White Turrets

Again Louise smiled, but this time with a surprised and almost reproachful glance of interrogation at her sister.

“Has not Winifred told you about our dear old home?” she said. “We think there is nothing like it in the world. Winifred, have you never described it to Miss Norreys?”

“We have always had so many other things to talk of,” said Winifred, indifferently. “Besides, I am not good at description.”

Hertha felt too provoked to look at her.

“You are right,” she said warmly to Louise, “I am sure there cannot be another place like it. There is something dreamy about it, too, even in this brilliant sunshine.”

“You feel that?” said the girl eagerly. “I am so glad. Yes, there is a very peculiar charm about it. I think it must be that it is so little changed from what it must have been hundreds of years ago. It is so easy in one’s fancy to re-people it with those who used to live in it and love it as we do now. Celia makes up all sorts of stories, based on the real history and legends of the place. Sometimes,” with a little laugh, “she really frightens herself, for we have a ghost. We call her the – ”

“Louise,” said Winifred, “I just won’t have you tell Miss Norreys that idiotic old story. I wish all ghost stories and nonsense of the kind were forbidden by Act of Parliament.”

“We should be in many ways the losers if it were so,” said Hertha, quietly. She could not understand Winifred, for there was evident earnestness under her half-laughing tone.

“What a strange, inconsistent girl she is!” thought the elder woman. “She looks and seems honesty itself, it is the thing that attracted me to her; and yet how she has deceived, or at least misled me, and through me, Mr Montague and others. I feel hot when I think of it! Still she does not feel ashamed, and she must have known I should be undeceived as soon as I came here. And now this about ghosts? Is it possible she is really afraid of that sort of thing, and that it makes her dislike her home? She certainly does not look as if she had ever had a fright.”

Her silence during these cogitations had reacted on her companions, and for a few minutes neither spoke. Then Winifred turned abruptly to Louise.

“Who is with you?” she said, “or who is coming? Lennox, of course, and any friends of his?”

“Yes,” Louise replied with the slightest possible increase of colour in her face. “Lennox and Captain Hillyer. We shall be quite a cheerful Easter party, if only papa gets better quickly.”

“Dear me,” thought Miss Norreys, who was not above all feminine weaknesses, “I do feel very angry with you, Winifred Maryon. I shall be all wrong about my clothes even: I shall have to telegraph for evening dresses.”

They were entering the drive by now. It was in keeping with all the rest. Long and straight, with thickly growing trees at each side, which gave an additional touch of mystery to the approach to the house. And though straight – so that the building standing somewhat high on its terraced summit, was conspicuous, the white flights of steps, gleaming like the walls themselves in the sunshine – the road dipped considerably, though gradually, here and there, causing all but the turrets, from which the house evidently took its name, momentarily to disappear.

Hertha, for the time, forgot all else in her true sense of pleasure and interest. And no words she could have chosen, had she been the most calculating of mortals, would have made such a pleasing impression in the still dubious Mrs Maryon as those with which her new guest replied to her words of cordial but slightly constrained greeting.

“I have never been so enchanted by anything as by the first sight of your exquisite old house. I feel for once in real fairy-land.”

And graceful Celia, in her pale-grey dress, with a flush on her cheeks and shy welcome in her lovely eyes, might, indeed, have been the Sleeping Beauty just awakened.

That “first impression” grew instead of fading, for it was well rooted. Both Mrs Maryon and her guest, so different in all else, so entirely unlike each other in the circumstances of their lives – the one so sheltered and protected, so curiously ignorant of life save in her own experience of it; the other, so early thrown upon herself, clung to by others at an age when most are still clinging and dependent; yet neither of the two either narrowed or hardened – these two, thanks to their genuine womanliness and unselfish single-mindedness, made friends, and such a friendship lasts.

By some tacit agreement the “talk,” which on Mrs Maryon’s part had been one underlying motive of the invitation, was during the first few days evaded. They did talk, but not so much about Winifred as of themselves, their personal feelings, and almost at once Mrs Maryon knew that she had utterly misjudged this girl, or woman, as Hertha preferred to call herself. Though it had arisen through no fault of her own, Winifred’s mother was acutely conscious of the prejudice she had harboured against Miss Norreys, and it now seemed to her as if she could not do enough to make amends for the mistaken opinion she was yet far too delicate-minded to avow to its object; and Hertha, on her side, bided her time for the explanation which she knew was unavoidable. She was feeling her way, anxious not to blame Winifred unduly, difficult as she found it to understand the girl, or to sympathise with the line she had taken up.

But the long tête-à-têtes with her friend which Miss Maryon had looked forward to did not come to pass. Instead, Hertha seemed never tired of talking to her hostess, relating to her as they grew to know each other better, tender recollections of her own mother and bygone days, which she seldom now allowed herself to dwell upon.

And Winifred, one of whose good qualities was a remarkable absence of jealousy, consoled herself by reflecting that Hertha was probably actuated by real regard for herself.

“She sees that it will make everything easier for mamma to like and trust her, and thus to get rid of all these old prejudices against women with a career,” she thought.

Altogether the days passed pleasantly. Hertha allowed herself, for the time, to live in the present. Her interest in both Celia and Louise deepened; of Celia’s unusual talent she became convinced, and she determined to do anything in her power to help the young girl to cultivate it. Mr Maryon recovered sufficiently to join the family party in the later hours of the day, when his cheerfulness made one almost forget his chronic invalidism.

“I like your cousin Lennox so much,” said Hertha one day to Celia; “I had no idea from the little I had heard of him that he was so – well, interesting, as well as sterling.”

“I am so glad you like him,” said Celia, her face lighting up. “Yes, he is very nice, though not, perhaps, exactly clever.”

“He is not stupid,” said Hertha.

“Oh, no; not stupid. He’s just the sort of man that would have got on splendidly if he had had a clever wife. It is such a pity,” and she sighed a little. “I daresay you have noticed – he is so devoted to Winifred, and she doesn’t care for him in the least.”

“To Winifred!” said Miss Norreys. “No, I certainly should not have thought so. Are you sure – it is not one of Winifred’s freaks to think so?” she was going to add, but stopped in time.

“Oh, quite sure,” said Celia, with the slightest possible inflection of annoyance. “Winifred is not at all the sort of girl to flirt, or anything like that. And I think it is only natural that he should be devoted to her. She is so clever, and so – unlike the common run, and Lennox has looked up to her all his life. We should all have been so glad, for then she could have settled down at home, or close to home, for good. Len’s little place is only two miles away. And it would have kept White Turrets in the family. He is our second-cousin, you know.”

“These arrangements seldom come to pass, however,” said Miss Norreys, philosophically. “Had that anything to do with Winifred’s dislike to staying at home, do you think?”

“Oh dear, no,” said Celia. “She did not think it a matter of much importance. She has always wanted to take a line of her own; she has always felt herself cramped by ordinary life. And she wants so to be of real use.”

The two were walking up and down the terrace. For a moment or two Hertha did not speak. Then she said quietly:

“Perhaps I should not discuss the matter with you, dear Celia. You are so much younger than I. But, before I go, I want to have a long talk with your mother. I must tell you that I was completely mistaken about you all. I had no idea whatever that Winifred had such a home, such plain home duties and responsibilities, as I strongly suspect she has. I – I thought you were very poor, and that she had to earn money to help you all.”

Celia grew crimson, and almost gasped for breath. “Miss Norreys!” she exclaimed. Then she added eagerly, “Winifred did not mean to mislead you – she is not like that.”

“N-no,” said Hertha. “I was very indignant at first, but now I don’t think she meant anything, except at all costs to get her own way. Of course there was no calculated deceit about it, otherwise she would have found some means of preventing my coming here. But she has placed me myself in a very disagreeable position, as I must make her see. And she must face the consequences. But I should like to know – you have plenty of sense – do you think she is doing right?”

Celia was sorely pressed. Her loyalty to Winifred rose up in arms. But she was taken at a disadvantage: she had always believed that Miss Norreys had warmly aided and abetted Winifred in her search for a career.

“I – I am so surprised,” she said at last. “I suppose it is best for me to tell you the truth. Yes, at the bottom of my heart I now think – I did not always, but I do now – that she could find plenty to do, and plenty opportunities of being useful to others, here at home. Especially as – you know all that, I suppose? You know that all the property, and it is large, will be hers. She is in the position of an eldest son.”

More and more astonished, Miss Norreys felt at a loss for words.

“No, I had no idea of that,” she said. “That puts her duty beyond all question. I cannot understand her. I feel almost inclined to say I have no patience with her.”

In her excitement she walked on rapidly. They had just, for the second or third time in their stroll, reached the end of the long front terrace, where some steps led down to a straight but more shaded walk, running parallel with one side of the house. Hertha was beginning to go down the steps, when Celia laid her hand on her arm. Turning in some surprise, Miss Norreys saw that she was paler than usual.

“Not down there, please,” she said. “I do dislike that walk: it is so gloomy, and – to tell you the truth, that is the path leading up from the old bowling-green, that they say is haunted.” Hertha could scarcely help laughing. Here, in the broad daylight, it seemed so absurd to be afraid of such things.

“I should, all the same, like to explore it,” she said. “Now I come to think of it, I don’t think I have been down there at all. But of course we won’t go that way if you would rather not;” and she good-naturedly turned back.

“I don’t generally mind so much,” said Celia, looking rather ashamed. “But – she, or it, really has been seen lately – they call her ‘The White Weeper’,” and she instinctively lowered her voice a little. “I mind it just now, because, you see, it seems so mixed up with Winifred.”

Miss Norreys looked puzzled. “Mixed up with Winifred?” she repeated, “how do you mean? What is the story of the White Weeper?”

So Celia related, as she had done to Eric Balderson, the old legend; entering into it in somewhat fuller detail than to that semi-sceptical person. For, as she went on, she saw that Hertha was not at all inclined to laugh at it; on the contrary, she looked as interested and impressed as could be desired.

“It is strange,” she said, when Celia stopped. “A curious tradition to have been handed down through so many generations. And I cannot see but that we should sometimes take these things as warnings or guides to a certain extent. Then the reason of Winifred’s annoyance, whenever it is mentioned, is that the White Weeper would evidently not approve of her present line?”

“Yes,” said Celia. “And – it does seem distinct. She,” and the girl gave a half-frightened look over her shoulder in the direction of the shady walk, “she has been seen lately, two or three times. And the people who have seen her were in more than one instance strangers here – and even those who have heard about the ghost don’t know the reason of her coming. They only think it portends some trouble. But I do think it strange that she should have begun to come so much more since Winifred has been so determined on leaving home.”

“You don’t disapprove altogether, at least you did not, of her ideas?” said Hertha.

Celia looked unhappy.

“I told you, dear Miss Norreys, that I have changed. I did sympathise more than I do now, and then I feel as if I were disloyal to her. I would rather not say more than that.”

Hertha did not press her.

“You don’t think Winifred is at all afraid of the White Weeper?” she said, with a little smile.

“She always mocks at it, but she gets angry too,” said Celia.

“Ah, that shows a latent misgiving somewhere. I am rather glad of it,” Miss Norreys replied.

Then, feeling that she had perhaps said as much as was wise to the girl, who was, after all, the youngest member of the family, she changed the subject.

But that evening she had a long and exhaustive talk with Mrs Maryon, which ended by Winifred’s mother feeling that she could never be thankful enough for the chance which had brought them the friendship of the woman she had so misjudged.

“And you prefer to put it all before Winifred yourself, then, my dear Miss Norreys?” said Mrs Maryon at the close of their conversation.

“I think so. I have strong grounds of my own. For, you see, though I do absolve her from any intention of deceiving me, the result to me is the same as if she had deliberately done so. In fact, it is almost worse – it makes me seem such a foolish person! I shall tell her that the whole must be explained to Mr Montague, and, as regards the society, it must be left in his hands. And she will not have the excuse of putting it upon Celia now. I may tell her what we have planned for her, may I not?”

“Certainly, most certainly,” said Mrs Maryon. “There is one comfort,” she went on. “If Winifred does give in, she will do so heartily. There is nothing small about her – no jealousies or resentfulness. If she stays at home or sets to work to do her duty here, she will be thorough about it.”

“Then let us devoutly trust she will,” said Miss Norreys. “I feel rather hopeful. I am not sure but that at the bottom of her heart she is a little désillusionnée about her career. It has not all been smooth sailing.”

But at this Winifred’s mother shook her head.

“That, I fear, in a nature like hers, would only rouse greater determination – not to use the harsher word, obstinacy,” she said.

But Hertha was sanguine and confident. She felt her own ground sure, and though personally willing enough to sink her own cause of complaint, she intended to make use of it for the sake of others.

That was to be a day – an evening rather – of explanations. The young people were amusing themselves in the billiard-room after dinner, and Miss Norreys, feeling a little tired, and having no special liking for billiards, was sitting quietly in the drawing-room, thinking over the family complications in which she found herself so unexpectedly involved, when the sound of some one entering the room made her look up. Somewhat to her astonishment, she saw that the new-comer was Lennox Maryon. Still more surprised did she feel when he came forward and drew a chair close to her own.

“Am I intruding?” he said; “you look nearly as startled as if I were the famous White Weeper herself.” His tone was bantering, but underneath Hertha perceived a touch of nervousness.

“I fancied you were absorbed in your game,” she said. “No, I did not fancy you were the White Weeper, though I confess I have been thinking about her. But she never comes inside the house?”

“She has never done so up to now,” said Lennox, “but Heaven knows what desperate steps she may not be driven to take if things go on as they are doing at present.”

His tone was so peculiar that Miss Norreys glanced at him questioningly.

“I hope devoutly she will wait till I have gone, then,” she said, half laughingly. “I have no wish at all to make her acquaintance. Are you joking, Mr Maryon, or are you at all, just a little, in earnest?”

“Yes and no,” he replied. “I am half joking out of the excess of my earnestness. Miss Norreys, I have something to tell you – a confession to make. Do you know, sometimes I have fancied you guessed, that I am very seriously, very thoroughly, in love, for the first time in my life?”

“With?” asked Hertha.

“My cousin Louise,” he said, quietly, though his sunburnt face deepened a little in colour.

Hertha nodded her head.

“Yes,” she said, “I thought so. And – what about Winifred, Mr Maryon?”

“I know the difference now,” he replied. “That was a case of thinking I was what every one wished me to be. Now – oh, what a difference!”

“You should be very grateful to Winifred,” said Hertha, drily.

“I am,” he said, naïvely, “most grateful. But,” – and here his honest eyes grew troubled – “it is far from plain sailing. As things are, Louise won’t hear of it, and she is a girl of her word. It all depends upon Winifred. Miss Norreys, she is infatuated.”

A full explanation followed. Lennox was clear-headed and entirely candid, and before the conversation was at an end, Hertha saw and understood things more thoroughly than even after her talk with Mrs Maryon.

“I will do what I can,” she said, “but I feel less confident than I did, somehow. I almost think I could brave a visit from the ghostly guardian of the family, if I thought her influence would carry the day.”

“Hush, my dear Miss Norreys,” said Lennox.

“I admire your devotion, but I tremble. Supposing she – it – took you at your word.”

And again Hertha felt uncertain if he were joking or in earnest.

But before she could say more, Celia appeared in the doorway.

“You lazy people!” she said, “everybody’s asking for you. We are going to have a dance in the hall before we go to bed.”

Chapter Ten.

Dreams and no Dreams

Miss Norreys’s mind, though a remarkably well-balanced one, was yet far from phlegmatic or unimpressionable. So far, indeed, from such did she know her inner self to be, that she had learned by experience to beware of her own natural impulsiveness, to have profound belief in “second thoughts.”

But she was full of quick sympathy, and ever ready to feel keen interest in her surroundings. It is scarcely to be wondered at, therefore, that on the night following the day we have been describing, she went up to her own room greatly engrossed by all she had heard, anxiously eager to prove herself a friend worthy of the name to the various members of the Maryon family who had appealed to her for assistance or advice. It was a beautiful night. Before Hertha got into bed she drew back the curtains of one of the two windows – her room was a corner one – as was her custom. For she loved the early morning light, and it never disturbed her slumbers before her usual hour for waking.

A flood of moonlight lay on the terrace beneath. The night was perfectly, peculiarly still, and not a leaf seemed to flutter. There was something curiously dream-like about the whole scene – for the room in which Hertha stood, and on which she threw a glance as she turned again, was, like most of those in the old house, quaint and picturesque in its very simplicity. White-panelled and wainscoted, with little wreaths of carved flowers above the lintel of the door and over the two old mirrors sunk in the walls; the bed in a sort of alcove; the ancient fireplace, surmounted by a very high and narrow carved and moulded mantel-piece, of the same dull, matt, white-painted wood, which was the chief characteristic of the house, the whole effect was like nothing that Miss Norreys remembered ever to have seen.

“It is very un-English, very un-nineteenth-century, very unlike all the attempted reproductions of the past we have so many of,” thought. Hertha. “It is so exactly what it may have been, and probably was, three or four hundred years ago. One can realise how the family life has gone on unbrokenly, with all the changing actors in it, generation after generation.”

And again she glanced out. For the first time it struck her that this window overlooked the lower terrace walk which Celia preferred to avoid. With a sudden increase of interest, Hertha pushed up the sash, and leaned out. Yes, that was the very place, the walk bare and open at the end near the house, growing dim and shady as it was lost to view in the shrubberies farther on.

“If it were worth the trouble,” thought Hertha, “I should like to put on a cloak and go right along to the end and back. I don’t think I should be afraid; the moonlight is so bright, and everything is so still. No flopping branches or sighing wind to make one fanciful. Yes, I think I should venture. And how proud I should be to tell them of it in the morning.”

But even as she gazed, a slight misgiving seized her. Was the night so perfectly still, or was the wind suddenly getting up? Something was moving at the far end of the walk – the “White Weeper’s” walk. What? The branch of a tree probably; there were aspens down there, Hertha remembered, and a mere nothing would set them quivering.

A slight shiver ran through her – it was growing chilly. With a half-contemptuous smile at herself, she drew down the window, and in a very few moments was safely ensconced in bed, though somewhat shivery still.

“I hope I haven’t caught cold through my own folly,” was her last waking thought.

For, notwithstanding her preoccupied mind and a certain amount of excitement, of which she was conscious, Hertha fell asleep quickly, and any one seeing her would have said that her slumbers were sound and untroubled.

But, in point of fact, she was dreaming vividly – all the events of the last few days seemed to be re-enacted before her, with the addition of various fantastic accompaniments such as dreamers know well. Friends and acquaintances she had not thought of for years suddenly appeared as familiar guests among the members of the family at White Turrets. Her own grandmother, whom as a child Hertha had been very fond of, seemed to be there as an ancient châtelaine of the place, pointing out to her, among the visitors, historical personages whom no living being could have known outside a book.

“We are expecting the King – Louis XVI – of course, and Queen Marie Antoinette, this evening. They have long wished to visit White Turrets, and now,” her grandmother was explaining to her, when, with a sudden start, Hertha awoke.

She was not sorry, for though the dream had been of curiously fascinating and fantastic interest, she had been conscious – and the consciousness remained with her even after she was awake – of a strange indescribable fear, that dream fear which, I fancy, at some time or other, every one must have experienced: a fear as of fate, all-pervading and irresistible, of perfectly unspeakable strangeness, as if we had got on to another plane of existence altogether, where nothing was as we had ever known it, where we feel ourselves alone in an isolation such as real life has never, even faintly, figured to us. Through all the familiar scenery of her dream – through the sound of her grandmother’s voice, and the perfect knowledge that she was here, at White Turrets, among the friends she seemed now to know so well – through the laughter and the smiles she knew to be around her, was this terrible ghastly consciousness of fear. And it did not at once disappear when she awoke. It seemed still to be clinging to her, haunting the air round about her. Never had Hertha suffered in the same way to such an extent.

“What can be the matter with me?” she said to herself. “I feel poisoned with fear. Dear me, if this sort of thing is the kind of sensation one has in a haunted room, Heaven preserve me from such an experience! But can there be any thing uncanny in this room? I have never felt it before. Oh no, it must all be fancy and nonsense. My nerves are upset, I suppose. I have been taking my friends’ troubles too much to heart.”