Chapter II: At Chilcote

'The hounds threw off at half-past eleven, and the afternoon is far advanced,' said Miss Cheyne, with a little anxiety of manner. 'I must take the nearest cut home.'

'Thither, of course, I shall do myself the honour of escorting you.'

'Thanks--so much.'

She could not say otherwise, as she could neither decline his escort nor with propriety ride home alone; yet she gave a glance rather helplessly around her, as all her immediate friends--and one more especially, whose escort her father wished her to have had--were now left miles behind, having 'come to grief' at the first fence, and were now she knew not where.

But then she thought it was not her fault that they had dropped out of the hunt, or out of their saddles perhaps.

'To reach the high-road, we must take this fence,' said Captain Goring, finding that the narrow lane they had pursued, ended in a species of _cul de sac_.

'Not a gap, not a gate is in sight.'

'And by Jove, Miss Cheyne, it is a rasper!' he exclaimed. 'Allow me to go first, then follow, head up and hand low.'

He measured the distance, cleared the fence, and came safely down on the hard road beyond.

With a little cry of half delight and half terror curiously mingled, the girl rushed her horse at the fence, but barely cleared it, as its hoofs touched the summit.

'What a nasty buck jump,' said Goring. 'Is that an Irish horse, used to double fences, I wonder?'

'And all my back-hair has come down.'

'Glorious hair it is, below your waist and more.'

'And all my own,' said the girl laughing, as she placed her switch between her pearly teeth, and with her gauntleted hands proceeded to knot the coils deftly up; 'all my own, by production, and not by purchase. And now for home,' she added, as they broke into an easy trot. 'Such a hard mouth this animal has!' she exclaimed, after a pause; 'my poor wrists are quite weary.'

'Why do you ride him?'

'I have not much choice.'

'How?'

'I owe my mount to the kindness of a friend of papa's, to Lord Cadbury,' she replied, colouring slightly, but with an air of annoyance.

'Indeed,' said Goring, briefly, and then after a pause, he added, 'you have ridden with these hounds before.'

'Yes, once when the meet was at Iver's Heath, and again when it was at Wokingham, and the deer was caught in a pond near Wilton Park.'

'And did Lord Cadbury on each occasion give you a mount?' he added, in a casual manner.

'Yes, we have no horses at Chilcote; but how curious you are,' she replied, colouring again, and with a sense of annoyance that he did not suspect, though the mention of the peer's name by her lips irritated Bevil Goring, and made him seek to repress the love that was growing in his heart.

Yet he knew not that he had impressed Alison Cheyne by his voice and manner beyond anyone whom she had hitherto met, but she was conscious that her heart beat quicker when he addressed her, and that the very sunshine seemed to grow brighter in his presence; but to what end was all this, she thought, unless--if he loved her--he was rich enough to suit her father's standard of wealth.

As they drew near Chilcote they tacitly, it seemed, reduced the pace of their horses to a walk.

'If it does not grieve you now to recur to the fate of your brother Ellon,' said Goring, in his softest tone, 'I may mention that I have a little souvenir of him, of which I would beg your acceptance.'

'A souvenir of Ellon!'

'Yes.'

'How came you to possess it?'

'When his effects were sold at Lahore, before his regiment marched again.'

'And this relic----'

'Is a ring with a girl's hair in it.'

'Thank you so much,' said she, with a quivering lip; 'but to deprive you----'

'Nay, nay, do not begin to speak thus. To whom should it belong but to you? And how strange is the chance that gives me an opportunity of presenting it!'

'I cannot decline it; but the girl--who can she have been? Poor Ellon, some secret is buried in his grave.'

'Soldiers' graves, I doubt not, hide many, and many a sad romance. I have generally worn it, curious to say, as my stock of jewellery is not very extensive.'

'Have you it with you now?'

'No, I never wear rings when riding, the stones are apt to get knocked out. I meant to do myself the pleasure of calling on you after the hunt; and shall, if you will permit me. To-morrow I am for guard.'

'For guard over what?'

'Nothing,' he said, laughing. 'There is nothing to see or to guard, but it is all the same to John Bull.'

'The day after, then?'

'The day after.'

They were close to the house now, and, lifting his hat, he bowed low and turned his horse just as a groom, who had been waiting in the porch, took hers by the bridle, and, waving the handle of her switch to him in farewell, Miss Cheyne gathered up her riding skirt and entered the house.

Bevil Goring lingered at the further end of the avenue that led to Chilcote, which was in a lovely locality, especially in summer, one of those sunny places within thirty miles of St. Paul's, and one secluded and woody--a place like Burnham Beeches, where the tree trunks are of amazing size, and the path that led to the house went down a deep dell, emblossomed in a wilderness leafy at all times but in winter.

The ash, the birch, and contorted beeches overhung the slopes on each side, and there seemed an entire absence of human care about them; and there in summer the sheep wandered among the tender grass, as if they were the only owners of the domain; but Bevil Goring had but one thought as he looked around him, and then turned lingeringly away.

'How delicious to ramble among these leafy glades with her! How deuced glad I am that I have that poor fellow's ring, and can gratify her--perhaps myself too. Bother the guard of to-morrow; but I must get it over as best I may.'

He lighted a cigar, and at a trot took the road to Aldershot, but so sunk in thoughts that were new and delicious that he forgot all about his 'soothing weed' till it scorched his thick dark moustache.

Meanwhile let us follow Alison Cheyne into her somewhat sequestered home.

She had blushed with annoyance when resigning the reins of her horse to Gaskins, Lord Cadbury's groom, while thinking that there was neither groom nor stable at Chilcote, though, as her father had told her many a time and oft, there were stalls for four and twenty nags at Essilmont, where others stabled their horses now; and sooth to tell, for causes yet to be told, she was provoked at being under any obligation to old Lord Cadbury, especially in the now reduced state of their fortunes.

She was received with a bright smile of welcome in the entrance hall by their sole male attendant, old Archie Auchindoir, Sir Ranald's man-of-all-work, who looked resentfully after the unconscious groom while taking away the horse, which he would gladly have retained for his young mistress by force if he could, for Archie thought regretfully of the once ample _ménage_ at far away Essilmont, where, like his father before him, he had grown to manhood and age in the family of the Cheynes.

He was true as steel to his old master, to whom, however, he sometimes ventured to say sharp things in the way of advice; and to the 'pock-puddings,' as he called the denizens of the present locality, he fearlessly said sharper and very cutting things with a smirk on his mouth and a glitter in his keen grey eyes, and with perfect impunity, as they were addressed in a language to the hearers unknown; but it gratified Archie none the less to utter them, as he often did in the guise of proverbs.

'Papa at home?' asked Alison.

'Yes, Miss,' said he, receiving her gloves and switch. 'And waiting anxiously for you, though ower proud to show it even to me; but, my certie, it's the life o' an auld hat to be weel cockit.'

Their household was so small now that Alison had no maid to attend upon her, and quickly changing her costume she sought at once the presence of her father, smoothing her hair with her white hands as she hurried to receive his kiss; for, so far as he was concerned, Alison, in her twentieth year, was as much a child as when in her little frocks.

He was seated in a little room called his study, though there were few books there; but there were a writing table usually littered with letters, and invariably with an unpleasant mass of accounts to amount 'rendered;' an easy chair, deep, high-backed, and cosy, in which he passed most of his time, and which was so placed that from it he had a full view of the long, woody, and neglected avenue. There he spent hours reading the _Field_ and turning over books on farming, veterinary surgery, and so forth, by mere force of habit, though he had not an acre of land or a dog or a horse to look after now; and these studies were varied by the perusal of prints of a conservative tendency, and an occasional dip into the pages of Burke.

He courteously threw into the fire the end of the cigar he had been smoking as his daughter entered, and twining her soft arm round him said, while nestling her face in his neck--

'Oh, papa, I have never had so delightful a day with the hounds as this!'

The master of a broken fortune and impoverished household, Sir Ranald Cheyne, baronet of Essilmont and that ilk, as he duly figured in that year's volume of Burke and Debrett, with a pedigree going far beyond the first baronet of his house, who had been patented in 1625, and duly infeft at the Castle-gate of Edinburgh with a vast patrimony in Nova Scotia, and 'power of pit and gallows' over his vassals there, was a proud and querulous man, stately in manner and somewhat cold and selfish to all men, save his daughter Alison, who was the apple of his eye, the pride of his old heart, on whose beauty, as the means of winning another fortune, all his hopes in life were based, and with whom he was now living in semi-obscurity at Chilcote, a small, venerable, and secluded mansion in Hampshire.

Sir Ranald had a pale and worn face that in youth had been eminently handsome; his silver hair, or rather what remained of it, was brushed back behind his wax-like ears, and a smile of great tenderness for his daughter, the last of his old, old race and the hope of his age, lighted up his aristocratic features.

A gold-rimmed _pince-nez_ was balanced on the thin ridge of his rather aquiline nose, and though his bright blue eyes were smiling, as we say, their normal expression may be described as usually one of 'worry.'

His voice was in unison with his face--it was worn too, if we may use the expression, yet soft and not unmusical.

'You had an escort to the gate, I saw?' said he, interrogatively. 'Lord Cadbury, of course; why did he not come in?'

'Oh, no; I missed him in the field somewhere.'

'And your escort?'

'Was Captain Goring--you know him--from Aldershot,' she replied, a little nervously.

'Again?' said Sir Ranald, with just the slightest shade of displeasure flitting over his face. 'You were safely driven to the meet by Mrs. Trelawney?'

'Yes; and, when I last saw her and dear little Netty, their victoria was wedged between a drag and a tax-cart. I do hope they escaped without harm.'

'I hope so, too, for she is a very charming woman. And you found Cadbury duly waiting at Salthill with his horses?'

'Yes; and Gaskins came here to get mine.'

'I hope you duly thanked Cadbury.'

'Of course, papa.'

'But why did he not make an effort to escort you home?' asked Sir Ranald, whom this point interested.

'I missed him in the running, as I said, papa,' replied Alison, colouring now. 'He is so slow at his fences.'

'Slow; he has the reputation of generally riding faster than his horse,' said Sir Ranald, who was unable to repress a joke at the _parvenu_ peer, whom he was not without quiet hopes of having for a son-in-law. 'Then, I suppose, Captain Goring was your escort for most of the day?'

'Yes,' replied Alison, frankly.

'In fact, I may presume that you and he were always neck-and-neck; taking your fences together, and all that sort of thing?'

'Oh, no, papa; certainly not,' replied Alison, thinking it was unwise to admit too much, though her father's surmises were very near the truth.

'I am astonished that Cadbury did not make an effort to join you.'

'I never saw him after the hounds threw off,' said Alison, a little wearily, as she knew how her father's secret thoughts were tending.

'Did you look for him?'

'No.'

'So--so--this is exactly what happened before.'

'Can I help it, papa, if his wont is to fail at the first fence?'

'You can help Captain Goring so opportunely taking his place.'

'I do not quite see what his place is; but oh, papa, what do you think? Capt. Goring heard of poor Ellon in India--he actually laid him in his grave, if one may say so!'

'How?'

'He commanded the soldiers who fired over it.'

'Indeed!' said Sir Ranald, with some interest now.

She was about to mention the proffered ring, which she deemed a precious relic, when her father said with a tone of some gravity, and even crustily--

'I don't much like your following the hounds, and think you must give it up.'

'Oh, it is delightful; and if I had a horse of my own----'

'There you go!' exclaimed her father, with a petty gush of irritation; 'I don't like it! Think how a girl looks in an October morning at a cover-side, her eyes watering, perhaps her nose red, and her cheeks blue, and after a while, perhaps, with her hat smashed, her habit torn, her hair hanging down her back, and some fellow fagging by her side drearily when he wishes her at the devil; or think of her learning to talk of curbs and spavins, hocks, stifle, and thoroughpin, like the gentleman jockey of a dragoon corps.'

'Oh, you dear old thing!' exclaimed Alison, caressing him and laughing, though she knew that his irritation was caused only by her having permitted Bevil Goring to take the place of her elderly and titled admirer. 'I have so little amusement here at Chilcote, papa, that I did not think you would grudge me----'

'A run with the hounds on Cadbury's horses?' he interrupted, with a slight quiver, 'but I dislike the risks you run, and the chance medley acquaintances you may meet; but pardon my petulance, darling; and now to dress for dinner, such as it is.'

Too well did Alison know that one of the acquaintances referred to was her late handsome escort; but she only said--

'I do love horses, and you remember, papa, how grieved you were when I had to relinquish, as a little girl, my dear old Shetland pony, Pepper, and you called me your "poor bankrupt child;" and I did so miss Pepper with his barrel-shaped body, his shaggy mane, and velvet nose that he used to rub against my neck till I gave him a carrot or an apple.'

'Hence, I am the more grateful to Cadbury for so kindly putting his horses at your disposal; but for him,' added Sir Ranald, forgetting his recent remark, 'you could not have been in your proper place with the buckhounds, or shared in the pleasures of the day. Of course you wince when I mention Cadbury,' said Sir Ranald, observing a cloudy expression flit over her face.

'Well, papa, he bores me.'

'Bores you? This is scarcely grateful after all the pleasure he puts at your disposal--his horses, his box at the opera, and the bouquets, music, and so forth he so frequently sends you.'

But Alison only shrugged her shoulders, while her father retired to change his costume; for either by force of old habit, or out of respect for himself, he always assumed evening dress (faded though it was) for dinner; albeit that the latter might consist of a little better than hashed mutton or scrag of mutton _à la Russe_, in which the housekeeper, Mrs. Rebecca Prune, excelled.

'I wish he would not talk to me so much of Lord Cadbury,' thought Alison; 'if his kindness is to be received in this fashion, I shall never accept a mount from him again, nor a piece of music either!'

In the few joyous hours she had spent--hours which the presence of Bevil Goring had, undoubtedly, served to brighten--Alison Cheyne had forgotten for a space the petty annoyances of her home life; its shifts and shams that often made her weary and sick at heart; her father's pride and frequent petulance; his constant repining at the present, and futile regret over the past; his loss of position, or rather of luxury and splendour, which the loss of fortune entailed.