The Mating of Lydia Part 3

Melrose laughed aloud.

"I? Good Heavens! I pay a parson to read me the English Church services!

Well, I don't wish to inflict my religious opinions upon any one, Tyson; but I may as well tell you that they don't run at all in the direction of parsons. And Mrs. Melrose--why I told you she was a Catholic--a Roman Catholic. What does she want with a church? But a parson's wife might have been useful. By the way, I thought I saw a nice-looking girl when we arrived, who has since disappeared."

"That was Thyrza Smart, sir--the daughter of Smart, the farmer."

"Excellent! Mrs. Melrose shall make friends with her."

"And of course, sir, both Pengarth and Keswick are within a drive."

"Oh, that's no good," said Melrose, easily. "We shall have no carriage."

The agent stared. "No carriage? I am afraid in that case you will find it very difficult getting about. There are no flys anywhere near that you can hire."

"What do we want with them?" Melrose lit another cigarette. "I may have a horse--possibly. And of course there's the light cart I told you to get.

We can't trust these things"--he pointed to the packages in the room--"to irresponsible people."

"The cart, sir, has been constantly at work. But--it won't exactly suit Mrs. Melrose." Tyson smiled discreetly.

"Oh! leave that to me--leave that to me!" said Melrose with an answering good humour. "Stable and carriage expenses are the deuce. There never was a coachman yet that didn't rob his employer. Well, thank you; I'm glad to have had this talk with you, and now, I go to bed. Beastly cold, I must say, this climate of yours!"

And with a very evident shiver the speaker b.u.t.toned the heavy fur coat he had never yet taken off more closely round him.

"What about that man from Carlisle--and the furnace?" he inquired sharply.

"He comes to-morrow, sir. I could not get him here earlier. I fear it will be an expensive job."

"No matter. With my work, I cannot risk incessant attacks of rheumatism.

The thing must be done, and done well. Good-night to you, Tyson."

Mr. Melrose waved a dismissing hand. "We shall resume our discussion to-morrow."

The agent departed. Melrose, left solitary, remained standing a while before the fire, examining attentively the architecture and decorations of the room, so far as the miserable light revealed them. Italian, no doubt, the stucco work of the ceiling, with its embossed nymphs and cupids, its cla.s.sical medallions. Not of the finest kind or period, but very charming--quite decorative. The house had been built on the site of an ancient border fortess, toward the middle of the eighteenth century, by the chief of a great family, from whose latest representative, his mother's first cousin, Edmund Melrose had now inherited it. Nothing could be more curious than its subsequent history. For it was no sooner finished, in a pure Georgian style, and lavishly incrusted in all its princ.i.p.al rooms with graceful decoration, than the man who built it died.

His descendants, who had plenty of houses in more southern and populous regions, turned their backs upon the Tower, refused to live in it, and, failing to find a tenant of the gentry cla.s.s, let part of it to the farmer, and put in a gardener as caretaker. Yet a certain small sum had always been allowed for keeping it in repair, and it was only within the last few years that dilapidation had made head.

Melrose took up the lamp, and carried it once more through the ground-floor of the Tower. Save for the dying fires, and the sputtering lamp, everything was dark and still in the s.p.a.cious house. The storm was dying down in fitful gusts that seemed at intervals to invade the shadowy s.p.a.ces of the corridor, driving before them the wisps of straw and paper that had been left here and there by the unpacking of the great writing-table. There could be no ghosts in the house, for nothing but a fraction of it had ever sheltered life; yet from its architectural beauty there breathed a kind of dumb, human protest against the disorderly ill-treatment to which it had been subjected.

In spite of his excitement and pre-occupation, Melrose felt it, and presently he turned abruptly, and went upstairs, still carrying the lamp; through the broad upper pa.s.sage answering to the corridor below, where doors in deep recesses, each with its cla.s.sical architrave, and its carved lintels, opened from either side. The farthest door on the right he had been shown as that of his wife's room; he opened one nearer, and let himself into his dressing-room, where Anastasia had taken care to light the fire, which no north country-woman would have thought of lighting for a mere man.

Putting the lamp down in the dressing-room, he pushed open his wife's door, and looked in. She was apparently asleep, and the child beside her.

The room struck cold, and, by a candle in a basin, he saw that it was littered from end to end with the contents of two or three trunks that were standing open. The furniture was no less scanty and poor than in the sitting-rooms, and the high panelled walls closing in upon the bed gave a dungeonlike aspect to the room.

A momentary pity for his wife, brought to this harsh c.u.mbrian spot, from the flowers and sun, the Bacchic laughter and colour of a Tuscan vintage, shot through Melrose. But his will silenced it. "She will get used to it," he said to himself again, with dry determination. Then he turned on his heel. The untidiness of his wife's room, her lack of method and charm, and the memory of her peevishness on the journey disgusted him.

There was a bed in his dressing-room; and he was soon soundly asleep there.

But his wife was not asleep, and she had been well aware of his presence on her threshold. While he stood there, she had held her breath, "willing" him to go away again; possessed by a silent pa.s.sion of rage and repulsion. When he closed the door behind him, she lay wide awake, trembling at all the night sounds in the house, lost in a thousand terrors and wild regrets.

Suddenly, with a crash the cas.e.m.e.nt window at the farther end of the room burst open under an onset of wind, Netta only just stifled the scream on her lips. She sat up, her teeth chattering. It was _awful_; but she must get up and shut it. Shivering, she crept out of bed, threw a shawl round her, and made one flight across the floor, possessed with a mad alarm lest the candle, which was flickering in the draught, should go out, and leave her in darkness.

But now that the window was open she saw, as she approached, that the night was not dark. There was a strong moonlight outside, and when she reached the window she drew in her breath. For there, close upon her, as it seemed, like one of her own Apennines risen and stalking through the night, towered a great mountain, cloud-wreathed, and gashed with vast ravines. The moon was shining on it between two chasing clouds, and the light and shade of the great spectacle, its illumined slopes, and impenetrable abysses, were at once magnificent and terrible.

Netta shut the window with groping, desperate hands, and rushed back to bed. Never had she felt so desolate, so cut off from all that once made her poor little life worth living. Yet, though she cried for a few minutes in sheer self-pity, it was not long before she too was asleep.

II

The day after the Melroses' arrival at the Tower was once more a day of rain--not now the tempestuous storm rain which had lashed the mill stream to fury, and bl.u.s.tered round the house as they stepped into it, but one of those steady, gray, and featureless downpours that Westmoreland and c.u.mbria know so well. The nearer mountains which were wholly blotted out, and of the far Helvellyn range and the Derwent.w.a.ter hills not a trace emerged. All colour had gone from the gra.s.s and the autumn trees; a few sheep and a solitary pony in the fields near the house stood forlorn and patient under the deluge; heaven and earth met in one fusion of rain just beyond the neglected garden that filled the front court; while on three sides of the house, and penetrating through every nook and corner of it, there rose, from depths far below, the roar of the stream which circled the sandstone rock whereon the Tower was built.

Mrs. Melrose came down late. She descended the stairs slowly, rubbing her cold hands together, and looking forlornly about her. She wore a dress of some straw-coloured stuff, too thin for the climate of a c.u.mbria autumn, and round her singularly small and fleshless neck, a wisp of black velvet. The top of the head was rather flat, and the heavy dark hair, projecting stiffly on either side of the face, emphasized at once the sharpness of the little bony chin, the general sallowness of complexion, and the remarkable size and blackness of the eyes. There was something snakelike about the flat head, and the thin triangular face; an effect which certainly belied the little lady, for there was nothing malicious or sinister in her personality.

She had not yet set eyes on her husband, who had risen early, and could now be heard giving directions to some one in the library to her right--a carpenter apparently, since there was hammering going on. She supposed she must find out something about the kitchen and the servants. Anastasia had brought up her breakfast that morning, with a flushed face, muttering complaint against the woman downstairs. A terror struck through her. If Anastasia should desert her--should give notice!

Timidly she pushed open the door of the big kitchen, and prepared to play the mistress. Mrs. Dixon was standing at the kitchen table with a pastry-board before her, making a meat pie. She greeted her new mistress civilly, though guardedly, and went on with what she was doing.

"Are you going to cook for us?" asked Mrs. Melrose, helplessly.

"That's what I unnerstood fro' Muster Tyson, ma'am."

"Then I came to speak to you about dinner."

"Thank you, ma'am, but Muster Melrose gave me the orders a good while sen. There was a cart goin' into Pengarth."

Pengarth was the nearest country town, some eight miles away.

Mrs. Melrose coloured.

"I must tell you what the baby requires," she said, drawing herself up.

Mrs. Dixon looked at the speaker impa.s.sively, over her spectacles.

Mrs. Melrose hurriedly named a patent food--some special biscuits--bananas.

"Yo' can have the milk yo' want fro' t' farm," said Mrs. Dixon slowly, in reply; "but there's nowt of aw them things i' t' house as I knows on."

"Then we must send for them."

Mrs. Dixon shook her head.

"There won't be anoother cart goin' in till t' day after to-morrow."

"I can't have the baby neglected!" exclaimed Mrs. Melrose, with sudden shrillness, looking angrily at the rugged face and figure before her.

"Mebbe yo'd go an talk to t' master?" suggested Mrs. Dixon, not without, as it seemed to Netta, a touch of slyness in eyes and voice. Of course they all knew by now that she was a cipher--that she was not to count.

Edmund had been giving all the orders--in his miserly cheese-paring way.

No comforts!--no conveniences!--not even bare necessaries, for herself and the child. Yet she knew very well that her husband was a rich man.