He patted her hand as he held it, patted and stroked it and looked at her with a tender and encouraging smile, which made Ida's eyes grow moist.

She rode down the dale gravely and sadly for some minutes: then the thought flashed through her mind, warming her heart, that she was not alone, but there was one who loved her and to whom she could by for consolation and encouragement. Yes, it was only right that she should tell Stafford all; there should be no concealment from him.

She rode down the dale looking for him, but he was nowhere to be seen.

When she came to the opening by the lake she saw the large, white Villa gleaming in the sunlight; a launch was patting off from the landing-place with men and women on board, and the could almost fancy that she heard the sound of laughter. The contrast of the prosperity typified by the great white place and the poverty of Heron Hall smote her sharply. She was poorer even than she had thought: what would the great, the rich Sir Stephen say to such a daughter-in-law? She watched the launch dreamily as it shot across the lake, and wondered whether Stafford was on board, laughing and talking perhaps with the beautiful Miss Falconer. In this moment of her trouble the thought was not pleasant, but there was no jealousy in it, for in her a.s.surance of his love he was free to talk and jest with whom he pleased. She turned, and after making her usual circuit, rode home-wards. As she reached the cross-road she heard the sound of a horse coming from the Hall, and she pulled up, her heart beating fast; then it sank with disappointment, for the horseman came round the bend and she saw that it was a groom.

He touched his hat as he pa.s.sed, and rode on at a sharp trot in the direction of Bryndremere. Ida wondered why he had been to the Hall, but concluded that he had gone there with some message about the farm produce.

When she rode into the stable-yard, she saw Jessie and Jason standing by the small hall door and talking eagerly, and Jessie came forward, and taking a letter from under her ap.r.o.n, held it out with a smile.

"It's just come from the Villa, Miss Ida," she said. "And oh, miss, what I told you this morning--it's quite true. It was Mr. Stafford's own groom as brought the note, and he says that his master is engaged to Miss Falconer, and that the whole place is in excitement over it. He was as proud as Punch, Miss Ida; for he says that his new mistress is terrible rich as well as beautiful, and that there'll be the grandest of grand doings up there."

The blood rushed to Ida's face for a moment, then faded, and she slipped the note into the pocket of her habit and laughed. For it sounded too ridiculous, too incredible to cause her even a shadow of annoyance. She gave one or two orders to Jason, then went into the hall, took the note from her pocket and looked at the address lovingly, lingeringly: for instinctively she knew whose hand had written it. It was the first letter she had received from him; what would it say to her? No doubt it was to tell her why he had not been able to meet her that morning, to ask her to meet him later in the day. With a blush of maidenly shame she lifted the envelope to her lips and kissed each written word.

Then she opened it, slowly, as lingeringly as she had looked at it, spinning out the pleasure, the delight which lay before her in the perusal of her first love-letter. With her foot upon the old-fashioned fender, her head drooping as if there was someone present to see her blushes, she read the letter; and it is not too much to say that at first she failed utterly to grasp its meaning. With knit brows and quaking heart, she read it again and again, until its significance was, so to speak, forced upon her; then the letter dropped from her hand, her arms fell limply to her sides, and she looked straight before her in a dazed, benumbed fashion, every word burning itself upon her brain and searing her heart.

The blow had fallen so suddenly, so unexpectedly, like a bolt from the blue, smiting the happiness of her young life as a sapling is smitten by summer lightning, that for the moment she felt no pain, nothing but the benumbing of all her faculties; so that she did not see the portrait of the dead and gone Heron upon which her eyes rested, did not hear her father's voice calling to her from the library, was conscious of nothing but those terrible words which were dinning through her brain like the booming of a great bell. Presently she uttered a low cry and clasped her head with her hand, as if to shut out the sound of the words that tortured her.

It could not be true--it could not be true! Stafford had not written it. It was some cruel jest, a very cruel jest, perpetrated by someone who hated them both, and who wantonly inflicted pain. Yes; that was it!

That could be the only explanation. Someone had written in his name; it was a forgery; she would meet Stafford presently, and they would laugh at it together. He would be very angry, would want to punish the person who had done it; but he and she would laugh together, and he would take her in his arms and kiss her in one of the many ways in which he had made a kiss an ecstasy of delight, and they would laugh together as he whispered that nothing should ever separate them.

She laughed now as she pictured the scene that would be enacted. But suddenly the laugh died on her lips, as there flashed across her mind the words Jessie had said. Stafford was engaged to Maude Falconer, the girl up at the Villa, whose beauty and grace and wealth all the dale was talking of.

Oh, G.o.d! Was there any truth in it, was there any truth in it? Had Stafford, indeed, written that cruel letter? Had he left her forever, forever, forever? Should she never see him again, never again hear him tell her that he loved her, would always love her?

The room spun round with her, she suddenly felt sick and faint, and, reeling, caught at the carved mantel-shelf to prevent herself from falling. Then gradually the death-like faintness pa.s.sed, and she became conscious that her father's voice was calling to her, and she clasped her head again and swept the hair from her forehead, and clenched her hands in the effort to gain her presence of mind and self-command.

She picked up the letter, and, with a shudder, thrust it in her bosom, as Cleopatra might have thrust the asp which was to destroy her; then with leaden feet, she crossed the hall and opened the library door, and saw her father standing by the table clutching some papers in one hand, and gesticulating wildly with the other. Dizzily, for there seemed to be a mist before her eyes, she went to him and laid a hand upon his arm.

"What is it, father?" she said, "Are you ill? What is the matter?"

He gazed at her vacantly and struck his hand on the table, after the manner of a child in a senseless pa.s.sion.

"Lost! Lost! All lost!" he mumbled, jumbling the words together almost incoherently.

"What is lost, father?" she asked.

"Everything, everything!" he cried, in the same manner. "I can't remember, can't remember! It's ruin, utter ruin! My head--I can't think, can't remember! Lost, lost!"

In her terror, she put her young arm round him as a mother encircles her child in the delirium of fever.

"Try and tell me, father!" she implored him. "Try and be calm, dearest!

Tell me, and I will help you. What is lost?"

He tried to struggle from her arms, tried to push her from him.

"You know!" he mumbled. "You've watched me--you know the truth!

Everything is lost! I am ruined! The mortgage! Herondale will pa.s.s away! I am a poor man, a very poor man! Have pity on me, have pity on me!"

He slipped, by their weight, from her arms and fell into the chair. She sank on to her knees, her arms still round him, and stroked and caressed his withered hand that twitched and shook; and to her horror his stony eyes grew more vacant, his jaw dropped, and he sank still lower in the chair. "Jessie! Jason!" she called, and they rushed in.

For a s.p.a.ce they stood aghast and unhelpful from fright, then Jason tried to lift his master from the heap into which he had collapsed. The old man's eyes closed, he straggled for breath, and when he had gained it, he looked from one to the other with a smile, a senile smile, which added to Ida's grief and terror.

"It's all right!" he whispered, huskily, pantingly. "It's all right; they don't know. They don't guess!" Then his manner changed to one of intense alarm and dismay. "Lost! Lost!" he gasped. "I'm ruined, rained!

Herondale has gone, gone--all is gone! My poor child--Ida!"

"Father!" broke from Ida's white lips. "Father, I am here. Look at me, speak to me. I am here--everything is not lost. I am here, and all is well."

His lips twisted into a smile, a smile of cunning, almost of glee; then he groaned, and the cry rose again:

"I can't remember--all is lost! Ruined! My poor child! Have pity on my child!"

As she clung to him, supporting him as she clung, she felt a shudder run through him, and he fell a lifeless heap upon her shoulder.

The minutes--were they minutes or years?--pa.s.sed, and were broken into fragments by a cry from Jessie.

"Miss Ida! Miss Ida! He's--the master's dead!'"

Ida raised her father's head from her shoulder and looked into his face, and knew that the girl had spoken the truth.

He was dead. She had lost both father and lover in one day!

CHAPTER XXVI.

Ida sat in the library on the morning of the funeral. A pelting rain beat upon the windows, over which the blinds had been drawn; the great silence which reigned in the chamber above, in which the dead master of Heron lay, brooded over the whole house, and seemed in no part of it more intense than in this great, book-lined room, in which G.o.dfrey Heron had spent so much of his life.

Ida lay back in the great arm-chair in which he had sat, her small brown hands lying limply in her lap, her eyes fixed absently upon the open book which lay on the table as he had left it. The pallor of her face, increased by her sorrow, was accentuated by the black dress, almost as plainly made as that which the red-eyed Jessie wore in her kitchen. Though nearly a week had elapsed since her father had died in her young arms, and notwithstanding her capacity for self-reliance, Ida had not yet recovered from the stupor of the shock.

She was scarcely thinking as she lay back in his chair and looked at the table over which he had bent for so many monotonous years; she scarcely realised that he had pa.s.sed out of her life, and that she was alone in the world; and she was only vaguely conscious that her sorrow had, so to speak, a double edge; that she had lost not only her father, but the man to whom she had given her heart, the man who should have been standing beside her now, shielding her with his strong arms, comforting her with words of pity and love. The double blow had fallen so suddenly, so unexpectedly, that the pain of it had been dulled and blunted. The capacity of human nature for suffering is, after all not unlimited. G.o.d says to physical pain and mental anguish, "Thus far and no farther;" and this limitation saved Ida from utter collapse.

Then, again, she was not free to indulge in idle grief, in the luxury of woe; the great house had still to be run, she had to bury her beloved dead, the mourning which seems such a hopeless mockery when the heart is racked with misery, had to be seen to; and she did it, and went through it all, with outward calm, sustained by that Heron spirit which may be described as the religion of her cla.s.s--_n.o.blesse oblige_.

Jessie had wept loudly through the house ever since the death, and could weep as loudly now; but if Ida shed any tears she wept in the silence and darkness of her own room, and no one heard her utter a moan. "To suffer in silence and be strong" was the badge of all her tribe, and she wore it with quiet stoicism.

G.o.dfrey Heron's death had happened so suddenly that the news of it scarcely got beyond the radius of the estate before the following morning, and Stafford had gone to London in ignorance of this second blow with which Fate had followed up the one he had dealt Ida: and when the neighbours--the Vaynes, the Bannerdales, and the Avorys--came quickly and readily enough to offer their sympathy and help, they could do nothing. The girl solitary and lonely in her grief as she had been solitary and lonely through her life, would see no one but the doctor and Mr. Wordley, and the people who had once been warm and intimate friends of the family left reluctantly and sully, to talk over the melancholy circ.u.mstance, and to wonder what would become of the daughter of the eccentric man who had lived the life of a recluse. Mr.

Wordley would have liked to have persuaded her to see some of the women who had hastened to comfort her; but he knew that any attempt at persuasion would have been in vain, that he would not have been able to break down the barrier of reserve which the girl had instinctively and reservedly erected between her suffering soul and the world. His heart ached for her, and he did all that a man could do to lighten the burden of her trouble; but there was very little that he could do beyond superintending the necessary arrangements for the funeral.

His first thought was of the relatives; but, somewhat to his own dismay, he found that the only one whom he could trace was a certain cousin, a more than middle-aged man who, though he bore the name of Heron, was quite unknown to Ida, and, so far as Mr. Wordley was aware, had not crossed the threshold of the Hall for many years. He was a certain John Heron, a retired barrister, who had gone in for religion, not in the form of either of the Established Churches, but of that of one of the least known sects, the members of which called themselves some kind of brothers, were supposed to be very strict observers of the Scriptural law, and were considered by those who did not belong to them both narrow-minded and uncharitable.

Mr. John Heron was a prominent member of this little sect, and was famous in its small circles for his extreme sanct.i.ty and his eloquence as a lay preacher. Mr. Wordley, with much misgiving, had invited this, the only relative he could find, to the funeral, and Ida was now awaiting this gentleman's arrival.

The stealthy footsteps which belong to those who minister to the dead pa.s.sed up and down the great house, Jason was setting out the simple "funeral baked meats" which are considered appropriate to the occasion, and Mr. Wordley paced up and down the hall with his hands behind his back, listening to the undertaker's men upstairs, and glancing through the window in expectation of the carriage which had been sent for Mr.

John Heron. Presently he saw it rounding a bend of the drive, and went into the library to prepare Ida.

She raised her head but not her eyes as he entered, and looked at him with that dull apathy which denotes the benumbed heart, the mind crushed under its heavy weight of sorrow.

"I came in to tell you, my dear, that Mr. John Heron is coming," he said. "The carriage is just turning the bend of the drive." "I will come," she said, rising and supporting herself by the heavy, carved arm of the great chair.