1 ^- i ^m £ LIBERA OF TH UNIVE.R Of ILLI I R.Y "^ L 5ITY MOIS 8Z^ M4fe4t v.l The person charging this material is re- sponsible for its return to the librarv' from which it was withdrawn on or before the Latest Date stamped below. Theft/ mutilction, and underlining of books are reasons for disciplinary action and may result in dismissal from the University. To renew call Telephone Center, 333-8400 UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS LIBRARY AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN DUE: l-a-?"^ m L161— O-1096 THOU ART THE UA^ Jl c^obcl BY THE AUTHOR OF "LADY AUDLEY'S SECRET,' " YIXEX, *'ISHMAEL," Etc. JN TEREE VOLUMES. VOL. r. LOXDOX SIMPKIN, MARSHALL, HAMILTOX, KENT & CO. STATIONERS' HALL COURT LIMITED ^All rights reserve^LI LONDON : PEINTED BT WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, STAMFORD STREET AND CHARING CROSS. ^ CONTENTS OF YOL. L j^ CHAPTER PAGE ^7s I. A Letter from the Dead ... ... ... 1 Tj II. Cora's Diary ... ... ... ... 34 III. A Mariage de Convenance ... ... 64 IV. From the Far-off Land ... ... 102 V. If it could hate been ... ... ... 139 VI. Urquhart considers HT3ISELF Ill-used ... 179 VII. Dreaming and Waking ... ... ... 203 VIIL In the Fine Wood ... ... ... 217 % IX. '*What do Tor KNOW about this?"'... ... 256 THOU ART THE MAN. CHAPTER I. A LETTER FROM THE DEAD. There were great black masses of cloud in the cold grey above, and a misty darkness brooded over the shoulder of the moor as the barouche, -with its fine, up-standing greys, came swinging round the curve of the road leading to Killander Castle — a more luxurious carriage than is generally to be met with in such a desolate region as Killander Moor — but this carriage belonged to a lady whose importance filled the land to the farthest limit of moor and valle}^ and away to the edge of yonder distant sea, whose leaden waves were edged with livid spray VOL. I. B 2 THOU AKT THE MAN. at this sunset hour of a stormy October after- noon. The lady — Sibyl, Countess of Penrith — was sitting alone in her carriage, wrapped in dark fur, with a proud, clearly cut face showing pale between the sable of her close-fitting toque and the sable collar of her long velvet mantle. Her eyes had a dreamy look as they surveyed the desolate landscape, the undulating sweep of moorland, the distant grey of the sea. The droop of the sensitive lips suggested mournful thoughts, or it might be only a pensive reverie in harmony with the sullen atmosphere, and the dark monotony of the landscape. Suddenly, out of the very ground, as it seemed to Lady Penrith, a rough, unkempt looking man came running after the carriage. The footman looked round at him, as if he had been a dog, and took no further heed than he would have taken of a dog. The coachman drove steadily on, touching the muscular shoulders of his sleek greys daintily with the A LETTER FROM THE DEAD. 3 point of his whip, quickening the pace as the sky darkened. The man came running on, giving chase to the carriage, and waving an arm in a ragged fustian sleeve. " Stop," cried Lady Penrith, and the coach- man pulled up his horses, in the midst of the bleak, bare moor, and the footman alighted from the box and came to the carriage door, touching his hat with gloved fingers, mute image of obedience and subserviency. " That man wants to speak to me," said her ladyship. " Wait." The vagabond's footsteps drew near. He was at the carriage door in less than three minutes, breathless and hoarsely panting, with a sound like the grating of rusty iron. He looked like a shepherd out of employment, ragged, gaunt, hungry-eyed. *' Are you Lady Penrith ? " he asked. *' Yes," answered her ladyship, with her purse open in her hand, having only one 4 THOU AKT THE MAN. idea as to the man's motive in following her carriage. Beggars were rare on that moorland road, but this man was evidently a beggar, she thought; and not being a political economist, her first impulse was to relieve him. He said never a word, but fumbled under the ragged shirt which hardly hid his lean breast, and brought forth a folded scrap of paper, which he flung into the lady's lap, then turned and ran away — across the moor this time, as fast as he had run after the carriage three minutes before. "Follow him," said Lady Penrith to the footman,^ and the footman went tripping and stumbling over the stony moor, nearly falling down at every second step. The hungry vagabond vanished into the dim grey of evening before the over-fed lackey in his buckled shoes had gone fifty yards across that uneven ground. He came back, breathlessly apologetic, and A LETTER FROM THE DEAD. 5 explained the impossibility of catching a man who ran like a rabbit. *' Do you know who he is, or where he comes from ? " *'No, my lady. Never saw him before, to my knowledge." " There is no village in that direction nearer than Cargill, and that is three miles off. He must have come from Cargill, I suppose. A beggar, no doubt. That will do, James. Home." Home ! The word, how often soever she might pronounce it, had always a sound of irony in her ear. What likeness was there between the English ideal of home and Killander Castle, on the Cumbrian moorland ; or Penrith House, Berkeley Square ; or the Mimosas at Cannes ; or the Den, near Braemar ; or any habitation owned by Archibald, ninth Earl of Penrith ? There are men and women who can create an atmosphere of domestic peace in a log-hut in the Australian bush, or in a lodging-house at 6 THOU AET THE MAN. the East End of London. There are others who, among a dozen palaces, cannot make one home. A pale streak of yellow light on the western edge of the moor showed where the sun had dipped below^ the horizon. A colder wind blew from the far-off sea, and Lady Penrith shivered as she took up the scrap of soiled paper from her lap, and held it gingerly with the tips of her gloved fingers. It was less than half a sheet of notepaper. There was only a few pencilled words in two straggling lines along the paper ; and those few words were so difficult to decipher that Lady Penrith had to pore over them for a long time in the waning light before she made them into the following sentences : — " Out of the grave, the living grave, a long- forgotten voice calls to you. Where their worm dieth not, and their fire is not quenched." No signature ; no indication of from whom or whence the message came. A madman's scrawl, no doubt inspired by some half-cloudy A LETTER FKOM THE DEAD. 7 purpose in the troubled brain of lunacy. The ragged wretch whom she had taken for a beggar was doubtless some wandering lunatic, harmless, and therefore permitted to ramble about the countryside. A religious enthusiast, perhaps ! The scrap of Scripture pointed that way. Lady Penrith resolved to drive to Cargill next day and search out the history of the writer, if indeed he lived there, as seemed likely; unless he were to be found in one of those lonely cottages scattered here and there over the face of the moor, between Penrith and Ardliston, the little seaport whence coal and iron were shipped for the south. A great tract of wild country, broken only by small and solitary hamlets, lay between these two points. The coal mines and smelting works and miners' villages all lay northward of Ardliston. The landscape on this southward side of the little harbour was wild and gloomy, but had a certain stern beauty of its own, and was not disfigured by mining operations of any kind. 8 THOU ART THE MAN. Lady Penrith was interested in the troubled mind which had prompted that pencil scrawL A call to repentance, no doubt ; such a sum- mons as the pauper Puritan, seeing rank and beauty roll by in a three-hundred-guinea ba- rouche, not unseldom feels himself called upon to deliver. There was really nothing to wonder at. There was hardly anything exceptional in the incident, unless perhaps it were that the man should have been there in the nick of time, as her ladyship's carriage went by. Yet even that circumstance was easy enough to understand if he were an inhabitant of the district. She drove in that direction often, and as a person of mark in the neighbourhood her habits were doubtless noted and known. No, there was nothing curious in the incident, nothing worthy of much thought ; and yet she thought of nothing else during her homeward drive. She carried the thought with her under the great grey gateway with its iron portcullis ; and into the hall, where the atmosphere of A LETTER FEOM THE DEAD. V smouldering logs and hothouse flowers had a feeling as of the warm, sweet South she knew so well; and up to her own sitting-room, where the slip of soiled paper lay on her lap as she sipped her solitary cup of tea. His lordship and his lordship's friends had been out shooting all day; her niece — a niece by courtesy — had gone with the luncheon cart, and the lady of Killander Castle had the great mediaeval fortress all to herself in the October gloaming. Presently she drew the lamp nearer, and scrutinised that pencilled scrawl even more closely than before in the bright white light. " It is not the writing of an uneducated man," she said to herself, and then her head sank lower, as her elbow rested on the cushioned arm of her chair, until her forehead almost touched the slip of paper on the table in front of her. She sat there some minutes, lost in dreamy thought. **How strange that the hand should le like * his,' " she murmured. And then after a 10 THOU ART THE MAX. pause, ''Is it really like, or do I fancy a resemblance because he is so often in my thoughts ? " Then, after another lapse into reverie, " He was not in my mind to-day. I had other things to think of. I was brooding on the hard realities of life; not upon its losses and regrets." She took up the paper, and studied it again, noting every stroke of the pencil. " It is like the writing of the dead," she said at last, with conviction. '^ The hand which wrote was the hand of a gentleman. I must hunt out the writer. I shall not rest until I find out who and what he is ; a madman, no doubt ; but should he be in poverty and distress I should like to help him — if it were only because he writes like the dead." She rose, raid went across the room to the large old-fashioned escritoire, where most of her letters were written, and where, among numerous pigeon-holes and quaint recesses, A LETTER FROM THE DEAD. 11 there v^eve two deep drawers, provided -with Bramah locks. She unlocked one of these, and dropped the scrap of paper on the top of the neatly-arranged packets of letters, tied with different coloured ribbons — letters which were in some wise the record of a woman's life. There was one of these packets tied with a broad black ribbon. Lady Penrith stood for a minute or so with the drawer open, looking down at those letters bound with the black band ; then she slowly closed the drawer and locked it, and as she turned away from the escritoire her eyes were dim with tears. That fancied resemblance in a handwriting had been like the lifting of a coffin lid for one last look at the dead face underneath. All the passion and the despair of a long buried past had come back to Sibyl Penrith at the bidding of an unknown lunatic who happened to write like the man to whom she had given her girlish heart ten years ago. 12 THOU AKT THE MAN. She was sitting in her low chair by the fire, in the shadow of a tall Indian screen, when the door opened suddenly and a rush of fresh air and an exuberant young woman came noisily into the room, and brought the dreamer back in an instant from the past with its fond regrets to the present with its manifold obligations. ''Oh, such a day!" cried the newcomer. '' You were better off even in your dreary afternoon drive. I had to wait, and wait, and wait for those men, till I was absolutely ravenous, and the hot dishes were utterly spoilt. I shall never go out with the luncheon cart again, unless I have three or four pretty girls to back me up. Those selfish wretches would be punctual enough then ; but they don't mind reducing poor plain me to the verge of starvation." "Poor plain Cora," said her ladyship, as the girl seated herself at the tea-table and began a spirited attack upon the cakes and buns A LETTER FROM THE DEAD. 13 which Lady Penrith had left untasted. *' Girls who really think themselves plain don't talk ahout it. They live in the hope that it is a secret between themselves and their looking- glasses." '*0h, but I am an exception to your rule," protested Miss Urquhart, with her large serviceable mouth full of Scotch bun. *' When I was twelve years old I found out the difference between beauty and ugliness. I heard all the pretty little girls admired — ' such blue eyes, such long lashes, such dear little mouths, such lily and rose complexions, and lovely golden hair,' while I observed that people called me good, or clever, or sensible ! As if any girl wanted to be called sensible ! So I looked steadily at my image in the glass, and I faced the unpleasant fact. " 'You are plain, Coralie,' I said to myself; ' unmistakably plain. You have tolerable eyes, and good teeth ; but your nose is a failure, your complexion is pallid, and your mouth is just 14 THOU AET THE MAN. twice too large for prettiness. Never forget that you are plain, my dear Coralie, and then perhaps other people won't remember the fact quite so often. Shake hands with Fate ; accept your thick nose and your pallid com- plexion as the stern necessities of your ex- istence, and make the most of your eyes and teeth, and your average head of hair.' That is the gist of what I said to myself, in less sophisticated language, perhaps, before I was fifteen, and from that line of conduct I have never departed. So if I have come to nineteen years of age without being admired, I have at least escaped being laughed at ! " " You are a bright, clever girl, Cora, and have quite enough good looks to float your cleverness, and to win you plenty of attention." *'Do you really mean that?" asked Miss Urquhart, turning a pair of keen brown eyes upon Lady Penrith. " Well, you who are among the handsomest of your sex can afford to be generous. The men are civil enough to A LETTER FEOM TPIE DEAD. 15 me, certainly ; and I believe some of them like me, in a way, as a jolly good fellow, don't yon know." *'' I think you ought to leave off being a jolly good fellow, Cora, and remember that you are a young lady, now your twentieth birthday is drawing near," said her ladyship, with kindly seriousness. ''What, leave off cigarettes, and horsey epithets, forego my morning fan in the stables and kennels — give the billiard-room a holiday — and take to embroidering window curtains and reading the last book of the Honourable Some- body's travels in Timbuctoo. So I would. Auntie, if I could only make up my mind which line is likely to pay best in such a case as mine — the well brought up, stand-offish young lady, or the free and easy young person whom her male acquaintances talk of as 'good fun,' or ' not a bad sort.' " *' Perhaps you will explain what you mean by paying best ? " 16 THOU ART THE MAN. ** Oh, I'm sure you catch my meaning. Which line will bring me the most eligible offer of marriage ? That is the question. Of course there is a sprinkling of proper-minded young men, the cream of the Peerage and the landed gentry, who could only be won by a proper- minded young woman ; but I doubt if among these chosen ones there is a chance for such as I, and I have observed that the ruck of young men prefer the society of a girl who is dis- tinctly on their own level, a little below them rather than a little above. That is why chorus girls and barmaids often get on so well in the world." *'Ah, Cora, what a pity you should have learnt so much about the seamy side of life." " Yes, that comes of being brought up by a father instead of a mother. Had my mother lived she would have reared me in a state of guileless innocence. I should have thought burlesque boys and pantomime fairies a kind of semi-angelic creatures, and I should never have A LETTER FROX THE DEAD. 17 heard of a barmaid ; whereas the governor used to entertain me with the gossip of the clubs every morning at breakfast, the only meal he took at home." "My poor Coralie ! And your father — pray don't call him governor — taught you that your mission in life is to marry ? " ''Well, if I can; badly, if I can't; at any rate to get myself some kind of a husband, so as to take myself off the paternal hands. At least, that was his idea a year or two ago. Now that you are so good to me and let me be here and in Berkeley Square he is no longer so keen on my marrying. So long as I don't worry or burden him he is satisfied. But when you grow tired of me " "I am not going to tire of you, Cora, I mean to grow fonder of you, if you will let me." "Let you! Why, I worship you. You are my ideal of all that is perfect in woman. If the leopard could change his spots I would VOL. I. c 18 THOU AKT THE MAN. l^rove my sincerity by trying to be like you — in grace and dignity and high and pure thoughts " Lady Penrith acknowledged these compli- ments with a sigh. *'Ah, I know you have only a poor opinion of yourself, you don't half know how good you are." " Good ! I am nothing, Cora ; a passive nonentity ; a piece of human furniture that fills an allotted space in Lord Penrith's establish- ment, and which is of no importance in the world, either for good or evil." " That is hard, ain't it," sighed Coralie. *' With your beauty you ought to have done as much harm as Cleopatra. You ought to have seen fleets destroyed and armies slaughtered for your beaux yeux, or kept two kingdoms in commotion, like Mary Stuart. Or even in these degenerate modern times you might have set the town in a blaze, been the cause of separa- * tions and divorces, Belgian duels, and Mayfair A LETTER FROM THE DEAD. 19 suicides. With beauty, and such wealth as yours — to be onlj^ Lady Penrith. No, it is not much after all. And yet how many people envy you — I, myself, for instance." "I hope you are above so paltry a feeling, Cora." "Don't hope anything good or noble of my father's daughter," said Coralie, renewing her attack upon a pile of crisp biscuits, and munch- ing as she talked. ** I don't like to hear a daughter speak of her father as you speak of yours, Cora," Lady Pem-ith said gravely, " and I would much rather you left his name out of our conversation. You ought to remember that he and I have long ceased to be friends." **I ought! I ought!" cried Cora. ''I am a wretch to forget," and then she put down her biscuit and sighed remorsefully. **It was so good of you to rescue me from my shabby, lonely life ; it was so good of you to forget that I am Hubert Urquhart's daughter." 20 THOU AllT THE MAN. "You are my husband's niece. That gives you a claim upon me, Cora." *' There are hundreds of women who would laugh such a claim to scorn; and you have plenty of girls of your own blood to care for; those nice Hammond girls, who are devoted to you." *'They are very good girls, but they have a mother to look after them." "And I was motherless and alone, educated in a second-rate school, kept by a needy French woman in a shabby suburb beyond the Bois de Boulogne, and eating my heart out in a dingy lodging-house, which had but one virtue, that it was near my father's favourite clubs. Oh, how I hated that dark, narrow street under the shadow of St. James's Church, and the joy-bells and death-bells, and the clock that struck all the weary hours; and the smart weddings, which served only to remind me how little chance I had of ever being married in a respect- able manner; and the landlady, who would A LETTER FRO^I THE DEAD. 21 come in and squat down uninvited upon the wretched sofa — until I felt tempted to ask whether the law between landlord and tenant made it her sofa or ours — and who condoled with me because I must be so lonely with my books and piano. As if books and piano were not better than her cockney company. Oh, it was a bottomless pit of squalid misery from which you rescued me. I ought to be grateful." " Don't talk about gratitude, Cora. Be happy. That is all I want of you." "I'll do my best," answered the girl briskly. "I don't know whether it is the chef or Mrs. Eicketts who makes these too delicious biscuits, but whatsoever hand mixes the paste it is the hand of genius. And now I must go and give myself a warm bath, after all the mud and mire of the day's diversion, and spend an hour or so in making myself just endurable." "Put on one of your prettiest frocks," said Lady Penrith. " Mr. Coverdale is a good enough match for any young woman." 22 THOU AKT THE MAN. *' The Honourable and Eeverend John Cover- dale ! It looks rather nice upon the address of a letter. But do you suppose for one moment, Aunt, that a serious and cultured Anglican parson would ever look with the eye of favour upon me ? " asked Cora, pausing with her hand upon the door. "Love delights in incongruities. Mr. Cover- dale is highly intellectual, and I believe both kind and conscientious. He is just the husband to " '* To reform me ! Ah, Aunt, if it were any use trying for him." She opened the door quickly, and was gone. Lady Penrith heard her whistling a music-hall melody, learnt in the smoking-room, as she went along the corridor. " That is the warmest affection I get in this house," thought Sibyl Penrith, as the notes died away in the distance. *' I wonder whether she is false or true. An Urquhart, and true ! That would indeed be an anomal}^ But then A LETTER FEOM THE DEAD. 26 there is the other side. Her mother may have been a good woman." She wanted to think well of this motherless girl if she could, for pure pity, although the girl was the daughter of that man whom she regarded as her worst enemy, the man who had turned the sweetest gift of life to bitterness and despair. She believed the worst of Hubert Urquhart, her husband's half-brother ; and yet, hearing from Lord Penrith that Hubert Urquhart's daughter was living alone and neglected in a West End bachelor lodging- house, all her kindly instincts rose in the girl's favour, and she lay awake a whole night thinking how she could serve this unhappy waif, whose misfortune it was to belong to such a father. There was one thing Lady Penrith could not do. She could not cross the threshold of any house inhabited by Hubert Urquhart. She spoke to her husband on the morning after that night of troubled thought. 24 THOU ART THE MAN. " I have been thinking of what you told me yesterday about your brother's girl," she began. *' I don't like the idea of your niece being in such a miserable position, and if you don't object I should like to take her to live with me. There is plenty of room for her, both here and in the country." "Yes, there is room enough, undoubtedly. We are not a large family," said Penrith, who had fretted himself with an angry wonder at the absence of an heir. Two children had been born to him, and had died in infancy. It seemed to him that there was a curse upon his union with a woman who had never flattered him so far as to j)retend she loved him. She had given him herself and her wealth, the plaything of Fate, the slave of adverse circumstances ; and it seemed to him, and perhaps to the wife also, that a blight had fallen upon their offspring, the withering blight of a home where love had never entered. A LETTER FROM THE DEAD. 25 "You have no objection, then ? " asked Sibyl, after a pause. They were in the hall, in the great stately house near Berkeley Square, one of those few houses in West End London, where rank may live within high garden walls, hidden from the outside world. The garden was gloomy, after the manner of London gardens, despite all that horticulture could do in the way of carpet beds and showy creepers. The house was grandly ugly without and splendidly luxurious within. The wife's wealth had been spent lavishly upon that long-neglected pile, and could the last Earl of Penrith have revisited his town mansion, his astonished ghost would hardly have recognised the rooms which, in his own day, had been conspicuous for the shabbiness of their curtains and carpets, and the ugliness of their furniture, of the later Georgian period. Under her present ladyship's regime the house had been furnished and decorated throughout after the fashion of 20 THOU ART THE MAN. Louis Seize; and it might have been the mansion cntrc cour ct jardin of a Legitimist nobleman in the Faubourg St. Germain. Space and light, grace of line, and delicacy of colouring distinguished those large and lofty reception-rooms, that airy hall, with its double sweep of shallow marble stairs, its groups of palms, and gracious marble forms of Fawn and Nymph, Cupid and Psyche. Penrith paced up and down the hall with an inscrutable countenance. He was a man in whom speech seemed in some wise an effort. *' You won't mind my having your niece as a kind of companion, will you, Penrith?" urged his wife. *' Mind ? No, of course not. It is very good of you to suggest the thing. All I fear is that the girl may prove a bore to you." And so the matter was settled, and Coralie Urquhart was transferred with her meagre be- longings from the shabby second-floor front in Jermyn Street to Penrith House, where there A LETTER FEOM THE DEAD. 27 was room and verge enough to allow this young lady her own sittmg-room, as well as a spacious bed and dressing-room. She declared that she felt like a princess amidst her new surroundings, and so much the more so after Madame Lolotte, her ladyship's dressmaker, had taken her measure for a complete set of frocks and out- door garments to suit all the requirements of her new life. Sibyl was far too delicate to suggest any overhauling of the girl's existing wardrobe, but a few judicious questions elicited the fact that Miss Urquhart possessed exactly five frocks, three tailor-made and threadbare, while the remaining two were evening gowns, a year and a half old, and too small to be worn without torture. " The Pater's tailor gave me a start with those nice little tweed frocks, when I came from Paris, but he has turned disagreeable since then, and won't give any more tick." Coralie was mildly reproved for that last 28 THOU ART THE MAN. word, and Madame Lolotte was sent for and told that she must produce a season's dresses for Miss Urquhart before the end of the week. She shrugged her shoulders and elevated her eyebrows, and then exhibited all her neat little teeth in a caressing smile. ^^ Pour Milacli on fait Vwipossihle,'" she said. ^^ Mais, mon Dieii, quatre jours iwur faire faire un trousseau! " In the result the impossible was done, so far as the production of two delicious little walking- gowns and three party-frocks, of a most exquisite simplicity, yet w"th a certain boldness of style and colouring which set off Miss Urquhart' s plainness. ^' Elle est franchement laide, la p'tite,'' the dressmaker told Lady Penrith's maid at a later interview. ''But it is an original style of ugli- ness, and I like it better than your milky- skinned English faces, with their insignificant features." Henceforward, Coralie's life was a bed of roses A LETTER FROM THE DEAD. 29 — or -svould have been had she been without conscience and without heart. Unhickily for her, she had not yet attained that hardness which rises su^Derior to all moral feelings, all vain compunctions; but she was her father's daughter, and she was in a fair way of becoming like him. He had a serious conversation with her the night before she left him to become a member of his brother's family. " Cora," he said, thoughtfully, lying back in the one comfortable armchair which his land- lady provided for her victims, ,and smoking his favourite briarwood, ''you and I are net likely to see much of each other while you are under Lady Penrith's protection." ""Why not? " she asked, wonderingly. "Because her ladyship hates me like poison. Never mind why she hates me. It is an old story, and a long one. I don't reciin'ocate the feeling, and I am profoundly interested in the lady and all that concerns her. By the way, 30 THOU AKT THE MAN. you keep a diary, of course ? Most girls do." *'Do they? Then they must have more to write about than I have had since I left Madame Michon's. What should I put down ? ' Tuesday : Poured out father's coffee. Went for a walk in the Green Park with the landlady's daughter. Began another novel, rather stupider than the last. Why does Mudie send one the books one doesn't ask for, instead of the book one has been wanting for the last three weeks ? Went to bed at half-past eleven. Father had not come home.' Do you think that sort of record would be w^orth keeping ? " " Happy the woman w^ho has no history," an- swered her father sententiously. " Well, you will keep a diary in future, if you please, Cora ; and you will keep it in such a manner as will admit of your allowing me to read it. You will have plenty to record at Penrith House and Killander Castle. You will have her ladyship — a most interesting study, a poem and a A LETTER FEOM THE DEAD. 31 history incarnate. I want you to observe her closely, and to ^vrite down everything that concerns her — her actions, sentiments, opinions, the people with whom she associates, and the esteem in which she holds them.*' ''Father," said Cora, looking at him with wide-open eyes and hardening lips, more earnestly than she had ever looked at him in her life before, " you want me to be a spy I " *' Xo, my dear ; I only want you to be an observer. My interest in Lady Penrith is founded on the purest motives. I want to put an end to the feud between us, which is perilous for her and unpleasant for me. I know her miserably mated to my brother, who is — well, about as bad as they make 'em," continued Urquhart, taking refuge in slang. " I have no doubt I can be of use to her in the future — financially, in the protection of her enormous fortune, and otherwise — and I can only serve her by watchfulness, personal or vicarious. It is just possible that this kindness to you means 32 THOU ART THE MAN. a change of feeling towards me — a holding out of the olive-branch. So much the better if it does ; but in any case you must watch for me, since I can't watch for myself. You will find out her friends and her enemies, and on which side the peril lies " " "Will you assure me that you are her friend, and that no harm to her can come of anything I may tell 3^ou? " *'I do assure you that I am her friend. I will go farther, and tell you that ten years ago I was her devoted lover. She refused me — her heart was buried in another man's grave — and a few months afterwards she married my elder brother. The match was of old Sir Joseph Higginson's making, I have no doubt. She accepted a coronet — with a wry face, perhaps, but accepted it, all the same, as women do. That old romantic feeling of mine died out of me long ago ; but Sibyl Penrith is still a great deal nearer and dearer to me than any other woman, and I should like to help her if ever she A LETTER FROM THE DEAD. 33 liave need of help. She is too rich not to be robbed ; she is too handsome not to be tempted. You will be with her in a confidential capacity ; you are keen enough to scent either danger, and to pass the warning on to me. You can send me your diary weekly." *' I can't understand how you can be of any use to her." ''I don't ask you to understand," replied Mr. Urquhart, with admirable nonchalance, puffing quietly at his briarwood. 'VOL. I. 34 THOU ART THE MAN. CHAPTER Ii; CORA S DIARY. I HARDLY know how I should dispose of my evening hours at Killander Castle, if father had not imposed this task of diary-keeping upon me. My aunt leaves the drawing-room as the clock strikes ten. I don't believe she goes to bed before midnight, but as she has never invited me to a " causerie " in her room, and as she always wishes me a distinct good night in the gallery, where we light our candles, I feel that solitude is my portion, and that I am left to my own resources till the next morning. I have always been a wretched sleeper ; and one of my worst miseries at Mme. Michon'& was to hear the church clock chime the quarters CORA'S DIAEY. 35 all through the long dreary night, perhaps until fiVe o'clock in the morning, when I dropped into the slumber of sheer exhaustion, and dreamt dreams that were darkened with the consciousness that the dressing bell would ring at six, and that I must be dressed and in the class-room at a quarter to seven. Oh, weary servitude ! oh, joyless days and restless nights ? When I find the wheels of life dragging rather wearily at Killander Castle, let me remember the dreary round of school work, the scanty fare of the school table, the burden of too frequent church services, and the ever-present conscious- ness that I was the worst-dressed girl in the school, and that my bills were always in arrear, I must, however, admit that Mme. Michon treated me fairly and kindly, after her lights, considering that she stood in danger of losing- by me. It was Mme. Michon's pupils, on whom my poverty inflicted no inconvenience, who made me feel the agony of being poor. If I bad not been the niece of an Earl, I think they 36 THOU AKT THE MAN. would have trampled upon me. My blue blood went for something, and I took an aggressive attitude against every girl who represented the wealth made in commerce. Well, that is **an auld sang," thank Heaven, and Lady Penrith ; and I am here in this Cumbrian Castle, lapped in luxury, with fine raiment in my wardrobe, and plenty of pocket-money ; and if the life is rather dull now and then, I am not the less grateful to Providence and my uncle's wife. As for my uncle himself, of whose race I am, and on whom alone I have any claim, he throws me a word now and then as he might throw a biscuit to one of his spaniels, and cares less, I fancy, what may become of me than what may become of the dog. He is a curious man — ^handsome, in a certain worn-out faded style, like a portrait by an old master that has been spoilt in the cleaning. He is straight as a dart, tall, well set up. He is said to have the grand manner, which I take to be a manner of caring for nobody in the world but one's self. CORA'S DIARY. 37 At ten o'clock my aunt bids me good night in the long gallery leading to her own rooms, and I cross the head of the great staircase, and retire to my own den, to yawn over a novel or to write my diary, till midnight. Inclination would take me to the smoke-room. where I believe I should be not altogether un- welcome ; for the men must have exhausted their stock of imjDroper anecdotes by ten o'clock, and must have begun to grow tired of their own society. They have told me severally, and on different occasions, that I am good fun. How much I should prefer being "good fun " down- stairs in that spacious, comfortable billiard- room, to moping up here over a dull novel, or my still duller diary ! The proprieties forbid me masculine society after ten o'clock ; so to thee, Diary, I turn, and try to interest myself in a study of character. Lady Penrith's character in parti- cular. There is a certain fascination, I find, even in S8 THOU AKT THE MAN. the dullest diary, when it is about one's self — one's own feelings, likes and dislikes, odd fancies, rebellious promptings against Fate and Mrs. Orundy ; but it is not so interesting when one writes about other people. My father honoured me by expressing a desire to read my jottings ^bout her ladyship ; I have therefore commenced s, system of diary - keeping by double entry. What I mean him to read I write in one volume ; my own little reveries I keep to myself in another volume. I suppose he really was in love with Lady Penrith, years ago, when I was a child, moping my little life away in the depths of Yorkshire, with my unpatrician maiden aunts. Yes, I suppose he was really and honestly in love with her, and not attached to her only on account of her wealth ; and yet I can hardly imagine my father a romantic lover, caring for ■anything above and beyond his own interest. There is a hardness about him, just as there is about his lordship, and which I should call the Urquhart hardness, for I can see the same CORA'S DIARY. 39 character indicated in many of the family portraits on these walls — a cold, calm concen- tration of purpose which I take to mean absolute selfishness. Yet it may be that even a man of that hard nature might be moved to forget himself by such a woman as Sibyl Penrith in the flush of her girlish beauty. She is abso- lutely beautiful now at nine and twenty. She took me to three very big parties before we left London, and she was the handsomest woman amidst a crowd where I felt that to be plain was to be the exception to the rule of EngHsh beauty. Yes, any man might have loved and suffered for such a woman; only I think Sir Joseph Higginson's coal-pits would have more attraction for my father than the loveHest face that ever shone upon mankind. In any case I can understand what a bitter blow it must have been to him when she married his elder brother. I wonder who the man was who died — the man she loved — the man in whose grave her heart is buried. Who was he, and where is 40 THOU ART THE MA^. that grave where her heart lies dead and cold ? Yes, I believe her heart is with the dead. She goes through life like an animated statue^ coldly beautiful, benevolent, charitable, religious^ polite and amiable to a most unsympathetic husband, fulfilling all the duties of that station to which it has pleased God to call her, and^ if I read her right, caring for nothing in the world except her books and piano. So much for my private opinions and specu- lations in volume two ; and now for my obser- vations upon life in general and Lady Penrith in particular in volume one, which, if my father insist, I shall allow him to peruse.. We have been at Killander Castle for more than two months, and there has not been an event worth recording, or, indeed, any circum- stance that can be honoured with the name of an event, till this afternoon. The life here since the beginning of August has been a& luxuriously monotonous as life on Tennyson's- COKA'S DIARY. 41 Lotos Island, only we have not enjoyed such a climate as tempted Ulysses and his com- panions to a perpetual repose. The weather- has been — distinctly British. His lordship spent the latter half of August and a great part of September in Scotland — shooting. He arrived here towards the end of last month, bringing a few friends with him, for more shooting. My aunt declined Scotland for this autumn. She wanted nothing but rest, after a busy season. Killander is her most established home. Here she has her largest collection of books and music, her favourite Broadwood, her finest garden and hothouses ; here, in short, she has all the things in which a great lady with an empty heart can take delight. Here, too, she is within a drive or even a long walk of the house in which she was- born, and the village where she knows exeij cottage and most of the inhabitants, from the bent old grandfather to the year-old baby. I have done a good deal of cottage-visiting with. 42 THOU ART THE MAN. her since we came here; and I must confess that I find cottagers, with their everlasting woes find incurable ailments, utterly insupportable, and I am puzzled to understand the order of intellect which can take pleasure in personal contact with them. To relieve their wants is a duty and an incli- nation which I can understand in a person as rich as Lady Penrith, who can never feel any the poorer for her beneficence ; but surely there fire clergymen's wives, and sisterhoods, and people that one could employ for all this dismal, uninteresting work, instead of bothering about •every detail of every old woman's miserable existence, as my aunt does. However, all this twaddle seems to interest her, and I have to sit or stand by while she listens to long rigmaroles about rheumatics, or sick children, or drinking husbands, or sons out of w^ork, or daughters that have gone wrong. It is one treadmill-round of human misery, to be miti- gated by beneficences of such miserable amount 43 • — taken in relation to her ladyship's wealth — that they really might just as well be distributed by a bailiff, or homely drudge of a curate's wife. "Why Lady Penrith should amuse herself by sympathising — or pretending to sympathise, for it can't be real — with all those squalid miseries I can no more understand then I can fathom the minds of those women who get up at half- past six every morning to attend matins, when they might enjoy the best hour of the day, the hour between waking and getting up, with a cup of strong tea and a volume of Guy de Maupas- sant's stories. I have never allowed my ennui or my senti- ments to escape during the frequent martyrdom of this cottage- visiting. Far from it. I shake the dirtiest paws, sip the vilest tea, and win all hearts in my jolly-good-fellow manner, which has given the cottagers the idea that however sternly Conservative " The Castle " may be, Miss Urquhart is at heart a Eadical. Sometimes I have been tempted into wonder- 44 THOU AET THE MAN. ing whether all this active benevolence, this; sympathy with the sick and sorrowing poor, may not be a self-imposed penance on the part of Lady Penrith ; the expiation of her maturer years for some sin of her girlhood. Yet, I cannot think that this passionless nature ever deviated from the straight path. Her character must have always been spotless ; superior to every temj)tation. And, again, for a woman born rich there are so few temptations. Satan, must offer so choice a bait when he fishes for the rich man's soul. What other idiosyncrasies besides this regard for the poor have I observed in my aunt's character ? First, her love of music, which amounts to a passion; secondly, her love of books, which astonishes me, books not being, at all in my way. I never read a book when I can get hold of a newspaper ; and I infinitely prefer Truth and the World to any of the authors who are called classics. Nor do I see that book-learning is of the slightest use to any Cora's diary. 45 young woman who does not want to write school-books or go out as a governess. The little I have seen of masculine society has shown me that men detest '* culture " in a woman. The men who go in for learning themselves hate a rival in their own field. Scholars don't want sympathy from women. They want blind admiration. And the average man — a monster of ignorance about everything ihat is not in the newspapers — shrinks from a -well-informed woman as from a drawing-room pestilence. To please the sterner sex a woman should know just enough of politics to be able to hsten intelligently to the old fogies and middle-aged bores, and enough about sport and society scandals to be able to carry on a touch- and-go conversation with a young man of average intellect. She may say a smart thing now and again, but she must never pretend to be a wit. She must accept her position as man's inferior, and honour and revere her sultan. 46 THOU ART THE MAN. If my father favours me by reading the last remarks he will perceive that I have taken his lessons in worldly wisdom to heart, and that I am studying how to please a potential husband. There is one here, Mr. Coverdale, Lord Work- ington's only son, who would be well worth pleasing — but, alas, alas, penniless and plain must shoot at lesser game. To return to Lady Penrith. She is a reading woman, and her spacious morning-room is lined with books, all of her own collection, and entirely distinct from the orthodox library of standard authors on the ground floor. I amused myself a few days ago, while I was waiting to go out driving with her, by a careful study of these books. I have been told to study the lady's character, and some part of her charac- ter must reveal itself in the books she chooses. I found poetry strongly represented by poets old and new. Byron, Shelley, Keats, Browning, and Tennyson are lavishly spread along the shelves, in various editions, with a richness of CORA'S DIARY. 47 binding and variety of style that mark the lady's appreciation. Milton and Shakespeare are equally honoured. The poets fill a large section of the bookcases near the fireplace ; and on this side of the room my aunt has her favourite armchair, tea-table, and cosy nook. If anything could make me fond of reading, it would be such a room as this. The novelists are here also, — Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, Lytton, and Eliot, and here and there a volume by a lesser light. Then come biography, history, criticism, metaphysics. My aunt seems to have taken all learning for her province, as somebody says of himself. One block of books especially interested me — for they suggested a warm interest in a subject which I should consider very remote from Lady Penrith's line of thought. On the shelves below the poets, and within reach of her hand as she sits in her favourite chair, I found a collection of books upon African travel and African sport, from Livingstone downwards. I never saw so 48 THOU ART THE MAN. many books upon one subject in any library I ^ever looked at. I ask myself, with natural wonder, how and why a woman who is utterly indifferent to sport in England and Scotland should be keenly interested in sport in Africa ; why a woman who has travelled very little in Europe should be interested in books of travel in that uncivil- ised quarter of the globe. The only answer to the riddle which offers itself to my mind is that the lady's interest in Africa is vicarious, and that the man to whom she gave her heart in youth was in some manner associated with the =dark continent. I have found her poring over Burton or Cameron, Stanley or Baker, in the lazy hour between afternoon tea and the dressing bell. I once ventured to ask her how she could find enjoyment in books which to me appeared essentially dull and dry, and she looked up with her sweet smile, and answered — " There is not a single page in these books without interest for me, Cora." CORA'S DIARY. 49 ^' And would yon like to travel in x\frica ? " " Dearly." ^' Why don't you, then?" She gave a faint sigh before she answered. " Hardly any woman could run the risks and endure the hardships to which these men exposed themselves ; and if any woman could, the world would not let her do it. My duties a,re at home." ** Were I you, I would hold every duty subordinate to my own whim," said I. " If I wanted to roam about African deserts, and ride across African swamps, and see the Falls of the Zambesi or the Mountains of the Moon, nothing should prevent me. I would defy opinion, as Lady Hester Stanhope did." I like to tease her about her wealth and its omnipotence sometimes. I think it is the sting of conscious poverty which goads me to remind her what a power she possesses, and how poor a use she makes of it. How deeply sad her face was while she spoke VOL. I. E 50 THOU AET THE MAX. of Africa ! Yes, that is the charm. Her lover must have been a wanderer in those wild path- ways. The next time I found myself alone in her morning-room I made a further examina- tion of her African collection. I looked for any volumes by less familiar names, thinking that among these I might find some book written by the man she loved. Very few men travel much in strange lands without delivering them- selves of a book. Sooner or later the thirst for paper and print takes possession of them. They hunt up their old journals and random records of sport, and eke out their own scanty materials with plagiarism from Burton or Stanley. I found one volume — a thinnish octavo — which attracted me for two reasons. Firstly, it was more delicately bound than any of the other books. Secondly, it showed signs of having been more read. The title was unpretentious — " My African Apprenticeship." The name of the author was. Cora's diaey. 51 Brandon Mountford ; the year of publication 1874 — just twelve years ago. On the fly-leaf I found a brief inscription — ** From B. M. to S. H. May 6, 1876." B. M., of course, stands for the author ; S. H., for Sibyl Higginson. It was not till the follow- ing year that Sir Joseph Higginson's daughter became Lady Penrith. Dear little book, to give me such precise information about yourself. "B. M. to S. H." Only a lover would write thus. Anyone upon ceremonious terms would ^have written, " From the author." I looked into the pages. The usual thing ! Descriptions of scenery, descriptions of storms, sunsets, sunrises, aurora borealis, wonderful effects of sky. Perils of being eaten by savages or wild beasts. Perils of having nothing to eat. Lion-shooting, fever, friendly natives. Nothing of personal history to tell me what manner of man Brandon Mountford was. But that vellum- bound book, with its delicately tooled edges and gold lettering, and with leaves that opened so SS."""^'"* ■52 THOU ART THE MAN. easily, with here and there a rose-petal or a withered violet, told me one fact for certain. Whatever "B. M." may have been — saint or sinner — Sibyl Higginson loved him, and Sibyl Penrith cherishes his memory. Oh, irony of Fate, that one woman should own over a million, and sit in her lonely room brooding over a dead man's book, while thou- sands of women in the world should be striving and wrestling to get themselves decently mar- ried for the sake of food and raiment, a shelter, and a fireside ! Had I a tenth part of Lady Penrith's money, what a variety of pleasures, excitements, and enjoyments I would wring out of this too brief existence of ours ! I peeped into the billiard-room after lunch to- day, and saw Mr. Coverdale knocking about the balls by himself in a low-spirited way, so I lingered in the room for a few minutes, look- ing for last week's Punch, and presently he invited me to play a fifty with him. He is a poor player, and I am a poor player, though I CORA'S DIARY. 53 have done my possible to make up for the deficiencies of m}- education by playing when- ever anybody condescends to ask me, and by practising whenever I can get the table to myself. The fifty took a longish time, for besides our slow scoring, the honourable and reverend ^John was in an expansive humour, and talked a good deal of his views, which are ritualistic to a degree that verges upon Romanism. I humoured him to the utmost — indeed, in religious matters I am rituaHstic if I am anything — and we had a really interesting conversation, in which I seemed to get more in sympathy with this cold pattern of propriety than I have ever been before. Indeed, as we put our cues into the rack he made me a little reproachful speech which was to my mind a compliment. "You are like St. Paul at least in one attribute. Miss Urquhart," he said. '' You can be all things to all men. Xo one who heard you talking slang with the shooters yesterday 54 THOU ART THE MAN. would anticipate your delightful conversation to-day." Now observe, author of my being, that your daughter's delightful conversation had chiefly consisted in holding her tongue. I had let him talk, and only said just so much as was necessary to lead him on to descant at large upon the theme he loves. Intelligent listening means sympathy, comprehension, everything to a talking man. The clock struck three. My aunt generally drives out at three o'clock, and as a rule I go with her. It is one of my duties, or privileges, whichever I like to call it. I rushed up to my room, put on jacket and hat, snatched a pair of gloves, and flew downstairs to the hall and out to the great flight of steps which approaches this stately castle. The barouche was at the door, and my aunt was already seated in it. At sight of my flying figure on the steps, the footman descended from his perch, and opened the carriage door. In COEA'S DIAEY. 00 another minute I Wcas seated at her ladyship's side. "I did not know you were coming with me, Cora," she said, and I detected a shade of annoyance in her tone. Offended at my unpunctuality, no douht, thought I: but it struck me afterwards that upon this particuhir afternoon she wanted to be alone. I apologised for my late appearance, and she affected an interest in my account of Mr. Cover- dale's conversation: but I could see that her mind was otherwhere, and that she spoke at random. We drove to Cargill, a village on the seaward side of the great dreary moor which separates Killander Castle from all the civilised world northward of its walls. Her ladyship stopped the carriage at the first house in the village. '•'I am going to some of the cottages, Cora,'* she said, *'but I shan't stay long in any of them. "Would you like to sit in the carriage till 56 THOU ART THE MAN. I have clone? There is the Nineteenth Century to amuse you." She pouited to a half-cut magazine on the empty seat. I hate these learned periodicals which presuppose a corresponding erudition on the part of the reader: and the notion that Lady Penrith did not want my company gave a stimulus to my curiosity. I jumped out of the carriage with alacrity. *'I had much rather see your cottagers than read the Nineteenth Century f'' said I. We went into several cottages, with the usual result. Ailments, rheumatic, and internal, sore legs, swollen faces, all the disagreeables of life — sons out of work, husbands given to drink — the old, old story. My aunt was sympa- thetic, took note of all necessities, and promised relief. In all this I could see nothing out of the beaten track ; but I observed that in every cottage she asked the same questions about a man she had seen upon the moor on the previous afternoon, a man who looked like- CORAS DIAllY. 0< a shepherd, very ragged and poor, and, as she thought, not altogether right in his mind. Xo one was able to identify the person she de- scribed, though many suggestions, more or less wide of the mark, were offered. She ex- hibited wonderful pertinacity in this inquiry, and we went from hovel to hovel till I wa& heartily sick of the subject. What did I care for a ragged man who was or was not of weak intellect ? *'I should like to help this poor creature," said my aunt ; and she charged every one of whom she inquired to make it his or her business to find the ragged personage, in order that he might be clothed, and put in the way of being restored to his right minL "Is there any as^ium for lunatics in the neighbourhood from which the man could have escaped ? " she asked of an elderly woman, who had given more signs of intelli- gence than the other aboriginals she liad questioned. 58 THOU ART THE MAN. "None nearer than Durrock, and that's a •good forty mile from here." The search was evidently hopeless, and my aunt's benevolent intentions were to bear no tfruit. The afternoon was cold and windy, with that parching east wind which is harmful alike to complexion and temper. I felt that my nose was blue, and I knew that I was in •a very acrimonious state of mind. The change from stuffy cottages to the bleak •outer air was too trying to have been patiently •endured by a saint ; yet Lady Penrith seemed alike unconscious of the nipping cold outside ;and of the frowsy warmth within. Not contented with this wearisome house to house inquiry, she drove a long round on our way home in order to repeat her questions at half a dozen isolated cottages; and it was nearly dark before the great grey bulk of the Penrith s' stronghold appeared across the grey •distance. I never look at that mediaeval .castle without a faint pang of envy, which coka's diaey. 59 no amount of recently acquired wealth, much as I adore money, could inspire. That legacy of past ages stirs the small modicum of romance in my nature. I envy Lady Penrith the possession of that fine old fortress ; and I am proud to think I am one of the race whose forbears held it in the days when every great nobleman was a warrior chieftain ; proud to think that I am descended fi-om ancestors who fought for king and country, when England was young and bold and warlike, rather than from some plodding lawyer who won his peerage in the dust and din of the law courts and by subserviency to the powers that be. So you see, father, you who are of the world worldly, there is a thin thread of romance still running through the warp and weft of your daughter's character. All your lessons in the craft that rules mankind have not extinguished my reverence for the past, and my belief in the value of ancient lineage — a value in one's own secret estimate of oneself, the feeHng that, 60 TIIOU AKT THE MAN. come what may, one is better than the ruck of mankind, better inherentl}^ by a superiority which dates from the Crusades, and which no achievement of newly made wealth can cancel. I contrived to suppress all demonstrations of vexation during that long, cold drive, with its circuitous extensions, but I could not quite restrain my natural curiosity. *' You must have some special reason for being interested in this ragged man, I should think, aunt, by your earnestness in searching for him," I said, when we had turned our backs upon a wretched stone hovel, half hidden in a dip of the moor. ''You are right, Cora; I have a reason," she answered quietly, and in a tone that forbade further questioning. I hugged myself in my sealskin jacket and muff — her gifts — and told myself that I must wait for time and chance to show me the nature of her reason. It must be a very strong one — if I have any power to read her 61 face — almost as strong as the reason for her interest in books of African travel. All the resources of my intelligence are hence- forth pledged to the solution of this social mystery. I have very little to think about, now that the all-absorbing question of ways and means has been made easy for me ; and for want of interest in my own insignificant exist- ence I am naturally thrown upon speculations about my aunt. If John Coverdale would only condescend to fall in love with me life would take different colours — would change from dull, uniform grey to the brilliant variety of the rainbow. Not that I am in love with that handsome pattern of propriety, mark you ; but every girl wants a lover. The conquest of man is woman's mission — the only mission worth a woman's thought; and not to be admired and loved is to be outside the pale. I am plain, let me not forget that— plain, but not repulsive. I have good eyes and teeth, and 62 THOU AKT THE MAN. you have told me that my face lights up when I talk, that my complexion improves by candle- light, and that I have a quality which you call "chien," and which is not without its charm for the opposite sex, especially the duller members of that sex, who are apt to be caught by smartness and gumption in a woman. This much of praise have you given me, my father, in the course of our conversations across- the morning coffee and rasher. Am I smart, have I gumption, I wonder ? I recall the stories I have heard of plain women and their conquests ; and it sometimes appears to me that the unbeautiful have been very often winners in the race. One hears of men who forsake lovely wives to go to perdition for plain and even elderly mistresses. One hears of men who line their bachelor rooms with pictures of beautiful women — who go about declaring that only perfect loveliness can charm them — and who unite themselves in lifelong union with sallow complexions and snub noses. CORA'S DIAEY. G3^ I will remember all these anomalies when I am inclined to despair of my own fortunes.. And in the meantime I will devote my leisure to the study of my aunt's character. She has been very good to me, and I ought to love her dearly. There are times when I tell myself that I do so love her; and then, perhaps, a cold wave of doubt comes over me. She is so handsome, so calm and self-possessed ; she has been so favoured by Fortune and Nature in all those respects where I have been hardly used. Is it human in me to love her ? ^lore especially when I much doubt if she has any affection for me ? She is a woman whose life is ruled by fixed principles and ideas. I believe she endures me and protects me, just as she goes to church on bleak, uncomfortable morn- ings, because the thing is a duty and has to be done. •64 TIIOU AKT THE MAX. CHAPTEE III. A MARIAGE DE CONVENANCE. Two and thirty years before that bleak October afternoon on which Corahe Urquhart descanted in her journal, Sir Joseph Higginson, of Arling- ton Street and Ellerslie Park, etc., startled his friends and neighbours by an aristocratic alliance, and the bringing home of a lovely girl-wife to reign over his spacious house near Ardliston. Sir Joseph was forty-nine years of age at the time of his marriage, plain of face and clumsy of figure ; but he was one of the wealthiest pit-owners in the North of England, and, if his immediate surroundings were sur- prised at this union, society in London regarded the marriage as the most natural thing in life. A 3IAEIAGE DE CONYENANCE. 65 Here was the Earl of Allandale, on the one part, with a large family, the offspring of two poorly dowered wives ; and here was a mil- lionaire of mature years, against whose position nothing could be said except that he had made it for himself, and against whose moral cha- racter no slander had ever reached the ear of the great world. Decidedly, pronounced society, Lord Allandale had done wisely in uniting his youngest daughter — youngest of a family of eleven — to Sir Joseph Higginson. The young lady herself was never heard to complain. Whatever dream she had cherished of a different union was a dream that had found its own tearful ending before she saw the lord of those Cumbrian pits. She was told that her acceptance of Sir Joseph would be advantageous to all her family, as well as an assurance of high fortune to herself. He could help her brothers, some of whom were public officials, while the more enterprising of the band dabbled in trade and exhibited their patrician name VOL. I. F 66 THOU ART THE MAN. upon the prospectuses of newly launched com- panies. She, as his wife, could be useful to her sisters, since his spacious mansion in Arlington Street would offer a better stage for matrimonial efforts than the somewhat shabby old house in Mayfair, which the Mountfords maintained with a struggle, and whose chief merit was to be found in certain unsavoury traditions of old- world scandals, duels, elopements, family quar- rels, forced marriages, which clung to the panelled walls of those low-ceiled rooms in which Lord AUandale's ancestors had lived, and loved, and hated, and suffered for more than two centuries. Lord Allandale professed an affectionate pride in the house because his family had held it so long ; but he was fain to confess that it was inconvenient and insanitary, and that it cost him a "plaguy lot of money" to keep the roof from tumbling in and the windows from falling out. ''If I were to sell the old gazabo to a pork- butcher from Chicago he would pull it down and A MARIAGE DE CONVENANCE. 67 build a little palace on the site, or scoop out the inside and restore it in the style of the seventeenth century/' said his lordship; ''hut I shan't part with it while I have a shot in the locker, and we must pig in it as best we can." Pigging was not an elegant expression, but it seemed hardly inappropriate, for the upper floors were divided into bedchambers not much larger than a modern pigsty, and of inconvenient shapes for the most part, in which the Ladies Mountford and their honourable brothers were almost as crowded as an Irish peasant's house- hold amid the fertile fields of Kerry. For compensation they had Basingstoke House, a great barrack in Hampshire, on a windy hill westward of Basingstoke, where there were small inconvenient bedrooms enough for the whole tribe. Lady Lucy Mountford submitted to fate, in the person of Sir Joseph Higginson, and became at once mistress of the house in ArHngton Street, palatial, splendid, rich in all things that make 68 THOU AET THE MAN. the outward grace and glory of life, and of Ellerslie Park, in Cumberland, a vast stone man- sion, essentially modern and essentially Tudor, designed by the most fashionable architect of the first ten years of Sir Joseph's prosperity. It had been discovered, or at any rate alleged, later that the fashionable architect was a fraud, that his Tudor houses were none of them genuinely Tudor, but only Tudoresque, and that he had stolen his flashiest ideas from the sober Flemings, of Antwerp and Ghent. Notwith- standing which condemnation from the ever- advancing critic, who is always getting beyond the perfection of yesterday, Ellerslie was a re- markable house in a very fine situation, with turrets and broad embayed windows that looked wide over land and sea. Sir Joseph owned most of the land to be seen from those windows, and he owned a whole district of collieries and colliers' cottages, which were happily unseen by the inmates of Ellerslie, and which lay in the furthermost dip of the A MARIAGE DE CONYEXAXCE. 69 long, low hill. He was the wealthiest man and the largest landowner in that part of the county, and he was not without his enemies — no pros- perous man ever escapes the hatred of the un- successful. ''It is the bright day that brings forth the adder." Sir Joseph was as popular as most county magistrates and employers of labour ; but it was said of him that he was a hard man, and that he never accepted less than twelve pence for his shilling. He had begun life as a toiler in those pits of which he was now owner. It was said of him that everything he touched turned to gold; that he had Satan's luck as well as his own ; but this is an assertion commonly made about every man who from small beginnings attains to gigantic wealth. The world sees only the speculator's success, but does not see, or at least readily forgets, the failures and disappointments that made the game of speculation difficult. It keeps no count of the hours of heart-sinking when the fortune already won trembled in the balance, and when 70 THOU ART THE JNIAN. it was only by hazarding all that the game could be saved. Joseph Higginson was talked of as a modern Midas ; and very few people knew or remembered how many an arduous stage there had been on that long uphill road to the pinnacle of success. He knew and remembered that he had been more than once on the verge of bank- ruptcy, and that he had more than once risked the game of life upon a single throw. He had shown himself a man of infinite resources, keen observation, and he was said to have had the gift of prophecy in a degree granted to but few financiers. He had reached the age of forty-nine, ostensi- bly a bachelor, and had gratified his nephews and nieces, most of whom he had helped to rise considerably from their original status, by the assertion, often repeated, that he never would marry, when a chance meeting in the board- room of an insurance company, where he was chairman, brought about an acquaintance with Lord Allandale, who was one of the directors. A MARIAGE DE CONVENAXCE. 71 Your impecunious nobleman is apt to incline towards the low-born millionaire, and Allandale flattered Sir Joseph by telling him how much he had heard about his work in the North, and how interested he was in seeing the man who had done such good work An invitation to a little dinner at the small house in Hertford Street followed a few days later. It was a man's dinner, and Sir Joseph hardly hoped to see the ladies of the family; but four out of the party of six left soon after ten o'clock — three to go to the House, where there was an important division coming on, and the fourth to look in at three or four smart dances — whereupon Lord Allan- dale proposed an adjournment to the drawing- room. " I don't know whether you know my wife," he said. " She goes out a good deal oftener than I do ? " "I have met her ladyship at parties, but I have never had the honour of an introduction," answered Sir Joseph, meekly. 72 THOU ART THE MAN. " Come up and be introduced now," said the Earl, cheerily. Sir Joseph laid down his half-smoked cigar in the old Derby dessert-i^late. He had observed that in noble families, however impecunious, one always found old china and Queen Anne silver, to excite the envy of the newly rich. He laid down his cigar, and pulled himself together, smoothing down the wrinkles in his white waistcoat. He was a stout man, short-necked, broad- shouldered, and always wore a white waistcoat, whether the thing were in or out of fashion, excellent or intolerable. He followed his host up the narrow Mayfair staircase, which was decorated with those shabby old pictures and engravings of country houses which indicate family possessions and a long history. How different, he thought, to his staircase in Arlington Street, where all was newly splendid, created as it were by one sweep of the up- holsterer's hand, all at a blow ! Here, portraits. A MARIAGE DE CONVEXAXCE.