The Golden Calf Part 13

'How pleased you all seem!' she said. 'I did not know you were so fond of your cousin. I thought it was the other you liked.'

'Oh, we like them both,' said Blanche, 'and it is so nice of Brian to come on purpose for Bessie's birthday. Do come and see him. He is on the top of the hill talking to Bess; and the kettle boils, and we are just going to have tea. We are all starving.'

'After such a dinner!' exclaimed Ida.

'Such a dinner, indeed!--two or three legs of fowls and a plate or so of pie!' e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Reginald, contemptuously. 'I began to be hungry a quarter of an hour afterwards. Come and see Brian.'

Ida looked round her wonderingly, feeling as if she was in a dream.

Dr. Rylance had disappeared. Urania was smiling at her sweetly, more sweetly than it was her wont to smile at Ida Palliser.

'One would think she knew that I had refused her father,' mused Ida.

They all climbed the hill, the children talking perpetually, Ida unusually silent. The smoke of a gipsy fire was going up from a hollow near the Druid altar, and two figures were standing beside the altar; one, a young man, with his arm resting on the granite slab, and his head bent as he talked, with seeming earnestness, to Bessie Wendover. He turned as the crowd approached, and Bessie introduced him to Miss Palliser. 'My cousin Brian--my dearest friend Ida,' she said.

'She is desperately fond of the Abbey,' said Blanche; 'so I hope she will like you. "Love me, love my dog," says the proverb, so I suppose one might say, "Love my house, love me."'

Ida stood silent amidst her loquacious friends, looking at the stranger with a touch of wonder. No, this was not the image which she had pictured to herself. Mr. Wendover was very good-looking--interesting even; he had the kind of face which women call nice--a pale complexion, dreamy gray eyes, thin lips, a well-shaped nose, a fairly intellectual forehead. But the Brian of her fancies was a man of firmer mould, larger features, a more resolute air, an eye with more fire, a brow marked by stronger lines. For some unknown reason she had fancied the master of the Abbey like that Sir Tristram Wendover who had been so loyal a subject and so brave a soldier, and before whose portrait she had so often lingered in dreamy contemplation.

'And you have really come all the way from Norway to be at Bessie's picnic?' she faltered at last, feeling that she was expected to say something.

'I would have come a longer distance for the sake of such a pleasant meeting,' he answered, smiling at her.

'Bessie,' cried Blanche, who had been grovelling on her knees before the gipsy fire, 'the kettle will go off the boil if you don't make tea instantly. If it were not your birthday I should make it myself.'

'You may,' said Bessie, 'although it is my birthday.'

She had walked a little way apart with Urania, and they two were talking somewhat earnestly.

'Those girls seem to be plotting something,' said Reginald; 'a charade for to-night, perhaps. It's sure to be stupid if Urania's in it.'

'You mean that it will be too clever,' said Horatio.

'Yes, that kind of cleverness which is the essence of stupidity.'

While Bessie and Miss Rylance conversed apart, and all the younger Wendovers devoted their energies to the preparation of a tremendous meal, Ida and Brian Wendover stood face to face upon the breezy hill-top, the girl sorely embarra.s.sed, the young man gazing at her as if he had never seen anything so lovely in his life.

'I have heard so much about you from Bessie,' he said after a silence which seemed long to both. 'Her letters for the last twelve months have been a perpetual paean--like one of the Homeric hymns, with you for the heroine. I had quite a dread of meeting you, feeling that, after having my expectations strung up to such a pitch, I must be disappointed.

Nothing human could justify Bessie's enthusiasm.'

'Please don't talk about it. Bessie's one weak point is her affection for me. I am very grateful. I love her dearly, but she does her best to make me ridiculous.'

'I am beginning to think Bessie a very sensible girl,' said Brian, longing to say much more, so deeply was he impressed by this G.o.ddess in a holland gown, with glorious eyes s.h.i.+ning upon him under the shadow of a coa.r.s.e straw hat.

'Have you come back to Hamps.h.i.+re for good?' asked Ida, as they strolled towards Bessie and Urania.

'For good! No, I never stay long.'

'What a pity that lovely old Abbey should be deserted!'

'Yes, it is rather a shame, is it not? But then no one could expect a young man to live there except in the hunting season--or for the sake of the shooting.'

'Could anyone ever grow tired of such a place?' asked Ida.

She was wondering at the young man's indifferent air, as if that solemn abbey, those romantic gardens, were of no account to him. She supposed that this was in the nature of things. A man born lord of such an elysium would set little value upon his paradise. Was it not Eve's weariness of Eden which inclined her ear to the serpent?

And now the banquet was spread upon the short smooth turf, and everybody was ordered to sit down. They made a merry circle, with the tea-kettle in the centre, piles of cake, and bread and b.u.t.ter, and jam-pots surrounding it. Blanche and Horatio were the chief officiators, and were tremendously busy ministering to the wants of others, while they satisfied their own hunger and thirst hurriedly between whiles. The damsel sat on the gra.s.s with a big crockery teapot in her lap, while her brother watched and managed the kettle, and ran to and fro with cups and saucers. Bessie, as the guest of honour, was commanded to sit still and look on.

'Dreadfully babyish, isn't it?' said Urania, smiling with her superior air at Brian, who had helped himself to a crust of home-made bread, and a liberal supply of gooseberry jam.

'Uncommonly jolly,' he answered gaily. 'I confess to a weakness for bread and jam. I wish people always gave it at afternoon teas.'

'Has it not a slight flavour of the nursery?'

'Of course it has. But a nursery picnic is ever so much better than a swell garden-party, and bread and jam is a great deal more wholesome than salmon-mayonaise and Strasbourg pie. You may despise me as much as you like, Miss Rylance. I came here determined to enjoy myself.'

'That is the right spirit for a picnic,' said Ida, 'People with grand ideas are not wanted.'

'And I suppose in the evening you will join in the dumb charades, and play hide-and-seek in the garden, all among spiders and c.o.c.kchafers.'

'I will do anything I am told to do,' answered Brian, cheerily. 'But I think the season of the c.o.c.kchafer is over.'

'What has become of Dr. Rylance?' asked Bessie, looking about her as if she had only that moment missed him.

'I think he went back to the farm for his horse,' said Urania. 'I suppose he found our juvenile sports rather depressing.'

'Well, he paid us a compliment in coming at all,' answered Bessie, 'so we must forgive him for getting tired of us.'

The drive home was very merry, albeit Bessie and her friend were to part next morning--Ida to go back to slavery. They were both young enough to be able to enjoy the present hour, even on the edge of darkness.

Bessie clasped her friend's hand as they sat side by side in the landau.

'You must come to us at Christmas,' she whispered: 'I shall ask mother to invite you.'

Brian was full of talk and gaiety as they drove home through the dusk. He was very different from that ideal Brian of Ida's girlish fancy--the Brian who embodied all her favourite attributes, and had all the finest qualities of the hero of romance. But he was an agreeable, well-bred young man, bringing with him that knowledge of life and the active world which made his talk seem new and enlightening after the strictly local and domestic intellects of the good people with whom she had been living.

With the family at The Knoll conversation had been bounded by Winchester on one side, and Romsey on the other. There was an agreeable freshness in the society of a young man who could talk of all that was newest in European art and literature, and who knew how the world was being governed.

But this fund of information was hinted at rather than expressed.

To-night Mr. Wendover seemed most inclined to mere nonsense talk--the lively nothings that please children. Of himself and his Norwegian adventures he said hardly anything.

'I suppose when a man has travelled so much he gets to look upon strange countries as a matter of course,' speculated Ida. 'If I had just come from Norway, I should talk of nothing else.'

The dumb-charades and hide-and-seek were played, but only by the lower orders, as Bessie called her younger brothers and sisters.

Ida strolled in the moonlit garden with Mr. Wendover, Bessie Urania, and Mr. Ratcliffe, a very juvenile curate, who was Bessie's admirer and slave. Urania had no particular admirer She felt that every one at Kingthorpe must needs behold her with mute wors.h.i.+p; but there was no one so audacious as to give expression to the feeling; no one of sufficient importance to be favoured with her smiles. She looked forward to her first season in London next year, and then she would be called upon to make her selection.

'She is worldly to the tips of her fingers,' said Ida, as she and Bessie talked apart from the others for a few minutes: 'I wonder she does not try to captivate your cousin.'