Vixen. Volume I

"Of course," answered Vixen, with a little toss of her head; "it would have been quite wrong if she had been absent."

They rode on in silence for a little while after this. Vixen was longing to say: "Rorie, you have treated me very badly. You ought to have told me you were going to be married." But something restrained her. She patted her horse's neck, listened to the lonely robins, and said not a word. The Squire and his tenant were a hundred yards ahead, talking loudly.

Presently they came to a point at which their roads parted, but Rorie still rode on by Vixen.

"Isn't that your nearest way?" asked Vixen, pointing down the cross-road with the ivory handle of her whip.

"I am not going the nearest way. I am going to the Abbey House with you."

"I wouldn't be so rude as to say Don't, but I think poor Sultan must be tired."

"Sultan shall have a by-day to-morrow."

They went into an oak plantation, where a broad open alley led from one side of the enclosure to the other. The wood had a mysterious look in the late afternoon, when the shadows were thickening under the tall thin trees. There was an all-pervading ghostly grayness as in a shadowy under-world. They rode silently over the thick wet carpet of fallen leaves, the horses starting a little now and then at the aspect of a newly-barked trunk lying white across the track. They were silent, having, in sooth, very little to say to each other just at this time. Vixen was nursing her wrathful feelings; Rorie felt that his future was confused and obscure. He ought to do something with his life, perhaps, as his mother had so warmly urged. But his soul was stirred by no ambitious promptings.

They were within two hundred yards of the gate at the end of the enclosure, when Vixen gave a sudden cry:

"Did papa's horse stumble?" she asked; "look how he sways in his saddle."

Another instant, and the Squire reeled forward, and fell headforemost across his horse's shoulder. The fall was so sudden and so heavy, that the horse fell with him, and then scrambled up on to his feet again affrighted, swung himself round, and rushed past Roderick and Vixen along the plashy track.

Vixen was off her horse in a moment, and had flown to her father's side. He lay like a log, face downwards upon the sodden leaves just inside the gate. The farmer had dismounted and was stooping over him, bridle in hand, with a frightened face.

"Oh, what is it?" cried Violet frantically. "Did the horse throw him? – Bullfinch, his favourite horse. Is he much hurt? Oh, help me to lift him up – help me – help me!"

Rorie was by her side by this time, kneeling down with her beside the prostrate Squire, trying to raise the heavy figure which lay like lead across his arm.

"It wasn't the horse, miss," said the farmer. "I'm afraid it's a seizure."

"A fit!" cried Vixen. "Oh, papa, papa – darling – darling – "

She was sobbing, clinging to him, trembling like a leaf, and turning a white, stricken face up towards Roderick.

"Do something to help him – for God's sake – do something," she cried; "you won't let him lie there and die for want of help. Some brandy – something," she gasped, stretching out her trembling hand.

The farmer had anticipated her thought. He had taken his flask from the saddle pocket, and was kneeling down by the Squire. Roderick had lifted the heavy head, and turned the ghastly face to the waning light. He tried to force a little brandy between the livid lips – but vainly.

"For God's sake get her away," he whispered to John Wimble, the farmer. "It's all over with him."

"Come away with me, my dear Miss Tempest," said Wimble, trying to raise Violet from her knees beside the Squire. She was gazing into that awful face distractedly – half divining its solemn meaning – yet watching for the kind eyes to open and look at her again. "Come away with me, and we'll get a doctor. Mr. Vawdrey will take care of your father."

"You go for the doctor," she answered firmly. "I'll stay with papa. Take my horse, he's faster than yours. Oh, he'll carry you well enough. You don't know how strong he is – go, quick – quick – Dr. Martin, at Lyndhurst – it's a long way, but you must get him. Papa will recover, and be able to ride home, perhaps, before you can get back to us, but go, go."

"You go for the doctor, miss; your horse will carry you fast enough. He'd never carry such a heavy weight as me, and my cob is dead beat. You go, and Mr. Vawdrey will go with you. I'll take care of the Squire."

Violet looked from one to the other helplessly.

"I'd rather stay with papa," she said. "You go – yes – go, go. I'll stay with papa."

She crouched down beside the prostrate figure on the damp marshy ground, took the heavy head on her lap, and looked up at the two men with a pale set face which indicated a resolve that neither of them was strong enough to overrule. They tried their utmost to persuade her, but in vain. She was fixed as a new Niobe – a stony image of young despair. So Roderick mounted his horse and rode off towards Lyndhurst, and honest Jack Wimble tied the other two horses to the gate, and took his stand beside them, a few paces from those two motionless figures on the ground, patiently waiting for the issue of this bitter hour.

It was one of the longest, weariest, saddest hours that ever youth and hope lived through. There was an awful heart-sickening fear in Violet's mind, but she gave it no definite shape. She would not say to herself, "My father is dead." The position in which he was lying hampered her arms so that she could not reach out her hand to lay it upon his heart. She bent her face down to his lips.

Oh God! not a flutter stirred upon her soft cheek as she laid it against those pallid lips. The lower jaw had fallen in an awful-looking way; but Violet had seen her father look like that sometimes as he slept, with open mouth, before the hall fire. It might be only a long swoon, a suspension of consciousness. Dr. Martin would come presently – oh, how long, how long the time seemed – and make all things right.

The crescent moon shone silver pale above that dim gray wood. The barked trunks gleamed white and spectral in the gathering dark. Owls began to hoot in the distance, frogs were awaking near at hand, belated rabbits flitted ghost-like across the track. All nature seemed of one gray or shadowy hue – silvery where the moonbeams fell.

The October air was chill and penetrating. There was a dull aching in Violet's limbs from the weight of her burden, but she was hardly conscious of physical pain. It seemed to her that she had been sitting there for hours waiting for the doctor's help. She thought the night must have nearly worn itself out.

"Dr. Martin could not have been at home," she said, speaking for the first time since Roderick rode away. "Mr. Vawdrey would fetch someone else, surely."

"My dear young lady, he hasn't had time to ride to Lyndhurst yet."

"Not yet," cried Vixen despairingly, "not yet! And it has been so long. Papa is getting so cold. The chill will be so bad for him."

"Worse for you, miss. I do wish you'd let me take you home."

"And leave papa here – alone – unconscious! How can you be so cruel as to think of such a thing?"

"Dear Miss Tempest, we're not doing him any good, and you may be getting a chill that will be nigh your death. If you would only go home to your mamma, now – it's hard upon her not to know – she'll be fretting about you, I daresay."

"Don't waste your breath talking to me," cried Vixen indignantly; "I shall not leave this spot till papa goes with me."

They waited for another quarter of an hour in dismal silence. The horses gnawed the lower branches of the trees, and gave occasional evidence of their impatience. Bullfinch had gone home to his stable no doubt. They were only about a mile-and-a-half from the Abbey House.

Hark! what was that? The splish-splash of horses' hoofs on the soft turf. Another minute and Rorie rode up to the gate with a stranger.

"I was lucky enough to meet this gentleman," he said, "a doctor from Southampton, who was at the hunt to-day. Violet dear, will you let me take you home now, and leave the doctor and Mr. Wimble with your father?"

"No," answered Vixen decisively.

The strange doctor knelt down and looked at his patient. He was a middle-aged man, grave-looking, with iron-gray hair – a man who impressed Vixen with a sense of power and authority. She looked at him silently, with a despairing appealing look that thrilled him, familiar as he was with such looks. He made his examination quietly, saying not a word, and keeping his face hidden. Then he turned to the two men who were standing close by, watching him anxiously.

"You must get some kind of litter to carry him home," he whispered.

And then with gentle firmness, with strong irresistible hands, he separated the living from the dead, lifted Violet from the ground and led her towards her horse.

"You must let Mr. Vawdrey take you home, my dear young lady," he said. "You can do nothing here."

"But you – you can do something," sobbed Violet, "you will bring him back to life – you – "

"I will do all that can be done," answered the doctor gently.

His tone told her more than his words. She gave one wild shriek, and threw herself down beside her dead father. A cloud came over the distracted brain, and she lay there senseless. The doctor and Rorie lifted her up and carried her to the gate where her horse was waiting. The doctor forced a little brandy through the locked lips, and between them Rorie and he placed her in the saddle. She had just consciousness enough by this time to hold the bridle mechanically, and to sit upright on her horse; and thus led by Roderick, she rode slowly back to the home that was never any more to be the same home that she had known and lived in through the joyous sixteen years of her life. All things were to be different to her henceforward. The joy of life was broken short off, like a flower snapped from its stem.

CHAPTER IX

A House of Mourning

There was sorrow at the Abbey House deeper and wilder than had entered within those doors for many a year. To Mrs. Tempest the shock of her husband's death was overwhelming. Her easy, luxurious, monotonous life had been very sweet to her, but her husband had been the dearest part of her life. She had taken little trouble to express her love for him, quite willing that he should take it for granted. She had been self-indulgent and vain; seeking her own ease, spending money and care on her own adornment; but she had not forgotten to make the Squire's life pleasant to him also. Newly-wedded lovers in the fair honeymoon-stage of existence could not have been fonder of each other than the middle-aged Squire and his somewhat faded wife. His loving eyes had never seen Time's changes in Pamela Tempest's pretty face, the lessening brightness of the eyes, the duller tints of the complexion, the loss of youth's glow and glory. To him she had always appeared the most beautiful woman in the world.

And now the fondly-indulged wife could do nothing but lie on her sofa and shed a rain of incessant tears, and drink strong tea, which had lost its power to comfort or exhilarate. She would see no one. She could not even be roused to interest herself in the mourning, though, with a handsome widow, Pauline thought that ought to be all important.

"There are so many styles of widows' caps now, ma'am. You really ought to see them, and choose for yourself," urged Pauline, an honest young Englishwoman, who had begun life as Polly, but whom Mrs. Tempest had elevated into Pauline.

"What does it matter, Pauline? Take anything you like. He will not be there to see."

Here the ready tears flowed afresh. That was the bitterest of all. That she should look nice in her mourning, and Edward not be there to praise her. In her feebleness she could not imagine life without him. She would hear his step at her door surely, his manly voice in the corridor. She would awake from this awful dream, in which he was not, and find him, and fall into his arms, and sob out her grief upon his breast, and tell him all she had suffered.

That was the dominant feeling in this weak soul. He could not be gone for ever.

Yet the truth came back upon her in hideous distinctness every now and then – came back suddenly and awfully, like the swift revelation of a desolate plague-stricken scene under a lightning flash. He was gone. He was lying in his coffin, in the dear old Tudor hall where they had sat so cosily. Those dismal reiterated strokes of the funeral-bell meant that his burial was at hand. They were moving the coffin already, perhaps. His place knew him no more.

She tottered to the darkened window, lifted the edge of the blind, and looked out. The funeral train was moving slowly along the carriage sweep, through the winding shrubberied road. How long, and black, and solemnly splendid the procession looked. Everybody had loved and respected him. It was a grand funeral. The thought of this general homage gave a faint thrill of comfort to the widow's heart.

"My noble husband," she ejaculated. "Who could help loving you?"

It seemed to her only a little while ago that she had driven up to the Tudor porch for the first time after her happy honeymoon, when she was in the bloom of youth and beauty, and life was like a schoolgirl's happy dream.

"How short life is," she sobbed; "how cruelly short for those who are happy!"

With Violet grief was no less passionate; but it did not find its sole vent in tears. The stronger soul was in rebellion against Providence. She kept aloof from her mother in the time of sorrow. What could they say to each other? They could only cry together. Violet shut herself in her room, and refused to see anyone, except patient Miss McCroke, who was always bringing her cups of tea, or basins of arrowroot, trying to coax her to take some kind of nourishment, dabbing her hot forehead with eau-de-Cologne – doing all those fussy little kindnesses which are so acutely aggravating in a great sorrow.

"Let me lie on the ground alone, and think of him, and wail for him."

That is what Violet Tempest would have said, if she could have expressed her desire clearly.

Roderick Vawdrey went back to the Abbey House after the funeral, and contrived to see Miss McCroke, who was full of sympathy for everybody.

"Do let me see Violet, that's a dear creature," he said. "I can't tell you how unhappy I am about her. I can't get her face out of my thoughts, as I saw it that dreadful night when I led her horse home – the wild sad eyes, the white lips."

"She is not fit to see anyone," said Miss McCroke; "but perhaps it might rouse her a little to see you."

Miss McCroke had an idea that all mourners ought to be roused; that much indulgence in grief for the dead was reprehensible.

"Yes," answered Rorie eagerly, "she would see me, I know. We are like brother and sister."

"Come into the schoolroom," said the governess, "and I'll see what I can do."

The schoolroom was Vixen's own particular den, and was not a bit like the popular idea of a schoolroom.

It was a pretty little room, with a high wooden dado, painted olive green, and a high-art paper of amazing ugliness, whereon brown and red storks disported themselves on a dull green ground. The high-art paper was enlivened with horsey caricatures by Leech, and a menagerie of pottery animals on various brackets.

A pot or a pan had been stuck into every corner that would hold one. There were desks, and boxes, and wickerwork baskets of every shape and kind, a dwarf oak bookcase on either side of the fireplace, with the books all at sixes and sevens, leaning against each other as if they were intoxicated. The broad mantelpiece presented a confusion of photographs, cups and saucers, violet jars, and Dresden shepherdesses. Over the quaint old Venetian glass dangled Vixen's first trophy, the fox's brush, tied with a scarlet ribbon. There were no birds, or squirrels, or dormice, for Vixen was too fond of the animal creation to shut her favourites up in cages; but there was a black bearskin spread in a corner for Argus to lie upon. In the wide low windows there were two banks of bright autumn flowers, pompons and dwarf roses, mignonette and veronica.

Miss McCroke drew up the blind, and stirred the fire.

"I'll go and ask her to come," she said.

"Do, like a dear," said Rorie.

He paced the room while she was gone, full of sadness. He had been very fond of the Squire, and that awfully sudden death, an apopleptic seizure, instantaneous as a thunderbolt, had impressed him very painfully. It was his first experience of the kind, and it was infinitely terrible to him. It seemed to him a long time before Vixen appeared, and then the door opened, and a slim black figure came in, a white fixed face looked at him piteously, with tearless eyes made big by a great grief. She came leaning on Miss McCroke, as if she could hardly walk unaided. The face was stranger to him than an altogether unknown face. It was Violet Tempest with all the vivid joyous life gone out of her, like a lamp that is extinguished.

He took her cold trembling hands and drew her gently to a chair, and sat down beside her.

"I wanted so much to see you, dear," he said, "to tell you how sorry we all are for you – my mother, my aunt, and cousin" – Violet gave a faint shiver – "all of us. The Duke liked your dear father so much. It was quite a shock to him."

"You are very good," Violet said mechanically.

She sat by him, pale and still as marble, looking at the ground. His voice and presence impressed her but faintly, like something a long way off. She was thinking of her dead father. She saw nothing but that one awful figure. They had laid him in his grave by this time. The cold cruel earth had fallen upon him and hidden him for ever from the light; he was shut away for ever from the fair glad world; he who had been so bright and cheerful, whose presence had carried gladness everywhere.

"Is the funeral quite over?" she asked presently, without lifting her heavy eyelids.

"Yes, dear. It was a noble funeral. Everybody was there – rich and poor. Everybody loved him."

"The poor most of all," she said. "I know how good he was to them."

Somebody knocked at the door and asked something of Miss McCroke, which obliged the governess to leave her pupil. Roderick was glad at her departure, That substantial figure in its new black dress had been a hinderance to freedom of conversation.

Miss McCroke's absence did not loosen Violet's tongue. She sat looking at the ground, and was dumb. That silent grief was very awful to Roderick.

"Violet, why don't you talk to me about your sorrow?" he said. "Surely you can trust me – your friend – your brother!"

That last word stung her into speech. The hazel eyes shot a swift angry glance at him.

"You have no right to call yourself that," she said, "you have not treated me like a sister."

"How not, dear?"

"You should have told me about your engagement – that you were going to marry Lady Mabel Ashbourne."

"Should I?" exclaimed Rorie, amazed. "If I had I should have told you an arrant falsehood. I am not engaged to my cousin Mabel. I am not going to marry her."

"Oh, it doesn't matter in the least whether you are or not," returned Vixen, with a weary air. "Papa is dead, and trifles like that can't affect me now. But I felt it unkind of you at the time I heard it."

"And where and how did you hear this wonderful news, Vixen?" asked Rorie, very pleased to get her thoughts away from her grief, were it only for a minute.

"Mamma told me that everybody said you were engaged, and that the fact was quite obvious."

"What everybody says, and what is quite obvious, is very seldom true, Violet. You may take that for a first principle in social science. I am not engaged to anyone. I have no thought of getting married – for the next three years."

Vixen received this information with chilling silence. She would have been very glad to hear it, perhaps, a week ago – at which time she had found it a sore thing to think of her old playfellow as Lady Mabel's affianced husband – but it mattered nothing now. The larger grief had swallowed up all smaller grievances. Roderick Vawdrey had receded into remote distance. He was no one, nothing, in a world that was suddenly emptied of all delight.

"What are you going to do, dear?" asked Roderick presently. "If you shut yourself up in your room and abandon yourself to grief, you will make yourself very ill. You ought to go away somewhere for a little while."

"For ever!" exclaimed Vixen passionately. "Do you think I can ever endure this dear home without papa? There is not a thing I look at that doesn't speak to me of him. The dogs, the horses. I almost hate them for reminding me so cruelly. Yes, we are going away at once, I believe. Mamma said so when I saw her this morning."

"Your poor mamma! How does she bear her grief?"

"Oh, she cries, and cries, and cries," said Vixen, rather contemptuously. "I think it comforts her to cry. I can't cry. I am like the dogs. If I did not restrain myself with all my might I should howl. I should like to lie on the ground outside his door – just as his dog does – and to refuse to eat or drink till I died."

"But, dear Violet, you are not alone in the world. You have your poor mamma to think of."

"Mamma – yes. I am sorry for her, of course. But she is only like a lay-figure in my life. Papa was everything."

"Do you know where your mamma is going to take you?"

"No; I neither know nor care. It will be to a house with four walls and a roof, I suppose. It will be all the same to me wherever it is."

What could Roderick say? It was too soon to talk about hope or comfort. His heart was rent by this dull silent grief; but he could do nothing except sit there silently by Vixen's side with her cold unresponsive hands held in his.

Miss McCroke came back presently, followed by a maid carrying a pretty little Japanese tea-tray.

"I have just been giving your poor mamma a cup of tea, Violet," said the governess. "Mr. Clements has been telling her about the will, and it has been quite too much for her. She was almost hysterical. But she's better now, poor dear. And now we'll all have some tea. Bring the table to the fire, Mr. Vawdrey, please, and let us make ourselves comfortable," concluded Miss McCroke, with an assumption of mild cheerfulness.

Perhaps there is not in all nature so cheerful a thing as a good sea-coal fire, with a log of beechwood on the top of the coals. It will be cheerful in the face of affliction. It sends out its gushes of warmth and brightness, its gay little arrowy flames that appear and disappear like elves dancing their midnight waltzes on a barren moor. It seems to say: "Look at me and be comforted! Look at me and hope! So from the dull blackness of sorrow rise the many coloured lights of new-born joy."

Vixen suffered her chair to be brought near that cheery fire, and just then Argus crept into the room and nestled at her knee. Roderick seated himself at the other side of the hearth – a bright little fire-place with its border of high-art tiles, illuminated with the story of "Mary, Mary, quite contrary," after quaintly mediaeval designs, by Mr. Stacey Marks. Miss McCroke poured out the tea in the quaint old red and blue Worcester cups, and valiantly sustained that assumption of cheerfulness. She would not have permitted herself to smile yesterday; but now the funeral was over, the blinds were drawn up, and a mild cheerfulness was allowable.

"If you would condescend to tell me where you are going, Vixen, I might contrive to come there too, by-and-by. We could have some rides together. You'll take Arion, of course."

"I don't know that I shall ever ride again," answered Violet with a shudder.

Could she ever forget that awful ride? Roderick hated himself for his foolish speech.

"Violet will have to devote herself to her studies very assiduously for the next two years," said Miss McCroke. "She is much more backwards than I like a pupil of mine to be at sixteen."

"Yes, I am going to grind at three or four foreign grammars, and to give my mind to latitude and longitude, and fractions, and decimals," said Vixen, with a bitter laugh. "Isn't that cheering?"

"Whatever you do, Vixen," cried Roderick earnestly, "don't be a paradigm."

"What's that?"