A Lady of Quality<br />Being a Most Curious, Hitherto Unknown History, as Related by Mr. Isaac Bicke by Frances Hodgson Burnett (e ink epub reader .TXT) 📗

she had little pity for his evil case, if one might judge by her face, when in the course of the running he took a hedge behind her, and pressing his horse, came up by her side and spoke.

“Clorinda,” he began breathlessly, through set teeth.

She could have left him and not answered, but she chose to restrain the pace of her wild beast for a moment and look at him.

“‘Your ladyship!’” she corrected his audacity.  “Or—‘my Lady Dunstanwolde.’”

“There was a time”—he said.

“This morning,” she said, “I found a letter in a casket in my closet.  I do not know the mad villain who wrote it.  I never knew him.”

“You did not,” he cried, with an oath, and then laughed scornfully.

“The letter lies in ashes on the hearth,” she said.  “’Twas burned unopened.  Do not ride so close, Sir John, and do not play the madman and the beast with the wife of my Lord Dunstanwolde.”

“‘The wife!’” he answered.  “‘My lord!’  ’Tis a new game this, and well played, by God!”

She did not so much as waver in her look, and her wide eyes smiled.

“Quite new,” she answered him—“quite new.  And could I not have played it well and fairly, I would not have touched the cards.  Keep your horse off, Sir John.  Mine is restive, and likes not another beast near him;” and she touched the creature with her whip, and he was gone like a thunderbolt.

The next day, being in her room, Anne saw her come from her dressing-table with a sealed letter in her hand.  She went to the bell and rang it.

“Anne,” she said, “I am going to rate my woman and turn her from my service.  I shall not beat or swear at her as I was wont to do with my women in time past.  You will be afraid, perhaps; but you must stay with me.”

She was standing by the fire with the letter held almost at arm’s length in her finger-tips, when the woman entered, who, seeing her face, turned pale, and casting her eyes upon the letter, paler still, and began to shake.

“You have attended mistresses of other ways than mine,” her lady said in her slow, clear voice, which seemed to cut as knives do.  “Some fool and madman has bribed you to serve him.  You cannot serve me also.  Come hither and put this in the fire.  If ’twere to be done I would make you hold it in the live coals with your hand.”

The woman came shuddering, looking as if she thought she might be struck dead.  She took the letter and kneeled, ashen pale, to burn it.  When ’twas done, her mistress pointed to the door.

“Go and gather your goods and chattels together, and leave within this hour,” she said.  “I will be my own tirewoman till I can find one who comes to me honest.”

When she was gone, Anne sat gazing at the ashes on the hearth.  She was pale also.

“Sister,” she said, “do you—”

“Yes,” answered my lady.  “’Tis a man who loved me, a cur and a knave.  He thought for an hour he was cured of his passion.  I could have told him ’twould spring up and burn more fierce than ever when he saw another man possess me.  ’Tis so with knaves and curs; and ’tis so with him.  He hath gone mad again.”

“Ay, mad!” cried Anne—“mad, and base, and wicked!”

Clorinda gazed at the ashes, her lips curling.

“He was ever base,” she said—“as he was at first, so he is now.  ’Tis thy favourite, Anne,” lightly, and she delicately spurned the blackened tinder with her foot—“thy favourite, John Oxon.”

Mistress Anne crouched in her seat and hid her face in her thin hands.

“Oh, my lady!” she cried, not feeling that she could say “sister,” “if he be base, and ever was so, pity him, pity him!  The base need pity more than all.”

For she had loved him madly, all unknowing her own passion, not presuming even to look up in his beautiful face, thinking of him only as the slave of her sister, and in dead secrecy knowing strange things—strange things!  And when she had seen the letter she had known the handwriting, and the beating of her simple heart had well-nigh strangled her—for she had seen words writ by him before.

* * * * *

When Dunstanwolde and his lady went back to their house in town, Mistress Anne went with them.  Clorinda willed that it should be so.  She made her there as peaceful and retired a nest of her own as she had given to her at Dunstanwolde.  By strange good fortune Barbara had been wedded to a plain gentleman, who, being a widower with children, needed a help-meet in his modest household, and through a distant relationship to Mistress Wimpole, encountered her charge, and saw in her meekness of spirit the thing which might fall into the supplying of his needs.  A beauty or a fine lady would not have suited him; he wanted but a housewife and a mother for his orphaned children, and this, a young woman who had lived straitly, and been forced to many contrivances for mere decency of apparel and ordinary comfort, might be trained to become.

So it fell that Mistress Anne could go to London without pangs of conscience at leaving her sister in the country and alone.  The stateliness of the town mansion, my Lady Dunstanwolde’s retinue of lacqueys and serving-women, her little black page, who waited on her and took her pug dogs to walk, her wardrobe, and jewels, and equipages, were each and all marvels to her, but seemed to her mind so far befitting that she remembered, wondering, the days when she had darned the tattered tapestry in her chamber, and changed the ribbands and fashions of her gowns.  Being now attired fittingly, though soberly as became her, she was not in these days—at least, as far as outward seeming went—an awkward blot upon the scene when she appeared among her sister’s company; but at heart she was as timid and shrinking as ever, and never mingled with the guests in the great rooms when she could avoid so doing.  Once or twice she went forth with Clorinda in her coach and six, and saw the glittering world, while she drew back into her corner of the equipage and gazed with all a country-bred woman’s timorous admiration.

“’Twas grand and like a beautiful show!” she said, when she came home the first time.  “But do not take me often, sister; I am too plain and shy, and feel that I am naught in it.”

But though she kept as much apart from the great World of Fashion as she could, she contrived to know of all her sister’s triumphs; to see her when she went forth in her bravery, though ’twere but to drive in the Mall; to be in her closet with her on great nights when her tirewomen were decking her in brocades and jewels, that she might show her highest beauty at some assembly or ball of State.  And at all these times, as also at all others, she knew that she but shared her own love and dazzled admiration with my Lord Dunstanwolde, whose tenderness, being so fed by his lady’s unfailing graciousness of bearing and kindly looks and words, grew with every hour that passed.

They held one night a splendid assembly at which a member of the Royal House was present.  That night Clorinda bade her sister appear.

“Sometimes—I do not command it always—but sometimes you must show yourself to our guests.  My lord will not be pleased else.  He says it is not fitting that his wife’s sister should remain unseen as if we hid her away through ungraciousness.  Your woman will prepare for you all things needful.  I myself will see that your dress becomes you.  I have commanded it already, and given much thought to its shape and colour.  I would have you very comely, Anne.”  And she kissed her lightly on her cheek—almost as gently as she sometimes kissed her lord’s grey hair.  In truth, though she was still a proud lady and stately in her ways, there had come upon her some strange subtle change Anne could not understand.

On the day on which the assembly was held, Mistress Anne’s woman brought to her a beautiful robe.  ’Twas flowered satin of the sheen and softness of a dove’s breast, and the lace adorning it was like a spider’s web for gossamer fineness.  The robe was sweetly fashioned, fitting her shape wondrously; and when she was attired in it at night a little colour came into her cheeks to see herself so far beyond all comeliness she had ever known before.  When she found herself in the midst of the dazzling scene in the rooms of entertainment, she was glad when at last she could feel herself lost among the crowd of guests.  Her only pleasure in such scenes was to withdraw to some hidden corner and look on as at a pageant or a play.  To-night she placed herself in the shadow of a screen, from which retreat she could see Clorinda and Dunstanwolde as they received their guests.  Thus she found enjoyment enough; for, in truth, her love and almost abject passion of adoration for her sister had grown as his lordship’s had, with every hour.  For a season there had rested upon her a black shadow beneath which she wept and trembled, bewildered and lost; though even at its darkest the object of her humble love had been a star whose brightness was not dimmed, because it could not be so whatsoever passed before it.  This cloud, however, being it seemed dispelled, the star had shone but more brilliant in its high place, and she the more passionately worshipped it.  To sit apart and see her idol’s radiance, to mark her as she reigned and seemed the more royal when she bent the knee to royalty itself, to see the shimmer of her jewels crowning her midnight hair and crashing the warm whiteness of her noble neck, to observe the admiration in all eyes as they dwelt upon her—this was, indeed, enough of happiness.

“She is, as ever,” she murmured, “not so much a woman as a proud lovely goddess who has deigned to descend to earth.  But my lord does not look like himself.  He seems shrunk in the face and old, and his eyes have rings about them.  I like not that.  He is so kind a gentleman and so happy that his body should not fail him.  I have marked that he has looked colourless for days, and Clorinda questioned him kindly on it, but he said he suffered naught.”

’Twas but a little later than she had thought this, that she remarked a gentleman step aside and stand quite near without observing her.  Feeling that she had no testimony to her fancifulness, she found herself thinking in a vague fashion that he, too, had come there because he chose to be unobserved.  ’Twould not have been so easy for him to retire as it had been for her smallness and insignificance to do so; and, indeed, she did not fancy that he meant to conceal himself, but merely to stand for a quiet moment a little apart from the crowd.

And as she looked up at him, wondering why this should be, she saw he was the noblest and most stately gentleman she had ever beheld.

She had never seen him before; he must either be a stranger or a rare visitor.  As Clorinda was beyond a woman’s height, he was beyond a man’s.

He carried himself as kingly as she did nobly; he had a countenance of strong, manly beauty, and a deep tawny eye, thick-fringed and full of fire; orders glittered upon his breast, and he wore a fair periwig, which became him wondrously, and seemed to make his eye more deep and burning by its contrast.

Beside his strength and majesty of bearing the stripling beauty of John Oxon would have seemed slight and paltry, a thing for flippant women to trifle with.

Mistress Anne looked at him with an admiration somewhat like reverence, and as she did so a sudden thought rose to her mind, and even as it rose, she marked what his gaze rested on, and how it dwelt upon it, and knew that he had stepped apart to stand and gaze as she did—only with a man’s hid fervour—at her sister’s self.

’Twas as if suddenly a strange secret had been told her.  She read it in his face, because he thought himself unobserved, and for a space had cast his mask aside.  He stood and gazed as a man who, starving at soul, fed himself through his eyes, having no hope of other sustenance, or as a man weary with long carrying of a burden, for a space laid it down for rest and to gather power to