As he was turning back to the hall, however, he heard voices from the mist--a loud man's voice, then a little cry as of some one in fright or anger, then a song. The rollicking tune of it shouted into the night, into the stately stillness that surrounded the old house, had the abruptest, unseemliest effect.

Helbeck ran down the steps. A dog-cart with lights approached the gateway in the low stone enclosure before the house. It shot through so fast and so awkwardly as to graze the inner post. There was another little cry.

Then, with various lurches and lunges, the cart drove round the gravel, and brought up somewhere near the steps.

Hubert Mason jumped down.

"Who's that? Mr. Helbeck? O Lord! glad to see yer, I'm sure! There's that little silly--she's been making such a' fuss all the way--thought I was going to upset her into the river, I do believe. She would try and get at the reins, though I told her it was the worst thing to do, whatever--to be interfering with the driver. Lord! I thought she'd have used the whip to me!"

And Mason stood beside the shafts, with his arms on the side, laughing loudly and looking at Laura.

"Stand out of the way, sir!" said Helbeck sternly, "and let me help Miss Fountain."

"Oh! I say!--Come now, I'm not going to stand you coming it over me twice in the same sort--not I," cried the young man with a violent change of tone. "_You_ get out of the way, d--mn you! I brought Miss Fountain home, and she's my cousin--so there!--not yours."

"Hubert, go away at once!" said Laura's shaking but imperious voice. "I prefer that Mr. Helbeck should help me."

She had risen and was clinging to the rail of the dog-cart, while her face drooped so that Helbeck could not see it.

Mason stepped back with another oath, caught his foot in the reins, which he had carelessly left hanging, and fell on his knees on the gravel.

"No matter," said Helbeck, seeing that Laura paused in terror. "Give me your hand, Miss Fountain."

She slipped on the step in the darkness, and Helbeck caught her and set her on her feet.

"Go in, please. I will look after him."

She ran up the steps, then turned to look.

Mason, still swearing and muttering, had some difficulty in getting up.

Helbeck stood by till he had risen and disentangled the reins.

"If you don't drive carefully down the park in the fog you'll come to harm," he said, shortly, as Mason mounted to his seat.

"That's none of your business," said Mason sulkily. "I brought my cousin all right--I suppose I can take myself. Now, come up, will you!"

He struck the pony savagely on the back with the reins. The tired animal started forward; the cart swayed again from side to side. Helbeck held his breath as it pa.s.sed the gate-posts; but it shaved through, and soon nothing but the gallop of retreating hoofs could be heard through the night.

He mounted the steps, and shut and barred the outer door. When he entered the hall, Laura was sitting by the oak table, one hand supporting and hiding her face, the other hanging listlessly beside her.

She struggled to her feet as he came in. The hood of her blue cloak had fallen backwards, and her hair was in confusion round her face and neck.

Her cheeks were very white, and there were tears in her eyes. She had never seemed to him so small, so childish, or so lovely.

He took no notice of her agitation or of her efforts to speak. He went to a tray of wine and biscuits that had been left by his orders on a side-table, and poured out some wine.

"No, I don't want it," she said, waving it away. "I don't know what to say----"

"You would do best to take it," he said, interrupting her.

His quiet insistence overcame her, and she drank it. It gave her back her voice and a little colour. She bit her lip, and looked after Helbeck as he walked away to the farther end of the hall to light a candle for her.

"Mr. Helbeck," she began as he came near. Then she gathered force. "You must--you ought to let me apologise."

"For what? I am afraid you had a disagreeable and dangerous drive home.

Would you like me to wake one of the servants--Ellen, perhaps--and tell her to come to you?"

"Oh! you won't let me say what I ought to say," she exclaimed in despair.

"That my cousin should have behaved like this--should have insulted you----"

"No! no!" he said with some peremptoriness. "Your cousin insulted you by daring to drive with you in such a state. That is all that matters to me--or should, I think, matter to you. Will you have your candle, and shall I call anyone?"

She shook her head and moved towards the staircase, he accompanying her.

When he saw how feebly she walked, he was on the point of asking her to take his arm and let him help her to her room; but he refrained.

At the foot of the stairs she paused. Her "good-night" died in her throat as she offered her hand. Her dejection, her girlish shame, made her inexpressibly attractive to him; it was the first time he had ever seen her with all her arms thrown down. But he said nothing. He bade her good-night with a cheerful courtesy, and, returning to the hall fire, he stood beside it till he heard the distant shutting of her door.

Then he sank back into his chair and sat motionless, with knitted brows, for nearly an hour, staring into the caverns of the fire.

CHAPTER II

Laura awoke very early the following morning, but though the sun was bright outside, it brought no gaiety to her. The night before she had hurried her undressing, that she might bury herself in her pillow as quickly as possible, and force sleep to come to her. It was her natural instinct in the face of pain or humiliation. To escape from it by any summary method was always her first thought. "I will, I must go to sleep!" she had said to herself, in a miserable fury with herself and fate; and by the help of an intense exhaustion sleep came.

But in the morning she could do herself no more violence. Memory took its course, and a very disquieting course it was. She sat up in bed, with her hands round her knees, thinking not only of all the wretched and untoward incidents connected with the ball, but of the whole three weeks that had gone before it. What had she been doing, how had she been behaving, that this odious youth should have dared to treat her in such a way?

Fricka jumped up beside her, and Laura held the dog's nose against her cheek for comfort, while she confessed herself. Oh! what a fool she had been. Why, pray, had she been paying all these visits to the farm, and spending all these hours in this young fellow's company? Her quick intelligence unravelled all the doubtful skein. Yearning towards her kindred?--yes, there had been something of that. Recoil from the Bannisdale ways, an angry eagerness to scout them and fly them?--yes, that there had always been in plenty. But she dived deeper into her self-disgust, and brought up the real bottom truth, disagreeable and hateful as it was: mere excitement about a young man, as a young man--mere love of power over a great hulking fellow whom other people found unmanageable! Aye, there it was, in spite of all the glosses she had put upon it in her letters to Molly Friedland. All through, she had known perfectly well that Hubert Mason was not her equal; that on a number of subjects he had vulgar habits and vulgar ideas; that he often expressed his admiration for her in a way she ought to have resented.

There were whole sides of him, indeed, that she shrank from exploring--that she wanted, nay, was determined, to know nothing about.

On the other hand, her young daring, for want of any better prey, had taken pleasure from the beginning in bringing him under her yoke. With her second visit to the farm she saw that she could make him her slave--that she had only to show him a little flattery, a little encouragement, and he would be as submissive and obedient to her as he was truculent and ill-tempered towards the rest of the world. And her vanity had actually plumed itself on so poor a prey! One excuse--yes, there was the one excuse! With her he had shown the side that she alone of his kindred could appreciate. But for the fear of Cousin Elizabeth she could have kept him hanging over the piano hour after hour while she played, in a pa.s.sion of delight. Here was common ground. Nay, in native power he was her superior, though she, with her better musical training, could help and correct him in a thousand ways. She had the woman's pa.s.sion for influence; and he seemed like wax in her hands. Why not help him to education and refinement, to the cultivation of the best that was in him? She would persuade Cousin Elizabeth--alter and amend his life for him--and Mr. Helbeck should see that there were better ways of dealing with people than by looking down upon them and despising them.

And now the very thought of these vain and silly dreams set her face aflame. Power over him? Let her only remember the humiliations, through which she had been dragged! All the dance came back upon her--the strange people, the strange young men, the strange, raftered room, with the noise of the mill-stream and the weir vibrating through it, and mingling with the chatter of the fiddles. But she had been determined to enjoy it, to give herself no airs, to forget with all her might that she was anyway different from these dale-folk, whose blood was hers. And with the older people all had been easy. With the elderly women especially, in their dark gowns and large Sunday collars, she had felt herself at home; again and again she had put herself under their wing, while in their silent way they turned their shrewd motherly eyes upon her, and took stock of her and every detail of her dress. And the old men, with their patriarchal manners and their broad speech--it had been all sweet and pleasant to her. "Noo, Miss, they tell ma as yo'.are Stephen Fountain's dowter. An I mut meak bold ter c.u.m an speak to thee, for a knew 'un when he was a lile lad." Or "Yo'll gee ma your hand, Miss Fountain, for we're pleased and proud to git, yo' here. Yer fadther an mea gaed to skule togedther. My worrd, but he was parlish cliver! An I daursay as you teak afther him."

Kind folk! with all the signs of their hard and simple life about them.

But the young men--how she had hated them!--whether they were shy, or whether they were bold; whether they romped with their sweethearts, and laughed at their own jokes like bulls of Bashan, or whether they wore their best clothes as though the garments burnt them, and danced the polka in a perspiring and anguished silence! No; she was not of _their_ cla.s.s, thank Heaven! She never wished to be. One man had asked her to put a pin in his collar; another had spilt a cup of coffee over her white dress; a third had confided to her that his young lady was "that luvin"

to him in public, he had been fair obliged to bid her "keep hersel to hersel afore foak." The only partner with whom it had given her the smallest pleasure to dance had been the schoolmaster and princ.i.p.al host of the evening, a tall, sickly young man, who wore spectacles and talked through his nose. But he talked of things she understood, and he danced tolerably. Alas! there had come the rub. Hubert Mason had stood sentinel beside her during the early part of the evening. He had a.s.sumed the proudest and most exclusive airs with regard to her, and his chief aim seemed to be to impress upon her the prestige he enjoyed among his fellows as a football player and an athlete. In the end his patronage and his boasting had become insupportable to a girl of any spirit. And his dancing! It seemed to her that he held her before him like a shield, and then charged the room with her. She had found herself the centre of all eyes, her pretty dress torn, her hair about her ears. So that she had shaken him off--with too much impatience, no doubt, and too little consideration for the touchiness of his temper. And then, what stormy looks, what mutterings, what disappearances into the refreshment-room--and, finally, what, fierce jealousy of the schoolmaster! Laura awoke at last to the disagreeable fact that she had to drive home with him--and he had already made her ridiculous. Even Polly--the bedizened Polly--looked grave, and there had been angry conferences between her and her brother.

Then came the departure, Laura by this time full of terrors, but not knowing what to do, nor how else she was to get home. And, oh! that grinning band of youths round the door--Mason's triumphant leap into the cart and boisterous farewell to his friends--and that first perilous moment, when the pony had almost backed into the mill stream, and was only set right again by half a dozen stalwart arms, amid the laughter of the street!

As for the wild drive through the dark, she shivered again, half with anger, half with terror, as she thought of it. How had they ever got home? She could not tell. He was drunk, of course. He seemed to her to have driven into everything and over everything, abusing the schoolmaster and Mr. Helbeck and his mother all the time, and turning upon her when she answered him, or showed any terror of what might happen to them, now with fury, and now with attempts at love-making which it had taken all her power over him to quell.

Their rush up the park had been like the ride of the wild horseman. Every moment she had expected to be in the river. And with the approach of the house he had grown wilder and more unmanageable than before. "Dang it!

let's wake up the old Papist!" he had said to her when she had tried to stop his singing. "What harm'll it do?"

As for the shame of their arrival, the very thought of Mr. Helbeck standing silent on the steps as they approached, of Hubert's behaviour, of her host's manner to her in the hall, made her shut her eyes and hide her red face against Fricka for sympathy. How was she ever to meet Mr.

Helbeck again, to hold her own against him any more!