A Witch of the Hills Volume II Part 8

'You mean that they make up their faces? Mr. Maude, Mr. Maude, listen.

A woman must have something to live upon, to live for. If through her fault or her misfortune, there is not love enough at home to keep her heart warm, she will--I don't say she ought, but she does--look about for a make-s.h.i.+ft, and finds it in the admiration of some lad younger than herself, who is ready to give more than he ever hopes to receive.

The boys like dyed hair and powdered faces, they think it "chic." But my friends are not the depraved creatures Fabian would like to make out.'

I was horribly shocked at her defence of these ladies, for it showed a bitter knowledge of some of the world's ways that jarred on the lips of a woman of twenty.

'I should not like to see you consoling yourself like that.'

She looked at me frankly, and her face relaxed into a faint smile as she spoke.

'You need not be afraid; now you are back in England, I don't want any other consolation. I can't forget that there is goodness in the world while I can see you and hear from you. You are going to settle in town?' she added quickly and anxiously.

'No, I had not thought of doing so. I am going back to Lark----'

Before I could finish the word she was at my feet, kneeling on a cus.h.i.+on and leaning over the arm of my chair with her face distorted by strong excitement.

'No, no, not Larkhall; you must not go back to Larkhall,' she whispered earnestly. 'Promise me you won't go there, promise, promise.'

'Why, what's the matter? Where should I go but to the only home I have had for eleven years?'

'Yes, but it isn't safe now. If I tell you why you will only laugh at me.'

'No, child, I should be ungrateful to laugh at any proof of your interest in me.'

She put her hand on my arm, earnestly pressing it at every other word to give emphasis to her warning.

'My father--you remember him--he is dissatisfied with my marriage. He says you promised to be answerable for my happiness, and he shall make you answer for breaking faith with him.'

'But I have not----'

'I know. I told him that, I told him everything; that I was dying, like the idiot I was, for the love of a man who didn't care for me. He has taken to drink--much worse than before--and he is impatient, savage, and won't listen to reason. He will do nothing but repeat, again and again, "He said he would answer for it, and he shall."'

'But he doesn't even know I have returned.'

'He said you were sure to fly back to the old nest, and--listen, Mr.

Maude, for I know this is true; he has gone up there to lie in wait for you. And remember, a man who has one crazed idea and won't listen to anything but his own mad impulses, is more dangerous than one who is angry with good cause.'

'Poor fellow, I think he has good cause.'

'But, Mr. Maude, you don't know what ridiculous things he says!'

'What things?'

'He says that you ought not to have consulted my caprices, but to have married me yourself straight away!'

She began to laugh as she finished, but I stopped her.

'He is quite right. So I ought to have done. Unluckily, there was one thing in the way.'

Babiole, who was still on the cus.h.i.+on at my feet, leaning against the arm of my chair as she used to do in the Highlands, was looking interested and deeply surprised.

'One thing in the way!' she echoed softly, looking into my face with earnest scrutiny. 'What--_before_ I fell in love with--Fabian?'

'Yes, long before that.'

She hesitated, and her eyes slowly left my face, while her brows contracted with a puzzled expression.

'What was it?' she asked at last, in a whisper.

'I was in love with you.'

I could see very little of her face, but a s.h.i.+ver pa.s.sed over her. For a moment I wondered, sitting quietly back in my chair, what she thought.

'Didn't you ever guess anything of it, child, when we had that odd sort of half-engagement?' I asked, in a most loyal tone of indifference.

She raised her head and looked at me modestly and solemnly.

'I should as soon have thought,' she said, in a low unsteady voice, 'that the Archbishop of Canterbury was--in love with me.'

'Aha!' I said with a ridiculous cackling laugh. 'Then I shouldn't have had much chance.'

The next moment I knew better. She rose without another word, as the sounds of an opening and shutting door reached our ears. But as she did so she cast upon me one quick, shy, involuntary side-glance, and I knew that my scruples about my ugly face had been worse than thrown away.

The next moment Fabian came into the room.

CHAPTER XX

I left London for Ballater the very next day; and having sent Ferguson on in advance to prepare the place for me, I found Larkhall just as I had left it four years before, down to a newspaper which had been lying on my study table. But the spirit of home had deserted the place; Ta-ta was still at Newcastle. To-to recognised me indeed, but with more sulky impatience at my absence than pleasure at my return.

The cottage was shut up and empty; I got the key from Janet after dinner, and wandered through the unused, damp-smelling little rooms.

The furniture had been left, by my orders, just as it had been during the occupation of Babiole and her mother. But I found that instead of recalling the child Babiole, as I had seen her so often flitting about the sitting-room, or, in the latter days, leaning back, languid and listless, with glistening dreamy eyes, in the rocking-chair by the fire, it was the pale little London lady with pretty conventional manners and worn weary face that I was trying to picture to myself in the uninhabited rooms. I came out again, locked the door carefully, and finished my cigar in the porch. It seemed to me a remarkably odd thing that Babiole's degeneration from the faultless angel she used as a child to appear, into a mere soured and sorrowful woman who looked six or seven years more than her age, had deepened my interest in her, while my knowledge that she had been lost to me through nothing but my own diffidence had changed its character.

To get the better of the unhealthy and morbid state of mind into which I now found myself falling, I began to break through my old habits of retirement, and to avail myself of such society as Ballater and its neighbourhood afforded. The hot weather had begun early this year, and the summer residents were already established before my arrival. I was a sort of 'great unknown' concerning whom there were floating about many interesting and romantic stories; therefore I found no lack of eager acquaintances as soon as I cared to make them. Prominent among these was a certain Mr. Farington, a Liverpool solicitor, who, after having made a yearly retreat to the Highlands each autumn, had now retired from business and taken the lease of a large house at the foot of Craigendarroch. He had been married twice, first to a lady of dazzling pecuniary charms who had left him one daughter, and after her death to a large and handsome lady who gave me a strong impression of having had doubtful antecedents. This second wife had a numerous family, ranging from five years old to fifteen, between whom and their half-sister was fixed the gulf of her mother's fortune.

At a very early stage of our acquaintance the eldest Miss Farington, who was a good-looking young woman of three and twenty, with a strong sense of the importance attached to an income of fifteen hundred a year, had honoured me by a marked partiality for which I, in my new sociability, at first felt grateful. It was pleasant to find some one who could pa.s.s an opinion, even if it was not a very original opinion, on a picture, a book, or a landscape, and Miss Farington could always do that with great precision. Perhaps, too, it flattered my vanity to be appealed to as the one representative of high civilisation amidst barbarian hordes. But when it became plain even to my modest merit that the lady proposed to annex me, I grew suddenly coy; and I then found to my surprise that, diffident as my disfigurement had made me, I was still, like the rest of my s.e.x, humble only to one woman, and mightily fatuous as regarded the rest. But if Miss Farington was merely what one calls 'a nice girl,' with no particularly conspicuous qualities of alluring sweetness or captivating vivacity, she had one virtue which would not have shamed an ancient Roman--an indomitable resolution that would not know defeat.

I am not making an idle boast; I am recording a fact when I say that that girl laid siege to me with a skill and patience which filled me alternately with admiration, grat.i.tude, and alarm. She learned my tastes, she studied my habits, she mastered my opinions, until I began to think that if a person who apparently knew me so well could like me so much, I must be an infinitely more amiable man than I had ever supposed. This frame of mind naturally led me to look kindly on the lady who had enabled me to make such a pleasing discovery, and I knew myself to be softening to such an extent that I felt that, unless Mr.

Farington should leave Ballater before the summer was over, I should be 'a gone c.o.o.n' before autumn. If she held on until the evenings grew cold and long, until the winds began to howl about lonely Larkhall, and to bring swirling showers of dead leaves to the ground with the hissing sound of a beach of pebbles under the retreating waves of a wintry sea, then I felt that I should give way, that I should see in Miss Farington's prosaic gray eyes pleasant domestic pictures, in her erect figure and sloping shoulders an attraction which to a lonely man, when the deer-stalking and fis.h.i.+ng seasons were over, were quite irresistible.

I had had one plaintive little letter from Babiole, in which she entreated me, in rather stiff and stilted language, out of which peeped a most touching anxiety, to beware of her father, who, she a.s.sured me, was more desperate and dangerous in his intentions to do me harm than she had even dared to suggest when face to face with me.

I wrote back in a clumsy letter as stiff as her own, but not so touching, that she need have no fear, as her father had settled down quietly at Aberdeen. I dared not tell her the truth, which I had found out through Ferguson--that Mr. Ellmer had indeed come up to the Highlands with the avowed intention of doing me some desperate harm; but that, having availed himself too freely, through his daughter's generosity, of his favourite indulgences, he had had an attack of _delirium tremens_, and had been placed under restraint in the county lunatic asylum.

Babiole's letter I carried about with me, and sometimes--for loneliness among the hills would make a sentimental fool of the most robust of us--I fancied that the little sheet of paper, in spite of Miss Farington and the domestic pictures, burnt into my heart.

It was in the middle of August, while the weather was still--everywhere but in the Highlands--insufferably hot, that I received a letter from Fabian which gave me a great shock. His wife had been very ill, he said, and although she had now been declared out of danger, she recovered strength so slowly that it had become imperative to send her away somewhere. Mrs. Ellmer, who was now with her, having suggested her old home in the Highlands, the doctor had agreed warmly, and Fabian therefore begged, as an old friend, that I would lend his wife and her mother the cottage for a short time, adding that he was sure I would look after my little favourite until, in a few days' time, he could rejoin her.

I took this letter up to Craigendarroch, and had first a cigar and then a pipe over it. To refuse Fabian's request was impossible; to lend the cottage and go away myself would be inhospitable and suspicious; to lend it and stay would be dangerous. With the last whiffs of tobacco an inspiration came. I swung back home, wrote back to Fabian that Larkhall itself, the cottage, the garden, the stables, and every toolshed about the place were entirely at Mrs. Scott's disposal, together with all the live stock, human and otherwise; and that she had only to fix the time of her arrival and Mrs. Ellmer's.