CHAPTER XVII.

MASTER CHARLES.

There was a whispered colloquy outside the door, succeeded by the entrance of a frank, open-faced young fellow, looking very comely in his green coat, and yet retaining a comical likeness to Miss Kingscote.

The gentleman was coming up freely to Lady Bell, prepared to regard her as an acquisition, in the profits of which he was entitled to a share.

He was not going to address her with the formal “I have the honour,” or “Your servant,” but with a friendly jocular “Good morning to you, Miss Barlowe, now that you have come to hand. Don’t let my sister and you put out your bright eyes with fine stitching,” when he, too, was induced to reverse the usual order of greeting to a companion, though making his amendment on more intelligent principles than those which had influenced Miss Kingscote.

Instead of speaking at all, he gave Lady Bell an amazed confused bow in return for her perfectly calm curtsey, and turned aside muttering to himself, “By George, she is a highflyer, and no mistake, she must be a tragedy queen herself.”

Miss Kingscote was senselessly elated by the manner in which her companion struck Master Charles. “Don’t you go for to contradict me again,” said his sister, with a meaning chuckle, shaking her fat finger at the lad; “mum’s the word, but we’ve all heard tell of pearls before swine.”

Lady Bell, in spite of her former heroics, was rather pleased to see in the dire dearth of sympathy which threatened to prevail in other quarters at Nutfield, that Master Charles, as his sister generally styled him, even in addressing him with simple honour and doting fondness, was personable and companionable.

But he was no such likely mate for Lady Bell, even had she been free, that she should be carried off her feet by his homespun attractions. These had not been cultivated beyond the point to which their natural manliness and intelligence had been brought by the parson of the parish, who had volunteered to act as young Kingscote of Nutfield’s governor, and by the country town’s fencing and dancing master, who had undertaken to convey to the young fellow a version of the deportment and manners of a gentleman. But Lady Bell had known fine gentlemen.

Lady Bell had been determined on keeping Master Charles at a distance. She owed it to the sedateness with which she was bound to behave, and to her knowledge of the real difference of their rank. So she began by being very quiet and reserved, and by resisting the faint and finally bashful advances of the master of the house.

But circumstances were tremendously against Lady Bell.

Nutfield was a country house where winter was approaching. Miss Kingscote was a garrulous rustic, from whom neither edification nor enlivenment, except of one kind, could be expected.

Master Charles was a gentleman, although of the plainer sort, prepossessing in look and speech, not without parts, information, and spirit, of an age not exceeding twenty-two.

Lady Bell was guileless, ingenuous as far as she dared to be ingenuous, naturally animated and enterprising, trained in a school of refinement and finish, and delicately handsome.

Lady Bell was unable to gainsay Master Charles in making friends with him, so far as allowing him to be on cordial terms with her. Soon he brought her trophies from the game preserves and hunting field. He consulted her on his purchases in the little town.

“Look here, Miss Barlowe,” he would say, “my tailor tells me this brocade, of which I have a pattern for a waistcoat, was brought right from France on an order of Sir Peregrine Cust’s. Do you affect it? lend me your taste.”

He told her of his engagements, and gave her a full account of his sayings and doings, and those of his friends. “I was at Colonel Barnard’s last night,” he would mention. “We had games, and the ladies proposed riddles. I wish my plaguey memory had retained them for the benefit of Deb and you, Miss Barlowe. What do you think? Miss Polly, the colonel’s daughter, stood up and danced a jig first-rate with her brother the sailor.”

He confessed that he had been longing desperately for his commission, but he was not so impatient now that Miss Barlowe had kindly consented to bear his sister company. They formed quite a little colony at home, who could play cribbage, piquet, or Pope Joan, of an evening, and be independent of the great world without—not that he was not going where glory waited him, that he did not mean to earn his right to sit down like an old man by his modest fire-side.

Lady Bell, though she had sufficient caution to keep her narratives within bounds, repaid Master Charles’s confidences by fine stories out of her short life with the players, out of the plays she had seen acted, and the few books which she had read.

She took his advice seriously on the feather trimmings which she was manufacturing for Miss Kingscote’s furbelows, whether the turkeys’ feathers did not “come in vastly pretty as a silver grey after the golden brown of the pheasants’ feathers?”

With a little pressing she sang to him, as an appropriate echo of his military aspirations, “Over the hills and far away;” she suffered him to escort her—to be sure Miss Kingscote was generally with her—when he overtook her on these country roads, which, in the shortening winter days, were not only barely surmountable in their mud and mire, but which were frequently forbidden to unattended women in the end of the last century.

In short, Master Charles and Miss Barlowe were gliding fast into an innocent, inconsiderate, highly perilous intimacy, which was almost inevitable between the pair shut up together and shut out from the world.

Young men were scarce about Lumley, and this young man was popular among the neighbours who had rescued him. Master Charles was freely welcome, where Miss Kingscote was merely tolerated and laughed at, in most of the country houses, and in the best town houses of Lumley. He could go a-visiting, if he chose, four evenings out of the seven.

Naturally it was otherwise with Miss Kingscote’s companion.

But all at once Lady Bell had her eyes opened to the precipice on the edge of which she was unwarily walking.

In the first place Miss Kingscote’s manner changed. Her boisterous good humour and rough hospitality gave way to a halting glumness and an absolute rudeness. Her easiness grew uneasy, and testified itself in a kind of alarmed, reproachful indulgence to the follies of mankind, as distinct from, and preyed upon by, those of womankind.

There were “creeturs,” Miss Kingscote declared emphatically, who stole into honourable houses and plotted against their credit. Miss Kingscote seemed to become morbidly concerned with these “creeturs,” vain peacocks, serpents in disguise, who aimed at occupying the seats of their betters, but would never reach those seats, instead would “sup” sorrow and disgrace, as the just punishment of their scandalous lightness of head and unwarrantable ambition.

“But you would never be such a pagan, Miss,” Miss Kingscote would protest relentingly, not without a warning in the relenting, “you’ve been taken in and had the warmest corner here, as if you had been my sister, indeed—though, Lud! no sister of mine—a Kingscote of Nutfield, would have gone into service, rather starve, or live on the hards, as I have lived many and many’s the day.”

“I don’t know what you mean, Miss Kingscote,” Lady Bell defended herself, too scornful in her surprise to be even sorely displeased. “I think the best of us may go into service, and that the only truly demeaning service is what we cannot honestly perform. Yes, you have been very kind to me, but I do not know what you mean.”

“You wouldn’t be so horn mad,” persisted Miss Kingscote, looking Lady Bell hard in the face, “as to force me to give you the back of the door, Miss Barlowe, for misbehaviour, with the small chance it would give of a rise in the world? As for them boobies of men,” added Miss Kingscote, “they are good for nought save to breed strife. They’re as blind as bats to their own goods, and as wild as tigerses when they’re crossed for their goods, and after their toys is broke, ‘trample these toys under foot’ is the order of the day.”

“You’re very hard on the men,” said Lady Bell, “but I have nothing to do to defend them.”

“In course, Master Charles is among the best of his sort,” explained Miss Kingscote, striving to speak loftily in her turn. “He’ll think better on it. He’ll come out at the head of the cart yet, and conduct himself conformable, not disappointing none of his friends and well-wishers. He’ll cut a dash, and bring home a flag or two, or a gun, like his forefathers did—his and mines. He’ll wait till then and mate with his equal.”

“With all my heart, Miss Kingscote,” replied Lady Bell, and then she remonstrated, “but good gracious! why should I have to come out at the foot of the cart because he is to leap from the head?”

Miss Kingscote had no answer to that indignant demand save a sulky “You know best, miss; it lies with you. I reckon your lot will be of your own choosing.”

Lady Bell could have laughed bitterly; she could have packed up the small wardrobe which she had gathered before her purse was stolen, and seen her last of Nutfield and the Kingscotes.

But here was no laughing matter, and although it had not come to this that Lady Bell Trevor, the forlorn young wife of Trevor of Trevor Court, had entered into a rivalry, which would have been tenfold base on her part, with Miss Polly Barnard and Miss Ironside, the daughters of the mayor of Lumley, for the favour of so simple a country gentleman, still she could ill dispense with the shelter of that gentleman’s roof and the countenance of his sister.

Neither was Lady Bell’s conscience quite clear. Her prudence—the slender prudence of sixteen—had slept, and the result threatened to be altogether disastrous.

Master Charles was not satisfied with the amount of friendship which Lady Bell had vouchsafed to him. He was pressing for more. His sister’s clumsy opposition, which rendered him surly to her, only made him more eager, open, and ostentatious in his approaches.

Lady Bell realised with a throb of apprehension that this task of keeping Master Charles in order, was by no means the easy task which she had conceitedly conceived beforehand, and set for herself without doubt or fear.

She began to tremble at Master Charles’s youthful keenness, confidence, and daring. He snatched her hand and kissed it before Miss Kingscote’s face. He stole Miss Barlowe’s handkerchief behind Miss Kingscote’s back and kept it. Trifles light as air these liberties were, but Lady Bell could have cried over them with shame and vexation.

She commenced to experience the weakness of wrong-doing in trying to summon up her dignity to repulse the assailant. Though desertion of duty and deceit in a certain measure, were not called by such hard names in Lady Bell’s day, and though those practices had been resorted to by her, half in ignorance, yet she fell back on accusing herself, and was not without a horrified intuition that the tendency of her conduct was to act like a canker in corroding her moral nature.