Gertrude Warden

“ You have never felt the bitter loneliness of being without a friend to love you among enemies? When I have been feeling tired, ill, and worn out, I have said to myself, ‘I must not give way; I must not die until my Stella is happily provided for.’ I could not die and leave you with him. But now if, as Lord Carthew suggests, the marriage takes place almost immediately—and, indeed, what is there to hinder it?—I shall have my mind at peace, knowing that you will be safe under the protection of a good man’s love. ”

“ It is impossible to imagine any one more gentle and kind than mamma. She suffers a deal, and bears it beautifully. Her heart constantly troubles her, yet she must be in terrible pain before she utters a complaint. I am not a bit like her, I am sorry to say,” she added, humbly. “I shall never have her gentleness, her patience and resignation. When I am angry, I hate—mamma is incapable of hatred. I don’t know how I should have lived at all but for her constant kindness.”
Tears suddenly gathered in Miss Cranstoun’s eyes. Hastily brushing them away, she turned to Lord Carthew with a sweet smile. ”

“ Stella’s shining dark-blue eyes seemed to be gazing at him from every corner, and with her voice they haunted his dreams, from which he awoke with outstretched arms to meet the empty air. He had never meant to fall in love with her or with anybody, and it angered him to think that even incessant occupation and bodily activity could not stifle the constant pain at his heart. To a man of his essentially manly and practical nature, it seemed little short of contemptible to be thus dominated by a hopeless feeling of love for a woman, particularly now that she had become the wife of his friend ”

“ She was fully resolved of one thing: that no man but Hilary Pritchard should be her husband; but she would never come to him with a stain upon her name.
Then, again, her reflections were disturbed by the memory of the gentle lady who believed her to be her daughter. How could she possibly desert her under any circumstances? Whatever the amount of her obligation toward Sir Philip, Stella realized that the love and duty she owed to Lady Gwendolen were none the less, but rather the more, urgent, should there, indeed, be no blood relationship between them. ”

“ And my eyes have seen what yours have not: your sister, my bonny Clare, as she lay dying in my arms, making me swear on her child’s head that I would punish Philip Cranstoun. ‘He swore he would break my pride,’ she said, with the death-rattle in her throat. ‘Mami, break his. Disgrace is worse than death to him. He has brought death upon me; bring disgrace upon him.’ I seem to hear her voice now, and to see her glazing eyes light up for the last time as she said the words.”
She sat still for a while, staring into the flaming logs over the outstretched figure of James Carewe. ”

“ Hiram Carewe, sir, a man of forty-one, a gypsy fellow, against whom more than one could bear witness he was a confirmed poacher, as was his precious son, James Carewe, who is now starting his five years. But you never heard anything like the savage way in which he turned upon Sir Philip when he saw him in the witness-box. ‘You murdered my father,’ he shouted out. ‘You, Philip Cranstoun, liar, and coward! Your men are liars and perjurers, too. You know right well what father and I came to the Chase for, and that we never struck a blow but in self-defence. ”

“ Sir Philip he swears, and the witch she shrieks with laughter. Then suddenly she stops, lifts her finger, and rolls out the most awful curse a body ever heard. William’s wife said it made her cold to her bones to listen. The woman cursed his whole life and all that he did. He should lose wife and child, she said, his name should become a scoff and a byword throughout the land; he should be wretched at home and hated abroad; no one should ever love him again; and she would live, if it was for fifty years, to laugh at him, as he lay dying in a miserable hovel, deserted and alone. ”

“ You should by rights be tramping from door to door at the heels of some filthy caravan, selling brooms, and stealing chickens, with a hedge to sleep under, and the police on your track! Do you know what you are—you, with your white face, and your defiant airs and graces, who do not consider an earl’s son good enough for you, but must needs disgrace yourself by a servant-girl flirtation in the corridor with a man who will make your folly a smoking-room jest? You think yourself a duke’s grandchild, a Douglas by descent, and daughter to my wife, Lady Gwendolen. ”

“ In order to rid herself of her, as it was now close on the dinner-hour at the Chase, Stella let her soft white hand be clutched within Sarah’s lean fingers, and stood watching, impatient, and yet a little interested in spite of herself, as the gypsy took a box of matches and a dirty end of candle from her pocket, and peered into her victim’s palm under the lightly falling rain.
“I see a prison, my deary, and a marriage forced upon you—marriage with a dark gentleman, who loves you, dear, and who is a great lord; but your heart is given to the fair man. ”

“ As much as an emotional woman can dread and hate a man and a system, so strongly had Stella’s mother hated and feared Sir Philip Cranstoun and the aristocratic lords of the soil of whom he was a representative, and a very strong measure of the same rebellion, the same hatred, she had transmitted to her daughter. So that it necessarily came about that Stella tried not to think about Hilary Pritchard because she believed him to be Lord Carthew, while her heart and sympathies went readily out to Lord Carthew, whom she believed to be an altogether poor and undistinguished person. ”

“ The Chase is gloomy and dreary and prison-like, and I am often very lonely; but it is a thousand times better than to be married to the man who has the highest title and the largest fortune among those who may condescend to take notice of me,” she went on, bitterly. “Why, if I could stoop to such a marriage, there would not be a scullery-maid at the Chase, or a cottager on my father’s property, who would not have the right to despise me!”
“But you might meet some one among these men of rank and wealth whom you might like,” suggested Lord Carthew. ”

“ Hilary’s brows darkened as she uttered the gamekeeper’s name, and he recalled what Lord Carthew had said of Stella’s extraordinary conduct toward him on her wedding journey.
“Are you on such close and confidential terms with this Lee, then, may I ask, that you entrust letters and messages to him?”
Stella’s dark-blue eyes opened wide in what looked like innocent surprise.
“Close and confidential terms?” she repeated. “Why, he is the gamekeeper! I hardly ever see him, and I shall never forgive him for hurting you. Surely, Hilary, you are not going to be jealous of the servants?” ”

“ Disdaining women of his own rank as silly, and those of a lower position in life as coarse and vulgar, nature had suddenly revenged herself upon him for his indifference to the other sex by inspiring in him a mad love for his sister’s beautiful gypsy protégée. In the height of this he had married her, and his passion had cooled almost as rapidly as it had grown hot. Instead of a docile and humble tool, he found a proud and self-willed girl, who seemed in no way impressed by his extraordinary condescension and kindness in making her Lady Cranstoun. ”

“ He glanced at her quickly, and then at the faces of the women behind her. The idea which possessed their brains entered his also, and he asked himself whether grief and harsh treatment could have temporarily deprived his daughter of her reason.
As Sir Philip led the bride along the terrace toward the church door, a murmur of admiration ran through the crowd. Her face had lost its pallor; through the tulle veil a bright color showed in her cheeks, and contrasted with the intense purple-blue of her restless, gleaming eyes. Two persons her gaze sought in the crowd about the doors. ”

“ In all his life he had thought but little of love for women, and now that the feeling overmastered him, he was inclined to question its authority, as well as to fly into paroxysms of jealousy without sufficient reason. He was not in the least conceited, and rather overrated Lord Carthew’s higher mental endowments, together with his eloquent tongue, high rank and wealth, when pitted against his own dower from nature of bone, and muscle, and manly beauty. He knew that Carthew loved Stella, and it would have seemed very natural to him that his passion should be returned. ”

“ Netherbridge,” she added, suddenly, while big tears rolled down her cheeks. “I may have been silly when I married, but I tried my utmost for over a year to love Sir Philip, and to please him, but he is more a fiend than a man, I think, and I would rather die than see a child of mine grow up resembling him. It is all these thoughts which, together with my awful anxiety for my father and Jim, are breaking my heart, and ruining my health. It is hate, and terror, and misery, and cruel, cruel anxiety, which make me starve myself and hope to die. ”

“ Even while answering her polite inquiries, Claud’s eyes involuntarily travelled to the face of Miss Cranstoun, who, dressed in a girlish dinner costume of ivory silk, sat beside Dr. Morland Graham. In the lamplight she looked even more attractive than in the half-obscurity in which he had before seen her. Her cheeks had but little color as contrasted with the vivid scarlet of her lips, but to Lord Carthew’s keenly observant eyes, this pallor, and the extraordinary brightness of her eyes, suggested in no way ill health, but rather a vivid and ardent nature under strong repression. ”

“ Are you not capable of appreciating the value of your own actions, or has grieving over your recent loss turned your brain? Do you understand that you are my wife, Lady Carthew, that my honor is yours, and that it is outraging my name and your own reputation to make yourself a laughing-stock for station idlers by vulgar familiarity with one of your father’s servants? Stella, I can hardly believe it possible that I should have to address such words to you; you, whom I have reverenced as the most innocent, most refined of women! You cannot surely know what you are doing ”

“ Round about the arched graystone doorway of the chapel the servants and retainers of the Chase were assembled, and a faint cheer went up as Lord Carthew helped his mother to descend from the carriage. The Squire was not popular with his tenants any more than with his domestics; he had an absolute genius, indeed, for making himself disliked by all classes among whom he moved. Still, he was all powerful in the district, and great interest was felt in the beautiful daughter whom hardly any one had ever seen outside the Chase enclosure. ”

“ Neville, a widow without children, Sir Philip Cranstoun’s eldest sister. Because I was so pretty, she had me lifted into her carriage, and took me to her beautiful home and had me educated, taught French, and music, and dancing, and drawing, and all that, meaning me to be a governess. Every now and then I broke loose and went tramping through the fields and lanes after my own people, whom I loved the best all along. Often and often, when my fingers ached with practising the piano, and I felt all stiff in tight clothes and shoes, I’d long for the old free life again. ”

“ Stella threw a shilling to the boy who held Black Bess, and with very slight assistance from him, vaulted into the saddle and turned the mare’s head in the direction where her master lay. Black Bess flew like an arrow from a bow, and the journey occupied even less time than in coming. The blood rushed over Stella’s face and neck as she saw, standing in the courtyard of the inn, watching her ride up, the tall, massive figure of Hilary Pritchard, with one arm in a sling, the sun shining on his yellow curls. ”