A Deputy Providence

Chapter I

A man and a maid were walking side by side early on a late autumn morning in a mid-English landscape, while the dews yet sparkled frostily on the crisp grasses, and the upper air was still rich with the strains of the conscientious lark earning his breakfast. The young man was attired in boating flannels and a blazer of many colours, and wore a hat of soft grey felt at the back of a mass of crisply curling brown hair. He was spare and athletic of build, and bronzed and ruddy with open air life. He carried a porte-couleur and a small sketch block in his hand, and a B campstool was slung upon his shoulder by one of the cross-straps which served as the seat. There was upon his face an air of nervousness and irresolution which any moderately acute observer would have felt at once to be altogether strange to it, and as he walked by his companion's side he shot a quick glance at her from time to time, gnawing his moustache meanwhile, like a man burdened by words he finds it difficult to speak.

The lady, who was some half-dozen years his junior, moved beside him with an air of contented abstraction and ignorance of the young man's symptoms of disquietude, which was perhaps a shade too perfect to be real. She was remarkably pretty and graceful, of that unmistakably English type which M. Du Maurier delights to draw, with a figure at once slight and full, and a face of great sweetness, wherein the tremulous sensi bility of the lips was contradicted by a demure twinkle of repressed humour in the eyes, bespeaking a combination of qualities unusually dangerous to the peace of male humanity. For Nature, who delights in the maintenance of ticklish balances, has left the eternal war of the sexes, waged with undiminished fierceness by every generation since the days of Adam, undecided to the credit of either contending party by a nice distribution of gifts and graces to each.

Humour, wThich philosophers have universally determined to be a masculine endowment — while recognizing the very occasional exceptions which support the rule — is a quality of such tremendous importance that, were it ever to become common among women, the earth and the fulness thereof would be indisputably theirs, and man would fall to the position of a mere supernumerary slave. To make the reader a present of a secret which he would in any case have guessed for himself before long, the man was in love with the maid, and had come out upon this early morning walk fired b with the most valorous intention of telling her so. He had formed the same resolu tion so often before, and always, as it seemed in the absence of the object of his dreams, in so fixed and final a manner, and had allowed so many opportunities to escape him, that he was beginning to think the tongue-tied cowardice, which afflicted him in her presence, chronic and incurable, and to abuse himself as an ass and poltroon, unworthy of the affection of any girl, not to say of such a paragon of feminine per fection as, for the time being, he thought his companion of the moment.

They had been walking side by side for ten minutes without speaking a word, and every additional second of silence was an added embarrassment. With such momentous issues at stake, how can a man talk commonplace ? Half-a-dozen times in that brief space the words he longed to speak had thrilled at his lips, and each time had been swallowed back with a heart-pang of mingled relief and despair. He felt half angry with the girl, that the face at which he sent so many veiled glances should look so tranquilly unsus picious of his tremors. The fields through which this interest ing couple were walking were bordered by a public road, from which they were divided by a flowering hedge of unequal height. The road was inch-deep with dry summer dust, so that a light trap pro ceeding along it at an easy jog trot made no noise sufficiently loud to warn the young people of the near presence of a possible observer.

In the trap was seated a ponderous elderly man, clad in black broadcloth and a high hat of lustrous silk. This person, idly scanning the prospect as he jogged along with the reins hanging loosely from his hand, caught sight of the occupants of the field through a chance gap in the hedge, and pulled in his horse with a sharp and sudden tug. The better to identify the couple who thus so stirred his interest, he rose upright in the trap, and viewed them for a good minute under the arch of a gnarled and heavy hand. " Humph ! " he said, in an undertone, and dropping back into his seat, lightly flicked the horse's flank, and pursued his noiseless course with a face suddenly gone thoughtful. In that mood his eyebrows, which were abnormally thick and inky black, came together over a corrugated knot at the root of a big and self-opinion ated nose, and the thin, wide lips met so closely that the respectable whisps of iron grey hair which decorated his otherwise clean-shaven face bristled forward like the whiskers of an angry cat.

The face in repose was kindly enough, though dour and masterful. " That's got to be stopped," he said to himself aloud and decisively, and bestowed a second cut upon the horse, which started into a quick trot at the imperative summons. " What a lovely morning ! " said the young lady presently, with a sigh of con tent. The remark was not startlingly original, and it had been in the young man's mind to offer it himself, but he had rejected it as too stupid and commonplace to serve even as the opening of a conversation from which he expected such vast results. Coming from his companion he hailed it with an amount of pleasure which the most bril liant epigram would not have occasioned from other lips and in other circumstances. The silence had become intolerable, and he had felt hopelessly impotent to break it unassisted.

" Yes," he assented. The sound of his own voice partially banished his misery. " It is more beautiful to me than — than perhaps it is to you." " Yes ? " the girl said. " Why is that ? " " Because it is almost the last — perhaps quite the last — that I may spend here." " Why, I thought you liked the place," said the girl. " You seemed in love with it only a day or two ago." The young man felt flouted and discomfited at this misconstruction of his words. " You know what I mean," he said, with a kind of plaintive sulkiness. " Isn't it rather an Irish way of paying the place a compliment to say you are glad to leave it ? " "I didn't say that." " Something so like it that there wasn't much difference," said the young lady. " Aud then if you do like it why do you leave it ? " " Because I have no choice.

I've got my marching orders." "Who from?" "Mr. Barstow." " Mr. Barstow ! " echoed the girl, looking at him with a face of surprise. " Yes. He gave me a hint last night at dinner — a very gentle one for him — I daresay you know enough of him to guess what his hints are like generally — that my further presence could be dispensed with." " What an old bear ! " said the girl. " Oh, he did it very mildly — for him. He said it was a pity to see a clever young chap like me fooling away my time in the country. I said that my time had been very well employed, and that I had made enough sketches down here to keep me going for a year at least. ' Then I should think you've got enough to go on with,' he said." " And what did you say then ? " " Changed the subject. You should have seen poor Jack's face while his father was talking.

He actually kicked the old man's shins under the table." " I hope it hurt him," said the girl. " Fancy turning a guest out of one's house in that fashion ! " " Oh, he's not a bad sort, old Barstow. His manners have not that repose, etcetera; but he has his good points. I'm just as well pleased not to be in Jack's shoes, though he'll have enough money to make up for any social agonies he has to suffer now when the old man goes. Everything must have a beginning, and Jack is cer tainly a wonderful specimen for the first generation." The girl making no reply to this, they fell back into silence for a time. The young artist had hailed his companion's overture to conversation very gladly, and had got along well enough so long as the theme lasted ; but now the reflection that he had come no nearer to the all-important sub ject to which he had meant to lead the talk dashed him again.

He was not at all like a shy lover to look at, and one or two girls scattered over the face of merry England might have told you that his looks did not belie him in this particular. But in love bashfulness is a barometer. A man is bold or timid according as his desire to conquer is deep or shallow ; and if my personal observation is worth anything, let the maiden beset by a bold and a timid suitor simultaneously, favour the latter, all else being equal. But a young man habituated to taking love as a pastime, and to easy conquests, can be as shy when genuinely in earnest as the most timid young recluse who ever cast a halo of equal divinity around duchess and housemaid, and such hitherto had been this young man's amatory history. He was obviously more than a mere landscape painter ; but then the young lady was more, too, than a mere village maiden.

The off-hand graces which fascinate Lottie the artist's model, and Sukey the milkmaid, would not serve here, and he was rather unskilled in the finer art of making love to a lady. Another hundred yards, very leisurely covered at a pace which grew slower at every step, brought them under the shadow of a clump of trees, by which ran a narrow field path leading to a little gate which opened on the road traversed ten minutes before by the ponderous elderly man in the trap. They paused there. It had been their parting point on their former walks, for beyond it the ground took a gentle rise, A DEPUTY PROVIDENCE. and beyond the little eminence lay the scattered houses of the village of Hargate. " I am sorry you are going," the girl said, lifting her eyes from the ground to his face, and holding out her hand.

" I wonder," he said, taking it in his own, and speaking a little hoarsely, " if you are as sorry as I am." She dropped her eyes again, and the colour in her face fluttered like the flickering shadow on still water. " I am very sorry," she said, and her voice was the firmer of the two. " Are you sorry enough to ask me to stay ? " he asked, tightening his hold on her hand. " But Mr. Barstow says you must go." " Hang- Mr. Barstow ! Miss Fetherston — Nelly — you know what I mean. I've been trying to speak for days past, and I couldn't, but now — the thought of leaving you " He had got his arm about her waist by this time, and the way in which her whole body yielded to the touch left further eloquence unneeded. " Are you happy now ? " she asked, looking up at him a minute later, and for the first time met his lips with no effort to escape.

" You've been looking so wretched lately that I — almost — wished " " You almost wished — what ? " " That it was leap year." The frank ness with which she accepted her happi ness was very pretty to see. "How could you be so stupid, Tom — I can call you Tom, now. I've known for ever so long that you cared for me ; why, couldn't you tell that I — liked you ? " " How could I, when you never gave me a sign ? " " Never gave you a sign ! Why, what sign do you expect a girl to give you ? Didn't I sit next to you in the brake coming home from the picnic, and get Sir John Talbot off with Lucy Moore, after he'd manœuvred for so long to keep the box seat for me ? Haven't I come out A DEPUTY PROVIDENCE. and met you — by accident, of course — every morning for a week past ? Why, things like that are equivalent to a decla ration, from a girl.

To call yourself the superior sex, and not to know what that means ! You don't know much about girls, or else you've met a terrible lot of flirts. Which is it, Tom ? No, you must let me go now. It's getting quite late, and I've a call to make in the village, and I mustn't keep papa waiting for breakfast. Please, Tom, let me go ! " " I'll come with you," he said. She submitted to another embrace, and repaired the havoc it and its predeces sors had made in her hair and dress with so enchanting a blush that the work had to be done all over again, after which they left the clump together, entwined, until they came to the top of the little eminence and in sight of the village, and then walking side by side with a respectful and proper distance between them. " Where have you to call ? " asked Tom.

" Only for a minute at Mrs. BuswelPs. She suffers dreadfully with the rheuma tism, poor old thing, and I promised her some liniment. You can stop outside till I come out, and then I must run home." They reached the cottage, and when his inamorata disappeared within it, Tom sat down on the low wall which separated its little garden from the road, and, lighting a cigarette, sat blinking happily in the sun light, and whistling between the puffs. He was so engaged when a musical metal lic clink caught his ear, and turning half round he beheld a rustic damsel in a sun bonnet and a coloured chintz dress turned up through the pocket-holes, and carrying a milking-pail from which rose a faint but sweetly odorous steam. " Well, Polly ! " said the young gentle man cheerfully. The girl, a strapping, ruddy-faced, wholesome-looking lass of the true Midland breed, smiled and nodded at his greeting.

" Blooming as ever, I see." " As bloomin' as a body can expect to be, as has been kept without a wink o' sleep all night, with granny and her rheu matics, drat her ! " " You shouldn't drat the infirmities of age," said Tom. " It isn't proper, Polly." " A lot you care about what's proper," said the rustic beauty. " P'r'aps it's proper to tell a gell as you'll buy her a lot o' ribbins, and then never to do it, eh ? " " That," said Tom, " is certainly not proper. Has anybody you know of been guilty of such conduct?" " I like the way you carry it off," said Polly, " but I'd like the ribbins better." " Did I promise you ribbons, Polly ? " asked Tom. " Why o' course ye did, last Friday night, down by the Parson's Spinney, when you " " We will not "go into the details of the interview," said Tom.

" Recent circumstances of which you are still ignorant, and of which delicacy demands that I shall allow you to become aware by other sources, render it desirable that I should forget, and strive to amend, the follies of my unregenerate youth." Polly stood open mouthed under this verbal shower-bath, with a rather vacuous smile in answer to the grave twinkle in Tom's eye. "You say that I promised you ribbons ? " " Yes," said Polly. " You did, and I look to have 'em." "My rustic Venus," said Tom, "you shall have 'em. But as I don't happen to have a haberdasher's shop about me for the moment, and as, in the altered circum stances to which I have — I trust ' with due circumspection — alluded, it might provoke remark and inquiry if I bought them my self, I trust I may be permitted to offer a substitute for the actual ribbons in current coin of the realm."

Polly's grin broadened as he produced half-a-crown from his pocket. " There you are." Polly, setting down her pail, held out her hands cupwise, after the fashion of females, to catch the coin. c " There it is," said Tom, putting it on the wall half-way between himself and Polly. She approached gingerly, glancing from the coin to him and back again. He put his cigarette to his lips with an os tentatiously careless gesture, and she made a dart at the half-crown, securing it, but recovering from her dash to find Tom's arm around her neck, cigarette and all. Not very unwillingly, despite her strug gles, she submitted to the embrace, but suddenly breaking away from him with a stifled squeak, picked up her can and bolted into the cottage. Tom, with his arm embracing air, looked round for the cause of this sudden panic, and beheld Miss Fetherston.

She sailed past him and down the road, walking rigidly erect, and looking some six inches higher than her real stature. She was fifty yards away before Tom was sufficiently recovered from the shock to drop from the wall and follow her. " I say, Nelly," he pleaded, coming level with her, "don't be angry. It was only a joke. You can't think " She checked herself for a moment, bending her head with a very stately gesture. " Good morning, Mr. Thornton," she said icily, and swept away, leaving him standing in the middle of the dusty road, looking almost as foolish as he felt. c

Chapter II

Meanwhile, the big man in the trap had jogged ponderously on until he came to an iron gate with a small stone-built lodge beside it, from which, at the sound of his approaching wheels, an elderly rustic issued to give him ingress to a crescent shaped avenue of trees which lay beyond. The trees and the house to which they led were about coeval, and were not more than twenty years old. The latter was a solid and unpretentious edifice of brick and stone of no particular school or epoch, and, despite its air of newness, homelike and friendly. The crunching of the trap wheels upon the gravel brought a stable keeper round a corner of the house, and as he disappeared leading the horse, the door of the house was opened, and the old gentleman marched solidly up the steps and into the hall. The thoughtful scowl had disappeared from his face, and given place to the expression of calm and rather domi neering resolution his features generally bore.

The servants, as if possessed of some nameless sixth sense which warned them of their master's coming, were just ar ranging themselves in the back settlements of the large breakfast-room as he entered, and gave him a muffled greeting, repaid by a nod, as he passed to the head of the table, where a big Church Service glittered with gilding.beside his plate and a pile of letters. Apparentlysomebodywas still missing from the congregation, for after looking round, the master of the house stood silent with his hand on the sacred volume. A young man in a tweed jacket entered, answered pleasantly to the murmured " good morn ing, sir," of the servants, and took a seat at the old man's right. " Tom's not back yet," he said, and at that Mr. Barstow planted his gold glasses on the extreme tip of his nose, and with his head well back and the book held at arm's length, read the morning service and a short prayer.

" And this we ask in Thy Son's name. Amen. Breakfast." The servants filed out quickly, and left father and son alone together. " Two minutes late, Jack," said the father. He did not consult his watch, as most men would have done, either to corroborate his reckoning or to impress the offender with a sense of his accuracy, but spoke with the unsupported authority of one whose every action tallied with the march of an inward chronometer. " Very sorry, sir. I'm afraid I overslept myself." There was little more than a family like ness between father and son, and even that was softened by the polishing influences which had come to the elder man too late in life to make any great impression on his rough-grained surface, but had dwelt about the boy from his cradle. " Self made " was written large on the old man's face, dress, and demeanour.

Harrow and Cam bridge had left their ineffaceable touch on Jack, and the two generations made a fine contrast as they sat side by side in the airy sunlit room. "Where's Mr. Thornton?" asked the father. He spoke with a distinct trace of the broad, slow South Staffordshire drawl. When angry, or more strongly moved than common in any way, the accent deepened, but he made no effort either to exaggerate or conceal it. " I haven't any idea," said Jack. "He went out early, as usual. Sketching, I suppose." The old man grunted, and betook himself to his correspondence, eating and drinking meanwhile, while Jack, opening the morning paper, followed his example. -The meal and the letter-reading finished, the father sat thoughtfully staring at his plate, and glancing from time to time at his son from under his heavy brows.

Presently the young man laid down the paper, and catching his father's eye bent upon him, repaid the look by a glance of inquiry. " I've something to say to you, Jack," said the old man. " Come into the library. We'll be quieter there." He led the way across the hall, Jack following, and settling himself in a roomy leather-covered chair beside the heavy oaken table by the window, motioned his son to a seat near at hand. " I've been thinking, Jack," he began, his usual slow and weighty speech a little slower and weightier, " I've been thinking as it's time as you began to think about getting married." " Married ! " repeated Jack with a laugh, " why, what on earth has put marriage into your head, dad ? " " That's what I'm going to tell you, if you'll gie me the time. For one thing, I'm gettin' on in years.

Seventy, I shall be, come Lady-day. Not as I reckon as there's any fear o' my going under yet awhile. I've got a fairish time afore me yet, please God." " I hope so," said the son. " J hope so," said the old man, " and I think so, but that's as may be, and a wise man sees a bit ahead, and looks at the chances. Now, takin' me all round, I've been a fairish good father to thee, Jack, and that I think thee'st own to, eh ? " " Well, yes," said Jack, " as fathers go, you've been a decided success." " I could ha' wished," continued Mr. Barstow, " as you'd ha' had more of a business turn, and ha' put your back into work a bit. It's a fine property as you'll come into when I'm gone, and a young chap with brains could improve it. Hows'ever, you niver seemed to tek any pleasure in business, and I niver fo'ced you, 'cause why ?

I don't believe iu pressed men, nor yet in makin' silk purses out o' sow's ears. However, that isn't what I want to talk about just now. I want you to get married, Jack, and I've got the gell as you must marry in my eye." Jack looked at his father with a vacuous stare for a moment, and then laughed outright. " Suppose," he said "that Iliad the girl I must marry in my eye, and the two were not identical. Eh ? " To the average mind this question looks something of a poser. But then the average mind is vitiated by many influences which had never come into touch with that of the man to whom it was addressed. It is a charming fiction, so persistently dwelt upon by poets and novelists, that most people accept it unquestioningly as a truth, that at least once in his life every son of Adam falls in love.

The statement may sound cynical — many truths do — but there are thousands of men who never get within measurable distance of the outermost boundaries of love's empire, and never spent a second's time in contemplation of any woman's charms — physical, mental or moral. Mr. Barstow was one of them. He had married Jack's mother because she had a thousand pounds to her fortune at a time whan a thousand pounds looked more in his eyes than ten times that sum would look at the present moment, had been rigidly faithful to her for the unromantic reason that he had always been too busy to be otherwise, had buried her with business like regret at the loss of the trustiest of housekeepers, and had erected to her a very handsome monument with an inscrip tion containing warmer words of compli ment than his prudence had ever permitted him to speak to her during their twenty years of life together.

" Supposin' it was so?" The question was spoken in a tone of such pure commonplace that Jack laughed again. "I've no time to waste i' foolery," the old man said, testily. " All right," said Jack. " Don't get waxy, governor. Your choice is a hot favourite, for there's no other in the field. Who is she ? " " She's Miss Fetherston." Jack sprang from his seat as though he had been suddenly pricked with a brad awl. " Miss Fetherston ! " he cried, with a face of wild amazement. " There's no need to shout a man's head off," returned the senior. "Miss Fether ston was the name I said. What's the matter with the lad ? Bist moonstruck ? " Thundersmitten would have been a better word. " You're joking," said Jack, presently " Didst iver know me joke i' your life?" asked the senior. "What's the matter with thee ?

" he asked again. " It's impossible," said Jack. " I'm dreaming ! It's impossible." " Why, what is there impossible about it ? The gell 's a likely gell enough, for all as I see, and a good gell too. She'll have a good lump o' land when the father goes, as can't be long with the life he leads. Then there's the General, her uncle, General Fetherston, as is more than fairly well-to-do, with neither chick nor child nearer than her to leave his money to." Jack's mind had begun to work again. He knew his father well enough to feel that if he had any chance at all in the argument, it lay in calm reason, and not in appeal or declamation. " I don't think there's much chance of that, father. The General and Mr. Fether ston haven't spoken a word to each other for ten years." " He sent the gell a present last birth day, accordin' to your own account."

" Yes ; and she sent it back." " Ah ! Fool like." " And as to Mr. Fetherston's property, why, it's all over the county that he's mortgaging everything he can. He dropped more than a thousand at Ascot. He won't have a stick left in five years." " I know all about the mortgages — more perhaps than you think for. He hasn't done much harm yet. As to the General, who else has he got to leave his money to ? Who d'ye think as he'll want to leave it to when the gell's got a husband with ten thousand a year i' the near future ? Money comes to money, my lad. You marry the gell, and I'll answer for the General." " You seem to think," said Jack, " that you can answer for a good deal." The old man gave a single hitch of his stolid head. Jack looked at him in a hopeless kind of way, unable for the mo ment to say more, his brain spinning.

"It's a bit sudden, I daresay," said Mr. Barstow, in an allowing fashion. " Think it out, lad ; think it out." He turned to the desk, and busied himself with the papers scattered about it. This perfect calmness exasperated Jack, and helped him to find his tongue. " Look here, guv'nor," he said, " not to mention the lady, don't you think you're disposing of me rather coolly ? " " Think it out, my lad ! Think it out," was the parental rejoinder. " There's one thing," said Jack, " that you may not know — which I don't think you can know, or you wouldn't make such a proposal. I asked Tom Thornton clown here with the express purpose of giving him a chance with Miss Fetherston." " So I suppose," said the old man. " I've every reason to believe," con tinued Jack, " that they are very fond of each other.