"And why," says Fairthorn, bluntly and coa.r.s.ely, urging at least reprieve; "why, if it must be, not wait till you are no more? Why must the old house be buried before you are?"

"Because," answered Darrell, "such an order, left by will, would seem a reproach to my heirs; it would wound Lionel to the quick. Done in my lifetime, and just after I have given my blessing on his marriage, I can suggest a thousand reasons for an old man's whim; and my manner alone will dispel all idea of a covert affront to his charming innocent bride."

"I wish she were hanged, with all my heart," muttered Fairthorn, "coming here to do such astonishing mischief! But, sir, I can't obey you; 'tis no use talking. You must get some one else. Parson Morley will do it--with pleasure too, no doubt; or that hobbling old man whom I suspect to be a conjurer. Who knows but what he may get knocked on the head as he is looking on with his wicked one eye; and then there will be an end of him, too, which would be a great satisfaction!"

"Pshaw, my dear d.i.c.k; there is no one else I can ask but you. The Parson would argue; I've had enough of his arguings; and the old man is the last whom my own arguings could deceive. Fiat just.i.tia."

"Don't, sir, don't; you are breaking my heart--'tis a shame, sir,"

sobbed the poor faithful rebel.

"Well, d.i.c.k, then I must see it done myself; and you shall go on first to Sorrento, and hire some villa to suit us. I don't see why Lionel should not be married next week; then the house will be clear.

And--yes--it was cowardly in me to shrink. Mine be the task. Shame on me to yield it to another. Go back to thy flute, d.i.c.k.

'Neque tibias Euterpe cohibet, nec Polyhymnia Lesboum refugit tendere barbiton!'"

At that last remorseless shaft from the Horatian quiver, "Venenatis gravida sagittis," Fairthorn could stand ground no longer; there was a shamble--a plunge--and once more the man was vanished.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE FLUTE-PLAYER SHOWS HOW LITTLE MUSIC HATH POWER TO SOOTHE THE SAVAGE BREAST--OF A MUSICIAN.

Fairthorn found himself on the very spot in which, more than five years ago, Lionel, stung by Fairthorn's own incontinent p.r.i.c.kles, had been discovered by Darrell. There he threw himself on the ground, as the boy had done; there, like the boy, he brooded moodily, bitterly--sore with the world and himself. To that letter, written on the day that Darrell had so shocked him, and on which letter he had counted as a last forlorn--hope, no answer had been given. In an hour or so, Lionel would arrive; those hateful nuptials, dooming Fawley as the nuptials of Paris and Helen had doomed Troy, would be finally arranged. In another week the work of demolition would commence. He never meant to leave Darrell to superintend that work. No; grumble and refuse as he might till the last moment, he knew well enough that, when it came to the point, he, Richard Fairthorn, must endure any torture that could save Guy Darrell from a pang. A voice comes singing low through the grove--the patter of feet on the crisp leaves. He looks up; Sir Isaac is scrutinising him gravely--behind Sir Isaac, Darrell's own doe, led patiently by Sophy, yes, lending its faithless neck to that female criminal's destroying hand. He could not bear that sight, which added insult to injury. He scrambled up--darted a kick at Sir Isaac--s.n.a.t.c.hed the doe from the girl's hand, and looked her in the face (her--not Sophy, but the doe) with a reproach that, if the brute had not been lost to all sense of shame, would have cut her to the heart; then, turning to Sophy, he said: "No, Miss! I reared this creature--fed it with my own hands, Miss. I gave it up to Guy Darrell, Miss; and you shan't steal this from him, whatever else you may do, Miss."

SOPHY.--"Indeed, Mr. Fairthorn, it was for Mr. Darrell's sake that I wished to make friends with the doe--as you would with poor Sir Isaac, if you would but try and like me--a little, only a very little, Mr.

Fairthorn."

FAIRTHORN.--"Don't!"

SOPHY.--"Don't what? I am so sorry to see I have annoyed you somehow.

You have not been the same person to me the last two or three days. Tell me what I have done wrong; scold me, but make it up."

FAIRTHORN.--"Don't holdout your hand to me! Don't be smiling in my face!

I don't choose it! Get out of my sight! You are standing between me and the old house--robbing me even of my last looks at the home which you--"

SOPHY.--"Which I--what?"

FAIRTHORN.--"Don't, I say, don't--don't tempt me. You had better not ask questions--that's all. I shall tell you the truth; I know I shall; my tongue is itching to tell it. Please to walk on."

Despite the grotesque manner and astounding rudeness of the flute-player, his distress of mind was so evident--there was something so genuine and earnest at the bottom of his ludicrous anger--that Sopby began to feel a vague presentiment of evil. That she was the mysterious cause of some great suffering to this strange enemy, whom she had unconsciously provoked, was clear; and she said, therefore, with more gravity than she had before evinced:

"Mr. Fairthorn, tell me how I have incurred your displeasure, I entreat you to do so; no matter how painful the truth may be, it is due to us both not to conceal it."

A ray of hope darted through Fairthorn's enraged and bewildered mind. He looked to the right--he looked to the left; no one near. Releasing his hold on the doe, he made a sidelong dart towards Sophy, and said: "Hush; do you really care what becomes of Mr. Darrell?"

"To be sure I do."

"You would not wish him to die broken-hearted in a foreign land--that old house levelled to the ground and buried in the lake? Eh, Miss--eh?"

"How can you ask me such questions?" said Sophy, faintly. "Do speak plainly, and at once."

"Well, I will, Miss. I believe you are a good young lady, after all--and don't wish really to bring disgrace upon all who want to keep you in the dark, and--"

"Disgrace!" interrupted Sopby; and her pure spirit rose, and the soft blue eye flashed a ray like a shooting-star.

"No, I am sure you would not like it; and some time or other you could not help knowing, and you would be very sorry for it. And that boy Lionel, who was as proud as Guy Darrell himself when I saw him last (prouder indeed)--that he should be so ungrateful to his benefactor!

And, indeed, the day may come when he may turn round on you, or on the lame old gentleman, and say he has been disgraced. Should not wonder at all! Young folks when they are sweet-hearting only talk about roses and angels, and such-like; but when husbands and wives fall out, as they always do sooner or later, they don't mince their words then, and they just take the sharpest thing that they can find at their tongue's end.

So you may depend on it, my dear Miss, that some day or other that young Haughton will say, 'that you lost him the old Manor-house and the old Darrell name,' and have been his disgrace; that's the very word, Miss; I have heard husbands and wives say it to each other over and over again."

SOPHY.--"Oh, Mr. Fairthorn! Mr. Fairthorn! these horrid words cannot be meant for me. I will go to Mr. Darrell--I will ask him how I can be a dis--" Her lips could not force out the word.

FAIRTHORN.--"Ay; go to Mr. Darrell, if you please. He will deny it all; he will never speak to me again. I don't care--I am reckless. But it is not the less true that you make him an exile because you may make me a beggar."

SOPHY (wringing her hands).--"Have you no mercy, Mr. Fairthorn? Will you not explain?"

FAIRTHORN.--"Yes, if you will promise to keep it secret at least for the next six months--anything for breathing-time."

SOPHY (impatiently).--"I promise, I promise; speak, speak."

And then Fairthorn did speak! He did speak of Jasper Losely--his character--his debas.e.m.e.nt--even of his midnight visit to her host's chamber. He did speak of the child fraudulently sought to be thrust on Darrell--of Darrell's just indignation and loathing. The man was merciless; though he had not an idea of the anguish he was inflicting, he was venting his own anguish. All the mystery of her past life became clear at once to the unhappy girl--all that had been kept from her by protecting love. All her vague conjectures now became a dreadful certainty;--explained now why Lionel had fled her--why he had written that letter, over the contents of which she had pondered, with her finger on her lip, as if to hush her own sighs--all, all! She marry Lionel now! impossible! She bring disgrace upon him in return for such generous, magnanimous affection! She drive his benefactor, her grandsire's vindicator, from his own hearth! She--she--that Sophy who, as a mere infant, had recoiled from the thought of playful subterfuge and tamperings with plain honest truth! She rose before Fairthorn had done; indeed, the tormentor, left to himself, would not have ceased till nightfall.

"Fear not, Mr. Fairthorn," she said, resolutely; "Mr. Darrell will be no exile! his house will not be destroyed. Lionel Haughton shall not wed the child of disgrace! Fear not, sir; all is safe!"

She shed not a tear; nor was there writ on her countenance that CHANGE, speaking of blighted hope, which had pa.s.sed over it at her young lover's melancholy farewell. No, now she was supported--now there was a virtue by the side of a sorrow--now love was to shelter and save the beloved from disgrace--from disgrace! At that thought, disgrace fell harmless from herself, as the rain from the plumes of a bird. She pa.s.sed on, her cheek glowing, her form erect.

By the porch-door she met Waife and the Morleys. With a kind of wild impetuosity she seized the old man's arm, and drew it fondly, clingingly within her own. Henceforth they two were to be, as in years gone by, all in all to each other. George Morley eyed her countenance in thoughtful surprise. Mrs. Morley, bent as usual on saying something seasonably kind, burst into an eulogium on her brilliant colour. So they pa.s.sed on towards the garden side of the house. Wheels--the tramp of hoofs, full gallop; and George Morley, looking up, exclaimed: "Ha! here comes Lionel! and see, Darrell is hastening out to welcome him!"

CHAPTER IX.

THE LETTER ON WHICH RICHARD FAIRTHORN RELIED FOR THE DEFEAT OF THE CONSPIRACY AGAINST FAWLEY MANOR-HOUSE. BAD ASPECTS FOR HOUSES. THE HOUSE OF VIPONT IS THREATENED. A PHYSICIAN ATTEMPTS TO MEDICINE TO A MIND DISEASED. A STRANGE COMMUNICATION, WHICH HURRIES THE READER ONTO THE NEXT CHAPTER.

It has been said that Fairthorn had committed to a certain letter his last desperate hope that something might yet save Fawley from demolition, and himself and his master from an exile's home in that smiling nook of earth to which Horace invited Septimius, as uniting the advantages of a mild climate, excellent mutton, capital wine; and affording to Septimius the prospective privilege of sprinkling a tear over the cinder of his poetical friend while the cinder was yet warm; inducements which had no charm at all to Fairthorn, who was quite satisfied with the Fawley southdowns--held in just horror all wishy-washy light wines--and had no desire to see Darrell reduced to a cinder for the pleasure of sprinkling that cinder with a tear.

The letter in question was addressed to Lady Montfort. Unscrupulously violating the sacred confidence of his master, the treacherous wretch, after accusing her, in language little more consistent with the respect due to the fair s.e.x than that which he had addressed to Sophy, of all the desolation that the perfidious nuptials of Caroline Lyndsay had brought upon Guy Darrell, declared that the least Lady Montfort could do to repair the wrongs inflicted by Caroline Lyndsay, was--not to pity his master!--that her pity was killing him. He repeated, with some grotesque comments of his own, but on the whole not inaccurately, what Darrell had said to him on the subject of her pity. He then informed her of Darrell's consent to Lionel's marriage with Sophy; in which criminal espousals it was clear, from Darrell's words, that Lady Montfort had had some nefarious share. In the most lugubrious colours he brought before her the consequences of that marriage--the extinguished name, the demolished dwelling-place, the renunciation of native soil itself. He called upon her, by all that was sacred, to contrive some means to undo the terrible mischief she had originally occasioned, and had recently helped to complete. His epistle ended by an attempt to conciliate and coax. He revived the image of that wild Caroline Lyndsay, to whom HE had never refused a favour; whose earliest sums he had a.s.sisted to cast up--to whose young idea he had communicated the elementary principles of the musical gamut--to whom he had played on his flute, winter eve and summer noon, by the hour together; that Caroline Lyndsay, who when a mere child, had led Guy Darrell where she willed, as by a thread of silk. Ah, how Fairthorn had leapt for joy when, eighteen years ago, he had thought that Caroline Lyndsay was to be the sunshine and delight of the house to which she had lived to bring the cloud and the grief! And by all these memories, Fairthorn conjured her either to break off the marriage she had evidently helped to bring about, or, failing that, to convince Guy Darrell that he was not the object of her remorseful and affectionate compa.s.sion.

Caroline was almost beside herself at the receipt of this letter. The picture of Guy Darrell effacing his very life from his native land, and destroying the last memorials of his birthright and his home--the conviction of the influence she still retained over his bleak and solitary existence--the experience she had already acquired that the influence failed where she had so fondly hoped it might begin to repair and to bless, all overpowered her with emotions of yearning tenderness and unmitigated despair. What could she do? She could not offer herself, again to be rejected. She could not write again, to force her penitence upon the man who, while acknowledging his love to be unconquered, had so resolutely refused to see, in the woman who had once deceived his trust--the Caroline of old! Alas, if he were but under the delusion that her pity was the subst.i.tute and not the companion of love, how could she undeceive him? How say--how write--"Accept me, for I love you." Caroline Montfort had no pride of rank, but she had pride of s.e.x; that pride had been called forth, encouraged, strengthened, throughout all the years of her wedded life. For Guy Darrell's sake, and to him alone, that pride she had cast away--trampled upon; such humility was due to him. But when the humility had been once in vain, could it be repeated--would it not be debas.e.m.e.nt? In the first experiment she had but to bow to his reproach--in a second experiment she might have but to endure his contempt. Yet how, with her sweet, earnest, affectionate nature--how she longed for one more interview--one more explanation! If chance could but bring it about; if she had but a pretext--a fair reason, apart from any interest of her own, to be in his presence once more! But in a few days he would have left England forever--his heart yet more hardened in its resolves by the last sacrifice to what it had so sternly recognised to be a due to others. Never to see him more--never to know how much in that sacrifice he was suffering now--would perhaps suffer more hereafter, in the reaction that follows all strain upon purpose--and yet not a word of comfort from her--her who felt born to be his comforter.

But this marriage, that cost him so much, must that be? Could she dare, even for his sake, to stand between two such fair young lives as those of Lionel and Sophy--confide to them what Fairthorn had declared--appeal to their generosity? She shrunk from inflicting such intolerable sorrow.

Could it be her duty? In her inability to solve this last problem, she bethought herself of Alban Morley; here, at least, he might give advice--offer suggestion. She sent to his house entreating him to call.

Her messenger was some hours before he found the Colonel, and then brought back but a few hasty lines--"impossible to call that day. The CRISIS had come at last! The Country, the House of Vipont, the British Empire, were trembling in the balance. The Colonel was engaged every moment for the next twelve hours. He had the Earl of Montfort, who was intractable and stupid beyond conception, to see and talk over; Carr Vipont was hard at work on the materials for the new Cabinet--Alban was helping Carr Vipont. If the House of Vipont failed England at this moment, it would not be a CRISIS, but a CRASH! The Colonel hoped to arrange an interview with Lady Montfort for a minute or two the next day. But perhaps she would excuse him from a journey to Twickenham, and drive into town to see him; if not at home, he would leave word where he was to be found."

By the beard of Jupiter Capitolinus, there are often revolutions in the heart of woman, during which she is callous to a Crisis, and has not even a fear for a CRASH!