The Golden Calf Part 18

'I am established at Penton Hook,' said Brian. 'I live on the water, and my only thought in life is to be near you. I shall know every stump of willow--every bulrush before I am a month older.'

'But surely you are not going to stay at Penton Hook for a month!'

exclaimed Ida, 'buried alive in that little lock-house?'

'I shall have my daily resurrection when I see you.'

'But you cannot imagine that I shall walk upon this path every afternoon, in order that you may land and talk nonsense?' protested Ida.

'I only imagine that this path is your daily walk, and that you would not be so heartless as to change your habits in order to deprive me of the sunshine of your presence,' replied Brian, gazing at her tenderly, as if Miss Wolf counted for nothing, and they two were standing alone among the reeds and willows.

'You will simply make this walk impossible for me. It is quite out of the question that I should come here again so long as you are likely to be lying in wait for me. Is it not so, Fraulein? You know Miss Pew's way of thinking, and how she would regard such conduct.'

Fraulein shook her head dolefully, and admitted that in Miss Pew's social code such a derogation from maiden dignity would be, in a manner, death--an offence beyond all hope of pardon.

'Hang Miss Pew!' exclaimed Brian. 'If Miss Pew were Minerva, with all the weight and influence of her father, the Thunderer, to back her up, I would defy her. Confess now, dear Fraulein--liebste Fraulein'--how tender his accents sounded in German!--'_you_ do not think it wrong for me to see the lady of my love for a few all-too-happy moments once a day?'

The Fraulein declared that it was the most natural thing in the world for them thus to meet, and that she for her part would be enchanted to play propriety, and to be her dearest Ida's companion on all such occasions, nor would thumbscrew or rack extort from her the secret of their loves.

'Nonsense!' exclaimed Ida, 'in future I shall always walk in the kitchen garden; the walls are ten feet high, and unless you had a horse that could fly, like Perseus, you would never be able to get at me.'

'I will get a flying horse,' answered Brian. 'Don't defy me. Remember there are things that have been heard of before now in love-stories, called ladders.'

After this their conversation became as light and airy as that dandelion seed which every breath of summer blows across the land. They were all three young, happy in health and hope despite of fortune. Ida began to think that Brian Wendover, if in nowise resembling her ideal, was a very agreeable young man. He was full of life and spirits; he spoke German admirably. He had the Fraulein's idolized Schiller on the tip of his tongue. He quoted Heine's tenderest love songs. Altogether his society was much more intellectual and more agreeable than any to be had at Mauleverer Manor. Miss Wolf parted from him reluctantly, and thought that Ida was unreasonably urgent when she insisted on leaving him at the end of half an hour's dawdling walk up and down the river path.

'Ach, how he is handsome! how he is clever! What for a man!' exclaimed Miss Wolf, as they went back to the Manor grounds, across the dusty high-road, the mere pa.s.sage over which had a faint flavour of excitement, as a momentary escape into the outside world. 'How proud you must be of his devotion to you!'

'Indeed I am not,' answered Ida, frankly. 'I only wonder at it. We have seen so little of each other; we have known each other so short a time.'

'I don't think time counts for lovers,' argued the romantic Gertrude.

'One sees a face which is one's fate, and only wonders how one can have lived until that moment, since life must have been so empty without _him_.'

'Have you done that sort of thing often?' asked Ida, with rather a cynical air. 'You talk as if it were a common experience of yours.'

Fraulein Wolf blushed and simpered.

'There was one,' she murmured, 'when I was very young. He was to me as a bright particular star. His father kept a shop, but, oh, his soul would have harmonized with the loftiest rank in the land. He was in the Landwehr. If you had seen him in his uniform--ach, Himmel! He went away to the Franco-Prussian war. I wept for him; I thought of him as Leonora of her Wilhelm. He came back. Ach!'

'Was he a ghost? Did he carry you off to the churchyard?'

'Neither to churchyard nor church,' sighed Gertrude. 'He was false! He married his father's cook--a fat, rosy-cheeked Swabian. All that was delicate and refined in his nature, every poetical yearning of his soul, had been trampled out of him in that h.e.l.lish war!'

'I dare say he was hungry after a prolonged existence upon wurst,' said Ida, 'and that instinct drew him to the cook-maid.'

After this there came many afternoons on which the Fraulein and Ida walked in the meadow path by the river, and walk there when they would, the light wherry always came glancing along the tide, and shot in among the reeds, and Miss Palliser's faithful swain was in attendance upon her.

On doubtful afternoons, when Ida was inclined to stay indoors, the sentimental Fraulein was always at her side to urge her to take the accustomed walk. Not only was Mr. Wendover's society agreeable to her poetic soul, but he occasionally brought some tender offering in the shape of hothouse grapes or Jersey pears, which were still more welcome to the fair German.

The governesses, Miss Motley, Miss Pillby, and Mademoiselle were always on duty on fine afternoons, in attendance upon the pupils' regulation walks--long dusty perambulations of dull high roads; and thus it happened that Ida and the Fraulein had the meadow path to themselves.

Nothing occurred during the s.p.a.ce of a fortnight to disturb their sense of security. The river-side seemed a kind of Paradise, without the possibility of a serpent. Ida's lover had not yet made her any categorical and formal offer of marriage. Indeed, he had never been one minute alone with her since their first meeting; but he talked as if it was a settled thing that they two were to be man and wife in the days to come. He did not speak as if their marriage were an event in the near future; and at this Ida wondered a little, seeing that the owner of Wendover Abbey could have no need to wait for a wife--to consider ways and means--and to be prudently patient, as struggling professional youth must be. This was curious; for that he loved her pa.s.sionately there could be little doubt. Every look, every tone told her as much a hundred times in an hour. Nor did she make any protest when he spoke of her as one pledged to him, though no formal covenant had been entered upon. She allowed him to talk as he pleased about their future; and her only wonder was, that in all his conversation he spoke so little of the house in which he was born, and indeed of his belongings generally.

Once she expatiated to Fraulein Wolf in Brian's presence upon the picturesque beauties of the Abbey.

'It is the dearest, n.o.blest old house you can conceive,' she said; 'and the old, old gardens and park are something too lovely: but I believe Mr.

Wendover does not care a straw about the place.'

'You know what comes of familiarity,' answered Brian, carelessly. 'I have seen too much of the Abbey to be moved to rapture by its Gothic charms every time I see it after the agony of separation.'

'But you would like to live there?'

'I would infinitely prefer living anywhere else. The place is too remote from civilization. A spot one might enjoy, perhaps, on the downhill side of sixty; but in youth or active middle age every sensible man should shun seclusion. A man has to fight against an inherent tendency to lapse into a vegetable.'

'Fox did not become a vegetable,' said Ida; 'yet how he adored St. Ann's Hill!'

'Fox was a hard drinker and a fast liver,' answered Brian.

'If he had not let the clock run down now and then, the works would have worn out sooner than they did.'

'But do you never feel the need of rest?' asked Ida.

Brian stifled a yawn.

'No; I'm afraid I have never worked hard enough for that. The need will come, perhaps, later--when the work comes.'

On more than one occasion when Ida talked of the Abbey, Mr. Wendover replied in the same tone. It was evident that he was indifferent to the family seat, or that he even disliked it. He had no pride in surroundings which might have inspired another man.

'One would think you had been frightened by the family ghost,' Ida said laughingly, 'you so studiously avoid talking about the Abbey.'

'I have not been frightened by the ghost--I am too modern to believe in ghosts.'

'Oh, but it is modern to believe in everything impossible--spirit-rapping, thought-reading.'

'Perhaps; but I am not of that temper.' And then, with a graver look than Ida had ever seen in his face, he said, 'You are full of enthusiasm about that old place among the hills, Ida. I hope you do not care more for the Abbey than for me.'

She crimsoned and looked down. The question touched her weakness too nearly.

'Oh, no,' she faltered; 'what are cedars and limestone as compared with humanity?'

'And if I were without the Abbey--if the Abbey and I were nothing to each other--should I be n.o.body in your sight?'

'It is difficult to dissociate a man from his surroundings,' she answered; 'but I suppose you would be just the same person?'

'I hope so,' said Brian. '"The rank is but the guinea stamp, the man's a man for a' that." But the guinea stamp is an uncommonly good thing in its way, I admit.'

These afternoon promenades between four and five o'clock, while the rest of the school was out walking, had been going on for a fortnight, and no harm to Ida had come of her indiscretion. Perhaps she hardly considered how wrong a thing she was doing in violating Miss Pew's confidence by conduct so entirely averse from Miss Pew's ideas of good behaviour. The confidence had been so grudgingly given, Miss Pew had been so systematically unkind, that the girl may be forgiven for detesting her, nay, even for glorying in the notion of acting in a manner which would shock all Miss Pew's dearest prejudices. Her meeting with her lover could scarcely be called clandestine, for she took very little pains to conceal the fact. If the affair had gone on secretly for so long, it was because of no artifice on her part.

But that any act of any member of the Mauleverer household could remain long unknown was almost an impossibility. If there had been but one pair of eyes in the establishment, and those the eyes of Miss Pillby, the thing would have been discovered; for those pale unlovely orbs were as the eyes of Argus himself in their manifold power to spy out the proceedings of other people--more especially of any person whom their owner disliked.

Now Miss Pillby had never loved Ida Palliser, objecting to her on broad grounds as a person whose beauty and talents were an indirect injury to mediocre people. Since Ida's visit to The Knoll her angry feeling had intensified with every mention of the pleasures and comforts of that abode. Miss Pillby, who never opened a book for her own pleasure, who cared nothing for music, and whose highest notion of art was all blacklead pencil and bread-crumbs, had plenty of vacant s.p.a.ce in her mind for other people's business. She was a sharp observer of the fiddle-faddle of daily life; she had a keen scent for evil motives underlying simple actions. Thus when she perceived the intimacy which had newly arisen between the Fraulein and Miss Palliser, she told herself that there must be some occult reason for the fact. Why did those two always walk together? What hidden charm had they discovered in the river-meadow?