Chapter I: The Little Master of Bindon

She played about with slight and sprightly talk,
And vivid smiles, and faintly venom’d points
Of slander, glancing here and grazing there.
—TENNYSON (_Merlin and Vivien_).

In the terraced gardens, under the spreading shadows of the cedar trees, was gathered a motley group. Beyond that patch of shade the sun blazed down on stone steps and balusters, on green turf and scarlet geranium, with a fervour the eye could scarce endure. The air was full of hot scents. On a day such as this, Bindon of old was wont to seem asleep: lulled by the rhythmic, rocking dream-note of the wild pigeons, deep in its encircling woods. On a day such as this, the wise rooks would put off conclave and it would be but some irrepressible younger member of the ancient community that would take a wild flight away from leafy shade and, wheeling over the tree tops, drop between the blue and the green a drowsy caw. But things were changed this July at Bindon: these very rooks held noisy counsel in mid air and discussed what flock of strange bright birds it was that had alighted in their quiet corner of the world, to startle its greens and greys, to out-flaunt its flower-beds with outlandish parrot plumage, to break the humming summer silence with unknown clamours.

“The Deyvil take my soul!” said Thomas Villars reflectively.

He was sitting on the grass at Lady Lochore’s feet; his long legs in the last cut of trousers strapped over positively the latest boots. The slimness of his waist, the juvenility of his manner, the black curls that hung luxuriantly over his clean-shaven face, all this conspired to give Mr. Villars quite an illusive air of youth, even from a very short distance. Only a close examination revealed the lines on the rouged cheek and the wrinkled fall of chin that the highest and finest stock could not quite conceal. The latest pedigree gave the year of his birth as some lost fifty years ago—it also described the lady who had presided at that event as belonging to the illustrious Castillian house of Lara. But ill-natured friends persisted, averred that this lady had belonged to no more foreign regions than the Minories, and thus they accounted for Tom’s black ringlets, for his bold arch of nose, for his slightly thick consonants and his unconquerable fondness for personal jewellery.

Mr. Villars was, however, almost universally accepted by society: his knowledge of the share market was only second to his astounding acquaintance with everyone’s exact financial situation.

“Deyvil take my soul!” he insisted. Tom Villars was fond of an oath as of a fine genteel habit.

“I defy even the Devil to do that,” said Lady Lochore, stopping the languidly pettish flap of her fan to shoot an angry look at him over its edge.

“Why so, fairest Queen of the Roses?”

“Tom Villars sold his soul to the Devil long ago,” put in Colonel Harcourt. “It is no longer an asset.”

Frankly fifty, with a handsome ruddy face under a sweep of grey hair that almost gave the impression of the forgotten becomingness of the powdered peruke, Colonel Harcourt, of the Grenadiers, erect, broad-chested, pleasantly swaggering, good humoured and yet haughty, proclaimed the guardsman to the first glance, even in his easy country garb.

“Sold his soul to the Devil?” echoed Luke Herrick, lifting his handsome young face from the daisies he was piling in pretty Priscilla Geary’s pink silk lap. “Sold his soul, did he? Uncommon bargain for Beelzebub and Co.! I thought the firm did better business.”

“You are quite wrong,” said Lady Lochore, looking down with disfavour upon the countenance of her victim, who feigned excessive enjoyment of the ambient wit and humour. “The Devil cannot take Tom Villars’ soul, nor could Tom Villars sell it to the Devil, for the very good reason that Tom Villars never had a soul to be disposed of.”

A shout of laughter went round the glowing idle group.

“Cruel, cruel, lady mine!” murmured the oriental Villars, striving to throw a fire of pleading devotion into his close-set shallow eyes as he looked up at Lady Lochore and at the same time to turn a dignified deaf ear upon his less important tormentors. “In how have I offended that you thus make a pincushion of my heart?”

Mr. Villars knew right well that with Lady Lochore, as with the other fair of his acquaintance, his favour fell with the barometer of certain little negotiations. But it was a characteristic—no doubt maternally inherited—that soft as he was upon the pleasure side of nature, when it came to business, he was invulnerable.

At this point Mr. Herrick burst into song. He had a pretty tenor voice:

Come, bring your sampler, and with art
Draw in’t a wounded heart
And dropping here and there!
Not that I think that any dart
Can make yours bleed a tear
Or pierce it anywhere——

This youth was proud of tracing a collateral relationship with the genial Cavalier singer, whom he was fond of quoting in season and out of season. He was a poet himself, or fancied so; cultivated loose locks, open collars and flying ties—something also of poetic license in other matters besides verse. But as his spirits were as inexhaustible as his purse—and he was at heart a guileless boy—there were not many who would hold him in rigour.

Lady Lochore looked at him with approval, as he lay stretched at her feet, just then pleasantly occupied in sticking his decapitated daisies into Miss Priscilla’s uncovered curls—a process to which that damsel submitted without so much as a blink of her demure eyelid.

“Heart!” echoed Lady Lochore. She had received that morning a postal application for overdue interest, and Tom Villars had been so detachedly sympathetic that there were no tortures she would not now cheerfully have inflicted upon him. “Heart!” she cried again, “why don’t you know what is going to happen, when the poor old machine that is Tom Villars comes to a standstill at last——”

“There will be a great concourse of physicians,” broke in Colonel Harcourt, whose wit was not equal to his humour, “and when they’ve taken off his wig and his stays and cut him open——”

“Out will fall,” interrupted Herrick, “the portrait of his dear cousin Rebecca—whom he loved in the days of George II.

‘Be she likewise one of those
That an acre hath of nose——’”

“The physician will find a dreadful little withered fungus,” pursued Lady Lochore, unheeding.

“Which,” lisped Priscilla, suddenly raising the most innocent eyes in all the world, “which they will send to Master Rickart to find a grand name for, as the deadliest kind of poison that ever set doctors wondering. And sure, ’tisn’t poison at all! Master Rickart will say, but just a poor kind of snuff that wouldn’t even make a cat sneeze.”

Mr. Villars had met Miss Priscilla Geary upon the great oak stair this morning; and, examining her through his single eyeglass, had vowed she was a rosebud, and pinched her chin—all in a very condescending manner.

“I think you’re all talking very great nonsense,” remarked the Dishonourable Caroline.

Mrs. Geary was comfortably ensconced in a deep garden chair. Now raising her large pale face and protuberant pale eye from a note-book upon which she had been making calculations, she seemed to become aware for the first time of the irresponsible clatter around her.

“Mr. Villars,” she proceeded, in soft gurgling notes not unlike those of the ringdove’s, “I have been just going over last night’s calculations and I think there’s a little error—on your side, dear Mr. Villars.”

Mr. Villars scrambled to his feet, more discomfited by this polite observation than by the broad insolence of the others’ banter.

“My dear Madam, I really think, ah—pray allow me—we went thoroughly into the matter last night.”

The little pupils in Mrs. Geary’s goggling eyes narrowed to pins’ points.

“I do not think anyone can ever accuse me of inaccuracy,” she cooed with emphasis. “Come and look for yourself, Mr. Villars. You owe me still three pounds nine and eightpence—and three farthings.”

“Bianca let
Me pay the debt
I owe thee, for a kiss!”

sang the irrepressible Herrick—stretching his arms dramatically to Priscilla, and advancing his impudent comely face as if to substantiate the words—upon which she slapped him with little angry fingers outspread; and Lady Lochore first frowned, then laughed; then suddenly sighed.

“Peep-bo, mamma!” cried a high baby voice.

Every line of Lady Lochore’s face became softened, at the same time intensified with that wonderful change that her child’s presence always brought to her. But her heavy frown instantly came back as she beheld Ellinor, hatless, bearing a glass of milk upon a tray, while, from behind the crisp folds of her skirt, the heir-presumptive of Lochore (and Bindon) peeped roguishly at his mother.

Herrick sprang to his feet. Colonel Harcourt turned his brown face to measure the new-comer with his frank eye and then rose also.

“Hebe,” said he, looking down with admiration at the fresh, sun-kissed cheek and the sun-illumined head, “Hebe, with the nectar of the God!”

He took the tray from her hand.

“Give me my milk,” said Lady Lochore. “Edmund, come here! Come here, darling. Are you thirsty? You shall drink out of mother’s glass. Come here, sir, this minute! Really, Mrs. Marvel, you should not take him from his nurse like this!”

With a shrill cry the child rushed back to Ellinor and clutched her skirt again, announcing in his wilful way that he would have no nasty milk, and that he loved the pretty lady. Ellinor had some little ado to restore him to his mother. Then, seeing him firmly captured at last by the end of his tartan sash, she stood a moment facing Lady Lochore’s vindictive eyes with scornful placidity.

“My father hopes you will drink the milk, cousin Maud,” said she, “and if you would add to it the little packet of powder that lies beside it on the tray, he bids me say that it would be most beneficial to your cough.”

For all response Lady Lochore drank off the glass; then handed back the tray to Ellinor as if she had been a servant, the little powder conspicuously untouched. Ellinor looked from one to the other of the two men; then with a fine careless gesture passed her burden to Herrick, and, without another word, walked away up the terrace steps.

Herrick glanced after her, glanced at the tray in his hand, and breaking into a quick laugh, promptly thrust it into Colonel Harcourt’s hands and scurried off in pursuit. Colonel Harcourt good-humouredly echoed the laugh, as he finally deposited the object on the grass, then stood in his turn, gazing philosophically after the two retreating figures that were now progressing side by side, while Lady Lochore and her son out-wrangled Mrs. Geary and Mr. Villars.

“’Pon my soul,” said Colonel Harcourt, “_vera incessu patuit Dea_. That woman walks as well as any I’ve ever seen!”

Lady Lochore caught the words, and they added to the irritation with which she was endeavouring to stifle her son’s protestation that he hated mamma.

“I’ll have you know who’s master, sir!” she cried, pinning down the struggling arms with sudden anger.

“I’m master. I am the little Master of Lochore—and Margery says I’m to be the little master here!”

The mother suddenly relaxed her grasp of him and sat stonily gazing at him while he rubbed his chubby arm and stared back at her with pouting lips. The next moment she went down on her knees beside him, and took him up in her arms, smothering him with kisses.

“Darling, so he shall be, darling, darling!”

A panting nurse here rushed upon the scene.

“Wretch!” exclaimed my lady, “you are not worth your salt! How dare you let the child escape you. Yes, take him, take him!—the weight of him!”

She caught Harcourt’s eye fixed reflectively upon her.

“Come and walk with me,” she commanded.

“I was two by honours, you remember,” cooed Mrs. Geary.

“I am positive, the Deyvil take my soul, Madam! But ’tis my score you are marking instead of your own!”

Deserted Priscilla sat making reflective bunches of daisies. She had not once looked up since Herrick so unceremoniously left her.

The sky was still as blue, the grass as green, the flowers as bright, the whole summer’s day as lovely; but fret and discord had crept in among them.