Читать книгу The Rogue's March - E. W. Hornung - Страница 5

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The household at Avenue Lodge consisted at this period of Nicholas Harding, M. P., J. P. (also of Fish Street Hill, E. C., and Winwood Hall, Suffolk); his five daughters; his men-servants and maid-servants, and a certain stranger within his gates.

Nicholas Harding was fifty years of age, and a widower for the second time. He was a big, blond, jovial, loud, overbearing man, without a grey hair in his massive, reddish head, or a sign of sorrow upon his healthy, pink, domineering face. Yet private bereavement was not the only misfortune that had fallen to a lot otherwise enviable enough: since the last General Election, a little charge of flagrant bribery had found its way even to an assize court, where it had indeed broken down, but not in a fashion wholly satisfactory to the accused.

An important witness had refused to open his mouth, as some said because he was well paid by Mr. Harding to keep it shut and endure the penalty; in any event, the charge was not permitted to be withdrawn, but the action merely dismissed, to allow of a new trial of which nothing had been heard up to the present time. But a naked sword thus dangled over Nicholas Harding’s ruddy, hard head, whose true temper the situation served to prove. So far from resigning his seat, he returned to the House with a shrug and a half-smile; and in the whole matter continued to bear himself with such modest gallantry as to remove the prejudices of many who had at first sided with the enemy.

Among his own Suffolk constituents the popular sympathy had been his from the beginning; and in London itself the feeling gained ground that a judgment which neither convicted nor exonerated was a judgment to be repudiated by all fair-minded persons. Ex-Ministers said or wrote as much to Mr. Harding (who belonged to the fashionable Opposition) in as many words. Cockaded coachmen were once more directed to drive to his house. Invitations were received which were worth receiving; and thus encouraged, Mr. Harding sent out invitations in return. He had deemed it inexpedient to entertain much of late; and even now it was a very judicious selection of his friends that was bidden to quite a small dinner party on the last Wednesday in April; while his sister, Lady Starkie, was called up from Bath to play hostess for the occasion.

“On any other,” wrote her brother, “Claire would do very well. But the enemy may blaspheme the less if you are here. I want you to see Claire. She is greatly improved since you were with us last.”

“It is the enemy that hath done this thing,” replied Lady Starkie; “those wicked Radicals, how I should like to transport the whole crew! Of course I will come. Why isn’t Claire married? She must be getting on in years.”

She was not yet twenty-one. The only child of his first wife, Claire had never occupied the place of younger ones in her father’s affections; had been consistently repressed in childhood; but had since contrived to please that critic by her clever management of an enlarged establishment. Indeed, the girl had come home from school very capable and shrewd and self-possessed, with an admirable drawing-room manner, and even better qualities of which Mr. Harding would have thought less; so they were carefully hidden from his view; for Claire had also her faults, and was both secretive and politic in the home circle, as a result of that early repression and injustice. Given that cause and this effect, and some clandestine folly may be counted upon in nine cases out of ten, and Claire’s was not the tenth.

It came about at Winwood Hall, the Suffolk shooting-box where the family had spent the last three autumns. Nicholas Harding had begun there in characteristic fashion by quarrelling with the gentle, white-haired parson (who would yet be neither domineered nor overborne by an interloping Londoner), and by forbidding his daughters the church, glebe, rectory, or any communication with its inmates from that day forth. A week or two later he came full upon Claire and the rector’s idle son comparing notes in the lane; and a pretty scene ensued. Mr. Harding shook his stick at the lad, who snatched it from him and snapped it across his knee. Claire was imprisoned under lock and key for four-and-twenty hours, and young Erichsen shinned up the waterspout and sat on her window-sill while the rest were at dinner. But this and succeeding incidents never came to the ears of Nicholas Harding. And partly in revenge for the indignity to which she had been subjected, and partly by reason of those adventitious traits already touched upon, the motherless and then all but friendless Claire disobeyed and intrigued thenceforward without a qualm.

The callow pair had enough in common: the girl had suffered from a step-mother, the lad was suffering from one then. In his old age Mr. Erichsen had married a managing woman thirty years his junior; and the blackness by her embedded in Tom Erichsen’s heart had known no relief till Claire Harding lit up his life. Claire understood; she sympathised, she soothed, she softened. And though so stealthily employed, her influence was all for good. Tom put his soul in her keeping, and made a great effort to run straight at college for her sake; but was nevertheless rusticated in the spring; and was absent, penitently reading, all the autumn following, when they never met. A year later the rector was in his own churchyard, and Tom a broken-hearted lodger in the village. Mrs. Erichsen had gone her way; and Tom was going his, to India, where through her unlooked-for interest a berth had been obtained for him in a Calcutta counting-house. A hundred guineas for outfit and passage-money was his only picking from the good old man’s estate; and it was a loan.

Tom said his long good-bye to Winwood just three days after the Hardings arrived. But in those three days Claire and he made many noble vows, and parted in a storm of tears. And there ended the first chapter of their secret history.

The single page known to Nicholas Harding was a thing of the past in his mind. He never thought of it now, and for the best of reasons. He firmly believed that Claire intended to marry an entirely different person, of whom he himself most cordially approved; and it made him for the first time as cordially approve of Claire.

And Claire on a sudden divined it all, and saw (also for the first time) the false position in which she had placed herself; and yet never regretted it, but rather gloried in having the least little thing to suffer for Tom’s sake.

Now, the other man in her mind, and in Nicholas Harding’s too, was the Stranger within their Gates.

James Edward William, Sir Emilius Daintree’s son, and heir to the baronetcy and entailed estates, was a melancholy, brooding bachelor little worse than thirty years of age. Unlike Mr. Harding, however, he looked much older, with his swarthy, saturnine countenance, and the white threads in the coal-black whiskers that curled beneath his deep-set chin. His lines had fallen in very different places from those of Mr. Harding; he had spent most of his restless life abroad. His soul had been burdened with a very different temperament; he had that of a poet; and his manhood had been poisoned at the fount by one of those wretched family quarrels which redound to nobody’s credit, and of which the outside world never get the rights. It was only known that Sir Emilius and his son had not been on speaking terms for years.

Such sympathy as is felt in these matters was entirely on the side of the son. The present baronet was not a popular man. His character was eccentric, and his morals so notorious that in many quarters the quarrel was from the first considered creditable to young Daintree. When, however, after an absence of eight years, the latter came home on leave from New South Wales, where he was a magistrate and a man of some importance and more promise in the young colony; and when the old savage, his father, not only still refused a reconciliation, but publicly cut his son on every possible occasion, then—well, the indignation might have been greater had James Daintree been himself a more popular man. But the truth was, he had come home a morbid, sensitive misanthropist; and this treatment made him ten times worse. He was seldom seen by his old friends anywhere; but he happened to make a stanch new one in the person of Nicholas Harding, whose house, indeed, became the wanderer’s home.

Claire’s attitude will be readily apprehended. Daintree opened his bruised heart to her, and she considered his father the most abominable old man alive. It was at Avenue Lodge that a parcel of faded flowers arrived for Daintree, and drove him almost crazy with rage and grief. He had placed them a day or two before upon his mother’s grave. He burst into a storm of oaths and tears before the girl, who thought the worse of him for neither. Lady Daintree had died the year before; in fact it was her death that had brought the outcast home, for the reconciliation for which he pleaded in vain.

He had the sympathy of all who knew him; that of Claire was spontaneous and heartfelt and frank; but it never blinded her to Daintree’s faults, which were those of a warped, egotistical, but yet an ardent nature. She cured him of one or two. But he was a man with a weight upon his soul, and she could not cure him of that. She was not told enough. After all, too, her head and her heart were full of another. And thus she was slower to detect the new lover in the new friend than would or could have been the case in normal circumstances.

Indeed it might never have dawned upon her until he spoke, but for the calling in of Lady Starkie to lend her distinguished countenance to the first dinner-party given by Nicholas Harding after his late ordeal. Lady Starkie was a lieutenant-general’s widow, and at all events a shrewd woman of the world.

“My dear,” said she, after luncheon, “that young man never took his eyes off you once, and you never once looked him in the face. You are in love at last!—you both are!”

“Aunt Emily!” cried Claire, aghast but scarlet.

“Hoity-toity!” exclaimed the old lady; “nothing escapesme. My dear, you will do very well; a very interesting face and an admirable family,malgréthat atrocious Sir Emilius, who won’t live for ever. No, no, he can’t keep that pace up much longer at his age; and then every mortal thing will be this young man’s and yours!”

“But —aunt! indeed you are mistaken. I—I don’t love him one atom! Such a thing has never entered my head.”

“Then may I ask what kept you awake all night?” was the bland inquiry. “My dear, you have a tell-tale face! I remarked it instantly: you cannot have slept a wink till morning!”

It was true; she had not; but then she had seen Tom Erichsen near Hyde Park Corner when she pictured him in Calcutta. And that was not all. She had pressed him for his address, and then written him a letter which had made her feel hot or cold ever since. The glow was from conscious pride in her own full, free, selfless love; the shiver from a new-born doubt of his, begotten by haunting memories of his face. And the more Claire thought of it the less could she fathom his still being in London, and so shabby. And she had thought of it all night long.

“I had things on my mind,” she now confessed; “but Mr. Daintree wasn’t one of them.”

“Then it’s somebody else,” reflected Lady Starkie, with half-shut eyes upon the girl’s dry lips and burning cheeks. “Who is this Captain Blaydes I hear so much about?” she asked aloud.

“Another friend of papa’s.”

“Another new friend?”

“Newer than Mr. Daintree. He comes to see papa on business. But I have had him a good deal on my hands; too much, for my taste.”

“You don’t like him, then?”

“Hate him!” said the girl, with sudden vehemence, her mind for once detaching itself from Tom. “There, it’s out: I never said it to anybody else, but it’s what I feel. Last week when Mr. Daintree wasn’t with us, Captain Blaydes was, and had his room. Aunt Emily, I want you to know about him; he was a horrid guest— insolent to the servants—forward with me—and more presuming with papa than any man I have ever seen. Yet papa vowed he was the best of fellows—and looked miserable all the week! And I was told to be civil to him or to leave the house myself. I want to know what it all means: no good, I’ll be bound. What should you say, Aunt Emily? We have had trouble enough lately; heaven knows, we want no more. And yet I had the strongest instinct about this man— that he was here for no good!”

“He is not coming to-night, I hope?”

“Yes, he is; but luckily not until after dinner. He could not get here in time. The Bury St. Edmunds coach—”

“He is coming from there!” cried Lady Starkie. “Then, my dear, you may be sure he has had some hand in that wretched election business! It is not over yet, Claire; you must endure such people until it is. But why have him to-night?”

“You may well ask! Papa expects him.”

“Well, it is a pity. Indeed, in my opinion, this dinner-party is a little premature— considering everything. However, let us only make it a success!”