Barren Honour Part 8

Harding Knowles has rather a disappointing face: you feel that it ought to have been handsome, and yet that is about the last epithet you would apply to it. The features individually are good, and there is plenty of intellect about them, though the forehead is narrow; but the general expression is disagreeable--something between the cunning and the captious. There is a want of repose, just now, about his whole demeanour--a sort of fidgety consciousness of not being in his right place; he is always changing his position restlessly, and his hands are never still for a moment. He had been Clydesdale's "coach" at Oxford for two or three terms, and had acquired a certain hold on the latter's favour, chiefly by the exercise of a brusque, rough flattery, which the Earl chose to mistake for sincerity and plain speaking.

No parasite can be perfect, unless he knows when to talk and when to hold his tongue. Knowles had mastered that part of the science, thoroughly. On the present occasion he saw that the silent humour possessed his patron, and was careful not to interrupt the lordly meditations; only throwing in now and then a casual observation requiring no particular answer. No one dreams of deep drinking nowadays in general society; but the Earl has evidently taken quite as much claret as was good for him--enough to make him obstinate and savage.

That pair at the piano seem to fascinate him strangely. He keeps watching every movement of Wyverne's lips, and every change in Helen's colour, as if he would guess the import of their low earnest words. A far deeper feeling than mere curiosity is evidently at work. It is well that the half-closed fingers shade his eyes just now, for they are not good to meet--hot and blood-shot, with a fierce longing and wrathful envy. Not an iota of all this escaped Harding Knowles; but he allowed the bad brutal nature to seethe on sullenly, till he deemed it was time to work the safety-valve.

"A pretty picture," he said at last, with rather a contemptuous glance in the direction of the lovers--Clydesdale ground out a bitter blasphemy between his teeth; but the other went on as if he had heard nothing--"Yes, a very pretty picture; and Sir Alan Wyverne deserves credit for his audacity. But I can't help feeling provoked, at such a rare creature being so perfectly thrown away. If ever there was a woman who was born to live in state, she sits there; and they will have to be pensioners of the Squire's, if they want anything beyond necessaries.

It's a thousand pities."

"You mean she might have made a better match?" the other asked: he felt he must say something, but he seemed to speak unwillingly, and his voice, always harsh and guttural, sounded thicker and hoa.r.s.er than usual.

"Yes, I am sure she might have made a better match: I _think_ she might have made--the best in England."

Knowles spoke very slowly and deliberately, almost pausing between each of the last words. His keen steady gaze fastened on Clydesdale, till the Earl's fierce blue eyes sank under the scrutiny, and the flush on his cheek deepened to crimson.

"What the d--l's the use of talking about that now?" he grumbled out, "now that it's all over and settled?"

"Settled, but not all over. I'm not fond of betting as a rule; but I should like to take long odds--_very_ long odds, mind, for Wyverne's dangerous when he is in earnest--that the engagement never comes off."

Lord Clydesdale paused quite a minute in reflection. There was a wicked crafty significance in the other's look that he could not misunderstand.

"I don't know what you call long odds," he said at last, "but I'll lay _you_ five thousand to fifty that it is not broken off within the year."

There are men, not peculiarly irascible or punctilious, who would have resented those words and the tone in which they were spoken as a direct personal insult; but Knowles was not sensitive when it was a question of his own advantage or advancement, and had sucked in avarice with his mother's milk.

"I'll book that bet," he answered, coolly. "I take all chances in. Sir Alan might die, you know, before the year is out; or Miss Vavasour might come to her senses."

So he wrote it down carefully on his ivory tablets, affixing the date and his initials. They both knew it--he was signing a bond, just as effectually as if it had been engrossed on parchment and regularly witnessed and sealed. But neither cared to look the other in the face now. In the basest natures there lingers often some faint useless remnant of shame. I fancy that Marcus rather shrank from meeting his patron's glance, when he went out from the Decemvir's presence to lay hands on Virginius's daughter.

While this conversation was going on, Max Vavasour had roused himself from his easy chair, and strolled over towards the piano. It is probable that he had got his orders from "my lady's" eloquent eye. As he came near, Wyverne drew back slightly, with a scarcely perceptible movement of impatience, and Helen stopped playing. They both guessed that her brother had not disturbed himself without a purpose.

"It's a great shame to interrupt you, Alan," Max said; "but one has certain duties towards one's guests, I believe; and you might help me very much, if you would be good-natured. You see, all this isn't much fun for Clydesdale; and I want to keep him in good humour, if I can--never mind why. He's mad after _ecarte_ just now, and he has heard that you are a celebrity at it. He asked me to-day if I thought you would mind playing with him? I would engage him myself with pleasure; but it would be no sport to either party. He knows, just as well as you do, how infamously I play."

Wyverne very seldom refused a reasonable request, and he was in no mood to be churlish.

"What must be, must be," he replied, with a sigh of resignation. "If the Great Earl is to be amused, and no other martyr is available, thy servant is ready, though not willing. I thought I had lost enough in my time at that game. It is hard to have to lose, now, such a pleasant seat as this. Tell him I'll come directly. I suppose he don't want to gamble?

He has two to one the best of it, though, when he has made me stir from here. Helen, perhaps you would not mind singing just one or two songs? I am Spartan in my tastes so far: I like to be marshalled to my death with sweet music."

So the two sat down, at the _ecarte_ table. Clydesdale betrayed an eagerness quite disproportionate to the occasion when Max Vavasour summoned him to the encounter. He suggested that the stakes should be a "pony" on the best of eleven games: to this Alan demurred.

"I have given up gambling now," he said; "but, even when I played for money, I never did so with women in the room. A pony is a nominal stake with you, of course: with me, it is different. You may have ten on, if you like. I only play one rubber."

The other a.s.sented without another word, and the battle began. The Earl was far from a contemptible adversary; but he was palpably over-matched.

Wyverne had held his own before this with the best and boldest of half the capitals in Europe. He played carelessly at first, for his thoughts were evidently elsewhere; but got interested as the game went on, and developed all the science he possessed: it carried him through one or two critical points against invariably indifferent cards. At last they were five games all, and were commencing "_la belle_." Max, Harding Knowles, and Bertie Grenvil (who never could keep away from a card-table, unless some extraordinary potent counter-excitement were present) had been watching the match from the beginning; the last having invested 11--10 on Wyverne--taken by Clydesdale eagerly. The cards ran evenly enough. By dint of sheer good play Alan scored three to his opponent's two. As he was taking up his hand in the next deal, Miss Vavasour came up softly behind him, and leant her arm on the high carved back of his chair. She felt sure that her cousin would win, and wanted to share even in that trivial triumph. I wonder how often in this world women have unconsciously baulked the very success they were most anxious to secure? Alan held the king and the odd trick certain; but, if his life had depended on the issue, he could not have helped looking up into the glorious dark eyes to thank them for their sympathy. At that moment his adversary played first, and Wyverne followed suit, without marking.

It was one of those fatal _coups_ that Fortune never forgives. The next deal Clydesdale turned up the king, and won the _vole_ easily.

Even Max Vavasour, who knew him well, and had seen him play for infinitely larger stakes, was astonished at the excitement that the Earl displayed; he dashed down the winning card with an energy which shook the table, and actually glared at his opponent with a savage air of exultation, utterly absurd and incomprehensible under the circ.u.mstances.

Alan leant back in his chair, regarding the victor's flushed cheek and quivering lips with an amused smile, not wholly devoid of sarcasm.

"On my honour, I envy you, Clydesdale," he said quietly; "there's an immense amount of pleasure before you. Only conceive the luxury of being able to gratify such a pa.s.sion for play as yours must be, without danger of ruin! I never was so interested about anything in my life as you were about that last hand; and bad cards for ten years, at heavy stakes, would only get rid of some of your superfluous thousands."

The exultation faded from the Earl's face, and it began to lower sullenly. He felt that he had made himself ridiculous, and hated Wyverne intensely for having made it more apparent.

"You don't seem to understand that we were playing for love," he muttered. "I had heard so much of your play, that I wanted to measure myself against it, and I was anxious to win. It appears that the great guns miss fire sometimes, like the rest of us."

"Of course they do," Wyverne answered, cheerfully. "Not that I am the least better than the average. But we are all impostors from first to last."

The party broke up for the night almost immediately afterwards. Alan laughed to scorn all his fair cousin's penitential fears about "her having interrupted him just at the wrong moment." It is doubtful if he ever felt any self-reproach for his carelessness, till Bertie Grenvil looked up plaintively in his face, as the two were wending their way to the smoking-room.

"Alan, I _did_ believe in your _ecarte_," he said.

There was not much in the words, but the Cherub uttered them with the air of a man to whom so wonderfully few things are left to believe in, that the defalcation of one of those objects of faith is a very serious matter indeed.

Yet Wyverne was wrong, and did his adversary in some sort injustice, when he supposed that the spirit of the gambler accounted altogether for the latter's eagerness and excitement. Other and different feelings were working in Lord Clydesdale's heart when he sat down to play. One of those vague superst.i.tious presentiments that men are ashamed to confess to their dearest friends shot across him at the moment. He had said within himself--"It is my luck against his, not only now, but hereafter.

If I win at this game, I shall beat him at others--at _all_." So you see, in the Earl's imagination, much more was at issue than the nominal stakes; and there was a double meaning in his words--"We were playing _for love_."

CHAPTER X.

"A shiny night, In the season of the year."

It was the third evening after that one recorded in the last chapter; the party at Dene remained the same, though a large reinforcement was expected on the morrow. Only the younger Vavasour was absent; he had gone out to dine and sleep at the house of a country magnate, with whom a Russian friend of Max's was staying. Lady Mildred and her daughter had just left the drawing-room--it was close upon midnight--Wyverne followed them into the hall to provide them with their tapers, and had not yet succeeded in lighting Helen's--there never was such an obstinate piece of wax, or such an awkward [Greek: pyrphoros.] It is possible he would have lingered yet longer over the operation, and some pleasant last words, but he suddenly caught sight of the chief butler standing in the deep doorway that led towards the offices. The emergency must have been very tremendous to induce that model of discretion to intrude himself on any colloquy whatever; he evidently did not intend to do so now; but an extraordinary intelligence and significance on the grave precise face, usually possessed by a polite vacuity, made Alan conclude his "good-nights" rather abruptly; he guessed that he was wanted.

"What is it, Hales?" he said, as soon as he came within speaking distance.

The butler's voice was mysteriously subdued as he replied--

"My master wishes to see you in his study immediately, if you please, Sir Alan. Mr. Somers is with him."

The said Somers was born and bred in Norfolk, but had been head keeper at Dene for fifteen years--a brave, honest, simple-minded man, rather blunt and unceremonious with his superiors, and apt to be surly with his equals and subordinates; but not ill-conditioned or bad hearted _au fond_; a really sincere and well-meaning Christian, too, though he would swear awfully at times. He had only one aim and object in life--the rearing and preservation of game; we should be lucky, some of us, if we carried out our single idea as thoroughly well.

The Squire was looking rather grave and anxious, as his nephew entered.

"Tell Sir Alan at once what you have been telling me, Somers," he said.

"There is no time to lose, if we mean to act."

The keeper's hard, dark face, grew more ominous and threatening, as he muttered--"Acting! I should hope there's no doubt about _that_: there never was such a chance." And then in his own curt, quaint way, he gave Wyverne the sum of his intelligence.

It appeared that the neighbourhood had been infested lately by a formidable poaching gang, chiefly organized and directed by a certain "Lanky Jem;" their head quarters were at Newmanham, and they had divided their patronage pretty equally, so far, over all the manors in a circle of miles round. They had done a good deal of harm already; for they first appeared in the egging season, and had netted a large number of partridges and hares, even before the first of September, since which day they had been out somewhere every night. Of course it was most important to arrest their depredations before they could get at the pheasants. The gang had been seen more than once at their work; but their numbers were too formidable--they mustered quite a score--for a small party to buckle with; and to track them home was impossible; they had carts always near, artfully concealed, with really good trotters in the shafts; so, when they had secured as much as they could carry, they were able to ensure their retreat, and dispose of their booty. In Newmanham they took the precaution of changing their quarters perpetually, which made it more difficult to catch them "red-handed."

That very day, however, one of the lot, partly from revenge, partly on the certainty of a rich reward, had turned traitor. Somers was in possession of exact information as to time and place: about _catching_ the poachers that night there was no doubt whatever--_holding_ them was another question; for "Lanky Jem" had made no secret of his intention to show fight if driven into a corner; indeed it was supposed that he would not be averse to having a brush, under favourable circ.u.mstances, with his natural enemies, the guardians of the game.

"They terms him Lanky Jem," the head-keeper explained; "'cause he comes from Lankyshire. He's a orkard customer in a row, they say, wery wenturesome and wery wenomous; he's taught his gang what they calls the 'rough-and-tumble game;' all's fair in that style they says, and if they gets you down, you may reckon on having their heel in your mouth before you can holler. I don't think that chap would have split, only he had words with Jem; he knocked two of his teeth out, and roughed him dreadful, by the looks on him. You'll see our man with the rest on 'em to-night, Sir Alan, and don't you go to hit him; he'll have a spotted hankercher half over his face, and won't be blacked like the others, that's how you'll know him. I've taken the liberty already of letting Sir Gilbert's folks know; we shall muster a score or thereabouts, and I don't see no fear about matching 'em. The moon won't be down these two hours, and they won't begin much afore that. They'll come back through Haldon-lane, and I thought of lining it, Sir Alan, and nipping down on 'em there, if it's agreeable to you; the banks are nicely steep, and they won't get out of _that_ trap in a hurry."

The Squire could not help smiling at the quiet way in which the old keeper took his nephew's presence and personal aid for granted.