CHAPTER II.

LADY BAKER.

It was hardly one o’clock when they beheld the terraced gardens of Mardenholme; gardens that were worth a day’s journey to see; a thoroughly Italian picture, set in a thoroughly English landscape; marble balustrades surmounting banks of flowers; tall spire-shaped conifers ranged at intervals, tier above tier; marble steps and marble basins, in every direction; and below this show-garden, sloping down to the river, a lawn of softest verdure, bordered by vast shrubberies, that to the stranger seemed pathless, yet where a fallen leaf could hardly have been found, so exquisite was the order of the grounds.

Geoffrey tied his boat to the lower branch of a mighty willow which dipped its green tresses in the stream, leaped out and landed his cousins as coolly as if he had arrived at an hotel. No mortal was to be seen for the first moment, but Jessie’s sharp eyes beheld a white shirt-sleeve gleaming athwart a group of magnolias.

‘There’s a gardener over there,’ she said: ‘we’d better ask him if Lady Baker is in the grounds.’

They made for the gardener, who, with the slow and philosophic air of a man whose wages are not dependent on the amount of his labour, was decapitating daisies that had been impertinent enough to lift their vulgar heads in this patrician domain. This hireling informed them that he had seen her ladyship somewheres about not ten minutes agone. She was in the Chaney temple, perhaps, and he volunteered to show them the way.

‘You needn’t trouble yourself,’ said Jessie. ‘I know the way.’

‘What does he mean by the Chaney temple?’ asked Geoffrey, as they departed.

‘It is a garden-house Lady Baker has had sent over from China,’ answered Belle. ‘I know she’s fond of sitting there.’

They entered a darksome alley in the shrubbery, which wound along the river-bank some little way, opening into a kind of wilderness; a very tame wilderness, inhabited by water-fowl of various tribes, which stretched out their necks and screamed vindictively at the intruders. Here on the brink of the river was the garden-house, an edifice of bamboo and lattice-work, adorned with bells, very much open to all the winds of heaven, but a pleasant shelter on a sultry day in August. When the breeze shook them, the numerous bells rang ever so faintly, and the sound woke echoes on the farther bank of the stream.

Lady Baker was reclining in a bamboo-chair, reading, with a young lady and gentleman, and a Japanese pug in attendance upon her.

‘Dear Lady Baker,’ cried Belle, anxious to make the best of her unceremonious approach, ‘I hope you won’t think it very dreadful of us to come into the gardens this way like burglars; but my cousin Geoffrey was so anxious to be presented to you, that he insisted on rowing us here this morning.’

‘I do think it extremely dreadful,’ replied the lady with a pleasant laugh. ‘And so this is the cousin of whom I have heard so much. Welcome to Mardenholme, Mr. Hossack. We ought to have known each other long before this, since we are such near neighbours.’

‘I have the honour to possess a small estate not far from your ladyship’s,’ answered Geoffrey; ‘but, being hitherto unacquainted with the chief attraction of the neighbourhood in your person, I have ignorantly given a lease of my place to a retired sugar-broker.’

‘That’s a pity, for I think we should have been good neighbours. Mr. Hossack, Mrs. Wimple; Mr. Wimple, Mr. Hossack,’ murmured Lady Baker in a parenthesis; at which introduction the young lady and the young gentleman, newly married, and indifferent to the external world, honoured Geoffrey with distant bows, and immediately withdrew to a trellised balcony overhanging the river, to gaze upon that limpid stream, or, in Geoffrey’s modern vocabulary, ‘to spoon.’ ‘You are a wonderful traveller, I understand,’ continued her ladyship.

‘Hardly, in the modern sense of the word,’ said Geoffrey, with becoming modesty. ‘I have hunted the bighorn on the Rocky Mountains, and shot grouse in Norway; but I have neither discovered the source of a river, nor found an unknown waterfall; in short, as a traveller, I am a very insignificant individual. But as a rule I keep moving, locomotion being about the only employment open to a man to whom Providence has denied either talent or ambition.’

‘You are at any rate more modest than the generality of lions, Mr. Hossack,’ Lady Baker replied graciously.

She was a little woman, sallow and thin, with a face which in any one less than the mistress of Mardenholme would have been insignificant. But she had fine eyes and teeth, and dressed with the exquisite taste of a woman who studied the fitness of things and not the fashion-book. She had a manner that was at once stately and caressing, and could confer a favour with the air of a princess of the blood royal. She had spent all her life in society, and, except when she slept, knew not what it was to be alone. She could have had but scanty leisure for reading, yet she knew, or seemed to know, everything that society knew. Her detractors declared that she never read anything but the newspapers, and thus, by a zealous study of the _Times_ and the critical journals, kept herself far in advance of those stupid people who wade through books. She skimmed the cream of other people’s knowledge, shrugged her shoulders in mild depreciation of books she had never read, and wore the newest shades of opinion as she wore the newest colours. For the rest, she was of an uncertain age, had been in society for about a quarter of a century, and looked five-and-thirty. Her light-brown hair, which she wore with almost classic simplicity, as yet revealed no tell-tale streak of silver. Perhaps, like Mr. Mivers in _Kenelm Chillingly_, Lady Baker had begun her wig early.

Sir Horatio Veering Baker, the husband of this distinguished personage, was rather an appanage of her state than an entity. She produced him on ceremonial occasions, just as her butler produced the parcel-gilt tankards and gigantic rosewater salvers on the buffet; and at other times he retired, like the moon on those dark nights when earth knows not her gentle splendour. He was a mild-faced old man, who devoted his days to various ologies, in which no one but himself and his old servant seemed to take the faintest interest—and the servant only pretended. He inhabited, for the most part, a distant wing of the mansion, where he had a vast area of glass cases for the display of those specimens which illustrated his ologies, and represented the labour of his life. Sometimes, but not always, he appeared at the bottom of his dinner table; and when, among her ladyship’s guests, a scientific man perchance appeared, Sir Horatio did him homage, and carried him off after dinner for an inspection of the specimens. Lady Baker was amiably tolerant of her husband’s hobbies. She received him with unvarying graciousness when he hobbled into her drawing-room in his dress-coat and antique tie, looking hardly less antediluvian than the petrified jawbone of a megatherium, which was one of the gems in his collection; and she was politely solicitous for his well-being when he pronounced himself ‘a little fagged,’ and preferred to dine in his study.

Geoffrey soon found himself on the friendliest terms with the mistress of Mardenholme. Lady Baker liked good-looking young men who had no unpleasant consciousness of their good looks, and liked the modern easy manner of youth, provided the ease never degenerated into insolence. She took Geoffrey under her wing immediately, walked nearly a mile with him under the midday sun, protected by a huge, white silk umbrella, to show him the lions of Mardenholme; that profound hypocrite, Mr. Hossack, affecting an ardent admiration of ferneries and flower beds, in the hope that this perambulatory exhibition might presently procure him the opportunity for which his soul languished.

‘Let me once find myself alone with this nice old party,’ he said to himself, ‘and I won’t let the chance slip. She shall tell me all she knows about the villain who wronged Janet Davoren.’

To his infinite vexation, however, his cousins, who worshipped the mistress of Mardenholme, followed close upon her footsteps throughout the exposition, went into raptures with every novelty among the ferny tribes, and made themselves altogether a nuisance. Geoffrey was beginning to struggle with dreary yawns when the Mardenholme luncheon gong relieved the situation.

‘And now that I’ve shown you my latest acquisition, let us go to luncheon,’ said Lady Baker, who was never happier than when feeding a new acquaintance. In fact, she liked her friends very much as she liked her orchids and ferns—for the sake of their novelty.

Nobody ever refused an invitation from Lady Baker. It was almost the same thing as a royal command. Jessie and Belle murmured something about ‘papa,’ and the voice of duty which called them back to Hillersdon. But Lady Baker waived the objection with that regal air of hers, which implied that any one else’s inconvenience was a question of smallest moment when her pleasure was at stake.

‘I should be positively unhappy if you went away,’ she said; ‘I have only that Mr. and Mrs. Wimple, whom you just now saw in the garden house. This is their first visit since their honeymoon, and their exhibition of mutual affection is almost unendurable. But as it is a match of my own making I am obliged to tolerate the infliction. They are my only visitors until to-morrow. So if you don’t stop, I shall be bored to death between this and dinner. I actually caught that absurd child, Florence Wimple, in the very act of spelling “YOU DARLING” in the deaf-and-dumb alphabet to that simpleton of a husband of hers across the breakfast table this morning.’

Moved by this melancholy picture, Jessie and Belle consented to remain. Geoffrey had meant to stay from the outset. Indeed, he had landed on the greensward of Mardenholme determined to attain his object before he left.