Chapter V

Ambrosia rode to Lefton Park through a land wind that drove the dense, grey clouds seawards. In the pauses of this wind a fine drizzle of rain fell, and there was no colour in any of the rugged landscape. Against her will, Ambrosia noticed the signs of neglect in the large park: fences needed repairing, the trees required pruning--the wreckage of last year’s tempest not yet entirely cleared away; the gardens, that were neat but not very plentifully replenished with flowers or shrubs; the house itself, an ancient structure, refronted in the palladian style, looking dingy and sombre. It was a pity there was not more money to spend on the place. Ambrosia had heard Luce talk of a mortgage on the woods. Well, perhaps next year the clay-pits would pay better, and the tin-mines give a return for all the money that had been spent on them. The Leftons had been for two generations unfortunate: their estate was on too lonely, too wild, and too unproductive a portion of land; this rock-bound coast hemmed them in from prosperity, it seemed--almost from civilisation.

The interior of the stately house bore the same evidence of pinched means. The splendid pictures, vases, and tables of basalt and porphyry, the walnut and needlework furniture--these still remained, but many of the larger rooms had been shut up, and everywhere were evidences of discreet economy.

Ambrosia found the old Earl where she usually found him--in his own private room (cabinet, he called it) off the library. He collected shells, and in this study of conchology passed most of his solitary days. He was a man who cared little for society, and nothing for affairs; an invalid of a gentle, temperate disposition, who held firmly to all the traditions of his family and his class, but had never had either the health or the energy to put these into practice.

Ambrosia blamed the brave negation of his patient philosophy for much that was so irritating in Luce. He had made--against his will, perhaps, but none the less effectively--something of a recluse of his only son, the child of his late marriage.

The little room, which looked upon a lake in the park and an avenue of trees, was lined with cabinets, shelves, and cases, all containing shells or books of shells--specimens carefully labelled and indexed, arranged in boxes and on cards.

The Earl did most of this work himself, but there was an elderly man who helped him--a Mr. Wilabraham, who had been Luce’s tutor, and now called himself the Earl’s secretary. He was present when Ambrosia entered the closet, and engaged in washing some shells in a glass bowl of clear water through which the sand ran and settled at the bottom.

The Earl was in his armchair, with his newspaper and his glasses across his knee; he greeted Ambrosia with real pleasure, and courteously dismissed the secretary.

Ambrosia sat down by the little table, still scattered with the unwashed shells, which emitted a faint yet pungent odour of the sea.

“Well, my dear,” said the old man kindly, “so she has arrived: now tell me all about it. I feel guilty because I was not at the ferry yesterday, but really I could not manage it.”

“No, of course,” said Ambrosia dutifully; and the old man added with a sudden smile:

“But if it had been _you_, my dear, coming home, I dare say I should have been there!”

Ambrosia looked at him thoughtfully. He had an appearance at once delicate and noble. There was a certain air of grandeur about him that nothing in his secluded life had justified, and yet she trusted him as implicitly as if he had proved himself again and again of the finest and most reliable material; and she thought, with a certain pang of despondency, how difficult, how almost impossible, it would be to leave him--to take Luce away and leave him. And yet it would be more impossible to wait for his death as a signal for freedom; they must go away, be at liberty; their youth had that right--a certain freedom, a little measure of liberty! Of course, they would come back; as long as he lived they would come back to Lefton Park; but they must go away!

She repeated this nervously in her heart. With the spring they must leave Cornwall!

“You don’t like her,” asked Lord Lefton, “eh?”

Ambrosia had been afraid that he would immediately say that. She did not quite know how to defend herself against a charge that was so true.

“It is all my fault,” she said; “there is nothing wrong with her--nothing. But I have grown stiff and cold, shut up so long in Sellar’s Mead, and this project of Oliver’s marriage was very startling--a thing to which it is difficult to get used.”

“There is no great need,” remarked the Earl drily, “why we should, any of us, get used to it; let Oliver go his own way.”

“Of course he will,” smiled Ambrosia. “He is his own master, as I had to remind him last night; but still, no one can be utterly isolated in his relationships. Oliver is self-conscious and agitated. He feels, I believe, that he has made rather--well, he feels, perhaps, that he has done a precipitous and perhaps foolish thing.”

“What is she like?” asked the Earl; and Ambrosia said at once, shaking out the folds of her dark blue riding-habit:

“She is very beautiful--really beautiful. One reads and hears so much about beauty, and one does not very often see it.”

“It depends,” replied the old man, “what you call beauty.”

“Beauty like that,” persisted Ambrosia; “really vivid and startling beauty. She has it, I assure you--beauty of face and of bearing. She is very finished, too--strangely so, for eighteen.”

“Dark, I suppose?” asked the Earl. “The Flimwels were always handsome. I remember her mother as a child--she was really a beauty, also.”

“Dark and flashing,” said Ambrosia, “with a swift, buoyant air, and very graceful; oh, indeed, there is no flaw in her. But that was a little startling at first--she is so composed. She speaks an excellent English, yet she is in everything a foreigner.”

“Foreigners,” remarked the Earl, “are all right in the proper place.”

“I don’t think,” said Ambrosia, with the faintest of ironic smiles, “that you would call Cornwall, and this part of Cornwall, the right place for such an one as Countess Fanny.”

“A Roman Catholic?” queried the old man.

“She was,” said Ambrosia, “but seems to have left all that very lightly. She and Oliver both say she is a Protestant now--yet last night she was looking for her beads. I don’t know; she has a worldly way, as if no faith were of any great matter to her.”

“Well, well,” remarked the old man, “it’s Oliver’s choice and Oliver’s life, and, I suppose, from one point of view, a very good thing; your brother and your husband, my dear Amy, will own all this part of the country between them. But has this young woman no other friends and no relations? It seems odd that she should have left Italy and come straight here. Will she not have a few weeks in Town--perhaps a visit to Paris--something before she marries Oliver and settles down at Sellar’s Mead?”

“I put all that to Oliver last night,” said Ambrosia; “and he--well, you know what Oliver is--he was impatient, and even harsh, at the mere suggestion. He says that Fanny is to remain with us till they are married in the spring, and she herself told me (and in a most unconcerned manner) that she was never either to return to Italy or to go abroad--nay, that she was not to visit London, but to remain here! What can one do? As you say, it is Oliver’s business.”

“And so she is beautiful!” mused the old man, putting aside his paper. “Beautiful, eh? I don’t quite like that. Beauty, you know, my dear, is something apart--not for every day; especially foreign beauty.”

“I know what you mean,” said Ambrosia; “and she sets it off too much. She’s fantastic; her clothes are queer: very gay and brightly coloured. Not quite the garments of a gentlewoman. I do not know how she escaped observation on the journey--nor how Oliver endured it if she did not escape.”

“Oliver is certainly,” replied the Earl, “the last man who should marry a conspicuous woman. In fact, my dear, I don’t think any man should marry a conspicuous woman--not Englishmen of our class. We don’t want beauty: not beauty like that--flashing beauty, as you call it, of feature and colouring. Yours, my dear Amy,” he added, with a courtly air, “is the type of beauty that is required in our country and our position.”

Ambrosia did not deny the compliment. She knew exactly what he meant. Neither the women of her house nor of his had ever been beautiful in the way that the Countess Fanny was beautiful. Well bred, yes; elegant, graceful, pleasing--but not beautiful. And she was quite aware of his attitude, which was the usual attitude of the English gentleman. Beauty was something rather to be avoided. It did not belong to the gracious women who had ruled either at Lefton Park or Sellar’s Mead.

“She is well behaved,” said Ambrosia, “and it should not be very difficult to get on with her. But she seems to me so cold. I could not think of half the pretty speeches I had prepared, and yet she was always smiling, but in a heartless sort of way. And yet, again, I have no right to speak--I don’t know; why, she has only been in the house a few hours. You must see her and judge for yourself, of course.”

“Won’t she find it dull here?” asked the old man. “They say it’s going to be a stormy winter, too.”

“Dull? So I should have thought, but she says she is used to seclusion and loneliness. Evidently this castle outside Rome was in a very isolated position, and, according to her account, she saw little company.”

“It is difficult and trying for you,” said the old man with sympathy.

Ambrosia rose impatiently, and went to the window and stared out at that grey prospect that smote her heart with a sense of gloom.

“It ought not to be,” she said, “it ought not to be so difficult. It is my fault entirely. I have allowed my spirits to sink--I do not know why.”

“Luce ought to be back to-day,” remarked the Earl.

Ambrosia did not answer, but continued to stare, with fascinated eyes, at the murky damp of the park and the lake, ruffled by the land wind. Something was wrong between her and Luce just as definitely as something was wrong between the Countess Fanny and Oliver. She could not endure to suppose that they had drifted into this engagement because they were friends of childhood’s standing, because they saw each other so frequently, because neither had any rival. And yet this, perhaps, was the bitter truth at the root of her lowering discontent. If Luce had seen many other women, he might not have married her! And if she had been wooed by other men, she might not have chosen Luce! Ugly to think like this, for it tinged all her most cherished thoughts with the darkness of disillusion. But she had lain awake nearly all night, listening to the winds howling in the chimneys and past her casement, and considering that expression that she had seen on Oliver’s dark face as he opened the door for Fanny. That was love--or passion? Which was the right word? She did not know; but in any case it was a look that she had never seen on Luce’s face, though he had so often turned to her in earnest affection and sincere admiration. But that look--never!

At the moment, she had endured a pang of surprisingly fierce jealousy; but afterwards, under a colder consideration, she had wondered if this was for good or evil, this fierce love, this violent passion which she had seen depicted on her brother’s sombre face. Perhaps she and Luce were better without it. Perhaps she was not the woman to evoke such a turbulent emotion in the heart of any man, and perhaps Luce was not the man to be so moved by any woman.

Ambrosia did not know. She moved in webs and mists of inexperience and ignorance, but she was troubled and disturbed, and she wished, with a sudden foolish perversity, that she was not four--nay, nearly five--years older than her future husband.

The wind rose with a sudden gust that rattled the window-pane.

“It is a merciful providence,” remarked the Earl, “that the lighthouse has been finished before the winter.”

“But Luce is not satisfied,” mused Ambrosia. “He still wishes to labour and to contrive for the lighthouse.”

“It is the question of the gas syren,” said the old man. “You know we have already fixed one which, in thick or foggy weather, gives three blasts; but that is not enough for Luce,” he added with a smile: “he must think of a bronze wolf, which shall be hollow, and give the signal through its mouth when the gale roars a blast in the metal.”

“But that is fantastic!” smiled Ambrosia.

“Like the Countess Fanny,” said the Earl.

Ambrosia turned to the window. Behind her was a large print of Winstanley Lighthouse of nearly two hundred years ago: a most elaborate, grotesque, and fanciful building--all manner of projections and contrivances, and a great flag at one side, and a weathercock in the form of an iron standard on top, and the inscription “_Pax in Bello_.”

Luce greatly admired this queer old print; but Ambrosia disliked it, because it was part of this obsession of Luce in a subject that to her was alien, and even repellent. Of course there must be lighthouses, but it was unnatural for a man like Luce to devote his life to one of them.

The Earl seemed to guess her mind. He sympathised and even agreed with her attitude towards Luce’s infatuation, but he had also a certain pride in the lighthouse, which had been first erected by one of his ancestors. Later, the cumbrous structure had been purchased by Trinity House, soon after swept away, and re-built; but the position was among the most exposed in the world, and even the new building had not been able to withstand the incessant tempests, not only of winter but of summer, which beat upon the precipitous coast. The Earl had strained both his influence and his fortune to have the lighthouse of St. Nite renovated. It had been placed in a new coat of granite three and a half feet thick, and raised thirty-five feet higher, while an explosive gas signal with a report every five minutes had been placed there, as well as a new powerful lantern.

The lighthouse was situated in the most dreadful and dangerous portion of the coast, and at the end of a long bridge of rock called “The Leopard,” which was covered, even in fair weather, by three feet of water.

Under the lighthouse, at the end of a long fissure in the rock, was a cavern, and when the sea was very high the noise produced by the rush and roar of pent-up air through this cavern was so great that the keepers could hardly sleep. Legend said that one man, a newcomer, had lost his reason when exposed for the first time to this terrific tumult beneath the lighthouse. Legend and superstition, all in the extreme dark, portentous and gloomy, clung to the Leopard’s Rock and the Lighthouse of St. Nite’s, and for this reason the fishers and the farmers alike regarded it with every feeling of awe and dread, and Lord Lefton and his son had both thought that, in spending so much time and money in giving so much heartfelt enthusiasm to the building and maintenance of the lighthouse, they were not only saving the lives of possible shipwrecked mariners, but also letting some light into the darkened minds of the Cornish peasantry, by proving that to them none but natural dangers haunted the Leopard’s Rock.

The huge lights of the lighthouse illuminated, they hoped, more than the darkness of the storm, and dispelled something of the blackness of ignorance and grossness of the superstition, and proved that the dangerous block of greenstone in the midst of an incessant swirl and eddy of waters was but a human obstacle that human ingenuity could overcome, and by no means tinged with any of the horrors of the supernatural.

The Earl now asked Ambrosia if she intended to go to the lighthouse while the weather was still comparatively fair and calm; but the girl replied no, she did not wish to visit St. Nite’s.

“It depresses me,” she said; “it is gloomy and awful.”

“But surely,” said the old man, “there is a certain comfort in the light and the syrens--a sense of protection and security?”

“To sailors, perhaps,” smiled Ambrosia faintly, “but scarcely to me.”

“Would your little Italian friend care to go?” asked the Earl. “Perhaps that would be a little point of interest for her before the winter comes.”

Ambrosia wondered why he had asked that.

“I should think,” she smiled, “that Fanny would be utterly uninterested in anything of that kind.” And she added swiftly: “Of course you must not think _I_ am uninterested--Luce’s enthusiasm should be enough to inspire one; but it is to me--well, the Leopard’s Rock, St. Nite’s Head and all that part--I don’t know, but it rather frightens me.”

“In the winter, yes,” conceded the Earl. “But now, why, it’s grand and sumptuous! I mean, if possible, to get down there. I should like to see Luce’s wolf howling out his warnings across the ocean; I think there is something quite splendid in that idea.”

“But is it practical?” asked Ambrosia.

“Is Luce ever practical?” asked that young man’s father; and Ambrosia winced, for this judgment sounded to her like a disparagement, and she could not endure even the slightest, most affectionate, disparagement of Luce, for she was too near disparaging him herself--disparaging at least some of his tastes and characteristics. She wanted to hear Luce exalted and praised.

“When,” she asked restively, “can you contrive to come over, sir, and see Fanny--or shall I bring her here?”

The Earl replied that he would drive over that afternoon.