CHAPTER III.

A SIREN.

As soon as the doctor had left the room, Hilary endeavored to struggle into a sitting position, from which he was restrained by Margaret, who had been told off to nurse him.

“Do, pray, keep quiet, my lord; you will undo all the doctor’s work. Now, take your medicine and lie still, please.”

“I’ll take the medicine if you like, but on condition that you go away then, nurse, if you please, and leave me to talk to my friend here.”

“Don’t let him talk too much and excite himself,” was Margaret’s parting admonition to Lord Carthew as she left the room.

As soon as they were alone, Hilary plunged into his subject, regardless of his friend’s warning gesture. From where he lay on the bed, the wounded man could not see the kneeling figure of the servant over the fire on the farther side of the great, bare room.

“What is all this foolery about changing names with me?” he began. “It must be stopped at once. I won’t stay for five minutes in the house under false pretences.”

“I am afraid you won’t be able to do much more with that fire,” Lord Carthew observed, raising his voice as he addressed the servant, while he glanced meaningly at his friend.

“I am afraid not, sir,” returned the woman, civilly. A few moments later she left the room, and carefully applied her ear to the keyhole outside, from which position she was enabled now and then to overhear scraps of the conversation within.

“Now let us talk this matter out quietly and in as few words as possible,” Lord Carthew began, drawing a chair to his friend’s bedside. “What does it matter to you for twenty-four hours what they call you? You will probably never see any of these people again. I have introduced us both in one set of names to Miss Cranstoun, and she has passed us on under those names to the doctor and to her mother. It’s impossible to go back now. You had agreed to the arrangement which we started earlier in the day. There is no reason why we should not play our little comedy out just because an unlucky accident has intervened.”

“I utterly decline to be a party to such nonsense,” exclaimed Hilary, angrily, the blood rushing to his face. “It’s all very well for you. A man who assumes a rank lower than his own is at worst a romantic fool; but a commoner who tries to pass himself off as a lord is a paltry cad, and it’s a situation I won’t fill for a single moment.”

“You can’t alter things now, as I said before,” Lord Carthew urged. “When it comes out--I should say, if it comes out at any time that we have changed places--I shall own up that it was a foolish freak of mine, carried out in spite of your opposition. Now lie still and try to go to sleep, there’s a good fellow. I can’t eat a second dinner, and I’m certainly not in drawing-room trim. Still I want to see as much of my--or rather of your--relatives as I can while we’re here, so that unless there’s anything I can do for you----”

“There’s certainly something you can do,” roared the wounded man, “and that at once. You must contradict your former ridiculous statement, and explain our true positions instantly to Miss Cranstoun and her mother. Otherwise, I shall get out of bed and go downstairs and do it myself, in spite of all the doctors in England.”

Almost before he had finished speaking, Lord Carthew had left the room, so quickly indeed that he barely escaped stumbling over the kneeling form of the servant outside the door, who immediately affected to be occupied in straightening the mat. He was extremely sorry for Hilary’s accident, and most anxious to see him well out of it. But he was also already fathoms deep in love, and longing to feast his eyes upon Miss Cranstoun again; besides had not the doctor declared that Hilary would be all right provided that fever did not follow, and that he must not be allowed to excite himself by talking?

In the oak-panelled dining-room, Lord Carthew found three persons seated at dinner, and he was instantly struck by the utter absence of resemblance between Lady Cranstoun and the young girl whom he supposed to be her daughter. The former was just such a Douglas as he had described to Hilary; tall, sandy-haired, and limp, with a thin face, a high nose and colorless blue-gray eyes under white lashes, a perfectly well-bred and entirely uninteresting personage of about eight-and-forty years of age, in gray silk, shrouded by a voluminous white knitted shawl of Shetland wool.

She gave Lord Carthew a long, nerveless, white hand in greeting, and inquired after his friend, expressing her regret at the accident. Even while answering her polite inquiries, Claud’s eyes involuntarily travelled to the face of Miss Cranstoun, who, dressed in a girlish dinner costume of ivory silk, sat beside Dr. Morland Graham. In the lamplight she looked even more attractive than in the half-obscurity in which he had before seen her. Her cheeks had but little color as contrasted with the vivid scarlet of her lips, but to Lord Carthew’s keenly observant eyes, this pallor, and the extraordinary brightness of her eyes, suggested in no way ill health, but rather a vivid and ardent nature under strong repression. Her gown was cut low about the throat, and the sleeves were little more than elbow length, showing off the fairness and purity of her skin and the delicacy of her slim wrists. A turquoise brooch was her only ornament, and seemed to carry out in color the intense blue of her eyes between the black pupils and the nearly purple borders to the iris. Her whole appearance was poetic and interesting in a high degree, but the young viscount remarked that her manner had lost something of its naïve frankness, and had become more sedate and restrained than before.

“I am the more interested in Lord Carthew,” Lady Cranstoun was saying, “because we are connections. Lord Northborough’s mother was a Douglas, and my aunt.”

She spoke in slow, unmusical tones, with a slight Scotch accent. Lord Carthew rightly judged that, being a Douglas, she would have an exaggerated pride of birth, which was indeed the poor lady’s chief weakness. A single question from him sufficed to start her on her favorite subject of the numerous marriages and relationships of her father, the Duke of Lanark’s, family. As her appetite was poor, and no one could be rude enough to interrupt her at her own table, she was soon deep in the intricacies of the Douglas ancestry and Douglas marriages, while Dr. Graham set himself steadily to enjoy the good fare before him, and Miss Cranstoun kept her eyes steadily fixed on her plate, her cheeks flushed, and her dark eyebrows contracted with annoyance.

The dinner was good, the wines were few but excellent, and the greater part of the table service was in solid old silver, adorned with the motto “Cranstoun, Remember,” and the mailed hand grasping a wolf’s head, which was the family device. Opposite Lord Carthew, as he sat at table, there hung a portrait of a man in armor, whose sinister light eyes seemed to follow his every movement. Look which way he would, from Stella Cranstoun’s beautiful face to the doctor’s plump, bland visage, or Lady Cranstoun’s washed-out countenance, Lord Carthew found his gaze fascinated and held by the pale, square, inscrutable face of the man in armor, about whose narrow, close-shut lips a bitter smile seemed to be playing.

“That is a wonderful picture opposite, Lady Cranstoun,” he felt compelled to say at last. “By this light and at this distance I can hardly distinguish whether it is really old, or only painted in the old manner.”

His hostess did not at once answer him, and he noted that she grew a shade or two paler, and that a frightened, furtive look came into her eyes. Miss Cranstoun ceased speaking to the doctor, and looked inquiringly toward her.

“The picture is modern,” Lady Cranstoun said at last, and paused again.

“It is a portrait of my father,” Stella added, with marked, even, as it seemed, defiant distinctness.

“An excellent piece of work, is it not?” Dr. Graham remarked, breaking in upon the silence which followed Miss Cranstoun’s statement. “The tone really reminds me of a Murillo--so dignified, and sombre, and mellow. Quite a harmony in gray, as we should call it in our latter-day studio slang. The work attracted considerable attention when it was hung in the Royal Academy five years ago. You see Sir Philip is represented in a suit of armor worn by a member of his own family at the Field of the Cloth of Gold. In his hand he holds a sword with lowered point, and he stands as though waiting for an enemy to attack him. The manipulation of the armor is most dexterously rendered, the effect of a low light upon it from the sky being reproduced admirably, really admirably. Herkomer has never done anything better.”

Involuntarily, as the doctor rambled on in his deep mellifluous tones, Lord Carthew’s eyes left Sir Philip’s portrait, and fixed themselves upon the face of his daughter. For one brief moment he caught upon her lovely features a cold, mocking expression almost identical with that which distinguished her father’s; but almost before he had had time to feel shocked and astonished thereby, Stella had turned to the doctor, and was asking him if he knew anything of the pictures which would attract the most attention at the forthcoming Academy exhibition, and listening with apparent interest to his replies.

In answer to Claud’s inquiry whether she went often to London to see the pictures, Miss Cranstoun answered that she had only been in London three or four times in her life.

“I read all about pictures and music in the ladies’ papers,” she said. “Mamma is so delicate, the journey to London tires her. But next month I am to be presented by my grandmamma, the Duchess of Lanark, and then, I suppose, I shall be taken to see everything.”

“You must be looking forward to your _début_, I imagine?” said Lord Carthew.

She looked across at him steadily, and then answered quietly:

“I suppose I ought to. But mamma will be dull without me.”

“Indeed I shall, my dear child,” Lady Cranstoun returned, with a look toward the young girl of so much kindness and affection that in Claud’s eyes it redeemed her plainness.

After the dessert had been served on heavy silver salvers, Lady Cranstoun rose, and followed by her daughter, glided quietly from the room. A pause attended their exit. Then Lord Carthew observed suddenly:

“If that portrait really resembles my absent host, he must be a man of very singular and striking appearance.”

“He is indeed,” returned Dr. Graham, with emphasis. “Shall we adjourn to the smoking-room? The tapestry in this room is liable to be injured by smoke.”

The smoking-room was the most genuinely comfortable room in the house which Claud had yet seen. Presumably Sir Philip, realizing that mediæval furniture did not blend with a proper enjoyment of Sir Walter Raleigh’s weed, had in this one instance adopted wholly modern and fashionable methods of decoration. The books which filled a case against the wall were nearly all French novels, the lounges were the perfection of comfort, and everything, from the shaded lamp to the liqueur stand, was from a London West-end firm.

As Dr. Graham closed the door upon them Lord Carthew unconsciously heaved a sigh of relief. He himself had been reared in a spacious ancestral home, and had spent his boyhood between Northborough Castle in the Isle of Wight, Belgrave Square in London, and the comfortable country seat which his father had built himself in Norfolk. But Lord Northborough was both a man of the world and a patron of the arts, while Claud’s American mother seized with avidity upon every new device for beautifying her homes. The solemn bareness of the Chase was wholly new to him, and being keenly sensitive, Lord Carthew was, moreover, oppressed by an indefinable sentiment in the air of chilly gloom and repression, which Lady Cranstoun’s dejected, nervous manners, and the compressed lips of her beautiful daughter, helped to accentuate.

“Now tell me, Dr. Graham,” he began, stretching his feet toward the pleasant warmth of the wood fire, “what manner of man is this Sir Philip Cranstoun? I have heard a good deal about him, and I am rather anxious to meet him.”

Dr. Graham stirred the fire, cleared his throat, and glanced somewhat apprehensively round the room.

“Sir Philip Cranstoun,” he began, “is a man of five or six and forty, in the prime of life, in fact, a stanch Conservative and belonging to one of the oldest families in England.”

“Yes, I know all about that. But what I mean is--what is he like in his own home, toward his family, for instance, and his servants?”

“Sir Philip,” returned the wary doctor, “is a good deal away, and Lady Cranstoun’s health does not permit her to accompany him to Scotland, or even to London. Miss Cranstoun, who is a most devoted daughter, invariably remains by her mother’s side, and has, I believe, never been out of England. But she has had every advantage of education; masters and mistresses have attended at the Chase ever since she was five years old, when I first made her acquaintance, to instruct her in English, French, German, Italian and Latin, music, singing, painting, dancing, and calisthenics; she is also an admirable horsewoman.”

“The last I know from personal observation,” returned Lord Carthew. “But we were speaking of her father. Is he not proud of such a lovely and accomplished daughter?”

The doctor glanced at him slyly out of the corners of his worldly, good-natured eyes.

“I presume, Mr. Pritchard,” he said, “that you are acquainted with some details of the daily life here and do not need any enlightenment from me?”

“Not at all,” Lord Carthew answered, frankly. “But I am of an observing disposition, and I have already formed an impression that every one in this house is cowed and dominated by its master, his daughter included.”

“You are perfectly right,” the doctor assented, after a short pause. “Miss Cranstoun is a charming girl; I like and admire her greatly. But it is useless to deny the friction which occasionally results from her father’s admonitions. Sir Philip is--er--well--he is not a popular man, and Miss Cranstoun, well-bred and affectionate as she most certainly is by nature, is not the kind of girl to endure being _driven_. She has a good deal of her father’s spirit, in short. Most certainly she does not get it from her mother, although when I knew Lady Gwendolen Douglas before her marriage, she was the handsomest and liveliest of the Duke of Lanark’s daughters. She has altered very greatly, very greatly indeed.”

Reading between the doctor’s words, Lord Carthew realized several things which the former left unsaid. For one, that Sir Philip was an intolerable tyrant and despot, who tried to grind the hearts of his amiable wife and lovely daughter under the iron heel of his will; for another, that between him and Stella Cranstoun an incessant struggle was waging; and for still another, that Dr. Morland Graham cordially disliked the baronet, although he was too politic to put his feelings into actual words.

“I very much hope,” Dr. Graham went on musingly, as he contemplated the glowing tip of his cigar, “that Miss Cranstoun will soon be happily married.”

A keen pang of jealousy shot through Lord Carthew’s heart.

“Has she any avowed admirer then?” he inquired, in would-be careless tones.

“Dear me, no! Beyond her French and German masters, and the old vicar of Grayling, and myself, she has hardly had any acquaintance with the other sex. A more absolutely fancy-free young lady, I should say, never existed. But she has so much charm and individuality, as well as beauty, that when once she enters into social life in London, under the judicious guardianship of her grandmother, the Duchess of Lanark, there is not much doubt that suitors will not long be lacking. Although I understand that the Chase is in strict entail to the heirs male of the Cranstoun family, as well as the Scotch property, Sir Philip’s daughter will no doubt be some day possessed of a very comfortable little income, which in these extravagant, money-loving days,” added the doctor, smiling, as he took a cup of coffee which a servant brought into the room at that moment on a silver salver, “is a thing which is supposed to enhance any young lady’s attraction.”

Lord Carthew said nothing, and remained for a short time plunged in thought. Not only had he fallen in love at first sight, but his instinct had happily guided his affections to exactly the right object. In spite of his thin veneer of almost revolutionary theories, Lord Northborough’s heir was at heart a Tory and an aristocrat, and Sir Philip’s daughter was a thousand times the more desirable in his eyes because she was a Cranstoun on her father’s side, and granddaughter to the Duke of Lanark. Had he experienced the same overmastering feeling of instantaneous love for a lowly-born girl, he would certainly have regretted it, and would possibly have done his best to conquer it. But in this case no such self-restraint was necessary. If only he could gain her affection, above all in the homely guise of Mr. Pritchard, son to a Yorkshire yeoman, perfect married happiness awaited him.

Dr. Morland Graham, leaning back in his chair, smoking, and enjoying an after-dinner mood of benevolent calm, watched his companion with some amusement, and wondered for what freak Lord Northborough’s son and heir, bearing a strong resemblance to his father and sporting on his finger a signet-ring upon which his family crest was plainly discernible as he held his cigar to his lips, was wandering about the county under the alias of Pritchard. Dr. Morland Graham liked to be on good terms with his aristocratic patients; he liked to know their little secrets, and they, being only mortal, were usually ready enough to confide them to “that dear kind, sympathetic Dr. Graham.” He knew quite well that the Earl and his wife were extremely anxious to see their only son, the “mad viscount,” married and settled, and it occurred to the worthy doctor that this might be an excellent opportunity for ameliorating the lot of Stella Cranstoun, who, once under the protecting care of a husband of wealth and position, would be free forever from the petty tyranny of her absolutely detestable father.

Lord Carthew knew nothing of the doctor’s musings. One thought alone possessed him. To see Stella as soon as possible, to talk to her, to draw her out of her reserve and gradually get her to confide in him. As if divining his wishes, Dr. Graham suggested an adjournment to the drawing-room, and proposed to Lady Cranstoun, who was reclining on a sofa, a game of chess.

The drawing-room was extremely large, and furnished in a chilly, old-fashioned style. The faded carpet belonged to the first years of Queen Victoria’s reign and was covered by day with a drugget, for Sir Philip Cranstoun was economical to stinginess in the appointment of his household. The walls were painted in white and gold, the furniture was of old-fashioned shape, covered by day with chintz, and resplendent at night in amber satin. A grand piano and a harp seemed lost in the distant and ill-lighted recesses of the room, which curtained four long windows opening on to a stone terrace at the back of the house. Near a tall standard lamp Lady Cranstoun’s sofa was standing, and close by, on a cushion on the hearthrug, her slender arms clasping her knees, and her eyes fixed on the fire, Stella Cranstoun was seated, with the head of a handsome collie dog resting on her knee.

As the two gentlemen entered the room, she looked up quickly, but did not speak, and it was only after the doctor had suggested the game of chess that Miss Cranstoun inquired eagerly:

“How is he now? Is he better?”

Lord Carthew flushed guiltily. In his desire to see Stella again he had forgotten his friend completely. But the doctor’s conscience was not so sensitive, and he answered, in his blandest professional tones, that Lord Carthew had been given a sedative before dinner, and that it was not advisable to disturb him at present.

“You haven’t been up then?” Stella murmured reproachfully to Claud, while Lady Cranstoun rang for the footman to remove her coffee-cup and to draw the chess-table up to her sofa.

“No. The nurse said he must not excite himself by talking.”

He felt it was rather a lame excuse, the more so as he felt her dark eyes fixed almost indignantly upon his face.

“You see,” she said, lowering her gaze, and slightly blushing, “I feel that the accident was all my fault, and that is what makes me so anxious.”

“I will go at once, and let you know how he is,” he returned, and left the room for that purpose after she had rewarded him with a smile of gratitude.

Hilary was not asleep. He was tossing in bed, with flushed cheeks and bright eyes. Margaret, the nurse, was in the room, so he addressed his friend in an indignant torrent of broken French.

“What possesses you to let the servants suppose you and I have changed places?” he burst out, angrily. “I simply won’t stand their ‘my lording’ me much longer. I didn’t come here to be made a fool of.”

His noisy, excited manner was so unlike his usual easy-going and pleasant disposition that Lord Carthew, watching him, could not but conclude that he was feverish, especially as Hilary seemed desperately thirsty. After handing him some ice, which by the doctor’s orders had been placed by the bedside, Lord Carthew took a seat near, and tried to calm him, while Margaret discreetly left the room.

“Look here, Hilary,” he said, “I will confess the truth. I have fallen in love at last, and Kyro’s prediction is fulfilled. That is why I so particularly wish to remain Mr. Pritchard for a few hours longer.”

Hilary became suddenly quiet.

“It’s that crazy girl who took the jump, and whose obstinacy and foolhardiness brought me this nice little charge of gunshot in my shoulder, I suppose?” he said.

“It is Miss Cranstoun certainly, but--”

“Oh! spare me a lover’s rhapsodies, old chap. Under the circumstances, you can scarcely expect me to regard her as you do.”

“She is more sorry about the accident than I can possibly tell you, and blames herself entirely----”

“Oh, I dare say. Well, go back and make love to her by all means. What is that?”

The sweet notes of a pure soprano voice were wafted up to them from the drawing-room immediately below. Some one was singing the Lorelei to the accompaniment of harp.

Lord Carthew crossed to the door and held it open. Something wild and plaintive in the quality of Stella’s voice, for he knew well the singer could be none other than she, touched him deeply, and seemed to draw him like a magnet to her side. Holding the door open, he glanced at the bed whereon Hilary lay with closed eyes and frowning brows, as though asleep, an impression which he carried out further by remaining silent when Claud addressed him.

Feeling his conscience freed from responsibility, Lord Carthew returned to the drawing-room. Lady Cranstoun and the doctor were deep in their game of chess, and in the half light he could see Stella seated at the harp, across the strings of which her delicate hands were straying, while the last note of the old German _volkslied_ lingered on her lips, a strangely poetic picture of beauty and harmony which Lord Carthew was destined to carry in his mind for all time.