Volume II Part 20 (1/2)
”You are wiser than I, then,” Vixen answered coldly; ”for my feelings tell me nothing about the future--except”--and here her face beamed at him with a lovely smile--”except that you will be kind to Bullfinch.”
”If I were an emperor I would make him a consul,” answered the Irishman.
He had contrived to separate Roderick and Vixen. The young man had returned to his allegiance, and was escorting Lady Mabel back to the house. Everybody began to feel chilly, now that the bells were silent, and there was a general hurrying off to the carriages, which were standing in an oval ring round a group of deodoras in front of the porch on the other side of the house.
Rorie and Vixen met no more that night. Lord Mallow took her to her carriage, and sat opposite her and talked to her during the homewards drive. Captain Winstanley was smoking a cigar on the box. His wife slumbered peacefully.
”I think I may be satisfied with Theodore,” she said, as she composed herself for sleep; ”my dress was not quite the worst in the room, was it, Violet?”
”It was lovely, mamma. You can make yourself quite happy,” answered Vixen truthfully; whereupon the matron breathed a gentle sigh of content, and lapsed into slumber.
They had the Boldrewood Road before them, a long hilly road cleaving the very heart of the Forest; a road full of ghosts at the best of times, but offering a Walpurgis revel of phantoms on such a night as this to the eye of the belated wanderer. How ghostly the deer were, as they skimmed across the road and flitted away into dim distances, mixing with and melting into the shadows of the trees. The little gray rabbits, sitting up on end, were like circles of hobgoblins that dispersed and vanished at the approach of mortals. The leafless old hawthorns, rugged and crooked, silvered by the moonlight, were most ghostlike of all. They took every form, from the most unearthly to the most grotesquely human.
Violet sat wrapped in her furred white mantle, watching the road as intently as if she had never seen it before. She never could grow tired of these things. She loved them with a love which was part of her nature.
”What a delightful evening, was it not?” asked Lord Mallow.
”I suppose it was very nice,” answered Violet coolly; ”but I have no standard of comparison. It was my first dinner at Ashbourne.”
”What a remarkably clever girl Lady Mabel is. Mr. Vawdrey ought to consider himself extremely fortunate.”
”I have never heard him say that he does not so consider himself.”
”Naturally. But I think he might be a little more enthusiastic. He is the coolest lover I ever saw.”
”Perhaps you judge him by comparison with Irish lovers. Your nation is more demonstrative than ours.”
”Oh, an Irish girl would cas.h.i.+er such a fellow as Mr. Vawdrey. But I may possibly misjudge him. You ought to know more about him than I. You have known him----”
”All my life,” said Violet simply. ”I know that he is good, and stanch and true, that he honoured his mother, and that he will make Lady Mabel Ashbourne a very good husband. Perhaps if she were a little less clever and a little more human, he might be happier with her; but no doubt that will all come right in time.”
”Any way it will be all the same in a century or so,” a.s.sented Lord Mallow. ”We are going to have lovely weather as long as this moon lasts, I believe. Will you go for a long ride to-morrow--like that first ride of ours?”
”When I took you all over the world for sport?” said Vixen laughing. ”I wonder you are inclined to trust me, after that. If Captain Winstanley likes I don't mind being your guide again to-morrow.”
”Captain Winstanley shall like. I'll answer for that. I would make his life unendurable if he were to refuse.”
CHAPTER XIII.
Crying for the moon.
Despite the glorious moonlight night which ushered in the new-born year, the first day of that year was abominable; a day of hopeless, incessant rain, falling from a leaden sky in which there was never a break, not a stray gleam of suns.h.i.+ne from morn till eve.
”The new year is like Shakespeare's Richard,” said Lord Mallow, when he stood in the porch after breakfast, surveying the horizon. ”'Tetchy and wayward was his infancy.' I never experienced anything so provoking. I was dreaming all night of our ride.”
”Were you not afraid of being like that dreadful man in 'Locksley Hall'?--
Like a dog, he hunts in dreams,”
asked Vixen mockingly.