CHAPTER XII.
"OH, IF THEY HAD!"
WANDERING about that afternoon in an aimless and restless manner, Rachel entered the drawing-room through the conservatory door, and found her cousin sitting there alone, at her own little davenport, writing letters. Lucilla looked up with a smile of cordial welcome.
"Do you know what I am doing?" she exclaimed brightly. "Come here, and say thank you. I am writing to ask Mr. Kingston to come."
"To ask Mr. Kingston to come?" the girl repeated blankly. "What for, Lucilla?"
Mrs. Thornley was not like Mrs. Reade; she was amiable and sweet, but a little dull of apprehension. She did not grasp the obvious significance of this reply. Still it struck her as inadequate.
"Why, my dear child, what a question! Because you are here, of course, and because he is moping about town, Beatrice says, and doesn't know what to do with himself."
"Does Beatrice say that?" inquired Rachel, with a little pang of self-reproach. This man, who had done her the greatest honour, who had paid her the highest compliment that any man could bestow on any woman – she was conscious of requiting him with ingratitude at this moment. "He is very, very – kind," she faltered. "I am afraid he thinks too much about me. When have you asked him to come, Lucilla?"
"In time for the dance next week, and as much sooner as he likes. I have told him to send word what day will suit him, if he can come, and that we will send to the station. Of course we could not allow him to come up by coach. I am very glad we have that dance in prospect; it will be something to amuse him. I should have been half afraid to ask him into the country if there had been nothing going on. He used to hate the bush. However," looking up archly, "Beatrice says I need not be afraid of his feeling dull on this occasion."
"Did Beatrice tell you to ask him? I mean did she suggest it to you?"
"Yes, dear – to tell the truth. I should not have asked him, simply because I knew he didn't like the bush. It did not occur to me that he would be fretting after you – Mr. Kingston fretting after anybody is such a very novel idea! Oh, my dear Rachel" – and here she drew the girl close and kissed her – "you are luckier than ever I thought you were!"
"Yes," sighed Rachel; "I know I am very lucky."
"And Beatrice says," continued Mrs. Thornley, with her arm round her cousin's waist, "that we shall be having everything settled soon, and that you are to have a delightful tour in Europe. How you will enjoy that! It was the one thing I wished for when I was married that I did not get. Not but what," the gentle woman added quickly, "I am very glad I did not get it now. I could not have been happier than I have been at Adelonga, and it must be very inconvenient to have a baby when one is travelling about. You must tell me, darling, what you would like for a present. John and I were talking about it last night – John thinks a great deal of you, you must know, which is a thing you ought to be proud of, for he is very particular and critical about girls – and he says he would like to give you something worth having. But I told him you and I would talk it over before we decided what it should be."
"How good you are! How good everybody is!" exclaimed Rachel, folding the girlish matron in a rather hysterical embrace. "But I don't think I shall be married just yet, Lucilla – wait till we hear what Mr. Kingston says."
"Oh, we know already what he is going to say."
"There is the party to be thought of first," proceeded Rachel, determined, now that Mr. Kingston was coming, not to dissipate in fruitless skirmishes the strength that she would require to fight the inevitable battle with him. "You have only a week before you, and you have not sent out your invitations, have you?"
"Yes, I have. I did that the day you were at the races, and have had answers to some of them. We shall get about thirty or forty people together, I hope – perhaps more. I wonder, by the way, whether Mr. Dalrymple could bring that friend of his, Mr. Jim Gordon – I wish I had thought to ask him. We have too large a proportion of married people, unfortunately." Lucilla had become thoughtful and business-like. "Seven bachelors altogether," she remarked musingly, after a pause; "that is not nearly enough. Does Mr. Kingston dance now, Rachel?"
"Yes, but not a great deal – mostly quadrilles. I think," she added, reflectively, "he is rather troubled with gout in one of his knees."
"Poor fellow! He waltzed with me I remember when I first came out, and that's not very long ago. Surely he can't have gout – a man who walks with such a peculiarly light and airy tread! Though, to be sure, I knew a man of twenty-five – or was it thirty-five? – who had gout badly."
"Perhaps it is rheumatism," suggested Rachel; "or lumbago."
"Nonsense. Lumbago, indeed! One would think he was a patriarch. But if he doesn't waltz – "
Lucilla paused in perplexity.
"Does Mr. Gordon waltz?" Rachel meekly inquired.
"Oh, no doubt – sure to. I have never seen him, but all those old army men dance well."
"Then I suppose Mr. Dalrymple dances well?"
"Of course he does. Poor fellow, he excels in everything that is of no consequence. Oh, yes, Mr. Dalrymple is decidedly an acquisition in a ball-room, whatever he may be elsewhere."
"Lucilla!"
"What, dear?"
"Why do you all speak of him in that hard way? You are so kind to everybody else, but for him nobody seems to have a good word. I think it is so cruel!" she broke out with sudden passion. "The way Mrs. Hale insulted him the other night – a man like that, whom she was not fit to associate with – and all of you sitting round and letting her do it – I think it is dreadful!"
"Oh, my dear," responded Mrs. Thornley, with tremulous earnestness, a little frightened at the vehemence that she was too dull to understand, and deeply shocked by the implied reflection on her hospitality, "you don't suppose we encouraged or defended Mrs. Hale? We were as vexed as you were at her gross want of taste – of common courtesy, one might say. John was excessively angry – with dear Mrs. Digby sitting by to hear it all; he said at first that he would never have her in his house again."
"But he is going to have her?"
"Yes. Well, they are old neighbours you see, and related to the Digbys. And I daresay she knows no better."
"She is a horrid woman," said Rachel, viciously; "and so is her husband."
"A horrid woman?" laughed Lucilla. "Oh, no, dear, be just – he is not so bad as that. And you know, Rachel" – becoming gently argumentative – "it is not surprising that people object to a man who has had such a career as Mr. Dalrymple's. You know what he has done?"
"Only fought a duel," said Rachel. "No, I am not defending him, Lucilla, but how many men have done the same in old days, without being objected to?"
"It was a very bad duel," said Lucilla gravely. "There were circumstances connected with it that were very disreputable – so they say."
"You shouldn't trust to hearsay," protested the girl eagerly. "Why don't you go by the evidence of your own senses? Does he look like the man to do disreputable things?"
"He looks like a man who could never do anything mean or underhand," said Mrs. Thornley; "I admit that. He has a noble face; and he has perfect manners; and he is clever. But, oh! Rachel, when a man has been in the dock, and for such a crime as that – "
"Do you mean he has been in prison?"
"Of course. He was arrested and put on his trial for murder, or manslaughter – I forget which it was called. He was acquitted we know, but by the merest accident. Popular feeling was with him, strange to say, and Mr. Gordon fought hard for him. They were not over particular in California, I suppose, and there was a flaw somewhere. But he might have been hung, Rachel! That is where it is – he was tried for murder, and he might have been hung!"
Rachel was leaning against the wall, and looking into the recess that made a passage to the conservatory. She was calling up a vision of that memorable night, which was the birthnight of her womanhood, so recently come and gone – the fern-tree canopy, letting the moonlight through, the little bench, set in a bower of cork and maidenhair, where she sat alone with him in a world of brooding shadows – the strong, proud face, bending forward to look at her, darkly distinct in the soft, green gloom.
And she heard his voice again, incisive, imperious, yet melting her very heart within her as he told her the simple history of this terrible episode in his life. He might have been hung! – he did not tell her that. She stole away from her cousin, and walked up and down the long alleys of the conservatory, pale and passionate with her fierce indignation. Would they indeed have dared to hang him? And if they had – oh, if they had!
Some thirty miles away Mr. Dalrymple was riding by his own short cuts through the bush, with his peaked cap drawn over his eyes. His beautiful horse, tall and stately like himself, with glossy dark coat, and a white star on his forehead, paced with long strides through saplings and brushwood, swinging his head slowly up and down on the loose rein with a rhythmical movement that betokened ease of body and content of mind.
His master gazed heedfully at the brilliant parrots flashing about with long, rushing darts over his head, and at the myriads of wild flowers crushed and trampled under foot. He wore a sprig of epacris in his button-hole, and carried a sheaf of delicate orchids with their stalks tucked under the saddle in front of him.
He hummed a Strauss waltz as he went along through the sunshine and shadows of the waning day, and thought of the time when he would go back to Adelonga and carry that girl with the sweet eyes away in his arms, on the wings of just such a dreamy measure, into the only realisable Utopia of this world.
And perhaps he was more glad of his life than he had ever been since the day when he so nearly lost it – caring not much whether he did so or not.