Chapter IX: Cadbury Redivivus

Unabashed by Alison's steady rejection of his suit, encouraged by the countenance given him by Sir Ranald, who had narrated to him in a letter written in his now feeble and scrawly hand all that had occurred subsequently to his missing Alison in Antwerp, and more than ever encouraged by the latter's missive with reference to the mysterious birthday gift, Lord Cadbury had the bad taste to resume his old footing of more than visitor, and attended by Gaskins, who had now completely recovered, he rode over almost daily from the Court to Chilcote, and was wont to linger long, to the great annoyance of Alison, though Sir Ranald, more ailing and querulous than ever, lay frequently a-bed till nearly noon.

Aware of the trick it could be proved he had, in a spirit of malevolence rather than to serve his master, played Bevil Goring in Antwerp, and his confession thereof in a moment of agony, weakness, and terror, when believing himself to be dying in the Belgian hospital, the rascal Gaskins was very loth to venture within twenty miles of Aldershot camp; but, while believing certainly that the wronged officer of the Rifles would never be at Cadbury Court, he was less sure that he might not fall upon him in the vicinity of Chilcote; thus he was greatly relieved when, in reply to some casual remarks, he elicited from Archie that Captain Goring was in London.

So Gaskins felt his shoulders safe as yet.

'Our fare is no gude enough nae doubt for a gentleman like you, Mr. Gaskins,' said Archie, as he ushered the dandified groom (whose surtout was girt by a waist-belt and garnished with a rosebud button-hole) into the kitchen, his whole face wearing a contemptuous smirk the while; 'but we can aye gi'e a bane o' cauld beef to pyke, wi' a farl o' breid and a cogie o' gude yill, and they are better, ye ken, than sowans, ill-soured, ill-sauted, and sodden.'

'What the dooce is he saying, Mrs. Prune?' asked Mr. Gaskins, in sore perplexity, as he carefully wiped his cockaded hat with a white handkerchief.

'Ye kenna what I am saying?' asked Archie, with contemptuous surprise.

'No, Mr. Hackindore, you must excuse me really.'

'Out of the world and into Kippen?' said Archie, with a toss of his head.

'And how is Sir Ranald, Mrs. Prune?' asked Gaskins.

'The laird is a wee thing dwining again,' said Archie, ere she could reply. 'They say aye ailin' ne'er fills the kirk-yard; but I'm fearsome at times this is the last blaze o' the candle in the socket,' he added, with a little break in his voice.

On the day of this visit Sir Ranald was not visible at all, and Lord Cadbury had Alison all to himself in the little drawing-room, where he was fast resuming his old airs of property and protection, and almost venturing to make what he deemed love in dull and emotionless tones; and Alison, had she not been grieved by her father's condition, and worried by the whole situation, might have laughed at Cadbury's Don Juanesque posing as too absurd.

'I shall never be able to describe to you,' said he, for the tenth time, 'my profound alarm and grief when I lost you so mysteriously at Antwerp.'

'In a place to which I should never have gone.'

'Not even with me?' he asked, softly.

'Not even with you; but I was weary, triste--glad to do anything to forget my own thoughts; but as for your friend Captain Smith----'

'Alison--my dear Miss Cheyne--how often am I to assure you that I know of no such man? If he was a Captain, in presuming to call himself a friend of mine, and acting as he did, he deserved the most severe punishment; and let me assure you that as we were in Belgium I should have lost no time in inviting him to breathe the morning air on the ramparts, or anywhere else,' added Cadbury, in a valiant tone, even while wincing at the recollection of the invitation he had received for a similar 'breather' in the Lunette St. Laurent.

'I thought duels were as much out of fashion as hoops, patches, and hair powder,' said Alison, with a little mockery in her tone.

'So did I, by Jove,' responded Cadbury, with some fervour in his tone. Then he added--'And so Sir Ranald will not appear to-day?'

'No--he is too unwell, and it is only when I think of his condition,' said Alison, with a quiver of her sweet lip and downcast eyelashes, 'I feel such gratitude to the donor of my birthday gift--it has given me so many things for papa that, I am not ashamed to say, I could never have procured.'

'And you have got no certainty of who sent it to you?' asked Cadbury, with a curious and very artful modulation of voice, as he slightly patted her hand.

'No--though I may strongly suspect,' replied Alison, while a painful kind of blush suffused her pale cheek.

'Suspect! can't you guess, rather?'

'Unless--it was you--or the kindest of friends.'

'I do not admit quite that it was; but--'

'Admission or not, it _was_ you,' said Alison, with emotions of gratitude and humiliation struggling in her proud heart, while her beautiful eyes looked shrinkingly upward to his; 'but, oh, my heart tells me, with fear, that it may have come too late--too late.'

'Do not say so,' replied Cadbury, in his kindest tone. 'If I have not graces of the person to recommend me,' he added, in a low voice, 'I have--it is admitted--great wealth; if that will make you happy, it is yours--and _his_.'

'I cannot love you for what you may have, and you cannot love me for what I have only got--a loveless heart.'

'But I may love you for what you are. There is a writer who tells that "it is finer to be loved for what you are than for what you have got," because the looks and money often run away, but _you_ remain--unless you die, that is to say.'

'Again this detestable subject!' thought Alison.

'I pity the loneliness of the life you lead here,' said he, 'with your birds, fowls, and flowers only as your companions.'

'And better to me as such, than some people can ever be.'

Cadbury was silent. There was the old dangerous glitter in his ferret-like eyes, and he tugged at his long white moustachios, but ere he could resume, Alison said,

'Excuse me, I must go to papa; I am sure I heard his bell.'

So the peer withdrew, only to come next day in 'his anxiety about the health of his old friend.'

With poor Alison it was too often a case of 'out of Scylla and into Charybdis,' as her father generally resumed precisely where Cadbury left off.

'Is he gone?' asked Sir Ranald, taking her hand in his thin, wasted, diaphanous fingers, and patting it tenderly on the coverlet of his bed.

'Who, papa?'

'Cadbury. I would speak to you about him again.'

She made a little impatient and disdainful _moue_ at the name, but her father, heedless of it, resumed--

'In the winter of my days I have been compelled to bury myself, and you too, darling, in this dead-alive, man-forgotten place--Chilcote; but I shall soon be out of it, and you--my poor child--you--you----'

His voice failed him, and Alison's heart failed her too as he spoke in this pitiful strain.

'As for loving Lord Cadbury,' said Alison, with a voice that seemed full of tears, 'do not talk to me of that when you are so ill and feeble, as it wrings my very soul to oppose you. I may--nay, I must--be grateful for the service his money gift----'

'Say gifts, Alison.'

'Well, gifts have done for you; but I can do no more, my dislike of him is so intense and rooted.'

'Dislike! The proverb has it that a woman's dislike is only love turned inside out; and he loves you so! Think of his coronet.'

'A new one--the gilt not even worn by time--a parvenu coronet.'

'Well,' said her father, impatiently, 'it will be old in time; and does not the land teem with parvenu baronets? They are thick as blackberries now!'

And Alison was thankful when he dropped asleep, and she was left to her own aching thoughts, and released from the hateful subject for a time.

When a man of Cadbury's age and proclivities conceives a fancy for a girl, he is usually terribly in earnest about it; but 'of that delicious agony--that glorious fear which makes pallid the face of the lover--the void in life which must be filled up by a beloved woman--what did he know?'

Nothing--or what had he ever known, old _vaurien_ as he was?

In short, he came now, not to watch or hope for recovery, but to learn how _ill_ Sir Ranald was becoming--the sooner the latter was gone the better for his schemes. The baronet had altered greatly for the worse in his mysterious and complicated ailment, and the doctors who came--and, thanks to the birthday gift of Alison, she had secured the best medical attendance--shook their heads gravely when they saw him; but not in her presence, as, with professional humanity, they wished to spare the poor girl any unnecessary pain.

Cadbury often reflected with genuine anger on how his plans for separating Alison from her father on the Continent, that he might both compromise and have her at his mercy, had failed; and that he had barely won, by any pretence, even her gratitude. He had spent 'a devil of a lot of money--even thousands one way or other,' and was no nearer his end than before--fair means or foul.

He had, moreover, been dreadfully insulted at the Hôtel St. Antoine, 'by that cad Goring,' and even put in terror of his precious life! And were all these to go for nothing?

Never, perhaps, since Time was born did a coward forgive the man who unmasked, affronted him, or did him dishonour in every way; thus more than ever was Cadbury rancorous at Bevil Goring, and resolved to revenge himself, through the means of Alison Cheyne, if he could.

'As for Goring,' said he, on one occasion to Sir Ranald, 'we know nothing of him save that he bears a commission, which any fellow who can pass the necessary exams, can get now; but as to who he is, or where he comes from, I don't suppose he could very clearly tell himself.'

Sir Ranald, though somewhat rancorous in regard to his friend's rival, was patrician enough to think such remarks unnecessary, and only answered by a kind of sniff. He knew, on one hand, that Goring used the arms of the Sussex Gorings, a chevron between two annulets, dating from the first Edward, while Lord Cadbury was what the Scots call a 'gutter blood,' whose father, the alderman, had, as recorded by Debrett, been the first esquire of his race 'by Act of Parliament.'

As for Alison, while undemonstrative, she was passionate as Juliet, soft and tender as Cordelia, yet none of the bloom had been taken off her young heart by that playing at love which is known as flirtation, 'ere life-time and love-time were one.' Alison, perhaps, never knew what it was, and thus the full harvest of her heart and soul had gone forth to Bevil Goring, and she felt that, if he failed her, life would 'have no more to bring but mockeries of the past.'

She knew--with terror and foreboding of woe--that the great and coming crisis in that life would be her father's death. She had learned now to look that matter in the face, and pondered thereon.

Then the winning ways and sweetly placid features of Sister Lisette Gabion--features that Fra Angelica might have painted with joy--would come back vividly to memory; and with them she recalled the peaceful calm of existence in the Beguinage of Antwerp, where no sound came from the world without but the bells that called to prayer and the sweet carillons of the great cathedral tower; and many times there were when she wondered, if Bevil failed her, could she find a shelter there?

For already somehow he seemed to have passed out of her life, though daily she kissed the engagement ring he had placed upon her mystic finger.

'Papa dead, I shall have no present and no future,' wailed the girl in her heart, 'and what will become of me?'

What if she had to go down into the ranks of that great army which toils for daily bread? And with whom and in what fashion would she earn it? Thoughts like these were corrodingly bitter for a girl so young and beautiful, so delicate and tenderly nurtured, as Alison Cheyne of Essilmont!