Kitabı oku: «Chambers's Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Art, No. 733, January 12, 1878», sayfa 2

HELENA, LADY HARROGATE

CHAPTER II. – AT CARBERY CHASE

The horseman, at whose approach the interesting inmate of The Traveller's Rest had so abruptly withdrawn from the place of observation whence he was contemplating the Elizabethan front of Carbery Court, had scarcely recognised in the lounger smoking his pipe beneath the elm, the bronzed seafaring fellow whom he had frequently of late encountered. But as the man moved off with hasty step and an evident dislike to observation, the rider's eyes for a moment followed him.

‘A queer customer that,’ he said carelessly to himself. ‘What is he, I wonder? If I saw that ugly face of his near Ashdown Park or Newmarket Heath, I'd lay a trifle that he was a racing tout; in London I would class him as a dog-dealer or dog-stealer, or possibly a sham smuggler, one of those gruff longshore-men who waylay you with their contraband cabbage-leaf Trabucos; but being here, I think he has more the look of a real one.’

Having said which, he rode on, in the quiet enjoyment of a cigar, towards the material of which it is unlikely that the leaf of any British vegetable had contributed; while no sound but the jingling of the bridle-rein and the tramp of the horse's feet broke the silence. Overhead there soared aloft a living canopy of verdure, formed by the mighty trees, that seemed to throw, as it were, a succession of triumphal arches over the smooth carriage-road, flecked with broad bars of light and shadow. There were vistas here and there, opening out from between the massive trees, on which an artist's eye might have feasted, dells clothed with beech and birch trees, fairy glens through which trickled some brooklet fresh from its cradle among the ridges of Dartmoor, pools on which the water-lily floated, and around which the deer bent down their antlered heads to drink. But Jasper Denzil had little or no appreciation of the charms of a landscape, and as he rode on, the only comment which escaped him was evoked by the sight of the superb old house, its many windows glistening golden in the sloping sun, as though to challenge admiration.

‘Tiresome old jail!’ he said, tossing away the stump of his cigar. ‘A nice place to be mewed up in, with the London season at high-pressure, is this! If it were mine to do as I liked with’ – But the only son and heir of Sir Sykes Denzil did not definitely state the course that he should pursue were he undisputed proprietor of Carbery Chase.

Jasper, whose actual age may have been six or at the most seven and twenty, was one of those men of whom it is puzzling to say whether they look, for their years, very youthful or surprisingly old. He was below the middle height, and his smooth pale face seemed at first sight almost boyish; but the cold glance of the small blue eyes, the firmness of the compressed lips, and the tell-tale lines that were faintly visible at the angles of both eyes and mouth, were not such as we associate with ingenuous youth.

Captain Denzil (Jasper had at an early age attained, thanks to the golden ladder by which the offspring of wealthy men were wont to climb, his captaincy in the light cavalry regiment to which he had till recently belonged) had proved himself an expensive son to Sir Sykes. His fair moustache, pallid face, and drawling accent were well known on race-courses, and quite familiar in those darkened rooms at fashionable clubs where the fickle goddess Chance is worshipped by card-players around their lamp-lit green tables, while it is honest daylight in the workaday world beyond.

He rode into the yard and dismounted; but instead of immediately entering the house, lingered to exchange a thoughtful word or two as to the signs of an incipient spavin in the off fore-leg of the fiery chestnut which he had been riding.

‘Knew he wasn't sound of course, when I bought him,’ remarked the captain, with calm philosophy. ‘A friend's horse never is, especially when the friend is such an impulsive open-hearted fellow as Charley Granger. But he was cheap, and he has a turn of speed, and I've entered him for the Pebworth Steeplechase, and don't want to pay forfeit. So see to the bandages, Phillips, will you; and don't have him out, except for gentle exercise on the soft, this fortnight. We mustn't neglect that leg.’

Jasper was not one of those who care for a horse, as some of us do, for the horse's own sake, and out of genuine love for the noblest of the dumb servants that do the bidding of mankind. But he did regard the genus equus as a very valuable instrument for gambling purposes, and as such to be tended with jealous care and helped, when convenient, to victory on the turf.

With a slow step and a careless indolent manner, Jasper Denzil crossed the paved yard, and entered by a side-door the mansion that must one day in the course of nature be his, but of which as a place of residence we have already heard him express an opinion the reverse of flattering. There was very little at Carbery Chase to amuse the captain, cut off from his usual sources of excitement and a temporary exile from London and its pleasures. It was sorry work this pottering business of picking up a few ten-pound bets on country courses, or winning paltry stakes by the aid of wretched platers. It was better than nothing no doubt; precisely as at Monaco we see the ruined millionaire, Spanish or Russian, eagerly playing for silver when his last rouleaux of louis-d'or have taken wing; but he felt that it was a sore degradation for one whose dash and coolness had won dubious compliments from very great personages.

Traversing a passage, Jasper presently crossed the great hall – full of costly marbles brought from Italy, in days when there were no manufacturers of the spurious antique – and opened the door of what was known as the morning-room, cheerful and bright as a morning-room should be, and overlooking the rose-garden, then glorious in its glow and blush of tender colour.

Two ladies were the occupants of the room, both young and both pretty, though each of them had that likeness to Jasper (her only brother) which we so constantly trace in members of the same family. Lucy it is true was dark-haired and dark-eyed; while Blanche, the younger and taller of the two, was delicately – perhaps too delicately – fair of complexion, and had hair of the palest gold. Sir Sykes had been for several years a widower; and all the Denzil family, with the exception of the baronet himself, were now present in that room, through the French windows of which came stealing in the fresh scent of roses.

‘I saw you, Jasper, from the pheasantry, as you came up the park; but you did not see me,’ said Miss Denzil, smiling. ‘You did not stay, then, to see the finish of the Pebworth cricket-match?’

‘I – no!’ answered Jasper with a yawn. ‘Cricket is amusing, I daresay, to those who knock the ball about, or to those who run to pick it up again, as the French countess said of our noble national game; but it is slow – fearfully slow.’ And the captain yawned again.

‘Most things are, I am afraid, at Carbery,’ said Blanche gently. – ‘We have tried to amuse him – have we not, Lucy? – by dragging him with us to such primitive merry-makings as lay within driving distance, archery-meetings, flower-shows’ —

‘Yes, and all manner of Arcadian entertainments of the same species,’ interrupted Jasper, drumming with his ringed fingers on the glass of the open window near which he was standing. ‘I believe I had a narrow escape from what they called a sillabub party at that old woman's (Lady Di Horner's) house at Ottery St Luke's, with a cow on the lawn and the rest of it. The natives, I suppose, like that kind of thing; I don't.’ There was a half-peevish lassitude in his tone, in his attitude, as he spoke, which added emphasis to words that were, if ungracious, perhaps not unkindly meant. But his sisters were not in the least offended that their brother should shew so unaffectedly how little pleasure he took in their society, and how complete was his distaste for their simple pleasures and homely occupations. A grown-up brother is, in the eyes of good girls, a hero by right of birth, and with Lucy and Blanche the captain was a privileged person, not to be judged by the standards of ordinary ethics.

‘If the governor,’ said Jasper, after a pause, ‘would ask people down here – I mean of course after town is empty – a houseful of people of the right sort, why then, one might get through the autumn and winter without being moped to death.’

Lucy shook her head. ‘There is no chance, brother,’ she said, ‘that papa should fill his house with what you would consider people of the right sort. The Vanes will come of course, and the Henshaws, and’ —

‘Never mind the rest of the names,’ broke in the captain with a lazy brusqueness; ‘heavy county members, who know more of the points of a bullock than they do of those of a horse; and their fat wives and starched daughters. What have I done, to be buried alive in this way!’

Women have this merit, that they seldom retort, as they might sometimes do with crushing effect, upon a man who bewails his hard lot, be his self-pity ever so unreasonable. Lucy and Blanche Denzil knew, or guessed, with tolerable accuracy that it was due to Jasper's own extravagance that he no longer wore the gay trappings of a captain of Lancers, and that the soles of his varnished boots were no longer familiar with the Pall-Mall pavement.

‘I'll go in and see my father; he's in the library, I suppose?’ said Jasper, and without waiting for an answer, he sauntered off.

Sir Sykes Denzil was a man of methodical habits, and his son's conjecture that he would be found at that hour in the library was quite warranted, not only by fact, but by his daily practice. On his way thither the young man passed by the suite of drawing-rooms, only the smallest of which was ever used, save on the occasions, not too frequent, when some great dinner-party or possibly a dance at Carbery Chase set all the neighbouring lanes and roads aglow with carriage-lamps. With all its splendour, the Court was what might be described as a dull house; the master of which had never made the most, even for selfish purposes, of his large share in the good things of this world.

The library, Sir Sykes's favourite room, was a stately apartment, with gilt cornices and a richly painted ceiling. It overlooked the stone terrace whereon, amidst statues and marble vases overbrimming with scarlet geraniums, the peacocks strutted. The great central window was of ancient stained glass, and from its quaint panes in their leaden setting flashed forth the lost colours of the blue and crimson, deemed inimitable for centuries past, but which probably owed their peculiar beauty to the corroding touch of time. This window, of which honourable mention was made in the county guide-book aforesaid, glimmered with heraldic blazonry, wherein the couchant greyhounds of the present owners of Carbery found no place.

The baronet, who was seated at his writing-table, strewn with papers, looked up as he heard the opening of the door, and greeted his son with rather a conventional smile of recognition. ‘So you are back with us earlier than usual, Jasper,’ he said, in a tone that was polite, but scarcely cordial. The young man's voice, as usual with him when he addressed his father, had lost much of the languid insolence which habit had rendered natural to him.

‘Yes, sir; I don't care much for cricket, so I did not stay to see the end of it. So far as I could hear, the Zingari were beating the County hollow. But as I said before, that style of thing is not much in my line.’

‘Better for you, my boy, if it had been,’ returned the baronet dryly. ‘A young fellow cannot break his health or ruin his fortunes at cricket, as more fashionable pastimes may help him to do.’

The captain winced and reddened. ‘I didn't expect a lecture, father,’ he said peevishly. ‘Indeed I'm not likely to forget the crasher I came down with, that my misfortunes should be thrown in my teeth every day I live.’

‘We will let the subject drop,’ said the baronet after a momentary pause. ‘Who were at Pebworth to-day? No lack of company, I suppose? Our friends hereabouts are not all as complete cosmopolitans as you are, Jasper; and some of the ladies at anyrate may have gone there in hopes of seeing Devon win the game.’

Jasper half sullenly made answer that he could scarcely say who were there. ‘Fulfords and Courtenays and the Carews, and the people from Prideaux Park, yes; and the De Vere girls, and Harrogate their brother. The old Earl wasn't there, and the ladies went on horseback.’

‘Lady Gladys looks well on horseback,’ observed Sir Sykes with a sidelong glance at his son.

‘Yes; and rides nicely,’ answered Jasper with an air of the most utter indifference; and then the eyes of the father and the son met, not frankly, but as the eyes of two wary fencing-masters might do at the instant of crossing swords. Sir Sykes and Jasper were not, so far as outward seeming went, in the least alike. The common attribute of worldliness they did indeed share, but neither in looks nor in manner did they resemble each other. The baronet was a tall and handsome man, whose dark hair was now dashed with gray, and his high forehead deeply lined, but who still presented to the eyes of the world a showy exterior and a bearing that was at once dignified and urbane. That he was not in perfect health could only be conjectured from the slowness of his step, and those faintly marked furrows near the corners of the shapely mouth, in which a shrewd physician might have read of mischief silently at work; but to unprofessional scrutiny he appeared simply as a gentleman of a goodly presence.

A melancholy man, albeit a proud and a courteous one, Sir Sykes was known to be. And singularly enough, the baronet's sadness was supposed to date from the day when he had lost, long years ago, the eldest of his three daughters, a little girl to whom he was rumoured to have been unusually attached. This was the odder, because Sir Sykes was not the sort of man who is generally credited with very deep feelings or a peculiar strength of family affection. He had borne his wife's decease with polished equanimity; but those who had known him in his early poverty and in his subsequent prosperity averred that the lord of Carbery had never been the same man since the death of this child.

‘I wish,’ said Sir Sykes, speaking slowly, and poising a gold-hafted paper-knife between his soft white fingers – ‘I wish I could see you married and settled.’

‘The settling, if, as I suppose, it means the making of a suitable settlement, makes the main impediment to marrying, with some of us at least,’ rejoined Jasper with mock gravity; but before his father could reply, a servant entered bringing a letter. Sir Sykes mechanically took up the letter from the silver tray and as mechanically opened it. But his eyes had hardly glanced at the first half-page before a great and sudden change came over his calm face; he grew white, almost livid, to his very lips, and let his hand which held the open letter drop heavily upon the table.

‘Are you ill, sir?’ said Jasper quickly and with a sort of anxiety unusual with him. It was impossible to avoid taking notice of the baronet's very evident emotion; impossible too not to connect the cause of it with the letter which Sir Sykes held in his hand. But the master of Carbery Chase rallied himself, and though his face was even ghastly in its pallor and his breath came painfully, he managed to smile as he rejoined: ‘Not ill. It is a mere pain, a spasm at most, which comes at times, but goes as quickly, or nearly so, as it comes. It is a trifle, not worth the talking about. It is getting late, and I have a note or two to write and some papers to look over before the dressing-bell rings. We shall meet at dinner presently.’

Jasper rose to go. ‘I hardly like’ – he began.

‘I am better; I am well; it is nothing,’ interrupted Sir Sykes irritably; and then blandly added: ‘I thank you, my dear boy, for your solicitude, but I am best alone.’

Jasper had not proceeded two paces along the carpeted corridor before he heard the key of the library door turned from within.

‘I'd give a cool hundred,’ said this exemplary youth, ‘to look over my father's shoulder as he reads that letter. To have a hold on the governor would’ – He left the rest of the sentence unspoken, and passed on, leaving Sir Sykes in the locked-up library to the company of his own solitary thoughts.