The Golden Calf, Mary Elizabeth Braddon [ebook reader screen .TXT] 📗

last six weeks; but embodied hatred had been close at hand in the presence of Miss Rylance; and if anyone had fallen in love with her during that time, it was the wrong person.

The young ladies were to go in the landau, leaving the exclusive enjoyment of Robin's variable humours to Horatio and the juveniles. There was a general idea that Robin, in conjunction with a hilly country, might be sooner or later fatal to the young Wendovers; but they went on driving him, nevertheless, as everybody knew that if he did ultimately prove disastrous to them it would be with the best intentions and without loss of temper.

Bessie and Ida took their seats in the roomy carriage, Reginald mounted to the perch beside the coachman, and they drove triumphantly through the village to the gate of Dr. Rylance's cottage, where Urania stood waiting for them.

'I hope we haven't kept you long?' said Bessie.

'Not more than a quarter of an hour,' answered Urania, meekly; 'but that seems rather long in a broiling sun. You always have such insufferably hot weather on your birthdays, Bessie.'

'It will be cool enough on the hills by-and-by,' said Bess, apologetically.

'I daresay there will be a cold wind,' returned Urania, who wore an unmistakable air of discontent. 'There generally is on these unnatural September days.'

'One would think you bore a grudge against the month of September because I was born in it,' retorted Bessie. And then, remembering her obligations, she hastened to add, 'How can I thank you sufficiently for that exquisite scent-case? It is far too lovely.'

'I am very glad you like it. One hardly knows what to choose.'

Miss Rylance had taken her seat in the landau by this time, and they were bowling along the smooth high road at that gentle jog-trot pace affected by a country gentleman's coachman.

The day was heavenly; the wind due south; a day on which life--mere sensual existence--is a delight. The landscape still wore its richest summer beauty--not a leaf had fallen. They were going upward, to the hilly region between Kingthorpe and Winchester, to a spot where there was a table-shaped edifice of stones, supposed to be of Druidic origin.

The young Wendovers were profoundly indifferent to the Druids, and to that hypothetical race who lived ages before the Druids, and have broken out all over the earth in stony excrescences, as yet vaguely classified. That three-legged granite table, whose origin was lost in the remoteness of past time, seemed to the young Wendovers a thing that had been created expressly for their amusement, to be climbed upon or crawled under as the fancy moved them. It was a capital rallying-point for a picnic or a gipsy tea-drinking.

'We are to have no grown-ups to-day,' said Reginald, looking down from his place beside the coachman. 'The pater and mater are away, and Aunt Betsy has a headache; so we can have things all our own way.'

'You are mistaken, Reginald,' said Urania; 'my father is going to join us by-and-by. I hope he won't be considered an interloper. I told him that it was to be a young party, and that I was sure he would be in the way; but he wouldn't take my advice. He is going to ride over in the broiling sun. Very foolish, I think.'

'I thought Dr. Rylance was in London?'

'He was till last night. He came down on purpose to be at your picnic.'

'I am sure I feel honoured,' said Bessie.

'Do you? I don't think _you_ are the attraction,' answered Urania, with a cantankerous glance at Miss Palliser.

Ida's dark eyes were looking far away across the hills. It seemed as if she neither heard Miss Rylance's speech nor saw the sneer which emphasized it.

Dr. Rylance's substantial hunter came plodding over the turfy ridge behind them five minutes afterwards, and presently he was riding at a measured trot beside the carriage door, congratulating Bessie on the beauty of the day, and saying civil things to every one.

'I could not resist the temptation to give myself a day's idleness in the Hampshire air,' he said.

Reginald felt an utterably savage. What a trouble-feast the man was. They would have to adapt the proceedings of the day to his middle-aged good manners. There could be no wild revelry, no freedom. Dr. Rylance was an embodiment of propriety.

Half-an-hour after dinner they were all scattered upon the hills.

Reginald, who cherished a secret passion for Ida, which was considerably in advance of his years, and who had calculated upon being her guide, philosopher, and friend all through the day, found himself ousted by the West End physician, who took complete possession of Miss Palliser, under the pretence of explaining the history--altogether speculative--of the spot. He discoursed eloquently about the Druids, expatiated upon the City of Winchester, dozing in the sunshine yonder, among its fat water meadows. He talked of the Saxons and the Normans, of William of Wykeham, and his successors, until poor Ida felt sick and faint from very weariness. It was all very delightful talk, no doubt--the polished utterance of a man who read his _Saturday Review_ and _Athenaeum_ diligently, saw an occasional number of _Fors Clavigera_, and even skimmed the more aesthetic papers in the _Architect_; but to Ida this expression of modern culture was all weariness. She would rather have been racing those wild young Wendovers down the slippery hill-side, on which they were perilling their necks; she would rather have been lying beside the lake in Kingthorpe Park, reading her well-thumbed Tennyson, or her shabby little Keats.

Her thoughts had wandered ever so far away when she was called back to the work-a-day world by finding that Dr. Rylance's conversation had suddenly slipped from archaeology into a more personal tone.

'Are you really going away to-morrow?' he asked.

'Yes,' answered Ida, sadly, looking at one of the last of the butterflies, whose brief summertide of existence was wearing to its close, like her own.

'You are going back to Mauleverer Manor?'

'Yes. I have another half-year of bondage, I am going back to drudgery and self-contempt, to be brow-beaten by Miss Pew, and looked down upon by most of her pupils. The girls in my own class are very fond of me, but I'm afraid their fondness is half pity. The grown-up girls with happy homes and rich fathers despise me. I hardly wonder at it. Genteel poverty certainly is contemptible. There is nothing debasing in a smock-frock or a fustian jacket. The labourers I see about Kingthorpe have a glorious air of independence, and I daresay are as proud, in their way, as if they were dukes. But shabby finery--genteel gowns worn threadbare: there is a deep degradation in those.'

'Not for you,' answered Dr. Rylance, earnestly, with an admiring look in his blue-gray eyes. They were somewhat handsome eyes when they did not put on their cruel expression. 'Not for you. Nothing could degrade, nothing could exalt you. You are superior to the accident of your surroundings.'

'It's very kind of you to say that; but it's a fallacy, all the same,' said Ida. 'Do you think Napoleon at St. Helena, squabbling with Sir Hudson Lowe, is as dignified a figure as Napoleon at the Tuileries, in the zenith of his power? But I ought not to be grumbling at fate. I have been happy for six sunshiny weeks. If I were to live to be a century old, I could never forget how good people at Kingthorpe have been to me. I will go back to my old slavery, and live upon the memory of that happiness.'

'Why should you go back to slavery?' asked Dr. Rylance, taking her hand in his and holding it with so strong a grasp that she could hardly have withdrawn it without violence. 'There is a home at Kingthorpe ready to receive you. If you have been happy there in the last few weeks, why not try if you can be happy there always? There is a house in Cavendish Square whose master would be proud to make you its mistress. Ida, we have seen very little of each other, and I may be precipitate in hazarding this offer; but I am as fond of you as if I had known you half a lifetime, and I believe that I could make your life happy.'

Ida Palliser's heart thrilled with a chill sense of horror and aversion. She had talked recklessly enough of her willingness to marry for money, and, lo! here was a prosperous man laying two handsomely furnished houses at her feet--a man of gentlemanlike bearing, good-looking, well-informed, well-spoken, with no signs of age in his well-preserved face and figure; a man whom any woman, friendless, portionless, a mere waif upon earth's surface, at the mercy of all the winds that blow, ought proudly and gladly to accept for her husband.

No, too bold had been her challenge to fate. She had said that she would marry any honest man who would lift her out of the quagmire of poverty: but she was not prepared to accept Dr. Rylance's offer, generous as it sounded. She would rather go back to the old treadmill, and her old fights with Miss Pew, than reign supreme over the dainty cottage at Kingthorpe and the house in Cavendish Square. Her time had not come.

Dr. Rylance had not risen to eloquence in making his offer; and Ida's reply was in plainest words.

'I am very sorry,' she faltered. 'I feel that it is very good of you to make such a proposal; but I cannot accept it.'

'There is some one else,' said the doctor. 'Your heart is given away already.'

'No,' she answered sadly; 'my heart is like an empty sepulchre.'

'Then why should I not hope to win you? I have been hasty, no doubt: but I want if possible to prevent your return to that odious school. If you would but make me happy by saying yes, you could stay with your kind friends at The Knoll till the day that makes you mistress of my house. We might be married in time to spend November in Italy. It is the nicest month for Rome. You have never seen Italy, perhaps?'

'No. I have seen very little that is worth seeing.'

'Ida, why will you not say yes? Do you doubt that I should try my uttermost to make you happy?'

'No,' she answered gravely, but I doubt my own capacity for that kind of happiness.'

Dr. Rylance was deeply wounded. He had been petted and admired by women during the ten years of his widowhood, favoured and a favourite everywhere. He had made up his mind deliberately to marry this penniless girl. Looked at from a worldling's point of view, it would seem, at the first glance, an utterly disadvantageous alliance: but Dr. Rylance had an eye that could sweep over horizons other than are revealed to the average gaze, and he told himself that so lovely a woman as Ida Palliser must inevitably become the fashion in that particular society which Dr. Rylance most affected: and a wife famed for her beauty and elegance Would assuredly be of more advantage to a fashionable physician than a common-place wife with a fortune. Dr. Rylance liked money; but he liked it only for what it could buy. He had no sons, and he was much too fond of himself to lead laborious days in order to leave a large fortune to his daughter. He had bought a lease of his London house, which would last his time; he had bought the freehold