Read Ebook: Micah Clarke - Tome I Les recrues de Monmouth by Doyle Arthur Conan Savine Albert Translator

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Ebook has 1773 lines and 66823 words, and 36 pages

"Mrs. Hathaway?" he said politely, with interrogative accent.

"No, I am not Mrs. Hathaway," was the reply, in a subdued voice, and the furtive eyes scanned the visitor's face. "I am only Mrs. Hathaway's companion--Mrs. Artress. Mrs. Hathaway has just received your card. She will be out directly."

The words were scarcely spoken when the door of an inner room opened, and Mrs. Hathaway made her appearance.

Sir Harold stood up, bowing.

She was not dressed in mourning, and it was probable, therefore, that her widowhood was not of recent beginning. She was clothed in an exquisitely embroidered morning dress of white, which trailed on the floor, and was relieved with ornaments of pale pink coral, and a broad coral-colored sash at her waist.

The lady sprang forward after an impulsive fashion, and clasped the baronet's hands in both her own. Her black eyes flooded with tears. And then, in a broken voice, she thanked her preserver for his gallant conduct on the previous evening assuring him that her gratitude would outlast her life. Her protestations and gratitude were not overdone, and unsuspecting Sir Harold accepted them as genuine, even while they embarrassed him.

He remained an hour, finding Mrs. Hathaway charming company and thoroughly fascinating. The companion sat apart, silent, busy with embroidery, a mere gray shadow; but her presence gave an easy unconstraint to both the baronet and the lady. When Sir Harold took his departure, sauntering down to the German Spa, he carried with him the abiding memory of Mrs. Hathaway's handsome brunette face and liquid black eyes, and thought himself that she was the most charming woman he had met for years.

From that day, throughout the season, the baronet was a frequent visitor at Mrs. Hathaway's private parlor. The gray companion was always at hand to play propriety, and the tongues of gossips, though busy, had no malevolence in them. Sir Harold had his own horses at Brighton, and placed one at Mrs. Hathaway's disposal. The widow accepted it, procured a bewitching costume from town, and had daily rides with the baronet. She also drove with him in his open, low carriage, and bowed right and left to her acquaintances upon such occasions with the gracious condescension of a princess. She sailed with him in his graceful yacht, upon day's excursions, her companion always accompanying, and rumor at length declared that the pair were engaged to be married.

Sir Harold heard the reports, and they set him thinking. The society of Mrs. Hathaway had become necessary to him. She understood his tastes, studying them with a flattery so delicate that he was pleased without understanding it. She read his favorite books, played his favorite music, and displayed talents of no mean order. She was fitted to adorn any position, however high, and Sir Harold thought with a pleasant thrill at his heart, how royally she would reign over his beautiful home.

In short, questioning his own heart, he found that he had worshiped his dead wife, who would be to him always young, as when he had buried her--but with the passion of later manhood, an exacting, jealous yearning affection, which gives all and demands all. With his children far from him, his life had been lonely, and he had known many desolate hours, when he would have given half his wealth for sympathy and love.

"I shall find both in Octavia," he thought, his noble face brightening. "I shall not wrong my children in marrying her. My son will be my heir. My daughter's fortune will not be imperilled by my second marriage. Neva is sixteen, and in two years more will come home. How can I do better for her than to give her a beautiful mother, young enough to win her confidence, old enough to be her guide? Octavia would love my girl, and would be her best chaperon in society, to which Neva must be by and by introduced. I should find in Octavia then a mother for my daughter, and a gentle loving wife and companion for myself. But will she accept me?"

He put the question to the test that very evening. He found the handsome widow alone in her parlor, the gray companion being for once absent, and he told her his love with a tremulous ardor and passion that it would have been the glory of a good woman to have evoked from a nature so grand as Sir Harold's.

The fascinating widow blushed and smiled assent, and her black-tressed head drooped to his shoulder, and Sir Harold clasped her in his arms as his betrothed wife.

With a lover's impetuosity he begged her to marry him at an early day. She hesitated coyly, as if for months she had not been striving and praying for this hour, and then was won to consent to marry him a month thence.

"I am alone in the world, and have no one to consult," she sighed. "I have an old aunt, a perfect miser, who lives in Bloomsbury Square, in London. She will permit me to be married from her house, as I was before. The marriage will have to be very quiet, for she is averse to display and expense. However, what she saves will come to me some day, so I need not complain. I shall want to keep Artress with me, Sir Harold. I can see that you don't like her, but she has been a faithful friend to me in all my troubles, and I cannot abandon her when prosperity smiles so splendidly upon me. I may keep her, may I not?"

Thus appealed to, Sir Harold smothered his dislike of the gray companion, and consented that she should become an inmate of his house.

Mrs. Hathaway proceeded to explain the causes of her friendlessness. She was an orphan, and had early married the Honorable Charles Hathaway, the younger son of a Viscount, who had died five years before. The Honorable Charles had been a dissipated spendthrift, and had left his wife the meagre income of some three hundred pounds a year. Her elegant clothing was, for the most part, relics of better days. As to the expensive style in which she lived, keeping a companion and maid, no one knew, save herself and one other, how she managed to support it. Her name and reputation were unblemished, and the most censorious tongue had nothing to say against her.

And yet she was none the less an unscrupulous, unprincipled adventuress.

This was the woman, the noble, gallant baronet proposed to take to his bosom as his wife, to endow with his name and wealth, to make the mother and guide of his pure young daughter. Would the sacrifice of the generous, unsuspected lover be permitted?

Sir Harold's son and heir was in India, and his daughter had not been summoned from her boarding-school in Paris. The baronet's tender father soul yearned for his daughter's presence at his second marriage; but Lady Wynde had urged that Neva's studies should not be interrupted, and had begged, as a personal favor, that her meeting with her young step-daughter might be delayed until her ladyship had become used to her new position. She professed to be timid and shrinking in regard to the meeting with Neva, and Sir Harold, in his passionate love for Octavia, put aside his own wishes, yielding to her request. But he had written to his daughter, announcing his intended second marriage, and had received in reply a tender, loving letter full of earnest prayers for his happiness, and expressing the kindest feelings toward the expected step-mother.

The words were spoken that made the strangely assorted pair one flesh. As the bride arose from her knees the wife of a wealthy baronet, the wearer of a title, the handsome face was lighted by a triumphant glow, her black eyes emitted a singular, exultant gleam, and a conscious triumph pervaded her manner.

She had played the first part of a daring game--and she had won!

As she passed into the vestry to sign the marriage register, leaning proudly upon the arm of her newly made husband, and followed by her few attending personal friends, a man who had witnessed the ceremony from behind a clustered pillar in the church, stole out into the square, his face lighted by a lurid smile, his eyes emitting the same peculiar, exultant gleam as the bride's had done.

This man was the tall, fair-haired gentleman, with waxed mustaches, sinister eyes and cynical smile, who, nearly three months before, had witnessed from the pier head at Brighton the rescue of Mrs. Hathaway from the sea by Sir Harold Wynde. And now this man muttered:

"The game prospers. Octavia is Lady Wynde. The first act is played. The next act requires more time, deliberation, caution. Every move must be considered carefully. We are bound to win the entire game."

Sir Harold and Lady Wynde ate their wedding breakfast in Bloomsbury Square, at the house of Lady Wynde's miserly aunt, Mrs. Hyde. A few of the baronet's choice friends were present. The absence of Sir Harold's daughter was not especially remarked save by the father, who longed with an anxious longing to see her face smiling upon him, and to hear her young voice whispering congratulations upon his second marriage. Neva had been especially near and dear to him. Her mother had died in her babyhood, and he had been both father and mother to his girl. He had early sent his son to school, but Neva he had kept with him until, a year before, his first wife's relatives had urged him to send her to a "finishing school" at Paris, and he had reluctantly yielded. Not even his passionate love for his bride could overcome or lessen the fatherly love and tenderness of years.

Immediately after the breakfast the newly married pair proceeded to Canterbury by special train. The gray companion and Lady Wynde's maid traveled in another compartment of the same coach. The Hawkhurst carriage was in waiting for the bridal pair at the station. Sir Harold assisted his wife into it, addressed a few kindly words to the old coachman on the box, and entered the vehicle. The gray companion and the maid entered a dog-cart, also in waiting. Hawkhurst was several miles distant, but the country between it and Canterbury was a charming one, and Lady Wynde found sufficient enjoyment in looking at the handsome seats, the trim hedges, and thrifty hop-gardens, and in wondering if Hawkhurst would realize her expectations. She found indeed more enjoyment in her own speculations than in the society of her husband.

About five o'clock of the afternoon, the bridal pair came in sight of the ancestral home of the Wynde's. The top of the low barouche was lowered and Sir Harold pointed out her future home to his bride with pardonable pride, and she surveyed it with eager eyes.

It was, as we have said, a magnificent estate, divided into numerous farms of goodly size. The home grounds of Hawkhurst proper, including the fields, pastures, meadows, parks, woods, plantations and gardens, comprised about four hundred acres. The mansion stood upon a ridge of ground some half a mile wide, and was seen from several points at a distance of three or four miles. It was a grand old building of gray stone, with a long facade, and was three stories in height. Its turrets and chimneys were noted for their picturesqueness. Its carved stone porches, its quaint wide windows, its steep roof, from which pert dormer-windows, saucily projected, were remarkable for their beauty or oddity. Despite its age, and its air of grandeur and stateliness, there was a home-like look about the great mansion that Lady Wynde did not fail to perceive at the first glance.

The house was flanked on either side by glass pineries, grape houses, hothouses, greenhouses and similar buildings. Further to the left of the dwelling, beyond the sunny gardens, was the great park, intersected with walks and drives, having a lake somewhere in the umbrageous depths, and herds of fallow-deer browsing on its herbage. In the rear of the house, built in the form of a quadrangle, of gray stone, were the handsome stables and offices of various descriptions. The mansion with its dependencies covered a great deal of ground, and presented an imposing appearance.

The house was approached by a shaded drive a half mile or more in length, which traversed a smooth green lawn dotted here and there with trees. A pair of bronze gates, protected and attended by a picturesque gray stone lodge, gave ingress to the grounds.

These gates swung open at the approach of Sir Harold Wynde and his bride, and the gate-keeper and his family came out bowing and smiling, to welcome home the future lady of Hawkhurst. Lady Wynde returned their greetings with graceful condescension, and then, as the carriage entered the drive, she fixed her eager eyes upon the long gray facade of the mansion, and said:

"It is beautiful--magnificent! You never did justice to its grandeurs, Harold, in describing Hawkhurst. It is strange that a house so large, and of such architectural pretension, should have such a bright and sunny appearance. The sunlight must flood every room in that glorious front. I should like to live all my days at Hawkhurst!"

"Your dower house will be as pleasant a home as this although not so pretentious," said Sir Harold, smiling gravely. "It is probable that you being twenty years my junior, will survive me, Octavia, and therefore I have settled upon you for your life use in your possible widowhood one of my prettiest places, and one which has served for many generations as the residence of the dowager widows of our family."

The glow on Lady Wynde's face faded a little, and her lips slightly compressed themselves, as they were wont to do when she was ill pleased.

"I have never asked you about your property, Harold," she remarked, "but your wife need be restrained from doing so by no sense of delicacy. I suppose your property is entailed?"

"Hawkhurst is entailed, but it will fall to the female line in case of the dying out of heirs male," replied the baronet, not marking his bride's scarcely suppressed eagerness. "It has belonged to our family from time immemorial, and was a royal grant to one of our ancestors who saved his monarch's life at risk of his own. Thus, at my death, Hawkhurst will go, with the title, to my son. If George should die, without issue, Hawkhurst--without the title, which is a separate affair--will go to my daughter."

"A weighty inheritance for a girl," remarked Lady Wynde. "And--and if she should die without issue?"

"The estate would go to distant cousins of mine."

Lady Wynde started. This was evidently an unexpected reply, and she could not repress her looks of disappointment.

"I--I should think your wife would come before your cousins," she murmured.

"How little you know about law, Octavia," said the baronet, with a grave, gentle smile. "The property must go to those of our blood. If our union is blessed with children, the eldest of them would inherit Hawkhurst before my cousins. But although the law has proclaimed us one flesh, yet it does not allow you to become the heir of my entailed property. It is singular even that a daughter is permitted to inherit before male cousins, but there was a clause in the royal deed of gift of Hawkhurst to my ancestors that gave the property to females in the direct line, in default of male heirs, but there has never been a female proprietor of the estate. I hope there never may be. I should hate to have the old name die out of the old place. But here we are at the house. Welcome home, my beautiful wife!"

The carriage stopped in the porch, and Sir Harold alighted and assisted out his bride. He drew her arm through his and led her up the lofty flight of stone steps, and in at the arched and open door-way. The servants were assembled to welcome home their lady, and the baronet uttered the necessary words of introduction and conducted his bride to the drawing-room.

This was an immensely long apartment, with nine wide windows on its eastern side looking out upon gardens and park. Sculptured arches, supported by slender columns of alabaster, relieved the long vista, and curtains depending from them were capable of dividing the grand room into three handsome ones. The drawing-room was furnished in modern style, and was all gayety, brightness and beauty. The furniture, of daintiest satin-wood, was upholstered in pale blue silk. The carpet, of softest gray hue, was bordered with blue.

"It is very lovely," commented the bride. "And that is a conservatory at the end? I shall be very happy here, Harold."

"I hope so," was the earnest response. "But let me take you up to your own rooms, Octavia. They have been newly furnished for your occupancy."

He gave her his arm and conducted her out into the wide hall, with its tesselated floor, up the wide marble staircase, to a suit of rooms directly over the drawing-room.

This suit comprised sitting-room, bedroom, dressing-room and bath-room. Their upholstery was of a vivid crimson hue. A faultless taste had guided the selection of the various adornments, and Lady Wynde's eyes kindled with appreciation as she marked the costliness and beauty of everything around her.

"Your trunks have arrived in the wagon, Octavia," said her husband, well pleased with her commendations. "Mrs. Artress and your maid, who came on in the dog-cart, have also arrived. Dinner has been ordered at seven. I will leave you to dress. And, by the way, should you have need of me, my dressing-room adjoins your own."

He went out. Lady Wynde rang for her maid and her gray companion, and dressed for dinner. When her toilet was made, the baronet's bride dismissed her maid and came out into her warm-hued sitting room, where Mrs. Artress sat by a window looking out into the leafy shadows of the park.

"Well?" said the beauty interrogatively. "What do you think? Have I not been successful?"

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