Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v108.djvu/576

542 the sheriffs at Rye often, but always at dusk and so forth.

The news that after three years a guest, and one who was not of the neighhorhood, should he admitted to Pages caused positive sensation in Kye, in Winehelsea, in Ashford, and the length of the Marshes from Ore to Littlestone, from Bodiam to the Rother's mouth.

The Lady Clemency thought only of the enterprise before her, the splendid welcome, the audacious stroke by which she would once and for all gain possession of the man for whom her whole being yearned these long five years. For so many months had she anticipated such preparation, and now that it summoned her energy and wit, her supreme discretion, she was almost overweighted by its detail. No one, except the old steward, who knew all her story, could have told that anything more than sheer business braced her at this moment. In the dairy, in the kitchens, in the stable, in the court itself, she had her finger upon everything, caring for each pan or caldron, each scrap of harness or well-packed press, as in the old days, when it was her joy to see that everything at Pages Court, from the smallest nail-head to the largest sconce, reflected the honor and beauty of her brother, its lord. Compared with him, other men had meant so little to her. He was her joy and her delight—nay, a holy charge—this boy five years her junior, born when his mother died, and commended to Clemency's care by their dead father. No man ever seemed to her so innocently gay, so passionately honorable, so delicately sensitive, but without effeminacy, as this boy, Ludlow Debonair Honeyfoot.

Clemency thought much in these days of the sudden change in their relationship which his coming of age had brought, remembering how she, till then the adviser of the boy, the head of Pages and all its tenants, had in a twinkling become only the secondary personage in authority, the mouthpiece of the boy's wishes. She welcomed the change, for it left her the more freedom for those cares and graces which were due to her brother's guests from the lady of Pages. The Earl ere he was seventeen had learned to spend and to give in a month more than his ancestors could have earned in six, and Clemency had made many a painful sacrifice in the latter years. Women adored him; men—even the hardest, the most conscienceless—would go out of their way to do him a service, even to the risking of their own necks. And he was partial to neither this woman nor that, neither more nor less than each man's perfect comrade—unless there was between him and Otway Romilly, the soldier, more tenderness than is usual between average good fellows.

She remembered the sudden revulsion of feeling, the shock of glad surprise, when their fortunes bettered. She remembered, with a sudden spasm of the heart, the very moment at which she had news of it.—when, seated by her window one cold spring evening, she slaved at the stitching of a new riding-vest for the boy, cut out of a skirt of her own. She listened now, breathless, for it seemed she could actually hear that swinging step of his as he raced up the stairs, burst into her room, tossed the stitching and needles and threads right and left, and poured into her lap many coins, and more gold than she had seen in one place for at least two years. Then came the delirium, the laughter, her inquiries, his mysterious evasions, her anxious wonder and fears—all allayed at last by his loving assurance that all was well, his creditors paid, and his own bad debts made good to him by the help of some genial friend whose name he must not yet divulge. "Honest gold, honestly come by." How those words, often repeated, were burnt in upon her brain! Then the dazzling gayety of the days which followed—days which told the round of the year in a circle of innocent joys, pretty extravagances, happy anticipations, days when Pages stood open to many a friend and many a stranger, days when it seemed to the lady of Pages that time halted; others full of strange surprises, half fearful, half delicious, holding hours in which her thoughts absolutely forgot for a time the dear young Earl, because intercourse with the closer of his friends—this Otway Romilly—was so different from anything else of the kind in her experience. These memories culminated in the shock of sharp disappointment that overwhelm-