The Doctor's Wife Part 18

He yawned and threw away his cigar, and strode across the yard towards the open window of a harness-room, at which a man was sitting in his shirt-sleeves, and with a Sunday paper before him.

"You may bring the Diver round in half-an-hour, Christie," said Mr.

Lansdell; "I shall ride over to Conventford this afternoon."

"Yes, sir."

Roland Lansdell did ride to Conventford; galloping his hardest into Waverly, to the scandal of the sober townspeople, who looked up from their tea-tables half-scared at the sound of the clattering hoofs upon the uneven pavement; and then dawdling at a foot-pace all along the avenue which extends in unbroken beauty from Waverly to Conventford. The streets of this latter town were crowded with gaily-dressed factory-girls, and the bells from three separate spires were clanging loudly in the summer air. Mr. Lansdell rode very slowly, thinking of "all manner of absurd things" as he went along; and he entered Mr.

Raymond's pretty drawing-room at Oakbank just in time to catch that gentleman drinking tea with the orphans.

Of course Roland had forgotten that his friend dined at an early hour on Sundays, and he had come to dine; but it wasn't of the least consequence, he would have some tea; yes, and cold beef, by all means, if there was cold beef.

A side-table was laid for him, and a great sirloin was brought in. But Mr. Lansdell did not make much havoc with the joint. He and Mr. Raymond had a good deal to say to each other: and Mr. Lansdell took very kindly to the orphans, and asked them a good many questions about their studies and their present governess, who was a native of Conventford, and had gone out that evening to drink tea with her friends: and then, somehow or other, the conversation rambled on to their late governess, Isabel Sleaford, and the orphans had a great deal to say about her. She was so nice, and she told them such pretty things: "Eugene Aram" and the "Giaour"--how wicked Black Ha.s.san was to tie his poor "sister" up in a sack and drown her, because he didn't wish her to marry the Giaour! Miss Sleaford had modified the romantic story in deference to the tender ages of her pupils. Yes, the young ladies said, they loved Miss Sleaford _dearly_. She was _so nice_; and sometimes, at night, when they begged her very, very hard, she would ACT (the orphans uttered this last word in an awfully distinct whisper); and, oh, that was beautiful! She would do Hamlet and the Ghost: when she stood one way, with a black cloak over her shoulder, she was Hamlet; when she stood the other way, with a mahogany ruler in her hand, she was the Ghost. And she acted the Ghost so beautifully, that sometimes they were frightened, and wouldn't go outside the schoolroom-door without a candle, and somebody's hand to hold--tight.

And then Mr. Raymond laughed, and told Roland what he thought of Isabel, phrenologically and otherwise.

"Poor little thing! I think there must be something sad about the story of her early life," he said; "for she so evidently shrinks from all allusion to it. It's the old story, I suppose,--an unkind step-mother and an uncomfortable home. Under these circ.u.mstances, I was very glad to see her married to a well-disposed, honest-hearted young man."

"She was very fond of Mr. Gilbert, I suppose,--very much in love with him?" said Roland, after a little pause.

"In love with him! not a bit of it. She was very fond of him, I dare say--not in the sentimental manner in which she discourses about her poets and her heroes; but she has every reason to be fond of him as a faithful protector and a good friend."

Mr. Raymond looked up suddenly, and fixed his eyes upon the face of his young kinsman. But it was dusk by this time; and in the dim light of the room Charles Raymond could not see the expression of Roland's face; he could only see the att.i.tude of his head, which drooped a little forward, supported by his hand.

"I lent my voice to the bringing about of Isabel Gilbert's marriage,"

Mr. Raymond said, slowly; "and G.o.d grant that no man may ever be base enough or cruel enough to interpose himself between these two!"

"Amen!" answered Roland Lansdell, in a deep solemn voice.

And then he walked to the window and looked out into the twilit garden, above which the faint summer moon had newly arisen.

"If I could have believed in that splendid fable of a future life, that grand compensating balance for all the sorrows and mistakes of this lower world, what a good man I might have been!" he thought, as he stood there looking out, with his arm resting upon the broad wooden sash, and his head upon his arm.

CHAPTER XVI.

MR. LANSDELL RELATES AN ADVENTURE.

The Tuesday was a fine day. The August sunshine--the beautiful harvest-time sunshine which was rejoicing the hearts of all the farmers in Midlandshire--awoke Mrs. Gilbert very early. She was going to Mordred Priory. For once she forgot to notice the ugliness of the shabby furniture, the bare whitewashed walls upon which her eyes opened. She was going to Mordred Priory. There are moments in our lives in which all the great expanse of the past and future seems as nothing compared with the consummate felicity of the present. It was very early; but not too early for her to get up, Mrs. Gilbert thought. She seated herself before the little gla.s.s at the open window, and brushed her long black hair; while the birds twittered and shook themselves in the sunshine, and the faint lowing of cattle came like a long drowsy murmur from the distant fields.

The surgeon and his wife had held solemn conference with each other as to the hour at which they ought to arrive at Mordred Priory. Luncheon might be eaten at any time from one until three. Mr. Gilbert said; and it was decided, therefore, that they should present themselves at the gates of the Priory a short time before one o'clock.

How pretty the village of Mordred looked in the sleepy August atmosphere, the hazy, Cuyp-like sunshine! How beautiful everything looked just at the entrance to the village, where there was a long straggling inn with a top-heavy roof, all dotted over with impossible little windows, a dear old red-tiled roof, with pouters and fantails brooding and cooing to themselves in the sunshine, and yellow stonecrop creeping here and there in patches of gold! To the right of the inn a shady road led away below the walls of the Priory to the square-turreted church; and, grander than the church itself, the lofty gates of Mordred dominated over all.

Isabel almost trembled as Mr. Gilbert got out of the gig and pulled the iron ring that hung at the end of a long chain on one side of those formidable oaken gates. It seemed like ringing at the door of the Past, somehow; and the Doctor's Wife half expected to see quaintly-costumed servants, with long points to their shoes and strange parti-coloured garments, and a jester with a cap and bells, when those great gates were opened. But the person who opened the gates was only a very harmless old woman, who inhabited some stony chambers on one side of the ponderous archway. George drove slowly under that splendid Norman gateway, and Isabel looked with a shiver at the portcullis and the great rusty chains high above her head. If it should fall some day upon Mr. Lansdell, as he was riding out of his grand domain! Her mind was like a voluminous picture-book, full of romantic incidents and dreadful catastrophes; and she was always imagining such events as these. Brown Molly jogged slowly along the winding drive,--oh, the beautiful shrubberies, and banks of verdure, and dark shining foliage, and spreading cedars, making solemn shadows yonder on the lawn, and peeps of glistening water in the distance; how beautiful! how beautiful!--and stopped before a Gothic porch, a grey old ivy-covered porch, beneath which there was an open doorway that revealed a hall with armour on the walls, and helmed cla.s.sic heads of white marble on black marble pedestals, and skins of savage beasts upon dark oak floors. Isabel had only caught a brief glimpse of the dusky splendour of this interior, when a groom appeared from behind a distant angle of the house and ran forward to take George Gilbert's horse; and in the next moment Mr. Lansdell came out of the porch, and bade his visitors welcome to Mordred.

"I am so glad to see you! What a lovely morning, is it not? I'm afraid you must have found the roads rather dusty, though. Take care of Mr.

Gilbert's horse, Christie; you'd better put him into one of the loose-boxes. You see my dogs know you, Mrs. Gilbert." A liver-coloured pointer and a great black retriever were taking friendly notice of Isabel. "Will you come and see my pictures at once? I expect Gwendoline and her father, and your friend Mr. Raymond, and the children, presently."

There was no special brilliancy or eloquence in all this, but it sounded different from other people's talk, somehow. The languid, lingering tones were very cordial in spite of their languor; and then how splendid the speaker looked in his loose black velvet morning coat, which harmonized so exquisitely with the Rembrandt hues of his complexion!

There was a waxen-looking hothouse flower in his b.u.t.ton-hole, and across that inspiration of a West-end tailor, his waistcoat, there glimmered a slender chain of very yellow gold, with onyx cameos and antique golden coins hanging to it,--altogether different from the clumsy yellow lockets and fusee-boxes which dangled on the padded chests of the officers at Conventford, whom Isabel had until lately so implicitly believed in.

Mr. Lansdell led the way into a room, beyond which there were other rooms opening one into the other in a long vista of splendour and sunshine. Isabel had only a very faint idea of what she saw in those beautiful rooms. It was all a confusion of brightness and colour, which was almost too much for her poor sentimental brain. It was all a splendid chaos, in which antique oak cabinets, and buhl and marqueterie, and carved ebony chairs, and filagree-work and ivory, old Chelsea, Battersea, Copenhagen, Vienna, Dresden, Sevres, Derby, and Salopian china, Majolica and Palissy ware, pictures and painted windows, revolved like the figures in a kaleidoscope before her dazzled eyes. Mr. Lansdell was very kind, and explained the nature of some of these beautiful things as he loitered here and there with his guests. George walked softly, with his hat in his hand, as if he had been in church, and stared with equal reverence at everything. He was pleased with a Vandevilde, because the sea was so nice and green, and the rigging so neatly made out; and he stopped a minute before a Fyt to admire the whiskers of a hare; and he thought that a plump-shouldered divinity by Greuze, with melting blue eyes and a grey satin gown, was rather a fine young woman; but he did not particularly admire the Murillos or the Spagnolettis, and thought that the models who sat to those two masters would have done better had they washed their faces and combed their hair before doing so.

Mr. Gilbert was not enthusiastic about the pictures; but Isabel's eyes wandered here and there in a rapture of admiration, and by-and-by those great dark eyes filled with tears before the gem of Mr. Lansdell's collection, a Raffaelle, a picture of the Man of Sorrows half fainting under the cruel burden of His cross, sublime in resignation, unspeakably sorrowful and tender; an exquisite half-length figure, sharply defined against a vivid blue sky. "My father believed in that picture," said Mr.

Lansdell; "but connoisseurs shrug their shoulders and tell me that it never stood upon the easel of Raffaelle d'Urbino."

"But it is so beautiful," Isabel answered in a low, awe stricken voice.

She had been very inattentive to the Rector's sermon on the previous Sunday, but her heart filled with tender devotion as she looked at this picture. "Does it matter much who painted it, if it is only beautiful?"

And then Mr. Lansdell began to explain in what manner the picture differed from the best-authenticated productions of the prince of painters; but in the middle of his little lecture Mr. Raymond and the orphans came trooping through the rooms, and the conversation became general. Soon after this Lady Gwendoline and her father made their appearance, and then a very neatly-dressed maid conducted the ladies to a dressing-room that had once belonged to Roland's mother, where the window-curtains were sea-green silk, and the looking-gla.s.s was framed in Sevres-biscuit, and where there were ivory-backed brushes, and glittering bottles of rich yellow-looking perfume in a casket of gold and enamel.

Isabel took off her bonnet, and smoothed her hair with one of the brushes, and remembered her dressing-table at home, and a broken black brush of George's with all the unprotected wires sticking out at the back. She thought of the drawer in the looking-gla.s.s, with a few bent hair-pins, and her husband's razors with coloured bone handles, and a flat empty bottle that had once held lavender-water, all jostling one another when the drawer was pulled open. Mrs. Gilbert thought of these things while Lady Gwendoline removed her bonnet--another marvellous bonnet--and drew off the tightest coffee-with-plenty-of-milk-in-it-coloured gloves, and revealed long white hands, luminous with opals and diamonds.

The Doctor's Wife had time to contemplate Lady Gwendoline's silk dress--that exquisitely-fitting dress, whose soft golden brown was only a little darker than the lady's hair; and the tiny embroidered collar, fitting closely to the long slender throat, and clasped by one big turquoise in a wide rim of l.u.s.treless gold, and the turquoise earrings just peeping out under rich bands of auburn hair, Mrs. Gilbert admired all these things, and she saw that Lady Gwendoline's face, which was so handsome in profile, was just a little faded and wan when you had a full view of it.

The orphans took the gold tops off the bottles one by one, and sniffed energetically at the different perfumes, and disputed in whispers as to which was nicest. Lady Gwendoline talked very kindly to Mrs. Gilbert.

She did not at all relish being asked to meet the Doctor's Wife, and she was angry with her cousin for noticing these people; but she was too well bred to be otherwise than kind to Roland's visitor.

They all went down-stairs presently, and were ushered into an oak-paneled room, where there was an oval table laid for luncheon, and where Isabel found herself seated presently on Mr. Lansdell's right hand, and opposite to Lady Gwendoline Pomphrey.

This was life. There was a Lance-like group of hothouse grapes and peaches, crowned with a pine-apple, in a high Dresden basket in the centre of the table. Isabel had never been in company with a pine-apple until to-day. There were flowers upon the table, and a faint odour of orange blossoms and apricots pervaded the atmosphere. There were starry white gla.s.ses, so fragile-looking that it seemed as if a breath would have blown them away; cup-shaped gla.s.ses, broad shallow gla.s.ses like water-lily leaves, gla.s.ses of the palest green, and here and there a glimpse of ruby gla.s.s flashing in the sunshine Mrs. Gilbert had a very vague idea of the nature of the viands which were served to her at that wonderful feast. Somebody dropped a lump of ice into the shallow gla.s.s, and filled it afterwards with a yellow bubbling wine, which had a faint flavour of jargonelle pears, and which some one said was Moselle. Mr.

Lansdell put some white creamy compound on her plate, which might or might not have been chicken: and one of the servants brought her an edifice of airy pastry, filled with some mysterious concoction in which there were little black lumps. She took a spoonful of the concoction, seeing that other people had done so; but she was very doubtful about the little black lumps, which she conjectured to be a mistake of the cook's. And then some one brought her an ice, a real ice,--just as if Mordred Priory had been a perpetual pastrycook's shop,--a pink ice in the shape of a pear, which she ate with a pointed gold spoon; and then the pine-apple was cut, and she had a slice of it, and was rather disappointed in it, as hardly realizing the promise of its appearance.

But all the dishes in that banquet were of "such stuff as dreams are made of." So may have tasted the dew-berries which t.i.tania's attendants gave to Bottom. To Isabel there was a dream-like flavour in everything.

Was not _he_ by her side, talking to her every now and then? The subjects of which he spoke were commonplace enough, certainly, and he talked to other people as well as to her. He talked about the plans of the Cabinet and the hunting season to Lord Ruysdale, and he talked of books and pictures with Mr. Raymond and Lady Gwendoline, and of parish matters with George Gilbert. He seemed to know all about everything in the world, Isabel thought. She could not say much. _How_ to admire was all the art she knew. As to the orphans, those young ladies sat side by side, and nudged each other when the sacrificial knife was plunged into any fresh viand, and discoursed together every now and then in rapturous whispers. No part of the banquet came amiss to these young persons, from rout-cakes and preserved ginger to lobster-salad or the wall of a fricandeau.

It was four o'clock by the time the pine-apple had been cut, and the banquet concluded. The oak-painted room was lighted by one window--a great square window--which almost filled one side of the room; a splendid window, out of which you could walk into a square garden--an old-fashioned garden--divided from the rest of the grounds by cropped hedges of dense box; wonderful boundaries, that had taken a century or two to grow. The bees were humming in this garden all luncheon-time, and yellow b.u.t.terflies shot backwards and forwards in the sunshine: tall hollyhocks flowered gorgeously in the prim beds, and threw straight shadows on the gra.s.s.

"Shall we go into the garden?" said Lady Gwendoline, as they rose from the table, and everybody a.s.sented: so presently Isabel found herself amidst a little group upon the miniature lawn, in the centre of which there was a broad marble basin, filled with gold fish, and a feeble little fountain, that made a faint tinkling sound in the still August atmosphere.

Mr. Raymond and Roland Lansdell both having plenty to say for themselves, and Lord Ruysdale and Lady Gwendoline being able to discourse pleasantly upon any possible subject, there had been no lack of animated conversation, though neither the doctor nor his wife had done much to keep the ball rolling.

Mr. Lansdell and his guests had been talking of all manner of things; flying off at tangents to all kinds of unlikely subjects; till they had come, somehow or other, to discuss the question of length of days.

"I can't say that I consider long life an inestimable blessing," said Roland, who was amusing himself with throwing minute morsels of a macaroon to the gold fish. "They're not so interesting as Sterne's donkey, are they, Mrs. Gilbert? No, I do _not_ consider long life an advantage, unless one can be 'warm and young' for ever, like our dear Raymond. Perhaps I am only depreciating the fruit because it hangs out of my reach, though; for everybody knows that the Lansdells never live to be old."

Isabel's heart gave a b.u.mp as Roland said this, and involuntarily she looked at him with just one sudden startled glance. Of course he would die young; Beings always have so died, and always must. A thrill of pain shot through her breast as she thought of this; yet I doubt if she would have had it otherwise. It would be almost better that he should break a blood-vessel, or catch a fever, or commit suicide, than that he should ever live to have grey hair, and wear spectacles and double-soled boots.

Brief as that sudden look of alarm had been, Roland had seen it, and paused for a moment before he went on talking.

"No; we are not a long-lived race. We have been consumptive; and we have had our heads cut off in the good old days, when to make a confidential remark to a friend was very often leze majesty, or high treason; and we have been killed in battle,--at Flodden, to wit, and at Fontenoy, and in the Peninsula; and one of us was shot through the lungs in an Irish duel, on the open sward of the 'Phaynix.' In short, I almost fancy some fearful ban must have been set upon us in the Dark Ages, when one of our progenitors, a wicked prior of Mordred, who had been a soldier and a renegade before he crept into the bosom of the Church, appropriated some of the sanctified plate to make a dowry for his handsome daughter, who married Sir Anthony Lansdell, knight, and thus became the mother of our race; and we are evidently a doomed race, for very few of us have ever lived to see a fortieth birthday."

"And how is your doom to be brought about, Roland?" asked Lady Gwendoline.

"Oh, _that's_ all settled," Mr. Lansdell answered. "I know my destiny."