The Lady Evelyn.

by Max Pemberton.

PROLOGUE

THE FACE IN THE RIVER

The porter did not know; the station-master was not sure; but both were agreed that it was a "good step to the 'all"--by which they signified the Derbyshire mansion of the third Earl of Melbourne.

"Might be you'd get a cab, might be you wouldn't," said the porter somewhat loftily--for here was a pa.s.senger who had spoken of walking over: "that'll depend on Jacob Price and the beer he's drunk this night. Some nights he can drive a man and some nights he can't. I'm not here to speak for him more than any other."

The station-master, who had been giving the whole weight of his intelligence to a brown paper parcel with no address upon it, here chimed in to ask a question in that patronizing manner peculiar to station-masters.

"Did his lordship expect you, sir?" he asked with some emphasis; as though, had it been the case, he certainly should have been informed of it. The reply found him all civility.

"I should have been here by the train arriving at half-past six," said Gavin Ord, the pa.s.senger in question--"it is my fault, certainly. No doubt, they sent to meet me----"

"The brown shay and a pair of 'osses stood in the yard more'n an hour,"

exclaimed the porter with just reproach. "I'll tell Mr. Jacob. He knows his betters when he sees him, drunk or sober----"

"Thank you," said Gavin quietly, "but I will not put his knowledge to the proof. After all, it's only five miles, you say----"

"And a public-house at Moretown if the dust sticks in your throat.

You'll do better walking than up alongside old Jacob at this time of night, sir----"

"Had we known that his lordship expected a guest, we'd have answered for a carriage," added the station-master, still apologetically.

The tall, fair-haired Englishman perplexed him. He hardly knew whether he addressed a Duke or a commoner. The voice and manner suggested the former; the intention to walk spoke of a vulgar habit rather befitting his lordship's curate than the honored guest of Melbourne Hall. Gavin Ord, upon his part, perhaps, delighted in perplexing people. He quite understood the kind of curiosity he had aroused; and, refusing to gratify it, he s.n.a.t.c.hed up a light dressing bag; and leaving directions for his heavier luggage to be forwarded in the morning, he set off briskly upon the high road to Moretown, beyond which, as all the world knows, lies the Manor of Melbourne.

"Going to make a long stay, sir?" had been the amiable station-master's last shot.

"Oh, I may settle down there for a long time," said Ord in reply; and this news was all over the village in an hour.

Strangers upon the road to Melbourne Hall were not so many that one should escape remark.

"If he's for the Lady Evelyn," the blithe porter confessed over his cups at a later hour, "she might go farther and get a worse-looking man. Gave me a shillin', he did, and carried his bag hisself. That's what I call a gentleman, now."

Unconscious of this tribute to his qualities, Gavin Ord was then more than three miles upon his road to Melbourne Hall. A hot day of August had given place to a delicious night, fresh and cool and redolent of sweet perfumes. The moon stood high above the horizon, shining with glorious mellow light upon the gathered sheaves and the grattan where the wheat was garnered. So plain were the hill-tops to be seen that the very flocks could almost be numbered upon them; while the bare walls of limestone, the tors of spar, and the higher mounts were veined as by rifts of jewels, giving back in glittering flashes the moonbeams they had husbanded. The roads themselves were eloquent by night. When a farmer's cart went rumbling by, Gavin could hear the echo of the horse's hoofs and the rolling sound of wheels for quite a long time.

He was a man of redoubtable physique, trained by laborious days at home and abroad to the finer qualities of his endurance; and nothing was more to his liking than this lonely pilgrimage to a splendid house wherein he believed that an advantageous welcome awaited him. A stranger to Lord Melbourne, he never allowed himself to forget that his own talents and achievements had made this visit possible and opened to him the doors of a house which few even of the aristocracy now entered.

For Gavin Ord was callen in London the first among the younger school of architects--an artist of prodigious originality and daring, and one with as many sides to his talent as a diamond has facets. Already had Burlington House heaped her honors upon him. The great Church at Kensington would, he believed, stand as his memorial to all time. But for a prodigality and a refusal to consider a mere matter of money, his plans for a new cathedral in the North would certainly have been accepted by the committee. As it was, critics said, "There is the man of to-morrow." He liked to hear them say it, for he had a great conceit in his art if none for himself. Something of the spirit of the old-time builders moved within him. His imagination dwelt in lofty temples, roamed in vast aisles--looked down upon men from a masterpiece of spires. He was but a servant, if only the stone which dominated men's hearts.

And now this famous old recluse, this eccentric unknown Earl of Melbourne, had summoned him to save the stately Melbourne Hall from its only enemy--time. He could not have found a more congenial task upon all the continents.

There can be no journey more pleasant than that which carries us a stage upon the road to our ambitions. Every event of the wayside is then an adventure to us; every inn at which we rest seems to offer us ambrosia. Here was Gavin Ord, at ten o'clock of the night, as good a walker upon the road to Melbourne Hall as any trained athlete out with the lark for a morning breather. Five or ten miles to go, it mattered nothing to him. He had forgotten already the five hours in a stuffy train; his mind was set upon the beauties of the moonlit landscape, the fine wooded slopes of the hills, the twinkling lights in the hollows, the dark towers of the scattered churches--more than all, upon the distant goal and the reception which would await him there.

How earnestly had the old Earl implored him to go to the Manor!

"Here is the finest Tudor house in England," he had written; "you can save it. Make it your home and learn to love it as I do. They tell me that in your leisure you ride and shoot. I will introduce you to the finest fencer in Derbyshire, and you shall tell me what you think of the pheasants. Don't expect to find a house-party. I see few people.

I desire to see fewer. My daughter will play tennis with you, and, if you are a golfer, there are lean long women on the hills who talk of nothing else but hazards and whins. These preach sermons in stones.

Come and hear them, and my motor shall show you Derbyshire. But, above all, become the servant of the Manor, as every true artist must be."

The letter of a man, Gavin said to himself when he read it. He liked it best because there was no gilt-edge of money upon it. The Earl's prodigious wealth had been the one blot hitherto upon the fair panorama of his desires. "There will be a host of flunkies in red breeches," he had thought, "and every one of them will look the question, 'How much is he good for?'" He knew that the present Master of Melbourne Hall had come to the estate and the t.i.tle almost by accident late in life, and after an adventurous career which men spoke of openly in clubs, but rarely in private life. A wild man who had been everything from a discredited attache at Bukharest to an equally unsuccessful miner in Australia--this was the third Earl of Melbourne.

And what of his daughter, the Lady Evelyn?

There were but wild fables spoken about this unknown girl and the secluded life her father compelled her to live at the Manor House.

Some said she was the daughter of a Roumanian gypsy whom the Earl had married after his disgrace at Bukharest. Others declared that her dead mother had been an actress who had enjoyed a brief spell of notoriety in Vienna and thence had been driven out by the infatuation of an archduke. None knew the truth, but there were many to suggest what the truth might be. Openly and scandalously, as the world will, idle tongues hinted that the Earl must have some good reason for his eccentric conduct. There were even stories that the Lady Evelyn was unmistakably a gypsy girl herself. "As brown as a walnut chiffonier,"

said little Backbiter at the Club. The fellow had never been within fifty miles of Melbourne Hall; and if he had met the Earl, he would have gone down on his marrow bones to him.

Gavin Ord recalled some of these stories as he followed the tortuous road and left the solitary village still farther behind him. They did not interest him. He had gone into Derbyshire to see not a woman but a house. Delight that he should be chosen for guardian of such a national treasure as Melbourne Hall went with him upon his way. He must be now, he thought, but a mile from the Manor gates. The road had become narrow and closely bordered by leafy elms. No longer could he see the moonlit heights or the twinkling lights in the valleys. There were no kindly beams to guide his steps. In weird darkness he followed the dusty track and pressed on toward the Manor. The rustling of leaves sounded almost like a human voice in his ears. He liked to think that Nature was still awake and speaking to him.

So it is evident that he possessed that quasi-divine attribute, imagination. His mood of thought responded instantly to any change, atmospheric, or of the light of the heavens. The sunshine could ever build temples of success for him; the twilight rarely failed to bring the question, what is the good of it all, of ambition and the stress and strife of arenas. In the night he would awake to remember that all men must die. In the daytime he would laugh at death and all the vain problems of the hereafter. That Melbourne Hall, approached in this gloom of a summer's night, should provoke no evil thoughts but only those of good omen, seemed a new witness to the pleasure with which he contemplated his stay there. He would accomplish something amid those ancient stones by which men should remember him. The aspiration quickened his step. A turn of the road revealed the lodge-gates, with a lighted window and a pleasant cottage. He entered Lord Melbourne's park and discerned the Hall, dim and stately and starred with lights, across the little river which stood for a moat before its walls.

This, then, was his goal, this superb fabric which the genius of the mediaeval age had bequeathed to England and to posterity. No words could rightly have described the emotions which stirred his imagination as he stood to contemplate the jagged line of building and battlement, chapel, tower and stable, which his hand should s.n.a.t.c.h from the greedy hand of time. The very park, with its soft gra.s.ses, and deer in shadow pictures beneath the trees, could conjure up a vision of knights and pages and stately dames and all the witching pageantry of half-forgotten centuries. The great house itself might have been the house of a thousand mysteries, locked in banded coffers, enshrined in ghostly walls--crying aloud none the less to him who would listen to the tongue of their romance. Gavin Ord stood in an ecstasy of homage to worship at the gates of such a temple as this. And, standing so, he heard a woman's cry.

He had walked across the park with slow steps and come to the narrow bridge of five Roman arches which spanned the shallow river--shallow, save for one deep pool over which many a fisherman must have thrown a skilful fly. Standing by the bal.u.s.trade to contemplate the picture, his delighted eyes traced every tower and pinnacle of Melbourne Hall with an artist's ecstasy--thence looked out over the moonlit park to glades of surpa.s.sing beauty and scenes which the centuries had hallowed. How inimitable it all was--the mighty yews about which Elizabeth's courtiers had grouped; the groves which had listened to many a child of Pampinea--the fearsome walls, what tragedies, what comedies, had been played within them! Even a dullard might contemplate the scene with awe. Gavin Ord was no dullard, and the spell it cast upon him was such as he had never known in all his life.

So entirely did it claim his mind and will that when he heard a woman's low cry beneath the very bridge he stood upon, he scarcely turned his head or gave the matter a thought.

What had happened; whence came the sound? Being repeated, he could no longer ignore it. In truth, it awed him not a little; for it was not the voice of a woman in danger but of one asking his pity, his help, as it seemed, in a low whispering voice which he now heard more clearly than if a strong man had shouted at him. Taking one quick glance at the river, Gavin declared that the cry could not have come from there.

Splashing and leaping over mossy boulders, a child might have waded across the stream, he thought. Then whence did the cry come? Turning about, to the right, to the left, he discovered himself to be still alone. It was the voice of imagination he began to say; and was about to quit the place when he heard it for the third time, and so unmistakably, that he no longer doubted it to be human.

Some one called to him from the river below the bridge.

He climbed upon the old stone parapet and looked down straight to the black silent pool about the arches. So dark was it in the shadows that the keenest eyes might not have perceived a human thing there. Gavin Ord, however, saw the thing as clearly as in daylight--a woman's fair head with great sodden leaves about it and streaming black hair caught up upon the ripples. A shudder of awe indescribable came upon him as he looked. For the woman was dead, he said--had been long dead, and yet her voice spoke to him.

He knew that she was dead, for the water lapped upon her half-closed eyes and the fair head turned slowly as the eddies swirled slowly about it. Every right instinct told him that this was a vision and not a truth of the night. He listened for the voice again; but it was silent now. As it ceased to speak to him, the spell vanished. He ran round quickly to the river bank and clambered over the slippery stones to the pool's edge.

It was black as night and void as the ether.

Gavin Ord was not a nervous man and very far from a superst.i.tious one.

When he had quite a.s.sured himself that he had been dreaming, his first act was to return to the path and laugh aloud at the whole venture.

"Melbourne Hall is generous to me," he said; "here are the very ghosts coming out to welcome me."

None the less he tried to remember what he had eaten in the train for dinner and whether his recent nights had been late or early.

"I shall get to bed at ten here," he said to himself, "and put in a good walk before breakfast. I have been doing a good deal and I never was great at night work. Of course, if I told anyone, I should be written down a liar. It's always the case when you hear or see anything the other man has not seen or heard."

He caught up his bag and marched on resolutely up the wide gravelled drive by which you reach the great gate of the Manor. A loud bell answering to his touch awakened splendid echoes in the courtyard of the house and set the dogs barking within. When a footman opened to him, he discovered that Melbourne Hall was a building about a quadrangle and that its main door admitted him no farther than to the great square court of which the chapel and the banqueting hall were the chief ornaments. Above the latter, lights shone brightly in many windows.

But the courtyard itself lay in darkness.