Page:Once a Week Jun to Dec 1864.pdf/31

16 I’d give a great deal out of my pocket if she were Lady Laura Anybody-else.”

“You’ll have to forgive her, I suppose. What a handsome girl she is!”

“No, I shan’t have to forgive her,” returned the earl, much offended at the suggestion. “I don’t intend to forgive her.”

Brave words, no doubt. But who knows what might have come of the interview had that pony carriage been allowed to stop? It might have been a turning point in Laura’s life, might have led to a reconciliation—for Lord Oakburn’s bark was worse than his bite, and he did love his children. But Laura Carlton, in her startled fear at seeing him so close to her, had herself given the check and the impetus, and the opportunity was gone by for ever.

“What brings her at Pembury?” growled the earl, as they drove through the park.

“I can’t tell,” replied Sir James. “I conclude she must be visiting at my brother’s.”

“I didn’t know she knew them,” was the comment of the earl. “Forgive a clandestine marriage! No, never!”

Brave words again of the Earl of Oakburn’s. Clandestine marriages are not good in themselves, and they often work incalculable ill, entailing embarrassing consequences on more than one generation, But the condemnation would have come with better grace from another than Lord Oakburn, seeing that he was contemplating something of the sort on his own account.

He slept one night at Chesney Oaks, and then he concluded his visit. Sir James Warden was surprised and vexed at the abrupt termination. He set it down to the unwelcome presence of the earl’s rebellious daughter at Pembury, and he pressed Lord Oakburn’s hand at parting, and begged him to come again shortly, at a more convenient period.

But most likely Lord Oakburn had never intended a longer stay. The probabilities were—it’s hard, you know, to have to write it of a middle-aged earl, a member of the sedate and honourable Upper House—that he had only taken Chesney Oaks as a blind to his daughters on his way to Miss Lethwait. For his real visit was to her.

Chesney Oaks was situated in quite an opposite part of the kingdom to Twifford vicarage, but by taking advantage of cross rails, Lord Oakburn contrived to reach Twifford late that same night. He did not intrude on them until the following morning. The house, a low one, covered with ivy, was small and unpretending, but exceedingly picturesque; its garden was beautiful, and the birds made their nests and sang in the clustering trees that surrounded the lawn and flowers.

In features they were very much alike, but in figure no two could be much more dissimilar than the father and daughter. The vicar was a little shrukenshrunken [sic] man, particularly timid in manner; his daughter magnificent as a queen. If she had looked queenly in the handsomely proportioned rooms of the earl’s town house, how much more so did she look in the miniature little parlour of the vicarage.

Lord Oakburn entered upon his business in his usual blunt fashion. He had come down, he said, to make acquaintance with Mr. Lethwait, and to know when the wedding was to be.

The vicar replied by stating that Eliza had told him all. And he, the father, was deeply sensible of the honour done her by the Earl of Oakburn, and that he himself should be proud and pleased to see her his wife; but that he felt a scruple upon the point, as did Eliza. He felt that her entrance into the family might be very objectionable to the earl’s daughters.

And, knowing what you do know of the earl, you may be sure that that speech was the signal for an outburst. He poured forth a torrent of angry eloquence in his peculiar manner, so completely annihilating every argument but his own, that the timid clergyman never dared to utter another word of objection. The earl must have it his own way: as it had been pretty sure from the first he would have it.

“Eliza has been a good and dutiful daughter, my lord,” said the vicar, who in his retired life, his humble home, had hardly ever been brought into contact with one of the earl’s social degree. “My living has been very small, and my expenses have been inevitably large—that is, large for one in my position. The last years of my wife’s life were years of illness; she suffered from a complaint that required constant medical attendance and expensive nourishment, and Eliza was to us throughout almost as a guardian angel. Every penny she could spare from her own absolute expenses, she sent to us. She has put up with undesirable places where the discomforts were great, the insults hard to be borne, and would not throw herself out, lest we might suffer. She has been a good daughter,” he emphatically added; “she will, I hesitate not to say it, make a good wife. And if only your lordship’s daughters will”

Another interrupting burst from his lordship: his daughters had nothing to do with it, and he did not intend that they should have. And the vicar was finally silenced.