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

of the Kingthorpe cottage; and he was living up to his income. When he died there would be two houses of furniture, plate, pictures, horses and carriages, and the Kingthorpe cottage, to be realized for Urania. He estimated these roughly as worth between six and seven thousand pounds, and he considered seven thousand pounds an ample fortune for his only daughter. Urania was in happy ignorance of the modesty of his views. She imagined herself an heiress on a much larger scale.

To offer himself to a penniless girl of whose belongings he knew absolutely nothing, and to be peremptorily refused! Dr. Rylance could hardly believe such a thing possible. The girl must be trifling with him, playing her fish, with the fixed intention of landing him presently. It was in the nature of girls to do that kind of thing. 'Why do you reject me?' he asked seriously 'is it because I am old enough to be your father?'

'No, I would marry a man old enough to be my grandfather if I loved him,' answered Ida, with cruel candour.

'And I am to understand that your refusal is irrevocable? he urged.

'Quite irrevocable. But I hope you believe that I am grateful for the honour you have done me.'

'That is the correct thing to say upon such occasions, answered Dr. Rylance, coldly; 'I wonder the sentence is not written in your copy books, among those moral aphorisms which are of so little use in after life.'

'The phrase may seem conventional, but in my case it means much more than usual,' said Ida; 'a girl who has neither money nor friends has good reason to be grateful when a gentleman asks her to be his wife.'

'I wish I could be grateful for your gratitude,' said Dr. Rylance, 'but I can't. I want your love, and nothing else. Is it on Urania's account that you reject me?' he urged. 'If you think that she would be a hindrance to your happiness, pray dismiss the thought. If she did not accommodate herself pleasantly to my choice her life would have to be spent apart from us. I would brook no rebellion.'

The cruel look had come into Dr. Rylance's eyes. He was desperately angry. He was surprised, humiliated, indignant. Never had the possibility of rejection occurred to him. It had been for him to decide whether he would or would not take this girl for his wife; and after due consideration of her merits and all surrounding circumstances, he had decided that he would take her.

'Is my daughter the stumbling-block?' he urged.

'No,' she answered, 'there is no stumbling-block. I would marry you to-morrow, if I felt that I could love you as a wife ought to love her husband. I said once--only a little while ago--that I would marry for money. I find that I am not so base as I thought myself.'

'Perhaps the temptation is not large enough,' said Dr. Rylance. 'If I had been Brian Wendover, and the owner of Kingthorpe Abbey, you would hardly have rejected me so lightly.'

Ida crimsoned to the roots of her hair. The shaft went home. It was as if Dr. Rylance had been inside her mind and knew all the foolish day-dreams she had dreamed in the idle summer afternoons, under the spreading cedar branches, or beside the lake in the Abbey grounds. Before she had time to express her resentment a cluster of young Wendovers came sweeping down the greensward at her side, and in the next minute Blanche was hanging upon her bodily, like a lusty parasite strangling a slim young tree.

'Darling,' cried Blanche gaspingly, 'such news. Brian has come--cousin Brian--after all, though he thought he couldn't. But he made a great effort, and he has come all the way as fast as he could tear to be here on Bessie's birthday. Isn't it too jolly?'

'All the way from Norway?' asked Ida.

'Yes,' said Urania, who had been carried down the hill with the torrent of Wendovers, 'all the way from Norway. Isn't it nice of him?'

Blanche's frank face was brimming over with smiles. The boys were all laughing. How happy Brian's coming had made them!

Ida looked at them wonderingly.

'How pleased you all seem!' she said. 'I did not know you were so fond of your cousin. I thought it was the other you liked.'

'Oh, we like them both,' said Blanche, 'and it is so nice of Brian to come on purpose for Bessie's birthday. Do come and see him. He is on the top of the hill talking to Bess; and the kettle boils, and we are just going to have tea. We are all starving.'

'After such a dinner!' exclaimed Ida.

'Such a dinner, indeed!--two or three legs of fowls and a plate or so of pie!' ejaculated Reginald, contemptuously. 'I began to be hungry a quarter of an hour afterwards. Come and see Brian.'

Ida looked round her wonderingly, feeling as if she was in a dream.

Dr. Rylance had disappeared. Urania was smiling at her sweetly, more sweetly than it was her wont to smile at Ida Palliser.

'One would think she knew that I had refused her father,' mused Ida.

They all climbed the hill, the children talking perpetually, Ida unusually silent. The smoke of a gipsy fire was going up from a hollow near the Druid altar, and two figures were standing beside the altar; one, a young man, with his arm resting on the granite slab, and his head bent as he talked, with seeming earnestness, to Bessie Wendover. He turned as the crowd approached, and Bessie introduced him to Miss Palliser. 'My cousin Brian--my dearest friend Ida,' she said.

'She is desperately fond of the Abbey,' said Blanche; 'so I hope she will like you. "Love me, love my dog," says the proverb, so I suppose one might say, "Love my house, love me."'

Ida stood silent amidst her loquacious friends, looking at the stranger with a touch of wonder. No, this was not the image which she had pictured to herself. Mr. Wendover was very good-looking--interesting even; he had the kind of face which women call nice--a pale complexion, dreamy gray eyes, thin lips, a well-shaped nose, a fairly intellectual forehead. But the Brian of her fancies was a man of firmer mould, larger features, a more resolute air, an eye with more fire, a brow marked by stronger lines. For some unknown reason she had fancied the master of the Abbey like that Sir Tristram Wendover who had been so loyal a subject and so brave a soldier, and before whose portrait she had so often lingered in dreamy contemplation.

'And you have really come all the way from Norway to be at Bessie's picnic?' she faltered at last, feeling that she was expected to say something.

'I would have come a longer distance for the sake of such a pleasant meeting,' he answered, smiling at her.

'Bessie,' cried Blanche, who had been grovelling on her knees before the gipsy fire, 'the kettle will go off the boil if you don't make tea instantly. If it were not your birthday I should make it myself.'

'You may,' said Bessie, 'although it is my birthday.'

She had walked a little way apart with Urania, and they two were talking somewhat earnestly.

'Those girls seem to be plotting something,' said Reginald; 'a charade for to-night, perhaps. It's sure to be stupid if Urania's in it.'

'You mean that it will be too clever,' said Horatio.

'Yes, that kind of cleverness which is the essence of stupidity.'

While Bessie and Miss Rylance conversed apart, and all the younger Wendovers devoted their energies to the preparation of a tremendous meal, Ida and Brian Wendover stood face to face upon the breezy hill-top, the girl sorely embarrassed, the young man gazing at her as if he had never seen anything so lovely in his life.

'I have heard so much about you from Bessie,' he said after a silence which seemed long to both. 'Her letters for the last twelve months have been a perpetual paean--like one of the Homeric hymns, with you for the heroine. I had quite a dread of meeting you, feeling that, after having my expectations strung up to such a pitch, I must be disappointed. Nothing human could justify Bessie's enthusiasm.'

'Please don't talk about it. Bessie's one weak point is her affection for me. I am very grateful. I love her dearly, but she does her best to make me ridiculous.'

'I am beginning to think Bessie a very sensible girl,' said Brian, longing to say much more, so deeply was he impressed by this goddess in a holland gown, with glorious eyes shining upon him under the shadow of a coarse straw hat.

'Have you come back to Hampshire for good?' asked Ida, as they strolled towards Bessie and Urania.

'For good! No, I never stay long.'

'What a pity that lovely old Abbey should be deserted!'

'Yes, it is rather a shame, is it not? But then no one could expect a young man to live there except in the hunting season--or for the sake of the shooting.'

'Could anyone ever grow tired of such a place?' asked Ida.

She was wondering at the young man's indifferent air, as if that solemn abbey, those romantic gardens, were of no account to him. She supposed that this was in the nature of things. A man born lord of such an elysium would set little value upon his paradise. Was it not Eve's weariness of Eden which inclined her ear to the serpent?

And now the banquet was spread upon the short smooth turf, and everybody was ordered to sit down. They made a merry circle, with the tea-kettle in the centre, piles of cake, and bread and butter, and jam-pots surrounding it. Blanche and Horatio were the chief officiators, and were tremendously busy ministering to the wants of others, while they satisfied their own hunger and thirst hurriedly between whiles. The damsel sat on the grass with a big crockery teapot in her lap, while her brother watched and managed the kettle, and ran to and fro with cups and saucers. Bessie, as the guest of honour, was commanded to sit still and look on.

'Dreadfully babyish, isn't it?' said Urania, smiling with her superior air at Brian, who had helped himself to a crust of home-made bread, and a liberal supply of gooseberry jam.

'Uncommonly jolly,' he answered gaily. 'I confess to a weakness for bread and jam. I wish people always gave it at afternoon teas.'

'Has it not a slight flavour of the nursery?'

'Of course it has. But a nursery picnic is ever so much better than a swell garden-party, and bread and jam is a great deal more wholesome than salmon-mayonaise and Strasbourg pie. You may despise me as much as you like, Miss Rylance. I came here determined to enjoy myself.'

'That is the right spirit for a picnic,' said Ida, 'People with grand ideas are not wanted.'

'And I suppose in the evening you will join in the dumb charades, and play hide-and-seek in the garden, all among spiders and cockchafers.'

'I will do anything I am told to do,' answered Brian, cheerily. 'But I think the season of the cockchafer is over.'

'What has become of Dr. Rylance?' asked Bessie, looking about her as if she had only that moment missed him.

'I think he went back to the farm for his horse,' said Urania. 'I suppose he found our juvenile sports rather