Page:Once a Week Volume 8.djvu/556

548 the shadow of its wooden pent-house without apparently producing the faintest impression upon the aural nerves of the two superannuated guardians of the mansion. But at last the day came upon which Mr. Monckton grew tired of his London dwelling-place in a dingy square in Bloomsbury, and determined to take possession of his Berkshire estate. He sent a couple of upholsterers to Tolldale Priory, with strict injunctions to set the old furniture in order, but to do nothing more; not so much as to alter the adjustment of a curtain or the accustomed position of a chair or table.

Perhaps he wished to see the familiar rooms looking exactly as they had looked when he had sat by Margaret Ravenshaw’s side, a bright and hopeful lad of twenty. He kept the snuff-taking old housekeeper and the deaf gardener, and brought his own small staff of well-trained servants from London. The town-bred servants would have willingly rebelled against their new dwelling-place, and the verdant shades that seemed to shut them in from the outer world; but their wages were too liberal to be resigned for any but a very powerful reason, and they submitted as best they could to the dreary solitude of their new abode:

Mr. Monckton travelled backwards and forwards between Tolldale and London almost every day, driving to the station in his phaeton in the morning, and being met by his groom on his return in the evening. The lawyer’s professional duties had taxed his strength to the utmost, and grave physicians had prescribed country air and occasional repose as absolutely necessary to him. For nearly ten years, therefore, he had lived at the Priory, forming few acquaintances, and positively no friends. His most intimate associates had been the De Crespignys. This had no doubt arisen from the circumstance of the Woodlands estate adjoining Tolldale. Mr. Monckton accepted the acquaintances whom accident forced upon him, but he sought none. Those who knew him best said that the shadow which had so early fallen upon his life had never passed away.

Of course Eleanor Vane had heard these things during her residence at Hazlewood. The knowledge of them invested the grave lawyer with a halo of romance in her girlish eyes. He, like herself, had his secret, and kept it faithfully.

drove her son and the two girls to Tolldale Priory in accordance with Mr. Monckton’s wish. The widow had no particular desire to bring either Laura or Eleanor into contact with her uncle, Maurice de Crespigny, for she nourished that intense jealousy of all visitors who crossed the threshold of the old man’s house, which is only known to expectant heirs whose chances of a fortune tremble in the wavering balance of an invalid’s caprice. But Mrs. Darrell could not afford to offend Mr. Monckton. He paid a high price for her protection of his ward, and was by no means the sort of man to be thwarted with impunity.

Launcelot Darrell lolled by his mother’s side, smoking a cigar and taking very little notice of the blossoming hedgerows and glimpses of luxuriant pastoral landscape. The two young ladies sat upon a low seat, with their backs to the ponies, and had therefore ample opportunity of observing the prodigal son’s face.

For the first time since Mr. Darrell’s return Eleanor Vane did watch that handsome face, seeking in it for some evidence of those words which Gilbert Monckton had spoken to her the day before.

“He is selfish, and shallow, and frivolous; false, I think, as well; more than this, he has a secret—a secret connected with his Indian experiences.”

This is what Mr. Monckton had said. Eleanor asked herself what right he had to say so much?

It was scarcely likely that a girl of Eleanor’s age, so unaccustomed to all society, so shut in from the outer world by her narrow and secluded life, could fail to be a little interested in the handsome stranger, whose advent had not been without a tinge of romance. She was interested in him, and all the more so because of that which Gilbert Monckton had said to her. There was a secret in Launcelot Darrell’s life. How strange this was! Had every creature a secret, part of themselves, hidden deep in their breasts, like that dark purpose of her own that had grown out of the misery of her father’s untimely death—some buried memory, whose influence was to overshadow all their lives?

She looked at the young man’s face. It had an expression of half-defiant recklessness which seemed almost habitual to it; but it was not the face of a happy man.

Laura Mason was the only person who talked much during that drive to Tolldale. That young lady’s tongue ran on in a pretty, incessant babble, about nothing in particular. The wild flowers in the hedgerows, the distant glimpses of country, the light clouds floating in the summer sky, the flaming poppies in the yellowing corn, the noisy fowl upon the margin of a pond, the shaggy horses looking over farm-yard gates,—every object, animate and inanimate, between Hazlewood and Tolldale was the subject of Miss Mason’s remark. Launcelot Darrell looked at her now and then with an expression of half-admiring amusement, and sometimes aroused himself to talk to her; but only to relapse very quickly into a half-contemptuous, half-sulky silence.

Mr. Monckton received his guests in a long low library, looking out into the neglected garden; a dusky chamber, darkened by the shadows of trailing parasites that hung over the narrow windows. But this room was an especial favourite with the grave master of the house. It was here he sat during the long lonely evenings that he spent at home. The drawing-rooms on the first-floor were only used upon those rare occasions when the lawyer opened his house to his friends of long standing, dashing clients, who were very well pleased to get a week’s shooting in the woody coverts about the Priory.

Neither Laura nor Eleanor felt very enthusiastic about the Raphael, which seemed to the two girls to represent an angular and rather repellent type of female beauty, but Launcelot