“I had hoped we might both talk rationally as friends.”
“Friends! Frank Tregear, I have been bold enough to tell you I love you; but you are not my friend, and cannot be my friend. If I have before asked you to help me in this mean catastrophe of mine, in my attack upon that poor boy, I withdraw my request. I think I will go back to the house now.”
“I will walk back to Ledburgh if you wish it without going to the house again.”
“No; I will have nothing that looks like being ashamed. You ought not to have come, but you need not run away.” Then they walked back to the house together and found Miss Cassewary on the terrace. “We have been to the lake,” said Mabel, “and have been talking of old days. I have but one ambition now in the world.” Of course Miss Cassewary asked what the remaining ambition was. “To get money enough to purchase this place from the ruins of the Grex property. If I could own the house and the lake, and the paddocks about, and had enough income to keep one servant and bread for us to eat—of course including you, Miss Cass—”
“Thank’ee, my dear; but I am not sure I should like it.”
“Yes; you would. Frank would come and see us perhaps once a year. I don’t suppose anybody else cares about the place, but to me it is the dearest spot in the world.” So she went on in almost high spirits, though alluding to the general decadence of the Grex family, till Tregear took his leave.
“I wish he had not come,” said Miss Cassewary when he was gone.
“Why should you wish that? There is not so much here to amuse me that you should begrudge me a stray visitor.”
“I don’t think that I grudge you anything in the way of pleasure, my dear; but still he should not have come. My Lord, if he knew it, would be angry.”
“Then let him be angry. Papa does not do so much for me that I am bound to think of him at every turn.”
“But I am—or rather I am bound to think of myself, if I take his bread.”
“Bread!”
“Well;—I do take his bread, and I take it on the understanding that I will be to you what a mother might be—or an aunt.”
“Well—and if so! Had I a mother living would not Frank Tregear have come to visit her, and in visiting her, would he not have seen me—and should we not have walked out together?”
“Not after all that has come and gone.”
“But you are not a mother nor yet an aunt, and you have to do just what I tell you. And don’t I know that you trust me in all things? And am I not trustworthy?”
“I think you are trustworthy.”
“I know what my duty is and I mean to do it. No one shall ever have to say of me that I have given way to self-indulgence. I couldn’t help his coming, you know.”
That same night, after Miss Cassewary had gone to bed, when the moon was high in the heavens and the world around her was all asleep, Lady Mabel again wandered out to the lake, and again seated herself on the same rock, and there she sat thinking of her past life and trying to think of that before her. It is so much easier to think of the past than of the future—to remember what has been than to resolve what shall be! She had reminded him of the offer which he had made and repeated to her more than once—to share with her all his chances in life. There would have been almost no income for them. All the world would have been against her. She would have caused his ruin. Her light on the matter had been so clear that it had not taken her very long to decide that such a thing must not be thought of. She had at last been quite stern in her decision.
Now she was brokenhearted because she found that he had left her in very truth. Oh yes;—she would marry the boy, if she could so arrange. Since that meeting at Richmond he had sent her the ring reset. She was to meet him down in Scotland within a week or two from the present time. Mrs. Montacute Jones had managed that. He had all but offered to her a second time at Richmond. But all that would not serve to make her happy. She declared to herself that she did not wish to see Frank Tregear again; but still it was a misery to her that his heart should in truth be given to another woman.
XXXVIII
Crummie-Toddie
Almost at the last moment Silverbridge and his brother Gerald were induced to join Lord Popplecourt’s shooting-party in Scotland. The party perhaps might more properly be called the party of Reginald Dobbes, who was a man knowing in such matters. It was he who made the party up. Popplecourt and Silverbridge were to share the expense between them, each bringing three guns. Silverbridge brought his brother and Frank Tregear—having refused a most piteous petition on the subject from Major Tifto. With Popplecourt of course came Reginald Dobbes, who was, in truth, to manage everything, and Lord Nidderdale, whose wife had generously permitted him this recreation. The shooting was in the west of Perthshire, known as Crummie-Toddie, and comprised an enormous acreage of so-called forest and moor. Mr. Dobbes declared that nothing like it had as yet been produced in Scotland. Everything had been made to give way to deer and grouse. The thing had been managed so well that the tourist nuisance had been considerably
