Phantom Fortune, Mary Elizabeth Braddon [free e novels .txt] 📗

accustomed duty. 'Indeed, dear grandmother, I had no idea it was so late; but it was such a lovely afternoon, and Mr. Hammond is so interested in everything connected with Wordsworth--'

She was looking her loveliest at this moment, all that was softest in her nature called forth by her desire to please her grandmother, whom she really loved. She hung over Lady Maulevrier's chair, attending to her small wants, and seeming scarcely to remember the existence of anyone else. In this phase of her character she seemed to Mr. Hammond the perfection of womanly grace.

Mary had rushed off to her room to change her muddy gown, and came in presently, dressed for dinner, looking the picture of innocence.

John Hammond received his tea-cup from Lesbia's hand, and lingered in the drawing-room talking to the dowager and her granddaughters till it was time to dress. Lady Maulevrier found herself favourably impressed by him in spite of her prejudices. It was very provoking of Maulevrier to have brought such a man to Fellside. His very merits were objectionable. She tried with exquisite art to draw him into some revealment as to his family and antecedents: but he evaded every attempt of that kind. It was too evident that he was a self-made man, whose intellect and good looks were his only fortune. It was criminal in Maulevrier to have brought such a person to Fellside. Her ladyship began to think seriously of sending the two girls to St. Bees or Tynemouth for change of air, in charge of Fräulein. But any sudden proceeding of that kind would inevitably awaken Lesbia's suspicions; and there is nothing so fatal to a woman's peace as this idea of danger. No, the peril must be faced. She could only hope that Maulevrier would soon tire of Fellside. A week's Westmoreland weather--gray skies and long rainy days, would send these young men away.


CHAPTER IX.


A CRY IN THE DARKNESS.

The peril had to be faced, for the weather did not favour Lady Maulevrier's hopes. Westmoreland skies forgot to shed their accustomed showers. Westmoreland hills seemed to have lost their power of drawing down the rain. That August was a lovely month, and the young people at Fellside revelled in ideal weather. Maulevrier took his friend everywhere--by hill and stream and force and gill--to all those chosen spots which make the glory of the Lake country--on Windermere and Thirlmere, away through the bleak pass of Kirkstone to Ullswater--on driving excursions, and on boating excursions, and pedestrian rambles, which latter the homely-minded Hammond seemed to like best of all, for he was a splendid walker, and loved the freedom of a mountain ramble, the liberty to pause and loiter and waste an hour at will, without being accountable to anybody's coachman, or responsible for the well-being of anybody's horses.

On some occasions the two girls and Miss Müller were of the party, and then it seemed to John Hammond as if nothing were needed to complete the glory of earth and sky. There were other days--rougher journeys--when the men went alone, and there were days when Lady Mary stole away from her books and music, and all those studies which she was supposed still to be pursuing--no longer closely supervised by her governess, but on parole, as it were--and went with her brother and his friend across the hills and far away. Those were happy days for Mary, for it was always delight to her to be with Maulevrier; yet she had a profound conviction of John Hammond's indifference, kind and courteous as he was in all his dealings with her, and a sense of her own inferiority, of her own humble charms and little power to please, which was so acute as to be almost pain. One day this keen sense of humiliation broke from her unawares in her talk with her brother, as they two sat on a broad heathy slope face to face with one of the Langdale pikes, and with a deep valley at their feet, while John Hammond was climbing from rock to rock in the gorge on their right, exploring the beauties of Dungeon Ghyll.

'I wonder whether he thinks me very ugly?' said Mary, with her hands clasped upon her knees, her eyes fixed on Wetherlam, upon whose steep brow a craggy mass of brown rock clothed with crimson heather stood out from the velvety green of the hill-side.

'Who thinks you ugly?'

'Mr. Hammond. I'm sure he does. I am so sunburnt and so horrid!'

'But you are not ugly. Why, Molly, what are you dreaming about?'

'Oh, yes, I am ugly. I may not seem so to you, perhaps, because you are used to me, but I know he must think me very plain compared with Lesbia, whom he admires so much.'

'Yes, he admires Lesbia. There is no doubt of that.'

'And I know he thinks me plain,' said Molly, contemplating Wetherlam with sorrowful eyes, as if the sequence were inevitable.

'My dearest girl, what nonsense! Plain, forsooth? Ugly, quotha? Why, there are not a finer pair of eyes in Westmoreland than my Molly's, or a prettier smile, or whiter teeth.'

'But all the rest is horrid,' said Mary, intensely in earnest. 'I am sunburnt, freckled, and altogether odious--like a haymaker or a market woman. Grandmother has said so often enough, and I know it is the truth. I can see it in Mr. Hammond's manner.'

'What! freckles and sunburn, and the haymaker, and all that?' cried Maulevrier, laughing. 'What an expressive manner Jack's must be, if it can convey all that--like Lord Burleigh's nod, by Jove. Why, what a goose you are, Mary. Jack thinks you a very nice girl, and a very pretty girl, I'll be bound; but aren't you clever enough to understand that when a man is over head and ears in love with one woman, he is apt to seem just a little indifferent to all the other women in the world? and there is no doubt Jack is desperately in love with Lesbia.'

'You ought not to let him be in love with her,' protested Mary. 'You know it can only lead to his unhappiness. You must know what grandmother is, and how she has made up her mind that Lesbia is to marry some great person. You ought not to have brought Mr. Hammond here. It is like letting him into a trap.'

'Do you think it was wrong?' asked her brother, smiling at her earnestness. 'I should be very sorry if poor Jack should come to grief. But still, if Lesbia likes him--which I think she does--we ought to be able to talk over the dowager.'

'Never,' cried Mary. 'Grandmother would never give way. You have no idea how ambitious she is. Why, once when Lesbia was in a poetical mood, and said she would marry the man she liked best in the world, if he were a pauper, her ladyship flew into a terrible passion, and told her she would renounce her, that she would curse her, if she were to marry beneath her, or marry without her grandmother's consent.'

'Hard lines for Hammond,' said Maulevrier, rather lightly. 'Then I suppose we must give up the idea of a match between him and Lesbia.'

'You ought not to have brought him here,' retorted Mary. 'You had better invent some plan for sending him away. If he stay it will be only to break his heart.'

'Dear child, men's hearts do not break so easily. I have fancied that mine was broken more than once in my life, yet it is sound enough, I assure you.'

'Oh!' sighed Mary, 'but you are not like him; wounds do not go so deep with you.'

The subject of their conversation came out of the rocky cleft in the hills as Mary spoke. She saw his hat appearing out of the gorge, and then the man himself emerged, a tall well-built figure, clad in brown tweed, coming towards them, with sketch-book and colour-box in his pocket. He had been making what he called memoranda of the waterfall, a stone or two here, a cluster of ferns there, or a tree torn up by the roots, and yet green and living, hanging across the torrent, a rude natural bridge.

This round by the Langdale Pikes and Dungeon Ghyll was one of their best days; or, at least, Molly and her brother thought so; for to those two the presence of Lesbia and her chaperon was always a restraint.

Mary could walk twice as far as her elder sister, and revelled in hill-side paths and all manner of rough places. They ordered their luncheon at the inn below the waterfall, and had it carried up on to the furzy slope in front of Wetherlam, where they could eat and drink and be merry to the music of the force as it came down from the hills behind them, while the lights and shadows came and went upon yonder rugged brow, now gray in the shadow, now ruddy in the sunshine.

Mary was as gay as a bird during that rough and ready luncheon. No one would have suspected her uneasiness about John Hammond's peril or her own plainness. She might let her real self appear to her brother, who had been her trusted friend and father confessor from her babyhood; but she was too thorough a woman to let Mr. Hammond discover the depth of her sympathy, the tenderness of her compassion for his woes. Later, as they were walking home across the hills, by Great Langdale and Little Langdale, and Fox Howe and Loughrigg Fell, she fell behind a few paces with Maulevrier, and said to him very earnestly--

'You won't tell, will you, dear?'

'Tell what?' he asked, staring at her.

'Don't tell Mr. Hammond what I said about his thinking me ugly. He might want to apologise to me, and that would be too humiliating. I was very childish to say such a silly thing.'

'Undoubtedly you were.'

'And you won't tell him?'

'Tell him anything that would degrade my Mary? Assail her dignity by so much as a breath? Sooner would I have this tongue torn out with red-hot pincers.'

On the next day, and the next, sunshine and summer skies still prevailed; but Mr. Hammond did not seem to care for rambling far afield. He preferred loitering about in the village, rowing on the lake, reading in the garden, and playing lawn tennis. He had only inclination for those amusements which kept him within a stone's throw of Fellside: and Mary knew that this disposition had arisen in his mind since Lesbia had withdrawn herself from all share in their excursions. Lesbia had not been rude to her brother or her brother's friend; she had declined their invitations with smiles and sweetness; but there was always some reason--a new song to be practised, a new book to be read, a letter to be written--why she should not go for drives or walks or steamboat trips with Maulevrier and his friend.

So Mr. Hammond suddenly found out that he had seen all that was worth seeing in the Lake country, and that there was nothing so enjoyable as the placid idleness of Fellside; and at Fellside Lady Lesbia could not always avoid him without a too-marked intention, so he tasted the sweetness of her society to a much greater extent than was good for his peace, if the case were indeed as hopeless as Lady Mary declared. He strolled about the grounds with her; he drank the sweet melody of her voice in Heine's tenderest ballads; he read to her on the sunlit lawn in the lazy afternoon hours; he