Innocent : her fancy and his fact Part 34

"Is he dead?" the girl asked, quietly.

"Yes--I--I think so--he died abroad--so they say, but I have never quite believed it--I don't know why! Come, let me show you the rooms. I am glad your name is Armitage."

She led the way, walking slowly,--Innocent followed like one in a dream. They ascended a small staircase, softly carpeted, to a square landing, and here Miss Leigh opened a door.

"This is the sitting-room," she said. "You see, it has a nice bow-window with a view of the garden. The bedroom is just beyond it--both lead into one another."

Innocent looked in and could not resist giving a little exclamation of pleasure. Everything was so clean and dainty and well kept--it seemed to her a perfect haven of rest and shelter. She turned to Miss Leigh in eager impulsiveness.

"Oh, please let me stay!" she said. "Now, at once! I have only just arrived in London and this is the first place I have seen. It seems so--so fortunate that you should have had a friend named Armitage!

Perhaps--perhaps I may be a friend too!"

A curious tremor seemed to pa.s.s over the old lady as though she shivered in a cold wind. She laid one hand gently on the girl's arm.

"You may, indeed!" she said. "One never can tell what may happen in this strange world! But we have to be practical--and I am very poor and pressed for money. I do not know you--and of course I should expect references from some respectable person who can tell me who you are and all about you."

Innocent grew pale. She gave a little expressive gesture of utter hopelessness.

"I cannot give you any references," she said--"I am quite alone in the world--my people are dead--you see I am in mourning. The last friend I had died a little while ago and left me four hundred pounds in bank-notes. I have them here"--and she touched her breast--"and if you like I will give you one of them in advance payment for the rooms and board at once."

The old lady heaved a quick sharp sigh. One hundred pounds! It would relieve her of a weight of pressing difficulty--and yet--! She paused, considering.

"No, my child!" she said, quietly. "I would not on any account take so much money from you. If you wish to stay, and if I must omit references and take you on trust--which I am quite willing to do!"--and she smiled, gravely--"I will accept two months' rent in advance if you think you can spare this--can you?"

"Yes--oh, yes!" the girl exclaimed, impulsively. "If only I may stay--now!"

"You may certainly stay now," and Miss Leigh rang a bell to summon the neat maid-servant. "Rachel, the rooms are let to this young lady, Miss Armitage. Will you prepare the bedroom and help her unpack her things?"

Then, turning round to Innocent, she said kindly,--"You will of course take your meals with me at my table--I keep very regular hours, and if for any cause you have to be absent, I should wish to know beforehand."

Innocent said nothing;--her eyes were full of tears, but she took the old lady's little hand and kissed it. They went down together again to the drawing-room, Innocent just pausing to tell the maid Rachel that she would prefer to unpack and arrange the contents of her satchel--all her luggage,--herself; and in a very few minutes the whole business was settled. Eager to prove her good faith to the gentle lady who had so readily trusted her, she drew from her bosom the envelope containing the bank-notes left to her by Hugo Jocelyn, and, unfolding all four, she spread them out on the table.

"You see," she said, "this is my little fortune! Please change one of them and take the two months' rent and anything more you want--please do!"

A faint colour flushed Miss Leigh's pale cheeks.

"No, my dear, no!" she answered. "You must not tempt me! I will take exactly the two months' rent and no more; but I think you ought not to carry this money about with you--you should put it in a bank. We'll talk of this afterwards--but go and lock it up somewhere now--there's a little desk in your room you could use--but a bank would be safest.

After dinner this evening I'll tell you what I think you ought to do--you are so very young!"--and she smiled--"such a young little thing! I shall have to look after you and play chaperone!"

Innocent looked up with a sweet confidence in her eyes.

"That will be kind of you!" she said, and leaving the one bank-note of a hundred pounds on the table, she folded up the other three in their original envelope and returned them to their secret place of safety.

"In a little while I will tell you a great deal about myself--and I do hope I shall please you! I will not give any trouble, and I'll try to be useful in the house if you'll let me. I can cook and sew and do all sorts of things!"

"Can you, indeed!" and Miss Leigh laughed good-naturedly. "And what about studying for literature?"

"Ah!--that of course comes first!" she said. "But I shall do all my writing in the mornings--in the afternoons I can help you as much as you like."

"My dear, your time must be your own," said Miss Leigh, decisively.

"You have paid for your accommodation, and you must have perfect liberty to do as you like, as long as you keep to my regular hours for meals and bed-time. I think we shall get on well together,--and I hope we shall be good friends!"

As she spoke she bent forward and on a sudden impulse drew the girl to her and kissed her. Poor lonely Innocent thrilled through all her being to the touch of instinctive tenderness, and her heart beat quickly as she saw the portrait on the harpsichord--her father's pictured face--apparently looking at her with a smile.

"Oh, you are very good to me!" she murmured, with a little sob in her breath, as she returned the gentle old lady's kiss. "I feel as if I had known you for years! Did you know him"--and she pointed to the portrait--"very long?"

Miss Leigh's eyes grew bright and tender.

"Yes!" she answered. "We were boy and girl together--and once--once we were very fond of each other. Perhaps I will tell you the story some day! Now go up to your rooms and arrange everything as you like, and rest a little. Would you like some tea? Anything to eat?"

Poor Innocent, who had left Briar Farm at dawn without any thought of food, and had travelled to London almost unconscious of either hunger or fatigue, was beginning to feel the lack of nourishment, and she gratefully accepted the suggestion.

"I lunch at two o'clock," continued Miss Leigh. "But it's only a little past twelve now, and if you have come a long way from the country you must be tired. I'll send Rachel up to you with some tea."

She went to give the order, and Innocent, left to herself for a moment, moved softly up to her father's picture and gazed upon it with all her soul in her eyes. It was a wonderful face--a face expressive of the highest thought and intelligence--the face of a thinker or a poet, though the finely moulded mouth and chin had nothing of the weakness which sometimes marks a mere dreamer of dreams. Timidly glancing about her to make sure she was not observed, she kissed the portrait, the cold gla.s.s which covered it meeting her warm caressing lips with a repelling chill. He was dead--this father whom she could never claim!--dead as Hugo Jocelyn, who had taken that father's place in her life. She might love the ghost of him if her fancy led her that way, as she loved the ghost of the "Sieur Amadis"--but there was nothing else to love! She was alone in the world, with neither father nor "knight of old" to protect or defend her, and on herself alone depended her future. She turned away and left the room, looking a fragile, sad, un.o.btrusive little creature, with nothing about her to suggest either beauty or power. Yet the mind in that delicate body had a strength of which she was unconscious, and she was already bending it instinctively and intellectually like a bow ready for the first shot--with an arrow which was destined to go straight to its mark.

Meanwhile on Briar Farm there had fallen a cloud of utter desolation.

The day was fair and brilliant with summer sunshine, the birds sang, the roses bloomed, the doves flew to and fro on the gabled roof, and Innocent's pet "Cupid" waited in vain on the corner of her window-sill for the usual summons that called it to her hand,--but a strange darkness and silence like a whelming wave submerged the very light from the eyes of those who suddenly found themselves deprived of a beloved presence--a personality un.o.btrusively sweet, which had bestowed on the old house a charm and grace far greater than had been fully recognised.

The "base-born" Innocent, nameless, and unbaptised, and therefore shadowed by the stupid scandal of commonplace convention, had given the "home" its homelike quality--her pretty idealistic fancies about the old sixteenth-century knight "Sieur Amadis" had invested the place with a touch of romance and poetry which it would hardly have possessed with-out her--her gentle ways, her care of the flowers and the animals, and the never-wearying delight she had taken in the household affairs--all her part in the daily life of the farm had been as necessary to happiness as the mastership of Hugo Jocelyn himself--and without her nothing seemed the same. Poor Priscilla went about her work, crying silently, and Robin Clifford paced restlessly up and down the smooth gra.s.s in front of the old house with Innocent's farewell letter in his hand, reading it again and again. He had returned early from the market town where he had stayed the night, eager to explain to her all the details of the business he had gone through with the lawyer to whom his Uncle Hugo had entrusted his affairs, and to tell her how admirably everything had been arranged for the prosperous continuance of Briar Farm on the old traditional methods of labour by which it had always been worked to advantage. Hugo Jocelyn had indeed shown plenty of sound wisdom and foresight in all his plans save one--and that one was his fixed idea of Innocent's marriage with his nephew. It had evidently never occurred to him that a girl could have a will of her own in such a momentous affair--much less that she could or would be so unwise as to refuse a good husband and a settled home when both were at hand for her acceptance. Robin himself, despite her rejection of him, had still hoped and believed that when the first shock of his uncle's death had lessened, he might by patience and unwearying tenderness move her heart to softer yielding, and he had meant to plead his cause with her for the sake of the famous old house itself, so that she might become its mistress and help him to prove a worthy descendant of its long line of owners. But now! All hope was at an end--she had taken the law into her own hands and gone--no one knew whither. Priscilla was the last who had seen her--Priscilla could only explain, with many tears, that when she had gone to call her to breakfast she had found her room vacant, her bed unslept in, and the letter for Robin on the table--and that letter disclosed little or nothing of her intentions.

"Oh, the poor child!" Priscilla said, sobbingly. "All alone in a hard world, with her strange little fancies, and no one to take care of her!

Oh, Mr. Robin, whatever are we to do!"

"Nothing!" and Robin's handsome face was pale and set. "We can only wait to hear from her--she will not keep us long in anxiety--she has too much heart for that. After all, it is MY fault, Priscilla! I tried to persuade her to marry me against her will--I should have let her alone."

Sudden boyish tears sprang to his eyes--he dashed them away in self-contempt.

"I'm a regular coward, you see," he said. "I could cry like a baby--not for myself so much, but to think of her running away from Briar Farm out into the wide world all alone! Little Innocent! She was safe here--and if she had wished it, _I_ would have gone away--I would have made HER the owner of the farm, and left her in peace to enjoy it and to marry any other man she fancied. But she wouldn't listen to any plan for her own happiness since she knew she was not my uncle's daughter--that is what has changed her! I wish she had never known!"

"Ay, so do I!" agreed Priscilla, dolefully. "But she's got the fancifullest notions! All about that old stone knight in the garden--an' what wi' the things he's left carved all over the wall of the room where she read them queer old books, she's fair 'mazed with ideas that don't belong to the ways o' the world at all. I can't think what'll become o' the child. Won't there be any means of findin' out where she's gone?"

"I'm afraid not!" answered Robin, sadly. "We muse trust to her remembrance of us, Priscilla, and her thoughts of the old home where she was loved and cared for." His voice shook. "It will be a dreary place without her! We shall miss her every minute, every hour of the day! I cannot fancy what the garden will look like without her little white figure flitting over the gra.s.s, and her sweet fair face smiling among the roses! Hang it all, Priscilla, if it were not for the last wishes of my Uncle Hugo I'd throw the whole thing up and go abroad!"

"Don't do that, Mister Robin!"--and Priscilla laid her rough work-worn hand on his arm--"Don't do it! It's turning your back on duty to give up the work entrusted to you by a dead man. You know it is! An' the child may come back any day! I shouldn't wonder if she got frightened at being alone and ran home again to-morrow! Think of it, Mister Robin!

Suppose she came an' you weren't here? Why, you'd never forgive yourself! I can't think she's gone far or that she'll stay away long.

Her heart's in Briar Farm all the while--I'd swear to that! Why, only yesterday when a fine lady came to see if she couldn't buy something out o' the house, you should just a' seen her toss her pretty little head when she told me how she'd said it wasn't to be sold."

"Lady? What lady?" and Robin looked, as he felt, bewildered by Priscilla's vague statement. "Did someone come here to see the house?"

"Not exactly--I don't know what it was all about," replied Priscilla.

"But quite a grand lady called an' gave me her card. I saw the name on it--'Lady Maude Blythe'--and she asked to see 'Miss Jocelyn' on business. I asked if it was anything I could do, and she said no. So I called the child in from the garden, and she and the lady had quite a long talk together in the best parlour. Then when the lady went away, Innocent told me that she had wished to buy something from Briar Farm--but that it was not to be sold."

Robin listened attentively. "Curious!" he murmured--"very curious! What was the lady's name?"

"Lady Maude Blythe," repeated Priscilla, slowly.

He took out a note-book and pencil, and wrote it down.

"You don't think she came to engage Innocent for some service?" he asked. "Or that Innocent herself had perhaps written to an agency asking for a place, and that this lady had come to see her in consequence?"

Such an idea had never occurred to Priscilla's mind, but now it was suggested to her it seemed more than likely.