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

played billiards with her; he was her faithful attendant at afternoon tea; he gave himself up to the study of her character, which, to his charmed eyes, seemed the perfection of pure and placid womanhood. There might, perhaps, be some lack of passion and of force in this nature, a marked absence of that impulsive feeling which is a charm in some women: but this want was atoned for by sweetness of character, and Mr. Hammond argued that in these calm natures there is often an unsuspected depth, a latent force, a grandeur of soul, which only reveals itself in the great ordeals of life.

So John Hammond hung about the luxurious drawing-room at Fellside in a manner which his friend Maulevrier ridiculed as unmanly.

'I had no idea you were such a tame cat,' he said: 'if when we were salmon fishing in Canada anybody had told me you could loll about a drawing-room all day listening to a girl squalling and reading novels, I shouldn't have believed a word of it.'

'We had plenty of roughing on the shores of the St. Lawrence,' answered Hammond. 'Summer idleness in a drawing-room is an agreeable variety.'

It is not to be supposed that John Hammond's state of mind could long remain unperceived by the keen eyes of the dowager. She saw the gradual dawning of his love, she saw the glow of its meridian. She was pleased to behold this proof of Lesbia's power over the heart of man. So would she conquer the man foredoomed to be her husband when the coming time should bring them together. But agreeable as the fact of this first conquest might be, as an evidence of Lesbia's supremacy among women, the situation was not without its peril; and Lady Maulevrier felt that she could no longer defer the duty of warning her granddaughter. She had wished, if possible, to treat the thing lightly to the very last, so that Lesbia should never know there had been danger. She had told her, a few days ago, that those drives, and walks with the two young men were undignified, even although guarded by the Fräulein's substantial presence.

'You are making yourself too much a companion to Maulevrier and his friend,' said the dowager. 'If you do not take care you will grow like Mary.'

'I would do anything in the world to avoid _that_,' replied Lesbia. 'Our walks and drives have been very pleasant. Mr. Hammond is extremely clever, and can talk about everything.'

Her colour heightened ever so little as she spoke of him, an indication duly observed by Lady Maulevrier.

'No doubt the man is clever; all adventurers are clever; and you have sense enough to see that this man is an adventurer--a mere sponge and toady of Maulevrier's.'

'There is nothing of the sponge or the toady in his manner,' protested Lady Lesbia, with a still deeper blush, the warm glow of angry feeling.

'My dear child, what do you know of such people--or of the atmosphere in which they are generated? The sponge and toady of to-day is not the clumsy fawning wretch you have read about in old-fashioned novels. He can flatter adroitly, and feed upon his friends, and yet maintain a show of manhood and independence. I'll wager Mr. Hammond's trip to Canada did not cost him sixpence, and that he hardly opened his purse all the time he was in Germany.'

'If my brother wants the company of a friend who is much poorer than himself, he must pay for it,' argued Lesbia. 'I think Maulevrier is lucky to have such a companion as Mr. Hammond.'

Yet, even while she so argued, Lady Lesbia felt in some manner humiliated by the idea that this man who so palpably worshipped her was too poor to pay his own travelling expenses.

Poets and philosophers may say what they will about the grandeur of plain living and high thinking; but a young woman thinks better of the plain liver who is not compelled to plainness by want of cash. The idea of narrow means, of dependence upon the capricious generosity of a wealthy friend is not without its humiliating influence. Lesbia was barely civil to Mr. Hammond that evening when he praised her singing; and she refused to join in a four game proposed by Maulevrier, albeit she and Mr. Hammond had beaten Mary and Maulevrier the evening before, with much exultant hilarity.

Hammond had been at Fellside nearly a month, and Maulevrier was beginning to talk about a move further northward. There was a grouse moor in Argyleshire which the two young men talked about as belonging to some unnamed friend of the Earl's, which they had thought of shooting over before the grouse season was ended.

'Lord Hartfield has property in Argyleshire,' said the dowager, when they talked of these shootings. 'Do you know his estate, Mr. Hammond?'

'Hammond knows that there is such a place, I daresay,' replied Maulevrier, replying for his friend.

'But you do not know Lord Hartfield, perhaps,' said her ladyship, not arrogantly, but still in a tone which implied her conviction that John Hammond would not be hand-in-glove with earls, in Scotland or elsewhere.

'Oh, yes! I know him by sight every one in Argyleshire knows him by sight.'

'Naturally. A young man in his position must be widely known. Is he popular?'

'Fairly so.'

'His father and I were friends many years ago,' said Lady Maulevrier, with a faint sigh. 'Have you ever heard if he resembles his father?'

'I believe not. I am told he is like his mother's family.'

'Then he ought to be handsome. Lady Florence Ilmington was a famous beauty.'

They were sitting in the drawing-room after dinner, the room dimly lighted by darkly-shaded lamps, the windows wide open to the summer sky and moonlit lake. In that subdued light Lady Maulevrier looked a woman in the prime of life. The classical modelling of her features and the delicacy of her complexion were unimpaired by time, while those traces of thought and care which gave age to her face in the broad light of day were invisible at night. John Hammond contemplated that refined and placid countenance with profound admiration. He remembered how her ladyship's grandson had compared her with the Sphinx; and it seemed to him to-night, as be studied her proud and tranquil beauty, that there was indeed something of the mysterious, the unreadable in that countenance, and that beneath its heroic calm there might be the ashes of tragic passion, the traces of a life-long struggle with fate. That such a woman, so beautiful, so gifted, so well fitted to shine and govern in the great world, should have been content to live a long life of absolute seclusion in this remote valley was in itself a social mystery which must needs set an observant young man wondering. It was all very well to say that Lady Maulevrier loved a country life, that she had made Fellside her earthly Paradise, and had no desire beyond it. The fact remained that it was not in Lady Maulevrier's temperament to be satisfied with such an existence; that falcon eye was never meant to gaze for ever upon one narrow range of mountain and lake; that lip was made to speak among the great ones of the world.

Lady Maulevrier was particularly gracious to her grandson's friend this evening. Maulevrier spoke so decisively about a speedy migration northward, seemed so inclined to regret the time wasted since the twelfth of the month, that she thought the danger was past, and she could afford to be civil. She really liked the young man, had no doubt in her own mind that he was a gentleman in the highest and broadest sense of the word, but not in the sense which made him an eligible husband for either of her granddaughters.

Lesbia was in a pensive mood this evening. She sat in the verandah, looking dreamily at the lake, and at Fairfield yonder, a broad green slope, silvered with moonlight, and seeming to stretch far away into unfathomable distance.

If one could but take one's lover by the hand and go wandering over those mystic moonlit slopes into some new unreal world where it would not matter whether a man were rich or poor, high-born or low-born, where there should be no such things as rank and state to be won or lost! Lesbia felt to-night as if she would like to live out her life in dreamland. Reality was too hard, too much set round by difficulties and sacrifices.

While Lesbia was losing herself in that dream-world, Lady Maulevrier unbent considerably to John Hammond, and talked to him with more appearance of interest in his actual self, and in his own affairs, than she had manifested hitherto although she had been uniformly courteous.

She asked him his plans for the future--had he chosen a profession?

He told her that he had not. He meant to devote himself to literature and politics.

'Is not that rather vague?' inquired her ladyship.

'Everything is vague at first.'

'But literature now--as an amusement, no doubt, it is delightful--but as a profession--does literature ever pay?'

'There have been such cases.'

'Yes, I suppose so. Walter Scott, Gibbon, Macaulay, Froude, those made money no doubt. But there is a suspicion of hopelessness in the idea of a young man starting in life intending to earn his bread by literature. One remembers Chatterton. I should have thought that in your case the law or the church would have been better. In the latter Maulevrier might have been useful to you. He is patron of three or four livings.'

'You are too good even to think of such a thing,' said Hammond; 'but I have set my heart upon a political career. I must swim or sink in that sea.'

Lady Maulevrier looked at him with a compassionate smile Poor young man! No doubt he thought himself a genius, and that doors which had remained shut to everybody else would turn on their hinges directly he knocked at them. She was sincerely sorry for him. Young, clever, enthusiastic, and doomed to bitterest disappointment.

'You have parents, perhaps, who are ambitious for you--a mother who thinks her son a heaven-born statesman!' said her ladyship, kindly.

'Alas, no! that incentive to ambition is wanting in my case. I have neither father nor mother living.'

'That is very sad. No doubt that fact has been a bond of sympathy between you and Maulevrier?'

'I believe it has.'

'Well, I hope Providence will smile upon your path.'

'Come what may, I shall never forget the happy weeks I have spent at Fellside,' said Hammond, 'or your ladyship's gracious hospitality.'

He took up the beautiful hand, white to transparency, showing the delicate tracing of blue veins, and pressed his lips upon it in chivalrous worship of age and womanly dignity.

Lady Maulevrier smiled upon him with her calm, grave smile. She would have liked to say, 'You shall be welcome again at Fellside,' but she felt that the man was dangerous. Not while Lesbia remained single could she court his company. If Maulevrier brought him she must tolerate his presence, but she would do nothing to invite that danger.

There was no music that evening. Maulevrier and Mary were playing billiards; Fräulein Müller was sitting in her corner working at a high-art counterpane. Lesbia came in from the verandah presently, and sat on a low stool by her grandmother's arm-chair, and talked to her in soft, cooing accents, inaudible to John Hammond, who sat a little way off turning the leaves of the _Contemporary Review_: and this