Page:Once a Week, Series 1, Volume II Dec 1859 to June 1860.pdf/328

 7, 1860.] smile, and rode at the little lad, to whom she was saying: “Here, bonny boy, this will buy you—”

She stopped, and coloured.

“Evan!”

The child descended rapidly to the ground.

A bow and a few murmured words replied to her.

“Isn’t this just like you, my dear Evan? Shouldn’t I know that whenever I met you, you would be doing something kind? How did you come here? You were on your way to Beckley!”

“To London,” said Evan.

“To London! and not coming over to see me—us?”

Here the little fellow’s father intervened to claim his offspring, and thank the lady and the gentleman; and, with his penny firmly grasped, he who had brought the lady and the gentleman together, was borne off a wealthy human creature.

Before much further could be said between them, the Countess de Saldar drove up.

“My dearest Rose!” and “My dear Countess!” and “Not Louisa, then?” and, “I am very glad to see you!” without attempting the endearing “Louisa”—passed.

The Countess de Saldar then admitted the presence of her brother.

“Think!” said Rose. “He talks of going on straight from here to London.”

“That pretty feminine pout will alone suffice to make him deviate, then,” said the Countess, with her sweetest open slyness. “I am now on the point of accepting your most kind invitation. Our foreign habits allow us to visit—thus early! He will come with me.”

Evan tried to look firm, and speak as he was trying to look. Rose fell to entreaty, and from entreaty rose to command; and in both was utterly fascinating to the poor youth. Luxuriously—while he hesitated and dwelt on this and that faint objection—his spirit drank the delicious changes of her face. To have her face before him but one day seemed so rich a boon to deny himself, that he was beginning to wonder at his constancy in refusal; and now that she spoke to him so pressingly, devoting her guileless eyes to him alone, he forgot a certain envious feeling that had possessed him while she was rattling among the other males—a doubt whether she ever cast a thought on Mr. Evan Harrington.

“Yes: he will come,” cried Rose; “and he shall ride home with me and my friend Drummond; and he shall have my groom’s horse, if he doesn’t mind. Bob can ride home in the cart with Polly, my maid; and he’ll like that, because Polly’s always good fun—when they’re not in love with her. Then, of course, she torments them.”

“Naturally,” said the Countess.

Mr. Evan Harrington’s final objection, based on his not having clothes, and so forth, was met by his foreseeing sister.

“I have your portmanteau packed, in with me, my dear brother; Conning has her feet on it. I divined that I should overtake you.”

Evan felt he was in the toils. After a struggle or two he yielded; and, having yielded, did it with grace. In a moment, and with a power of self-compression equal to that of the adept Countess, he threw off his moodiness as easily as if it had been his Spanish mantle, and assumed a gaiety that made the Countess’s eyes beam rapturously upon him, and was pleasing to Rose, apart from the lead in admiration the Countess had given her—not for the first time. We mortals, the best of us, may be silly sheep in our likes and dislikes: where there is no premeditated or instinctive antagonism, we can be led into warm acknowledgment of merits we have not sounded. This the Countess de Saldar knew right well.

Rose now intimated her wish to perform the ceremony of introduction between her aunt and uncle present, and the visitors to Beckley Court. The Countess smiled, and in the few paces that separated the two groups, whispered her brother: “Miss Jocelyn, my dear.”

The eye-glasses of the Beckley group were dropped with one accord. The ceremony was gone through. The softly-shadowed differences of a grand manner addressed to ladies, and to males, were exquisitely accomplished by the Countess de Saldar.

“Harrington? Harrington?” her quick ear caught on the mouth of squire Uploft, scanning Evan.

Her accent was very foreign, as she said aloud: “We are entirely strangers to your game—your creeckèt. My brother and myself are scarcely English. Nothing save diplomacy are we adepts in!”

“You must be excessively dangerous, madam,” said Sir George, hat in air.

“Even in that, I fear, we are babes and sucklings, and might take many a lesson from you. Will you instruct me in your creeckèt? What are they doing now? It seems very unintelligible—indistinct—is it not?”

Inasmuch as Farmer Broadmead and Master Nat Hodges were surrounded by a clamorous mob, shouting both sides of the case, as if the loudest and longest-winded were sure to wrest a favourable judgment from those two infallible authorities on the laws of cricket, the noble game was certainly in a state of indistinctness.

The squire came forward to explain, piteously entreated not to expect too much from a woman’s inapprehensive arts, which he plainly promised (under eyes that had melted harder men) he would not. His forbearance and bucolic gallantry were needed, for he had the Countess’s radiant full visage alone. Her senses were dancing in her right ear, which had heard the name of Lady Roseley pronounced, and a voice respond to it from the carriage.

Into what a pit had she suddenly plunged! You ask why she did not drive away as fast as the horses would carry her, and fly the veiled head of Demogorgon obscuring valley and hill and the shining firmament, and threatening to glare destruction on her? You do not know an intriguer. She relinquishes the joys of life for the joys of intrigue. This is her element. The Countess did feel that the heavens were hard on her. She resolved none the less to fight her way to her object; for where so much had conspired