Chapter XVI: A Mysterious Visitor

The dinner at the Stormonts is as other dinners in the same house. The guests are Mr. and Mrs. Groshen, Dr. and Mrs. Mitsand, and one Miss Mitsand, the ugliest, as Fred remarks with a sense of injury. The flower-pots on the table, the silver dishes, the ruby hock glasses, the finger-glasses engraved with the Greek key pattern, the talk, the twaddle, Mrs. Groshen’s Honiton lace, how well Sibyl knows them all! She breathes a sigh for the days that are gone, before that slow, pompous banquet is ended, and thinks that after all there was more pleasure in a haddock and a cup of tea in Dixon Street than in all this provincial splendour.

The talk is chiefly of the races, who was there and who was not there. The county families are brought on the table, and discussed fully, together with their genealogies, which are as well known and as complicated as if they were Greek heroes or demigods.

Mrs. Stormont praises Sir Wilford Cardonnel, and those dear girls his sisters, and talks of the rose-garden and ferneries at the How; whereby she bears down rather heavily upon Mrs. Groshen, who has never been bidden to that earthly paradise. Mr. Groshen opines that Sir Wilford is better off than most of the county people, whom he disparages as a shabby lot, but adds that at the rate Sir Wilford is going on with his drags and hunters he is likely to outrun the constable before he is many years older.

That the evening entertainment which follows the feast is dull, not even Mrs. Stormont’s dearest friend Mrs. Groshen could deny, were her views taken on the subject.

Sibyl knows every piece of furniture in the drawing-room by heart, every photograph in the album. She knows the Miss Stormonts’ favourite fantasias better than those performers themselves, or they would play more correctly. She knows exactly how she will be asked to play one of her lovely pieces, or to sing one of her sweet songs, and how the young ladies will pretend to delight in Chopin, and the elders praise her wonderful ‘fingering,’ and how stifled yawns will at intervals prevail among the company. She knows how Violet will tell her about some new fern she has discovered, ‘such a darling’; and how Rose will ask her if she is going on the Continent this year, and will then favour her with some interesting facts about her Swiss tour with papa three years ago.

What a blessed relief when the clock on the mantelpiece strikes eleven! Sibyl has been wondering for ever so long why her carriage has not been announced.

‘Dear Mrs. Stormont, I think they must have forgotten me,’ she says. ‘But we are such near neighbours, I can walk home easily.’

‘My love, it is quite early; don’t talk of going; the carriage will come for you, I am sure. We want another of those delicious sonatas. Not going, surely, Mrs. Groshen,’ cries Mrs. Stormont, rejoicing in her soul to see the banker and his wife advancing to her, stately and smiling, to tell her that they have spent ‘a most enjoyable evening.’

Every one discovers that it is frightfully late. No one would have supposed it for an instant. How swift are the pinions of Time when pleasure quickens them!

Mrs. Stormont, pressed by Sibyl, makes an inquiry about Mr. Trenchard’s carriage. It has not come.

‘We walked here,’ says Mr. Groshen. ‘Matilda grumbled about her dress, but I wouldn’t have my horses harnessed again after they had come from the racecourse, and I couldn’t have them standing in harness while she changed her dress. It is no use having fine horses if you don’t study them a little. And we’re such near neighbours. We’ll take care of you, Miss Faunthorpe, if you don’t mind walking.’

‘I should like it,’ says Sibyl, with a longing look at the cool purple night beyond the open window of the gaslit room.

Fred springs up eagerly from the ottoman on which he has been sitting in patient attendance on the unattractive Miss Mitsand.

‘Let me see you home, Miss Faunthorpe. I shall be delighted.’

Sibyl runs away to put on her bonnet, and the guests issue forth in a bevy. Dr. Mitsand’s useful brougham is waiting, the others walk home in the tranquil perfumed air. Fred offers his arm, which Sibyl accepts with the infinite ease of indifference. Mr. and Mrs. Groshen make themselves agreeable by walking on briskly.

‘Isn’t it a lovely night?’ gasps Fred, rapturously.

‘Yes, it’s very fine. We generally have nice evenings in June.’

‘Ye-es,’ replies Fred, after judicious consideration. ‘I think we do. Nice long evenings, at any rate. The twenty-first being the longest day, of course, is a reason. Nice month for races, too; but rather rainy sometimes, don’t you think?’

Sibyl concedes the point.

‘I remember one wet June--poured all the month--regular cats and dogs. The racecourse was a morass; of course the heaviest timbered horse won. Here we are, I declare, close to Lancaster Lodge! How I wish it was further off!’

‘Not very flattering to me to wish us less near neighbours,’ says Sibyl, laughing.

‘Oh, come now, Miss Faunthorpe, you know I don’t mean that; but just for to-night, for the sake of prolonging this delightful walk.’

‘Don’t talk nonsense, please,’ says Sibyl. ‘And be kind enough to ring the bell.’

They are standing at the gate by this time, and Fred lingers, as if loth to perform that necessary duty.

He rings, and the lodgekeeper opens the side gate. Sibyl offers Mr. Stormont her hand on the threshold, but gives him no invitation to enter the domain.

‘Good night,’ she says, and then cries suddenly, ‘Do you hear that?’

It is a most melodious jug-jugging from a dark clump of chestnuts near the gate.

‘I hear something chirping,’ replies Fred, dubiously.

‘It’s the nightingale. It sings every night just at this time. Isn’t it exquisite?’

‘Rather throaty,’ says Fred.

‘Good night,’ repeats Sibyl, shutting the gate in his face.

‘Horrid young man!’ she ejaculates.

How dark, and cool, and silent, save for those nightingales, the grounds are to-night! She is in no hurry to go into the house. The dewy turf, the tall black trees standing out against a sky of mixed light and colour, the moon rising grandly above the elms yonder, just where the Lancaster Lodge grounds meet the edge of Redcastle Park, Sir John Boldero’s domain--all is beautiful.

Sibyl walks slowly along the shrubberied drive, and round to the lawn behind the house, that wide sweep of velvet grass upon which she and her uncle spend the summer afternoons. Mr. Trenchard’s study is on this side of the house. The lighted windows inform Sibyl that he has not yet retired for the night.

The study opens on the lawn by a half-glass door. She can go into the house this way, and surprise her forgetful uncle by her return, and tell him all about her day, about Sir Wilford Cardonnel’s attentions, of which she is proud. She thinks it will please her uncle to know that one of the magnates of the land has admired her.

She goes towards this glass door, but makes a dead stop before one of the study windows, startled by what she sees there. It is nothing very remarkable, perhaps, at the first showing, only uncle Stephen and a stranger; but the stranger is no ordinary person, and there is that in Stephen Trenchard’s face which makes the scene remarkable.

The lamp burns brightly on the official-looking table, which is spread with papers--formidable-looking papers, bristling with figures, ruled with red ink. They are laid open, as if for inspection, and among them lies an open ledger.

Sibyl has no experience which can teach her the exact nature of these papers, but she knows instinctively that they must have some relation to commerce.

Stephen Trenchard’s face is black as thunder. His left hand lies on that open ledger; with the right he points to a column of figures, running his square forefinger down the column with a vicious dig of the nail here and there, as much as to say, ‘Look at that, sir, and at that!’ and ‘What do you say to that?’

The stranger stands at Mr. Trenchard’s elbow. He is a foreigner--an Oriental--Sibyl thinks, though his plain and faultless clothes are perfectly English. He has a dark olive skin, eyes black as night, an aquiline nose, a narrow oval face, and silky blue-black hair. He is something less than middle height, stout, and sleek. His lips move softly, and his plump yellow hand seems to expostulate as Stephen Trenchard scowls at the figures.

‘Who can he be?’ wonders Sibyl, abandoning all intention of seeing her uncle to-night. ‘Some Indian friend of uncle Stephen’s, I suppose. But what can all those papers mean, and why does uncle Stephen look so angry? He looked just like that when he spoke of Philip Secretan.’

She goes round to the front of the house. The hall door is open, and the footman is airing himself on the threshold, listening to the nightingales.

‘Why wasn’t the carriage sent for me?’ asks Sibyl.

‘Indeed, ma’am, I don’t know. Was it ordered?’

‘I suppose so. Mr. Trenchard said he would send it.’

‘I’m afraid master must have forgotten, ma’am. I didn’t take no message to the coachman. Perhaps it was the gentleman coming to see him that put it out of his mind.’

‘I suppose so. Who is the gentleman? Do you know?’

‘No, ma’am, there was no name given. The gentleman came after dinner, about nine o’clock. He came from London, I believe. The London train hadn’t been long in when he came, and he’s been with Mr. Trenchard ever since.’

‘Is he going to stay here to-night?’

‘I don’t know, ma’am. There’s been nothing said, but Mrs. Skinner had the Blue Room got ready in case it should be wanted, as a premonitory measure.’

Sibyl yawns languidly, and goes upstairs to her own room, puzzled, but not seriously disturbed. This stranger has come on some business errand evidently. She knows that her uncle’s temper is not particularly placid, and concludes that he has been irritated by some vexation of a commercial character. Yet she cannot understand how this can be, since she has been taught to believe that Mr. Trenchard has retired from business.

Curiosity would impel her to await the stranger’s departure in the drawing-room, or to discover whether he is to remain for the night; but she does not care to encounter her uncle in his present temper, and he would doubtless be offended by anything that could look like espionage.

It is nearly midnight when she goes to her room. Her windows open on the garden, and are above those of the study. She seats herself by an open window, and looks out into the cool, shadowy garden. Presently she hears a voice raised in anger, her uncle’s voice, she knows; but the stranger’s tones never reach her ear.

‘His voice is like his looks, I dare say,’ she thinks, ‘soft, and silky, and cunning. I shouldn’t think he was the kind of man uncle Trenchard would trust.’

She wastes more than an hour in undressing, brushing her hair, putting away her finery. The clocks strike one, but those lighted windows still shine upon the dark turf below.

‘What a long interview!’ she thinks. ‘This Indian gentleman must surely be going to stay all night. He would never leave the house at such an hour as this.’

She falls asleep at last, worn out by the fatigues of the day, but at the last moment hears that angry voice of her uncle’s suddenly raised in a gust of passion.

She wakes next morning with an uneasy sense of something having gone wrong; but it is some moments before that scene in the room beneath flashes back upon her.

‘Who can that man be?’ she asks herself again, ‘and why was uncle Trenchard so angry? Some Indian merchant, perhaps, to whom he has lent money. The loss of a few thousands ought not to make him so angry. It must be like a drop in the ocean compared with his immense wealth. But then I know he is fond of money, and that it pains him to part even with a ten-pound note.’

She dresses, and goes down to the dining-room, looking as fresh as the newly opened roses, to which the nightingale sings at sundown. Mr. Trenchard is in his accustomed seat, the big crimson morocco arm-chair drawn into the bay-window. The sashes are up, and the sweet morning air comes in across the flower-beds. Eight o’clock is the hour for breakfast, winter and summer, at Lancaster Lodge, and unpunctuality is little less than a crime in the eyes of Stephen Trenchard, who is usually dressed in his blue frock coat and nankeen waistcoat and trousers by six, and prowling about the grounds to the discomfiture of his gardeners.

He is a shade paler than usual, and has purple shadows under his eyes. His hand shakes a little, Sibyl thinks, as he turns the leaves of the Manchester daily, which he reads every morning before breakfast. The face he turns to her as she bends over him to administer her morning kiss has an old and wan look in the sunshine. Can it be that Mrs. Stormont is right, and that Stephen Trenchard is breaking up?

There are no early prayers at Lancaster Lodge. Mr. Trenchard has his ideas upon religion, and his own particular creed by which he is to stand or fall, no doubt; but whatever these are, he keeps them strictly to himself. He never goes to church, a neglect of duty which in a person of Mr. Trenchard’s consequence Redcastle regards as an eccentricity, but which would make a social outlaw of a small butcher or baker. He has no objection to Sibyl’s attendance at the minster, where she exhibits the latest fashions on Sunday mornings. He is no declared infidel. He simply ignores religion, as a thing he has been able to dispense with all his life.

Sibyl takes her place before the silver urn, and begins the business of tea-making. Mr. Trenchard drinks green tea unmixed with black, and is very particular about the preparation of the beverage. Marion has never succeeded in pleasing him in this matter. Sibyl has never failed.

‘You are looking so tired this morning, dear uncle!’ she says, in her soft winning voice. ‘You were up very late last night, were you not?’

‘How do you know that? You were in bed, I suppose?’

‘Not till twelve o’clock. I stayed rather late at the Stormonts, thinking you would send the carriage for me.’

‘The carriage? ah, to be sure. I forgot.’

‘It didn’t matter in the least. I walked home. That horrid Fred brought me. Such a lovely night, the walk would have been delightful with any one else.’

‘Ah, you don’t like young Stormont?’ says Mr. Trenchard, looking sharply at her. ‘I’m glad of it, child. He’s a genteel pauper at best. You must marry some one better than that.’

Sibyl pales at the mention of marriage.

‘I don’t mean to marry at all, uncle. I’m much happier as I am, with you.’

‘Stuff and nonsense, my dear! Marriage is a woman’s mission, and with your pretty face you are sure to get a rich husband.’

‘You wouldn’t have me marry for money, uncle Trenchard!’ cries Sibyl, with a horrified look.

Here is this old man, rolling in wealth, and yet counselling a mercenary marriage.

‘I wouldn’t have you marry without money. You are no girl to play at love in a cottage. That’s a game you’d soon grow tired of.’

Sibyl starts as if she had been stung.

‘Don’t talk of marriage, uncle Trenchard. The subject is hateful to me. There is no one in Redcastle that I care for, or am ever likely to care for.’

‘I am sorry to hear it,’ replies Mr. Trenchard, with a moody look, as he resumes his newspaper.

Stephen Trenchard is not a man who riots in the good things of this life. His breakfast consists of a cup of green tea and a little bit of dry toast. His other meals are of the simplest. But there is considerable epicureanism in his simplicity, and he resents a bad dinner as a personal injury.

‘I expected to find a visitor here this morning,’ Sibyl says presently, too curious to be silent on the subject of that nocturnal interview in Mr. Trenchard’s study.

‘Indeed! Have you invited any one?’

‘I should not take such a liberty without your permission--unless it were Marion or Jenny. I thought the gentleman who was with you last night would stay----.’

Her uncle looks at her with a darker frown than she has ever provoked before.

‘The gentleman came on business, and left as soon as his business was concluded,’ replies Mr. Trenchard, in chilling tones. ‘The less you trouble yourself about my affairs, Sibyl, the better for our mutual happiness.’

‘I only wondered----’ falters Sibyl.

‘Don’t wonder. It’s a most unprofitable occupation of the mind. Who told you there was any one with me last night?’

‘I saw him.’

‘Saw him? How?’

‘The night was so lovely, that I walked round the garden after Fred Stormont left me at the gate, and I was coming in at your study door, seeing your lamp burning, when I saw that you were not alone.’

‘The gentleman you saw is a Calcutta merchant, an old acquaintance, who wanted my advice in a critical turn of his affairs. And now you know all that there is to be known, and may leave off wondering.’

Mr. Trenchard sips his tea and nibbles his dry toast in silence, and presently disappears altogether behind the county paper.

Sibyl is disappointed. She expected to be questioned about yesterday, to be asked if she had made any conquests, to be able to describe Sir Wilford Cardonnel’s obvious subjugation, and the effect which it produced on the Stormonts,--Rose’s envious looks, Violet’s constrained civility, Fred’s anguish of mind as he curveted on the unmanageable gray.

Finding her uncle indisposed for conversation, Sibyl leaves the dining-room as soon as decency permits, and flits away to her favourite retreat--the garden. Life which is all a summer holiday is pleasant enough, doubtless; but oh, how monotonous! and, in Sibyl’s case, how lonely!

This morning, exhausted with yesterday’s excitement, she throws herself back in her low wicker chair wearily, and sighs two or three times in a quarter of an hour without knowing why,--sighs for the days that are gone--for poverty and Alexis, perhaps, though she would hardly confess as much.

The roses glorify the garden, the trees cast their deep cool shadows on the sunny grass; the house yonder, with all its windows shining in the sun, its venetians, its flower-boxes, its prosperous air, as of a habitation for which wealth has done its uttermost,--all these things remind her that her lot has fallen in a pleasant place. Yet she yearns for something more.

How soon will it come? How soon will the heritage for which she waits be hers? Mrs. Stormont has noticed a change in Stephen Trenchard, and that change has been very obvious to Sibyl’s eyes this morning.

She struggles against sordid, mercenary thoughts, but they are too strong for her. She cannot help speculating about the future which seems drawing nearer, that future which is to reunite her to Alexis--to open the door of a new glad world, to release her from this dull bondage in the narrow paths of provincial pretence and respectability.

She knows that she is her uncle’s favourite niece. Marion is suffered to come and go, but is rarely favoured with so much as a civil word or a kindly glance from Mr. Trenchard. Jenny he openly abominates. Her noisy bouncing ways distress him beyond measure, and she is rarely admitted to his presence. Sibyl therefore concludes that--although Mr. Trenchard, out of kindly feeling, may leave a few thousands to Marion and Jenny, just enough to secure them a competence--the bulk of his fortune will be hers. That vast wealth which has made Redcastle bow down before him will be hers; and Redcastle, which already fawns upon her--honouring her prospective riches--will fall prostrate and worship her.

‘Poor uncle Trenchard,’ she thinks, compassionately. ‘What is the good of money to the old? His prosperity comes at the wrong end of life. What can his wealth give him? A fine house, where he lives alone, a splendid solitude. Horses which he rarely uses. For all the personal gratification he has out of his wealth he would be as well off with six hundred a year. But he has the homage of Redcastle, which would not be given to a man of limited income, even though he devoted half his revenue to acts of charity.’

Sibyl sees the end of her bondage coming near, and thinks of Alexis with tender longing for reunion. Will he come back to her? Will he forgive her? Yes, a thousand times yes. He loves her too well to be obdurate. Whatever anger he may have felt at her abandonment of him will melt away before her smiles.

It is a trial to be so ignorant of his fate, not to know where he is or what he is doing, whether fortune has been kind or cruel to him.

Great heaven! if he should be dead! If the fight should have been too hard, and he fallen!

Her heart grows cold at the mere thought that such a thing is possible. She shudders, clasps her hands over her eyes as if to shut out the horrid spectacle. If he were dead; hope’s airy palace built on a fatal quicksand; and the future she has looked forward to a future never to be realized! No, she will not think of anything so hideous. Fate must be kind to true love, and she has loved her husband truly, even when deserting him to secure fortune. She remembers how often she has heard him say that it is easy for a single man to fight the battle of life, that alone he could have struggled on somehow, could have obtained employment, could have roamed the world till he found just the one spot where he could prosper. He has never said it reproachfully. He was too fond of her for that. But he has said it; and the memory of that speech is a consoling thought to Sibyl just now.

‘He has emigrated, I dare say,’ she thinks. ‘He had a longing to try his luck in Australia. He is on the other side of the world, most likely, and when I am free to call him back to me, I shall have to wait ever so long before he can come.’

She is aroused from this reverie, from the deepest deep of thought, by the mellifluous soprano of Mrs. Stormont, raised inquiringly--that society voice in which a comedy actress makes some trivial inquiry at the wing before she appears on the stage.

‘In the garden?’ screams Mrs. Stormont. ‘Dear child! I will find her.’

Mrs. Stormont emerges from the shrubbery, rustling in a flounced cambric morning dress. She wears a black lace shawl, her last summer’s bonnet ‘done up’ inexpensively by her maid, and in honest truth has been ‘up town’ to pay her tradesmen’s weekly accounts. The Stormonts, though near, are good pay.

‘Old Mother Stormont will haggle about the bone in a bit of brisket, and she will worry about her Sunday sirloin,’ says Mr. Heffer, the butcher, ‘but she do pay uncommon reglar, I will say that for the old gal.’

Familiarity, induced by Mrs. Stormont’s frequent personal visits of complaint or inspection at Mr. Heffer’s shop, has bred contempt in that citizen’s mind. The customers he respects are those who never cross his threshold or weigh his meat.

Mrs. Stormont is followed by a tall stranger in gray, who looks about him admiringly, and whom Sibyl hardly recognises at the first glance.

‘Charming place--kept so well, too--garden much neater than my fellows keep the How. How d’ye do, Miss Faunthorpe? Hope you weren’t tired by the races yesterday.’

Sibyl blushes becomingly, startled by this sudden appearance of the mighty Sir Wilford Cardonnel--startled out of all sad thoughts, and gratified by this proof of her power.

‘I met this tiresome Sir Wilford in the market-place, Sibyl,’ says Mrs. Stormont with juvenile playfulness--which sits upon her portly middle age about as becomingly as the airy gauze bonnet on her pepper-and-salt chignon,--‘and he insisted upon my bringing him to call on you. I hope you are not shocked with us for invading you at such a barbarous hour.’

Sibyl assures Mrs. Stormont that the hour is a matter of no importance.

‘You are just as glad to see us as if we had come in proper visiting hours,’ exclaims the lady. ‘What a dear candid child she is! I don’t know what you did with my poor Fred last night, Sibyl, but you sent him home quite low-spirited.’

This is said with meaning, and Sir Wilford looks at the speaker curiously.

‘Poor Fred,’ he cries in his loud voice, ‘I think it must have been the bumping he got on that bony gray that made him low-spirited.’

‘I’m afraid I said good night rather abruptly,’ says Sibyl, ‘which was very ungrateful of me after his kindness in seeing me home. But I was vexed with him for not appreciating our nightingales.’

‘Not appreciate the nightingales! How odd!’ exclaims Mrs. Stormont. ‘Fred has such an ear for music.’

‘Shouldn’t have thought it from his trotting,’ remarks the candid Sir Wilford. ‘Man with a good ear always keeps time in the saddle. So you’ve nightingales here, Miss Faunthorpe? Shouldn’t have thought it, so near the town. We’ve no end of ’em at the How. Jug-jug-jug from sundown till midnight. I should like to show you our gardens at the How, by the by. Mrs. Stormont might drive you over some day.’

Mrs. Stormont, divided between her desire to be intimate with the best of the county families, and her maternal solicitude for Fred, whose interests are evidently in peril, can only smile blandly and assentingly. To drive over to the How in a friendly way is to take the highest rank in Redcastle society. Mrs. Groshen will feel absolutely crushed when she is told of such a visit. And after all, poor Fred’s courtship hangs on hand dismally, and may never come to anything. Sibyl, although courted by the whole family, has given no token of preference for the eldest hope. Sibyl with Stephen Trenchard’s fortune, and exalted into Lady Cardonnel, would be a splendid person to know. The dear girls, Rose and Violet, would be asked to stay at the How, no doubt; might make splendid matches, marry into the county.

The conversation meanders on in the same elevated strain for half an hour while Sibyl and her visitors walk round the garden, Sir Wilford admiring everything ‘monstrously,’ to use his own phrase, and grumbling a good deal about those ‘fellows’ of his at the How.

‘I never saw such flower-beds,’ he says; ‘there’s not a dead leaf among ’em.’

‘My uncle is very particular about the garden,’ says Sibyl.

‘That reminds me that I must ask to be introduced to your uncle.’

‘I dare say he is in his study,’ replies Sibyl. ‘I’ll run and see.’

She has an idea that it would hardly do to take Sir Wilford to her uncle without some note of preparation, Mr. Trenchard being somewhat out of sorts to-day.

She is saved the trouble of going to the study, however, for Stephen Trenchard is seen coming across the lawn in his Panama hat, and they all three go to meet him. He receives Mrs. Stormont and Sir Wilford graciously, and, the luncheon bell ringing while he is conversing with them, insists upon their staying to luncheon. So they all go together to the dining-room, Mrs. Stormont protesting that her absence will be the cause of consternation at home.

Sibyl is fluttered and a little pleased at the idea of having made such an important conquest,--a useless triumph, of course, for a woman in her position, but one that flatters womanly vanity.