Chapter VII · —A NEW FACE AT CARBERY.

‘She be coming for sure. Carriage, with second coachman, just getting ready for a start to Dundleton, to meet the down train at 9.17,’ said a pink-faced youth, whose stature and chest measurement would have procured for him the interested admiration of a sergeant-major in Her Majesty’s Brigade of Guards, but who was as yet but imperfect in his domestic drill as third footman at Carbery Chase.

‘What’s 9.17?’ demanded the mature female addressed, with some asperity, as she dredged flour over some cunningly compounded mess simmering beside the fire in the back-kitchen. ‘Can’t you give a body the time o’ the day? They didn’t cut it so fine when I was your age, young chap!’

And indeed it is marvellous to note how the junior population throughout Western Christendom appears to have learned to think and speak by railway time, and to have been, as it were, inoculated by Bradshaw.

‘Thought you knowed all that ’n, cook!’ half-sulkily, half-apologetically rejoined the gigantic hobbledehoy, mindful of that functionary’s empire over the roasts, subject of course to the high fiat of Monsieur Cornichon, the white-capped and black-bearded chef.

‘Anyhow, this Miss Whatshername ’ll be here soon after eleven.’

‘Willis is her name, and she comes from the Ingees,’ put in a tart young town-made house-maid. ‘I wonder if she’s black?’ This quasi-witticism provoked a titter among the rest of the under-servants there collected; for anything was welcome that could excuse a laugh; and besides, a new recruit to the aristocracy of the waited-upon is sure to be smartly criticised by the plebs of those who wait.

‘I wonder,’ said the old sub-cook, stirring her saucepan, ‘if she’ll be setting her cap at young Mr Jasper?’

‘The captain knows too well on which side his bread is buttered,’ pronounced the gaunt house-maid-in-chief, an invaluable female, lynx-eyed for spiders’ webs, and vigilant as to the minutest details of bedroom duty.

Opinions at Carbery Chase were very much divided as to the new-comer’s exact status and claims to consideration. There were those who invidiously described her as ‘Sir Sykes’s charity child,’ and appeared to regard her as a species of genteel mendicant most foolishly invited down to Devonshire. There were others who were not sorry for the arrival of any one considered capable of lending animation to a house where the regular routine of every-day life ran on with somewhat sluggish flow. And there were a few philosophers in plush or white aprons, much flouted by the rest, who held that Sir Sykes was himself the best judge as to what guests, permanent or temporary, should be allowed to share the shelter of his roof at Carbery.

That there was enough and to spare in that opulent mansion which acknowledged Sir Sykes Denzil for its master, was patent to all. Large as was Sir Sykes’s household and handsome his expenditure (for how many baronets chronicled in the gilt-edged volumes of Messrs Dod and Debrett, can afford themselves the luxury of a third and fourth footman, a French chef like high-salaried M. Cornichon, and a groom of the chambers?), he was known to live within his income; and was rumoured by his inferiors to be guilty of the offence, never mentioned otherwise than with a resentful reverence, of ‘putting by.’ Sir Sykes’s men and maids were probably not students of Dean Swift’s ironical advice to their order; but we may rely on it that the servants of Dives himself had strongly defined ideas as to the proportion of high feasting that should accompany the purple and fine linen of their patron.

Meanwhile, in spite of the early training which is supposed to make an Englishman of Sir Sykes Denzil’s degree as outwardly impassive as a Red Indian, no one at Carbery appeared to think so much about the arrival of Miss Willis as did the baronet himself. Her coming did not now at anyrate partake of the character of a surprise, for weeks had naturally elapsed between the incoming of the late and that of the new mail, and there had been time enough for preparations, if such were necessary. Sir Sykes, however, on the morning of his ward’s arrival could not avoid, not merely the being nervous and anxious, but the exhibiting to all who cared to look of his inexplicable nervousness and unreasonable anxiety. He went and came at frequent and irregular intervals between his own traditional apartment the library, and that morning-room where his daughters usually sat over their sketches and lacework and china-painting, and all those laborious trifles on which young ladies employ their taper fingers.

That their father was undignified in his apparently uncalled-for agitation as to the Indian orphan’s arrival, was too evident not to be recognised by even the most dutiful of daughters. But both Blanche and Lucy willingly accounted for the baronet’s restlessness on the ground of the revival of early associations, acting on the nerves of one whose health was no longer robust.

‘Let her only come here and quietly drop into her place among us,’ said the elder sister to the younger; ‘and depend upon it, papa will find her presence at Carbery as unexciting as though she were a supplementary daughter returning “for good,” as the girls call it, from a boarding-school.’

Jasper could, had it so pleased him, have considerably enlightened the ignorance of his unsuspecting sisters. But the captain prudently said nothing, and did not ostensibly keep watch upon his father’s actions, or deviate much from his own habit of indolently hanging about the stables, the kennels wherein sleek pointers and shaggy retrievers howled and rattled their chains, the billiard-room, and other resorts of ingenuous youth. The baronet’s nervousness was not in itself surprising to him, in whose memory was fresh the conversation which he had overheard while lurking in the mean garden of The Traveller’s Rest; but he could only conjecture what might be the hidden springs that prompted a course of conduct difficult to reconcile with a clean conscience and a secure worldly position.

‘I never,’ said Jasper to himself musingly, as he knocked about the balls on the billiard-table, ‘heard a word against the governor. He was awfully needy and that sort of thing once, of course; but I never knew there to be a whisper of any sharp practice either at écarté or with the bones. Had there been such, some good-natured fellow or other about the clubs would have let fall a hint of it before now in my hearing, or some servant would have tattled, when I wore a jacket and was Master Jasper. He’s not much liked, my father, but respected he is. I doubt if many, who fluked by a lucky chance upon a great fortune, get so civilly spoken of behind their backs.’

Jasper was not one to have cherished those tender recollections of infantine joys and sorrows, which with some men remain green and fresh to the last. He had, to use his own expression, to ‘hark back’ with painful effort and purpose, ere he could reproduce before his mental vision the long past of his early boyhood. ‘I have a vague notion,’ said he, after an interval of this appeal to memory, ‘that my mother gave me more sweetmeats than were good for me, and that she, and I too, seemed to stand in awe of my father. I’m sure I don’t know why, unless it were because he was serious and silent—a grave Spanish Don, as I used to think. But she said too that he had been of a livelier mood once, and something about his high spirits having deserted him just when the world began to smile. My old nurse—what was her name, I wonder?—Wiggins, Priggins—all nurses are named something of the sort, and all combine to dote over the little wretches that torment them—used to talk about the governor’s sad looks dating from the loss of that young sister of mine. She would have been younger than Lucy, older than Blanche, I take it. But why, in the name of common-sense, a man of the world should never forget the loss of a chit in the nursery—that is, if it was all on the square—but then, again, the motive!’ And the captain’s arching eyebrows and the compression of his thin lips were very expressive of his readiness to believe the very worst that could be believed as to his nearest and dearest, if only a plausible reason for such villainy could be alleged. ‘If it had been myself now,’ he muttered, as he sent the red ball, with a mechanical precision that proved him a dexterous pool-player, into pocket after pocket of the green table; ‘but even then the governor, who had Apollyon’s own luck, did not need to cut off the entail by illegal methods. He’s no life-tenant of Carbery, as he makes me feel whenever our views don’t exactly coincide; could leave it to my sisters; or back again, if he chose, to the De Vere lot; and so, what interest he could have had in spiriting away little Mabel Denzil, is a question that I defy Œdipus, or a modern racing prophet, to answer.’ Having said which, the captain rang the bell for something to drink, drank that something, and immersed his fine faculties in the delightful study of a sporting newspaper.

Jasper had not had leisure to thread his way very far through the labyrinth of darkling vaticinations, so dear to men who like himself are of the horse, horsey, as to probable or certain winners of important events to come off, or to discriminate with sufficient nicety between the inherent truth or falsehood of the reports that made the barometer of the betting world oscillate so wildly between panic and exultation, before the grinding of wheels on the smooth gravel announced the arrival of the carriage, and that Sir Sykes’s ward was at the threshold of Carbery Court, her future home.

‘I’d give a trifle,’ thought Jasper, ‘to know how many throbs to the minute the governor’s pulse is giving just now. I suppose, like a pattern guardian, he will receive her in the hall. I’ll wait till the first disjointed welcomes are over, and then drop in and inspect the new importation. I wonder if she drinks rum, like her brother?’

The captain had drawn, mentally, a fancy portrait of Hold’s sister, and had marvelled how Blanche and Lucy would be likely to get on with such a one as she could scarcely fail to be. But at the very first glance Jasper abandoned as untenable the conjecture that Miss Willis could drink rum, and he owned to himself, with the candour which men of his stamp exhibit in self-communing alone, how very wide of the mark was the likeness which his imagination had traced.

Miss Willis was very short and slight, and the deep mourning which she wore made her look even slighter and shorter than she really was. She had jet black hair that curled naturally, which, as if in ignorance or defiance of fashion, she wore in a crop, and which made the whiteness of her skin seem more conspicuous than it would otherwise have done. A pale little face, lit up by a pair of fine dark eyes, that drooped modestly to the carpet, as suitable to her shy, timid air. Whether she were pretty or the reverse, was not to be so summarily settled as is the case with most of her sex.

It was the eyes, and the eyes alone, that lent a marked peculiarity to the countenance of Sir Sykes’s ward. Look at them, and the verdict that Miss Willis was charming would have been pronounced by many women and most men. Confine the scrutiny to the other features, and the judgment that the Indian orphan was a plain, pale little creature, would as inevitably have resulted. She looked young, quite a girl. The delicate smoothness of her cheek suggested that her age might be under twenty; but there was a subdued thoughtfulness in her aspect that might have harmonised well with her years, had she been older by a lustrum.

‘I was talking of Œdipus,’ such was Jasper’s soliloquy after a half-hour spent in the new arrival’s company; ‘but here is the Sphynx herself, by Jove!’

It was with an inexpressible sentiment of relief that the baronet saw what style of person his ward appeared to be. Here were no solecisms in breeding, no coarseness of tone, or affectations more painful than honest roughness ever is, to wince at, to gloss over, to excuse on the ground of a youth spent in a far country, and often in stations where European society was scarce, and perhaps not always choice as regarded its quality. Sir Sykes had reckoned, at best, on a probationary period during which he should have had to play the irksome part of an apologist for the shortcomings of her whom he had invited to be the companion of his own daughters.

But Sir Sykes and Jasper, too, were forced to admit that Miss Willis was either an actress of consummate address, or, what really seemed the more probable, was merely appearing in her genuine character. Timid and somewhat constrained, but not awkward, was her manner of responding to the warm greeting of Sir Sykes’s two daughters and to the grave urbanity of the baronet himself. She did not say much; but her voice trembled when she thanked Sir Sykes for his ‘extreme kindness’ to a stranger like herself. Then Blanche kissed her. She should not be a stranger long, she said. And then the girl broke down, sobbing. ‘How good you all are to me,’ she said. ‘I hope—I do hope not to be very troublesome, not to’——

And then there were more tears and more kissing; and the Misses Denzil took complete possession of their new friend, and bore her off to be installed in her room, and to learn to be at home at Carbery. Nothing could have gone off better than the orphan’s reception; and even Jasper felt this, and forbore to sneer. His own heart was as hard as the nether millstone; but he accepted the fact that his sisters possessed organs of a different degree of sensibility, precisely as he owned that roses had perfume, and that the thrushes and nightingales sang sweetly in the garden.

‘She’s no more the sister of yonder pirate fellow,’ such was the captain’s conclusion, ‘than the last Derby winner was a drayhorse. I thought the rascal spoke mockingly of the relationship between her and him. No; she’s not Hold’s sister. I wonder whether she is mine?’

In the course of the afternoon of that day, Lord Harrogate, who had ridden over from High Tor, made his appearance. There was, as has been mentioned, a frequent exchange of neighbourly communications between the two great houses of the vicinity. The Earl, it is true, seldom called upon Sir Sykes, and Sir Sykes as seldom on the Earl; but the Countess was often at Carbery, and the young people of both families were much in each other’s company. By the time of Lord Harrogate’s visit, the girl from India had made considerable progress in winning the good-will of the Misses Denzil, prepossessed in her favour from the beginning. They had devoted the time since luncheon to shewing her the lions of Carbery—the tapestry of the ‘Queen’s Chamber,’ faded but sumptuous; the stained glass; the chapel; the pictures; the grand conservatory, built by a former lord of Carbery, on a scale too ambitious for the use of a private family, and which was kept up at a cost which even Sir Sykes murmured at; and the other local curiosities.

The orphan had proved herself a patient and intelligent sight-seer, willing to be pleased, thankful for the kind desire of her entertainers that she should be pleased, and discriminating in her admiration. There was still some constraint in her manner, and of herself and her former life she scarcely spoke. Perhaps her loss was too recent for her to be able to talk freely of India, while of the journey to England she said little. ‘There were fellow-passengers who took much care of me,’ she replied once, in answer to a question on Lucy’s part. ‘Indeed, I met kindness on every hand. Perhaps my being alone, and my black frock’—— And then her eyes filled with tears and she turned her head away.

Lord Harrogate, when introduced to the baronet’s ward, experienced one of the oddest sensations that he had ever felt, and akin to that tantalising, nameless thrill with which we all sometimes fancy that we have seen some place which we know ourselves to visit for the first time, or witnessed some scene which never before met our eyes. He had started, when first he saw Miss Willis, and had eyed her in the inquiring fashion in which we scan a face familiar to us. But it was evident that Miss Willis did not know him, as indeed it was impossible that she, Indian born and bred, and now in England for the first time, should know him. And yet, long after he had left Carbery, the perplexing thought occurred to him again and again that he remembered the face, which, as all could aver, he had beheld for the first time on that day.