Chapter XV: Town and County

A curious thing happens that evening after dinner. It is Mr. Trenchard’s habit to read the daily papers at his ease in the drawing-room as soon as he has withdrawn from the dinner-table; or, if he is idly disposed, Sibyl reads to him, and beguiles him into placid slumber. This evening he reads the papers for himself, beginning, as usual, with the _Times_, which he studies profoundly. He sits in his easy chair by one open window. Sibyl yawns over a novel at another. Rather dreary these summer evenings at Lancaster Lodge, when twilight’s purple shadows rise ghost-like among the trees on the lawn, and the gates are closed upon the outer world. Welcome even such commonplace interruption as the advent of Frederick Stormont, and an adjournment to the billiard-room.

Sibyl looks up from her book with a start at a sudden movement of her uncle’s. What was that half-stifled exclamation which sounded so like an oath? Stephen Trenchard is standing up, with the paper crumpled in his right hand, staring blankly at his niece. She goes to him, looks at him in frightened interrogation; but he neither sees nor hears her. Is this some kind of seizure,--epileptic, paralytic? She thinks so, tremblingly, for a moment, before Mr. Trenchard’s keen black eyes resume their power of vision and look into hers.

‘Dearest uncle, what is the matter?’

‘Nothing that need concern you, Sibyl. A friend, an old friend of mine, dead in India. The announcement of his death shocked me, that’s all. I ought not to have been surprised. At my age a man must expect old friends to drop off. Go back to your book, my dear. There is no reason for you to be agitated.’

Sibyl looks wonderingly at the paper in her uncle’s hand. It is not the supplement. That, with its births, marriages, and deaths, lies on the carpet unopened. She remembers that the deaths of distinguished people are sometimes recorded in the body of the paper, and this friend of her uncle’s is doubtless a person worthy of an obituary paragraph.

‘I am so sorry,’ she says sympathetically.

‘So am I. But it was to be expected. Go back to your book, child.’

Perceiving that sympathy is not required, Sibyl returns to her seat by the distant window. Marion would have hung about her uncle for a quarter of an hour bemoaning his loss and offering stale crumbs of consolation.

Sibyl hears the door shut ten minutes afterwards, and looking up, sees that Stephen Trenchard has vanished. She hastens to look for the newspapers, eager to find out all she can about her uncle’s departed friend; but Mr. Trenchard has taken the papers with him, and when she searches for them next day in his study and in other likely places, they are not to be found. Nor does Mr. Trenchard reappear that evening. The butler brings Sibyl a message at tea-time to the effect that his master has letters to write, and will take tea in his study. So that particular infusion of hyson with which Mr. Trenchard is in the habit of irritating his nerves is carried to the study on a salver, and Sibyl is left to spend her evening alone.

There are times, on just such an evening as this, when memory recalls that one room in Dixon Street, Chelsea, and his company whose easy temper and natural gaiety of heart could brighten deepest poverty with an occasional ray of light.

‘If I could have borne poverty as well as he, we might have struggled on together to the end,’ she thinks, with a touch of remorse. ‘But then what a pity it would have been to lose uncle Trenchard’s fortune! How ghastly pale he looked to-night, poor dear man!’

Mr. Trenchard seems a little out of sorts for the next few days, not quite so keen and far-seeing, so exacting or high-handed in his household as it is his wont to be. He has a preoccupied air, a thoughtful look, and is evidently much concerned by the loss of that departed friend whose name he has not mentioned.

Sibyl wonders at this a little, never having heard Mr. Trenchard talk of any intimate friend in India. He has told numerous stories of Calcutta society, of trade and chicanery in that palatial city; but of friendship, of intimate congenial companions, he has not breathed a word. Nor in the year and a half of his residence at Redcastle has a single Anglo-Indian acquaintance visited him. Impossible to imagine a man more independent of friendship, yet he seems cut to the quick by the death of this distant friend, and is slow to recover his equanimity.

Mrs. Stormont calls about three days before the races, and finds Mr. Trenchard and his niece on the lawn, the gentleman asleep, or meditating, his countenance shrouded by an orange-coloured bandanna, like a new veiled prophet, the lady working point lace at the rate of a stitch a minute.

The kind soul has come to talk about the races.

‘I wish you could be induced to join us, dear Mr. Trenchard.’

‘You’re very good, my dear madam, but the thing is not in my way. I hardly know whether a horse should have four legs or six. If you were to show me a six-legged animal I doubt if I should remark the redundancy.’

‘And yet you have the finest carriage horses in Redcastle.’

‘Because I did not choose them myself, madam.’

‘I shall call for you at half-past twelve, my dear,’ says Mrs. Stormont, turning to Sibyl. ‘Fred is going to ride. I shall hire Shrub’s landau and pair. My poor dear ponies would be frightened to death on a racecourse.’

Shrub is the proprietor of the George Hotel and livery stables and has the honour of ministering to the _élite_ on all state occasions.

‘Why hire Shrub’s landau when my barouche is at your service?’ asks Mr. Trenchard. ‘I shall be glad to give that idle coachman of mine a day’s work.’

‘My dear Mr. Trenchard, you are too kind. Such an idea never entered my head.’

‘Odd if it didn’t,’ thinks Sibyl, ‘when you are always making use of the carriage in some way or other.’

The Stormonts have allowed Sibyl to drive them a good deal during the last few months, to the infinite relief of the ponies and the buck-basket, both of which institutions are slightly the worse for wear. You may get fifteen years’ good work out of a pony, but when he approaches his majority his powers are apt to wane.

Mrs. Stormont allows herself to be entreated, and finally yields gracefully, and with an airy coquetry, but only on condition that Mr. Trenchard shall dine with them on the race day. This he promises, with certain reservations.

‘If I feel myself up to the mark, I’ll come,’ he says, ‘but I have not been particularly well lately.’

‘Uncle Trenchard has lost an old friend in India,’ explains Sibyl, and seeing her uncle’s impatient frown, is sorry she has made the remark.

‘Indeed!’ exclaims Mrs. Stormont, thirsting for information. ‘In the civil service or the army? The colonel has so many old Indian friends.’

‘My friend was neither in the civil service nor the army,’ says Mr. Trenchard, and says no more.

Mrs. Stormont is disappointed, but she has got the carriage, which was the object of her visit, so she drifts off into the usual Redcastle talk. ‘Have you seen the Groshens lately?’ and ‘Did you hear that Dr. Mitsand has been very ill?’ and so on; with which interesting discourse she beguiles the next half-hour.

The race day comes with the calendar, and a glorious day, hot blue sky, roads white with dust, grass brown and slippery, bad for the horses, opine the learned in such matters. The grand stand is gleaming in the sun, flags are flying, the town is all astir, flies are driving to and fro between station and racecourse, with visitors from Krampston, people who smell of commerce and dockyard, oakum and tar, a rough lot in the estimation of genteel Redcastle. At half-past twelve the Trenchard barouche calls for Mrs. Stormont and her two daughters; Sibyl has taken her place in it already. She wishes to sit with her back to the horses, but this Mrs. Stormont will not allow, and after a little polite skirmishing she takes her place next that lady, the Miss Stormonts side by side on the opposite seat, which they fill to overflowing. On the way to the course the ladies have time for a silent review of each other’s apparel. Rose and Violet are in washed muslins and home-made bonnets. Mrs. Stormont wears her dove-coloured moire, which is an institution in Redcastle, and as well known as the town clock.

‘Here comes Mrs. Groshen’s carriage. I suppose she is going to crush us with some new finery,’ says Rose, with a venomous look at the maize silk and India muslin.

‘I hope it will be in a little better taste than usual,’ remarks Violet, who is of a more calculating temper than her sister. ‘What lovely embroidery that is of yours, Sibyl! I can’t help noticing it.’

Frederick joins the party presently, on a brute of a gray horse, whose ownership he participates with young Jewson, the lawyer’s son. The joint animal, having very little mouth to speak of at the best, and being ridden on opposite principles by his two proprietors, is about as manageable as a watering-place donkey. Frank Jewson, who is the better equestrian of the co-owners, boasts that he rides with his knees. Fred Stormont hangs on by the reins, and makes the wretched quadruped’s mouth his fulcrum. He is not happy on horseback himself, or the cause of happiness to his steed, and the joint proprietorship is an extravagance which he can ill afford. But he feels that the horse gives him social status, and endures bravely. The beast is consistent, and starting with a fixed idea that the sooner he gets back to his stables the better for his own well-being, tugs desperately at every turning in the endeavour to make a short cut home, and if confronted in his straight course with any object which he dislikes, wheels sharp round, and sets off at a lively trot stable-wards. The first half-hour of Mr. Stormont’s ride is one prolonged tussle with the gray, which, in the pride of their hearts, the joint proprietors have christened Flying Dutchman.

‘The Dutchman is awfully fresh to-day, Fred,’ remonstrates Rose, when the gray has backed into the landau half a dozen times, in his efforts to go up every side street or alley; ‘hadn’t you better try him on the curb?’

‘I think I am riding him on the curb,’ says Fred, looking doubtfully at his reins, which are in an inextricable muddle, ‘the fact is Jewson spoils his mouth. Yah, you beast, what’s the matter now?’ as the Dutchman, taking objection to a very small child in a white pinafore, gathers all his legs together, collapses, and scrambles frantically across the street, with a noise as of a detachment of cavalry.

‘Is that a fit?’ asks Sibyl, when Mr. Trenchard’s horses have recovered from their consternation at this manœuvre.

‘No, it’s only a shy. He cannot stand a perambulator.’

‘Nor a woman in a red cloak, nor a baker’s cart, nor a washing-basket, nor a chimney sweep, nor a heap of stones, nor an organ,’ says Rose, indignantly; ‘I never knew such a beast. He’ll have your life some day, Fred, I feel convinced.’

‘He’s more than half thoroughbred,’ says Frederick, leaning over to pat the animal’s neck--an attention which the Dutchman resents by a sudden slouch forward, and a furious shake of his head, whereby he all but precipitates Fred upon the paving stones.

‘Are you fond of riding?’ asks Sibyl, as the horseman pulls himself together, scarlet after his struggles with his steed, and settles into a jolting trot beside the barouche.

‘P--p--passion--ate--ly,’ says Fred, the syllables jerked out of him piecemeal by the gray.

‘But that seems rather an uncomfortable horse to ride.’

‘He’s a little fidgety in the town, but he’s splendid when you get him on the turf. You should see him in a stretching gallop across the grass.’

Mr. Stormont omits to state that in these stretching gallops he is entirely at the Dutchman’s mercy, and suffers abject terror.

They turn out of the Market-place presently, into a broad lane leading to the woods--a lane in which there are nice old houses on one side, and orchards on the other, and at the top of this lane they come out upon that open stretch of greensward, with a hollow full of hazel bushes, hawthorn, and blackberry here and there, which is dignified with the name of Redcastle Woods.

Yonder towers the stand, white in the sunshine, flags blue, red, and yellow, fluttering gaily, the oval course on the southern side of a slope, and a fringe of carriages and smartly dressed people--a simple rustic racecourse, with its local gentry, and sprinkling of citizens from busy Krampston.

The Stormont barouche takes its position among the great ones of the land, and by good luck finds itself in the very lap of the county. The magnates of Redcastle are six carriages off, Mrs. Groshen becking and nodding at her friends, gorgeously arrayed in a brilliant mauve silk, which glistens in the sun, and a bonnet loaded with feathers.

There are many greetings between Mrs. Stormont and her neighbours--for the Stormonts occupy the border line of Redcastle society, and are graciously regarded by the county families. Loud ‘how d’ye do’s’ are uttered by the occupants of a tall coach next door to the barouche, two young men and two young women are seated on the box--the men in homespun tweed, the women in brown holland and brown straw hats. Two grooms in dark green, and mahogany tops, are in attendance.

‘Are we going to have some good racing, Sir Wilford?’ asks Mrs. Stormont, radiant at finding herself in such good company, and Mrs. Groshen afar off like Dives. The bigger of the gray men answers in a loud good-natured voice, dropping lightly down from his perch, and coming close to the barouche.

‘Not much fun, I’m afraid; wretched lot of leather platers. Going to speculate, Miss Stormont? Better put something on Stagheen for the Cup. Sure to win.’

He addresses himself to the fair Rose, shaking hands with her the while, but he looks at Sibyl. That delicate clear-cut face, with its brown eyes, is strange to him, and in a place where everybody knows everybody else that is enough to awaken interest.

Sibyl remembers him as one of the hunters she has seen ride past the walls of Lancaster Lodge, clad in weather-stained scarlet.

He is tall--six feet two--broad shouldered, with the frame of an athlete. He has shaggy brown hair, shaggy brown moustache, good-humoured gray eyes, a commonplace nose, a good, firm mouth, and strong square chin, large hands in well-worn tan gloves.

‘Sir Wilford Cardonnel, Miss Faunthorpe,’ says Mrs. Stormont, graciously.

Sir Wilford takes off his hat and looks pleased, but is little wiser than before. This name of Faunthorpe means nothing for him.

‘Fond of racing?’ he inquires, following up the introduction.

‘This is the first time I was ever at a race,’ replies Sibyl. ‘But I think I shall enjoy it very much.’

‘Then you don’t belong to this part of the country, I suppose? We Yorkshire folks are always going to races.’

‘Yes, I have lived in Redcastle ever since--or almost ever since, I left school.’

‘And have never come to the races?’

‘I couldn’t get anybody to bring me,’ replies Sibyl, frankly. ‘Neither of my uncles care about races. Good gracious!’

This exclamation is evoked by a most startling apparition on the other side of the course, exactly opposite the barouche. A shabby old pony carriage, quite the most ancient vehicle of its kind in Redcastle, a dilapidated, unkempt pony, with his nose in a nose-bag, an elderly gentleman in a discoloured white hat, a young woman in pink muslin, and a girl of nondescript appearance, in short petticoats, standing on the back seat of the pony carriage, in order the better to survey the brilliant scene, and making a positively awful exhibition of her legs.

These are uncle Robert, Marion, and Jenny. Sibyl beholds them with unmitigated consternation. She will be obliged to acknowledge them presently, to avow her relationship to that wretched chaise, that odious pony, in the face of the county families, nay, the highest and mightiest of the high and mighty--the Cardonnels of the How, people she has heard the Stormonts talk about with as much reverence as if they had the prosperity of the county in their keeping, wound up the sun like a clock, and turned on the rain from a tap in their custody.

‘This is Marion’s doing,’ thinks Sibyl, indignantly. ‘That girl is capable of anything. To think that they must needs come and perch themselves exactly opposite us!’

There seems deliberate malice in the act. A few minutes ago there was only empty space where the pony chaise stands now. The chaise has been placed there since the arrival of the barouche.

Dr. Faunthorpe surveys his niece’s party mildly through his spectacles; Marion nods and kisses her hand; but Sibyl, once having seen her danger, looks every way except towards the doctor’s chaise. Jenny, more energetic than her elders, is not to be baffled. Finding nods and hand-kissing unnoticed, she raises her shrill young voice, and screams, ‘Sibyl, Sibyl! Look this way, Sibyl.’

‘Who is that leggy child calling?’ asks Sir Wilford, looking at Jenny through his race-glass, which brings her to the end of his nose. ‘What an excitable young person! And what a funny party! A little old man in spectacles and a white hat, a tall young woman with ginger hair, and that leggy child dancing about upon the cushions. And what a pony! The very one Noah had in the ark, I should think.’

Sibyl grows crimson. Can she acknowledge her kith and kin after this? While she hesitates, Mrs. Stormont raises her gold-rimmed binoculars, and scrutinizes the opposite party.

‘Why, my dear,’ she exclaims, not sorry to set off any obligation involved in the loan of the barouche by the humiliation of its owner, ‘it’s that dear, good little man, Dr. Faunthorpe, and your sisters. I wonder you didn’t recognise the pony; there’s not another like him in Redcastle.’

‘Is that little girl your sister?’ says Sir Wilford. ‘I beg your pardon and hers if I said anything impertinent. She seems a fine, high-spirited girl, but in an awful state of excitement. Shall I bring her across to you? She wants to speak to you, I fancy.’

‘Oh, pray leave her where she is,’ replies Sibyl. ‘She’s a dreadful nuisance. There, there, child,’ nodding to the obnoxious hoyden; ‘won’t that do?’

Jane kisses her hand again vehemently, and having succeeded in attracting her sister’s attention, seems tolerably resigned.

Sibyl feels that her maize-coloured silk and India muslin, the barouche, and all things are a failure after this. And there are the Miss Cardonnels in their plain holland gowns, with satchels at their waists, brown hats, brown feathers, brown holland umbrellas--singularly plain attire, which looks in better form for a racecourse than Sibyl’s flower-show costume.

Sir Wilford stands by the barouche for an hour or more, and tells Sibyl all about the horses. He devotes himself to her almost exclusively before the face of Redcastle. Fred Stormont, pounding restlessly about upon the gray, and bringing that excited animal to anchor beside the barouche, when he can, feels that he is nowhere, and begins to think that he has erred on the side of caution and hesitancy in his wooing of Stephen Trenchard’s niece.

The races may not be good races from a professional point of view,--the horses may be the very refuse of famous stables, but the excitement and exhilaration of the crowd are not lessened by that fact. No weighty stakes are lost or won, but every one seems happy. Broad grins are the only wear. There is a great deal of picnicking between the races, and people who would have lived through the day at home on a biscuit and a glass of sherry, do wild things in the consumption of lobster salad, chicken, mayonnaise, and pigeon pie.

Mrs. Stormont has provided the most refined of baskets,--delicate papers of anchovy and chicken sandwiches, fragile biscuits, some choice fruit, and a bottle of dry sherry. These favours she dispenses to her party, while Sir Wilford and his people are devouring their lobster salad on the roof of the drag, enlivened by a running fire of champagne corks.

Fred, roving to and fro on the gray, declines the maternal sherry.

‘No thanks, mother; when I’m dry myself I don’t want my wine dry. I’ll go and do a bitter at the stand presently.’

Sibyl has gradually recovered that death-blow of the pony carriage. Sir Wilford Cardonnel’s attentions have put her in good humour. It is as if some prince of the blood-royal had paid her homage in the presence of his subjects, and she knows that Mrs. Groshen and Mrs. Marlin Spyke, the Miss Jewsons, and above all dearest Rose and Violet, will be provoked to envy by the distinction thus conferred upon her. Indeed, dear Rose’s brow has a cloudy look already, and Violet is snappish. Only Mrs. Stormont preserves her equanimity, and smiles upon the baronet when he re-descends from the drag and takes up his position again beside the barouche.

Sibyl’s ignorance of racing matters is curiously attractive to him from its novelty, his sisters being learned in the minutest details of the turf, and as well up in stable talk as their brother’s stud groom, under whom they have graduated. He lingers by her side till the races are nearly over, and his grooms go to fetch the horses. The important duty of seeing these animals put to distracts him a little, but he comes back again at the last to say good-bye to Mrs. Stormont and her daughters and to Sibyl.

‘I should like you to know my sisters,’ he says, ‘I am sure you’d suit each other,’--a mendacious assertion inspired by the exigencies of the situation, Sir Wilford knowing very well that town and county have seldom an idea in common. He has not ventured to bring about an introduction on the course, his sisters being at an inconvenient altitude, and of an uncertain temper. But he feels that he must contrive to see more of Miss Faunthorpe somehow or other. Who can she be? She is too richly dressed for a governess, and the Stormonts are too civil to her. Yet she must be a nobody, or Mrs. Stormont would have taken care to parade her people. He resolves to call on the Stormonts in a day or two, and find out all about their _protegée_; and sustained by this resolution, he takes his reluctant leave. How splendid his coach looks to Sibyl! the four broad-chested bays, with their honest English-looking heads, horses that mean work, the steel chains, the black harness, austerely simple in its mounting, the grooms in Lincoln green, the two girls in brown holland nodding good-bye to the Stormonts as Sir Wilford drives away, making a wide sweep upon the turf, his horses going as if this was the happiest moment of their lives, his grooms climbing into their places after the team has started, with some hazard of life and limb, but with honour to themselves.

‘Charming man, Sir Wilford Cardonnel,’ says Mrs. Stormont. ‘The Cardonnels are one of the oldest of our county families. How do you like him, Sibyl?’

‘He seems good-natured,’ replies Sibyl, carelessly. What are the Cardonnels to her? and what avails this young man’s admiration, save to flaunt in the face of her acquaintance? _Her_ name is written in the Book of Fate, and in the registers of St. Apollonius, Pimlico.

‘The soul of good nature. His sisters are charming too; great friends of Rose and Violet’s.’

‘Uncommon intimate,’ says Fred, who has dragged that unyielding gray up to the carriage once more. ‘They see one another twice a year, I should think. For my part, I detest the county people. They’re a parcel of narrow-minded snobs, who think the beginning and end of life is to ride straight to hounds.’

Having relieved his jealous pangs by this vindictive burst, Fred goes to look after Mr. Trenchard’s horses, and presently the barouche falls in with the line of vehicles driving towards the town, Fred and the gray in attendance, that animal suddenly amenable to reason now that he is going back to his stable.

Sibyl drives home with the Stormonts, with whom she is to dine.

‘I do hope your dear uncle will join us at dinner,’ says Mrs. Stormont.

That hope is nipped in the bud, for among the day’s letters Mrs. Stormont finds a note from Stephen Trenchard:--

‘DEAR MRS. STORMONT,

‘I do not feel well enough to avail myself of your kind
invitation for this evening, so must ask you to excuse me. I will
send the carriage for Sibyl at half-past ten.

‘Yours very truly,
‘STEPHEN TRENCHARD.’

‘I’m afraid your uncle is breaking up, my dear,’ remarks Mrs. Stormont with a sigh. ‘I saw a change in him when I called the other day.’

‘That is strange,’ says Sibyl, ‘for he has not been actually ill. He has not kept his room for a single day.’

‘He is a man of iron nerves, my love, and would be reluctant to give way to illness, but I feel sure that he is declining. At his age, and after a life in India, you cannot expect to have him with you many years.’

Sibyl looks grave. No, she has not counted on her uncle living many years, or at least when she deserted her husband she told herself that the old man’s life could be but brief, and that a few years of patience would be rewarded by fortune and independence for all her life to come. But since she has lived with uncle Trenchard she has been inclined to think differently. In his wiry frame and active habits, his temperance, his iron nerves, there seems the promise of life prolonged to its utmost limits. He may live to be ninety, and she be almost an old woman ere she reap the wages of her toil; and in that case what is to become of Alexis?

Mrs. Stormont’s remark inspires a new hope. The end may not be so far off after all. She is not ungrateful to her uncle, she is not without some kind of affection for him, but the hope of reunion with her husband, of forgiveness and atonement, is sweet.