Volume III Part 6 (1/2)
”I'm afraid I'm rather late,” Vixen said apologetically.
She felt a kind of half-pitying respect for Miss Skipwith, as a harmless lunatic.
”My dear, I daresay that as an absolute fact you are late,” answered the lady of the manor, without looking up from her book, ”but as time is never too long for me, I have been hardly conscious of the delay.
Your stepfather has gone down to the club at St. Helier's to see some of his old acquaintances. Perhaps you would like a cup of tea?”
Vixen replied that she would very much like some tea, whereupon Miss Skipwith poured out a weak and tepid infusion, against which the girl inwardly protested.
”If I am to exist at Les Tourelles, I must at least have decent tea,”
she said to herself. ”I must buy an occasional pound for my own consumption, make friends with Mrs. Doddery, and get her to brew it for me.”
And then Vixen knelt down by the arm-chair and tried to get upon intimate terms with the Persian. He was a serious-minded animal, and seemed inclined to resent her advances, so she left him in peace on his patchwork cus.h.i.+on, a relic of those earlier days when Miss Skipwith had squandered her precious hours on the feminine inanity of needle-work.
Vixen thought of the German _Volkslied_, as she looked at the old lady in the black cap, bending over a ponderous volume, with the solemn-visaged cat coiled on the chair beside her.
”Minerva's Vogel war ein Kauz.”
The Persian cat seemed as much an attribute of the female theologian as the bird of the G.o.ddess.
Vixen went to her room soon after dark, and thus avoided the Captain, who did not return till ten. She was worn out with the fatigue of the voyage, her long ramble, the painful thoughts and manifold agitations of the last two days. She set her candle on the dressing-table, and looked round the bare empty room, feeling as if she were in a dream. It was all strange, and unhomely, and comfortless; like one of those wild dream-pictures which seem so appallingly real in their hideous unreality.
”And I am to live here indefinitely--for the next six years, perhaps, until I come of age and am my own mistress. It is too dreadful!”
She went to bed and slept a deep and comforting sleep, for very weariness: and she dreamt that she was walking on the battlements of Mount Orgueil, in the drowsy afternoon sunlight, with Charles Stuart; and the face of the royal exile was the face of Roderick Vawdrey, and the hand that held hers as they two stood side by side in the suns.h.i.+ne was the broad strong hand of her girlhood's friend.
When she went downstairs between eight and nine next morning she found Miss Skipwith pacing slowly to and fro the terrace in front of the drawing-room windows, conning over the pencil notes of her yesterday's studies.
”Your stepfather has been gone half-an-hour, my dear,” said the lady of the manor. ”He was very sorry to have to go without wis.h.i.+ng you good-bye.”
CHAPTER II.
Chiefly Financial.
Violet was gone. Her rooms were empty; her faithful little waiting-maid was dismissed; her dog's deep-toned thunder no longer sounded through the house, baying joyous welcome when his mistress came down for her early morning ramble in the shrubberies. Arion had been sent to gra.s.s, and was running wild in fertile pastures, shoeless and unfettered as the South American mustang on his native prairie. Nothing a.s.sociated with the exiled heiress was left, except the rooms she had inhabited; and even they looked blank and empty and strange without her. It was almost as if a whole family had departed. Vixen's presence seemed to have filled the house with youth and freshness, and free joyous life.
Without her all was silent as the grave.
Mrs. Winstanley missed her daughter sorely. She had been wont to complain fretfully of the girl's exuberance; but the blank her absence made struck a chill to the mother's heart. She had fancied that life would be easier without Violet; that her union with her husband would be more complete; and now she found herself looking wistfully towards the door of her morning-room, listening vaguely for a footstep; and the figure she looked for at the door, and the footsteps she listened for in the corridor were not Conrad Winstanley's. It was the buoyant step of her daughter she missed; it was the bright frank face of her daughter she yearned for.
One day the captain surprised her in tears, and asked the reason of her melancholy.
”I daresay it's very weak of me, Conrad,” she said piteously, ”but I miss Violet more and more every day.”
”It is uncommonly weak of you,” answered the Captain with agreeable candour, ”but I suppose it's natural. People generally get attached to their worries; and as your daughter was an incessant worry, you very naturally lament her absence. I am honest enough to confess that I am very glad she is gone. We had no domestic peace while she was with us.”
”But she is not to stay away for ever, Conrad. I cannot be separated from my only daughter for ever. That would be too dreadful.”
”'For ever' is a long word,” answered the Captain coolly. ”She will come back to us--of course.”