The Great House. Weyman Stanley John
she not? Was she to miss Greenwich because Lord Audley went to a good bootmaker?
So when Peter Basset, still pale and qualmish, came on deck in the early morning, a little below the Pool, the first person he saw was the girl whom he had come to escort. She was standing high above him on the captain's bridge, her hands clasping the rail, her hair blown about and shining golden in the sunshine. Lord Audley's stately form towered above her. He was pointing out this and that, and they were talking gaily; and now and again the captain spoke to them, and many were looking at them. She did not see Basset; he was on the deck below, standing amid the common crowd, and so he was free to look at her as he pleased. He might be said not to have seen her before, and what he saw now bewildered, nay, staggered him. Unwillingly, and to please his uncle, he had come to meet a girl of whom they knew no more than this, that, rescued from some backwater of Paris life, into which a weak and shiftless father had plunged her, she had earned her living, if she had earned it at all, in a dependent capacity. He had looked to find her one of two things; either flashy and underbred, with every fault an Englishman might consider French, or a nice mixture of craft and servility. He had not been able to decide which he would prefer.
Instead he saw a girl tall, slender, and slow of movement, with eyes set under a fine width of brow and grave when they smiled, a chin fuller than perfect beauty required, a mouth a little large, a perfect nose. Auburn hair, thick and waving, drooped over each temple, and framed a face as calm as it was fair. "Surely a pearl found on a midden!" he thought. And as the thought passed through his mind, Mary looked down. Her eyes roved for a moment over the crowded deck, where some, like Basset, returned her gaze with interest, while others sought their baggage or bawled for missing companions. He was not a man, it has been said, to stand out in a crowd, and her eyes travelled over him without seeing him. Audley spoke to her, she lifted her eyes, she looked ashore again. But the unheeding glance which had not deigned to know him stung Basset! He dubbed her, with all her beauty, proud and hard. Still-to be such and to have sprung from such a life! It was marvellous.
He knew nothing of the convent school with its hourly discipline lasting through years. He did not guess that the obstinacy which had been weakness in the father was strength in the child. Much less could he divine that the improvidence of that father had become a beacon, warning the daughter off the rocks which had been fatal to him! Mary was no miracle, but neither was she proud or hard.
They had passed Erith, and Greenwich with its stately pile and formal gardens glittering in the sunshine of an April morning. The ripple of a westerly wind, meeting the flood, silvered the turbid surface. A hundred wherries skimmed like water-flies hither and thither, long lines of colliers fringed the wharves, tall China clippers forged slowly up under a scrap of foresail, dumb barges deep laden with hay or Barclay's Entire, moved mysteriously with the tide. On all sides hoarse voices bawled orders or objurgations. Charmed with the gayety, the movement, the color, Mary could not take her eyes from the scene. The sunshine, the leap of life, the pulse of spring, moved in her blood and put to flight the fears that had weighed on her at nightfall. She told herself with elation that this was England, this was her native land, this was her home.
Meanwhile Audley's mind took another direction. He reflected that in a few minutes he must part from the girl, and must trust henceforth to the impression he had made. For some hours he had scarcely given a thought to Basset, but he recalled him now, and he searched for him in the throng below. He found him at last, pressed against the rail between a fat woman with a basket and a crying child. Their eyes met. My lord glanced away, but he could not refrain from a smile as he pictured the poor affair the other had made of his errand. And Basset saw the smile and read its meaning, and though he was not self-assertive, though he was, indeed, backward to a fault, anger ran through his veins. To have travelled three hundred miles in order to meet this girl, to have found her happy in another's company, and to have accepted the second place-the position had vexed him even under the qualms of illness. This morning, and since he had seen her, it stirred in him an unwonted resentment. He d-d Audley under his breath, disengaged himself from the basket which the fat woman was thrusting into his ribs, lifted the child aside. He escaped below to collect his effects.
But in a short time he recovered his temper. When the boat began to go about in the crowded Pool and Mary reluctantly withdrew her eyes from the White Tower, darkened by the smoke and the tragedies of twenty generations, she found him awaiting them at the foot of the ladder. He was still pale, and the girl's conscience smote her. For many hours she had not given him a thought. "I hope you are better," she said gently.
"Horrid thing, mal de mer!" remarked my lord, with a gleam of humor in his eye.
"Thank you, I am quite right this morning," Basset answered.
"You go from Euston Grove, I suppose?"
"Yes. The morning train starts in a little over an hour."
No more was said, and they went ashore together. Audley, an old traveller, and one whose height and presence gave weight to his orders, saw to Mary's safety in the crowd, shielded her from touts and tide-waiters, took the upper hand. He watched the aproned porters disappearing with the baggage in the direction of the Custom House, and a thought struck him. "I am sorry that my servant is not here," he said. "He would see our things through without troubling us." His eyes met Basset's.
Basset disdained to refuse. "I will do it," he said. He received the keys and followed the baggage.
Audley looked at Mary and laughed. "I think you'll find him useful," he said. "Takes a hint and is not too forward."
"For shame!" she cried. "It is very good of him to go." But she could not refrain from a smile.
"Well trained," Audley continued in a whimsical tone, "fetches and carries, barks at the name of Peel and growls at the name of Cobden, gives up a stick when required, could be taught to beg-by the right person."
She laughed-she could not resist his manner. "But you are not very kind," she said. "Please to call a-whatever we need. He shall not do everything."
"Everything?" Lord Audley echoed. "He should do nothing," in a lower tone, "if I had my way."
Mary blushed.
CHAPTER VI
FIELD AND FORGE
The window of the clumsy carriage was narrow, but Mary gazed through it as if she could never see enough of the flying landscape, the fields, the woods, the ivy-clad homes and red-roofed towns that passed in procession before her. The emotions of those who journeyed for the first time on a railway at a speed four times as great as that of the swiftest High-flier that ever devoured the road are forgotten by this generation. But they were vivid. The thing was a miracle. And though by this time men had ceased to believe that he who passed through the air at sixty miles an hour must of necessity cease to breathe, the novice still felt that he could never tire of the panorama so swiftly unrolled before him.
And it was not only wonder, it was admiration that held Mary chained to the window. Her infancy had been spent in a drab London street, her early youth in the heart of a Paris which was still gloomy and mediæval. Some beautiful things she had seen on fête days, the bend of the river at Meudon or St. Germain, and once the Forest of Fontainebleau; on Sundays the Bois. But the smiling English meadows, the gray towers of village churches, the parks and lawns of manor-houses, the canals with their lines of painted barges, and here and there a gay packet boat-she drank in the beauty of these, and more than once her eyes grew dim. For a time Basset, seated in the opposite corner, did not exist for her; while he, behind the Morning Chronicle, made his observations and took note of her at his leisure. The longer he looked the more he marvelled.
He asked himself with amusement what John Audley would think of her when he, too, should see her. He anticipated the old man's surprise on finding her so remote from their preconceived ideas of her. He wondered what she would think of John Audley.
And while he pondered, and now scanned his paper without reading it, and now stole another glance at her, he steeled himself against her. She might not have been to blame, it might not have been her fault; but, between them, the two on the boat had put him in his place and he could not forget it. He had cut a poor figure, and he resented it. He foresaw that in the future she would be dependent on him for society, and he would be a fool