“Una! Do you know how late it is? Where have you been? How your head will ache to-morrow!”
“I’ve been in the smoking-room and I’ve smoked a cigarette, and tasted a brandy-and-soda!” said Una, with a touch of Tory’s wicked defiance.
“Would mother let you?” said Amethyst slowly.
“Oh yes!” said Una, shrugging her shoulders, “but I shan’t let you!”
She flung her arms round Amethyst and kissed her with burning lips, then scuttled away into her own room.
Chapter Seven
No Cunning to be Strange
“When do you suppose Amethyst will find my lady out?” said Kattern and Tory, as they started for the primrose-picking the next day, and Amethyst ran back again to beg her mother to drive round to the wood and join them.
“Not yet,” said Tory, “my lady is making up to her, as much as ever she did to any man she ever went in for, and Amethyst would believe black was white just at present.”
“I’d like to see her face, if we told her what my lady is really like.”
“You are not to tell her,” said Una, suddenly turning round upon them, “I won’t have it. Let her be happy while she can; I shall tell her, when I think it proper.”
Una looked languid and dull to-day. She did not care for gathering primroses, and she was not strong enough to enjoy long out-door expeditions. She watched Amethyst, with a look on her face, and thoughts in her heart, which would much have astonished the elder girl if she had noticed the one, or guessed at the other.
Amethyst good-naturedly patronised Kate and Gertie Leigh, girls matching in age with Kattern and Tory; she made friends with their governess, who had recently been the head girl at a rival school to Saint Etheldred’s, and was discussing the honours respectively gained by the two institutions at all the recent examinations, with the heartiest interest, when the party was enlarged by the arrival of Miss Riddell and her nephew, and Mrs Leigh and her son. Lady Haredale, Major Fowler, and some of the other guests at Cleverley also turned up. It was a day of rare spring loveliness, blue sky, young green leaves, and springing flowers.
“A day of beginnings,” Sylvester Riddell said, as he noted the budding oak trees, the unfolding blossoms, the opening intercourse that was still in its first spring.
“You like the woods?” he said to Amethyst.
“Oh yes,” she said, “I like everything here; you can’t think how pleasant beginning to be at home is.”
“I suppose you are making several beginnings,” he said.
“Yes,” she answered, “I am beginning to know my sisters – and every one here – and next week I am going to my first ball.”
“Beginnings are very charming when they do not imply endings,” said Sylvester tritely; but he was thinking so much of the lovely slender girl before him that he spoke half mechanically.
“That can never be,” said Amethyst, with sudden gravity. “My school-days are ended, and my living with my aunt. Beginnings must come out of endings – but then they are beginnings,” she added; and stooping, she picked a primrose, round which still lingered the large faded leaves of last year, and showed it to him, with a grave smile on her soft young lips.
Sylvester never forgot her as she stood there, dressed all in mossy green that harmonised with the woods. He had a dim sense that a beginning was coming to him, as he took the fresh primrose and the faded leaf out of her hand.
“One ought to be able to spin a poem out of this,” he said; but just then Lucian Leigh came springing down the bank, a picturesque figure in his brown suit, and looking, as the little girls climbed and scrambled after him, as like a young wood god, as Amethyst was like a wood nymph.
“They matched exactly,” Sylvester thought, as they drew by instinct together, and through all the merry afternoon, seemed the motive of the picture, the centre of the piece.
“It is quite charming to be so rustic,” said Lady Haredale; while Tory and Kattern forgot about being charming as they scrambled about with their contemporaries, and Amethyst drank in happiness with the sun and the air. To-day was indeed a delightful beginning.
It began a great deal. Lady Haredale was a person who liked something to be always going on, and hardly a day passed without some little scheme of pleasure, some opportunity for meetings something that gave colour and brightness to the days. Distant neighbours seemed to come nearer, and Cleverley had never been so gay within the memory of man.
Yet it all seemed quite simple. Lady Haredale, the Cleverley ladies said, liked simple pleasures, and freely owned that she must have inexpensive ones. There was the county ball for a climax, and various set entertainments given at the country houses round for salient points; but Lady Haredale did little but keep open house in a sort of free and easy way. Lord Haredale was a good deal absent in London, and Major Fowler, so old a family friend, acted as a sort of deputy master of the house, showed the young men the way to the sideboard, set games of billiards on foot, took a hand at whist in the evenings. Sometimes, when there were young people, they all played round games, and put three penny bits into the pool. It could not be true, that whisper of Lady Haredale playing for high stakes and losing money, or she could not have laughed so merrily over the threepenny “vingt-un with variations.”
Then, when the wind was cold after playing tennis, for which the season was still early, she made such pretty fun over producing champagne and claret cup at afternoon tea, that, though such was not the Cleverley custom except at large garden-parties, there seemed nothing to wonder at; – though it was a pity that so young a girl as Una Haredale should be allowed to drink it.
Lady Haredale did not dress too youthfully, or try to keep her beautiful daughter in the background; on the contrary, everything was arranged to make a good time for Amethyst; Lady Haredale chose her dresses with the utmost care, and taught her how to arrange them becomingly, with so outspoken a delight in the girl’s beauty as almost rendered her flattery harmless. Those were happy weeks. Now and then came little shocks and startling incidents; but they fell on unheeding ears.
A very few words are enough to tell Amethyst’s story. She and Lucian Leigh fell in love with each other; suddenly, rapturously, without delay or misgiving, almost at the first sight of each other’s fair faces, almost with the first sense of an answering stir in each other’s souls, Lucian courted her in a quiet but most unmistakable fashion; and soon, life for Amethyst meant his presence, his words and looks. She was carried off her feet, caught out of herself. Even as she knew “what made the assembly shine” for her, she was well assured that she “made the ball fine” for him. She did not remain unconscious or ignorant of what had befallen her. Love did not come to her with slow, cautious, and imperceptible footsteps, he caught her in a sweet frenzy, which left no space for misgivings; while her quickly answering warmth probably hastened and intensified the passion, which might have seemed alien to Lucian’s slower and shyer nature.
A few social meetings and games of tennis together – one or two encounters “by chance,” which yet were so important that it seemed as if the whole course of life must have been arranged to bring them about – a sunny Sunday or two, in the same church, singing the same hymns – a belief in each other’s goodness, so that no misgivings troubled their joy in each other’s charms, scraps of talk – wonderful glances – the county ball, where Amethyst’s success woke Lucian to the sudden fear of rivalry, and where the world began to say that she was a great beauty – a dance the next night at a neighbour’s house – a long, long waltz together, then, dim lights, heavy-scented flowers, a wonderful sense of being alone, after the crowd of dancers; then feelings found words, words hardly needed, his arms were round her, his kiss on her lips, and, after scarcely a doubt or a fear, in three short weeks, in a dozen meetings, Amethyst’s heart was won, her promise given, and all her story, as she believed, told.
But, with the actual promise given, with