, her parasol upon her shoulder.

"And what of your papa to-day?" he asked.

"Kind Cyril, you always ask for him, my only and unfailing friend;
papa is sleeping: he always takes an after-dinner nap; but when I
watch him thus there always comes over me a horrible, an awful
thought, Cyril!"

"What--which?"

"If he were dead--DEAD--my dear papa, instead of only sleeping, what
should I do then?"

"Rely on me, darling," he whispered, and drew her close to him, and
now he observed that Mary had her veil tied tightly over her face, to
conceal her tears, perhaps.

"I can't kiss you through _that_ thing, dearest," he urged, while
endeavouring to remove it.

"Better not kiss me at all.  Oh, would that you had never done so,
Cyril!"

His fine dark blue eyes possessed usually a wonderful, a magnetic
power of fascination in them; but on this occasion they failed to
reassure Mary, who, despite all her efforts at self-control, began to
weep, and Cyril, with his natural abhorrence of a scene, felt more of
worry than wonder.

"What _is_ the matter?  Speak, darling Mary," he urged, tenderly; for
he could see that she looked wan, and a dark tinge that lay under
each of her eyes, was visible through the purity of her skin.

"Oh, forgive me, Cyril, forgive me!"

"For what?" he asked, with growing wonder.

"For having doubted your affection; but doubts did begin to steal
into my head.  I began to fear there was a change somewhere, and I
have been praying humbly to God that you might not love me less now
than before."

"Love you less!  I do not comprehend!"

"Yes, yes," sobbed Mary, nestling her sad little face on the breast
of his black velvet shooting coat; "for Chesters hinted to me----"

"What dared he to hint?" exclaimed Cyril, striking his spurred heel
into the gravel.

"Oh, pardon me, Cyril.  I know not what I am saying.  I have slept so
little for two or three nights past.  I never do sleep when I have
not seen you, and Cyril, you seem always so gay and happy with her--I
mean--those people with whom I see you at times."

"Gay, Mary?  Yes.  I have to smile, like the Spartan boy, who had the
fox under his mantle--the fox whose teeth devoured his vitals,"
replied Cyril, making rather a far-fetched simile.  "One is not
always happy when smiling.  I think ever of you, when absent, of our
coming separation, and the difficulties of our mutual position."

There was a pause, during which he looked tenderly and lovingly into
the violet eyes of Mary, and thought how dovelike, sad, and sweet
they were in expression.

Then he began to perceive her ruling thought by her leading question.

"Your new cousin seems to be a most attractive girl.  Is she not so?"

"Very.  Her eyes are gloriously beautiful, Mary."

"Oh, indeed," said Mary, while her nether lip quivered, her eyes
drooped, and a pallor almost ghastly stole over her soft face.

"Yes, just like yours, except that the lids are not so finely formed,
nor the lashes, though thick, so long."

"Am I to compare with her?" she asked, a little assured.

"Yes," said Cyril, smiling back at the wistful smile.

"Indeed!"

"Yes; but you would gain immensely by the comparison.  But come, my
dearest, there must be no pouting, no doubt of me, no jealousy of
poor Gwenny.  You know how dearly I love, and have ever loved
you--ay, almost since you were a mere girl, when I came home from
India, and brought your dead brother's sword and rings to
Lonewoodlee; but listen to me now, I have much to say, and may not
have so good an opportunity again."

His left arm was round her waist; their right hands were clasped
together, and as Mary's head drooped on his shoulder, her words
became sighs or only half-articulated tenderness.  She looked
helpless and beautiful, soft and ladylike; and once more, in the
tumult of his heart, Cyril, with broken accents, urged a private
marriage, for her further security, in case the worst should happen
to him; but Mary was firm, and with tears and paleness--not
blushes--spoke of her father's health, and how she would not and
could not, with honour to herself, marry even Cyril (whom she loved
as her own soul) in a fashion such as he proposed, as it would insure
the contempt of his family and the doubt of society; and this she
reiterated again, firmly, sadly, earnestly, and with her eyes full of
tears, till Cyril became convinced that the idea was impolitic,
unwise, and not calculated to conduce to their future happiness.

He drew the glove from her left hand, and while placing the diamond
ring upon her wedding finger--a slender little finger it was--he drew
her still closer to his breast.

"Mary," he whispered, "my darling Mary, you are the secret wife of my
heart.  Never let this betrothal ring--the ring that binds you to
me--leave your finger until I replace it by one that shall be
consecrated!" and he kissed her on the eyes, and then the hand that
bore the symbol which was indicative of affection long before the
days of Juvenal.

"As your wife, Cyril, I shall ever deem myself; as your widow, should
we never meet again!" said Mary, in a soft, low, agitated voice.

And with something of a prayer in his heart, Cyril lifted his hat, as
he kissed her once more.  After this they became more composed, even
more happy, perhaps, for their hearts became filled with a divine
trust in themselves and in the future.

"Yet what shall I do when you are far away from me, Cyril?" asked
Mary.  "Men love so differently from women.  They have their
avocations, occupations--their friends and amusements.  The lonely
woman can but brood and weep in silence: her heart, thrust back upon
herself as it were, for lack of the thousand little tendernesses and
kindnesses that the man she loves can alone bestow."

"True, Mary; but do not repine thus, darling."

The twilight had deepened into the gloaming now, and even that was
darkening fast; so leading his horse by the bridle, Cyril walked
along the lonely hill-side path with Mary towards her home, and at
last, with happy hearts, they parted at the end of the ancient
thicket.

"Shall I see you to-morrow, Cyril?" she asked, as he mounted.

"It is impossible, Mary.  I am engaged to dine at Ernescleugh, and
that place lies in quite an opposite direction from this.  Adieu till
next evening.  Adieu, with a thousand kisses to you."

And he galloped away.

Mary's heart misgave her; he was to dine at Ernescleugh, with Everard
Home.  She had, with a reticence that was unwise and unlike her,
shrank nervously from speaking to Cyril of her enforced detention at
Chesterhaugh; but now she trembled lest the young Master of
Ernescleugh had recognised her in the waggonette, and might speak of
the strange circumstance of her being there with Chesters, and at
such an hour.

The demon of doubt had been removed from her heart; but fear now took
his place, and a time came when Mary repented bitterly of the
reticence in question.

She was alternately happy and fearful--longing intently for her next
meeting with Cyril, and resolved to tell him openly of the only
secret that haunted her; and she was never weary of kissing and
looking at the ring, the solemn link which bound her fate to that of
Cyril Wedderburn.

And now, when she thought of the place where it had been placed upon
her finger--the old triple thorn tree--there came back to memory a
quaint legend connected with her family.  It was a little ominous, so
far as regarded the ring, and yet Mary laughed.

For local tradition avers that, in the days when Mary of Lorraine was
Regent of Scotland, Malcolm Lennox, younger brother of Oliver, who
built the present Tower of Lonewoodlee, was a famous Border warrior,
who caused an infinite deal of trouble and anxiety to the Governor of
Berwick, the Captain of Norham, and other Wardens along the English
Border.  Like his compatriot, Sir William of Deloraine--

  "A stark moss-trooping Scot was he
  As ere couched Border lance by knee.
  Blindfold he knew the paths to cross,
  By Solway sands and Tarra Moss.
  By wily turns and desperate bounds,
  He baffled Percy's best bloodhounds."

But one night he had got more wine than usual, when supping with the
Laird of Thirlstane, and lost his way in Dogden Moss, where he must
have perished, had not a beautiful young woman, who suddenly
appeared, become his guide to firm land, and before daybreak he had
betrothed himself to her, and placed on a finger of her left hand a
golden ring.

Some nights after this, he was assailed by a multitude of wild cats,
who seemed to have been holding a species of "sabbatt," or Walpurgis
festival, at the triple thorn tree, and had to defend himself with a
sword.  In the course of this strange _mêlée_ he hewed the foreleg
from one which had made itself particularly obnoxious in the assault;
and on the yelling grimalkins taking to flight, he found that his
trenchant whinger had amputated, not the limb of a cat, but the fair
and handsome arm of a young woman; and on a finger of the hand he
found his own ring, and knew thereby that he had betrothed himself to
a witch!

He never recovered his horror of this adventure; he became more
reckless of life than ever, and perished some years after in the
famous Raid of the Redswire, on the green ridge of the Carterfells,
pierced by three English arrows.  This was the last conflict of any
importance fought on the Borders prior to the union of the Crowns,
and was chiefly remarkable from the circumstance that the Scots won
the day by being well supplied with firearms, while the English had
only the long-bow, with bill and spear.




CHAPTER XXII.

WHAT THE MORROW BROUGHT FORTH.

Cyril found that a note had come from Lady Ernescleugh, inviting all
at Willowdean to dine with her, _en famille_, to talk over their
plans for the future season in London, when it came.  "As for
Edinburgh," she added, "with its eight assemblies, and a few club
balls, all so mixed, it is not to be thought of in these railway
times.  What suited our grandmothers won't suit us, who have young
folks to introduce in society."

So Cyril found that the carriage and pony-phaeton had been ordered,
as all were going to the Cleugh, save poor little Miss M'Caw, whom
Lady Ernescleugh had omitted, notwithstanding her long pedigree; but
then it was only a Highland one, as her ladyship thought, "and those
people all boast of such, whether they are Peers of the realm or
street-porters."

Ere long we shall have more startling events to describe than
dinners, drives, or luncheons, and so shall only say that the
"festive board" at Ernescleugh, a fine mansion facing the sea, and
perched on a lofty eminence, was like any other in a wealthy and
noble family.

Before the windows, stretched away in distance the vast extent of the
dark blue German Sea, with here and there a white sail, or the long
wreathed smoke of a steamer visible; and just as the company sat down
to dinner, they might have seen, had not the curtains been closely
drawn, the light on the Isle of May, about five-and-twenty miles
distant, at the mouth of the Firth of Forth, twinkling redly out upon
the waste of waters.

Save the wines, everything on the table was Scotch: the fish were
from the adjacent sea or the Leader; the beef and mutton bred and fed
on the Lammermuir hills; the vegetables and flowers were reared by
the gardener at Ernescleugh; but all these figured in the bill of
fare under French names, as _potages_, _poissons_, _relevés_, and
_entrées_--a source of sore bewilderment to plain folks like the Rev.
Gideon M'Guffog, parish minister; Dr. Squills, the Lawyer, and the
Baron Bailie of Willowdean, when once or so in the year they were
invited to a state dinner at Ernescleugh.

Everard Home, the Master, a fashionable looking young man of a very
good style, in absence of the Lord, his father, who was on diplomatic
service in the Ionian Isles, placed Lady Wedderburn on his right.
Sir John handed the hostess to her place, and Cyril, to his mother's
satisfaction, led in Gwenny; but then no other lady was present.

When Cyril looked at the unexceptionable wife his mother urged upon
him, with her delicate neck and arms, so snow-white when contrasted
with her black dress and jet ornaments, her rich Indian shawl of
alternate black, gold, and scarlet stripes, diamonds flashing out
here and there, as bright as her own eyes, his mind wandered away
involuntarily to little lonely Mary, in her plain stuff attire; her
sole ornaments a brooch and collar.

Lady Ernescleugh, a more showy, dowager-looking, and though
fair-haired, an older and haughtier style of woman than Lady
Wedderburn, with very good taste, wore a black dress of the richest
velvet, trimmed only with silver grey _grebe_, as all her guests were
in mourning, and both families had been intimate for years.

As three of the gentlemen present belonged to the service, a little
"shop" would creep into their conversation, which ran chiefly on the
approaching war, and the mustering of armaments by sea and land; for
by the London papers of the previous day it was fast becoming
apparent, as the Master said, "that matters were looking less and
less rosy in the East;" and Lady Ernescleugh, who had recently got
him transferred from the Line to the Scots Fusileer Guards, in the
hope that he might soldier only in London, and never encounter harder
service than might be seen at Windsor, in the Wellington Barracks, at
the Bank, or the Tower, was both alarmed and disgusted to find that
several battalions of the Household Brigade were detailed to form a
portion of the army of the East--the force destined to protect Turkey
from the Russians; "those barbarous Russians!" she added, "whom she
and Ernescleugh, when he was Ambassador at St. Petersburg, found to
be little better than their forefathers are described to have been
under Catharine."

"The Semiramis of the North," said Robert Wedderburn.

"And we all know how wicked her times were," said Lady Ernescleugh.

How little could Cyril foresee to what this conversation was to lead;
when the young host said, laughing--

"By Jove, mother, there is more wickedness now in the world than ever
existed then.  Yes, even among ourselves," he added, wiping the
champagne froth from his fair moustache, "only we don't always see
it."

"How, Everard?  I do not understand."

"It is more subtle, more refined, more cunning, and much better bred."

"The latter is certainly some advantage," said Cyril.

"Besides, Wedderburn, we don't call our little peccadilloes by such
deuced hard names as our rough ancestors did--that is all."

"I do not quite understand you, Everard," said Lady Ernescleugh,
smiling, but with a little air of pique; "you seem to be aiming at
something or some one."

Cyril, who had been talking to Gwenny, now became aware that the
Master was bending over his wine glass, and saying something to
Horace Ramornie, in a low tone, but laughing and confidentially.  He
detected the name of "Mary Lennox," and after a time those alarming
words, "By Jove, Ramornie, it could not be termed a summer
flirtation, as he was driving her home through the snow, at midnight,
too.  Queer, is it not? for we all know the fellow's character: but
then the poor girl is so left to herself, in that old house by her
ailing father, that"--here his voice sank lower--"but it is a pity,
for she is so pretty!"

What had happened?  To whom was he referring?  Cyril felt his ears
tingling, his heart grow still, and his face turn pale; all the more
so that the clear keen eyes of his mother were on him, and he
remembered the conversation in her boudoir.

He burned with impatience until the three ladies withdrew to the
drawing-room; and the moment they had been bowed out, and he and the
other gentlemen resumed their seats, ere closing up towards their
young host, he very plainly asked, "what they had been talking about?"

"The strangest thing in the world," replied Horace, with a serious
expression in his quiet dark eyes; "a scandalous story concerning the
daughter of old Oliver Lennox, of Lonewoodlee.  Of course, you know
the girl; by sight, at least."

"Scandalous!" repeated Cyril, making a violent effort to control
himself, though there came a flash from his eye, lurid as that from a
cannon's mouth, and there came a terrible frown from his brow, which
he concealed by resting it on his hand.  "And this story?"

"Is, that she spent a night in the house of Chesterhaugh."

"Take care, take care," said Sir John; "she represents one of the
oldest families in the Merae."

"A fact!" persisted the Master of Ernescleugh, in a low tone; "she
spent there a night, or nearly so, about the time you were so
mysteriously missing, Wedderburn.  I was riding home from Greenlaw,
accompanied by a groom; there had been a severe fall of snow, and
just as we drew near the gate of Chesterhaugh, it was opened by old
Tony Heron, the keeper, and out came Rooke Chesters, in that bang-up
waggonette of his, with Miss Lennox seated by his side.  I could
swear to her, though she was well muffled up in a railway-rug.  The
time was past twelve, and he was evidently driving her home!  Now we
all know that ladies, old or young, don't visit Rooke Chesters.  It
is an ugly story, and I would rather not have known it."

Cyril's voice sounded strange, even to himself; but he asked, calmly--

"Did you see her face, Home?"

"No.  She was closely veiled; but I know her little hat with the
golden pheasant's plume."

Cyril remembered that he had shot that pheasant.

"Did you speak with her?"

"No.  We passed each other at a hard trot."

"Then what proof have you, beyond mere suspicion, that the lady was
Miss Lennox at all?"

There was something categorical in Cyril's tone which made Everard
Home tug his moustache; but he replied--

"My groom got a match for his cigar from the gatekeeper, Tony Heron,
whose information put the matter beyond a doubt, and Chesters' groom,
Trayner, confirmed the story next day, with many a joke Miss Lennox
would not like to have heard.  But pass the wine, the decanters stand
with you, my Royal Fusileer."

What horrible mystery, worse even than that of his own disappearance,
lay concealed under all this?  Was Rooke Chesters ordained by fate to
be the evil genius of them both?  Heron, the gatekeeper, the groom of
Chesters, and Ernescleugh were cognizant of the story, and Mary's
name and honour were a joke and a source of vulgar and malevolent
speculation in every servants'-hall and household in the Merse!  A
stunned sensation came over him.  Even were the story utterly false
it was a terrible one, and the most degrading deductions would be
drawn from it; and even as he sat and thought over it, mechanically
passing the decanter, and filling and emptying his glass, an age
seemed to have elapsed since yester-evening by the stile--a mighty
gulf to have opened between him and Mary Lennox.

"I usually make it a legal rule," said Robert Wedderburn, "only to
believe the half of what I see, and nothing that I simply hear.
These groom fellows may have been mistaken, after all; but it is
passing strange!"

Cyril could have embraced his brother for these words; but still the
story had gone abroad.

Cyril now remembered of Mary admitting that Chesters had addressed
her in the language of love; and yet she had ventured to spend some
hours--gossips said a night--in the house, the house of a man with a
reputation so tainted.

He also remembered her strange emotion when they last met.  Was it
compunction for her own perfidy, or affected doubt of his love, or
neither, or what was it?  Alas! he knew not what or whom to believe
in now.

Her doubts must have been of herself and of her own faith; not of him
or his faith!  His Mary, so pure and gentle in eye and manner, to be
subjected even to the glances of a man like Rooke Chesters was
exasperating.  What then was he to think of the companionship of
hours?  He knew that Chesters visited occasionally her bedridden
father, hence an interview could be nothing novel to either; but fast
in his passionate and impulsive heart, the emotions of jealousy,
doubt, and mortification became predominant.

He almost loathed the Master of Ernescleugh for his unwitting
communication; but he concealed all he felt, for the bitter
conviction forced itself upon him, that if Mary Lennox were unworthy
of his love, there would then be more reason than ever to hide that
love from all.  So those who saw him, as he sat at table chatting of
politics, the coming war, the points of this horse or that terrier or
pointer, could little have dreamed of the volcano that was in his
heart, through which a hundred varying emotions were sweeping.

There were utter perplexity and keen distress; shame and doubt,
jealousy and wounded self-esteem.  Could it really be the case that
she had encouraged the advances of two--of Chesters and himself--as
lovers, and on hearing of the loss of one had gone, actually gone to
the house of the other?  He had known of such things.  There was his
old flame at Canterbury, who had beaded the cigar-case; but, pshaw!
she was a garrison-hack of ten years standing, and was known to every
corps from Chatham to China.

What did it all mean, or what would it all mean?  To be the rival of
Chesters would be humiliation enough.  He was grieved and maddened by
the whole affair; for his secret love, the light and joy of his soul,
was about to be quenched now.

His family--his mother, at least--had heard of it; and knowing, as
they and she did, the reputation of Chesters, could he speak now of
making her his wife; and yet he loved her so!  Surely she would be
able to explain it all; but still the ugly _cause_ for explanation
existed.

Why had she concealed the whole circumstance from him?  Why such
reticence?  There was something in this fact that filled him with
dire and dark suspicion, and but yesterday he had placed a ring on
her wedding finger, a token of their solemn betrothal before God, and
amid the silence of the starlight and the dewy evening he had
tenderly taken her to his breast and called her his wife--"the wife
of his heart;" and yet she had acted thus in the time of his
absence--of his supposed death--and made her name and honour the
sport of gossips, of grooms and gate-keepers!

If so artful, why decline on any terms or pretence the proposal of
marriage he had made her?  Chesters had insinuated something to her
of himself (Cyril) and Gwenny, something to excite her jealousy and
to pique her by her own admission; thus they must have been talking
confidentially, and to what purpose?

So did he torment himself, viewing the circumstance in all its worst
points.  Glass after glass of strong, deep-coloured, and heady old
Madeira did Cyril imbibe; and then others of Grande Chartreuse and
Curaçoa, by way of _chasse-café_, ere the gentlemen took their coffee
and joined the ladies; indeed Cyril, though invariably most
temperate, on this night seemed not to care how much he drank,
provided he drowned, or even deadened, care for the time.

On entering the drawing-room he was painfully conscious, by a
peculiar expression, almost a radiant one, in his mother's face, that
Lady Ernescleugh had told her the whole of this obnoxious story, this
horrible _esclandre_, about the girl he had hoped or meant to marry;
to whom he was solemnly but secretly plighted, and whom he loved with
inexpressible tenderness.

There was a steady glitter in his mother's eye that provoked him, and
he turned to Gwenny, who was idling over the keys of the piano, as if
waiting for some one to speak with her.

He said something, he knew not what, and she replied without his
seeming to hear or understand her; but she immediately began to play
with more animation.  How nimbly and gracefully her white fingers
wandered over the ivory keys, making even them seem almost dull in
colour by comparison; and he looked on, and turned the leaves of the
music, as one in a terrible dream, ignorant or heedless whether
Gwenny was playing a Highland Reel or the "Soldier's March" in
_Faust_, for the soul of him he could not have told, as he heard only
the voices of his mother and Lady Ernescleugh, as they lay back in a
crimson satin _fauteuil_, with their heads stooped towards each
other, and talking over their glittering fans.

"They are no doubt a strange set," said his mother, "that small
family of Lonewoodlee" (small, indeed! thought Cyril).  "The father,
a quarrelsome old person, has had, as you know, endless law disputes
with Sir John; but, luckily for us, has always lost them.  A
spendthrift, he is now a bankrupt; and his girl, though so quiet and
modest in aspect and manner, must be a designing minx."

"But, my dear Lady Wedderburn, quiet ones are always the deepest.
'Smooth waters,' you are aware," said Lady Ernescleugh, with a little
laugh.

"And who knows what she may be, if all were known?"

"The _esclandre_ about visiting a bachelor of Captain Chesters'
proclivities does not surprise me a bit; no doubt it is the result of
her bringing-up, or rather the want of bringing-up."

"She has been motherless for years," urged Lady Wedderburn, gently.

"Hence the result," replied Lady Ernescleugh, a cold and haughty
dame, who had never perhaps committed a solecism in her life, and
never pardoned one in others.  "I am so glad we have never had her
here, though the girl is handsome and presentable enough."

"And now that Gwenny has come to Willowdean, my countenancing her,
even by a casual bow, is impossible.  I have already passed her at
church and elsewhere before the story came out; and one cannot be too
careful whom one knows, for you are aware, my dear Lady Ernescleugh,
that----" and here his mother's voice sank to a whisper, but Cyril
was nearly driven mad by what he had heard.

"Dear Aunt," said Gwenny, "I do not know the unfortunate young person
of whom you are talking----"

"And must never do so."

"But I am reminded of a maxim of my poor papa's."

"Ah! and this maxim?"

"Was always, 'Sift news first, and swallow it afterwards.'  Proverbs
are bad taste, I believe; but he often said this when he heard wild
stories of Thugs and Dacoits, of stranglings and poisonings, of men
being carried off by tigers, and all the odd things that happen in
Indian life."

"But, Gwenny," said Cyril, patting her white shoulder, and looking
very much as if he would like to kiss her, "this is not India, but
prosaic, self-righteous, and censorious Scotland."

"True, Cyril," added Horace Ramornie, who had also drawn near Gwenny:
"the world here finds no fault with imprudence, or even wickedness;
but great fault with either being found out.  So with this girl's
rash visit to Chesterhaugh, in which there may have been no harm; but
I am sorry for her old father's sake, though I have rarely seen him,
and sorry for her own."

"But the fact of spending four or five hours alone with an
enterprising fellow like Chesters has an ugly sound about it," said
Robert.

"You speak with the natural suspicion of a lawyer; Horace with the
generosity of a soldier," retorted Cyril, on whom all these remarks
fell like molten lead.

Thus, one of the very ends which Chesters had in view when he took
advantage of the snowstorm, and by a special falsehood, framed
between him and Trayner, contrived to detain the restless Mary in his
house, seemed on the point of being achieved; for there are many men
in the world like him--men who seek to blacken the reputation of the
very girls they mean to betray, to forward their own purpose by
dislocating them from the sympathy, protection, and even compassion
of men.

As for the pity of their own sex, that is easily lost!

To Cyril the rest of the evening passed away like a nightmare; and at
last, to his infinite relief, the carriage and phaeton came to the
door, and Ernescleugh, the frowning rocks, the sea, and the distant
light that twinkled on the Isle of May, were all left behind as they
drove homeward inland.

Sir John wished to smoke; so he, Robert, and Horace were in the open
phaeton, while Cyril sat in the carriage with his mother and Gwenny.
Of what had they been arranging for the London season he knew
nothing, and cared less.  When that time came, he should be, he
hoped, face to face with the Cossacks.

He was sternly moody and silent, and both failed to extract a word
from him.  His mother knew his secret; with her he was past acting,
and endurance could endure no more.

She stole her soft hand into his--the hand that in infancy and youth
had never tired of caressing him--and whispered in his ear--

"My beloved Cyril, a noble heart like yours was not meant to be
wasted on a worthless girl like Mary Lennox of Lonewoodlee."

Cruel words, though she said them ever so softly and tenderly; but
they put a finishing stroke to his misery, and he started as if stung
by a wasp.

On arriving at home, he hastened to his own room, and desired Gervase
Asloane, the butler, to bring him a bumper of champagne; and with the
wine Asloane brought him a letter.  He tore it open.  It was from
Chesters, the first he had ever received from him, and he rapidly
perused it, with surprise and rage mingling in his heart.  It ran
thus:--


  "Army and Navy Club,
    London.

"My Dear Wedderburn,--Glad to hear of your turning up again in this
sublunary sphere; but sorry that I could not stay at home to
congratulate you in person.  I suppose we shall see all about it in
the papers--_Bell's Life_, most likely?  I had to leave in haste, as
Bill Trayner put me up to a good thing or two, about to come off on
the Turf.  Sir John cashed up your IOU like a brick; but I mean to
let Chesterhaugh--put it out to dry-nurse--and go abroad, or take
service in one of the proposed foreign battalions.  Have you made up
your book?  The City and Suburban is the next good handicap set for
decision.  Eugenie is said to be really a good thing.  Those who back
her won't regret it.  10 to 30 are taken for Varna; and 1000 to 10
against Baltic."  ["What the devil is all this to me!" muttered
Cyril.  "Bah!"]

"Awful scrape yours was.  What the deuce did you do to the bay hunter
to render it unmanageable?  How excited that little girl at
Lonewoodlee was about the affair.  I had no end of trouble, one
night, before I got her consoled; but _consoled_ she was in the end.
And now, with best wishes, old fellow, believe me ever yours
faithfully,

  "R. R. CHESTERS."


"Insolent scoundrel!" exclaimed Cyril, before whom came in memory the
mocking laugh, the sinister smile, and the green-grey,
phosphorescent-like eyes of the writer, as he crushed up the jibing
letter, and tossed it in the fire; but not before he observed that it
was sealed with the onyx ring which bore the arms of Louis De la
Fosse, the young French traveller whom Chesters had so unmercifully
pillaged at play.

There was a tone of banter in Chesters' letter, and of insolent
reference to Mary, that filled the heart of Cyril with fury.

What meant this sudden horror?  Cyril asked in his heart: an intrigue
with Chesters at the very time when he himself was supposed to have
perished by a violent and mysterious death.  How could he question
her about it without degradation to them both? and yet, as their
mutual relations stood, confidence between them was necessary, most
necessary.  If he should speak of it, what would her answer be, yea
or nay?  If the former, how was she to explain it away?  If the
latter, must he believe her?  Oh, it was maddening!  An intrigue with
Chesters--of all men in the world, Chesters!

Perhaps it was about her father's protested bill she had visited him.
If so, what terms might not Chesters have made with her for it?  So,
as jealousy makes the food it feeds on, he wove endless pictures of
treachery and duplicity, and vowed to call out Chesters, and shoot
him down like a dog, on the first available opportunity, forgetting
that even then, in the year we were to storm the heights of Alma,
duels had become out of fashion and forbidden.

He thanked Heaven for the prospect of a speedy war, and a hot one,
too.  Anything was better than enduring what he suffered.  Would he
resign his leave and rejoin the Fusileers at once, or remain till the
last hour, and make fierce love to his cousin Gwenny?

Perhaps it was all some horrible mistake, which might be easily
explained.  But why had Mary so studiously avoided all reference to
the circumstance?  Desperately he clung to hope, and resolved himself
to see about it.  And now he, the heedless young officer, the man of
pleasure and amusement, wealth and position, felt for the first time
in his life that sickening and gnawing emotion of clamorous anxiety
in his heart which Mary had endured during the suspense consequent to
his disappearance, since Chesters had engendered in her heart a
jealousy of Gwendoleyne Wedderburn, and never perhaps so keenly as on
the evening she walked to Chesterhaugh.

Cyril knew that he should have no further opportunity of questioning
the Master of Ernescleugh, as the leave of the latter was on the
point of expiry, and he was to start by train on the morrow to rejoin
his battalion of the Guards in the Wellington Barracks, London.




CHAPTER XXIII.

THE DAWN OF LOVE.

Prior to all this the intimacy between Horace Ramornie and
Gwendoleyne Wedderburn had been ripening with a rapidity that her
aunt, had she known of it, would have deemed "frightful" as well as
fatal to all her hopes; but still love had never been spoken of
between them.

Busy about his estate and the farms thereon; busy too about country
matters, and the affairs of the little Burgh of Barony which owned
him as patron and superior, Sir John Wedderburn spent much of his
time out of doors, and a deal of it in his saddle.  Cyril had been
entirely occupied by his own secret passion, while Robert was sulky,
and affected to be deep in his legal studies, reading up for a
forthcoming examination, and frequently went alone fishing.  As the
household was in mourning there were few invitations given, and few
visitors at Willowdean; hence, in spite of all Lady Wedderburn's
plans, Horace--not Cyril--and Gwenny were generally thrown together;
and what could be more natural than that the young people should
learn to love each other?

Yet he dared not speak of the passion that was growing in his heart.

Lady Wedderburn had not been without a dread that the Master of
Ernescleugh, young Everard Home, who was every way an agreeable and
remarkably good-looking man, might "cut out" both her sons.  Gwenny
knew that he was the heir to a peerage, and rank would have much
weight in the mind of an Indian-bred girl; so she was thankful when
his leave of absence expired, and he was recalled to London.  She did
not speak again to Cyril of Mary Lennox, either tauntingly or
otherwise; but once she said to her husband--

"Cyril has been looking pale and unhappy of late, and I know it must
be caused by that artful girl at Lonewoodlee.  What does the foolish
fellow go on about?  Absurd!  It is only a girl's pretty face, after
all."

"Have you forgotten the days of your own youth, and what your face
was then to me as Kate Douglas?  Ay, and is so still," said the
good-natured Baronet, pinching her chin.

"True; but I didn't gad about the country alone on snowy nights with
men like Rooke Chesters.  Cyril is conscious of her unworthiness; so
it is only the memory of a face that disturbs him."

"Don't worry poor Cyril; once with his regiment, he may forget all
about her.  Yet what does a poet say?--

  "'_Only_ the face of a woman;
    Only a face--nothing more!
  But the memory of that sweet vision
    Comes back to my heart o'er and o'er.
  Only a woman's soft eyes;
    Only a look, that was all;
  A glance that I chanced to encounter
    Still binds my soul in thrall.'

It was at a ball of the Caledonian Hunt we first met, Kate.  And
never forget you were once young."

Gwendoleyne Wedderburn thought there was some analogy in the destiny
of herself and Horace from the fact of his being so young, and having
come, like herself, to Willowdean in his boyhood, without father or
mother.  Horace was a smart subaltern in the Line now, and had quite
considered himself a man in all respects for a few years past; but
Gwenny loved to think of him as the lonely boy he had been; for his
manner was grave and gentle, and his voice and smile were ever sweet
and pleasant to her.

Cyril, we have said, was pre-occupied, and Robert had enough of the
student in him to be somewhat brusque, so Horace she preferred
undisguisedly, to the infinite chagrin of Lady Wedderburn; and, if
truth must be told, somewhat to the amusement of Sir John, who,
though he would have been pleased enough to see his son with a bride
so suitable and wealthy, was an enemy to all match-making.

The large and stately house of Willowdean, with its shady library,
its galleried conservatory, its long corridors hung with valuable
pictures, and its spacious garden, was a pleasant place for such
sweet companionship; and whatever young Ramornie did, when not with
Gwenny, was always done as if in a kind of dream to occupy the blank
of time when he could not be with her.

How would time be occupied when they should be parted, perhaps to
meet no more!

The garden was older than the house, having belonged to its
predecessor, the ancient mansion, "the peel and fortalice of
Willowdean;" thus its yew hedges and boxwood borders were thick and
dense beyond any to be seen in gardens of more modern date; and in
the centre stood the ancient sun-dial, by the gnomon of which Sir
John's forefathers had set or regulated their round silver watches
that were like turnips in shape, and had perhaps wooden wheels that
were worked "by thorl and string."

As yet the garden was only in bud, and there for the first time
Gwenny heard with wonder the voice of the cuckoo when she and Horace
were planting some rare Indian seeds which she had brought from the
Choultry; and she sighed when reflecting that he must be so far away
when these seeds became flowers in all their tropical glory; and when
(then so bleak and bare), with its famous ribbon-borders of every
imaginable colour, the hedges of azaleas and drooping fuchsias under
the shelter of the older rows of privet and yew, the clusters of
beautiful shrubs and beds of geraniums, verbenas, and calceolarias
were in all the bloom and splendour of summer.

And many a delightful drive they had in the park, when Gwenny usually
took the reins of the pony-phaeton, for there the grass was smooth as
a billiard-table, having been carefully rolled and mowed in season,
ever since clover-seeds had first been sown in it, in 1708, by Sir
Cyril Wedderburn--the same Baronet who drank the health of James
VIII., sword in hand, at Greenlaw Cross, when the Comte de Fourbin's
fleet, with the Scots and Irish Brigades on board, was off the Isle
of May; who nearly rabbled out the Union Parliament, and played many
other political pranks in his time.

The month was still March; but already the park--or "policy," as the
Scots called it--was sheeted with pale yellow primroses, where, in
the next month the Lent lilies would be in all their golden bloom.

But their drives were not confined to the park, for frequently they
had the open carriage.  Then Lady Wedderburn and Miss M'Caw were
always present; and, as the large and handsome vehicle bowled along
the smooth roads, Gwenny would laugh, and like a happy child, clap
her hands to the two white-and-black spotted Dalmatian dogs, which
bounded along on each side, caracoling amid the dust, and seeming to
exult in the dignity of being outriders to such an equipage,
reminding her of the bare-footed suwaries she had often seen running
beside the elephant of a native prince on the plain of the Choultry.

Poor Horace, however, saw the views and wishes of his aunt pretty
plainly, for she was unskilful enough to show her hand to all but
Gwenny.

He knew, and felt keenly conscious, of all he owed to the uncle upon
whom he had been cast in boyhood, a penniless orphan: his education,
his commission and yearly allowance; and though loving Gwenny
passionately, and with all his soul--for she seemed the realization
of the wife he could love, the ideal of his dreamy hours--he shrank
from any declaration that might, perhaps, mar the plans of those to
whom he owed everything in the world, and also mar, it might be, the
fortune of his relation, his brother officer and friend, for he was
ignorant of the recent ties already formed by Cyril.

It was hard for Horace to know and feel that the love he had longed
for, the wife he had pictured in many a vision of fervid fancy, was
now daily by his side, and yet that he dared not look upon her as
more than a friend; while, at the same time, it was impossible to
resist the charm, the delight, the intoxication of her presence, and
the craving to seek her society; to listen to her voice, to look into
her softly-lidded eyes, that were by turns shy, passionate, and full
of child-like surprise; to touch her hand timidly, and think of all
that might have been.

Ah, what did it all matter!  A little time, and it would be a thing
of the past, this delightful companionship.  Miles upon miles of land
and sea must be between them, and the Russian hordes would be before
him.

Yet often was the perilous secret, that he loved her, on the point of
his lips, on certain occasions that suddenly seemed to invite it.

Attended by a groom they had ridden one day past the house, the park,
and woods of Ernescleugh, to the verge of the cliff over which Cyril
had been dragged by his horse.  The tide was out, and the isolated
rock from which he had been rescued by the crew of the fisher-smack
was plainly visible, with the gulls wheeling in circles and the white
waves boiling round it.

Gwenny was shuddering as she looked alternately down at the rock and
upward at the ruins of Fast Castle, perched on the giddy verge of a
tremendous cliff, the fragment of a baronial tower "'twixt cloud and
ocean hung," with the blue sky visible through its fissures and
gaping windows.  Laying his right hand on her reins, as if to steady
her horse, which the booming of the waves below and the screaming of
the seabirds above had startled, he sought in reality but to touch
the pretty bridle-hand, that was cased in its tight black leather
riding gauntlet, as he said--

"I think you admire this sample of our grim Scottish scenery, Miss
Wedderburn?"

"Before I answer you," said she, looking with a bright smile under
her veil, which the wind was blowing out like a pennant, "you must
tell me why you persist in calling me Miss Wedderburn?  Did I not say
once before that you were to call me Gwenny?  _Miss_ sounds so stiff!
All the family at Willowdean, and even cold and hard Lady
Ernescleugh, call me Gwenny."

"And by that name I always think of you--in my heart."

"Then call me Gwenny, I insist, as I once did before."

"I do not like to do so, when, when----"

"Is not the name pretty?  It was my mamma's."

"Apart from itself, association will ever render it adorable to me."

"Well?"

"Somehow I don't like to do so when Lady Wedderburn is present;
something tells me that she would not be pleased," replied Horace,
blushing in spite of himself, and then the girl blushed too, for she
began to see something of his meaning and the inferences to be drawn
from what he said.  "But," he added, retaining her reins and hand in
his for a little way, "let us leave this giddy verge; it is dangerous
with a shying horse."

The groom drew near to make the same remark, and so the occasion was
lost.


At another time the news came that the Queen, in conjunction with the
Emperor of the French, had at last declared war against Russia!

Gwenny's dark eyes were upon Horace as he read the _Times_ aloud in
the conservatory, with a flush on his cheek and a strange emotion in
his heart.

"All leaves will be cancelled now!" said he.

"And you, cousin Horace, you will be quite anxious to find yourself
in Turkey!"

"I _was_ anxious," said he, in a low voice.

"And what has made you change your mind; surely not dread of danger?"

Her question was a home thrust; but he only answered curtly, while
his heart beat quicker and his cheek grew pale--

"I am a soldier, Gwenny."

"Then what has caused the change?

"Dare I tell you?" he asked, in a low and tremulous voice, as he took
her hand; "but no, I dare not," he added.

Nor could he have done so then, for Lady Wedderburn was not far from
them, feeding a screaming parroquet, whose neck Horace could have
wrung with stern joy.  Still he was venturing to say something more
in an incoherent and desponding way, when Gwenny came close to him,
with her soft, serene, and loving eyes smiling into his, and placing
her rapid little hand on his mouth, she said--

"Now, Horace, if you love me, silence; for sadness worries me, and I
won't be worried or sad till you are gone; and then Heaven knows I
shall be sad enough."

She joined her aunt, and again the secret remained untold.

"IF I love her!" thought Horace, with a choking sensation in his
throat; but Gwenny had begun to suspect or feel all that he had left
untold, through "that silent method of communion which no crowd can
prevent persons who know each other well from interchanging."

To all the beauty we have described, a beauty that was dark and pale,
yet sparkling, Gwendoleyne added a manner that came with her Welsh
blood; it was full of those nameless and indescribable charms which
the French, ever so happy in apt phraseology, term _folâtre et
caressante_, winning and playful; but there is no perfection out of
novels and romances, so Gwenny, with all her loveliness, was not
perfect.  She had a fiery little temper at times, which, like her
dark eyes and their long lashes, she inherited with her Welsh blood;
but she was all perfection to young Horace Ramornie, and in the core
of his heart he idolized her!




CHAPTER XXIV.

PARTED IN SORROW.

In the dining-room at Lonewoodlee Mary was seated in the deep recess
of a window.  She was sewing, and singing merrily the while.  She
felt happy, light in heart, and high in spirit, unusually so for her;
but ever and anon she paused in her work and even in her song to
contemplate her new ring and recall the exact words of Cyril when he
placed it on her finger, the expression of his eyes, and the tone of
his voice.

The window was open, for the time was noon-tide, the day was warm and
sunny, and the spring freshness in the atmosphere was delightful.
The bleating of the sheep that browsed close by the Tower, the voices
of the birds that twittered in the old trees and shrubbery, with the
hum of insect life, all came pleasantly to the girl's ear, so, as we
have said, at times her song died away, and her needle paused as she
sank into happy thought, and abandoning herself to her day dreams,
repeated, "Wife of my heart; ah, he called me so; the wife of his
heart!"

So pre-occupied was Mary that she did not hear the hoofs of a horse
approach the Tower, nor the ringing of the door-bell announce a
visitor, till Alison Home, her face a little flushed with surprise
and importance, placed in her hand the card of

  CYRIL WEDDERBURN,
      _Royal Fusileers._


"Where is he--this gentleman?" asked Mary, starting from her seat.

"In his saddle at the door; but he asks if he can see you, Miss
Lennox."

"Show him in at once, Alison."

When their past mode of meeting and corresponding are considered, it
may easily be supposed that a visit from Cyril, openly, formally, and
at such an early hour as noon, filled Mary with anxiety, excitement,
and alarm!  To visit thus had long ceased to be his use and wont,
after the quarrels ensued with his family; so what could it portend?
With true feminine instinct she glanced at a mirror--one of those
quaint, old-fashioned, carved plate glasses with bevelled borders,
set in an ebony frame--gave a final smooth to her rich brown hair,
and was not ill-pleased to find, that though she was scarcely dressed
in a style to receive visitors, she wore a morning robe of spotted
muslin that was very becoming, and from the frilled sleeves and neck
of which her taper arms and slender throat came forth to the best
advantage.

Save his ring, ornament she had none.

Cyril was ushered in with hat and whip in hand, and the moment their
eyes met, her heart became filled with dismay.  He did not approach
her or take her hand, even the faint sickly smile that
conventionalism or good-breeding had spread over his face passed
away, and he stood looking at her irresolutely, and keeping the
dining-table between them.

Grieved and exasperated as he was by the ugly story he had heard so
recently, Cyril glanced sadly from Mary to the old faded portraits
that hung on the walls--older they were than some of the ancestry at
Willowdean--and much of sorrow and pity began to mingle with his
indignation.  And there, too, were the arms and monogram of Oliver
Lennox, who had been a good man and true to his Queen in the stormy
times of the Reformation, carved above the antique fireplace, which
looked so quaint with its heavy Scoto-Italian mouldings of stone; but
in the old-fashioned basket-grate there burned a cheerful fire,
composed less of coal than of cuttings from the thicket without,
roots, fircones, and peat.

"Oh, Cyril," exclaimed Mary, piteously, "what has happened--what is
amiss?  You have such a pale and tell-tale face!  You neither take my
hand nor seat yourself."

"Nor shall I do either until you have heard me--if I even do so then,
Mary," said he, slowly, as if to gain time or arrange his perplexed
thoughts, and doubtful in what terms to break the purpose of his
unhappy visit, she looked so charming in that plain undress, so
gentle-eyed and dove-like.  "Things were said of you last night by
Everard Home, my mother, and Lady Ernescleugh, that have rent my
heart asunder.  Long, long will their words haunt me.  Oh, Mary, I
shall not readily forget that dinner at Ernescleugh!"

Mary now knew all; the Master had recognised her on that fatal night,
when, in her innocence and helplessness, she fell into the species of
snare contrived, for her by Chesters and his roguish groom.  Dropping
her needlework, she grasped the back of a chair for support, and
asked, with something of hauteur, nevertheless--

"And what did you say, Cyril, when those people dared to say hard
things of me?'

"Say, girl! what could I say?  I sat and smiled, I suppose.  I was in
good society, where people must hide every emotion, and had to smile
like the Spartan boy I spoke of; and to smile thus is too often the
hardest portion of the weary battle of life."

"To the point, Cyril--oh, of what do they accuse me?"

"On the night of the snow-storm, you visited the house of
Chesterhaugh; you were there for hours, and Everard Home saw you
leaving the gate, at midnight, in Chesters' waggonette, and seated by
his side.  Home's groom saw this, too!  Was such a visit, in such a
time of supposed grief, and to such a man, becoming in the girl whom
I loved, and who I thought loved me?  Even though I was believed to
be dead, was it becoming in your father's daughter?  He is, I know, a
ruined man; but ruin or improvidence cannot blot out the past, or
alter the fact that he is a gentleman descended from as good blood as
any in Scotland--not that most folks set much store on that nowadays,
but I do.  Oh, that I had indeed been drowned--that I had perished on
that night of terror, rather than have lived to hear this said of
Mary Lennox, that she is no longer worthy of me!"

"Cruel, Cyril!  Oh, how cruel is all this of you!" said Mary,
wringing her hands.

"Oh, Mary, Mary!  God alone knows how I have loved you, and how I
love you still; but even were that story not true, that such should
be said of you--my future wife--tears up my heart by the roots."

"But it _is_ true," said Mary.

"What was your reason for such a visit and at such a time?"

"Oh, Cyril, the best," said Mary, with a bursting heart, while she
stretched her trembling hands towards him, for his somewhat imperious
manner chilled and scared her.

"Why were my informants of a circumstance so strange and improper
first the Master of Ernescleugh, and then Chesters himself?  What was
your motive for concealment?"

"A good one.  I felt assured that you might disapprove of it, and I
was powerless; I had no control over my stay there.  I was in
Chesterhaugh certainly, but I did not go to visit Captain Chesters.
I was lured in; the snow fell: I could not get away; and--and--and,
oh, how can you speak to me thus, and think such things of me!"

Cyril bit his nether lip passionately, for the jesting words, the
sneer of Chesters, that "she was consoled in the end," seemed burnt
into his heart.

"I care not now for your motive, or even to inquire into it.  Mary
Lennox, we cannot undo the past; what I have to think of is the
future."

"Oh, Cyril, bear with me, and hear a very simple explanation
connected with yourself."

But he would listen to nothing, and exclaimed, in a hollow tone--

"Oh, has God no pity for love lost, for trust misplaced, and a heart
wasted as mine has been on you!"

"I am innocent, Cyril, innocent of wrong, even of error," said Mary,
with simple dignity; and had he not been goaded by his own angry
thoughts and the galling words of others, he might have read the
assurance of what she said in the expression of her face, in her
clear earnest eyes, her parted lips, and her very attitude, as she
stood with outstretched hands.  "I am guiltless of all blame, and a
day must come when God will clear me."

"The day may come--but too late," said he, hoarsely and gloomily.

"Never too late if we are both on this side of the grave, Cyril; yet,
thank Heaven, this life does not last for ever."

"And your father's?" said he, reproachfully.

"Oh, Cyril, your rebuke is just!" said Mary, in a flood of tears;
"but your anger is not so, and it makes me so miserable."

"You can have no explanation to give, and I seek nothing beyond the
admission of the fact," said Cyril, with a cold severity that
afterwards surprised himself; "and now I quit you.  Thank fate, we
are on the eve of a war.  A few days--ay, perhaps but a few
hours--and I shall leave you and all the folly of regret and love
behind me, to enter on a stirring and a glorious career.  Adieu!
Never more shall we be as we have been; never more shall we meet
where we have met so often!  All is at end between us, Mary; and from
this hour our paths in life must lie for ever apart!"

The door closed; she heard the clatter of his horse's hoofs die away
in the distance, and then she knew that Cyril was gone--gone, without
even asking, or learning the cause of her visit to Chesterhaugh.

She felt that he had treated her both harshly and unjustly, and the
sense of that bore her up for a time; but a time only.  As one in a
dream, she still clutched the back of the chair to prevent herself
from falling.  The bleating of the sheep in the meadow, the voices of
the birds in the trees and among the ivy that rustled on the old
Tower wall, and the hum of the insects, were all in her ears as
before.  Her eyes wandered over the pastoral Lammermuir hills with
something of a hunted and despairing expression in them; of wild
anxiety, as though peace and rest lay somewhere far beyond, and the
whole interview seemed like a dream--an unreality.

Nothing was distinct; she felt as if struggling with a nightmare.

After a time, and as the day wore on, she began to perceive the
realities of her position, and to feel the imperative necessity for a
complete explanation with Cyril; but she was overwhelmed by the false
position in which she was placed, by shame, anger, and unmerited
mortification, that such a story should have gone abroad in the
fashion it had done, and she knew how it would be viewed by the
severe and censorious.

She knew that "woman is woman's worst foe;" and to be pointed at by
stern spinsters, with rigid religious and moral opinions--spinsters
who never missed sermon or communion, or omitted their names in such
lists as printed the names of the charitable, and who had in their
hearts only a pretended horror for the mammon of
unrighteousness--would be terrible and humiliating in the extreme.

From the dinner-table at Ernescleugh, she knew, or feared, the story
in many exaggerated forms would spread like wildfire among the
professing Christians and stern Church--we beg their
pardon--Kirk-goers, and nasal-singing Pharisees of Willowdean; and
that many hands and eyes would be uplifted in dismay at the
"shortcomings of the daughter of Lonewoodlee."

She knew, also, how utterly merciless such local gossips were; but to
be an object of speculation to the self-righteous on one hand, and to
be pitied and misjudged by those who had loved her on the other, was
a fear that proved bitter as the waters of Marah--yea, more bitter
than death could be--to the sensitive Mary Lennox.  She felt humbled,
and seemed to have made acquaintance with degradation, she knew not
why.

Oh; how in her heart she hated that man Chesters, who had caused all
this misery!

But Cyril would come again to Lonewoodlee, to console and to comfort
her.

"After all the vows we have exchanged--after all our hours of
happiness together--Cyril, Cyril! how could you leave me thus cruelly
and coldly?" she would exclaim, almost aloud, while wringing her poor
hands in a paroxysm of grief.

Sometimes, when an emotion of anger at his determined injustice and
assumption of her guilt got the better of her sorrow, she drew the
betrothal ring _almost_ off her finger, and as often kissed and slid
it back again, loth, by removing it, entirely to break the spiritual
link or tie between herself and Cyril Wedderburn.

"He will come to me again!" she often whispered in her heart, fondly.
"Oh, yes: he must come to me once more."

But days went by, and Mary watched and wept, for the days became
weeks and months; yet Cyril Wedderburn came no more to Lonewoodlee.




CHAPTER XXV.

THE TELEGRAM.

So infirm was he of purpose, notwithstanding his severity with Mary,
that he had barely quitted her presence and ridden off, ere he began
to relent towards her; and then the mocking story of Everard Home,
and the cruel and stinging passage of Chesters' letter, came back to
memory, tearing the wound afresh to exasperate him: and now events
succeeded each other with considerable rapidity.

The whole of the afternoon subsequent, to his interview with Mary,
Cyril secluded himself in his own room; there he wrote three letters
to her, full of sorrow for what he termed her error, with the earnest
advice and hope that, if ever she required a friend--oh, how cold
seemed the word!--she should remember him; but each production in
turn dissatisfied him.  He knew not how the tenor of them might sound
when read, so each in succession was concluded only to be torn up and
committed to the flames; and in this state of indecision he remained
until the first gong for dinner resounded in the lofty vestibule
below.

Under his very window, as he wrote, he could hear his father's groom
openly relating to one of the gardeners Mr. Bill Trayner's very
coarse and freely-garnished account of the visit paid by "old
Lennox's daughter to the Captain on the night of the storm."

It was evident to all how moody Cyril had become; and on this day he
felt relieved rather than bored, as he usually was, by the presence
of the Reverend Mr. M'Guffog, a prosy old man; the nervous, but
good-natured Dr. Squills, and the Baron Bailie, whom Sir John had
brought home with him, as he wished their conjunct advice about some
local matter.

Cyril knew that the eyes of his mother, Horace, and Robert, were on
him; and although the two last-named suspected that he had some
little interest at Lonewoodlee, the former knew to a certainty the
cause of that gloom and depression which, to do him justice, he
endeavoured to conceal.  He strove to interest himself in the
minister's chief topics, an augmentation of his stipend and repairs
of the manse; with the Doctor on the important subjects of compulsory
vaccination, and his quarrels with the parochial board; and even with
the Baron Bailie, who was a grocer in the Vennel of Willowdean, on
the probable war-prices of butter and cheese; but he was glad, when
he had done his duty thus, to turn to Gwenny, and rest his head
thoughtfully on his hand, through the fingers of which his hair stole
in dark and glossy brown locks, close, thick, and crisp; and Lady
Wedderburn, as she saw their faces bent near each other, looked at
them admiringly, and thought how handsome they were, and how
admirably suited to each other.

But the world is full of cross-purposes, and while Cyril poured some
good-natured nothings into Gwenny's ear, her eyes, from time to time,
sought those of Horace Ramornie.

An unusually important ring at the hall-door bell reached the ears
even of those at the dinner table, and made all exchange glances,
just as Lady Wedderburn and Gwenny rose to retire; but the entrance
of Gervase Asloane, with a suspicious looking yellow document on a
silver salver, made them pause.

"A telegram for Mr. Cyril--for the Captain, I mean," said the old
man, in a subdued voice, and, as Cyril tore it open, his mother grew
pale as a lily.

"From whom is it, dearest?" she asked, drawing near.

"The Colonel."

A low exclamation escaped her.

"He telegraphs, 'We are to embark for the East on the 5th proximo, so
you have not a moment to lose in rejoining.  Provide yourself with a
good six-chambered revolver.  All ours have done so.  Tell Ramornie
he is detailed for the Depot, so his leave remains intact.'"

A bright flush spread over Cyril's face as he read.  There in action,
far away from Willowdean and Lonewoodlee, and from all his present
bitter associations and mortifications, was a relief opened suddenly
up; yet his eyes turned to the sad, the earnest and anxious look of
his poor mother, who, instead of retiring to the drawing-room,
reseated herself at the table for a little time, with her eyes full
of tears.

Heartfelt and well-bred hopes were expressed by the Minister, the
Doctor, and the Baron Bailie, that he and all his comrades might have
a pleasant and prosperous voyage to the land of the Turk and the
Heathen, "whither," added the Minister, "no Christian soldiery had
gone since the Twelfth Crusade, so ours was an epoch in the world's
history;" but there might be no actual war after all, for was not
this an age of subtle diplomacy and peace-making at any price; and to
these last expressions of hope, his mother clung desperately, with a
sob in her throat and a prayer in her heart; but Sir John, who was a
bitter enemy of Lord Aberdeen's Government, and was suspicious of his
Russian sympathies, pretty broadly "d--d the notion of peace at any
price, and hoped the day would never come when Britannia, if smitten
on one cheek, would quietly turn the other!"

"You'll not be long behind me, Horace, I fear," said Cyril, gaily, as
he took off his wine; "the service companies are barely the full
strength, and we shall soon have gaps to fill.  Gervase," he added,
turning to the old butler, who lingered nervously behind his chair,
with an expression in his face that indicated a desire to "whimper,"
and to pat Cyril on the head or back, as he had often done in
boyhood, "you'll have all my traps packed and brought downstairs.
Have the carriage brought round in time for the night train for
England."

Before this, Cyril had been, perhaps, the most silent member of the
company; now it was he who talked most and was the gayest; but his
mother was voiceless, and even Gwenny felt crushed (and would have
been more so had Horace been going), for all knew they were looking
on a face they might never see again, and listening to a voice that
never more might fall upon their ear.

The fatal telegram!

It lay on the polished table, like an executioner's warrant, to Lady
Wedderburn's eyes--the ukase that was to tear her son from her--and
she forgot all about her matrimonial schemes and fears of Horace; she
only looked at her handsome and curly-haired Cyril, and thought of
all that was before him; that terrible perspective; the long voyage
in a comfortless hired transport, by the stormy Bay of Biscay, the
Mediterranean and the Levant, the Bosphorus and the Black Sea; of the
varied climates; and more than all--oh, more than all!--the chances
of an unequal and disastrous war against the hordes of Russia.  Then
her maternal heart died within her: she could only lay her face on
his breast and weep.

Many a wife and mother over all the British Isles felt the same
emotion at that fatal time, when, after forty years of peace, and
Waterloo had become as a tale that is told, the clouds of war began
to gather in the North and East; and long, long in London, the mighty
heart of the Empire, was remembered that early morning when the drum
beat that summoned the Guards, the flower of our army, to the field;
on that same morning when sixty thousand citizens of Edinburgh
accompanied the departing steps of the King's Own to the ship that
bore them away, for all the land was full of sympathy.

Now Cyril hated "a scene."

"What's the row, mamma?" asked he, indignantly.  "How often have you
seen me leave home to join the Fusileers, and always come back
jollier than ever?"

"But you never left Willowdean at such a time of war and peril as
this--going from me perhaps never to return, my boy!"

"Kate, my love, do be calm, be sensible," urged Sir John; and
becoming less excited, she left the room, leaning on Gwenny's arm,
and urging Cyril soon to join her.

All her future plans and minor considerations, even the dread of Mary
Lennox, were merged now in one thought; and when she regarded his
fine face and stalwart figure, her memory went back over the sunny
days of his boyhood, and to the tenderer time beyond, when, "like the
callow cygnet in its nest," he clung to her bosom, when merry
bonfires were blazing redly on the Twinlaw and Earlston Hill, on
Beimerside, and over all the Lammermuirs, from the beautiful vale of
the Gala to the terrible rocks of St. Abb, for the birth of an heir
to the beloved house of Willowdean.

And now, now, what might it all come to--the care, affection,
education, and pride of past years?

A bullet shot from the musket of an unlettered Russian slave, and a
tomb without a coffin or a stone!

So might the life of one so loved--the life she had hoped was to
stretch out so far beyond that of his parents as God should
will--pass away.  Cyril, whom she had prayed and trusted might live
to see his children's children, long after she had been laid in the
family vault at Willowdean church.  And as she skilfully tormented
herself by dark anticipations like these, she turned to Gwenny (who,
sooth to say, was somewhat scared by the suddenness of the summons,
and her excessive and unwonted burst of grief), and said--

"Oh, Gwenny, why did I ever permit him to be a soldier--why?  But
regrets are useless now; yet I am very ill used, I think.  Horace has
neither father nor mother to regret him, and yet he remains with the
Depot, as that provoking Colonel says, while Cyril goes abroad with
the regiment!"

She glanced at the magnificent French clock, a miracle of sculpture
and gilding, that stood on a white marble console table.

In two hours she knew he must be gone.

"Two hours only, Gwenny!" she said.

The gentlemen soon joined them, and then she was compelled to
preserve an appearance of calmness.  Cyril did not immediately come
in with them, and her heart misgave her that perhaps he had started
to Lonewoodlee, but he had only visited his own room for a moment to
give it a farewell glance, and issue to Gervase some final
instructions.  His mother now, however, grudged every moment he was
absent from her side.  Sir John drew near and took her hands
caressingly in his own, for their sympathies of course were one,
though her emotions were the keener of the two.

The long-looked-for and dreaded day, yea, the very hour, had come
when there was to be a final parting; when Cyril's place and chair
would be vacant once more, and Willowdean a broken home!  His
sword-case and portmanteau were already strapped in the
entrance-hall; and now the little family circle that had lived
together in such close and pleasant companionship was to be severed.

The grief of Miss M'Caw was so noisy and uncontrollable that she had
to retire to her own room; and Lady Wedderburn looked almost
hostilely, certainly with envy, at her unconscious nephew, who "was
detailed for the Depot," and whose home leave extended for nearly a
month beyond that of Cyril, as the spring drills had not yet
commenced.

"I would to Heaven that Horace's leave had been up too," said Lady
Wedderburn through her tears, in a whisper to Sir John.

"Why, surely there is time enough for him to go, poor boy!"

"Because we should then have had but one leave-taking, and--and this
rioting and romping about with Gwenny is scarcely proper."

"Oh, the old idea!  A month will see it all over; a memory of the
past, and Horace will have other and sterner work on hand than flying
over the Merse with a pretty young girl."

"Yes; but the memory thereof may last with the lives of both."

"Scarcely.  Where are now all the girls I flirted with when I was the
age of Horace?  Gwenny is only eighteen, at a time when love is often
a mere illusion, Kate, that passes away or fixes on some other
object, often with perilous rapidity; so Cyril may have the best
chance after all when in a few months he comes back to us," said Sir
John, with an external air of confidence and cheerfulness he was far
from feeling, as he rose and crossed the room to bid farewell to
their three guests, who, finding themselves rather _de trop_, after
formally partaking of coffee, were bowed out.

Poor Cyril's heart had been sorely divided and torn since the arrival
of the telegram.  From that moment till the time of his final
departure by train, four hours, he knew, would intervene; his horse
would in a few minutes have taken him to Mary's presence, and so
vacillating and unstable are the resolutions of a jealous lover, that
there were times when he felt strongly impelled to visit her once
again!

Had he done so, how much suffering might in the future have been
spared to both; but the golden moments passed and never returned
again.

"To what end or purpose should I go?" he asked of himself, almost
fiercely.  "Weakness, folly, disgrace!  No--no!  Once in the train
for London, and then all is over!"

Yet his soul was full of compassion and dread for what might yet be
the fate, the future, of this delicate girl, whom he had loved so
truly and tenderly.

Cyril was sincerely attached to all the household at Willowdean, to
his parents and family, and to none more than his mother, who had
ever been, to his eyes, the _belle ideal_ of all a lady and a mother
ought to be; yet he was glad, as he had to go, that the telegram and
the rail would whisk him off, as he said, "double quick," for the
solemnity of leave-taking bored and worried him; so he shared not his
mother's envy of poor Horace's more protracted visit.

He was now anxious only to have it all over, and be gone!

After the dark turn his love affair had taken, he felt inclined to
thank God for the relief he should find amid the turmoil of war and
foreign service with the Fusileers; he felt a gloomy joy, or grim
satisfaction, in the idea that Mary might weep if she saw his name in
the Gazette among the killed; but instantly thrust aside the morbid
thought, as he reflected compassionately on his tender mother, his
loving father, and all the friends by whom his loss would be
lamented; and life certainly was more valuable than the tears of a
false woman!

Already the carriage was at the door; his luggage, sword, and rugs
were placed in it; he heard the horses' hoofs rasping impatiently
among the gravel, as if they resented being harnessed out at such an
hour, and the spotted dogs were gambolling about them.  Then Cyril's
lips quivered, as he drew on his kid gloves with singular but nervous
accuracy.  His father, brother, and cousin proposed to accompany him
to the station; but he was affectionately peremptory, and would have
no second leavetaking.

As his mother cut a parting lock from his thick brown hair, she
fairly broke down again, and sobbing, fell upon his neck.  By this
Sir John, who had his emotions more under control, was greatly moved;
for to see Cyril joining his regiment now was so different from what
his departure had been on any previous occasion, save on his first
appointment, when he was under orders for India.

"Mother darling," whispered Cyril, "when going now, I have but one
favour to ask of you; be kind to that poor girl at Lonewoodlee,
should aught happen.  I have loved her well; and for my sake----"

"I shall, Cyril--if I can."

Some hurried salutes, tears, and shaking of hands, a murmured adieu
from the assembled servants, and all was over like a dream.  He was
lying back in the recess of the well-cushioned carriage, and heard
the budding branches of the old avenue--budding now as they had done
for two hundred springs and more--sweeping its roof as he was driven
away.

The old minister, Dr. Squills, with many more, were already at the
railway station to see him finally off, with a farewell cheer; and as
the departing train plunged with a mad shriek into the dark tunnel
and vanished, the former lamented aloud that "once again the Merse
had lost the best angler that ever dropped a line in the siller
Tweed; the primest curler that ever shot a stone at the rinks; the
boldest rider, the best sportsman, and the lightest dancer in a' the
country side; but God's blessing and a' our gude wishes follow him!"

Until far on in the coming grey dawn, even till the sun rose on land
and sea, his mother lay a-bed, sleepless, with watch in hand,
reckoning with anxious heart the hours and pauses in his southern
journey.  Now she knew he must be at Berwick; now at York; now at
Peterborough, and so on, until in fancy she saw the train rushing
into the roar and bustle of King's Cross Station.

How long a period might elapse, and how much would he have to
undergo, before he traversed that route homeward to her again?

After a little time poor Mary Lennox heard, and a dreadful shock it
gave her, of his abrupt departure on the very night of the sorrowful
day when last they met; and she knew that he had gone without a
farewell word or letter of explanation, and that he still thought
hardly and strongly, even bitterly, of her, and the girl's heart
waxed sore with its great grief.

They could meet no more at the stile by the triple thorn, or under
the old pine-trees; and for her own peace she meant in future to shun
those places.

Did she repine, even enviously, a little, when Dr. Squills told her
incidentally, that Cyril had telegraphed home (and not to her) "of
his safe arrival at headquarters?"  We fear she did.

Cyril's new line of conduct seemed so harsh!  Had he wished to
quarrel with her, and begun to love his cousin?  It almost seemed so.
Well, she had still her poor old father, who clung to her and her
only, even as a helpless and querulous child might have done; but how
long should he be spared to her?

God alone knew.




CHAPTER XXVI.

MARY'S NEW TERROR.

Some weeks elapsed after this, and yet Mary heard nothing of Cyril;
even the lingering hope that he would write to her died away; she
knew not where his regiment was stationed; where it was to sail from,
when, or for where; and still full of deep and tender interest, as
her heart was for him, this ignorance of all concerning him was most
tantalizing, till one evening she was startled by a sudden visit from
Captain Chesters, who had been for some time absent in London; and
with all her horror of him, she hoped to glean in the course of
conversation some tidings of the absent and the loved.

The month was April now, but the day had been rainy and gloomy, and
Lonewoodlee, with its weather-beaten walls, its masses of dark green
ivy and group of stern old pines, had worn its most grim aspect.

The live-long day the rain had been sowing moor and lea, gorging the
watercourses and runnels, while masses of cold white vapour were
rolling slowly upward from all the lower portions of the pastoral
landscape.  The desolate face of Nature around the Tower increased
the desolation of Mary's heart, for she was at all times an
impressionable creature, and the whole of that dreary day she had sat
by her father's bed-side sewing, or reading to him, and thinking of
Cyril Wedderburn; where was he--on the land or on the sea--and did he
ever think of her now!

On this day it had seemed to Mary that when her father spoke, a
strange brightness and smoothing out of wrinkles spread over his
withered face; his brow became stern at times, his eyes sparkled with
a new light, and she saw something of what his features must have
been in the days of his youth, and in the time of her dead mother's
bridal--in the happier years that had gone for ever.

Then as she watched and saw how the brow seemed to become broad and
open, the cheek to flush, and a younger appearance to steal over all
his face, she trembled in her heart lest the last great crisis and
the Shadowy Hand were approaching, for most of the day he had raved
of his dead son, and the now almost forgotten Indian war in which he
fell.  "It is always dreadful even to the accustomed watchers of the
sick, when the mind wanders" writes the charming authoress of "Lost
and Won;" "when the soul goes on some wild journey of its own, away
from direct human associations, fighting with imaginary dangers,
yearning for impossible delights, living among distorted shadows and
amazing pictures that have their origin in some magic-lantern
reflection of past or present life."  So it was with poor Oliver
Lennox.  Sometimes he mistook Mary for her mother, who was in the
grave; then came scenes in the hunting-field; for he had been a keen
and fearless sportsman, mingled oddly with terror and hatred of duns,
and the fancied presence of his dead son Harry, to whom he had been
tenderly attached.  To these occasional aberrations of intellect,
Mary never became used, and they always filled her with the keenest
anguish and dismay.

And so for a long and weary day Mary had been enduring all this, till
she thought her own brain would turn, when Alison Home announced that
Captain Chesters was in the dining-room, where she found him booted
and spurred, and warming himself before the large fire of coal,
roots, and peat, and perfectly dry, apparently, his overalls and
ample Inverness cape, which he had left in the hall, having protected
him completely from the rain.

The same old portraits that had looked down on Cyril
Wedderburn--portraits of the Lennoxes of past times, "seeming
ghostly, desolate, and dread," were looking down on him, but they
suggested no other idea to his mind than that they were "uncommonly
seedy, and were in appearance only fit for Wardour Street."

Her father was slowly, but surely, passing away, and Mary, in the
utter loneliness of her heart--she had so few visitors and fewer
friends--now felt compelled (despising herself the while therefor) to
receive politely this unwelcome visitor, for, save her father, she
knew no human being to care for, or who seemed to care for her; thus
a kind of sullen desperation had been stealing over her since Cyril's
sudden departure.

Aware that it was Chesters who had injured her with her betrothed,
Mary regarded him with a secret fear, equalled only by her loathing,
and summoned as she had been from the bedside of her ruined and
impoverished parent, whom she knew to be in this man's power, made
these emotions all the stronger.

To the _roué_ Chesters there was something altogether delightful in
the freshness and presence of this young girl, so plainly and
modestly attired, and with her rich hair so beautifully dressed, as
she came near him, and brought an odour of the dried lavender (from
plants in the old garden), amid which all her handkerchiefs, collars,
and cuffs were folded; and in her bosom, fastened by her solitary
little brooch, were some of the first violets of the season, which
Alison had gathered for her, singularly enough, near the stile at the
old triple thorn.

Mary had not been without many a mortification since Cyril's
departure, and since the story had gone abroad.  Lady Wedderburn,
Lady Ernescleugh and others--even the unpretending Mrs. M'Guffog, the
minister's wife--had eyed her coldly and curiously from under their
parasols; and some even had ventured to survey her more boldly than
had been their wont--or she nervously fancied they did so--and all
this she owed to the scheme and tongue of Ralph Rooke Chesters!

And now with the first glance, Mary discerned, to her alarm, that her
visitor was, as the saying is, "flushed with wine," or too probably
something more potent, as his face was almost purple in some places,
his green eyes were bloodshot, and his utterance was somewhat
uncertain.  He held out his hand, without drawing his thick riding
glove off, and regarded her with one of his cool, leering, and
insolent smiles.

"Bravo, Miss Lennox!  How goes it with you?" he asked.  "Dull enough,
I suppose, in this atrocious weather?"

"Pray be seated," said Mary, retreating back a pace, after barely
touching his hand.

"Thanks," he replied, continuing to eye her smilingly, and to twirl
and untwirl the lash of his short riding whip.

Ignorant of all that passed at Willowdean between Lady Wedderburn and
Cyril, or knowing only that the latter was gone, the advent of Gwenny
gave Chesters some courage to renew his attempts to gain a place in
Mary's heart, or at least to bend her to his purpose; and when tired
of her--for tire he knew he should--why, then in Cyril's absence, he
might have a chance of winning the heiress, if he met her in London;
for Chesters was a man of the most unbounded assurance.

"So Wedderburn is off to join his regiment at last--ha! ha!--after
engaging himself to his pretty cousin?" said he, bluntly.

"You are surely misinformed," said Mary, faintly.

"I am not.  He told me all about it in London."

This, of course, was utterly false; but Mary could not know that it
was so, and he was resolved on making her miserable by inspiring her
with jealousy and mistrust.

"And where is his regiment lying at present?" she asked.

"'Tisn't lying anywhere just now," he replied, in a mocking tone,
which, like his smile, was replete with insolence.

"I do not understand you, sir," said Mary.

"You're dying to know all about it, though.  Well, after our mutual
friend Wedderburn had been going it, as usual, among the girls at
Chatham and Rochester--oh, I know the style perfectly--the Fusileers
sailed from Southampton on the fifth of this month."

"For where?" asked Mary, in a low, breathless voice.

"Oh, Malta, Turkey, or somewhere thereabout.  What can it matter to
you now?  Come, Miss Lennox--or may I not call you Mary?

  "'See the mountains kiss high Heaven,
  And the waves clasp one another.'"

And he proceeded to quote again his favourite and almost only piece
of poetry, drawing nearer her as he did so; but Mary arose, with lips
compressed and eyes flashing, and so Chesters, whose ideas of
love-making had not been acquired in the society of ladies generally,
became correspondingly irritated.

"Well, if you won't be jolly, but are determined to be unpleasant,"
said he, with an insolent laugh, "suppose we talk about business?"

"I am more and more at a loss to understand you, sir."

"You can understand this, I presume, Miss Lennox, that I took up the
old gentleman's bill--not for his own sake, but yours?"

"Though you have been so often his guest in better days?  Yet, from
whatever motive you freed my poor papa from the terror of it, you
performed an act of great kindness and charity, for which I shall
ever thank you and remember you in my prayers."

"Bah!" said he, with gloomy scorn, "who pray nowadays?  You treat me
more like a dog than a gentleman, Miss Lennox; but," he added, as the
fumes of what he had taken were beginning to mount upward, "do you
know that for all the grand airs you give yourself, I could have your
father arrested and marched off to Greenlaw Gaol; and if you continue
as obdurate as you are now, what the devil is to hinder me from doing
so?"

Terror of the man, and of his new and unwonted bearing, got the
better of Mary's anger, and compelled her to dissemble.  But she
said--

"You talk daringly, sir; for what reason could you, or any such as
you, have Oliver Lennox of Lonewoodlee arrested?"

"Debt.  Have you already forgotten the bill I took up for him?"

"Never shall I forget your kindness.  But has not the bill expired?
I think the phrase is."

"No; it can never expire.  I had it protested and renewed; so it
grows daily in value--interest upon interest.  The world is divided
into two classes--at least, I have found it so--fools and scoundrels,
or dupes and despots.  Now, by Jove!  I prefer being the last named;
anything is better than being a fool or a dupe."

Mary was speechless.  The bill! that fatal bill!  She remembered how
she had bathed her father's trembling hand in Rimmel and iced water,
before he had achieved the signing and indorsation of it, with a
signature so all unlike what his own was wont to be, that the bank
people had eyed it dubiously for a time.

"How did your father ever expect to meet this bill, unless some
good-natured fellow like myself had come forward?  He is a veritable
old goose, who seems to have thought his pasture land of Lonewoodlee
a perfect California, a Golconda, or El Dorado, that no end of money
could be got out of."

"And what have you thought of Chesterhaugh?" retorted Mary.

"Pretty much the same, by Jove!  But though Chesterhaugh is entailed,
I have contrived to make all the timber march, and something more."

Amid all the difficulties, monetary and otherwise, that Mary had
undergone, no man had ever before dared to address her in the tone
and manner now adopted by this bold reprobate.  A clamorous anxiety,
a strong sense of weary confusion, a terrible, yet dull oppression of
the heart and aching of the head, a sensation as if she was all
pulse, pervaded her.  She made a struggle to appear calm, and only
after a time became conscious that Chesters was speaking again, but
with thicker utterances than ever.

"Give me one kiss, Mary dear, and a promise of a little hope that you
will love me in the time to come, and I shall be patient, though I
want money horribly.  Once I had only to draw upon my banker, now I
have to draw upon my wits--a devil of a difference, you'll admit.  So
just one kiss, my sweet----"

"Stand back, sir, I command you!" exclaimed Mary, raising her hand to
the bell.

"Why, hang it! you don't mean to mourn for ever about that selfish
muff, Wedderburn, who has discarded you--cast you off for a richer
engagement?"

"He could not well have made a poorer one," sighed Mary.

"Had he been a man of honour, he would never have concealed from his
family the fact that he loved you."

This was perhaps the most stinging remark Chesters had made, and
having some truth in it, Mary felt it more keenly; so if fear made
her tolerate the presence of Chesters, wounded pride now caused her
to loathe him more and more.  Remembering all the trickery of which
Cyril--her absent Cyril--had suspected him, hinting even at intended
murder, perhaps; his sharping at cards, and the apparent snare into
which he had lured herself, indignation for a moment got the better
of her fear and policy, and with invincible hauteur in her face and
manner, she said--

"I have to request, sir, that you never again mention the name of
Captain Wedderburn to me.  Indeed, I am astonished that you dare to
speak of him to any one."

"Why? by Jove!"

"When you know that his horse was drugged on that terrible night."

"By whom?" he asked, with a frown.

"Your worthy groom, or yourself."

"Dare you say so to me--a gentleman?" he asked, making a stride
towards her, and laying a hand heavily on her arm.

"I do.  A gentleman?  Take your hand away, Captain Chesters, or,
though a girl, I shall----"

"Do what?"

"Summon aid, and have you expelled," replied Mary, feeling again all
her own helplessness.

Her words and bearing had, however, the effect of completely sobering
her tormentor, who took up his hat, and, while a cruel white glitter
came into his green eyes, said, with a mocking bow, "As you please,
Mary Lennox; as you please.  But I warn you, that if you are not more
complaisant when next we meet, my protested bill shall go into the
hands of Grubb and Wylie, my solicitors.  If you have no mercy on me,
why the deuce should I have any on your father?  And so I wish you
good evening."

Mary made no reply to the unmanly threat of this would-be lover; but
turned her back upon him and rang the bell, that Alison might usher
him out.  And as the sound of his horse's hoofs died away in the rain
that lashed the windows, she felt as if her heart was dying within
her, for never before had she undergone an interview so singular and
insulting; and she felt, moreover, an intuitive foreboding that she
had not seen the last of Rooke Chesters.  "Sufficient unto the day is
the evil thereof," saith the old Scriptural proverb.  But she could
not help dreading evil and gloom, misery and desperation, beyond the
present; and that Chesters might, in his baffled rage at herself, be
infamous enough to attempt to arrest her father, place him in prison,
and so kill him outright, came on her soul like a new and hitherto
unforeseen terror.

But strange events were to happen ere Mary and her tormentor met
again.  And after a few weeks she learned, incidentally, from Dr.
Squills, that Chesters had left the neighbourhood once more, and
betaken himself to London.  All that remained of Chesterhaugh, being
entailed, had been put under trust for the behoof of his long-patient
creditors; the house and grounds were advertised to be let by Messrs.
Grub and Wylie; so Mary and the district were alike freed from the
annoyance of his presence for a time.

But she found her home gradually growing more and more intolerable to
her.  Cyril's sudden and unwonted visit just before his departure,
and her subsequent anxiety for letters which never came, all
betokened some mystery.  Her rather stormy interview with Chesters,
overheard, doubtless, by vulgar ears that were at the keyhole, and
the total cessation of his visits afterwards; together with the great
local _esclandre_ of the snowy night at Chesterhaugh, had been made
subjects for discussion at the village tap, the blacksmith's forge,
and even beside her own kitchen-hearth.

Mary could gather much of this from the manner of Alison Home and her
other domestic; and they had seen much that Mary wist not of, for,
like all their class, they could read the faces of their superiors as
one may read a book; and in hers they saw only trouble and sorrow,
distraction and care.

She felt that Cyril had deserted her, and she would say in her heart--

"His love for me was but one thought, one fancy, it may be, among
many; while mine, alas! it was the die on which I staked my all--the
chain whereon all the links of my life were strung."



END OF VOL. I.




  LONDON:
  SAVILL, EDWARDS AND CO., PRINTERS, CHANDOS STREET,
  COVENT GARDEN.




[Transcriber's note: Inconsistent and archaic spelling is as printed.]









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