Chapter I: A Message Out of the Past

One hot day in the latter end of June, Lady Bell was sitting in the orchard, with Mrs. Sundon’s child in her lap, cooing to it, tickling it, tossing it, decking it with daisies, pretending to herself and to it, that the not-many-weeks-old child noticed and appreciated its floral finery.

The long, flower-besprinkled grass grew all round, beneath the bending, leafy boughs, through the shadows of which came perpetually shifting chequers of sunshine. There could just be seen, down a vista, the quaint, grey house of Nutfield, with the last year’s yellow corn-stacks beyond the orchard, mellowing and warming the green and grey tints under the blue and white cloud-flecked sky.

Mrs. Sundon with her fine figure and face, in one of her white wrappers and close caps, came slowly up between the interlacing boughs; she stopped beside Lady Bell and the child, looking down upon them. The group was very sweet and graceful, and wanted only a St. Joseph and a little St. John to make it stand for one of the old Italian “Riposos.”

“Look here, Lady Bell,” said Mrs. Sundon, putting her finger on a paragraph in a newspaper which she held in her hand.

Lady Bell started and rose up in vague perturbation. For precaution’s sake Mrs. Sundon had abstained from giving her friend, even in private, that friend’s name and title, since Mrs. Sundon had discovered Lady Bell at Nutfield. What had surprised the compromising words from Mrs. Sundon now?

Lady Bell took the newspaper and looked at the place indicated. Her hand was shaking, her breath was coming fast, her eyes were dazzled; but the intimation was so plain and direct that she took in its meaning at a glance. There was no ambiguity there to prevent the message reaching its destination and doing its work. “If Lady Bell Trevor wish to see her husband in life, let her return at once to Trevor Court.”

A mist passed before Lady Bell’s eyes; the sunny June orchard, with the soft, fair child whom Mrs. Sundon had taken into her arms, and Mrs. Sundon herself, all grew in a moment blurred and dark, as if the very dews of death and remorse had fallen on them.

“Oh, Mrs. Sundon, what shall I do?” cried Lady Bell, wringing her hands. “I did not love him, I had no cause to love him; but I was his wife, who was yet no wife to him, and he is a dying man.”

“Go back to him immediately,” advised Mrs. Sundon, “while there is still time to wipe out your offence to him—it was light compared with his to you. But it is ill having an unsettled score with the dead. This would hang like a millstone round your neck, and weigh you down all your days.”

“I’ll go back if you counsel it,” submitted Lady Bell desperately, setting off in nervous haste to the house. “But how am I to face him? if he have strength left to lift his hand still, will he strike me as I have seen him strike his man? Or, if he is gone, must I stay in the house with the dead, I who never saw anybody die but Lady Lucie, who died blessing me? Would that I had minded her precepts better; she would not have had me leave the worst of husbands. And how many miles will it be to post cross country, Mrs. Sundon? you have a good head and may guess. Can you tell me if I shall be as long in going as I was in coming here? only I did not come straight! Oh! will you be so kind as to lend me the money you think I shall need, for I have only three crowns in my purse?”

“My dear, I shall take you,” said Mrs. Sundon quietly. “Do you think I would send you off on such an errand alone?”

“Oh, I am so thankful,” Lady Bell admitted in her relief, “now I may do my duty at last; no, I don’t mean that,” she checked herself the next moment, “I cannot hear of you doing such a thing. How could you leave your baby? You are too delicate yet for such a journey—and to go to that neighbourhood above all others. It is vastly generous of you to propose it, just what I should have expected from you; but, of course, I cannot consent; I shall manage by myself, somehow.”

“Say no more, Lady Bell,” Mrs. Sundon put an end to the discussion, “I am going with you. The child will do very well with her nurse. Do you think I would put my child, any more than myself, between me and my duty and privilege? I should call that treating my child very ill, paying her a poor compliment, for which I should hope she would never thank me. I am abler for the journey than I was for coming here. I need not fear to go near Chevely, which has been sold, as I dare say you’ve heard. You cannot tell what I can do without harm to my health,” declared Mrs. Sundon, with a little bitterness. “I travelled from what had been my home, handed into the carriage by a bailiff on starting, and went out of town when my child was no more than ten days old. I could not have slept another night under that roof. But even if I had been a weaker woman, I should not have shrunk from this poor effort, and you would not have refused me my right.”

Lady Bell had no longer the heart, any more than the will, to decline Mrs. Sundon’s support in the emergency. If Mrs. Sundon’s presence made Mr. Trevor mad—should he regard it as another act of wilful disobedience even when Lady Bell was pretending to obey him—it would be time enough then to undertake the ungracious task of refusing the elder woman’s countenance.

The great news that Mrs. Sundon and Mrs. Barlowe were to set off on horseback within the hour, availing themselves, by permission, of Miss Kingscote’s and Master Charles’s horses, in order to reach Lumley, where they were to hire a chaise to proceed on a journey of indefinite duration, fell flat. It was as nothing compared to the stunning shock inflicted on Miss Kingscote when Mrs. Sundon saw fit to communicate to the hostess the real rank and history of her companion.

“Lud! lud! a Lady Bell all the time, and I to have gone and found fault with her, and kept her pottering about my business, mending lace, and cleaning silver, lud-a-mercy, what shall I do, brother? Mayn’t I be took up by the King or the Lords, like the ‘torney was, whom I’ve heard tell of, no farther gone than father and mother’s day, afore we came down in the world, and I were a mite of a child—he gave a warrant to arrest a fine lady in her coach in the street, at the suit of a tradesman, and he himself was had up before the justices—I mean afore the Lords, for an insult to the quality. Mayn’t I be had up and put in prison, though I never knowed, nor meant it, and I’ll beg her pardon over and over again, and she was a right-down pleasant lass, madam—Lud! I’m losing my head—lady, save when she was in the tantrums.”

“Nonsense, Deb,” exclaimed Master Charles impatiently; “you did her a kindness, and helped her in her end. As it proves,” he continued a little sarcastically; “whether Miss or Madam, she has been all along far beyond our flight, and will never waste another thought on us, now that she has found birds of her own feather, and is ready to go off with them to her own perch.”

“She were a runaway wife all the same,” reflected Miss Kingscote sapiently, “though she were ten times a Lady Bell, and she had left her man as must have been hers in the face of day, which made the leaving a heap bolder in my madam—nay, my lady. I vow I as good as telled her she was no match for the Kingscotes of Nutfield.”

“You had nothing to do to say anything of the kind, even though this Lady Bell had been a simple waiting-maid or scullion. I don’t care which,” Master Charles was provoked into telling his sister, as his good-humoured indulgence gave way. “The Kingscotes have not kept their own in the world without loss, and they can ill afford to despise the humblest—I say that, if I am supposed to have anything to do with the future matching of the Kingscotes,” declared the young gentleman loftily, “and they’ll be long enough of being matched for me, since I could bring a mate to little better than a farm-house, and a farmer’s kin. I’ll thank you, Deb, not to meddle in the matter.”

“There, I’ve given offence to Master Charles,” Miss Kingscote reflected glumly after she was alone. “He’s taken to hurting my feelings by twitting me with what we’ve lost, as if the worsest loss weren’t mine! not that I show it neither, for I’m sure I’m a powerful fine woman, considering my lack of education. And so she’s Lady Bell, and if she had bidden still, I mun have said my lady every blessed word, and run at her heels as I’ve never made her run at mine. But if this Squire Trevor, as she has given leg-bail to, had not come on the carpet, first and foremost, ere we set eyes on her, mightn’t she have been my Lady Bell Kingscote! That do sound fine! prodigious fine! But if there had never been no Squire Trevor, there would never have been no bolting, banding with the players, turning up at Nutfield, and making friends with Master Charles, so there is an end on’t. My Master Charles mun go to the wars, and risk a sabre’s cut spoiling his bonnie face,” mused Miss Kingscote, whimpering at the very thought, “afore he fill his chimney-corner, and bring home his lady to sit down cheek by jowl with him, while I’ll be right glad to retire to mother’s room, save when they want my company, for I ain’t teethy or prideful—I never were. That mun be the order of the day, as Master Charles ought to know.”

Even before the parting, Master Charles had cause to renounce his mortified conviction of how little he and his sister were to Lady Bell Trevor, and of how she had done with them from this day.

She was grateful for the assistance and escort as far as Lumley, which he offered so soon as he ascertained that the offer would be agreeable to her and Madam Sundon.

Lady Bell put her head out of the chaise window at the last. Her scared eyes looked with almost timid beseeching into his face. She told him, without any sign of haughtiness, but with many tokens of a retentive memory for the smallest act of consideration and kindness, of contrition for having played a part to him and his sister, and for not having trusted them in full, that she had been very well off and happy at Nutfield. She hoped that his colours would arrive soon, that he would see a campaign to his wish, and return safe and sound to cheer his sister’s heart.

Lady Bell sent Miss Kingscote her grateful duty. Lady Bell trusted they would meet again, when she would be able to finish her chair-covers. In the meantime, she would not forget to procure patterns for Miss Kingscote. Miss Kingscote must be especially kind to Lady Bell’s brood of chicks—the first brood she had seen set, seen hatched, and fed every day with her own hands.

It was plain that for the moment, in place of being eager to resume her cast-off rank and state, Lady Bell had forgotten where and why she was going, and everything about Squire Trevor and his danger. It was only when the chaise rolled off, and she sank back in her corner, that she withdrew into herself to face the grim record of the bond she had broken, and the forfeit she was called on to pay.

It was on a fresh summer morning, when, having started early to accomplish the last stage of their journey, Lady Bell and Mrs. Sundon came in sight of Trevor Court.

The gates were standing open; early as it was, the lodge seemed deserted, so that the chaise entered without parley. The dew was lying like pearls on the grass by the drive, and silvering the yews on the terrace. The spirals of smoke from the red chimney-stacks were rising straight in the clear air. A gush of birds’ song sounded far and wide. There was something light, bright, and exhilarating in the air, and in the aspect of nature, which lent a peculiar charm to what was imposing in the pile of building and its grounds.

“I have not seen Trevor Court before, save from a distance,” Mrs. Sundon let fall the remark. “You never told me, Lady Bell, what a fine old place it was.”

“I don’t think I ever noticed it till the last time I saw it,” Lady Bell replied almost in a whisper; she recalled vividly that last time sitting on the September morning in the travelling chariot beside its master, who lingered in taking a short leave of his treasure.

The next moment Lady Bell gave a shriek and put her hands before her face. The chaise had turned into the sweep before the house, where, in sombre contrast to the summer morning, the windows were all shrouded, and the hatchment was up.