Phantom Fortune, a Novel - M. E. Braddon

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he has brought a friend.'

      'Indeed! He might have done me the honour to inquire if his friend's visit would be agreeable. What kind of person?'

      'I have no idea. I didn't look at him. Maulevrier is looking so well. They will be here in a minute. May I order dinner for them?'

      'Of course, they must have dinner,' said her ladyship, resignedly, as if the whole thing were an infliction; and Mary ran out and interviewed the butler, begging that all things might be made particularly comfortable for the travellers. It was nine o'clock, and the servants were enjoying their eventide repose.

      Having given her orders, Mary went back to the drawing-room, impatiently expectant of her brother's arrival, for which event Lesbia and her grandmother waited with perfect tranquillity, the dowager calmly continuing the perusal of her Times, while Lesbia sat at her piano in a shadowy corner, and played one of Mendelssohn's softest Lieder. To these dreamy strains Maulevrier and his friend presently entered.

      'How d'ye do, grandmother? how do, Lesbia? This is my very good friend and Canadian travelling companion, Jack Hammond—Lady Maulevrier, Lady Lesbia.'

      'Very glad to see you, Mr. Hammond,' said the dowager, in a tone so purely conventional that it might mean anything. 'Hammond? I ought to remember your family—the Hammonds of----'

      'Of nowhere,' answered the stranger in the easiest tone; 'I spring from a race of nobodies, of whose existence your ladyship is not likely to have heard.'

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       Table of Contents

      That faint interest which Lady Lesbia had felt in the advent of a stranger dwindled to nothing after Mr. Hammond's frank avowal of his insignificance. At the very beginning of her career, with the world waiting to be conquered by her, a high-born beauty could not be expected to feel any interest in nobodies. Lesbia shook hands with her brother, honoured the stranger with a stately bend of her beautiful throat, and then withdrew herself from their society altogether as it were, and began to explore her basket of crewels, at a distant table, by the soft light of a shaded lamp, while Maulevrier answered his grandmother's questions, and Mary stood watching him, hanging on his words, as if unconscious of any other presence.

      Mr. Hammond went over to the window and looked out at the view. The moon was rising above the amphitheatre of hills, and her rays were silvering the placid bosom of the lake. Lights were dotted here and there about the valley, telling of village life. The Prince of Wales's hotel yonder sparkled with its many lights, like a castle in a fairy tale. The stranger had looked upon many a grander scene, but on none more lovely. Here were lake and mountain in little, without the snow-peaks and awful inaccessible regions of solitude and peril; homely hills that one might climb, placid English vales in which English poets have lived and died.

      'Hammond and I mean to spend a month or six weeks with you, if you can make us comfortable,' said Maulevrier.

      'I am delighted to hear that you can contemplate staying a month anywhere,' replied her ladyship. 'Your usual habits are as restless as if your life were a disease. It shall not be my fault if you and Mr. Hammond are uncomfortable at Fellside.'

      There was courtesy, but no cordiality in the reply. If Mr. Hammond was a sensitive man, touchily conscious of his own obscurity, he must have felt that he was not wanted at Fellside—that he was an excrescence, matter in the wrong place.

      Nobody had presented the stranger to Lady Mary. It never entered into Maulevrier's mind to be ceremonious about his sister Molly. She was so much a part of himself that it seemed as if anyone who knew him must needs know her. Molly sat a little way from the window by which Mr. Hammond was standing, and looked at him doubtfully, wonderingly, with not altogether a friendly eye, as he stood with his profile turned to her, and his eyes upon the landscape. She was inclined to be jealous of her brother's friend, who would most likely deprive her of much of that beloved society. Hitherto she had been Maulevrier's chosen companion, at Fellside—indeed, his sole companion after the dismissal of his tutor. Now this brown, bearded stranger would usurp her privileges—those two young men would go roaming over the hills, fishing, otter-hunting, going to distant wrestling matches and leaving her at home. It was a hard thing, and she was prepared to detest the interloper. Even to-night she would be a loser by his presence. Under ordinary circumstances she would have gone to the dining-room with Maulevrier, and sat by him and waited upon him as he ate. But she dared not intrude herself upon a meal that was to be shared with a stranger.

      She looked at John Hammond critically, eager to find fault with his appearence; but unluckily for her present humour there was not much room for fault-finding.

      He was tall, broad-shouldered, well-built. His enemies would hardly deny that he was good-looking—nay, even handsome. The massive regular features were irreproachable. He was more sunburnt than a gentleman ought to be, Mary thought. She told herself that his good looks were of a vulgar quality, like those of Charles Ford, the champion wrestler, whom she saw at the sports the other day. Why did Maulevrier pick up a companion who was evidently not of his own sphere? Hoydenish, plain-spoken, frank and affectionate as Mary Haselden was, she knew that she belonged to a race apart, that there were circles beneath circles, below her own world, circles which hers could never touch, and she supposed Mr. Hammond to be some waif from one of those nethermost worlds—a village doctor's son, perhaps, or even a tradesman's—sent to the University by some benevolent busybody, and placed at a disadvantage ever afterwards, an unfortunate anomaly, suspended between two worlds like Mahomet's coffin.

      The butler announced that his lordship's dinner was served.

      'Come along, Molly,' said Maulevrier; 'come and tell me about the terriers, while I eat my dinner.'

      Mary hesitated, glanced doubtfully at her grandmother, who made no sign, and then slipped out of the room, hanging fondly on her brother's arm, and almost forgetting that there was any such person as Mr. Hammond in existence.

      When these three were gone Lady Lesbia expressed herself strongly upon Maulevrier's folly in bringing such a person as Mr. Hammond to Fellside.

      'What are we to do with him, grandmother?' she said, pettishly. 'Is he to live with us, and be one of us, a person of whose belongings we know positively nothing, who owns that his people are common?'

      'My dear, he is your brother's friend, and we have the right to suppose he is a gentleman.'

      'Not on that account,' said Lesbia, more sharply than her wont. 'Didn't he make a friend, or almost a friend of Jack Howell, the huntsman, and of Ford, the wrestler. I have no confidence in Maulevrier's ideas of fitness.'

      'We shall find out all about this Mr. Hamleigh—no Hammond—in a day or two,' replied her ladyship, placidly; 'and in the meantime we must tolerate him, and be grateful to him if he reconcile Maulevrier to remaining at Fellside for the next six weeks.'

      Lesbia was silent. She did not consider Maulevrier's presence at Fellside an unmitigated advantage, or, indeed, his presence anywhere. Those two were not sympathetic. Maulevrier made fun of his elder sister's perfections, chaffed her intolerably about the great man she was going to captivate, in her first season, the great houses in which she was going to reign. Lesbia despised him for that neglect of all his opportunities of culture which had left him, after the most orthodox and costly curriculum, almost as ignorant as a ploughboy. She despised a man whose only delight was in horse and hound, gun and fishing-tackle. Molly would have cared very little for the guns or the fishing-tackle perhaps in the abstract; but she cared for everything that interested Maulevrier, even to the bagful of rats which were let loose in the stable-yard sometimes, for the education of a particularly game fox-terrier.

      There was plenty of talk

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