Chapter II

The kind old clergyman said that title was pretty, if a little odd for England.

“I did not know exactly how one should address her,” he remarked; “if she would be known here as Miss Caldini----”

“Oliver always calls her the Countess Fanny,” interrupted Ambrosia. “I suppose he has got into that way, and we must follow it. She is, too, you know, a contessa--or contessina; in Italy all the children take the title, and that makes it a much more common affair than it is over here. Her name is Francesca Sylvestra Caldini; but, as I say, Oliver always calls her the Countess Fanny, and I suppose we must do the same. As you have remarked,” added Ambrosia with something of an effort, “it is a pretty name, and I dare say suits her very well; though it has that touch of the fantastic that I should have thought would not have appealed to Oliver.”

“She is, I suppose,” asked Mr. Spragge, “a Roman Catholic?”

And Ambrosia said, yes, she supposed so, and there would be a slight awkwardness and difficulty there. Though one wished to be extremely tolerant, yet to be tolerant did require a certain exercise of patience. Of course, the girl could be nothing else than a Romanist, brought up in Italy by Romanist parents; but it was awkward; there was no Roman Church or priest nearer than Truro, and that, in the winter, was almost inaccessible. How would the girl contrive? Perhaps she was ardent in her faith, and perhaps not; Ambrosia did not know. But the subject was tiresome. Here again, it was strange in Oliver, who was such a firm and ardent Churchman, to betroth himself to what he had always hitherto termed “a papist”; and Ambrosia smiled into the fire, not without irony. Mr. Spragge did not smile, though his thought was the same as the thought of Ambrosia--that this was, of course, a clear case of infatuation. The man cared nothing about anything, except possessing the girl; this, put crudely, was what was in the minds both of Ambrosia and of the clergyman, and there lay their distress and their problem.

Neither of them was very sympathetic toward, or very capable of dealing with, crude or violent passion. Ambrosia did not wish to be shut up in the house with these two people during the winter months of their betrothal; and Mr. Spragge did not want to stand by and be a witness of what, in his own heart, he condemned as a most unsuitable and unworthy matrimonial arrangement.

Sherry and biscuits were brought in, and Ambrosia was glad of the wine. Even though she sat close to the fire, she had the sensation that her blood was chill, and running sluggishly in her veins.

“I suppose,” she reflected regretfully, “that Oliver should never have gone out to Italy to fetch her home. It seemed to me at the time an injudicious arrangement. We should both have gone, or someone else should have been sent--Dr. Drayton and his sister, for instance, or even yourself. That would have been a far wiser proceeding.”

“What,” asked the clergyman, “induced Mr. Sellar to go himself, and to go alone?”

“I don’t know,” said Ambrosia. “You know that he is impulsive and self-willed; and I think the very fact that I remarked that it was not suitable persuaded him to take that course. She is, you see, our second cousin and he her guardian, and it seems she has no nearer relations; and her parents died so suddenly----”

Ambrosia paused, for as she spoke of the death of the Countess Fanny’s parents she had again, and very acutely, that sensation of Death making a circle round them, cutting them off from the rest of the world. Yes, here it was again! Two sudden deaths, casting the Countess Fanny into their midst! If those two strangers had lived, why, neither she nor Oliver would have been likely ever to meet this foreign girl.

“Well,” she added, endeavouring to cast off this sombre reflection, “there it is, she was left in some great castle outside Rome, with only a Frenchwoman, a certain Madame de Mailly, as her companion. And, as she inherits Flimwel Grange, there seems to have been some decision that she should come over here and claim the place--it is very troubled in Italy now. I don’t quite understand what her lawyers and guardians decided, but at least, as you know, they wrote to Oliver, who was left the girl’s guardian, and asked if there was someone who could fetch the girl home; and Oliver himself went.”

“Is this French lady accompanying her?” asked Mr. Spragge.

“Only as far as Calais, I believe,” replied Ambrosia. “I do not think Oliver cared for her at all, or she for Oliver. I gathered, indeed, from his letters that there was some warm dispute between them, and that, though the Countess Fanny could obviously not travel alone with Oliver, the lady had been dispensed with as soon as her chaperonage was no longer necessary.” And Ambrosia smiled again, reflecting on what was likely to have been that passage of arms between her brother and the unknown Frenchwoman.

“It is perhaps as well,” said Mr. Spragge with some relief. “I do not think our village, Miss Sellar, would be altogether acceptable to a lively French lady used to foreign society!”

“But will it,” asked Ambrosia at once, “be acceptable to the Countess Fanny?”

“Well,” said the clergyman, “she has made her choice, as one says, and must even make the best of it, I suppose that she will find interest and excitement in her new life. There will be a great deal for her to learn, of course, and I dare say a great deal for her to unlearn!”

“But youth,” remarked Ambrosia, “does not enjoy either learning or unlearning! There are few diversions here, and, for a young girl, hardly any company. We are, when you come to think of it, Mr. Spragge, a very odd little community. There are just the fisher-folk, the farmers, Dr. Drayton, yourself--and who else? There is seldom any society at Lefton Park, and Oliver is so rooted to the place that I do not think he would be easily induced to go away, even for a brief visit.”

“Yes,” agreed Mr. Spragge, “it is a lonely and a quiet place, and I am sorry that my own children are married and far away, and that Dr. Drayton has none; also that, as you say, Lefton Park entertains so little society. It will, no doubt, I am afraid, be very dull for the Countess Fanny!”

“I shall be what company I can for her till the spring,” replied Ambrosia; “and then I, also, hope to go away; not unreasonably, I think, Mr. Spragge? I have lived here all my life, and know the place too well!”

“It is certainly not a lively life for a beautiful young woman,” said Mr. Spragge, in his most fatherly and courteous manner; “and I can well understand that when you are married to Lord Vanden you will be glad to leave us.”

“You make me feel ungrateful!” said Ambrosia. “Of course I belong here, and I never can belong anywhere else; and, I do believe, love it all as I never can love anything else; but there comes a time when one is melancholy, and it seems lonely and confined in interest. There are times, too, sir, when the landscape oppresses me, and the constant thought of the winter terrifies me! I must confess that I do look forward with dread to the long months before the spring comes.” And her lips and her hands trembled a little as she spoke.

“A brilliant woman in a dull place!” smiled the old clergyman. “What you say is most natural, and I can only admire you for the spirit with which you have endured such a long monotony!” (“And with,” he thought, “a difficult man!” For he did not either very much admire or very much like Oliver Sellar.)

“Lord Vanden is away,” he added, “is he not? Or has he returned since I was last at Lefton Park?”

“He is still in London,” said Ambrosia, “eager with plans about the new lighthouse. Oh, how absorbed he is in that subject! I wish he had been here to-day, to go with us to the ferry! The more of us there are,” she added, with a smile, “the easier, I think, it will be. And now, it is surely time that we departed? The boat is most uncertain, and just because we are late it may be early.”

“It would be dreadful to miss them,” agreed Mr. Spragge; and Ambrosia went upstairs and put on her mantle and her bonnet. As she tied the strings under her chin and looked into the large, mahogany-framed mirror, she thought of the words that the old clergyman had just spoken: “A brilliant woman in a dull place!” That was probably the truth; she was not beautiful, but she was graceful, elegant, polished, charming--a creature for crowds, brilliant functions--one who could wear clothes and jewels grandly; witty, cultured, amiable; not, by nature, the least austere or melancholy. Well, here she was--shut up for twenty-seven years at Sellar’s Mead, in the loneliest part of Cornwall, in the extreme of England. Next year, in the spring, she and Lucius would get away. Whether he wished it or not, she would take him away! For his own sake as well as hers. It was not much of a title or much of a fortune, but it _was_ a title and a fortune; in not so many years she would be a countess--not a toy title from Italy, but an English countess--and the means, meagre as they were, would be sufficient, with her careful management, to support that splendid pretension. She would go with Lucius to London, to Paris--perhaps to Vienna or Florence; and she would meet people like herself--stately and elegant women, polished and charming men. People who “did things”--soldiers, diplomats. She would entertain herself by music, singing, painting. She would dress with taste, if not in the extreme of luxury. She would have a beautiful equipage and well-trained servants. She would not often come to Lefton Park, and perhaps not ever to Sellar’s Mead. That depended on the Countess Fanny. Why, with this brilliant prospect before her, could she not brace herself with more patience to endure the time of waiting? She was angry with herself for her own despondency. Perhaps it was because Luce was away? Why must he so frequently go away, absorbed in the lighthouse and in his schemes for the lighthouse? It irritated his father and irritated her; and yet he must do it. Even this special day, when she would have liked his counsel and support, when she would very much have desired him beside her at the ferry, when Oliver brought his foreign bride, he must be away, consulting with engineers in London about the lighthouse. The lighthouse was very well--of course it must be there; and she was glad that the Earl, even out of his constrained means, had been able to contribute so lavishly towards the cost of the lighthouse. There was a grandeur about that gesture, even though it meant something off her own prospective fortune. Perhaps next year the clay-pits would pay better, and they could give even more. Ambrosia was not mean-minded. In everything she was lavish and generous, though so careful and thrifty in her management.

But this absorption in the thing itself--that did not please her. She agreed entirely with the old Earl, who had said: “It is for us to pay the money, not to build the thing.” But Luce did not think so. He was interested in the lighthouse as a separate entity, not as a mere splendid gesture of generosity and princely sumptuousness; something individual--a creation, almost a personality.

Ambrosia, as she again went downstairs, was thinking that when she was married to Luce she would break him of this obsession about the lighthouse. They would go away, and he, perhaps for years, would never see St. Nite’s Head or St. Nite’s Lighthouse.

The brougham was at the porticoed door, and Ambrosia ran her practised eye over the turn-out. Very neat and faultless; nothing wrong anywhere. She stepped inside with Mr. Spragge.

The wind was cold, and the sky deepening in its metallic grey colour. The trees were all bent in one way under that invisible power of the wind--bent towards the sea, for the wind was rushing up from the land.

“They will have a rough crossing!” remarked Mr. Spragge, and he began to excuse his wife for not accompanying them on this expedition of welcome, for, he said, she had been ill for the last two or three days, and not able to leave the house.

Ambrosia listened with an inward impatience to these excuses. Lord Lefton had made the same. He, too, was ill. So much illness, so much old age and death! Ambrosia shut her eyes. She did not wish to see the prospect from the carriage windows. Every day, now, those hills and roads would be more and more grey, more and more bleak, the trees more and more leafless, the fallows a deeper tint of barren russet; the long winter ahead, with Oliver and this strange girl on her hands!

She interlaced her fingers nervously. It was cold in the brougham, and she was shivering when they reached the ferry, where the road ended suddenly on a dreary stretch of foreshore.

She had always disliked the ferry, which had helped to cut them off from the outer world. The train came no nearer than Truro, and from Truro one must take the coach to St. Lade, and at St. Lade one must cross this wide, deep arm of sea and river mingled, and so reach the isolation of St. Nite’s Head.

Mr. Spragge got out of the brougham and walked up and down, conversing genially with the fishermen and others by the little platform where the small steamer put in. Ambrosia remained in the brougham on the smooth piece of road above the foreshore, and stared from the window at the prospect. It seemed to her to hold neither beauty nor tenderness. The wind was casting long fragments of ash-coloured clouds above the ash-coloured water, which was ruffled into heavy waves. On either side the shores were clothed with dreary pines, now a dingy black against the vinegar colour of the hills.

“What is this restless impatience?” Ambrosia asked herself. “It is my own country--my own place; I ought to love it! And yet, far from loving it, I am scarcely able to tolerate it!”

She could see the boat now--a black smear in the distance, labouring heavily under a banner of murky smoke; and her heart began to beat with what she herself called a foolish trepidation.

“How stupid not to be able to meet a moment like this! How stupid to be afraid of anything or anyone! No misfortune has happened, and I am to marry Luce in the spring. Why must I be so despondent and so foolish?”

And Ambrosia accused her long seclusion from the world for her present nervousness. She ought to have more social ease, and if she had been allowed to leave St. Nite’s before she would have had this social asset. She would not have trembled before a moment like this. She tried to forget herself and consider the feelings of the strange, half-foreign girl being brought towards her on that distant boat. _She_ had some excuse for nervousness, some good cause for feeling faint and sick! What a landscape to meet her astonished eyes! What a prospect of gloom and ashes! How cold the wind would seem, how chilly the air! How rough the people! Even to Ambrosia the inhabitants of Cornwall were most uncouth and crude. What would they seem to this elegant Italian? And Oliver--how had Oliver behaved during the long and tedious journey? Ambrosia could guess that he had been difficult. That was her word for Oliver. In her loyalty to her brother, she used that expression in preference to a more severe term. Oliver was difficult, she would say; but the word meant to her a great deal more than “difficult.” She wondered if, by now, it meant more to the Countess Fanny.

She left the brougham as the boat put in, and, stepping daintily, came down on to the shore of stones and mud, holding high her stiff taffeta skirt with one hand and putting back the fluttering veil from her face with the other.

There was hardly anyone on the boat--only a few rough fisher-people, a farm-boy, and Oliver, and--yes--there was the girl, standing eagerly at the rail. Not in mourning, though she had so recently lost her parents. Ambrosia at once noted that, and was vexed with herself for noticing, for she was not there to pick faults in this stranger. No, not in mourning; that figure at the rail wore a green bonnet and a striped shawl. Perceiving Ambrosia she took out a tiny handkerchief, and waved it with a great deal of excitement. Ambrosia did not care for that gesture, or for the excitement. For a second time she checked herself from finding fault.

Oliver raised his hat, and bowed stiffly; Mr. Spragge bowed with the best figure he could muster. Ambrosia was conscious of a certain grotesqueness, almost of a certain ridiculousness, in the whole meeting of the four of them, here on this windy, muddy foreshore, with this dark and gloomy landscape about them, with the rough peasants and fishermen grinning and gaping. Not a very beautiful or charming scene, but she, Ambrosia, must plainly make the best of it, and throw what grace she could over these unpromising circumstances.

The Countess Fanny stepped off the boat. She moved buoyantly down the rough gangway. With sailing skirts and billowing shawl and fluttering veil, she stepped on to the shore.

Ambrosia instantly embraced her and disliked her. Alas!