Part 31 (1/2)
In the cart Sir Charles Ba.s.sett, splashed all over with mud, and his white waistcoat b.l.o.o.d.y, lay with his head upon Richard Ba.s.sett's knee.
His hair was wet with blood, some of which had trickled down his cheek and dried. Even Richard's buckskins were slightly stained with it.
At that sight Lady Ba.s.sett uttered a scream, which those who heard it never forgot, and flung herself, Heaven knows how, into the cart; but she got there, and soon had that bleeding head on her bosom. She took no notice of Richard Ba.s.sett, but she got Sir Charles away from him, and the cart took her, embracing him tenderly, and kissing his hurt head, and moaning over him, all through the village to Huntercombe Hall.
Four years ago they pa.s.sed through the same village in a carriage-and-four--bells pealing, rustics shouting--to take possession of Huntercombe, and fill it with pledges of their great and happy love; and as they flashed past the heir at law shrank hopeless into his little cottage. Now, how changed the pageant!--a farmer's cart, a splashed and bleeding and senseless form in it, supported by a childless, despairing woman, one weeping attendant walking at the side, and, among the gentlemen pacing slowly behind, the heir at law, with his head lowered in that decent affectation of regret which all heirs can put on to hide the indecent complacency within.
CHAPTER XV.
AT the steps of Huntercombe Hall the servants streamed out, and relieved the strangers of the sorrowful load. Sir Charles was carried into the Hall, and Richard Ba.s.sett turned away, with one triumphant flash of his eye, quickly suppressed, and walked with impenetrable countenance and studied demeanor into Highmore House.
Even here he did not throw off the mask. It peeled off by degrees. He began by telling his wife, gravely enough, Sir Charles had met with a severe fall, and he had attended to him and taken him home.
”Ah, I am glad you did that, Richard,” said Mrs. Ba.s.sett. ”And is he very badly hurt?”
”I am afraid he will hardly get over it. He never spoke. He just groaned when they took him down from the cart at Huntercombe.”
”Poor Lady Ba.s.sett!”
”Ay, it will be a bad job for her. Jane!”
”Yes, dear.”
”There is a providence in it. The fall would never have killed him; but his head struck a tree upon the ground; and that tree was one of the very elms he had just cut down to rob our boy.”
”Indeed?”
”Yes; he was felling the very hedgerow timber, and this was one of the old elms in a hedge. He must have done it out of spite, for elm-wood fetches no price; it is good for nothing I know of, except coffins.
Well, he has cut down _his.”_
”Poor man! Richard, death reconciles enemies. Surely you can forgive him now.”
”I mean to try.”
Richard Ba.s.sett seemed now to have imbibed the spirit of quicksilver.
His occupations were not actually enlarged, yet, somehow or other, he seemed full of business. He was all complacent bustle about nothing. He left off inveighing against Sir Charles. And, indeed, if you are one of those weak spirits to whom censure is intolerable, there is a cheap and easy way to moderate the rancor of detraction--you have only to die.
Let me comfort genius in particular with this little recipe.
Why, on one occasion, Ba.s.sett actually snubbed Wheeler for a mere allusion. That worthy just happened to remark, ”No more felling of timber on Ba.s.sett Manor for a while.”
”For shame!” said Richard. ”The man had his faults, but he had his good qualities too: a high-spirited gentleman, beloved by his friends and respected by all the county. His successor will find it hard to reconcile the county to his loss.”
Wheeler stared, and then grinned satirically.
This eulogy was never repeated, for Sir Charles proved ungrateful--he omitted to die, after all.
Attended by first-rate physicians, tenderly nursed and watched by Lady Ba.s.sett and Mary Wells, he got better by degrees; and every stage of his slow but hopeful progress was communicated to the servants and the village, and to the ladies and gentlemen who rode up to the door every day and left their cards of inquiry.
The most attentive of all these was the new rector, a young clergyman, who had obtained the living by exchange. He was a man highly gifted both in body and mind--a swarthy Adonis, whose large dark eyes from the very first turned with glowing admiration on the blonde beauties of Lady Ba.s.sett.