Jack's secret : a novel

Front matter

ETT CAMERON

RUTH

CANDLER

Contents

GAAP. PAGE

I. — The Three Maids op Fairmead - . 1

IT.— The Naiad .... 10

Chapter I. The Three Maids Of Fairmead

" She dwelt among the untrodden ways Beside the Springs of Dove, A maid whom there were none to praise, And very few to love."

— Wordsworth.

" Man is the cause of all the trouble in the world. We do not require the testimony, overwhelming as it is, of a mass of correspondence recently published in a daily paper, to convince us of the fact that woman's only chance of safety is to keep clear of him, her only hope of happiness a firm resolution to shape her life without him."

The speaker was a very old lady. She sat bolt upright upon her garden-chair, and as she gave utterance to the above sentiment, which, truth to say, she had thus solemnly enunciated many hundreds of times before, the heavy gold-rimmed glasses in her wrinkled right hand, swayed slowly up and down, as though to impress the words yet more firmly and emphatically upon the minds of her hearers.

There were three generations of women seated together upon the broad lawn in front of Fairmead Hall : Miss Durham the elder, who had spoken, Miss Margaret Durham, her niece, who heard her in pensive silence and with looks of gentle resignation, and Margaret the younger, her greatniece, commonly called Madge, who looked profoundly wearied, and somewhat mutinous into the bargain, as she listened.

Madge looked, in fact, as if she could have said a great deal if she had dared. But as nobody had ever yet dared to contradict old Miss Durham, after a brief pause she took up once more the thread of her parable.

" You have heard me tell you more than once, of the prophecy in our family which, strangely enough, my dears, is now apparently in course of being fulfilled. The old distich ran somewhat obscurely, and was not clearly understood in

I my father's time, but now there can be no doubt of its meaning.

" ' When Fairmeacl's maids shall rule successive three, Then Fairmead's lands shall peace and plenty see.'

" The three maids are to rule successively, that is quite evident. Three maids of the old family, of course. I call it a remarkable piece of prophecy, my dears, most remarkably carried out in ourselves," and Miss Durham looked from one to the other of her nieces triumphantly.

Miss Margaret nodded her head and murmured : " Yes, indeed ! " with an air of deep conviction, for she had a profound respect for the traditions of her family, but in the depths of her heart, Madge said to herself that it was a very silly thing that she should be doomed to spinsterhood for the sole object of carrying out an ambiguous and ignorant prophecy.

" I am sure," continued Miss Durham, looking complacently from the old house, that lay bathed in the afternoon sunshine on one side of the lawn, back to the emerald green meadows sloping gently down towards the river, beyond the gardens, where sleek Alderney cows munched their placid way through the rich pasture, " I am sure that I can honestly say that peace and plenty have slowly but steadily increased ever since, by my brother's, your father's death, Margaret, I became the mistress of Fairmead, and since a third Miss Durham has been, by the will of Providence, sent orphaned to the home of our fathers, it seems as though Heaven itself had pointed out to us the better path which the old prophecy long ago designed us to follow, and in so doing we shall avoid those dangers and misfortunes which unhappy women, who trust themselves in the hands of a man, are certain to incur."

" It is a pity that the world cannot go on without men altogether," observed Madge, in so gentle a voice that the little undercurrent of sarcasm in the remark was wholly unobserved by her aunts.

"You may say so, indeed, my dear," cried the old lady heartily, whilst Aunt Margaret shook her head and sighed, " but unluckily for the true interests of women, there are many positions in life which must perforce be filled by the creatures, although to my dying day I shall stoutly maintain that women would make as good doctors, school-masters, lawyers, even Members of Parliament, as any man amongst |the lot. However, there are other considerations, no -doubt "

Here Wilson, the butler, bearing the silver tea-kettle, followed by James, with the tea-tiay, appearing suddenly upon the scene, necessarily cut short the old lady's remarks, and whatever she might have further revealed concerning the ultimate uses of the sterner sex, was promptly smothered in silence.

Whilst the two men-servants spread the snowy cloth upon the little garden-table, laid out the glittering Queen Anne silver service and the tiny, priceless cups and saucers of Japan ware, and disposed the tempting little dishes of homemade cakes and comfits into suitable positions, the three ladies sat looking on, each wrapped in a reverie of her own thoughts, but when the domestics had withdrawn and they were alone once more, Miss Durham observed complacently, as she took the tiny cup of steaming fragrance from her elder niece's hand :

" It is at any rate a comfort to me to know that, whatever other foolish and headstrong women, blind to their own best interests, may do, 1 and my two dear nieces have been wise enough to choose a single life, surrounded by every comfort of fortune and of freedom, and that no selfish and heartless male being will ever acquire the right to squander our worldly goods or to devastate the peaceful security of our hearts."

" No, indeed, dearest aunt," murmured Margaret the elder, who had been so long accustomed to imbibe these opinions from the lips of the family autocrat that she had ended by believing them to be her own. " No, indeed, we should be very ungrateful if we did not rejoice at our own immunity from the sad troubles which marriage invariably brings upon women. My own dear mother, for instance," and Miss Margaret lifted her handkerchief furtively to her eyes, for her mother had died of a heart complaint, and it was pretty well believed in the familf that graceless Tom Durham, her handsome husband, had by his gallantries and excesses considerably hastened her end,

" Madge, too, will do well to remember the sad example of her own parents," remarked Miss Durham, gazing sternly at her great-niece.

" I thmk they were very happy," murmured Madge, deprecatingly, but the words were spoken so low that the old lady, who was somewhat hard of hearing, did not catch them.

" They died in squalor and misery, in a mean London lodging, dependent upon my charity for the bare necessaries of existence," continued Miss Durham severely, "and this terrible state of things was brought about by no fault of your mother's, remember, but because my nephew wantonly squandered her forlune and his own, in unwarrantable and unsuccessful speculations."

Madge put down her. empty tea-cup, and with no appearance of resentment or nf tpmnpf v<-«eo gently from the table

I* and walked quietly away across the lawn towards the

meadows.

The two elder ladies sat and watched the graceful, slender, white -robed figure for a few minutes in silence, then with a shadow of actual apprehension upon her face, old Miss Durham asked quickly :

" Is it possible that she rebels ? "

" No, no, dear aunt ! do not be uneasy She is a good girl. Since that sad day when a little sobbing child of nine years old you took her away from that wretched lodging after my poor brother's funeral, and brought her to live with us here, has she not always been obedient and teachable ? Madge will never run contrary to your wishes, I am sure, nor break away from your careful training. She is twenty-one, now, and must surely see for herself the wisdom of a life of maidenhood. Besides, she has seen no one "

" No ; after all, that is the chief thing. No man must be permitted to gain an ascendancy in her life. It was the course I pursued with you, Margaret, and see how successful it has been ! "

Miss Margaret sighed. It was true, indeed that she had chosen the better part, but there were stillimemories, faint, yet seductive; and there were times too, when at the very bottom of her soul she hankered just a very little still, after the abominable flesh-pots of the Egyptians !

Meanwhile Madge had reached the further side of the lawn, and was strolling down the gentle slope of the meadows towards the glittering river. It was one of those early days of delight, when spring is just merging into summer, when all the earth is teeming with life and gladness, and when the bare fact of existence seems a boon and a blessing for which to render praise.

The sky Avas blue as a turquoise, the trees still were decked in the tender greens of their youth, the meadows were bespangled with daisies and buttercups, and myriads of summer flowerets hung out their delicate colours upon the sun- bathed slopes of the hedgerows. The clumps of hawthornbushes along the riverside were white with fragrant blossom, and the birds sang in glad and noisy chorus amongst their branches, whilst ever and anon, the sad double note of the cuckoo broke in with harmonious undertone into the tuneful concert of nature.

Madge realised that it was good even to be alive upon such a day. Five minutes ago her eyes had filled with angry tears, and she had felt hopeless and full of rebellious thoughts, but now all that was hard and angry was exorcised away, and the youth within her sprang up full of vague, glad hopes and longings.

The tender breeze ruffled her white skirts as she walked and stirred the loose tresses of her gold-brown hair, the azure skies mirrored themselves in her upturned eyes, and the wild rose in the briar-hedge seemed but a pale and colourless thing beside the delicate pinkness of her rounded cheek.

The Alderney cows lifted their heads as she passed, and, as though wonderstruck at the sight of this fair human flower, stood gazing gravely after her as she went by.

And then a curious thing came to pass, or seemed to her to come to pass. Every bird that sang and every flower that bloomed, each whiff of the scented breeze and each leaflet that fluttered over her head — all seemed to cry out together one thing, one thought, to her charmed ears.

" Youth is the time for love ! " they cried. " Love is for youth, and youth is for love !" There was not a voice under heaven or upon the radiant world beneath, that did not take up the cry and echo it back from the four corners of the earth.

" Youth is the time for love — for love and life, for life and love ! "

Only the cattle, looking after her with a mild, reproachful gaze, seemed to speak unutterable warnings out .of their great, sad, brown eyes.

" They are all quite right," cried Madge to herself, for, for lack of other companionship, this girl had developed a wonderful faculty for making friendships with the birds and flowers and animals of her daily life, and it was quite an extraordinary thing how they all knew how to talk to her in a language, which like a fairy maiden she had found out how to interpret. " They all are right — all but the cows, nasty things, they look so sad and solemn, they must have been listening to Aunt Durham ! At twenty-one, how can I be expected to feel as they do ? " she meant her aunts, not the cows. "Aunt Durham must be seventy, and Aunt Margaret fifty, but I am young — young, young, why should I not be wooed and won as well as others? Ah ! I wonder — I wonder "

Her voice died away with a little sigh.

She stood by this time upon the river bank between two snowy-laden may bushes ; the wide stream glittering in the sunlight sped swiftly and silently at her feet. Beyond, on the further side of the river, rose a high, wood-covered hillside, curving grandly to the west round the bend of the water, but sloping gently down towards the east into the watermeadovvs below. The trees on the wooded bank were still flecked with spring s tender colouring, deepening here and there into summer fulness, and the hillside mirrored itself back in the waters which laved its feet. It was a scene of greenest peace and beauty, such as England and the Thames alone can portray to us.

Madge Duiham, upon the green verge of the river between two snowy-laden hawthorn bushes, might have stood in that picture for the image of the Goddess of Summer herself. Not that she was wondrously or stattlingly beautiful, for there was nothing marvellous about her at all, either in form or feature, only she was so fresh, and radiant, and unspoilt, such a happy type of a well-grown country maiden, healthy in mind and jbody, such as are still scattered by the score, thank God, all over the face of our dear old England.

Maidens who have clean hearts and simple aspirations, and who in no way resemble those flirting, dressing, admiration-loving girls, whom a long course of London seasons and London manners and customs, have transfigured into prematurely wide-awake women of the world.

Girls such as Madge Durham are cast in another mould. Evil does not exist for them, save in vague and intangible shadows, life is a beautiful dream, love a sacred poem but dimly understood, not a stepping stone to diamonds and handsome marriage settlements ; whereas strangest delusion of all ! duty seems to them to be the most important thing in the world, and pleasure a merely accidental circumstance in no way to be looked out for or unduly courted.

It will be a bad day for us all when that sweet old type of England's daughters dies out of the land, and becomes merged in the new fashioned product of our latter day civilization !

Madge Durham's mind and thoughts, as she stood upon the river brink, were as clear and as transparent as the running water into which she gazed.

The girl had been curiously brought up, and strange ideas had been inculcated into her ever since her childhood. She had been only a very little girl when she had lived with those unfortunate parents who had died in poverty. She knew, indeed, that they had been very poor, and sometimes very unhappy ; yet, in spite of all her aunt's warnings and teachings, she knew also that they had loved each other, and had believed in each other, and that, therefore, they had not been wholly wretched. It grieved her even now, by reason of those childish memories, to hear Miss Durham point the moral of her tales by covert abuse of her dead father. Perhaps — and by dint of being told so very often — Madge did in some measure believe it — perhaps men were, indeed, unsatisfactory creatures, and possibly her own father had been no exception to the general rule ; still as he was dead she often wished her aunt would leave his name and his memory in peace.

Old Miss Durham's tirades against the wickedness of men struck her as exaggerated, and her laudations of the beauties of a single life did not find a cordial echo in her secret heart. She did not intend to rebel, if Providence, as Aunt Durham said, indeed intended her to be to her life's end the third maiden mistress of Fairmead Hall ; but it might well be that Heaven had other views concerning her, and Madge was too thoroughly sensible to believe it possible that women were all created to become old maids.

Her attitude, therefore, was one of indecison, of a negative and patient awaiting upon the issues of the future. She had been well educated, and carefully trained. The best of governesses, the most finished of finishing lessons had been bestowed upon her. She had read a great deal, and her mind had widened, and her wits become sharpened by what she had read.

Yet, at twenty-one, she was in many ways more girlish than many girls of seventeen. For instance, she had only been to one ball — that had been the solitary dissipation of her life, and it had taken place two years ago. A country neighbour had given the entertainment, and strong pressure had been put by many friends upon old Miss Durham to induce her to permit her great niece to be present.

With all her theories and fancies, Miss Durham was a gentlewoman, and a descendant of an old county family. It was no part of her programme to be at odds with her neighbours. Madge was allowed to go to the ball, and both the Miss Durhams accompanied her. She had been beautifully dressed for the occasion — dressed as befitted her station, and her position as the heiress of Fairmead, but her great-aunt had laid so many orders and injunctions upon her that it is to be doubted whether the poor child enjoyed herself much. She was not to dance more than once with any gentleman, the moment each dance was over she was to return to her aunts, she was to speak as little as possible to her partners, and she was on no account to go into the refreshment or supper room with any one of them ; if she were hungry or thirsty she was to tell her Aunt Margaret, who would accompany her into the adjoining rooms.

" And I am sure I hope no harm will come of it ! " said old Miss Durham to Aunt Margaret as she settled herself down, gold rimmed glasses on nose, to do her duty in a commanding position in the ball-room — the duty of never taking her keen eyes off her young niece for the remainder of the evening.

No harm apparently did come of it. Madge who was obedient both by nature and by training, scrupulously and conscientiously carried out her great-aunt's orders, not only in the letter but in the spirit. She danced very prettily, looked very nice, and spoke very little — most of her partners thought her stupid. At an early hour, after a decorous little supper of cold chicken and lemonade, eaten under her Aunt Margaret's supervision, she was taken home in the family chariot and put carefully and affectionately to bed, and told that she might lie in bed an hour longer the next morning. When she came down she kissed her aunts and thanked them for taking her to the ball, and assured them that she had enjoyed herself very much ; and then she went back to her practising and her reading of Macaulay's History of England, after breakfast, as if nothing unusual had happened.

Lady Gray's ball became a thing of the past, and Miss Durham congratulated herself heartily upon the wise precautionary measures which had effectually fenced off the possibility of evil results. But although that great event of her life was now two years ago, and had never been repeated since, there were trifling circumstances connected with it which Madge had never forgotten, and which she thought about very often even now.

She remembered perfectly, for instance, the face of one of her partners, a young fellow with brown eyes and dark hair, and a peculiarly pleasant smile, who had seemed surprised because, in answer to a common-place question, she had said that she had not only never been to London, but that she was never in the least likely to go there.

" Oh, but that is impossible, you know ! " he had replied, laughingly. " Every girl goes up to London."

" I shall never do so," she had answered, gravely. " I shall never be allowed to leave my aunt's house."

" What, not even when you marry ? " had cried the young man, thoughtlessly, and then he had been still more surprised when, blushing very deeply at so light an allusion to so portentous a subject, his fair partner had replied very seriously :

" I am never to be allowed to marry."

The dance coming at this moment abruptly to an end, Miss Durham had immediately requested to be taken back to her aunts, and the young man had had no opportunity for receiving any enlightenment or explanation concerning this truly surprising statement.

Madge, however, had by no means forgotten the unbounded astonishment depicted in the pleasant brown eyes which had opened their widest upon her, at what was to her a very ordinary statement indeed.

She had had no idea what that brown-eyed young man's name had been. He had come up to her once more durin°- the evening and had asked her to dance again with him but acting under orders, Madge had politely refused to do so, and he had seemed quite hurt and had left her somewhat abruptly, when, on his further suggesting that he should take her into the supper room, she had very decidedly declined this offer as well.

After that, he had not spoken to her again. But she had very often thought of him since^ indeed, she was thinking of him now, as she stood by the river side and watched the rippling waters.

Who was he ? she wondered — how foolish she had been not to ask his name ? She had never met him again and as he was evidently a stranger — a mere bird of passage in the country, nothing seemed less likely than that she should ever have done so. She had gathered, indeed, from his conversation that he was at Oxford, and that he had merely come over for the ball, in the capacity of a " dancing man," to stay for one night at a neighbouring country house.

She could not tell why she had thought of him more than of any of her other partners— some of them had been better looking, some of them had been better dancers — but not one of them lingered in her memory so pertinaciously as did this nameless youth with the merry brown eyes and the pleasant smile.

There was a boathouse beyond the row of hawthorn bushes that fringed the meadow, and it was to the boathouse that presently Madge bent her footsteps. In some respects she enjoyed the most perfect liberty. Having been brought up to ride and to row, she was free as air to follow her own devices as to her indulgence in these out of door pursuits. She was perfectly at home either in the saddle or in a boat. Frequently she ordered her pony and rode forth alone for hours upon the downs or among the shady lanes, and almost daily she sculled her light skiff briskly up the broad river, or paddled her tiny canoe lazily amongst the shadowy back waters where the branches met over her head and white water lilies floated upon the almost streamless tide.

With a practised hand she untied the painter of her boat, jumped lightly in, and pushed her off from the narrow landing place into the stream, and as she shot swiftly out of the deep shadows of the boathouse into the sunshine without, she very nearly came into contact with an outrigger, manned by a gentleman in white flannels, who was evidently intent upon getting the utmost speed of which she was capable out of his narrow craft, and who came tearing up stream at lightning speed immediately in her course.

Madge, accustomed to all sorts of river complications, halloed lustily :

" Look ahead, sir ! " and pulled herself round towards the bank again.

The gentleman half turned his head, swerved quickly out of her way, shouted back a word of thanks, and in a couple of long swinging strokes was almost too far away from her for her to distinguish his face.

She could see, however, as she watched his swiftly retreating form that seemed almost on a level with the water over which the outrigger skimmed like a summer insect, that he was a fair complexioned young man of an unclassical cast of feature, and that his figure was considerably more inclined to corpulence than has ever been thought to be consistent in the hero of a romance.

She was also quite positive that she had never seen him before in her life.

He shot rapidly out of the landscape, round the curve of the river, and she saw him no more. Very soon, too, she entirely forgot that fat young man who had so narrowly escaped running her down. Her thoughts, in fact, went back by an easy transition of ideas, to that other man of whom she had been unprofitably dreaming before her reverie had been so brusquely interrupted.

Yet, all unknown to herself, Madge Durham's fate had turned at last, the final page of her quiet and uneventful existence had been closed for ever, and a new chapter wherein was destined to be written the whole trouble-tossed story of her life, had silently and relentlessly opened itself before her.

There was no one to warn her that that corpulent young gentleman in white flannels was destined to bear a part in her fortunes, yet so it was : and with the swift appearance and disappearance of the vanished outrigger, the first small link was forged in that long chain which was to lead her — whither ?

Chapter II. The Naiad

" We have been friends together In sunshine and in shade,'

— Caroline Norton.

" Jack ! n

No answer.

" Jack, you lazy brute ! "

" What's up ? " from within, in a very sleepy voice.

" I do believe you are asleep ! do bustle up a bit and lend a hand with these dishes."

" Great Heavens, Lance, why in the name of fortune should you or I wash up dishes ! Where's that scoundrel, Antonio?"

" Gone ashore. I've sent him to forage for eggs, those we have been getting the last few days from the village have been filth — mine had a live chick in it this morning, and I positively can't exist without fresh eggs for breakfast. Do come and help there's a good chap."

Thus adjured, Jack Ludlow presently made his appearance at the door of the saloon, and stood leaning there with his hands in his pockets, whilst he lazily watched the proceedings of a broad-backed young man with a florid complexion who was busily engaged in the homely occupation of washing up the dinner plates.

" What a pity it is, Lance, that nature has cursed you with so indomitable an amount of energy," he observed presently, "together with so bountiful a measure of adipose deposit — you never can be still."

" My good fellow, just consider what I should grow to, if I ever did keep still ! " replied his friend, in no way offended at the allusion to his personal peculiarity. "As it is, by dint of hard work I keep myself down to decent size. I don't mind telling you I have lost a stone since we have been down here ! I walked up to the railway station yesterday whilst you were asleep and had myself weighed. A stone, all but half an ounce, I do assure you. I couldn't keep it up if I didn't take the exercise. Why I must have sculled eight miles up stream this afternoon, just as hard as ever I could pull. Oh — it's a fine thing."

" Whilst I was fishing for gudgeon in a backwater, off the punt. Chacun a son gout, Lance. I'd rather be excused from eight miles up stream before dinner, myself."

The western sky was all aglow with the red light of the sunset, there was not a ripple upon the water, nor the whisper of a breeze in the air.

The Naiad lay at her moorings like a painted ship upon a painted picture.

She was a beautiful house-boat, newly built of polished pine, and furnished with every modern improvement without and within ; from the tip of her symmetrical bows to the graceful curve of her stern, there was not a line about her that a captious critic could find a fault with. She was an ideal river residence. Her upper deck was gay with flowers in boxes and with scarlet awnings, and complete with lounging chairs and handy little tables, and her after-swim was softly carpeted with crimson cushions and tuikish rugs. A whole fleet of small boats of various descriptions lay about her ready for use or amusement, and if you penetrated through the amber satin portiere curtains into her saloon, there was not a single comfort or luxury from a book shelf stocked with well-chosen volumes up to a cottage piano which it could be left to the hearts of two decently disposed young gentlemen to desire.

For Jack Ludlow having remarked casually one day that he should like to possess a houseboat, it naturally followed that in a very short space of time the most perfect house-boat that could be found, had been purchased for him and fitted up for his use, regardless of expense. For this young man was quite accustomed to have things arranged in this sumptuous fashion for him, and from the day of his birth he had seldom or ever, been denied a single desire upon which his fancy had been set.