Читать книгу Patsy - S. R. Crockett - Страница 14

Table of Contents

In spite of her black, close-clustering hair Patsy had the dark blue eyes of her Uncle Julian. Young men and older ones also (who ought to have known better) were in the habit of calling them violet when they walked with Patsy in the twilight, when many unforeseen things happen.

Then Patsy knew exactly what to think. For her Uncle Julian had told her that when a man is in love, he becomes colour blind. When asked how he knew, Julian said that once on a time he had friends who used to confide their love affairs to him. But he smiled as he said it—the believe-as-much-of-that-as-you-like smile which was Patsy's own, and was her heritage from a less grave race than the Ferrises of Cairn Ferris.

Julian had the same smile when he condemned the Free Trade as an interference with the financial policy of King George, and at the same time drew a jug from a jar of "special" Hollands, or from such an anker of cognac as could not be found elsewhere in Scotland. He had found both, as it were dropped from heaven, in a corner of his stable, but Tam Eident, whom he had carefully catechized, knew nothing about the matter. He had, he averred, been asleep at the time in his bed in the stable-loft.

Doubtless the Free Traders thought they were paying for some complaisance on the part of the master of Abbey Burnfoot. But his light burned steadily up in his study window. He had never looked down on the flitting torches, the turmoil of the loading, the black figures crossing and recrossing the glimmering strips of sand, the clinking of shod feet on the banks of pebble, the jingling of the chains of the pack saddles. He had been wisely deaf and had carried his lamp upstairs to the little turret chamber, where he chose to sleep on wild nights, that he might the better hear the wind swirl about him, the wind thresh and the sea roar and churn on the beaches and snore in the spouting-crags of the Burnfoot.

So on nights when strange noises came from without, and the wild birds keckled with a sound that might be mistaken for the neighing of horses, Julian Wemyss betook himself to his strong tower, and, locking the door at the top of the stone staircase, went peacefully to sleep, till the morrow showed up wide wet sands, whipped by the wind, many tracks of horses among the dunes, and, dipping far down the channel towards St. Bees, the top-sails of a schooner, which might be the much-sought-for Good Intent, or, again, might not.

Julian Wemyss was not so old as you might expect from a man so learned and so apart from the world. Various reasons had been given for his retirement to this lonely spot when, during the truce, an appointment as ambassador extraordinary to Paris was within his grasp. He had acquitted himself highly on several "missions" already, and there was no doubt that Vienna was only a step to a permanency in Paris, so soon as the war should cease. But suddenly Julian Wemyss resigned all his appointments into the King's hands, and it was whispered that he had done so on account of a lady so highly placed that even to name her was something like high treason. This was already years ago and even the memory of it had grown dim.

Now, Julian Wemyss might be somewhere near fifty years of age, but did not look a day more than forty, and with certain lights on his face and that kindly smile of his, wise and tolerant, he looked younger still.

He was erect and slender, not very tall beside Adam, his brother-in-law, but moving with a light, easy carriage something between that of an athlete and a favourite of drawing-rooms.

He had the noticeable dark blue eyes that twinkled merrily, yet with something gloomy in their darkness, as of hyacinths in a woodland glade, drifting and smoky, like the kind of smoke that comes from weed-burning or a peat-fire lit on a still day.

His niece, who had heard from Jean Garland some of the talk of the country, for long dared not ask her uncle point-blank if it were true about the princess, but she showed such continual curiosity about his love affairs, that he would keep her waiting while he made an entry in his diary, or other book of written notes, and then declare solemnly that the only girl he had ever loved was named Patsy, and was a thankless brat, unworthy of the care and affection of the best of uncles.

"Nonsense," his niece would cry, happy, however, all the same to have him say so.

"A girl named Patsy," he would continue, "who was put into my arms an hour old to take what care I could of, her father being ill-suited for the task! I am the only relative she has on her mother's side, and Adam Ferris is equally solitary on the other. So we must take good care of the minx, Adam and I. She is all we have, little as she deserves that we should waste a thought on her—though she threatens to run away with the first gipsy that comes to the yett, as did the Countess of Cassillis in the ballad."

"My father has been telling tales—oh, shame of him!" cried Patsy, reddening. "I said that I would run away with you, if you were not my uncle, but then I did not know about—"

She stopped suddenly. Her tongue had betrayed her.

"About what? Out with it," said Julian.

"About the princess!" Patsy answered, her eyes in his.

"Who has been listening to gossip now?" said Julian Wemyss.

"I—I," cried Patsy, "and I would give all I have to know what is true and what is clatter of the country."

"There is little to hide," said Julian quietly, looking past his niece out of the windows giving on the sea; "but that little is not my own to tell. If some day I am at liberty to speak, I promise that little Patsy Ferris shall be the first to hear."

Then he patted her head reproachfully. "Little Curiosity," he said with tenderness, "it is not good for girls to be told everything. Old fellows like me ought to know, so as to keep their wards out of mischief. The world is a strange and dangerous place, full of traps and quicksands, and for this reason see that you always come to me with your troubles. Do not bother Adam Ferris with them. He has never ventured beyond the Plainstones of Dumfries on a cattle-fair day. Besides many women have told me their sorrows."

"Yes," promised Patsy. "I don't know about princesses, but I do know that many girls must have loved you, Uncle Julian, for that is the reason you are so sweet to me now!"

Julian's chief ally in the county was Miss Aline Minto of Balmacminto, who lived at Ladykirk. She was wealthy, but had been so shy of men that she had escaped numberless wooers, sorely enamoured of the Balmacminto estates, and now at the age of forty-five showed the prettiest fringes of white curls in the world, a complexion of seventeen, and something so trustful and rare in the way of brown eyes that Raeburn, at the height of his fame, had painted her for the mere love of winsomeness in growing old.

She knew Julian's reputation and at first had kept out of his way. But when once she met him, the two had become comrades on the spot. Miss Aline saw that this man had no designs either upon her or upon the estates. A kindly aloofness from all such mean projects, an ease and grace that spoke of worlds quite unrealized by Miss Aline, somehow urged her to confide in him. In a month he had become indispensable. Miss Aline asked his advice and called upon Julian Wemyss for aid in all circumstances.

He found her a new factor, carrying on the duties till the new young man (from his own solicitor's office) was installed. He waited with Miss Aline the portentous visit of Sir Bunny Bunny, Bart., of Crawhall. He came to demand the honour of her hand for his clodhopping son, George Bunny Bunny, who hitherto had only distinguished himself by shooting a keeper in the leg, by frightening village children gathering violets and daisies, and by going to the wars with a troop of horse raised in the neighbourhood, only to be sent back again for incompetence. He had, since then, been the chief support of the press-gang in the neighbourhood, and, if he had not been so much despised, might have been hated. But he had enough sense to restrain from active interference with the Free Traders, for, owing to a personal dislike for violence in any form which might endanger his skin, he kept clear of press-gang scrimmages, confining himself to assisting Superintendent McClure with such information as the Easterhall coast-line afforded.

The baronet himself was a keen-eyed, long-nosed old gentleman, with many times the spirit of his son. He had been accustomed all his life to getting his own way, except with his wife. Even at Castle Raincy he had known how to cow the gentle mother of Louis Raincy, though something dangerous in the boy's eye had led him to let Louis alone.

"The spark of mad Raincy blood is in the whelp," he confided to his friends; "the same his grandfather has. They can look positively murderous sometimes."

Sir Bunny was taken aback to find Julian waiting for him in Miss Aline's white and gold drawing-room at Ladykirk.

"Am I, then, to congratulate you?" he said to Julian Wemyss, with false good nature.

"You are," said Julian calmly, "upon the friendship and trust of the best woman in the world. Anything else I should consider impertinence and know how to resent as such!"

"I desire to see Miss Aline," said Sir Bunny, to cut short a conversation which might easily become unpleasant.

"Certainly," said Julian carelessly, as if he were saying the lightest of nothings; "but I think you will find that I could have answered you quite as well."

"How so?" said the baronet, glowering at him, his fingers twitching to take this courtly, easy-spoken man by the throat.

"Because you come to propose your son, Mr. George, for the honour of the hand of Miss Aline Minto. Miss Aline can say 'No' for herself. But I think you had better not trouble her and content yourself with the indication I give you."

"And what is that?"

"That Miss Aline prefers to remain as she is!"

The baronet, however, insisted on a personal answer. Miss Aline came in and stood shyly while Sir Bunny pointed out the advantages of his proposal—the estates joined, the parish under control, and the family name changed by poll deed to Minto-Bunny-Bunny.

"I am obliged for your thinking of me," said Miss Aline sweetly, "but for the present I have no intention of marrying."

"I warn you," said Sir Bunny Bunny, "that by continuing to act as you are doing, you are exposing yourself to misconstruction—"

Julian Wemyss, who had been looking out of the window, turned suddenly and caught his eye.

Old Sir Bunny was no coward, but he shrank from the look of Julian Wemyss as if it had been a knife at his breast.

"I mean," he said, "that Miss Aline, gracious and youthful as she is, ought to remember that youth does not last for ever!"

He thought he had turned the matter off rather neatly, and was surprised when Julian merely shrugged his shoulders and turned again to the window. Presently Sir Bunny Bunny made his bow and departed, cursing the interference of Julian Wemyss in what had long been the desire of his heart, the union of the Bunny Bunny properties with those of Balmacminto. He had thought about it so long that it had become to his mind an accomplished fact. Indeed, he had only been waiting for his loutish son George to finish his wild-oat sowing before communicating the news of her good fortune to Miss Aline.

He was still more astonished on the way home from Ladykirk. An officer, riding, checked at his approach, and, with a sketched salute, reined his steed long enough to ask, "Do you know where Mr. Julian Wemyss is to be found? He is to go home immediately. His Royal Highness the Duke is at Abbey Burnfoot!"

"What duke?" the baronet fairly gasped.

"The Duke of Lyonesse, of course, on his way from Ireland," said the officer, "he was junior attaché to Mr. Wemyss at Vienna!"

"Good God!" said the baronet, "I wonder if Wemyss will bring him to Bunny House."

And he offered to ride with the officer to where Julian might be found. The adjutant took one look at the plethoric proportions of the baronet's mount, and answered that he was in a hurry. A simple indication would be enough for him. Whereupon, with some reluctance, Sir Bunny pointed to the chimneys of Ladykirk quietly reeking through the trees, and with a hasty lift of his reins the officer rode on, leaving the baronet staring after him, wondering whether he ought to tell his wife, or if he should leave her to find out for herself.

His brain wheeled. For Julian Wemyss, whom none of them, except Miss Aline, had chosen to know, was receiving at his house, hitherto the eyesore and scandal of the neighbourhood, a Prince of the blood Royal. After all, there must have been something in that talk of great ladies heartbroken because of this Julian Wemyss, in whom the county saw nothing, and in whose ambassadorship they had refused to believe, even though his resignation of it so unexpectedly had been commented upon in the Edinburgh Magazine, which was taken in by Sir Bunny and passed round afterwards from house to house.

What could so great a man find to do there? In a distant and disdainful fashion Sir Bunny knew Abbey Burnfoot. It was not even a mansion—merely a new-fangled sort of cottage at the best—built in Italian fashion, they said, but after all, only two score yards of garden, with a narrow rim of links overgrown with sea pink and ground holly. It was stuck ridiculously in between the white sands and the pour of the Abbey Burn—no drives or pleasances, no cropped hedges and trim parterres—nothing, in short, which Royalty had a right to expect when visiting a real gentleman's country seat, such as he flattered himself could be found at Bunny House in the shire of Wigton.

It did not occur to Sir Bunny Bunny, with his poor little squireen's point of view, that His Royal Highness might possibly come to see, not long avenues and close cropped hedges, but his old kind chief of Constantinople and Vienna.

So he was forced to content himself with many shakings of his head, and muttering that the country was going to the dogs when princes consorted with beggars or little better, as he rode off home to Bunny House in desperate fear of what his wife Lady Bunny would say when he got there.