CHAPTER II.

ST. BEVIS’S AND SQUIRE GODWIN.

Within three months from the date of the drawing-room, Lady Lucie Penruddock was dead and buried. Her dowager’s allowance had lapsed to the Squire Penruddock of the day. The sale of the furniture in her lodging had done little more than pay the expenses of its late owner’s funeral. Lady Bell Etheredge, the one orphan child of an earl who had so squandered his estate in his lifetime, that it seemed rather proper and convenient that his title had died with him, was left destitute. Her sole inheritance consisted of her suit of mourning, with her other suits, and a little sum of pocket-money, sufficient to carry her down to Warwickshire to the keeping of her mother’s unmarried brother and sister, Squire Godwin and Mrs. Die Godwin, of St. Bevis’s.

The journey was made by posting under the escort of a maid and a man, appointed to see Lady Bell safe, by some friend of Lady Lucie’s, who took so much interest in the girl, for her grand-aunt’s sake. It was travelling away from the civilised world to Lady Bell, and it was travelling which lasted for several days, and was half-killing in the mingled grief and fatigue that attended on it.

Lady Bell reached St. Bevis’s early on a dark, wet October evening. For so young a girl, she was sunk in depression and desolation; since she had bidden farewell to all she had known and loved. She had never seen her mother’s kindred, for there had been a quarrel between them and her father soon after his marriage, while the particulars which Lady Lucie had let fall from time to time, that seemed to make little impression then, but were painfully present to Lady Bell’s mind now, were not reassuring.

Lady Bell had tried for the last half-hour to catch a glimpse of the country round St. Bevis’s through the steaming chaise windows. The fact was, that all the country was new to her, except what, in her ignorance, she had called country when she had gone out of town for a day’s pleasure to Chelsea, or Richmond, or Greenwich. But the most ardent admirer of the country, pure and simple, will admit that the close of a dismal day in the fall of the year, when the fields are bare, and the woods half stripped, is hardly a propitious season for a novice making her first acquaintance with the country, even though she be not turning her back on the delights of youth, though the country inns at which she has lain have not been comfortless, though the roads are not quagmires, and though her nerves are not shaken with fears of highwaymen.

“Lud, how horrid lonesome it do be here,” exclaimed the maid who sat inside with Lady Bell, while the man sat outside with the driver. “We shall see a man hanging in chains at the next cross roads, I come bound. It would give me the dumps in no time to be kept down here. However do country bumpkins and their sweethearts make shift to exist in such a hole? In course, it is quite different with the gentlefolks, who can have their country houses full of company.” The woman corrected herself, remembering, in time, Lady Bell’s circumstances.

Lady Bell could not find fault, for she caught herself echoing the reflection in her own style as she pressed her white face against the glass, “What can life be like here without a court, or assemblies, or drums, or even shops—and we have not passed a waggon or pack-horses since we left the great road.”

At last the driver proceeded to draw up his horses, mud and mire to the fetlocks. There before Lady Bell rose a portion of a pillared façade, belonging to a great house that had never been completely built, and of which the fragments were only dimly illuminated by the light from within, confined to a few windows, and by a lamp swinging over the entrance-door. The whole building had a cheerless and spectral air to Lady Bell. There was no want of life in it, however, such as it was. A troop of men, most of them in stable-boy’s jackets or country frocks, one or two in tarnished livery, rushed out at the sound of wheels to hail the chaise, and shout for news before the travellers had time to alight. “Any word of the Foxlow races, driver, before you started?” “Were Nimble Dick’s dying speech and confession come out?”

“Shut your pipes, you rude rascals; it is the young lady, the squire’s niece,” protested a more civilised voice than those of the others; while a bloated, pursy man in slovenly black, who might be either butler or chaplain to Squire Godwin, stepped forward, opened the door, and helped the cramped, shivering girl out, amidst a slight cessation of the rough clamour. “Your servant, Lady Bell Etheredge; follow me.”

He conducted her into a dreary unfurnished hall on a vast scale, paused a moment, laid a flabby finger on his forehead, scratched his head under his wig, spoke to himself, but yet as it sounded in confidence to Lady Bell. “Curse me if I know where I had better take her first. Mrs. Die is not to be seen at this hour, or it will be the worse for the person who sees her. Mrs. Kitty won’t leave Mrs. Die’s room to do the honours; I think I had better take his niece to the squire himself, though we do interrupt his game.”

They proceeded up a spacious staircase with the walls in a grimy edition of the original whitewash,—oak balustrades, but the space between filled with hempen rope, and the wide steps as innocent of the application of water as ever were the steps of stairs in any Hotel de Polignac of Paris, or Strozzi House of Florence. They traversed gusty unmatted corridors until they reached a room which bore some traces of habitableness and use.

It was a moderately sized room, panelled and hung with portraits, as Lady Bell saw when her usher threw open the door after he had knocked. It was supplied with a carpet, table, and chairs, and had a fire blazing behind the dogs. Two gentlemen were in the room, sitting at the table engaged at cards, with wax candles, bottles and glasses at their elbows. The one who faced Lady Bell as she entered was a facsimile of her conductor, except that the last was shaggier and dirtier, but not so bloated and pursy as his fellow. He looked up on the interruption, and, turning his head a little, so that his side-face could not be seen by his companion at table, winked warningly to the new-comers. The other man, whose back was to Lady Bell, wore a velvet coat and had his hair in powder. He grumbled resentfully before he looked round. “What the plague do you mean by bringing any one here at this hour, Sneyd?”

“It is your niece, Lady Bell Etheredge, squire. I thought you would like to see her at once, as Mrs. Die is not to be disturbed after supper,” answered the squire’s butler, as if he were delivering a carefully considered speech.

The squire with a little “humph!” possibly meant to be inaudible, got up and turned round. “My dear niece, I beg to welcome you to St. Bevis’s,” he said, in a voice cultivated and agreeable in spite of its slight hoarseness. He took Lady Bell by the hand, saluted her, sat down opposite to her and looked at her, giving her the opportunity of glancing with a gleam of hopefulness at him. He was a handsome, nay, an elegant man in middle life, though his face was haggard with hard living and devouring anxiety. Notwithstanding the evident dilapidation of his house and the disorder of his household, his dress was costly and fashionable,—in every particular that of a well-endowed gentleman somewhat foppish for his years. His spotless ruffles were of Mechlin, the ring on his finger was worth many diamonds, and as it was a delicately cut antique, it required the taste of a scholarly fine gentleman to appreciate it.

Lady Bell experienced a feeling of relief. In Mr. Godwin’s presence she was restored to the element in which she had been reared. From her first dismal glimpse of her future home she did not know what churlish boor she had expected her uncle to be.

Unfortunately, that feeling of relief came too late to be of service to Lady Bell. If she had known it, her first interview with her uncle had been critical, and one moment had rendered it a failure. He was a man liable to excessive partialities or aversions where women were concerned. Had Lady Bell caught his fancy at first, and struck him as having the making of a charming young woman, though he might have borne a grudge at her father’s memory and been annoyed at her becoming dependent on him, he might also have felt pride in her, and been as kind an uncle as circumstances and character would have permitted. He might have gone so far as to make a pet of her, and thus have had a strange thread of gentleness introduced into the web of his life. How far the result would have been to Lady Bell’s advantage is a different matter.

As it was, Squire Godwin saw Lady Bell first in her tumbled habit and bent hat, her face blue with cold, her eyes red with crying, her mouth relaxed with fasting, Lady Lucie’s excellent lessons as to holding herself up, walking and sitting, for the moment forgotten. Mr. Godwin set down Lady Bell, without hesitation, as a plain, unformed, weak-minded girl, of whose breeding Lady Lucie had made a mess, whose title sounded still more incongruously than poverty alone could have made it sound, who would be nothing save “an infernal plague” to him who had plagues enough without her. And Squire Godwin was a man who rarely departed from a conclusion.

The next words which her uncle addressed to Lady Bell were spoken with courtesy in their reserve, but they fell on her spirits, now beginning to rise, like so many bolts of ice.

“Sneyd will see that you get some refreshment before you retire for the night. You will meet Mrs. Die, and be put under her charge in the morning. Let me wish you a very good night, Lady Bell.”

Down, fathoms down, went the dismayed girlish heart; but, for as lightly as her uncle esteemed her breeding, then and thenceforth, Lady Bell walked out of the room, marshalled by Sneyd, with a more erect head and firmer step than those with which she had entered it. She did not salt the spiced beef, home-made bread, and mulled white wine with which Sneyd sought to regale her, with the tears which were ready to choke her. She responded loftily to his good-humoured attempts at entertaining her, so that he pronounced her in his mind “a chip of the old block,” as proud and passionate as fire, like Mrs. Die herself—but trust her to be broken in by Mrs. Die and Mrs. Kitty together, the poor young mylady!

Even after Lady Bell had been conducted to the dark, chill closet—all that there was for her room—which looked out on an unfinished wing of the house, where owls roosted and cats scrambled and miauled, she would not have given way before herself, so great was the mistake of Mr. Godwin that Lady Lucie’s instructions had not sunk into her grand-niece’s heart, had it not been for a physical, certainly not in itself heroic, shrinking from darkness, and apprehension at the idea of ghosts—like that of Cock Lane, which caused Lady Bell at last to lay aside her youthful dignity, as Louis le Grand laid aside his wig, from between closed curtains, and to break down and sob herself to sleep, with the bed-clothes drawn tightly over her head.