Pigs in clover

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Chapter Two

That was how Fraulein Eckelstein came to Hadalstone Hall sixteen years after Angela's death, to stand in the place of mother, father, brothers, and sisters to Aline, to be her companion, to fill the life of a girl, a girl who, tfaou^ Stephen had forgotten the fact or its significance.

Lord John Hay ward's granddaughter, and might |this was only problematic, yet it should have been taken

consideration) have inherited from him as well as

Angela. Moreover, let it be understood at once,

vthing less like his daughter than Stephen's mental pic-

of her at this moment it would be impossible *o find. Fraulein Eckelstein arrived one dull autumn evening, and Aline, rather shy, in her short school-room dress and pioafore, her long fair hair down her back, and her blue eyes still misty with the tears shed over Miss Clare's depwttire. was in the hall waiting for her with eager expectancy. It was a dull hfe the child had lived at Hadalstone, and even the coming of a new governess was an excitement. Miss Clare had been there ever since Aline anld remember; she was a kind and gentle creature of the recognised nursery-governess type, curiously ignorant, and very sentimental. She nurtured romantic attachments, sometimes to the ritualistic rector, and someiintes to the elderly doctor's locum tenens, and always to die Honourable Stephen Hayward, whom she had seen en rare occasions. She and Aline talked of him frequently in the key Constantia set, regarding him as a Vxag amongst men, tn intellect as in character, a Bayard of the nineteenth century. That she had finally given her bart and hand to the curate was, as Constantia had said, oonpletdy suitable.

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Aline expected Fraulein Eckelstein at least to share the opinion of her little world; but the very first evening she was disillusioned. Fraulein said:

" I haf not heard of your father ; I haf not seen him. Your aunt it was I saw."

" But you know how great my father is ; you know he might have been in the Cabinet if he had remained with Gladstone?"

" I would haf you know there is no great statesman in England ; no man is like the Count von Bismarck. You haf much to learn."

Fraulein Eckelstein was a treasure. Constantia had been most careful in examining her credentials, and the Duchess had agreed with her that they were really beyond reproach.

" A treasure, my dear. The very woman for poor An- fl gela's girl ; I congratulate you on having secured her," > said the old lady, out of the wisdom of her eighty years. " I see by her papers that she is certificated here as well as in Germany, and that she was with the Von Orlondoflf ^ girls. Very charming girls they were, I remember. One H of them married Cecil's nephew, and the other is in Rome " — Princess Plom, You couM not have done better."

If Aline had inherited anything from her grandfather, she had certainly inherited from her father his fastidiousness, his aesthetic sense, his refinement of sensation ; that one saw at once in her delicate, high-bred air, in her childish daintinesses and dislikes. But there was no one to note Aline 's dislikes; she was very childish for her sixteen years, and shy. She only knew what Miss Clare had taught her.

She waited for her new governess in the old hall. Almost the first words of Fraulein Eckelstein were to complain that it was draughty. It was of oak, black with age; the supporting columns of the wide staircase had been carved by Grinling Gibbons, but the panelling of the walls that held the ancestral portraits had been there two centuries before his time.

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"Draughty!"* repeated Aline, with wide eyes, wondering. She was a child of the open air, the pale rose of her young cheeks was sun-kissed, wind-caressed, her fairness browned a little through its transparency.

'It is very draughty; we will not linger here long. I win go to my room now. We will not begin work until lo-morrow. I do hope that the school-room has south aspect. Now, you show me my rooms. We will be very good friends, and you will work hard, eli ! but to-night I .must rest; I haf my neuralgia. I will haf supper in ncin own room."

That was the first Aline heard of draught or of ncutisl^ia. Miss Clare had been a healthy English girl, notwithstanding her leaning to romance and sentimental ism. " I do not like the bedroom you haf given me," she aid the next morning, " there is dirty stuff on the walls ; the bed is wooden, wooden, I cannot sleep."

Tliat she disparaged the tapestry hangings of the second-best bedroom, and its bed of Spanish mahogany, hort the child somehow. She loved her home, there was nothing else for her to love; decayed, dilapidated, bare it wa*, yet she loved it, knew its history, and the history of all it5 rooms.

** 111 tell the housekeeper," she said quietly ; " she will

change it for you. Perhaps you would like to choose one.

We have twenty-seven bedrooms," she was proud of that;

that twenty of them were uninhabitable seemed of no

consequence. " I chose yours for you ; I thought you

would like it. The tapestry there is Dutch, and so is the

chest in the corner. It was Captain Thomas Hayward's

nxm, the one who fought at Leyden in the sixteenth cen-

" It is very dirty," said Fraulein Eckelstein.

She was a tall woman, had mittens on her bony hands,

and a shawl over her sloping shoulders. She was truly an

"o^tlent creature, but she had ruined her system in her

:•) by crammJng a very small brain with dry cachets

ot learoiQg. She was conscientiously anxious to feed \vet new pupil on the same pabulum. It had not been thought necessary in her case to wash it down with the milk of human kindness ; there was no milk in her.

Among the idiosyncrasies that Aline hated most was Fraulein's habit of wearing a black silk apron, and of constantly using her pocket-handkerchief. Every time her bony hand drew her handkerchief from her glace silk pocket the child's teeth were set on edge. Then, Aline loved England, — that was in the Hayward blood, their inalienable inheritance ; and Fraulein disparaged England in favour of the Fatherland, from which, by the way, like so many of her compatriots, she had voluntarily exiled herself from the meanest motives. She found the climate insupportable, and she excluded as much of it as possible. Aline 's lesson time was a continuous struggle to keq) awake in a room from which all draughts and all air were shut out relentlessly,

Fraulein's digestion played as prominent a part in her conversation as her neuralgia.

" It is your English cookery, your vile English cookery, that I feel ; the beef and the mutton, the mutton and the beef, ach! and so hard. I haf pain in my chest — and your puddings.— I cannot eat them."

She grumbled continuously, the meals were made unappetising with g^oss comment. She took a daily constitutional with her pupil conscientiously, and she found fault all the time. "The park was damp, the climate was — English. Goloshed and generally mackintoshed, her nose red, cotton wool in her ears, she persistently grumbled, and Aline found her walks were spoiled for her as her meals had been. In lesson time Fraulein grumbled also, not without cause, at Aline's ignorance, inattention, stupidity. She said it was so English; only in England could a girl of fifteen, nearly sixteen, know nothing, absolutely nothing. Ach ! it was terrible, horrible.

Fraulein Eckelstein prided herself on speaking English perfectly; nevertheless, her accent grated on the child's ear. She grew to hate it so desperately that any other n

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I accent, local, cockney, Yorkshire, grew soft, attractive to her, by contrast, and this was another of her misfortunes.

ft is important to realise Fraulein Eckclstein, for a certain amount of sympathy is necessary in reading Aline's iu'story, and to live with Fraulein Eckelstein was a misfortune, nothing less. These German governesses, excellent creatures, good teachers, soul-deadening companions, press hardly on their sensitive pupils, even when tempered with motlier. father, brothers, sisters, home; endured without these mitigations, they are simply stupifying; and Aline, if she spelt better, was still less intelligent at the end than at the beginning of Fraulein's [ministrations.

Until Fraulein Eckelstein came, she had been a happy diild, if a lonely one. There were butterflies, flowers, and bees in her garden, squirrels in the woods, hares in the heather. There was everj-thing a child could want, exfellow-children. She was ignorant, perhaps, but Iwcet and wholesome, loving nature. She grew depressed 'before Fraulein had been a week in the house, almost cfore she had turned the flowers and the birds out of the iroom, remnants of woodland rambles, and had had linoleum nailed on to the schoolroom table, and 'varked out a daily course of study on a ruled sheet of paper. Soon everything about Fraulein Eckelstein, her German self-satisfaction, the interest she took in her own health, her blatantly bad digestion, her constant colds, her ugliness, everything about and pertaining to that certificated treasure, became alike intolerable to the sensitive, growing girl. A year found her reading and writing improved, she remembered a few dates, she could do a ample, a very simple, sum in arithmetic, and she knew a little, a very little, German grammar, but it found her also grown out of childhood, not yet into womanhood, md with her character all awry and deformed ; the pres- •ure had been in the wrong places and the result was (SnfltToas.

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Aline became introspective, cried constantly, had spasms of acute self-pity. She was motherless, lier father did not love her, at least, he did not come to see her; she read his name in the newspapers, treasured the paragraphs about him. the reports of his speeches, made a cult of him, and dreamed constantly of emotional moments in which he would figure. She was very much alone ; her distaste for her governess extended to the way she walked, the way she ate, and sat, and spoke, and breathed.

After her sixteenth birthday Aline got over her weeping and her fits of melancholy, nature reasserted itself in a measure. But she never got over her distaste for the German woman, while the image of her father, which had dominated her morbid period, had not died out of her mind.

Fraulein Eckelstein, for all her certificates and knowledge, was provincial, plebeian, narrow-minded, ill-bred. Because she was all this and more. Aline spent no time with her that she was not compelled to spend ; and the governess was glad of many hours to herself. She wrote long letters on thin foreign paper to friends, former pupils, relatives, long letters with involved sentences, and verbs that played hide-and-seek, long, verbose, unnecessary letters ; it was her only relaxation. She thought it literary and appropriate, and in a measure dignified. She did not grumble in her letters ; she endeavoured to impress upon her correspondents the grandeur of her position.

While Fraulein Eckelstein wrote letters. Aline was citlier alone or went for long rides with old Sam Shingles, who had been stud-groom to Stephen's father in the days when there had been a stud, racehorses, and a training stable at Hadalstonc Hall, and alt the paraphernalia that had spelt Stephen's ruined inheritance and blasted name. Sam taught Aline to ride, he gave her respite from Fraulein ; he was part of the tonic that cured her of morbid weeping. He talked to her of the good old days when ad I

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I her grandfather was alive, and the Hunt met nearly every week in the Hadalstone woods, when the stables wefe full of young 'uns, and there was never a year when Hadalstone had not a string of horses at Doncaster. He had the tact to omit the time that came after. He let Jack Hayward's difficulties, forgeries, expiation, lie in the grave with him. The old stud-groom remembered nothing of his old master but his generosity, and easy ways, and tljc handsome face and figure that had brought the wocaen after him.

This was much more interesting than French verbs. The gallops through the woods, the whiff of fresh air in her face as she leaped gate or bar, the rise and motion of the animal beneath her, were rest and refreshment and new life after Fraulein and the stuffy, overheated rooms. And she liked hearing about her grandfather.

It was all right as long as Sam Shingles rode with her ; «he got nothing but good from her two hours' canter, air, and exercise. She was stupid and dull with Fraulein; for her taste was violated, the air was vitiated, and the guttural German voice outraged her delicate Saxon ears. She learned as little as she possibly could, and, if Frauleia Eckelslein had not been a truly indefatigable teacher, evei that little would have been less.

So Aline talked to her maid, played sometimes with the vicarage babies, and envied them their father, who Ufsed. and dandled, and spoiled them ; she was consoled hf the cheery doctor for her enforced hours with Frau- Wn, and, until she was approaching her seventeenth year, ihe Uved practically without further companionship. In letters, and during rare visits, Constantia excused Stephen for his apparent neglect : " his country claimed htn," she said. But Aline felt he was the one thing in the world that belonged to her, and she longed always thtt he should love her, write to her, notice her, come to itr. She was lonely in her seventeenth year ; there were fvdens and woods, and wide stretches of moorland, but 4e was s girl-child, and these were not enough. Aunt

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Constantia was vague and indefinite as to when she or her father would come; she forgot to hold out prospects of Aline coming to them. The family visitors were few and far between. The Duchess's appearance remained a unique visitation, and Aunt Constantia promised Aline no immediate change. She was to be " finished." At eighteen, or perhaps a little later, the Duchess would present her. Fn the meantime, she was told to work hard at her studies with Fraulein.

It was a critical moment for Jack Forrest to appear upon the scene. Aline, in revolt at Racine with a German accent, and Schiller in a voice like a nutmeg-grater, had begun to read penny novelettes, threepenny gutter fiction. Family Herald Supplements, borrowed from the silly, sentimental London servant who acted as maid to her. She grew as romantic as Miss Clare, and she longed for adventures. She longed for adventures! And fate, or Stephen, or perhaps an unfortunately wise decision of the Jockey Club, sent Jack Forrest to Hadal stone.

There was nothing whatever attractive about Jack Forrest; he was a hard-featured, dun-coloured, under-sized man of about thirty, who chewed a straw, and wore high collars, and looked like a prematurely decayed stable-boy. Even Aline, keen for novelty and experience and perhaps emotion, was disappointed in his appearance the first time she saw him. Jane had talked atxiut his coming in mysterious undertones as she brushed that golden hair at night. Aline had listened open-eared; there was a mystery, and Jack Forrest was the hero of it. Her interest was quickly aroused, her feelings no less quickly excited. Jane was a comparatively newcomer at Hadalstone, but Mrs. Dean had been there in the time of Stephen's father and mother. Aline resorted to Mrs. Dean for further information. The housekeeper's room had been the harbour of refuge for Aline ever since her babyhood ; there jam was to be found, and sweet cake^fl and gossip about the glory of the house in those bad old, eood old, days, when Mrs. Dean and Sam Shingles were rt hardly middle-aged, and that fine, dashing, rakish grandfather of Aline's was alive.

Mrs. Dean was in her dotage, garrulous, indiscreet, in the first stage of senile decay, but still she alluded and maudled, instead of speaking out. Aline was a child with her head full of impossible, unnatural, kitchen-maid romances, and the romance of Jack Forrest seemed to touch her nearly. She misunderstood it, of course. The sor- <iid intrigue between Mrs. Dean's daughter, who had been boasemaid at the Hall, and that wretched debauchee, Stephen's father, was something it would have been impossible for her to understand. And Mrs. Dean, with all her gamJousness, was careful not to mention her own relationship to the newcomer. All that Aline took in was lltU Jack Forrest was an unacknowledged son of the House; that he had been neglected, sent away from Radalstone, and his return in a menial capacity was a tardy act of reparation of her father's doing. She had »ecn little, known little of her father ; she hardly realised of what she suspected him. She was under the spell of the penny novelette. " An unacknowledged son of the Hoasc" was the romantic euphemism vrith which she dothed the ci-devant stable-boy. And the House, the family, her grandfather, were all of extraordinary importance to her.

But she was very disappointed with Jack Forrest's appeanmce the first day he came to Hadalstone. He was Bot a romantic figyre in a Newmarket coat, unnaturally Bgbt, and a billycock hat unnaturally curved.

Here is the history of his coming to Hadalstone.

About the time that Sam Shingles ceased to be the aomtnal head of the defunct Hadalstone stables, Stephen, hjsy and overworked in London, received an ill-written, indifferently spelt, communication that he showed to his cuusin. He took the letter to the Marquis and asked, " Is it tnic? Do you think it is true?" For Stephen, akboagh he knew so well that his father had been a blackgnard, knew little of details, and nothing of the housemaid and her child. The present Marquis of Jevington had been a man, and in his father's confidence, when Stephen was a little boy at school.

" What does it matter ?" answered the other carelessly, having skimmed the letter. " The fellow says he is your father's son ; he asks for help on that ground. It is very likely true," he added drily. " Surely it is not a great shock to you that it is very Ukely true."

" No," Stephen answered, not letting his cousin see he was stung, hiding his sensitiveness, his wownds that never healed ; " it is not a great shock that my father had an illegitimate son. But this fellow is a peculiarly notorious blackguard," he went on, after just a little pause to take breath. For it hurt, it always hurt, that his father had been — himself. " He has just been warned off the turf."

" If he had written you before, you might have arranged something with the Club?"

" It is a particularly bad case. He pulled the beast up just under the judge's nose. Not the first time either; I heard all about it from John."

John was the eldest son of the Marquis, in age Stephen's contemporary ; he was absorbed in racing, and one of the Stewards of the Jockey Club.

" What does he want you to do ?"

" He wants me to lend him some money, f lOOO is the sum he names ; an insolent letter. There is no doubt his mother was in service at Hadalstone; I remember her faintly."

"You can't let him starve; you must find something for him."

" I thought perhaps you could employ him at Culpepper. I asked John, but John says he won't touch him; he's a thorough scoundrel."

" No, I can't do anything ; I have too many claims on me. Send him back to Hadalstone; that's where bis mother came from. Make him groom, gamekeeper, or steward ; surely you can find some sort of sinecure that

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I wJH enable you to give him a small income without appearing to be blackmailed. He certainly could not do any (urm at Hadalstone."

The sapient Marquis thought he could not do any iaim, and in the end Stephen offered him Sam Shingle's iiticcure. It was a curious, unfortunate, almost dramatic coinddervce that the only post at Hadalstone into which Jack Forrest could fit with any approach to suitability lixnild have been vacant at this moment. Jack Forrest accepted it, since nothing better offered. He would see his grandmother; he had a sneaking respect for her, a respect his mother had forfeited many years ago, before liie disappeared in the vortex of Piccadilly Circus. His fwMhtr had told him the true story of the trick she had pbyrd on her old master at Hadalstone. and twitted him rith his likeness to his real father, a stable-boy, whose brief stay at the Hall had been terminated by a kick from a restive racehorse. The truth had been kept from the respectable Mrs. Dean ; the shock of her daughter s behaviour had been softened to her by the Master's generosity. The girl flaunted her shame in the village until Stephen's father died, and her boy had been a familiar at the Hall in those days, and was constantly in and out of dat same housekeeper's room where Aline now made heridf at home.

It was natural that on his return to Hadalstone, after Marly eighteen years hard-lived disreputable years. Jack Forrc 8t should seek out his grandmother, natural, too, that Aline should see him there; but all that followed *a» nnnatural, horrible, almost incredible.

The mystery about Jack Forrest, that hint and innuendo created, was. in the face of Aline 's ignorance and imoeenee. responsible for her interest in him. She could oat but lake an interest in him since she had gathered, asfly, that he was a " son of the House," and since the Houae seemed to her in her retired and lonely life of such paramount importance. Jack Forrest, the housekeeper's room, Jane's hair-brushing confidences, were all so much so

FIGS IN CLOVER more vital than Fraulein Eckelstein. She b€£;an to lii vividly in the romance she was creating.

Jack Forrest looked better on a horse than anywhere else. The first time Aline had seen him she had been chilled, disappointed; but in the saddle, his limited legs in gaiters, a cap replacing the cockney billy-cock, and gloves on the rough hands, it was possible, though even then it should have been difficult, for the halo of romance slowly to transfigure him. And riding with Aline was the only one of Sam Shingle's duties that Forrest actually performed. They rode together daily. He taught Aline a few things about horses that Sam had forgotten, or had never known ; he was a man of very few words, a silent man who chewed rather than talked, but for the moment his few words spoke praise. He told Aline she had the makings of a fine horsewoman, he praised her courage, once he praised her figure.

Nobody suspected danger ; it was impossible to suspect the child, so fair, with her proud carriage, and delicate high-bred air, of having anything in common with the ex-jockey. Mrs. Dean and Jane had talked much of Jack Forrest before he came. It was dull in the country, and they had few things to talk about, but, after he came, and he had had tea once or twice in the housekeeper's room, they left off talking of him, or even thinking of him. He was one of themselves, and not a bright one. His habit of silence alienated them. He lived over the stables where Sam had lived, and his spare time seemed to be spent in the public-house. A boy brought Miss Alinc's horse up to the house every day, and Jack came up with it, mounted her, and they rode out together, just as it used to be in Sam's time, only Sam used to bring the horses up himself without the assistance of the stable-boy.

Together they rode away from the verbs and the translations and Fraulein Eckelstein. Jack Forrest was a man of little education and low wit, but he knew how to hold his tongue ; he had learned it in the training stables. Into this thin-lipped, clean-shaven, silent man, then, with snu tyes dose together, and impenetrable face, poor Aline read M q>itoine of all her novelettes. He was tlie rightful <nmtr of the Hadalstone estates, her father was the usurper, she herself an interloper. If he was silent, he was thinking of his wrongs ; if his words were strange, Bopicked, his accent unaccustomed, it was their fault, the Haywards' fault, for neglecting him in his youth. She was not a dever girl ; she did not, as will be seen, become a wise woman. In her extreme youth and ignorance, in ber loneliness and dislike of the one companion with whom she had been provided, she was amenable to any sort of temptation, exposed to any danger that should threaten her. Rightful heirs, unacknowledged and despised, were common enough in penny novelettes. Even in a. book that Aunt Con had given her was the story of a Scotch laird who posed as a groom to win his sister's love and confidence. Aline's imagination, roaming in mrow limits, called Jack Forrest Jack Hayward, and tried to sec in him a hero of romance.

It wa* not entirely Jack Forrest's fault. He was not responsible for the muddle-headed child's wrong information, or wrongly understood information. He was not the sort of scoundrel that he appeared to be by what loDowctl, but he was " dead broke," and suspended from liding^, and he had a scheme, every broken-down jockey hu a seficme, and it wanted money to work it, Stephen kid written him a curt letter, and given him the post at Hidalstoae and two pounds per week. The scheme or coup W3S connected with horses and faking; it could not be worked from Hadalstone. Forrest tried his grandmother, hat she had no savings. Wages were not high at Hadal- «one, they were not even paid very regularly ; and what little she had, had gone from time to time to that poor tainted woman, Jack's mother, who walked the town, Hitil, five years ago, she had walked into the great Silence.

And Aline threw herself at his head, literally threw hmelf at his head. He told Stephen so, in that one inter- Tiew he had w^itli him, that too late interview, and

Stephen's bitter incredulous contempt made it seem a^ surd. But it was true. The child had beautiful thoughts, she meant to give him back the inheritance of which he had been robbed. She was always thinking of how this could be accomplished. She puzzled over it, and thought of it, night and day. Wild schemes of appealing to her father were quenched by her limited knowledge of how he stood in the matter. It seemed as if Stephen, having been his father's heir, must be concerned in the wrong that had been done to Forrest. She was hazy about the story, and thought of the broken jockey as " Cousin Jack." Her heart beat high when the right thought came to her some few weeks after he had arrived at Hadalstone. There was a wonderful flush in her peach-like skin, a brightness in her blue eyes, when riding with him on the day that the light had dawned. She turned in her saddle quickly, as the g^eat thought took shape, and asked htm:

" Are you married ; have you ever been married ?" I

The man was low class, but sharp enough. On the answer he gave her she slowly, with heightening flush and brightening eye, told him her fine thoughts. Often, since he had discovered her misinformation, they had discussed his " wrongs ;" and he followed her meaning quickly now.

" By Gad ! she's not a bad bit of flesh, and he'd have to fork out then," was his unspoken answer. And then he played his easy part. He told her he was not married, and he would like well enough to marry her. His part was easy to play, because Aline gave him all the cues.j (He had not quite understood the " tack" she was on first, but she talked more and more freely to him, and he followed where she led. Very little was required of him. The horrible sacrifice seemed the simplest matter to Aline. She promised to marry him almost before he had made up his mind that the " spec" was a sure one.