Felicia, when the thing was settled, danced about Victoria"s room, kissed her mother and ran off at once, with Victoria"s permission, to ask the old coachman who ruled the Duddon stables to give her riding-lessons.
Victoria noticed that she carefully avoided consulting Tatham in any way about her lessons. Indeed the earlier, half-childish, half-audacious efforts she had made to attract his attention entirely ceased about this time.
And he, as soon as it was evident that Mrs. Melrose would not take his advice, and that legal proceedings must be renounced, felt a natural slackening of interest in his mother"s guests. He was perfectly kind and polite to them but Netta"s cowardice disgusted him; and it was a personal disappointment to be thus balked of that public campaign against Melrose"s enormities which would have satisfied the just and long-baffled feelings of a whole county; and--incidentally--would surely have unmasked a greedy and unscrupulous adventurer.
Meanwhile the whole story of Mrs. Melrose and her daughter had spread rapidly through the neighbourhood. The local papers, now teeming with attacks on Melrose, and the management of the Melrose property, had fastened with avidity on the news of their arrival. "Mrs. Edmund Melrose and her daughter, after an absence of twenty years have arrived in c.u.mbria. They are now staying at Duddon Castle with Countess Tatham. Mr.
Claude Faversham is at Threlfall Tower." These few sentences served as symbols of a dramatic situation which was being discussed in every house of the district, in the farms and cottages no less eagerly than by the Andovers and the Bartons. The heiress of Threlfall was not dead! After twenty years she and her mother had returned to claim their rights from the Ogre; and Duddon Castle, the headquarters of all that was powerful and respected in the county, had taken up their cause. Meanwhile the little heiress had been, it seemed, supplanted. Claude Faversham was in possession at Threlfall, and was being treated as the heir. Mr. Melrose had flatly refused even to see his wife and daughter whom he had left in poverty and starvation for twenty years.
Upon these facts the twin spirit of romance and hatred swooped vulturelike. Any story of inheritance, especially when charm and youth are mixed up with it, kindles the popular mind. It was soon known that Miss Melrose was pretty, and small; though, said report, worn to a skeleton by paternal ill-usage. Romance likes its heroines small. The countryside adopted the unconscious Felicia, and promptly married her to Harry Tatham. What could be more appropriate? Duddon could afford to risk a dowry; and what maiden in distress could wish for a better Perseus than the splendid young man who was the general favourite of the neighbourhood?
As to the hatred of Melrose which gave zest to the tale of his daughter, it was becoming a fury. The whole Mainstairs village had now been ejected, by the help of a large body of police requisitioned from Carlisle for the purpose. Of the able-bodied, some had migrated to the neighbouring towns, some were camped on Duddon land, in some wood and iron huts hastily run up for their accommodation. And thus a village which might be traced in Doomsday Book had been wiped out. For the sick Tatham had offered a vacant farmhouse as a hospital; and Victoria, Mrs.
Andover, and other ladies had furnished and equipped it. Some twenty cases of enteric and diphtheria, were housed there, a few of them doomed beyond hope. Melrose had been peremptorily asked for a subscription to the fund raised, and had replied in his own handwriting that owing to the heavy expenses he had been put to by the behaviour of his Mainstairs tenants, as reported to him by his agent, Mr. Faversham, he must respectfully decline. The letter was published in the two local papers with appropriate comments, and a week later an indignation meeting to protest against the state of the Threlfall property, and to pet.i.tion the Local Government Board to hold an inquiry on the spot, was held in Carlisle, with Tatham in the chair. And everywhere the public indignation which could not get at Melrose, who now, except for railway journeys, never showed himself outside the wall of his park, was beginning to fall upon the "adventurer" who was his tool and accomplice, and had become the supplanter of his young and helpless daughter. Men who four months before had been eager to welcome Faversham to his new office now pa.s.sed him in the street without recognition. At the County Club to which he had been easily elected, Colonel Barton proposing him, he was conspicuously cut by Barton himself, Squire Andover and many others following suit. "An impostor, and a cad!" said Barton fiercely to Undershaw. "He took me in--and I can"t forgive him. He is doing all Melrose"s dirty work for him, better than Melrose could do it himself. His letters, for instance, to our Council Committee about the allotments we are trying to get out of the old villain have been devilish clever, and devilish impudent! Melrose couldn"t have written them. And now this business of the girl!--and the fortune!--sickening!"
"He is a queer chap," said Undershaw thoughtfully. "I"ve been as mad with him as anybody--but somehow--don"t know. Suppose we wait a bit. Melrose"s life is a bad one."
But Barton refused to wait, and went off storming.
The facts, he vowed, were more than enough.
The weeks pa.s.sed on. Duddon knew no longer what Green Cottage was doing. Victoria, at any rate, was ignorant, and forbore to ask--by word of mouth; though her thoughts were one long interrogation on the subject of Lydia, both as to the present and the past. Was she still in correspondence with Faversham, as Victoria now understood from Tatham she had been all the summer? Was she still defending him? Perhaps engaged to him? For a fair-minded and sensible woman, Victoria fell into strange bogs of prejudice and injustice in the course of these ponderings.
In her drives and walks at this time, Victoria generally avoided the neighbourhood of the cottage. But one afternoon at the very end of October, she overtook--walking--a slight, m.u.f.fled figure in the Whitebeck road, and recognized Susy Penfold. A constrained greeting pa.s.sed between them, and Lady Tatham learnt that Lydia was away--had been away, indeed, since the day following her last interview with Harry. The very next morning she and her mother had been summoned to London by the grave illness of Mrs. Penfold"s elder sister. And there they were still; though Lydia was expected home shortly.
Victoria walked on, with relieved feelings, she scarcely knew why. At any rate there had been no personal contact between Faversham and a charming though foolish girl, during these weeks of popular indignation.
By what shabby arts had the mean and grasping fellow now installed at Threlfall ever succeeded in obtaining a hold over a being so refined, so fastidious and--to all appearances--so high-minded, as Lydia Penfold?
To refuse Harry and decline on Claude Faversham! Victoria acknowledged indeed a certain pseudo-Byronic charm in the man. She could not forget the handsome head as she had seen it last at the door of Melrose"s library; or the melodramatic black and white of the face, of the small, peaked beard, the dark brows, pale lantern cheeks, and heavy-lidded eyes.
All the picturesque adventurers of the world betray something, she thought, of a common stamp.
At last one evening, when Tatham was away on county business, and Felicia had gone to bed, Victoria suddenly unburdened herself to Cyril Boden, as they sat one on either side of a November fire, while a southwesterly gale from the high fells bl.u.s.tered and raged outside.
Boden was the confessor of a good many people. Not that he was by any means an orthodox Christian; his ascetic ways had very little to do with any accepted form of doctrine. But there was in him the natural priestly power, which the priest by ordination may have or miss. It was because men and women realized in himself the presence of a travailing, questioning, suffering soul, together with an iron self-repression, that those who suffered and questioned came to him, and threw themselves upon him; often getting more buffeting than balm for their pains; but always conscious of some mysterious attractions in him, as of one who, like Sir Boris, had seen the Grail, but might never tell of the vision.
Victoria was truly attached to him. He had been with her during the days of her husband"s sudden illness and death; he had advised her with regard to the pa.s.sing difficulties of Tatham"s school and college days and pointed a way for her through many perplexities of her own. Duddon was as much of a home to him, as he probably possessed in the world. When he had worn himself out with some one or other of the many causes he pursued in South London, working with a sombre pa.s.sion which had in it very little of the mystical joy or hope which sustain others in similar efforts; when he had scarcely a coat to his back, or a shoe to his feet; when his doctor began to talk of tuberculin tests and the high Alps; then he would wire to Duddon, and come and vegetate under Victoria"s wing, for just as many weeks as were necessary to send him back to London restored to a certain physical standard. To watch Harry Tatham"s wholesome, kindly, prosperous life, untroubled by any of the nightmares that weighed upon his own, was an unfailing pleasure to a weary man. He loved both Harry and his mother. Nevertheless, as soon as he arrived, both felt him the gadfly in the house. His mind was nothing if not critical. And undoubtedly the sight of easy wealth was an irritation to him. He struggled against it; but sometimes it would out.
As he sat this evening crouched over the fire, his hands spread to the blaze, he looked more frail than usual; a fact which perhaps, half-consciously, affected Victoria and drew out her confidence. His dress suit, primevally old, would scarcely, she reflected, hold together another winter. But how it was to be replaced had already cost her and Harry much thought. There was n.o.body more personally, fanatically proud than Boden toward his well-to-do friends. His clothes indeed were a matter of tender anxiety in the Duddon household, and Tatham"s valet and Victoria"s maids did him many small services, some of which he repaid with a smile and a word--priceless to the recipient; and some he was never aware of. When his visits to Duddon first began, the contents of his Gladstone bag used to provide merriment in the servants" hall, and legend said that a young footman had once dared to be insolent to him.
Had any one ventured the same conduct now he would have been sent to Coventry by every servant in the house.
It was to this austere, incalculable, yet always attractive listener, that Victoria told the story of Harry and Lydia, of the Faversham adventure, and the Melrose inheritance. If she wanted advice, a little moral guidance for herself--and indeed she did want it--she did not get any; but of comment there was plenty.
"That"s the girl I saw here last time," mused Boden, nursing his knee--"lovely creature--with some mind in her face. So she"s refused Harry--and Duddon?"
"Which no doubt will commend her to you!" said Victoria, not without a certain bristling of her feathers.
"It does," said Boden quietly. "Upon my word, it was a fine thing to do."
"Just because we happen to be rich?" Victoria"s eyelids fluttered a little.
"No! but because it throws a little light on what we choose to call the soul. It brings one back to a faint belief in the existence of the thing.
Here is one of the great fortunes, and one of the splendid houses of the world, and a little painting girl who makes a few pounds by her drawings says "No, thank you!" when they are laid at her feet--because--of a little trifle called love which she can"t bring to the bargain. I confess that bucks one up. "The day-star doth his beams restore.""
He took up the tongs, and began absently to rebuild the fire. Victoria waited on his remarks with heightened colour.
"Of course I"m sorry for Harry," he said, after a moment, with his queer smile. "I saw there was something wrong when I arrived. But it"s salutary--very salutary! Hasn"t he had everything in the world he wanted from his cradle? And isn"t it as certain as anything can be that he"ll find some other charming girl, who"ll faint with joy, when he asks her, and give you all the grandchildren you want? And meanwhile we have this bit of the heroic--this defiance of a miry world, cropping up--to help us out of our mud-holes. I"m awfully sorry for Harry--but I take off my hat to the girl."
Victoria"s expression became sarcastic.
"Who will ultimately marry," she said, "according to _my_ interpretation of the business, a first-cla.s.s adventurer--possessed of a million of money--stolen from its proper owners."
"I don"t believe it. I"ve seen her! But, upon my word, what a queer parable it all is! Shall I tell you how it shapes itself to me?" He looked, tongs in hand, at Victoria, his greenish eyes all alive. "I see you all--you, Harry, Faversham, and Melrose, Miss Lydia--grouped round a central point. The point is wealth. You are all in different relations to wealth. You and Harry are indifferent to wealth, because you have always had it. It has come to you without toiling and spinning--can you imagine being without it?--but it has not spoilt you. You sit loose to it; because you have never _struggled_ for it. But I doubt whether the Recording Angel, when it comes to reckoning up, will give you very high marks for your indifference! Dear friend!"--he put out a sudden hand and touched Victoria"s--"bear with me! There"s one thing you"ll hear, if any one does, at the last day--"I was a stranger and ye took me in."" His eyes shone upon her.
After which, he resumed in his former tone: "Then take Melrose. He too is determined by his relation to wealth. Wealth has just ruined him--burnt him up--made out of him so much refuse for the nether fires. Faversham again! Wealth, the crucial, deciding factor! The testing with him is still going on. He seems, from your account, to be coming out badly. And lastly, the girl--who, like you, is indifferent to wealth, but for different reasons; who probably hates and shrinks from it; like a wild bird that fears the cage. You, my dear lady--you and Harry--have got so used to wealth, its trammels no longer gall you. You carry the weight of it, as the horse of the Middle Ages carried his trappings; it"s second nature. And you can enjoy, you can move, you can feel, in spite of it.
You have risked your soul, without knowing it; but you have kept your soul! This girl, I take it, is afraid to risk her soul. She is not in love with Harry--worse luck for Harry!--she is in love--remember I have talked to her a little!--with something she calls beauty, with liberty, with an unfettered course for the spirit, with all the lovely, intangible, priceless _best_, which the world holds for its true lovers.
Wealth grasping at that best has a way of killing it--as the child kills the b.u.t.terfly. _That"s_ what she"s afraid of. As to Faversham"--he got up from his seat, and with his thumbs in his waistcoat began to pace the room--"Faversham no doubt is in a bad way. He"s on the road to d.a.m.nation.
Melrose of course is d.a.m.ned and done with. But Faversham? I reserve judgment. If he"s in love with that girl, and she with him--I can"t make out, however, that you have much reason to think it--but suppose he is, she"ll have the handling of him. Shan"t we back her?"
He turned with vivacity to his hostess.
Victoria laughed indignantly.
"You may if you like. The odds are too doubtful for me."
"That"s because you"re Harry"s mother!" he said with his sly, but most winning, smile. "Well--there"s the parable--writ large. _Mammon!_--how you get it--how you use it--whether you dominate it--or it dominates you. Whether it is the greater curse, or the greater blessing to men--it was the question in Christ"s day--it"s the question now. But it has never been put with such intensity, as to this generation! As to your particular version of the parable--I wait to see! The tale"s not through yet."
XVIII
A few days later, Lady Tatham received a letter, which she opened with some agitation. It was from Lydia in London:
"DEAR LADY TATHAM:
"I have waited some weeks before writing to you, partly because, as Susy I hear has told you, I have been busy nursing my mother"s sister, but still more because my heart failed me--again and again.
"And yet I feel I ought to write--partly in justice to myself--partly to ask you to forgive the pain I fear I may have caused you. I know--for he has told me--that Lord Tatham never concealed from you all that has pa.s.sed between us; and so I feel sure that you know what happened about a month ago, when we agreed that it would be wiser not to meet again for the present.
"I don"t exactly want to defend myself. It still seems to me true that, in the future, men and women will find it much more possible to be comrades and friends, without any thought of falling in love or marrying, than they do now; and that it will be a good thing for both. And if it is true, are not some of us justified in making experiments now? Lord Tatham I know will have told you I was quite frank from the beginning. I did not wish to marry; but I meant to be a very true friend; and I wanted to be allowed to love you both, as one loves one"s friends, and to share your life a little. And the thing I most wished was that Lord Tatham should marry--some one quite different from myself.
"So we agreed that we would write, and share each other"s feelings and thoughts as far as we could. And I hoped that any other idea with regard to me would soon pa.s.s out of Lord Tatham"s mind. I did--most sincerely; and I think he believes that I did. How good and dear he always was to me!--how much I have learnt from him! And yet I am afraid it was all very blind, and ill-considered--perhaps very selfish--on my part. I did not understand what harm I _might_ do; though I hope with all my heart--and believe--that I have not done anything irreparable. It is very hard for me to regret it; because all my life I shall be the richer and the wiser for having known so good a man; one so true, so unselfish, so high-minded. Women so rarely come to know men, except in marriage, or through books; and your son"s character has sweetened and enn.o.bled whole sides of life for me--forever.
"But if--in return--I have given him pain--and you, who love him! I was always afraid of you--but I would have done anything in the world to serve you. Will you let me have a little word--just to tell me that you forgive, and understand. I ask it with a very sore heart--full, full of grat.i.tude to him and to you, for all your goodness."
Victoria was oddly affected by this letter. It both touched and angered her. She was touched by what it said, deeply touched; and angered by what it omitted. And yet how could the writer have said anything more!--or anything else! Victoria admitted that her thoughts had run far beyond what she knew--in any true sense--or had any right to conjecture.
Nevertheless the fact in her belief remained a fact, that but for Faversham and some disastrous influence he had gained over her almost at once, Harry would have had his chance with Lydia Penfold. As it was, she had been allowing Harry to offer her his most intimate thoughts and feelings, while she was actually falling in love with his inferior. This was what enraged Victoria. Whatever Cyril Boden might say, it seemed to her maternal jealousy something equivalent to the betrayal of a sacred confidence.
Yet clearly she could not say so to Lydia Penfold--nor could Lydia confess it! She wrote as follows: