Phantom Fortune Part 16

'At a minute's notice. I am not in the habit of hesitating about any step which I consider necessary for my grandchildren's welfare.'

She looked him full in the face, with those falcon eyes of hers; and he gave her back a look as resolute, and every whit as full of courage and of pride.

'Well,' he said, after a very perceptible pause, 'no doubt your ladyship has done wisely, and I must submit to your jurisdiction. But I had asked Lady Lesbia a question, and I had been promised an answer.'

'Your question has been answered by Lady Lesbia. She left a note for you,' replied Lady Maulevrier.

'Thanks,' answered Mr. Hammond, briefly, and he hurried from the room without another word.

The letter was on the table in his bedroom. He had little hope of any good waiting for him in a letter so written. The dowager and the world had triumphed over a girl's dawning love, no doubt.

This was Lesbia's letter:

'Dear Mr. Hammond,--Lady Maulevrier desires me to say that the proposal which you honoured me by making this morning is one which I cannot possibly accept, and that any idea of an engagement between you and me could result only in misery and humiliation to both. She thinks it best, under these circ.u.mstances, that we should not again meet, and I shall therefore have left Fellside before you receive this letter.

'With all good wishes, very faithfully yours,

'LESBIA HASELDEN.'

'Very faithfully mine--faithful to her false training, to the worldly mind that rules her; faithful to the G.o.ds of this world--Belial and Mammon, and the Moloch Fashion. Poor cowardly soul! She loves me, and owns as much, yet weakly flies from me, afraid to trust the strong arm and the brave heart of the man who loves her, preferring the glittering shams of the world to the reality of true and honest love. Well, child, I have weighed you in the balance and found you wanting. Would to G.o.d it had been otherwise! If you had been brave and bold for love's sake, where is that pure and perfect chrysolite for which I would have bartered you?'

He flung himself into a chair, and sat with his head bowed upon his folded arms, and his eyes not innocent of tears. What would he not have given to find truth and courage and scorn of the world's wealth in that heart which he had tried to win. Did he think her altogether heartless because she so glibly renounced him? No, he was too just for that. He called her only half-hearted. She was like the cat in the adage, 'Letting I dare not, wait upon I would.' But he told himself with one deep sigh of resignation that she was lost to him for ever.

'I have tried her, and found her not worth the winning,' he said.

The house, even the lovely landscape smiling under his windows, the pastoral valley, smooth lake and willowy island, seemed hateful to him.

He felt himself hemmed round by those green hills, by yonder brown and rugged wall of Nabb Scar, stifled for want of breathing s.p.a.ce. The landscape was lovely enough, but it was like a beautiful grave. He longed to get away from it.

'Another man would follow her to St. Bees,' he said. 'I will not.'

He flung a few things into a Gladstone bag, sat down, and wrote a brief note to Maulevrier, asking him to make his excuses to her ladyship. He had made up his mind to go to Keswick that afternoon, and would rejoin his friend to-morrow, at Carlisle. This done, he rang for Maulevrier's valet, and asked that person to look after his luggage and bring it on to Scotland with his master's things; and then, without a word of adieu to anyone, John Hammond went out of the house, with the Gladstone bag in his hand, and shook the dust of Fellside off his feet.

He ordered a fly at the Prince of Wales's Hotel, and drove to Keswick, whence he went on to the Lodore. The gloom and s.p.a.ciousness of Derwent.w.a.ter, grey in the gathering dusk, suited his humour better than the emerald prettiness of Grasmere--the roar of the waterfall made music in his ear. He dined in a private room, and spent the evening roaming on the sh.o.r.es of the lake, and at eleven o'clock went back to his hotel and sat late into the night reading Heine, and thinking of the girl who had refused him.

Mr. Hammond's letter was delivered to Lord Maulevrier five minutes before dinner, as he sat in the drawing-room with her ladyship and Mary.

Poor Mary had put on another pretty gown for dinner, still bent upon effacing Mr. Hammond's image of her as a tousled, frantic creature in torn and muddy raiment. She sat watching the door, just as Hammond had watched it three hours ago.

'So,' said Maulevrier, 'your ladyship has succeeded in driving my friend away. Hammond has left Fellside, and begs me to convey to you his compliments and his grateful acknowledgment of all your kindness.'

'I hope I have not been uncivil to him,' answered Lady Maulevrier coldly. 'As you had both made up your minds to go to-morrow, it can matter very little that he should go to-day.'

Mary looked down at the ribbon and lace on her prettiest frock, and thought that it mattered a great deal to her. Yet, if he had stayed, would he have seen her frock or her? With his bodily eyes, perhaps, but not with the eyes of his mind. Those eyes saw only Lesbia.

'No, perhaps it hardly matters,' answered Maulevrier, with suppressed anger. 'The man is not worth talking about or thinking about. What is he? Only the best, truest, bravest fellow I ever knew.'

'There are shepherds and guides in Grasmere of whom we could say almost as much,' said Lady Maulevrier, 'yet you would scarcely expect me to encourage one of them to pay his addresses to your sister? Pray spare us all nonsense-talk, Maulevrier. This business is very well ended. You ought never to have brought Mr. Hammond here.'

'I am sure of that now. I am very sorry I did bring him.'

'Oh, the man will not die for love. A disappointment of that kind is good for a young man in his position. It will preserve him from more vulgar entanglements, and perhaps from the folly of a too early marriage.'

'That is a mighty philosophical way of looking at the matter.'

'It is the only true way. I hope when you are my age you will have learnt to look at everything in a philosophical spirit.'

'Well, Lady Maulevrier, you have had it all your own way,' said the young man, walking up and down the room in an angry mood. 'I hope you will never be sorry for having come between two people who loved each other, and might have made each other happy.'

'I shall never he sorry for having saved my granddaughter from an imprudent marriage. Give me your arm, Maulevrier, and let me hear no more about Mr. Hammond. We have all had quite enough of him,' said her ladyship, as the butler announced dinner.

CHAPTER XIII.

'SINCE PAINTED OR NOT PAINTED ALL SHALL FADE.'

Fraulein Muller and her charge returned from St. Bees after a sojourn of about three weeks upon that quiet sh.o.r.e: but Lady Lesbia did not appear to be improved in health or spirits by the revivifying breezes of the ocean.

'It is a dull, horrid place, and I was bored to death there!' she said, when Mary asked how she had enjoyed herself. 'There was no question of enjoyment. Grandmother took it into her head that I was looking ill, and sent me to the sea; but I should have been just as well at Fellside.'

This meant that between Lesbia and that distinctly inferior being, her younger sister, there was to be no confidence. Mary had watched the life-drama acted under her eyes too closely not to know all about it, and was not inclined to be so put off.

That pale perturbed countenance of John Hammond's, those eager inquiring eyes looking to the door which opened not, had haunted Mary's waking thoughts, had even mingled with the tangled web of her dreams. Oh, how could any woman scorn such love? To be so loved, and by such a man, seemed to Mary the perfection of earthly bliss. She had never been educated up to those wider and loftier views of life, which teach a woman that houses and lands, place and power, are the supreme good.

'I can't understand how you could treat that n.o.ble-minded man so badly,'

she exclaimed one day, when she and Lesbia were alone in the library, and after she had sat for ever so long, staring out of the window, meditating upon her sister's cruelty.

'Of whom are you speaking, pray?'

'As if you didn't know! Of Mr. Hammond.'

'And pray, how do you know that he is n.o.ble-minded, or that I treated him badly?'

'Well, as to his being n.o.ble-minded, that jumps to the eyes, as French books say. As for your treatment of him, I was looking on all the time, and I know how unkind you were, and I heard him talking to you in the fir-copse that day.'

'You Were listening' cried Lesbia indignantly.

'I was not listening! I was pa.s.sing by. And if people choose to carry on their love affairs out of doors they must expect to be overheard. I heard him pleading to you, telling you how he would work for you, fight the battle of life for you, asking you to be trustful and brave for his sake. But you have a heart of stone. You and grandmother both have hearts of stone. I think she must have taken out your heart when you were little, and put a stone in its place.'

'Really,' said Lesbia, trying to carry things with a high hand, albeit her very human heart was beating pa.s.sionately all the time, 'I think you ought to be very grateful to me--and grandmother--for refusing Mr.

Hammond.'

'Why grateful?'

'Because it leaves you a chance of getting him for yourself; and everybody can see that you are over head and ears in love with him. That jumps to the eyes, as you say.'

Mary turned crimson, trembled with rage, looked at her sister as if she would kill her, for a moment or so, and finally burst into tears.