By this time the carriage was entering the gates of the park, and the thick wood cleared and revealed long vistas of short hill grass, rising and falling like moorland, and studded with solitary clumps of firs. Then a turn in the drive brought them once more into shadow, this time beneath a heath-clad knoll where beeches and hazels made a pleasant tangle. All this was new, not three years old; but soon they were in the ancient part of the policy which had surrounded the old house of Glenavelin. Here the grass was lusher, the trees antique oaks and beeches, and grey walls showed the boundary of an old pleasure-ground. Here in the soft sunlit afternoon sleep hung like a cloud, and the peace of centuries dwelt in the long avenues and golden pastures. Another turning and the house came in sight, at first glance a jumble of grey towers and ivied walls. Wings had been built to the original square keep, and even now it was not large, a mere moorland dwelling. But the whitewashed walls, the crow-step gables, and the quaint Scots baronial turrets gave it a perfection to the eye like a house in a dream. To Alice, accustomed to the vulgarity of suburban villas with Italian campaniles, a florid lodge a stone’s throw from the house, darkened too with smoke and tawdry with paint, this old-world dwelling was a patch of wonderland. Her eyes drank in the beauty of the place—the great blue backs of hill beyond, the acres of sweet pasture, the primeval woods.
“Is this Glenavelin?” she cried. “Oh, what a place to live in!”
“Yes, it’s very pretty, dear.” And Lady Manorwater, who possessed half a dozen houses up and down the land, patted her guest’s arm and looked with pleasure on the flushed girlish face.
Two hours later, Alice, having completed dressing, leaned out of her bedroom window to drink in the soft air of evening. She had not brought a maid, and had refused her hostess’s offer to lend her her own on the ground that maids were a superfluity. It was her desire to be a very practical young person, a scorner of modes and trivialities, and yet she had taken unusual care with her toilet this evening, and had spent many minutes before the glass. Looking at herself carefully, a growing conviction began to be confirmed—that she was really rather pretty. She had reddish-brown hair and—a rare conjunction—dark eyes and eyebrows and a delicate colour. As a small girl she had lamented bitterly the fate that had not given her the orthodox beauty of the dark or fair maiden, and in her school days she had passed for plain. Now it began to dawn on her that she had beauty of a kind—the charm of strangeness; and her slim strong figure had the grace which a wholesome life alone can give. She was in high spirits, curious, interested, and generous. The people amused her, the place was a fairyland and outside the golden weather lay still and fragrant among the hills.
When she came down to the drawing-room she found the whole party assembled. A tall man with a brown beard and a slight stoop ceased to assault the handle of a firescreen and came over to greet her. He had only come back half an hour ago, he explained, and so had missed her arrival. The face attracted and soothed her. Abundant kindness lurked in the humorous brown eyes, and a queer pucker on the brow gave him the air of a benevolent despot. If this was Lord Manorwater, she had no further dread of the great ones of the earth. There were four other men, two of them mild, spectacled people, who had the air of students and a precise affected mode of talk, and one a boy cousin of whom no one took the slightest notice. The fourth was a striking figure, a man of about forty in appearance, tall and a little stout, with a rugged face which in some way suggested a picture of a prehistoric animal in an old natural history she had owned. The high cheek-bones, large nose, and slightly protruding eyes had an unfinished air about them, as if their owner had escaped prematurely from a mould. A quantity of bushy black hair—which he wore longer than most men—enhanced the dramatic air of his appearance. It was a face full of vigour and a kind of strength, shrewd, a little coarse, and solemn almost to the farcical. He was introduced in a rush of words by the hostess, but beyond the fact that it was a monosyllable, Alice did not catch his name.
Lord Manorwater took in Miss Afflint, and Alice fell to the dark man with the monosyllabic name. He had a way of bowing over his hand which slightly repelled the girl, who had no taste for elaborate manners. His first question, too, displeased her. He asked her if she was one of the Wisharts of some unpronounceable place.
She replied briefly that she did not know. Her grandfathers on both sides had been farmers.
The gentleman bowed with the smiling unconcern of one to whom pedigree is a matter of course.
“I have heard often of your father,” he said. “He is one of the local supports of the party to which I have the honour to belong. He represents one great section of our retainers, our host another. I am glad to see such friendship between the two.” And he smiled elaborately from Alice to Lord Manorwater.
Alice was uncomfortable. She felt she must be sitting beside some very great man, and she was tortured by vain efforts to remember the monosyllable which had stood for his name. She did not like his voice, and, great man or not, she resented the obvious patronage. He spoke with a touch of the drawl which is currently supposed to belong only to the half-educated classes of England.
She turned to the boy who sat on the other side of her. The young gentleman—his name was Arthur and, apparently, nothing else—was only too ready to talk. He proceeded to explain, compendiously, his doings of the past week, to which the girl listened politely. Then anxiety got the upper hand, and she asked in a whisper, a propos of nothing in particular, the name of her left-hand neighbour.
“They call him Stocks,” said the boy, delighted at the tone of confidence, and was going on to sketch the character of the gentleman in question when Alice cut him short.
“Will you take me to fish some day?” she asked.
“Any day,” gasped the hilarious Arthur. “I’m ready, and I’ll tell you what, I know the very burn—” and he babbled on happily till he saw that Miss Wishart had ceased to listen. It was the first time a pretty girl had shown herself desirous of his company, and he was intoxicated with the thought.
But Alice felt that she was in some way bound to make the most of Mr. Stocks, and she set herself heroically to the task. She had never heard of him, but then she was not well versed in the minutiae of things political, and he clearly was a politician. Doubtless to her father his name was a household word. So she spoke to him of Glenavelin and its beauties.
He asked her if she had seen Royston Castle, the residence of his friend the Duke of Sanctamund. When he had stayed there he had been much impressed—
Then she spoke wildly of anything, of books and pictures and people and politics. She found him well-informed, clever, and dogmatic. The culminating point was reached when she embarked on a stray remark concerning certain events then happening in India.
He contradicted her with a lofty politeness.
She quoted a book on Kashmir.
He laughed the authority to scorn. “Lewis Haystoun?” he asked. “What can he know about such things? A wandering dilettante, the worst type of the pseudo-culture of our universities. He must see all things through the spectacles of his upbringing.”
Fortunately he spoke in a low voice, but Lord Manorwater caught the name.
“You are talking about Lewie,” he said; and then to the table at large, “do you know that Lewie is home? I saw him to-day.”
Bertha Afflint clapped her hands. “Oh, splendid! When is he coming over? I shall drive to Etterick to-morrow. No—bother! I can’t go to-morrow, I shall go on Wednesday.”
Lady Manorwater opened mild eyes of surprise. “Why didn’t the boy write?” And the young Arthur indulged in sundry exclamations, “Oh, ripping, I say! What? A clinking good chap, my cousin Lewie!”
“Who is this Lewis the well-beloved?” said Mr. Stocks. “I was talking about a very different person—Lewis Haystoun, the author of a foolish book on Kashmir.”
“Don’t you like it?” said Lord Manorwater, pleasantly.