CHAPTER VIII.

GREENLANDS.

IT was the drowsiest hour of a drowsy August afternoon when Eustace Thorburn made his way on foot from the Windsor terminus to the bailiff’s house at Greenlands. He had put his luggage into a great lumbering fly, which was to crawl after him to his destination; and he went on foot through the rich pastoral country, with the grandest castle in the world looming upon him at every turn, in all its proud array of battlemented tower and terrace, keep and chapel. He went to begin his new life, and the country through which he went seemed to him more beautiful than his dreams of Paradise. Remember that he had newly come from the sandy flats of Flemish Flanders, and that the fairest landscape he had beheld of late was a row of lindens sheltering a sluggish canal, and a herd of cattle browsing upon sun-burnt table-lands. The shadow of a bitter grief was about and around him, and all the sunlight and beauty of the outer world seemed very dim and remote to him--something fair and beautiful in which he had no actual part, like a picture seen from afar off. But the influence of all this outward loveliness penetrated to his poor desolate heart, and warmed and melted it. His thoughts amidst these woods and pastures could never be so bitter, it seemed to him, as they had been in the stony quadrangle at Villebrumeuse. He thought of his mother as he walked slowly along the quiet roads and byways; but he no longer brooded gloomily upon her wrongs on earth as he had been wont to brood. He fancied her happy in heaven.

His way to Greenlands led him by the low meads athwart which the Thames winds like a silver ribbon, for the great neglected park of which Harold Jerningham was owner lay on the border of that delicious river. The way was very lonely, and somewhat intricate. Eustace had occasion to stop at more than one cottage-door, and to ask his way of more than one rosy-faced rustic matron, who came from her wash-tub to answer his inquiries, sometimes accompanied by a toddling child, that peered curiously at the stranger from between the lattice-work of a garden-gate. The way was long and lonely; but at last, when the sun was low, the pedestrian came to a gate in a stout oak fence, and knew that he was on the threshold of Harold Jerningham’s domain. The gate was unlocked, as the country people had told Eustace that it would be. The gate opened into the wildest region of the park; but at the end of a deep glade the traveller saw the great red-brick mansion, massive and stately, on the summit of a grassy slope.

“A noble domain,” he thought, as he stopped to contemplate the scene before him. “Perhaps the heir to it is a young man with a father who is prouder of him than of lands or houses, or wealth or name. I can fancy the festivities and rejoicings when _he_ came of age. There were great tents on the lawn yonder, I dare say, and oxen roasted whole, and monster casks of ale set running.”

Eustace Thorburn’s imagination filled in all the details of that possible picture. He could see that imaginary heir walking slowly through a joyous crowd, with his arm linked in his father’s. It was upon the image of that father the young man’s mind dwelt with a strange melancholy yearning, half sorrow, half bitterness. How the proud face softened into tenderness, and the eyes grew dim with tears, as the father listened to the shouts and clamour of an admiring throng! This fatherless young man could so vividly imagine the love which must exist between a father and his son. Perhaps he imagined some more exalted feeling than ever did exist in human breasts. Perhaps he exaggerated the joys of such an affection; as the parched traveller in the desert may imagine unutterable deliciousness in a draught of the water that is spilt and wasted by heedless hands at the public fountain of a city.

As the traveller drew near to the red-brick mansion the vision of the possible festivity melted away, for he saw that no festival could have been celebrated in that place for many a year gone by. The palace of the Sleeping Beauty, buried deep in the innermost recesses of a forest, and forgotten by waking mankind, could have scarcely been more lonely or neglected of aspect than this old Berkshire mansion. The rabbits frisked across the young man’s pathway as he went through the shadowy arcades, and the golden plumage of a pheasant glimmered here and there among the fern and underwood. Everywhere there was neglect and decay. The grass grew long and rank, and even in the gardens, where the handiwork of the gardener was visible, and where Eustace saw two feeble old men mowing the grass, it was evident that the work was only half done.

The path which Eustace had been directed to take led him past the gardens, which were only divided by an invisible fence from the park. He could have gone to the bailiff’s house by the high-road had he chosen; but this short-cut across the park saved him nearly a mile, and was a pleasanter way. To Eustace it was unspeakably delightful. The solemn quiet of the place imparted a new charm to its natural loveliness. A turn in the path brought him presently upon a wide expanse of smooth turf, shadowed here and there by great oaks and beeches, and across this wooded lawn he saw the river, gleaming bright and blue, athwart a fringe of trembling rushes. He paused for a few moments, transfixed by the tranquil loveliness of this English landscape, steeped in the rosy light of a summer evening.

“I suppose the owner of the place is a poor man, who cannot afford to occupy it,” he thought; whereby it may be seen how a stranger, who judges by appearances, is likely to form a false conclusion.

Eustace Thorburn was ready to bestow his compassion upon the man who was lord of this enchanting domain, and yet unable to enjoy its loveliness.

The gray walls and red-tiled roof of the bailiff’s house appeared between two masses of foliage as he drew near the border of the park. It was a house with many gables and great stacks of rickety-looking chimneys. Such a house as inspires contempt in the mind of a practical modern architect, by reason of the space that is frittered away on unnecessary passages, and little bits of rooms too small and dark for any civilized inhabitant, and ghastly cupboards in unsuspected places. It was a house in whose ample cellarage a gang of burglars might have lain perdu for a week, without the family being made aware of their presence. It was a house in which one could hardly retire to rest without expecting to see a pair of appalling Eyes staring at one through a crevice in the panelling, or two dreadful Boots emerging from beneath the drapery of the bed. If furniture of the commonest fashion, and fresh from the upholsterer, takes to itself awful voices after midnight, and creaks and groans with dismal significance in a modern London habitation, as it will--witness universal experience--what might not be expected from old oak bureaus and Elizabethan arm-chairs in this gabled dwelling? The out-buildings and disused chambers had that damp, earthy odour, which is known to every imaginative mind as the smell of ghosts; and that ubiquitous and nameless suicide, who seems to have hung himself or cut his throat at some remote date in every old house, had hung himself here, and made himself obnoxious to simple Berkshire maid-servants by those Cock-lane-like scrapings and tappings and rushings which the sternly commonplace mind is apt to attribute to rats.

This was the place to which Eustace Thorburn came in the rosy summer evening to begin his new life. The garden, which he entered by a low wooden gate, was the growth of a hundred and fifty years, and was as securely walled in by thick and high hedges of holly and yew as it could have been by the work of any mortal builder. The air was odorous with the perfume of bright English flowers; and as the stranger drew near the house he was greeted with such a burst of honest woodland music from the throats of blackbirds and thrushes, larks and linnets, as he never remembered to have heard in all his life before.

They were caged birds that sang so blithely, and their cages hung in the roomy wooden porch with a thatched roof, over which there was spread a curtain of flowering clematis and rich crimson-veined honeysuckle. Out of this dusky porch a great Newfoundland dog sprang at the intruder, awakening distant echoes by his deep-toned thunder. But a woman’s voice, very sweet and melodious, as the young man thought, called from the cottage, “Down, Hephæstus!--quiet, boy; quiet!” Eustace wondered what kind of woman this could be who lived in the student’s cottage, and called her dog Hephæstus.

The Newfoundland crouched at the stranger’s feet, obedient to the sound of that familiar voice; and then a man’s footstep sounded in the porch, and Theodore de Bergerac came out to meet his secretary. Eustace had been too much occupied by bitter and sorrowful thoughts within the last week to puzzle himself by speculative ideas about his new employer; but of course he had some vague notion--unconsciously conceived--of what M. de Bergerac would be like, and the real M. de Bergerac was the very reverse of that shadowy creature of his imagining. There had been in his mind some faint picture of a little wizen old man, with a weird face and a black-velvet skull-cap. Why a black-velvet skull-cap he could not have said; but possibly that kind of head-gear is in a manner allied with the idea of extreme erudition and much consumption of midnight oil. He had fancied a frail, wasted creature, with long, straggling white hair falling in unkempt locks upon the greasy collar of a dressing-gown; and lo! the man who came to greet him was tall and stalwart, with a bright, frank face, which had once been very handsome, and was handsome still, and iron-gray hair arranged with scrupulous neatness. He walked rather lame, and carried a cane with a head of oxidized silver, exquisitely modelled--a gem in its way, like all the surroundings of its possessor, who had the taste of a Bernard or a Bohn.

This was Theodore de Bergerac, the man who at sixty years of age retained the freshness and gaiety of six-and-twenty. The lameness from which he suffered had afflicted him for the last thirty years, for it was the result of a musket-wound received at the siege of Antwerp. The student had been a soldier in those days, and had done good service under the brave leader he loved so well.

M. de Bergerac greeted Eustace with friendly courtesy. He spoke the English language perfectly; and it was only by a certain delicate precision of pronunciation--a somewhat measured accent--and by an occasional Gallic locution that strangers discovered his nationality.

“Welcome to Greenlands, Mr. Thorburn. If you are fond of the country, I think you will love Berkshire. It has all the richness of southern France, and all the home-like comfort of Normandy. If we were a little nearer the sea, and could catch the breath of the ocean now and then from the summit of our hills, we should be in Paradise. But a man cannot expect to be _quite_ in Paradise; and I suppose this is as near an approach to Eden as we can hope for upon earth. Have you dined? We live as people lived in French provincial towns when I was a boy; and our hours are as early as those of the country-people round about us. I suppose in London the world is beginning to dress for dinner. We dined half a dozen hours ago; but I can promise you an excellent supper. My little _ménagère_ has made arrangements for a perfect banquet in your honour.”

Eustace wondered whether the little _ménagère_ and the lady who called to the dog were one and the same person. It was very foolish of him to wish that it might be so, and to imagine that the person must needs be young and beautiful. But then poetical three-and-twenty is subject to such foolish wishes and imaginings.

Theodore de Bergerac and his secretary went into the house, where lights began to glimmer here and there in the dusk. The room into which the Frenchman led Eustace had that sweet rustic charm peculiar to country drawing-rooms; but the stranger fancied it had a certain harmonious beauty which he had never beheld in any other apartment. _Every_ thing in it was beautiful. There were no false forms, no discordant tones lurking here and there to mar the harmony of the general effect. No pert young Cupid in Parian folded his mis-shapen wings, or uplifted his insolent pug nose before the outraged beholder--no hideous form of modern vase or flower-pot--no gaudy abomination of cheap Bohemian glass offended the eye; no impossible roses and lilies in Berlin-wool and bead-work offered themselves as a flowery couch for the visitor’s repose. A subdued harmony of form and colour pervaded every object. The valuable books scattered lavishly in every direction made no parade of their costliness. The rare old china needed examination before its beauty revealed itself. Everything was fresh and pure and delicate. There was a perfume of many flowers mingled with the subtle aroma of Russia-leather bindings, very pleasant to the stranger’s nostrils. New though the place was to him, he had no sense of strangeness; he felt rather as if he had come home to some delicious and familiar resting-place for which he had long been yearning. Perhaps this feeling may have been a vague foreshadowing of his fate. Perhaps he had a faint semi-consciousness of the fact that perfect happiness was to come to him in that house.

The two men sat for some little time in the dimly-lighted room--lighted only by a pair of small wax candles in antique bronze candle-sticks. They talked of many things, gliding imperceptibly from one subject to another without either jerks or pauses in the smooth current of talk. De Bergerac was a delightful talker--playful and serious, gay and earnest by turns--now childishly emphatic about trifles, now touching the profoundest subjects with a graceful lightness. Eustace was charmed by his new employer, and began to think that his lines had fallen in pleasant places.

He may have been still more inclined to think so a few minutes later, when a trim little maid-servant announced that supper was ready, and M. de Bergerac led him into the dining-room.

The dining-room was only an old-fashioned oak-panelled chamber, like the drawing-room; but the hands which had beautified the one had imparted the same air of grace and refinement to the other. There were more pictures and books and china, more fresh flowers in vases of dark-blue Wedgwood: and, above all, there was that sweet home-like aspect, which has a deeper charm than is to be imparted by the choicest treasures of art or the fairest gifts of nature. A small round table was laid for supper; and the bright colouring of a lobster, the tender green of a salad, the varied hues of some fruit piled high in a basket-shaped china dish, to say nothing of all the glitter and sparkle of rare old-fashioned glass and silver, or the amber and ruby of wines, made no uninviting picture under the mellow light of the lamp.

But there was a fairer picture to be seen in that chamber, which distracted the stranger’s gaze from the hospitable preparations that had been made for him--the picture of a girl standing by a ponderous old easy-chair, with her white hands loosely folded on the cushion, and with the great black Newfoundland dog at her feet.

In the course of his eventless life Eustace Thorburn had not seen many beautiful women, so it is a small thing to say that the girl he saw to-night seemed to him the loveliest creature he had ever beheld. The dark beauties of Villebrumeuse, rich in the southern graces of their Spanish ancestors, had flashed their black eyes upon the young Englishman sometimes, as he paced the quiet streets of their city, but had gone by unnoticed by him. It may have been that to-night his imagination was unusually exalted, his mind peculiarly prone to receive impressions, for it seemed to him as if he had passed out of the dull, beaten tracks of every-day life into an enchanted region, a kind of Arcadian fairy-land, of which this beauteous creature was a fitting queen.

She was an honest English beauty, and the brightness of her complexion had ripened under an English sun. Her dark-blue eyes seemed darker and bluer by reason of the rosy bloom of her cheeks and the crimson of her perfect mouth. The dusky gold of her hair was no fictitious charm derived from the costly washes of a court perfumer. She was no spurious Venetian beauty, with locks of tawny red; but a fair English girl, fresh and bright as a woodland summer morning, pure as a flower with the dew upon its opening petals. Her white muslin dress was unrelieved by a trinket or a ribbon; but what need had she of colour or jewels, whose eyes were more brilliant than the rarest sapphires, whose lips were more precious than Neapolitan coral, and in whose innocent young beauty there was a brightness surpassing the radiance of earthly gems?

“My daughter,” said M. de Bergerac; “my daughter Helen--Mr. Thorburn.” Whereupon this enchanting creature greeted the stranger with a bright smile and some indistinct murmur of welcome. They seated themselves at the little supper-table presently, and this divine Helen looked on admiringly while her father carved a fore-quarter of lamb. It was a long time since Eustace had taken a hasty snack of luncheon with his uncle, before starting for Windsor, yet he had little appetite for that innocent Berkshire lamb. His gaze wandered from the contents of his plate to Helen de Bergerac’s fair young face; and if he had been sharing the Barmecide’s shadowy feast, he could scarcely have been more unconscious of the flavour of the viands or the aroma of the wines.

“Help yourself to some of that Medoc, Mr. Thorburn,” said his host; “and be sure you do justice to my daughter’s salad. Helen is a salad-maker whom Brillat Savarin might have approved. The salad is the _chef-d’œuvre_ of amateur art. No hired cook ever yet excelled in the composition of a salad. The task is too delicate for a hand that has been soiled by wages.”

Eustace blushed. Three-and-twenty is so painfully sensitive. Was he not going to take wages in that house? He stole a look at his host’s daughter, and wondered whether she felt a patrician contempt for her father’s secretary. She had the blood of Spanish grandees in her veins, despite her English beauty. Heaven knows what haughty hidalgo might have infused his pride into those azure veins.

“She is aptly named,” thought the young man; “Helen, the destroyer of ships and of men. Helen, the daughter of Jupiter and Nemesis--for I will never believe that poor Leda was any more than the nurse of that fatal creature. Helen, the daughter of Nemesis--let me remember her parentage, and beware of her.”

He discovered one fact in relation to Mademoiselle de Bergerac before the evening was over, though he could only watch her furtively now and then while her father was talking. He discovered that the damsel’s heart was already engaged, and that he who came to lay siege to it would have need of patience and constancy. She was in love with her father. She watched him with tender, reverential eyes, and listened to him as to the voice of an oracle. Once, when his hand lay on the arm of his chair, she lifted it gently to her lips. And in all this there was no taint of affectation. No dryad of those Berkshire woods could have been more innocently natural than this descendant of Spanish hidalgos. No consciousness of her loveliness and fascination disturbed her sweet serenity as she talked to her father’s secretary. She talked to him of pastoral pleasures and pursuits, and he divined from her talk that her country life was very dear to her. Her father went to London very often, she told Eustace in the course of the evening, to buy books; and sometimes, but very rarely, took her with him.

“And then I see the SHOPS,” she said; and by the tone of subdued ecstacy with which she pronounced this word, Eustace discovered for the first time that she was mortal. “I am afraid you will despise me very much for liking to see the shops. Papa does. He thinks it is the most foolish thing in the world to be fond of standing on a crowded pavement to look at dresses and bonnets that one is never likely to have.”

“Or to want,” interposed M. de Bergerac, looking proudly at the girl’s animated face. “What could a little girl who makes butter do with fine silk dresses; and she is able to make butter for Windsor market, this young lady, as well as she is able to read Greek,” added the father, fondly.

Eustace watched the two faces with a pensive admiration. Here was that ideal father of whom he had dreamed so often; here was that pure and perfect love which he had fancied.

It was late before the little party separated, for M. de Bergerac had a student’s attachment to the quiet of midnight, and an absent-minded man’s unconsciousness of the flight of time. The clock of some village church-tower, hidden away somewhere beyond the beeches and oaks of Greenlands, struck twelve half an hour before the Frenchman conducted Eustace to the room that had been prepared for him. It was only a rustic chamber, with lattice casements set deep in a wall of old-fashioned solidity. The white draperies were faintly perfumed with that odour of rose-leaves and lavender which is as the very breath of the country. The lattice was open, and there was a vase of flowers on the broad window-ledge. Eustace wondered who had arranged those flowers. Not the trim little maid-servant surely. _She_ would have squeezed the tender blossoms into a tightly-packed circular bunch; while these were only a few loose half-budding roses nestling among cool green leaves.

The lattice was open, and the harvest-moon shone full and bright above the woods of which Harold Jerningham was master. Eustace stood at the open casement for some time after his host had left him. He stood there in the solemn stillness, looking out across those sombre masses of foliage towards the moonlit river--so difficult to believe in by this light as an earthly river, navigable by coal-barges, and instrumental in the turning of paper-mills. He looked out upon that landscape of semi-divine beauty, and thought with a half-contemptuous pity of the man who owned it. Theodore de Bergerac had talked of his friend during the varied course of that evening’s conversation, and Eustace had discovered that the lord of Greenlands was a lonely and childless wanderer--a wanderer in first-class carriages, and a dweller in the most expensive caravanseries; but not the less homeless, and joyless, and purposeless--not the less a standing example of the worthlessness of earthly prosperity.

Eustace Thorburn, the nameless and fatherless, pitied this childless man. It was scarcely strange if he let the underwood grow wild in his park, and foul weeds lie thick upon his lake. For whom should he be careful, for whom should he adorn and beautify, for whose sake should he plant young trees, or cut new avenues in the woodland? For what purpose should he heap up riches, who knew not what strange hand was destined to gather them?

But the secretary did not brood long on the sorrowful fate of that unknown Harold Jerningham. A fairer image came between him and the moonlit park, and it bore the likeness of Helen de Bergerac.

“I waste my thoughts upon a girl’s lovely face, when I ought to be thinking of the work that lies before me,” the young man said to himself, in angry scorn of his weakness. “Let me remember why I am here, and keep my brain clear of my employer’s daughter, in order that I may be able to help him honestly with his book.”

He slept soundly and sweetly, lulled by the faint rustling of the foliage and the far-away murmur of the river. But his slumbers were not dreamless. He thought he saw the old red-brick mansion all ablaze with light. Long rows of windows shone on the darkness of the night, joyous music was wafted from the open lattices, and an indistinguishable some one in a crowd, that seemed all confusion and clamour, told him the heir of Greenlands had come of age.

He woke to see the sunshine in his room, and to hear Helen de Bergerac singing a waltz of Verdi’s; while the song-birds in the porch strained their melodious throats to the uttermost, in the endeavour to drown their mistress’s music.