A GENTLEMAN IN BLACK.
They had both risen preparatory to Miss Maud’s flitting and a parting kiss and good-night, when Miss Max said, suddenly:
“And what about Mr. Marston?”
“Well, what about him?” answered Miss Vernon, a little crossly, for she had not recovered the conversation that had just occurred.
“Nothing very particular — nothing at all, in fact — only I had intended talking about him fifty times to-day, and something always prevented. He’s coming to the ball at Wymering, isn’t he?”
“I don’t know; he said so. I don’t care,” said the handsome girl, drowsily. And she advanced her hand and her lips a little, as if for her final salutation.
But Miss Max had not quite done.
“I like him so much. I think him so clever, and so good-natured, and so nice. I wish so much, Maud, that you and he were married,” said Miss Max, with audacious directness.
“And I wish so much that you and he were married,” retorted Maud, looking lazily at the flame of her bedroom candle, which she held in her hand. “That would be a more natural consequence, I think, of your liking and admiring.”
“You can’t deny that he is wildly in love with you,” said Miss Max.
“I can’t deny that he was perhaps wildly in love with a poor seamstress in a dark serge dress a few days ago, and may possibly be in love with another to-day. That is wildly in love, as you say. I don’t think there is anything very flattering in being the object of that kind of folly.”
“Well, he will be a good deal surprised, I venture to say, when he comes in quest of his seamstress to the Wymering cloak-room,” remarked Miss Max, with a pleasant anticipation of the éclaircissement.
“That depends on two things: first, how his seamstress meets him; and, secondly, whether she meets him there at all. Good-night. It is very late.”
And with these words she kissed her genial old friend, and was gone.
Miss Max looked after her, and shook her head with a smile.
“There goes impracticability itself!” she says, and throws up her hands and eyes with a shrug. “I pity that poor young man; Heaven only knows what’s in store for him. I shall engage in no more vagaries at all events. What an old fool I was to join in that madcap project of rambling over the country and concealing our names! What will Mr. Marston think of us?”
When she laid her busy, rheumatic little head, bound up in its queer night-cap, on her pillow, it began at once to construct all manner of situations and pictures.
Here was a romance in a delightful state of confusion! On this case her head may work all night long, for a year, without a chance of exhausting its fertile problems; for it presents what the doctors call a complication. Barbara Vernon, with her whole heart, hates the Warhamptons; and the Warhamptons, with all theirs, detest Barbara Vernon. It is too long a story to tell all the aggressions and reprisals which have carried the feud to the internecine point.
“I must certainly tell Maud. I’ll tell her in the morning,” thought Miss Max. “It’s only fair.”
Perhaps this incorrigible old matchmaker fancied that it might not prejudice Mr. Marston if Maud knew that her mother had placed him under anathema.
By noon next day Lord Verney and Lord Barroden, and their attorneys, had taken flight, and Miss Maximilla Medwyn had gone on to see friends at Naunton, with an uncertain promise of returning in a day or two to Roydon Hall.
There is no life in that grand house but the phantom life on its pictured walls. The hour is dull for Maud, who sits listlessly looking from one of the great drawing-room windows. Lady Vernon, who has seen, in succession, two deputations in the library, returns, and in stately silence sits down and resumes her examination of a series of letters from the late Bishop of Rotherham, and notes them for transmission to Mr. Coke.
Maud changes her posture, and glances at her mother. Why is there never any love in the cold elegance of that face? Why can’t she make up her mind and be patient? The throb of life will as soon visit that marble statue of Joan of Arc, by the door; Psyche at the other side, in her chill beauty, will as easily glow and soften into flesh.
Miss Vernon leans on her hand, listless, gloomy — in a degree indignant.
The room is darkening. The darker the better, she thinks. It is no metaphoric, but a real darkness; for clouds portending thunder, or heavy rain or hail, have, on a sudden, overcast the sky, and are growing thicker.
The light is dying out, the shadow blackens on Lady Vernon’s letters; she raises her eyes. One can hardly see to read.
Lady Vernon lays her letter on the table. She can no longer see the features of the Titian over the door, and the marble statues at either side have faded into vague white drifts. Some heavy, perpendicular drops fall, plashing on the smooth flags outside the window, and the melancholy rumble of distant thunder booms, followed by a momentarily aggravated down-pour, and a sudden thickening of the darkness.
This was a rather sublime prelude to the footman’s voice, announcing:
“Mr. Dawe.”
Maud glanced toward the door, which was in obscurity, and then at Lady Vernon, who, sitting full in the light of the window, had turned, with a stare and a frown, as if she had heard something incredible and unwelcome, toward the person who was entering.
By no means an heroic figure, nor worthy of being heralded by thunder, has stepped in somewhat slowly and stiffly, and halts in the side-light of the window, relieved by the dark background. It is a small man, dark visaged, with a black wig, a grave, dull, mahogany face, furrowed with lines of reserve. Maud is certain that she never saw that small, insignificant-looking man before, who is staring with a very grave but not unfriendly countenance at her mother.
He is buttoned up in a black outside coat, with a cape to it; he holds a rather low-crowned hat in his hand, and wears those shining leather coverings for the legs, which are buckled up to the knees. Getting in and getting out of his posting carriage he has scrupulously avoided dust or mud. His boots are without a speck. His queer hat is nattily brushed, and, in stable phraseology, has not a hair turned. His black coat is the finest possible, but it has great pockets at either side, each of which seems laden with papers, mufflers, and other things, so that his hips seem to descend gradually, and culminate near his knees.
This man’s brown face, smoothly shaved, is furrowed and solemn enough for five-and-sixty. In his dress and air there is nothing of the careless queerness of a country gentleman. His singularities suggest rather the eccentricity of a precise and rich old city humorist.
There is something characteristic and queer enough, in the buttoned-up and black-wigged little man, to interest Maud’s curiosity.
He has not been ten seconds in the room, and stands poised on his leather-cased legs, looking gravely and quietly at Lady Vernon, and, like a ghost, says nothing till he is spoken to. One can reckon the tick, tick, tick of the Louis Quatorze clock on the bracket by the chimney-piece.
Lady Vernon stood up with an effort, still looking hard at him, and advancing a step, she said:
“Mr. Dawe? I’m so surprised. I could scarcely believe my ears. It is such an age since I have seen you here.”
And she put out her hand hospitably, and he took it in his brown old fingers, with the stiffness of a mummy, and as he shook it slightly, he said in his wooden tones, quietly:
“Yes, it is sixteen years and eight months. I was looking into my notes yesterday — sixteen years on the eighteenth of November last. You look well, Barbara. Your looks are not much altered; no — considering.”
“It is very good of you to come to see me; you mustn’t stay away so long again,” she replied in her silvery tones.
“This is your daughter?” he interrupted with a little wave of his dark, thin hand towards the young lady.
“Yes, that is she. Maud, shake hands with Mr. Dawe.”
“Maud Guendoline she was baptised,” he said, as he advanced two stiff steps toward her, with his small but prominent brown eyes fixed upon her. She rose and placed her pretty fingers on that hand of box-wood, which closed on them.