Stories in Light and Shadow by Bret Harte (100 best novels of all time TXT) 📖

The consul gave a slight start, and was aware that Beverdale was looking at him.

“Perhaps you know her?” said Beverdale.

“Just enough to agree with you that she is charming,” said the consul. “I dined with them, and saw them at the consulate.”

“Oh yes; I always forget you are a consul. Then, of course, you know all about them. I suppose they’re very rich, and in society over there?” said Beverdale in a voice that was quite animated.

It was on the consul’s lips to say that the late Mr. Desborough was an Englishman, and even to speak playfully of their proposed quest, but a sudden instinct withheld him. After all, perhaps it was only a caprice, or idea, they had forgotten,—perhaps, who knows?—that they were already ashamed of. They had evidently “got on” in English society, if that was their real intent, and doubtless Miss Desborough, by this time, was quite as content with the chance of becoming related to the Earl of Beverdale, through his son and heir, Algernon, as if they had found a real Lord Desborough among their own relatives. The consul knew that Lord Beverdale was not a rich man, that like most men of old family he was not a slave to class prejudice; indeed, the consul had seen very few noblemen off the stage or out of the pages of a novel who were. So he said, with a slight affectation of authority, that there was as little doubt of the young lady’s wealth as there was of her personal attractions.

They were nearing the house through a long avenue of chestnuts whose variegated leaves were already beginning to strew the ground beneath, and they could see the vista open upon the mullioned windows of the Priory, lighted up by the yellow October sunshine. In that sunshine stood a tall, clean-limbed young fellow, dressed in a shooting-suit, whom the consul recognized at once as Lord Algernon, the son of his companion. As if to accent the graces of this vision of youth and vigor, near him, in the shadow, an old man had halted, hat in hand, still holding the rake with which he had been gathering the dead leaves in the avenue; his back bent, partly with years, partly with the obeisance of a servitor. There was something so marked in this contrast, in this old man standing in the shadow of the fading year, himself as dried and withered as the leaves he was raking, yet pausing to make his reverence to this passing sunshine of youth and prosperity in the presence of his coming master, that the consul, as they swept by, looked after him with a stirring of pain.

“Rather an old man to be still at work,” said the consul.

Beverdale laughed. “You must not let him hear you say so; he considers himself quite as fit as any younger man in the place, and, by Jove! though he’s nearly eighty, I’m inclined to believe it. He’s not one of our people, however; he comes from the village, and is taken on at odd times, partly to please himself. His great aim is to be independent of his children,—he has a granddaughter who is one of the maids at the Priory,—and to keep himself out of the workhouse. He does not come from these parts— somewhere farther north, I fancy. But he’s a tough lot, and has a deal of work in him yet.”

“Seems to be going a bit stale lately,” said Lord Algernon, “and I think is getting a little queer in his head. He has a trick of stopping and staring straight ahead, at times, when he seems to go off for a minute or two. There!” continued the young man, with a light laugh. “I say! he’s doing it now!” They both turned quickly and gazed at the bent figure—not fifty yards away—standing in exactly the same attitude as before. But, even as they gazed, he slowly lifted his rake and began his monotonous work again.

At Scrooby Priory, the consul found that the fame of his fair countrywoman had indeed preceded her, and that the other guests were quite as anxious to see Miss Desborough as he was. One of them had already met her in London; another knew her as one of the house party at the Duke of Northforeland’s, where she had been a central figure. Some of her naive sallies and frank criticisms were repeated with great unction by the gentlemen, and with some slight trepidation and a “fearful joy” by the ladies. He was more than ever convinced that mother and daughter had forgotten their lineal Desboroughs, and he resolved to leave any allusion to it to the young lady herself.

She, however, availed herself of that privilege the evening after her arrival. “Who’d have thought of meeting YOU here?” she said, sweeping her skirts away to make room for him on a sofa. “It’s a coon’s age since I saw you—not since you gave us that letter to those genealogical gentlemen in London.”

The consul hoped that it had proved successful.

“Yes, but maw guessed we didn’t care to go back to Hengist and Horsa, and when they let loose a lot of ‘Debboroughs’ and ‘Daybrooks’ upon us, maw kicked! We’ve got a drawing ten yards long, that looks like a sour apple tree, with lots of Desboroughs hanging up on the branches like last year’s pippins, and I guess about as worm-eaten. We took that well enough, but when it came to giving us a map of straight lines and dashes with names written under them like an old Morse telegraph slip, struck by lightning, then maw and I guessed that it made us tired.

“You know,” she went on, opening her clear gray eyes on the consul, with a characteristic flash of shrewd good sense through her quaint humor, “we never reckoned where this thing would land us, and we found we were paying a hundred pounds, not only for the Desboroughs, but all the people they’d MARRIED, and their CHILDREN, and children’s children, and there were a lot of outsiders we’d never heard of, nor wanted to hear of. Maw once thought she’d got on the trail of a Plantagenet, and followed it keen, until she found she had been reading the dreadful thing upside down. Then we concluded we wouldn’t take any more stock in the family until it had risen.”

During this speech the consul could not help noticing that, although her attitude was playfully confidential to him, her voice really was pitched high enough to reach the ears of smaller groups around her, who were not only following her with the intensest admiration, but had shamelessly abandoned their own conversation, and had even faced towards her. Was she really posing in her naivete? There was a certain mischievous, even aggressive, consciousness in her pretty eyelids. Then she suddenly dropped both eyes and voice, and said to the consul in a genuine aside, “I like this sort of thing much better.”

The consul looked puzzled. “What sort of thing?”

“Why, all these swell people, don’t you see? those pictures on the walls! this elegant room! everything that has come down from the past, all ready and settled for you, you know—ages ago! Something you haven’t to pick up for yourself and worry over.”

But here the consul pointed out that the place itself was not “ancestral” as regarded the present earl, and that even the original title of his predecessors had passed away from it. “In fact, it came into the family by one of those ‘outsiders’ you deprecate. But I dare say you’d find the place quite as comfortable with Lord Beverdale for a host as you would if you had found out he were a cousin,” he added.

“Better,” said the young lady frankly.

“I suppose your mother participates in these preferences?” said the consul, with a smile.

“No,” said Miss Desborough, with the same frankness, “I think maw’s rather cut up at not finding a Desborough. She was invited down here, but SHE’S rather independent, you know, so she allowed I could take care of myself, while she went off to stay with the old Dowager Lady Mistowe, who thinks maw a very proper womanly person. I made maw mad by telling her that’s just what old Lady Mistowe would say of her cook—for I can’t stand these people’s patronage. However, I shouldn’t wonder if I was invited here as a ‘most original person.’”

But here Lord Algernon came up to implore her to sing them one of “those plantation songs;” and Miss Desborough, with scarcely a change of voice or manner, allowed herself to be led to the piano. The consul had little chance to speak with her again, but he saw enough that evening to convince him not only that Lord Algernon was very much in love with her, but that the fact had been equally and complacently accepted by the family and guests. That her present visit was only an opportunity for a formal engagement was clear to every woman in the house—not excepting, I fear, even the fair subject of gossip herself. Yet she seemed so unconcerned and self-contained that the consul wondered if she really cared for Lord Algernon. And having thus wondered, he came to the conclusion that it didn’t much matter, for the happiness of so practically organized a young lady, if she loved him or not.

It is highly probable that Miss Sadie Desborough had not even gone so far as to ask herself that question. She awoke the next morning with a sense of easy victory and calm satisfaction that had, however, none of the transports of affection. Her taste was satisfied by the love of a handsome young fellow,—a typical Englishman,—who, if not exactly original or ideal, was, she felt, of an universally accepted, “hall-marked” standard, the legitimate outcome of a highly ordered, carefully guarded civilization, whose repose was the absence of struggle or ambition; a man whose regular features were not yet differentiated from the rest of his class by any of those disturbing lines which people call character. Everything was made ready for her, without care or preparation; she had not even an ideal to realize or to modify. She could slip without any jar or dislocation into this life which was just saved from self-indulgence and sybaritic luxury by certain conventional rules of activity and the occupation of amusement which, as obligations of her position, even appeared to suggest the novel aspect of a DUTY! She could accept all this without the sense of being an intruder in an unbroken lineage—thanks to the consul’s account of the Beverdales’ inheritance. She already pictured herself as the mistress of this fair domain, the custodian of its treasures and traditions, and the dispenser of its hospitalities, but—as she conscientiously believed—without pride or vanity, in her position; only an intense and thoughtful appreciation of it. Nor did she dream of ever displaying it ostentatiously before her less fortunate fellow countrywomen; on the contrary, she looked forward to their possible criticism of her casting off all transatlantic ties with an uneasy consciousness that was perhaps her nearest approach to patriotism. Yet, again, she reasoned that, as her father was an Englishman, she was only returning to her old home. As to her mother, she had already comforted herself by noticing certain discrepancies in that lady’s temperament, which led her to believe that she herself alone inherited her father’s nature—for her mother was, of course, distinctly American! So little conscious was she of any possible snobbishness in this belief, that in her superb naivete she would have argued the point with the consul, and employed a wit and dialect that were purely American.

She had slipped out of the Priory early that morning that she might enjoy alone, unattended and unciceroned, the aspect of