Chapter X: Captain Dalton

We have said that Tony Dalton--tall, dark, and handsome Tony, the pattern officer of his corps--had promised little Netty Trelawney an Indian necklet. He had duly called with it, and clasped round the neck of the slender girl a gold Champac necklace from Delhi, and it is difficult for those even acquainted with the _chef-d'œuvres_ of the first European jewellers, to imagine the beautiful nature of these necklaces, so called from the flowers whose petals they resemble.

'I know not how to thank you, Captain Dalton, for your kindness to Netty,' said the beautiful widow, with her brightest smile, 'it is much too valuable a present for a child.'

'She will not always be a child, and in the years to come----'

'The years to come; she is barely nine, and at twenty it is difficult to think of what life may be at thirty--still more at fifty,' said she, with a curious emphasis, as her eyelids drooped.

'But, like myself, you are not yet thirty,' said Dalton, 'hence we are both a long way off fifty.'

After this he rode over occasionally from the camp--it was rather an idle time with him then, before the spring drills of the next year commenced--and he seemed rapidly to establish himself at the Grange as a friend, and on a better basis than the younger man, poor Jerry Wilmot, had done, for the latter name was off even the lady's visitors' list now.

In life and history passages seem to repeat themselves; thus, just as Dalton arrived one evening, he heard, through the open window, the voice of Laura Trelawney singing the old song before referred to, and with the strain there came many a memory he had been striving to forget.

'Strange!' he muttered; 'that song again!'

Sweet, clear, and sad, as if it was meant for him, and him alone, her voice seemed to come floating to him in liquid melody, in pain and pathos.

Then he heard some merry voice, with which he was familiar; and as he was ushered into the pretty drawing-room, wherein Jerry met his doom, for a man who was evidently fast conceiving a _tendresse_ for the brilliant Mrs. Trelawney, it was curious that he should feel a kind of relief--a kind of protection for himself, or from committing himself too far--in the casual presence of Alison Cheyne and Bevil Goring.

The former smiled brightly, and gave Bevil a glance of intelligence as Dalton was ushered in. It was evidently, both thought, becoming a case, and Alison was already beginning to see herself a prospective bridesmaid and Bevil groomsman.

'How curious you should all three visit me just at the same time,' said Mrs. Trelawney.

'I was visiting my poor,' said Alison.

'And came to comfort the widow and orphan on the way.'

'Have you many recipients of your bounty, Miss Cheyne?' said Dalton, for lack of something else to say.

'I have little in my power; but they are all so grateful and so good.'

'Ah!' said Mrs. Trelawney, 'I don't take so charitable a view of human nature as you do, child; if the poor are generally virtuous, it is because they have not the guineas to be wicked with.'

'One of your wild speeches, Mrs. Trelawney, I hope,' said Goring; 'my guineas are few--thus I have a fellow-feeling.'

And, leaving the last visitor and their hostess to discuss the point _tête-à-tête_, the lovers strolled into the now somewhat desolate garden, where the fallen leaves lay thick; but their own emotions seemed to brighten it with all the flowers that ever grew in Eden, and with the walks they were pretty familiar with now.

'And so you were dining _en famille_ at old Cadbury's place?' said Goring, as he drew her hand over his arm and retained it there. 'Was it a slow affair, darling?'

'Utterly slow,' said Alison, with a sigh, while looking into his face with smiling eyes.

'Tell me all about it?'

'There is nothing to tell,' replied Alison, feeling the while terribly conscious that there was far too much if inferences were to be drawn; but she shrank from giving pain to her lover by relating her father's desires and bluntly-expressed wishes, though she feared that Bevil was quite sharp enough to suspect more than he or she admitted, else whence his questions.

And now, lover-like, their conversation, interesting only to themselves, drifted rapidly into the never-ending topic of their own passionate regard for each other, their future hopes, and certainly most vague plans, while dusk was closing round them--the soft semi-darkness of an autumnal night; yet it was full of distant sounds, and not a few sweet scents that mingled with the heavy odour of the fallen leaves.

Alison had tied a little laced handkerchief over her hair, and her eyes were beaming upward, sweetly and coquettishly, as they met the glances of her lover, who thought she looked like the sweetest picture ever painted, especially when her long lashes rested on the paleness of her cheek when she cast them down.

'May I see you home when the time comes?' he asked.

'Not for worlds, Bevil darling.'

'It is so dark.'

'But Daisy Prune is to call for me, and we know all the roads and lanes hereabout as well as if we had made them.'

They were very, very happy just then, these two--happy in the security of each other's love, and could little foresee the turmoil and misery a little time was to bring forth for both.

By the light of a softly-shaded lamp the other pair were _tête-à-tête_ in the drawing-room, maintaining a curious and disjointed conversation, as if some unuttered or unutterable secret loaded the tongue of each; and, truth to tell, the officer, who had led his men to the storming of more than one hill-fort on the vast slopes of the Hindoo Koosh--who had been wont to pot his tiger and stick his furious pig in the jungle--who had been all over India, from the Sand Heads of the Hooghly to the gates of Cabul--if he had now come on a love-making errand, was the less self-possessed of the two.

Mrs. Trelawney possessed the rare art of dressing in such dainty perfection as never woman did before, he thought; and all her toilettes seemed to harmonise so much with the time and place in which he saw them, and with his own taste.

As they conversed on indifferent subjects, a strange and subtle magnetism drew their eyes to meet from time to time in a manner that expressed or admitted much, and yet no particular word of regard--still less of love--escaped Dalton; but little Netty by her remarks sometimes made both feel very awkward, and wish that she was relegated to the region of the nursery.

The child, encouraged by his tender manner to herself--more than all, her beautiful necklet--often hung with confidence and familiarity about him, and with pretty pertinacity questioned him about his past adventures, where he had been and what he had seen, if he ever had a wife, and much more to the same effect, as if his past life were of interest to her, as it was no doubt beginning to be to her mamma; and on this occasion, by a simple remark, she made both feel quite uncomfortable.

Resting her elbows on his knee, and planting her little face between her hands, she looked up in his eyes and said,

'Captain Dalton, do you come to see me or mamma?'

'I come to see both,' replied Dalton, smiling as he stroked her bright hair.

'But you talk so much more to mamma than to me.'

'You are a little girl, Netty; well?'

'That I think--I think----'

'What? A penny for your thoughts.'

'That you are in love with mamma. Is it so?'

Strange to say, at this remark Dalton grew very pale, while Mrs. Trelawney, though she coloured considerably, laughed excessively at the situation thus created, but was rather surprised that Dalton failed to take advantage of it, even to pay her, as he could easily have done, a well-turned compliment.

'Netty seems to have quite a matrimonial interest in you, Captain Dalton,' said she, still laughing.

'Yes; she has more than once asked me if I ever had a wife.'

Mrs. Trelawney, while her own bright eyes were partly hidden by the shade on the globe of the lamp, was keenly scrutinizing the half-averted face of her admirer.

'You have not been always a woman-hater?' she asked.

'I never was--far from it--the reverse,' said he, hastily.

'And yet in all those years you have never fallen in love?'

'I never thought of it till I came back to England. One does not think of marriage up country in the land of brown squaws.'

'And so you never thought of it?'

'Never.'

Dalton was colouring deeply now, and she extracted his answers from him 'as if she had been extracting his teeth,' as she afterwards told Alison.

'Now, however, under better auspices, and at home, I may wish to change,' he began.

'Change what?' interrupted Mrs. Trelawney, with a curious sharpness of tone; 'to reform? I have read that we often hear of a woman marrying a man to reform him, but that no one ever heard of a man marrying a woman to reform _her_.'

Dalton felt that his love-making, if love-making it was, took a strange turn now, and that she was infusing banter or rebuke into the conversation.

'I cannot comprehend, Mrs. Trelawney, how it is that when I am with you,' said Dalton, gravely, with a soft and half-broken voice, 'there comes back upon me much of my past life, or rather a portion of it, that I would fain forget.'

'How is this?'

'Because you have some strange and magnetic influence over me, to which I have not as yet the key. I have sought to bury, to forget that past I refer to--to live it down----'

'I have no wish to pry into your secrets, Captain Dalton, nor to act the part of a Father Confessor, so pray don't confide in me,' said Mrs. Trelawney, with a--for her--curious hardness in her usually sweet voice. 'I have read somewhere that life itself, from the cradle to the grave, is but a kind of gloaming hour, wherein mortals grope dimly after happiness, and find it not.'

'I would that the happiness of my future life lay in your hands, Mrs. Trelawney,' said Dalton, with an expression of eye and tone of voice there was no mistaking.

Mrs. Trelawney did not reply, but she smiled with a curiously mingled expression of triumph, pleasure, and, strange to say, disdain, rippling over her bright face--emotions to which we shall ere long have the key.

Her cheeks flushed, her lips curved with her smile, and for a moment her whole mien was that of a young girl delighted with flattery. Dalton was about to say something more, when the sudden disdain that replaced the first expression prevented him, and she said, laughingly,

'I can give the ladies a capital addition to the creed, Captain Dalton.'

'What is it?'

'Never to love any man, but make all men love you; as the song has it, "Love not--the thing you love may change;" but here come Miss Cheyne and Captain Goring.'

'A strange woman--an enigma, indeed,' thought Dalton, who had an unpleasant suspicion that she was secretly deriding the avowal he had, perhaps, been on the point of making.

'Oh, Alison,' she said, suddenly, 'you remember Bella Chevenix, the handsome, dashing girl, who always wears rich dresses, but of green or grey tints, a muslin fichu, with a yellow rose in it, and so forth. You have heard what has happened, I suppose?'

'That she was engaged, or nearly so, to Colonel Graves?'

'Yes--but he has behaved disgracefully.'

'How?'

'What do you think her family found out?' she asked, addressing Dalton, to his surprise.

'That he was no colonel at all, perhaps,' said he.

'Oh, worse than that.'

'Worse!--what could be worse?'

'I do not care to think, Mrs. Trelawney--not knowing the parties--that he was a criminal, perhaps.'

'Worse still.'

'Good heavens, Laura!' exclaimed Alison.

'And he proposed for her?'

'Yes; was it not horrible, Captain Dalton?'

'Don't appeal to me,' he replied, abruptly.

'Bella was at a ball in Willis's Rooms, dancing with Wilmot, of Captain Dalton's regiment, while the colonel was there _vis-à-vis_ with some one else, and Jerry, in the most casual way, asked her if she knew Mrs. Graves. Bella thought he was talking nonsense, but it turned out to be truth, as there is a Mrs. Graves; but, as Bella is a professional beauty, luckily, her affections were not too deeply engaged. However, such affairs are a warning to us all in society. Don't you think so, Captain Dalton?'

But for the shaded lamp, the sudden paleness that overspread the handsome face of Dalton would have been apparent to all at this anecdote of Mrs. Trelawney, who saw that his eyes drooped, and that not even his heavy moustache concealed the quiver of his lip as he took his hat and prepared to retire.

'How strange Captain Dalton looks!' whispered Alison to Goring, as they were parting.

'Yes; poor Tony has become a changed man, moody and irritable, since he has known your friend, Mrs. Trelawney. He is no longer the quiet, gentle, and easy-going fellow he used to be. And now, once again, good-bye, my darling.'

And with a pressure of the hand, a kiss snatched, all the sweeter for being so, they parted, knowing when and where they were to meet again.

Whatever was the secret, unrevealed yet, that hung on Dalton's heart, he left the house of Mrs. Trelawney with a heaviness of soul and gloom of manner that were but too apparent to Bevil Goring. There was a baffled and dismayed expression in his face that made him all unlike his old soldierly self, and on his lips there was an unuttered vow that he would go near Chilcote Grange no more--a vow, however, that he found himself unable to keep.