LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

McKirdy indignantly, "Madam has never wasted a thought upon him—why should she?"

      He looked quite angrily at his companion. Barbara was still smiling: a delicate colour, the effect of walking against the wind, had come into her face.

      "They're all alike," growled the doctor to himself, "just mention a young man to a young woman and smiling begins," but the harsh judgment, like most harsh judgments, was singularly at fault. Poor Barbara was waking up to life again, ready to take pleasure in the slightest matter which touched her sense of humour. The doctor, however, had become seriously uneasy. Why this strange interest in the Boringdons? Mrs. Rebell now belonged to the Priory, and so was surely bound to adopt without question all his, Alexander McKirdy's, views and prejudices. Her next words fortunately gave him the opening he sought.

      "I suppose there are many young ladies at Chancton?"

      "There is just one," he said, brightening, "a fine upstanding lass. The father of her is General Thomas Kemp. May-be you've heard of him, for he's quite a hero, Victoria Cross and a' that, though the fools about here don't recognise him as such."

       "No," said Barbara, "I never heard of the heroic General Kemp."

      Her eyes were brimming over with soft laughter. Living with her parents first in one and then in another continental town, she had had as a young girl many long solitary hours at her disposal, and she had then read, with keen zest, numberless old-fashioned novels of English life. This talk seemed to bring back to her mind many a favourite story, out of which she had tried in the long ago to reconstruct the England she had then so longed to know. Ah! now she must begin novel-reading again! And so she said, "I suppose that Oliver Boringdon is in love with the General's daughter."

      Doctor McKirdy turned and looked at her, amazed and rather suspicious; "you show great prescience—really remarkable prescience, Ma'am. I was just about explaining to you that there is no doubt something like a kindness betwixt them. There's another one likes her, a Captain Laxton, but they say she won't have aught to say to him."

      "Oh no! she must be true to Mr. Boringdon, and then, after a long engagement—oh! how wise to have a long engagement,"—Barbara sighed instinctively—"they will be married in the little church which I look down upon from my stone balcony? and then—why then they will live happy ever after!"

      "No, no, I cannot promise you that," said Doctor McKirdy gruffly, "that would be forecasting a great deal too much!"

      Even as he spoke the deeply rutted path was emerging abruptly on a vast expanse of rolling uplands. They were now on the open down; Barbara laid a detaining hand on the old Scotchman's arm, and looked about her with enraptured eyes. Before her, to the east, lay a dark oasis, a black-green stretch of fir plantation, redeemed a hundred years ago from the close cropped turf, and a large white house looked out from thence up the distant sea. To the north, some three miles away, rose the high sky-line. A dense wood, said to be part of the primeval forest, crept upwards on a parallel line. There, so says tradition, Boadicea made her last stand, and across this down a Roman road still asserts the final supremacy of the imperial force.

      A sound of voices, of steady tramping feet, broke the exquisite stillness. Towards them, on the path which at a certain point sharply converged from that on which Doctor McKirdy and Barbara stood, advanced Fate, coming in the shape of two men who were in sharp contrast the one to the other.

      Oliver Boringdon—dark, upright, steady-eyed—had still something of the Londoner and of the Government official about his appearance. His dark, close-cropped hair was covered by a neat cap which matched his serge coat and knickerbockers. His companion, James Berwick, looked—as indeed he was—far more a citizen of the world. He was bare-headed, his fair hair ruffled and lifted from his lined forehead by the wind; his shooting clothes, of rough tweed and ugly yellow check colouring, were more or less out of shape. He was smoking a huge pipe, and as he walked along, with rather ungainly steps—the gait of a man more at home in the saddle than on foot—he swung an oak stick this way and that, now and again throwing it in the air and catching it again—a trick which sorely tried the patience of his staider companion.

      When they reached the nearest point to Doctor McKirdy and Mrs. Rebell, the one took off his cap and the other waved his stick vigorously by way of greeting. Indeed Berwick, as Doctor McKirdy very well saw, would have soon lessened the ten yards space between the two groups, but Boringdon, looking before him rather more straightly than before, was already walking on.

      "Well," said the doctor, "you have now had your wish, Ma'am: that was Mr. Oliver Boringdon, and the other is his fidus Achates, Mr. James Berwick: he's a conceited loon if you like. But then he's more reason to be so! Now what d'ye think they reminded me of as they walked along there?"

      "I don't know," faltered Barbara. She was still feeling as if a sudden blast of wind had beaten across her face—such had been the effect of the piercing, measuring glance of the man whom she took to be Oliver Boringdon. No doubt the over-bold look was excused by the fact that he recognised in her his sister's friend. Barbara flushed deeply; she was wondering, with acute discomfort, what account of her, and of her affairs, Grace Johnstone—impetuous, indiscreet Grace—had written to her mother and brother? Oh! surely she could be trusted to have kept secret certain things she knew—things which had been discovered by the Johnstones, and admitted by Barbara in her first moments of agonised relief from Pedro Rebell's half-crazy ill-usage.

      "Well, I'll tell you what the sight of the two of them suggested to me," went on Doctor McKirdy, "and in fact what they exactly appeared like, just now——" he hesitated a moment, and then with manifest enjoyment added, "The policeman and the poacher! That's what any stranger might well ha' taken them for, eh?" But Barbara had given no heed to the bold gazer's more drab companion.

CHAPTER III.

       Table of Contents

      "Mates are chosen marketwise Coolest bargainer best buys, Leap not, nor let leap the heart; Trot your track and drag your cart, So your end may be in wool Honoured and with manger full."

      George Meredith.

      Mrs. Boringdon, sitting in the drawing-room at Chancton Cottage, looked, in spite of her handsome dress and her manner and appearance of refinement, strangely unsuited to the place in which she found herself. Even the Indian tea-table—one of the few pieces of furniture added to the room by its present occupant, and now laden with substantial silver tea-pot, cream-jug, and sugar-basin burnished to their highest point of brilliancy—was out of keeping with its fragile charm. The room, indeed, had been scarcely altered since it had been furnished, some sixty years before, as a maiden retreat for one of Madame Sampiero's aunts, the Miss Lavinia Rebell of whom tradition still lingered in the village, and whose lover had been killed in the Peninsular War.

      On her arrival at Chancton Mrs. Boringdon would have dearly liked to consign the shabby old furniture, the faded water-colours and colour prints, to some unhonoured lumber-room of the Priory, but even had such desecration been otherwise possible, the new mistress of Chancton Cottage was only too well aware that she lacked the means to make the old-fashioned house what she would have considered habitable. Indeed, she had been thankful to learn that the estate agency offered to her son through the intermediary of his friend, James Berwick, carried with it the use of a fully furnished house of any sort.

      Whenever Mrs. Boringdon felt more than usually dissatisfied and critical of the furnishings of the rooms where she was fated to spend so much of her time—for she had no love of the open air—she tried to remind herself that this phase of her life was only temporary; that soon—her son thought in two or three years, but Berwick laughed at so prudent a forecast—the present Government would go out, and then "something" must surely be found for her clever Oliver.

      To-day, her son had brought his friend back to lunch, and the two young men had stayed on in the dining-room and in the little smoking-room beyond, talking eagerly the one with the other. As the mother sat in her drawing-room patiently longing for her cup of tea, but content to wait Oliver's

Скачать книгу