APPROACHING.
HIS chaise had followed him to the steps, and he sprang into it, shut the door himself, pulled up the window, and leaned back. He was not long in collecting his ideas, for the attorney, standing in the middle of his room, saw him let down the front window and call something to the driver, who forthwith got his horses into motion.
Mr. Tarlcot, watching the vehicle as it drove away, observed that it turned the comer, not in the direction of the town he had named, but of the George.
“Forgot something there,” conjectured the lawyer. “Oh! hey? why he may be going on to the vicar’s house, and upon my life there’s no one there but a parcel of women to meet him.
In haste he put on his hat, and was out on the steps in a moment, and trotted down to the comer, with an anxious face.
There one commands a view across the front of the George inn, and of some houses beyond it, along the margin of the lake, to the vicar’s house.
The elm trees and the two grey piers, capped with stone balls, stained and worn with the rains and suns of two centuries, stood hardly four hundred yards away.
It was with a very uncomfortable sensation that he saw the chaise draw up at the vicar’s house, and Captain Torquil spring out and run up to the hall door.
Mr. Tarlcot was nothing short of very much frightened when he saw this. He was a serious man, and never swore-and the “bless my soul!” with which he witnessed the occurrence very inadequately expressed the intensity of his feeling. The attorney looked this way and that, in his perplexity; and he bethought him of Tom Shackles, whom he saw at that moment striding into the George. So he followed him in, and talked a little with him in the hall.
In the meantime, the vicar’s house had received this sinister visitor.
When he knocked at the door, good Mrs. Jenner was in the scene of her new and delightful interest. The baby was in a sound sleep — Mrs. Jolliffe pronounced it very refreshing — and Mrs. Jenner and Kitty Bell, with their souls in their eyes, smiled down benedictions and thanksgivings in breathless silence upon the little slumberer. When the knock was heard at the hall-door, Mrs. Jenner, with a shudder, wondered how any one could be so brutal as to run such a risk as that of drumming a double-knock just at the hour when it might be supposed the little darling was asleep.
She stole softly out on the lobby, and listened. She heard the stranger inquire for her, and Mall answer that she was at home. She then heard them both go up to the drawing-room and the visitor say “Captain Torquil.”
A sudden faintness overcame Mrs. Jenner for a moment on hearing that dreaded name. But her very terror strung up her energies; and with a light step, and pale face, she entered the nursery, and said —
“Here’s a man come about the baby. Lock the door on the inside, when I go, and keep my precious darling safe.”
“Agoy!” exclaimed Kitty, popping her head out at the nursery door, with round eyes, and round mouth, and good honest round cheeks. “What shall we do wi’ t’ bab, ma’am? We can’t get down wi”t, ’twould begin bledderin’, and he’d be sure to catch it. If I had but the sword that’s in the master’s study, ma’am.”
“Be quiet, Kitty-don’t talk like a mafflin’. Get into the room, and open to no one till I tell you.”
And with these words, Mrs. Jenner assumed her stateliest air; and shaking out her brown silk dress a little, she went down-stairs to the drawing-room with as dauntless a demeanour as she could command, and an awful tremor at her heart.
Mrs. Jenner was quite a lady, though something of that stiff school which has quite passed away.
With her a curtsey was no make-belief, but a dignified salutation, during which you might leisurely count four, or walk across the room. She saw a man lightly and elegantly made, and strikingly handsome, though not young.
He turned about from the window, where he stood as she entered, looking across the lake at the mountains that seemed so towering and so near, and made her a grand-seigneur bow, as ceremonious and more graceful than her own old English curtsey.
She was agreeably surprised! There was here something so deferential, so graceful, so engaging.
Captain Torquil introduced himself, and made many apologies for disturbing her. Ladies in the country, who were known to be really kind and charitable, he knew, had hardly ever an hour to themselves.
He was so glad, he said, that this little excursion to look after a foolish run-away servant should have led him back, though only for a moment, to Golden Friars. When he was a boy he had been here for three months, every year, for three years in succession; and had walked over those beautiful mountains again and again; and knew every rivulet and ravine, every curve and hollow, especially of that huge clump of mountains that overhung the lake. He remembered this house so well; that was long before her time. It was a Mr. Drayton, he thought, that had it then. A change very much for the better when Mr. Jenner came.
This he said pointedly.
And particularly he remembered Mrs. Drayton. She was not at all liked down here. Country people are very discriminating; they know a lady. It would be a great pleasure to his poor wife, who was a sad invalid, to hear how her cousin at Golden Friars was. What this delightful air and exquisite scenery can do for people! A paradise that communicates its own immortality. He wished so much he could get his poor wife into some such exquisite panorama, and vivifying atmosphere.
“She’s not old. Still, I need not tell you, a young woman, poor Janet might be almost in her best looks at this moment; and if she had lived in a place like this, she would have been. You and she are contemporaries, I know.”
Good Mrs. Jenner was six years her senior.
“And I find it certainly very hard to believe. My poor wife so often speaks of you. I felt as if I knew you; as if — I hope I was not very impertinent — I had a kind of right, almost, to come in in this unceremonious way. And there is my particular friend, General Donnington — Sir Edward Donnington he is now, you know, and very rich — a great sum, Indian prize-money. Of course you heard. Poor fellow! He never married, and never will, I suppose. He had his romance, and his grief; I know all about that,” said he, very low, looking down on the carpet.
“And he’s another friend who talks to me, more than I need say, about Golden Friars, and our relations there.”
Mrs. Jenner always blushed easily, and she blushed now, looking down with a faint little smile, and a gentle sigh; and she thought what a melancholy music was in Captain Torquil’s voice, and what a charming person he was, and what nice simple tastes and feelings he seemed to have.
“I am thinking of getting away from town life, I’m tired of London. There is nothing on earth, I think, I should so entirely enjoy as living in a place like this-in this very place — living and dying here.”
There was here a pause, as he looked pensively across the lake to the grand background of mountain.
“And,” he continued, “we have had a little responsibility — a very pleasant one — thrown upon us by poor dear Alice Mildmay. You have heard of her death, of course, poor thing. She was fond of my wife, and honoured me with her confidence and good opinion, and consulted me latterly about everything, and her poor little girl, only eighteen months old, she has left in our charge; and it would be so delightful to have it here-close to you-and perhaps, sooner or later, we might induce you to take it altogether under your care. The fact is, my poor wife’s miserable health would quite unfit her, except for a short time, for the anxieties and trouble of such a charge. But it would be a very ungracious thing to refuse, and for a few months, I suppose, we must submit and comply with so solemn a request, until we find — I should be so delighted if it were eventually in this house-a suitable protectress for the poor little thing. At present I have had to follow down here a person whom I wish I could describe as simply foolish — in fact, a particularly wicked and audacious woman, who has stolen the child. I detest having to punish any one — in fact, if you knew me, you would understand that it is downright torture to me, the bare idea of doing so. But that wicked woman — it is a duty one can’t get over to stop such doings peremptorily; and I’m come all this way, you see, to do that. Her name is Hileria Pullen. Is she in the house?”
“No, certainly,” said Mrs. Jenner, who, as the crisis seemed to approach, flushed very much, and grew plainly very uncomfortable. “I never saw her-she never was in this house.”
“But the little child is; Doctor Jenner says so, and in a better place it could not possibly be,” said Captain Torquil, “nor under more admirable superintendence or kinder care. You’ll kindly allow me, however, to see the child, and assure myself that it is the very child, and all safe, and quite out of the hands of that wicked woman. And, being once assured upon these points, I would ask you kindly to take pity upon me, who have no servant with me capable of taking charge of the infant, and to permit it to remain here, in your kind hands, as much longer as will consist with your convenience and liking.” Here was a polite and plausible speech enough. But what was that in the captain’s dark greedy eye — in his thin lips, and finely-cut pallid features, that affrighted Mrs. Jenner with a sudden sense of treachery and danger!