Volume I Part 23 (1/2)
”I can never resist it. And perhaps after tea you will be so good as to give me the treat you talked about just now.”
”To show you the house?” said Mrs. Tempest. ”Do you think we shall have light enough?”
”Abundance. An old house like this is seen at its best in the twilight.
Don't you think so, Mrs. Scobel?”
”Oh, yes,” exclaimed Mrs. Scobel, with a lively recollection of her alb.u.m. ”'They who would see Melrose aright, should see it'--I think, by-the-bye, Sir Walter Scott says, 'by moonlight.'”
”Yes, for an ancient Gothic abbey; but twilight is better for a Tudor manor-house. Are you sure it will not fatigue you?” inquired the Captain, with an air of solicitude, as Mrs. Tempest rose languidly.
”No; I shall be very pleased to show you the dear old place. It is full of sad a.s.sociations, of course, out I do not allow my mind to dwell upon them more than I can help.”
”No,” cried Vixen bitterly. ”We go to dinner-parties and kettledrums, and go into raptures about orchids and old china, and try to cure our broken hearts that way.”
”Are you coming, Violet?” asked her mother sweetly.
”No, thanks, mamma. I am tired after my ride. Mrs. Scobel will help you to play cicerone.”
Captain Winstanley left the room without so much as a look at Violet Tempest. Yet her rude reception had galled him more than any cross that fate had lately inflicted upon him. He had fancied that time would have softened her feeling towards him, that rural seclusion and the society of rustic n.o.bodies would have made him appear at an advantage, that she would have welcomed the brightness and culture of metropolitan life in his person. He had hoped a great deal from the lapse of time since their last meeting. But this sullen reception, this silent expression of dislike, told him that Violet Tempest's aversion was a plant of deep root.
”The first woman who ever disliked me,” he thought. ”No wonder that she interests me more than other women. She is like that chestnut mare that threw me six times before I got the better of her. Yet she proved the best horse I ever had, and I rode her till she hadn't a leg to stand upon, and than sold her for twice the money she cost me. There are two conquests a man can make over a woman, one to make her love him, the other----”
”That suit of chain-armour was worn by Sir Gilbert Tempest at Acre,”
said the widow. ”The plate-armour belonged to Sir Percy, who was killed at Barnet. Each of them was knighted before he was five-and-twenty years old, for prowess in the field. The portrait over the chimneypiece is the celebrated Judge Tempest, who was famous for----Well, he did something wonderful, I know. Perhaps Mrs. Scobel remembers,” concluded Mrs. Tempest, feebly.
”It was at the trial of the seven bishops,” suggested the Vicar's wife.
”In the time of Queen Elizabeth,” a.s.sented Mrs. Tempest. ”That one with the lace cravat and steel breastplate was an admiral in Charles the Second's reign, and was made a baronet for his valiant behaviour when the Dutch fleet were at Chatham. The baronetcy died with his son, who left only daughters. The eldest married a Mr. Percival, who took the name of Tempest, and sat for the borough of----Perhaps Mrs. Scobel knows. I have such a bad memory for these things; though I have heard my dear husband talk about them often.”
Captain Winstanley looked round the great oak-panelled hall dreamily, and heard very little of Mrs. Tempest's vague prattling about her husband's ancestors.
What a lovely old place, he was thinking. A house that would give a man importance in the land, supported, as it was, by an estate bringing in something between five and six thousand a year. How much military distinction, how many battles must a soldier win before he could make himself master of such a fortune?
”And it needed but for that girl to like me, and a little gold ring would have given me the freehold of it all,” thought Conrad Winstanley bitterly.
How many penniless girls, or girls with fortunes so far beneath the measure of a fine gentleman's needs as to be useless, had been over head and ears in love with the elegant Captain; how many pretty girls had tempted him by their beauty and winsomeness to be false to his grand principle that marriage meant promotion. And here was an obstinate minx who would have realised all his aims, and whom he felt himself able to love to distraction into the bargain; and, behold, some adverse devil had entered into her mind, and made Conrad Winstanley hateful to her.
”It's like witchcraft,” he said to himself. ”Why should this one woman be different from all other women? Perhaps it's the colour. That ruddy auburn hair, the loveliest I ever saw, means temper. But I conquered the chestnut, and I'll conquer Miss Tempest--or make her smart for it.”
”A handsome music-gallery, is it not?” said the widow. ”The carved bal.u.s.trade is generally admired.”
Then they went into the dining-room, and looked cursorily at about a dozen large dingy pictures of the Italian school, which a man who knew anything about art would have condemned at a glance. Fine examples of brown varnish, all of them. Thence to the library, lined with its carved-oak dwarf bookcases, containing books which n.o.body had opened for a generation--Livy, Gibbon, Hume, Burke, Smollett, Plutarch, Thomson. These sages, clad in s.h.i.+ny brown leather and gilding, made as good a lining for the walls as anything else, and gave an air of snugness to the room in which the family dined when there was no company.
They came presently to the Squire's den, at the end of a corridor.
”That was my dear husband's study,” sighed Mrs. Tempest. ”It looks south, into the rose garden, and is one of the prettiest rooms in the house. But we keep it locked, and I think Violet has the key.”
”Pray don't let Miss Tempest be disturbed,” said Captain Winstanley. ”I have seen quite enough to know what a delightful house you have--all the interest of days that are gone, all the luxuries of to-day. I think that blending of past and present is most fascinating. I should never be a severe restorer of antiquity, or refuse to sit in a chair that wasn't undeniably Gothic.”