“I think that we have met before,” said Harold, in a somewhat nervous fashion, as he stretched out his hand.
“Yes,” answered Ida, taking it, “I remember. It was in the long drift, five years ago, on a windy afternoon, when my hat blew over the hedge and you went to fetch it.”
“You have a good memory, Miss de la Molle,” said he, feeling not a little pleased that she should have recollected the incident.
“Evidently not better than your own, Colonel Quaritch,” was the ready answer. “Besides, one sees so few strangers here that one naturally remembers them. It is a place where nothing happens—time passes, that is all.”
Meanwhile the old Squire, who had been making a prodigious fuss with his hat and stick, which he managed to send clattering down the flight of stone steps, departed to get ready, saying in a kind of roar as he went that Ida was to order in the dinner, as he would be down in a minute.
Accordingly she rang the bell, and told the maid to bring in the soup in five minutes and to lay another place. Then turning to Harold she began to apologise to him.
“I don’t know what sort of dinner you will get, Colonel Quaritch,” she said; “it is so provoking of my father; he never gives one the least warning when he is going to ask any one to dinner.”
“Not at all—not at all,” he answered hurriedly. “It is I who ought to apologise, coming down on you like—like——”
“A wolf on the fold,” suggested Ida.
“Yes, exactly,” he went on earnestly, looking at his coat, “but not in purple and gold.”
“Well,” she went on laughing, “you will get very little to eat for your pains, and I know that soldiers always like good dinners.”
“How do you know that, Miss de la Molle?”
“Oh, because of poor James and his friends whom he used to bring here. By the way, Colonel Quaritch,” she went on with a sudden softening of the voice, “you have been in Egypt, I know, because I have so often seen your name in the papers; did you ever meet my brother there?”
“I knew him slightly,” he answered. “Only very slightly. I did not know that he was your brother, or indeed that you had a brother. He was a dashing officer.”
What he did not say, however, was that he also knew him to have been one of the wildest and most extravagant young men in an extravagant regiment, and as such had to some extent shunned his society on the few occasions that he had been thrown in with him. Perhaps Ida, with a woman’s quickness, divined from his tone that there was something behind his remark—at any rate she did not ask him for particulars of their slight acquaintance.
“He was my only brother,” she continued; “there never were but we two, and of course his loss was a great blow to me. My father cannot get over it at all, although——” and she broke off suddenly, and rested her head upon her hand.
At this moment the Squire was heard advancing down the stairs, shouting to the servants as he came.
“A thousand pardons, my dear, a thousand pardons,” he said as he entered the room, “but, well, if you will forgive particulars, I was quite unable to discover the whereabouts of a certain necessary portion of the male attire. Now, Colonel Quaritch, will you take my daughter? Stop, you don’t know the way—perhaps I had better show you with the candle.”
Accordingly he advanced out of the vestibule, and turning to the left, led the way down a long passage till he reached the dining-room. This apartment was like the vestibule, oak-panelled, but the walls were decorated with family and other portraits, including a very curious painting of the Castle itself, as it was before its destruction in the time of Cromwell. This painting was executed on a massive slab of oak, and conceived in a most quaint and formal style, being relieved in the foreground with stags at gaze and woodeny horses, that must, according to any rule of proportion, have been about half as large as the gateway towers. Evidently, also, it was of an older date than the present house, which is Jacobean, having probably been removed to its present position from the ruins of the Castle. Such as it was, however, it gave a very good idea of what the ancient seat of the Boisseys and de la Molles had been like before the Roundheads had made an end of its glory. The dining-room itself was commodious, though not large. It was lighted by three narrow windows which looked out upon the moat, and bore a considerable air of solid comfort. The table, made of black oak, of extraordinary solidity and weight, was matched by a sideboard of the same material and apparently of the same date, both pieces of furniture being, as Mr. de la Molle informed his guests, relics of the Castle.
On this sideboard were placed several pieces of old and massive plate, each of which was rudely engraved with three falcons or, the arms of the de la Molle family. One piece, indeed, a very ancient salver, bore those of the Boisseys—a ragged oak, in an escutcheon of pretence—showing thereby that it dated from that de la Molle who in the time of Henry the Seventh had obtained the property by marriage with the Boissey heiress.
Conversation having turned that way, as the dinner, which was a simple one, went on, the old Squire had this piece of plate brought to Harold Quaritch for him to examine.
“It is very curious,” he said; “have you much of this, Mr. de la Molle?”
“No indeed,” he said; “I wish I had. It all vanished in the time of Charles the First.”
“Melted down, I suppose,” said the Colonel.
“No, that is the odd part of it. I don’t think it was. It was hidden somewhere—I don’t know where, or perhaps it was turned into money and the money hidden. But I will tell you the story if you like as soon as we have done dinner.”
Accordingly, when the servants had removed the cloth, and after the old fashion placed the wine upon the naked wood, the Squire began his tale, of which the following is the substance.
“In the time of James I. the de la Molle family was at the height of its prosperity, that is, so far as money goes. For several generations previous the representatives of the family had withdrawn themselves from any active participation in public affairs, and living here at small expense upon their lands, which were at that time very large, had amassed a quantity of wealth that, for the age, might fairly be called enormous. Thus, Sir Stephen de la Molle, the grandfather of the Sir James who lived in the time of James I., left to his son, also named Stephen, a sum of no less than twenty-three thousand pounds in gold. This Stephen was a great miser, and tradition says that he trebled the sum in his lifetime. Anyhow, he died rich as Croesus, and abominated alike by his tenants and by the country side, as might be expected when a gentleman of his race and fame degraded himself, as this Sir Stephen undoubtedly did, to the practice of usury.
“With the next heir, Sir James, however, the old spirit of the de la Molles seems to have revived, although it is sufficiently clear that he was by no means a spendthrift, but on the contrary, a careful man, though one who maintained his station and refused to soil his fingers with such base dealing as it had pleased his uncle to do. Going to court, he became, perhaps on account of his wealth, a considerable favourite with James I., to whom he was greatly attached and from whom he bought a baronetcy. Indeed, the best proof of his devotion is, that he on two occasions lent large sums of money to the King which were never repaid. On the accession of Charles I., however, Sir James left court under circumstances which were never quite cleared up. It is said that smarting under some slight which was put upon him, he made a somewhat brusque demand for the money that he had lent to James. Thereon the King, with sarcastic wit, congratulated him on the fact that the spirit of his uncle, Sir Stephen de la Molle, whose name was still a byword in the land, evidently survived in the family. Sir James turned white with anger, bowed, and without a word left the court, nor did he ever return thither.
“Years passed, and the civil war was at its height. Sir James had as yet steadily refused to take any share in it. He had never