her an acceptance of a long-standing invitation to visit Lady Strathmuir, a distant relative living in Surrey, until times grew more settled. To Aileen the thought of throwing herself upon the hospitality of one she had never met was extremely distasteful, and she hailed my proposal as an alternative much to be desired.
The disagreeable duty of laying before my lawyer the involved condition of my affairs had to be endured, and I sent for him at once to get it over with the sooner. He pulled a prodigious long face at my statement of the gaming debts I had managed to contract during my three months’ experiment as the prodigal son in London, but though he was extraordinarily severe with me I made out in the end that affairs were not so bad as I had thought. The estate would have to be plastered with a mortgage, but some years of stiff economy and retrenchment, together with a ruthless pruning of the fine timber, would suffice to put me on my feet again. The expenditures of the household would have to be cut down, but Mr. Brief thought that a modest establishment befitting my rank might still be maintained. If I thought of marrying——
A ripple of laughter from the lawn, where Aileen and Charles were arranging fishing tackle, was wafted through the open window and cut athwart the dry speech of the lawyer. My eyes found her and lingered on the soft curves, the rose-leaf colouring, the eager face framed in a sunlit aureola of radiant hair. Already my mind had a trick of imagining her the mistress of the Grange. Did she sit for a moment in the seat that had been my mother’s my heart sang; did she pluck a posy or pour a cup of tea ’twas the same. “If I thought of marrying——” Well, ’twas a thing to be considered one day—when I came back from the wars.
Chapter VI
In the Matter of a Kiss
It may be guessed that the music of the gray morn when we started found a ready echo in my heart. The whistle of a plover cut the breaking day, the meadow larks piped clear above us in chorus with the trilling of the thrush, the wimpling burn tinkled its song, and the joy that took me fairly by the throat was in tune with all of them. For what does a lover ask but to be one and twenty, to be astride a willing horse, and to be beside the one woman in the world for him? Sure ’tis heaven enough to watch the colour come and go in her face, to hear the lilt of her voice, and to see the changing light in her eye. What though at times we were shy as the wild rabbit, we were none the less happy for that. In our hearts there bubbled a childlike gaiety; we skipped upon the sunlit hilltops of life.
And here was the one drop of poison in the honey of my cup: that I was wearing an abominable misfit of a drab-coloured suit of homespun more adapted to some village tradesman than to a young cavalier of fashion, for on account of the hue and cry against me I had pocketed my pride and was travelling under an incognito. Nor did it comfort me one whit that Aileen also was furbished up in sombre gray to represent my sister, for she looked so taking in it that I vow ’twas more becoming than her finery. Yet I made the best of it, and many a good laugh we got from rehearsing our parts.
I can make no hand at remembering what we had to say to each other, nor does it matter; in cold type ’twould lose much of its charm. The merry prattle of her pretty broken English was set to music for me, and the very silences were eloquent of thrill. Early I discovered that I had not appreciated fully her mental powers, on account of a habit she had of falling into a shy silence when several were present. She had a nimble wit, an alert fancy, and a zest for life as earnest as it was refreshing. A score of times that day she was out of the shabby chaise to pick the wild flowers or to chat with the children by the wayside. The memory of her warm friendliness to me stands out the more clear contrasted with the frigid days that followed.
It may be thought by some that our course in travelling together bordered on the edge of the proprieties, but it must be remembered that the situation was a difficult one for us both. Besides which my sister Cloe was always inclined to be independent, of a romantical disposition, and herself young; as for Aileen, I doubt whether any thought of the conventions crossed her mind. Her people would be wearying to see her; her friend Kenneth Montagu had offered his services to conduct her home; Hamish Gorm was a jealous enough chaperone for any girl, and the maid that Cloe had supplied would serve to keep the tongues of the gossips from clacking.
We put up that first evening at The King’s Arms, a great rambling inn of two stories which caught the trade of many of the fashionable world on their way to and from London. Aileen and I dined together at a table in the far end of the large dining-room. As I remember we were still uncommon merry, she showing herself very clever at odd quips and turns of expression. We found matter for jest in a large placard on the wall, with what purported to be a picture of me, the printed matter containing the usual description and offer of reward. Watching her, I was thinking that I had never known a girl more in love with life or with so mobile a face when a large company of arrivals from London poured gaily into the room.
They were patched and powdered as if prepared for a ball rather than for the dust of the road. Dowagers, frigid and stately as marble, murmured racy gossip to each other behind their fans. Famous beauties flitted hither and thither, beckoning languid fops with their alluring eyes. Wits and beaux sauntered about elegantly even as at White’s. ’Twas plain that this was a party en route for one of the great county houses near.
Aileen stared with wide-open eyes and parted lips at these great dames from the fashionable world about which she knew nothing. They were prominent members of the leading school for backbiting in England, and in ten minutes they had talked more scandal than the Highland lass had heard before in a lifetime. But the worst of the situation was that there was not one of them but would cry “Montagu!” when they clapped eyes on me. Here were Lord March, George Selwyn, Sir James Craven, Topham Beauclerc, and young Winton Westerleigh; Lady Di Davenport and the Countess Dowager of Rocksboro; the Hon. Isabel Stanford, Mistress Antoinette Westerleigh, and others as well known to me. They had taken us at unawares, and as Creagh would have put it in an Irish bull the only retreat possible for us was an advance through the enemy. At present they paid no more attention to us than they would to the wooden negro in front of a tobacco shop, but at any moment detection might confront me. Faith, here was a predicament! Conceive me, with a hundred guineas set upon my head, thrust into the very company in all England I would most have avoided.
And of all the people in the world they chanced on me as a topic of conversation. George Selwyn, strolling up and down the room, for want of something better to do, stopped in front of that confounded placard and began reading it aloud. Now I don’t mind being described as “Tall, strong, well-built, and extremely good-looking; brown eyes and waving hair like ilk; carries himself with distinction;” but I grue at being set down as a common cutpurse, especially when I had taken the trouble to send back Sir Robert’s jewelry at some risk to myself.
“Wonder what Montagu has done with himself,” queried Beauclerc after Selwyn had finished.
“Or what Volney has done with him,” muttered March behind his hand. “I’ll lay two to one in ponies he never lives to cross another man.”
“You’re wrong, March, if you think Volney finished him. He’s alive all right. I heard it from Denman that he got safe across to France. Pity Volney didn’t pink the fellow through the heart for his d——d impudence in interfering; not that I can stand Volney either, curse the popinjay!” snarled Craven sourly.
“If Montagu reaches the continent, ’twill be a passover the Jews who hold his notes will not relish,” suggested Selwyn in his sleepy way.
A pink-and-white-faced youth shimmering in cream satin was the animated heart of another group. His love for scandal and his facility for acquiring the latest tidbit made him the delight of many an old tabby cat. Now his eyes shone with the joy of imparting a delicious morsel.
“Egad, then, you’re all wrong,” he was saying in a shrill falsetto. “Stap me, the way of it was this! I have it on the best of authority and it comes direct, rot me if it doesn’t! Sir Robert’s man, Watkins, told Madame Bellevue’s maid, from whom it came straight to Lord Pam’s fellow and through him to old Methuselah, who mentioned