A certain quality of attraction about Blair which made
women love him.—Page [22]

Children of Destiny

By MOLLY ELLIOT SEAWELL

With Illustrations By
A. B. WENZELL

A. L. BURT COMPANY
Publishers New York

Copyright 1893
D. Appleton and Company

Copyright 1903
The Bobbs-Merrill Company

APRIL

Children of Destiny

CHILDREN OF DESTINY.

CHAPTER I.

The hot June sunshine poured down upon the great fields of yellow wheat at Deerchase, and the velvet wind swept softly over them, making long billows and shadowy dimples in the golden sea of grain. The air was all blue and gold, and vibrating with the music of harvest time—the reedlike harmonies of the wind-swept wheat, the droning of many bees, the merry drumming of the cicada in the long grass, and, above all, the song of the black reapers, as they swung their glittering scythes in the morning sun. One side of the vast field was skirted by purplish woods, through which went constantly a solemn murmur—the only sad note in the symphony. On the other side rose great clumps and groves of live oaks and silver beeches and feathery elms, shading a spacious brick house with innumerable peaks and gables. Beyond this house and its pleasure grounds a broad and glittering river went merrily on its way to the south Atlantic. Nature in this coast country of Virginia is prodigal of beauty, and bestows all manner of charms with a lavish hand. Here are found blue rivers and bluer skies, and pale splendours of moonlit nights and exquisite dawns and fair noons. Here Nature runs the whole gamut of beauty—through the laughing loveliness of spring mornings, the capricious sweetness of summer days, when the landscape hides itself, like a sulky beauty, in white mists and silvery rains, to the cold glory of the winter nights; there is no discord nor anything unlovely. But in the harvest time it is most gracious and love-compelling. There is something ineffably gay in harvest, and the negroes, those children of the sun, sang as merrily and as naturally as the grasshoppers that chirped in the green heart of the woods.

The long row of black reapers swung their scythes in rhythm, their voices rising and falling in cadence with the cutting of the wheat. The head man led the singing as he led the reapers. After them came a crowd of negro women, gathering up the wheat and tying it into bundles—it was as primitive as the harvesting in the days of Ruth and Boaz. It was not work, it was rather play. The song of the reapers had an accompaniment of shrill laughter from the women, who occasionally joined in the singing—

“When I was young, I useter to wait

Behine ole marster, han’ he plate,

An’ pass de bottle when he dry,

An’ bresh away dat blue-tail fly.�

The men’s voices rolled this out sonorously and melodiously. Then came the chorus, in which the high sweet voices of the women soared like the larks and the thrushes:

“Jim, crack corn, I doan’ keer,

Jim, crack corn, I doan’ keer,

Jim, crack corn, I doan’ keer.

Ole—marster’s—gone—away!�

The last line was a wail; but the first lines were full of a devil-may-care music, which made some of the women drop their bundles of wheat, and, picking up their striped cotton skirts, they danced a breakdown nimbly. A dozen little negro boys carried buckets of water about the field to refresh the thirsty harvesters, and one negro girl, with her arms folded and a great pail on her head of whisky and water with mint floating around in it, was vociferously greeted whenever she appeared, and a drink from the gourd in the pail invariably caused a fresh outburst of song.

Hot and bright as the fields were, it was not too hot and bright for these merry labourers. But there was a stretch of coolness and of shade on the edge of the woods where the dew still sparkled upon the blackberry-bushes and the grass and undergrowth. And in a shady place under a hawthorn bush sat a black-eyed little boy with a dog across his knees. They had for company a Latin book, which the boy made a lazy pretence of studying, wearing all the time a sulky scowl. But when he found that he could put the book to a better use than studying, by propping the dog’s head upon it so as to bring the tawny, intelligent eyes upon a level with his own, the scowl cleared away. His face, then, though full of archness and sweetness, was not altogether happy. He gazed into the dog’s eyes wistfully, for, although many people gazed upon him kindly, no creature in the wide world ever gazed upon him so affectionately as this one poor brute of a dog.

Presently, while lost in a sort of dream, listening to the song of the reapers as it melted away in the distance, and following up pretty, idle fancies that danced before him like white butterflies in the sun, he heard a crashing behind him of a burly figure making its way through the leaves and grass, and an ungainly man, past middle age, and blear-eyed and snuffy, appeared before him. In the pure, fresh morning light he looked coarser, more dissipated than could be imagined; but when his voice rang out, not even the wood bird’s note put it to shame—it was so clear, so rich, so sweet. That voice was the one charm left to him.

“Well, Lewis, my lad,� he cried out, “how are you and my old friend Horatius Flaccus getting on this deuced fine morning? Drat the dog—you always have him about.�

“You shouldn’t drat him, Mr. Bulstrode,� answered Lewis, “because old Service likes Latin better than I do. He has scarcely blinked since I put the book in his paw.�

“Dogs do like Latin,� answered Bulstrode, with a wink; “let me show you, sir.�

Lewis burst out laughing at the idea that dogs had any taste for the classics; and the dog, withdrawing his head, showed his teeth in a snarl.

“Snarl away, my friend,� said Bulstrode jovially, seating himself, with awkward comfort, on the grass. “I lay I’ll make you change your tune. Do you know—� Bulstrode’s pronunciation was not equal to the music of his voice, and he said “D’ye know.� “D’ye know, boy, that the two great powers to charm women and dogs are the eye and the voice? Now, as for my eyes—Lord, I never had any charm in ’em, and the life I’ve led wasn’t calculated to give ’em any. But see if that damned dog doesn’t stop his growling when I give him some first-class Latin.�

Bulstrode took the book and began to read sonorously one of the longer odes. Lewis, whose black eyes were wonderfully expressive, was laughing to himself, the more so when, as Bulstrode rolled out the lines of rhythmic beauty, old Service ceased his growling and appeared to be listening gravely. Bulstrode put out his hand and drew the dog toward him, and in a little while Service was resting his head on Bulstrode’s knee and blinking placidly and solemnly into his face.

“There you have it!� cried Bulstrode, slapping the book together. “Let me tell you, Lewis, in the old days, when my face was fresh and fair, I used to walk up and down the river bank at Cambridge, reciting these odes to a gang of undergraduates, and sometimes there’d be a don on the outskirts of the crowd. Don’t know what a don is? Well, I’ll tell you some day. And the reason my Latin and Greek are so much better than my English is because I learned my English from the vulgar. But my Latin and Greek I learned from the very finest old Latin and Greek gentlemen that ever were—the cream of the company, boy; and that and my voice are about the only decent things left about me.�

“And your philosophy,� said Lewis, hesitating—“that great book you’re helping Mr. Skelton on.�

“Philosophy—fudge!� cried Bulstrode carelessly. “There’s Skelton now, shut up in that musty library yonder�—jerking his thumb toward the Deerchase house—“grinding away at his system of philosophy; and here am I, the true philosopher, enjoying this infernally glorious harvest and these picturesque black people, that I never can get used to, no matter how long I live in this odd country. D’ye know what Kant says? Of course you don’t; so I’ll tell you. He says that two men, like him over yonder�—Bulstrode jerked his thumb again over his shoulder—“and your humble servant, engaged in pursuing abstract philosophy, are like two idiots who want a drink of milk; so one milks a post, while the other holds a sieve. That’s philosophy, my dear boy.�

This puzzled Lewis very much, who was nevertheless accustomed to hearing Bulstrode pooh-poohing philosophy, while Mr. Skelton always uttered the word reverently.

“You see yourself,� cried Bulstrode, giving his battered hat a rakish cock, “Skelton is a fine example of what enormous study and research will bring a man to, and I’m another one. He has been studying for twenty years to write the greatest book that ever was written. He’s spent the twenty best years of his life, and he’s got fifteen thousand books stored away in that grand new library he has built, and he’s bought me, body and soul, to help him out, and the result will be—he’ll never write the book!�

Bulstrode slapped his hand down on his knee as he brought out the “never� in a ringing voice; the dog gave a single loud yelp, and Lewis Pryor jumped up in surprise.

“You don’t mean it, Mr. Bulstrode!� he cried breathlessly, for he had been bred upon the expectation that a great work was being then written in the Deerchase library by Mr. Skelton, and when it was given to the world the planet would stop revolving for a time at least. Bulstrode had an ungovernable indiscreetness, and, the string of his tongue being loosed, he proceeded to discuss Skelton’s affairs with great freedom, and without regarding in the least the youth of his companion.

“Yes, I do mean it. Skelton’s milking the post, and he’s hired me to hold the sieve. He’s been preparing—preparing—preparing to write that book; and the more he prepares, the more he won’t write it. Not that Skelton hasn’t great powers; you know those things he wrote at the university, particularly that ‘Voices of the People’? Well, Skelton’s got a bogie after him—the bogie of a too brilliant promise in his youth. He’s mortally afraid of the young fellow who wrote ‘Voices of the People.’ But he’ll carry out that other project of his—no doubt at all about that.�

“What is it?� asked Lewis, full of curiosity, though not altogether comprehending what he heard.

“Oh, that determination of his to ruin Jack Blair and his wife,� replied Bulstrode, flapping away a fly. “Mrs. Blair, you know, jilted the Great Panjandrum fifteen years ago, and ran away with Blair; and they’ll pay for it with every acre of land and stick of timber they’ve got in the world!�

Lewis pondered a moment or two.

“But I thought Mr. Skelton and the Blairs were so friendly and polite, and—�

“O Lord, yes. Deuced friendly and polite! That’s the way with gentlefolks—genteel brutality—shaking hands and smiling one at the other, and all the time a knife up the sleeve. Don’t understand gentlefolks myself.�

This rather shocked Lewis, who was accustomed to hearing everybody he knew called a gentleman, and the title insisted upon tenaciously.

“Why, Mr. Bulstrode,� he said diffidently, “ain’t you a gentleman?�

“Lord bless you, no!� cried Bulstrode loudly and frankly. “My father kept a mews, and my mother—God bless her!—I’ll say no more. But look you, Lewis Pryor,� said he, rising, and with a sort of rude dignity, “though I be not a gentleman here,� slapping his body, “I’m a gentleman here,� tapping his forehead. “I’m an aristocrat from my chops upward.�

Lewis had risen too. He thought this was very queer talk, but he did not laugh at it, or feel contempt for Bulstrode, who had straightened himself up, and had actually lost something of his plebeian aspect.

“And,� he added with an ill-suppressed chuckle, “I’m a gentleman when I’m drunk. You see, as long as I’m sober I remember the mews, and my father in his black weepers driving the hearse, and the delight I used to feel when the young sprigs of the nobility and gentry at the university would ask me to their wine parties to hear me spout Ovid and Anacreon, for they knew I wasn’t a gentleman. But when I’m drunk, I only remember that I was a ‘double first’; that every Greek and Latinist in England knows Wat Bulstrode’s name; and when this precious philosopher Skelton was scouring the universities to find a man to help him out with his—ha! ha!—great work, he could not for love or money get any better man than ragged, drunken, out-at-elbows Wat Bulstrode. I tell you, boy, when I’m drunk I’m a king! I’m more—I’m a gentleman! There is something in Greek which provokes an intolerable thirst. You say that Latin is dry; so it is, so it is, my boy—very dry and musty!� and then Bulstrode, in a rich, sweet, rollicking voice, as delicious as his speaking voice, trolled out the fag end of a song that echoed and re-echoed through the green woods:

“I went to Strasburg, when I got drunk,

With the most learned Professor Brunck.

I went to Wortz, where I got more drunken,

With the more learned Professor Bruncken.�

Bulstrode had quite forgotten the boy’s presence. Lewis gazed at him with wide, innocent boyish eyes. It was rather a tipsy age, and to be a little convivial was considered a mark of a liberal spirit, but Lewis was astute enough to see that this was not the sort of gentlemanly joviality which prevailed in the age and in the country. The song of the reapers was still mellowly heard in the distance; their scythe blades glittered in the sun, the merriment, the plenty, the beauty and simplicity of the scene was like Arcady; but the contrast between what Nature had made, and what man had made of himself, in Bulstrode, was appalling.

Suddenly, the careless delight expressed in Bulstrode’s look and manner vanished, and a strange passion of despair overcame him.

“But then, there is the waking up—the waking up—great God!� he shouted. “Then I see that I’m, after all, nothing but a worthless dog; that this man Skelton owns me; that I never will be anything but worthless and learned and drunken; that I’m no better than any other hanger-on, for all my Greek and Latin! However,� he added, stuffing his hands in his pockets and as suddenly laying aside his tragic air, “there never was such a hanger-on. Upon my soul, it’s a question whether Richard Skelton owns Wat Bulstrode, or Wat Bulstrode and the books own Richard Skelton. But look’ee here, boy, I had almost forgot you, and the dog too. I don’t envy Richard Skelton. No man pursues his enemy with gaiety of heart. He has spent more money in ruining Jack Blair than would have made ten good men prosperous; and, after all, it’s that passion of Blair’s for horse racing that will ruin him in the end. Gad! I don’t know that I’m any worse than Skelton, or any other man I know.—Why, hello! what the devil—�

This last was involuntarily brought out by Skelton himself, who at that moment stood before him. Lewis had seen Skelton coming, and had vainly tugged at Bulstrode’s coat-tails without any effect.

Whether Skelton’s philosophy commanded respect or not, his personality certainly did. He was about medium height, lean, dark, and well made. Also, whether he was handsome or not the world had not yet decided during all his forty years of life; but certain it was few men could look handsome beside him. His eyes, though, were singularly black and beautiful, like those of the boy standing by him. He was in riding dress, and held a little whip in his hand; he had ridden out to the harvest field, and then dismounted and left his horse while he walked through the stubble and clover. He had overheard much that Bulstrode had last said, and, in spite of his invincible composure, his face showed a silent rage and displeasure. Bulstrode and Lewis knew it by the sultry gleam of his black eyes. Bulstrode instantly lost his air of independence, and all of his efforts to retain it only resulted in a half-cowed swagger.

“Bulstrode,� said Skelton in a cool voice, “how often have I recommended you not to discuss me or my affairs?�

“Don’t know, I’m sure,� blustered Bulstrode, his hands still in his pockets. Both of them had realised the boy’s presence. As Bulstrode really loved him, he hated to be cowed before Lewis. The boy was looking downwards, his eyes on the ground; the dog nestled close to him. Both Skelton and Bulstrode remained silent for a moment or two.

“You know,� said Skelton after a pause, “I am not a man to threaten.�

“Yes, by Jove, I do,� answered Bulstrode, breaking into a complaining whine. “I don’t know why it is, Skelton, that you can always bully me; unless it’s because you’re a gentleman, and I ain’t. You dashed patricians always have us plebes under the hack—always, always. The fellows that went ahorseback were always better than those who went afootback. Sometimes, by George, I wish I had been born a gentleman!�

Bulstrode’s collapse was so rapid and complete that wrath could not hold against him. Skelton merely said something about an unbridled tongue being a firebrand, and then, turning to Lewis, said:

“The harvest is the black man’s holiday. Come with me, and we will see him enjoy it.�

Skelton’s tone to Lewis was peculiar; although his words were cold, and his manner reserved, his voice expressed a strange fondness. Lewis felt sorry for Bulstrode, standing alone and ashamed, and after he had gone a little way by Skelton’s side he turned back and ran toward Bulstrode, holding out his book.

“Won’t you have my Horace for company, Mr. Bulstrode?� he cried; “though I believe you know every word in it. But a book is company—when one can’t get a dog, that is.�

“Yes, boy,� answered Bulstrode, taking one hand out of his pocket. “Old Horace and I will forget this workaday world. We have had a good many bouts in our time, Horatius Flaccus and I. The old fellow was a good judge of wine. Pity he didn’t know anything about tobacco.� He began speaking with a sigh, and ended with a grin.

Skelton and Lewis turned off together, and walked along the edge of the field. The fresh, sweet scent of the newly cut wheat filled the air; the clover blossoms that grew with the wheat harboured a cloud of happy bees; over the land hung a soft haze. Lewis drank in delightedly all of the languid beauty of the scene, and so did Skelton in his quiet, controlled way.

Lewis shrewdly suspected that the reason Skelton carried him off was to get him out of Bulstrode’s way, for although Bulstrode was nominally his tutor, and had plenty of opportunities for talking, he was not always as communicative as on that morning. The boy was much in awe of Skelton. He could not altogether make out his own feelings in the matter. He knew of no relationship between them, and thought he knew he was the son of Thomas Pryor, in his lifetime a tutor of Skelton’s. He called Skelton “Mr. Skelton,� and never remembered to have had a caress from him in all his life. But he never looked into Skelton’s eyes, which were precisely like his own, that he did not feel as if some strong and secret bond united them.

Meanwhile, Bulstrode stood in his careless attitude, looking after them, his eyes fixed on Skelton’s straight, well set-up figure.

“There you go,� he apostrophised. “Most men think they could advise the Almighty; but you, Richard Skelton, think yourself the Lord Almighty Himself! Unbridled tongue, indeed! I lay odds that I’ll make you write that sixth section of your Introduction over again before this day is out. I know a weak spot in your theory that knocks that chapter into flinders, and I’ve been saving it up for just such an occasion as this. But go your way, and I’ll go mine.�

“Fair and free is the king’s highway!�

he sang, loudly and sweetly.

CHAPTER II.

It is impossible for anything in this tame, latter-day age to be compared with the marvels of fifty, sixty, seventy years ago. The worn-out, tired race declines to be awed, or delighted, or startled any more. “Old Wonder is dead.� People have lost the sense of admiration. It is the price paid for civilisation.

But it was not always so. Fifty years ago the romantic, the interesting, even the mysterious, still existed. Luxury was rare, and life was so hard and poor to most people on this continent that imagination had to be called in to make it even tolerable. Superlatives had not gone out of fashion, and therefore it is quite just to apply the words grand, magnificent, superb, to Deerchase. True, if that deadly enemy of superlatives, comparison, be levelled against it, there is no doubt the irreverent modern would smile; for what the fresh, wonder-loving people in 1820 thought ineffably splendid, the jaded, sated people of 19— would think cheap, tawdry, not worth speaking of, after all. So that the pictures in the main hall at Deerchase would be pronounced mediocre, the park rather ambitious than imposing, the stables and the establishment generally insignificant compared with those of the merchant princes of to-day. But the owner of Deerchase had this immense advantage over the rich people of to-day—not the whole possessions of all of them could command half the awe, delight, and distinction that Deerchase did in its time. And if the power of places to awe and delight be gone, what shall be said of the lost power of individuals? But in 1820 hero worship survived with many other beautiful and imaginative things that the world has outgrown; and Richard Skelton, Esquire, was an object of envy and admiration to the whole county, and to half the State of Virginia besides.

For Richard Skelton, Esquire, was certainly born with a golden, not a silver, spoon in his mouth. In his childhood his dark beauty and a certain proud, disdainful air, natural to him, made him look like a little prince. In those days Byron was the poet; and the boy, with his great fortune, his beauty, his orphanhood, his precocious wit and melancholy, was called a young Lara. As he grew older, there were indications in him of strange mental powers, and a cool and determined will that was perfectly unbreakable. He brooded his youth away (in these degenerate days it would be said he loafed) sadly and darkly in the library at Deerchase. Old Tom Shapleigh, his guardian, who feared neither man nor devil, and who was himself a person of no mean powers, always felt, when his ward’s dark, inscrutable eyes were fixed upon him, a ridiculous and awkward inferiority—the more ridiculous and awkward because old Tom really had accomplished a good deal in life, while Richard Skelton could not possibly have accomplished anything at the very early age when he was perfectly commanding, not to say patronising, to his guardian. Old Tom did not take charge of the great Skelton property and the strange Skelton boy for pure love. The profits of managing such a property were considerable, and he was the very best manager of land and negroes in all the region about. But the Skelton boy, from the time he was out of round jackets, always assumed an air toward his guardian as if the guardian were merely his agent. This gave old Tom much saturnine amusement, for he was one of those men whose sense of humour was so sharp that he could smile over his own discomfiture at the hands of a haughty stripling, and could even laugh grimly at the burden of a silly wife, which he had taken upon himself.

For those who like life with a good strong flavour to it, Skelton and old Tom Shapleigh, and the people around them, were not devoid of interest. They belonged to a sturdy, well-fed, hard riding, hard drinking, landed aristocracy that was as much rooted to the land as the great oaks that towered in the virgin woods. All landowners are more or less bound to the soil; but these people were peculiarly so, because they had no outside world. There was no great city on this side of the Atlantic Ocean, and their journeys were merely a slight enlargement of their orbit. Their idea of seeing the world was a trip in the family coach to the Springs, where they met exactly the same people, bearing the same names, that they had left at home. This fixity and monotony produced in them an intensity of provincialism, a strength of prejudice, hardly to be conceived of now. They were only a few generations removed from an English ancestry, which in this new land prayed daily, “God bless England, our sweet native country!� Feudalism, in the form of a mild and patriarchal slave system, was still strong with them when it had gone to decay in Europe. The brighter sun had warmed their blood somewhat; they were more fiery and more wary than their forefathers. They were arrogant, yet simple-minded, and loved power more than money. They also loved learning, after their fashion, and kept the roster full at William and Mary College. But their learning was used to perpetuate their political power. By means of putting all their men of parts into politics, they managed to wage successfully an unequal fight for power during many generations. The same kind of equality existed among them as among the Spanish grandees, who call each other by their nicknames as freely as peasants, but are careful to give an outsider all his titles and dignities. There was a vast deal of tinsel in their cloth of gold; their luxuries were shabbily pieced out, and they were not quite as grand as they fancied themselves. But, after all, there is something imposing in a system which gives a man his own land, his house built of his own timber, his bricks made of his own red clay, his servants clothed and shod by his own workmen, his own blacksmiths, wheelwrights, carpenters, shoemakers—in short, a little kingdom of which he is the sovereign. Naturally it makes him arrogant, but it also makes him independent; and where each man stands upon punctilio everybody is likely to be polite. So they had few quarrels, but such as they had were deadly. The hair-splitting, the subtleties of the fin du siècle were unknown, undreamed of, by them. Everything was simple and direct—love, hate, fear, remorse, and joy. God and the devil were close to every man. Their lives were fixed, and had the continuity of an epic, instead of the fragmentary, disjointed lives that the people of to-day are living. And as they were necessarily obliged to spend all their mortal days together, they knew each other and each other’s generations like a book, and this effectually estopped pretension of all sorts. It was a picturesque, gay, pleasure-loving life, its Arcadian simplicity sometimes interrupted by tragedies, but it only lasted until the railroad and the telegraph brought all the world within speaking distance.

The rivers, broad and shallow and salt, that made in from the ocean bays, were the spots wisely chosen for the homesteads. The plantations extended back into a slightly rolling country, but every “p’int,� as the negroes called it, was the site for a house. At Deerchase, from the long stone porch covered with climbing tea roses, which faced the shining river, half a dozen rambling brick houses on their respective “p’ints� could be seen. The farthest off was only a mile up the river as the crow flies, but the indentations of the stream made it more, and when one undertook to go by land, the multitude of gates to be opened between different properties and the various windings and turnings to get there at all made it seem a dozen miles at least. This last place was Newington, where Mr. and Mrs. Jack Blair lived, and which Bulstrode so freely predicted would be in the market soon on account of a grudge owed the Blairs by the Great Panjandrum—Richard Skelton, Esquire. The next place to Deerchase was Belfield, where old Tom Shapleigh and that wonderful woman, Mrs. Shapleigh, lived with their daughter Sylvia, who had inherited more than her father’s brains and less than her mother’s beauty. Only a shallow creek, running into a marsh, divided Deerchase and Belfield, and it was not twenty minutes’ walk from one house to the other. This nearness had been very convenient to old Tom in managing the Skelton property, but it had not conduced to any intimacy between guardian and ward. Richard Skelton was not much above Mr. Shapleigh’s shoulder when he took to asking to be excused when his guardian called. Old Tom resented this impertinence as an impetuous, full-blooded, middle-aged gentleman might be expected to. He stormed up and down the Deerchase hall, nearly frightened Bob Skinny, the black butler, into fits, blazed away at the tutor, who would go and plead with the boy through the keyhole of a locked door.

“My dear Richard, come out and see your guardian; Mr. Shapleigh particularly wants to see you.�

“And I particularly don’t want to see Mr. Shapleigh; so go away and leave me,� young Skelton would answer in his smooth, soft voice.

As there was nothing for old Tom to do unless he kicked the door down, he would go home fuming, and have to content himself with writing very fierce and ungrammatical letters, of which the spelling was reckless, but the meaning plain, to his ward, which were never answered. Then old Tom would begin to laugh—it was so comical—and the next time he met the boy there would be that same haughty reserve on Skelton’s part, at which his guardian did not know whether to be most angry or amused. He was philosophic under it, though, and would say:

“Look at the tutors I’ve got for him, begad! and every man-jack of them has been under the hack of that determined little beggar from the start. And when a man, woman, or child can get the upper hand of one who lives in daily, hourly contact, why, you might just as well let ’em go their own gait. Damme, I can’t do anything with the arrogant little upstart!�

No expense was spared in tutors, and, as each successive one had a horse to ride and a servant to wait on him, and was treated politely by young Skelton as long as he was let alone, the tutors never complained, and old Tom was quite in the dark as to his ward’s real acquirements. Mrs. Shapleigh frequently urged Mr. Shapleigh to go over to Deerchase and demand categorically of Richard Skelton exactly how much Latin and mathematics he knew, but old Tom had tried that caper unsuccessfully several times. He did find out, though—or rather Mrs. Shapleigh found out for him—that Skelton had fallen desperately in love with his cousin, Elizabeth Armistead, who was as poor as a church mouse; and, although Elizabeth was known to have a weakness for Jack Blair, her whole family got after her and bullied her into engaging herself to the handsome stripling at Deerchase. Skelton was then twenty. Elizabeth herself was only seventeen, but seventeen was considered quite old in those days. This affair annoyed Mrs. Shapleigh very much, whose daughter Sylvia, being about ten years old at the time, she looked forward to seeing established as mistress of Deerchase by the time she was eighteen.

“Mr. Shapleigh,� his better half complained, “why don’t you go over to Deerchase and tell Richard Skelton up and down, that if he has fallen in love with Elizabeth Armistead he has got to fall out again?�

“My love, if I wanted him to fall out of love I’d let him get married. There’s no such specific for love as matrimony, madam.�

“It is not, indeed, Mr. Shapleigh,� answered madam, who, though weak in logic was not deficient in spirit, “and I’m sure that’s what my poor dear mother used to tell me when I thought I was in love with you. But just look at those Armisteads! Not a penny among them scarcely, and plotting and planning ever since Richard Skelton was born to get him for Elizabeth!�

“Gadzooks, ma’am, in that case the Armisteads are too clever for all of us, because they must have been planning the match at least three years before Elizabeth was born.�

“Now, Mr. Shapleigh, how silly you talk! Of course they couldn’t have planned it before Elizabeth was born. But it does seem a hard case that Richard Skelton should be carried off right under our noses, and Sylvia here quite ten years old, and I with my heart set on seeing her Mrs. Skelton, of Deerchase. But those Armisteads are a designing pack. You may take my word for it.�

“I do, my life, I do,� cried old Tom with a wink. Meanwhile there was no doubt that young Skelton was indeed violently in love with his cousin Elizabeth. It was his first passion, and he pursued it with an indescribable fierceness. Elizabeth, who had both beauty and spirit, was a little frightened at the intensity of his love and jealousy. She had been engaged to Jack Blair, of Newington, who was accounted a good match and was a gallant, lovable fellow enough, but, dazzled by Skelton’s personality and position and money, and beset by her family, she threw her lover over. They had one last interview, when Blair left her weeping and wringing her hands, while he threw himself on his horse and galloped home with a face as black as midnight.

Elizabeth could not quite forget Blair, and Skelton was too subtle not to see it. He lavished contempt on Blair, calling him a great hulking country squire, who cared for nothing but a screeching run after the hounds or a roaring flirtation with a pretty girl. He quite overlooked a certain quality of attraction about Blair which made women love him, children fondle him, and dogs fawn upon him. Skelton waked up to it, though, one fine morning, when he found that Elizabeth and Blair had decamped during the night and were then on their way to North Carolina to be married.

How Skelton took it nobody knew. He shut himself up in the library at Deerchase, and no one dared to come near him except Bob Skinny, who would tiptoe softly to the door once in a while with a tray and something to eat. There was a feeling in the county as if Abingdon Church had suddenly tumbled down, or the river had all at once turned backwards, when it was known that Richard Skelton had been actually and ignominiously jilted. Mrs. Shapleigh had a good heart, and, in spite of her plans for Sylvia, felt sorry for Skelton.

“Do, Mr. Shapleigh,� she pleaded, “go over and see poor Richard Skelton, and tell him there’s as good fish in the sea as ever were caught.�

“Zounds, madam,� answered old Tom, with energy, “I’m no poltroon, but I wouldn’t trust myself in the Deerchase library with that message for ten thousand dollars! He’d murder me. You’d be a widow, ma’am, as sure as shooting.�

“Well, Mr. Shapleigh, I hope, if I ever am a widow, I shall submit cheerfully to the Lord’s will; and I shall have as handsome a monument put up over you as there is in the county.�

“And I’ll do the same by you, my dear, if you should precede me. I’ll have one big enough to put on it the longest epitaph you ever saw; and I’ll tell my second wife every day of the virtues of my first.�

“Oh, oh, Mr. Shapleigh, why will you start such dreadful subjects!� cried Mrs. Shapleigh, in great distress.

Let it not be supposed that Mr. and Mrs. Shapleigh were not as comfortable as most married couples. Unlike most, though, in thirty years it had not been determined which was the better man. Mrs. Shapleigh had the mighty weapon of silliness, which has won many matrimonial battles. She never knew when she was beaten, and consequently remained unconquered. Old Tom, having married, like the average man, because the woman tickled his fancy, accepted with great good humour the avalanche of daily disgust that he had brought upon himself, and joked over his misfortune, instead of cutting his throat about it.

But as the wind is tempered to the shorn lamb, Mr. Shapleigh was blessed with a slight deafness, which varied according to whether he did or did not want to hear what Mrs. Shapleigh was saying. At particular stages in an argument, or at the mention of certain expenses, he always became as deaf as a post. He did not believe in cures for deafness, and held on to his beloved infirmity like a drowning man to a plank.

Thirty years of bickering rather endeared them to each other, particularly as neither had a bad heart. But old Tom sometimes thought, with a dash of tragedy, that had the visitation of God come upon him in the shape of a foolish daughter, he would have been tempted to cut his throat, after all. Sylvia, however, was far from foolish, and Mr. Shapleigh sometimes felt that Fate had treated him shabbily in making his daughter as much too clever as his wife was too silly.

Mrs. Shapleigh sent for Bob Skinny, that he might describe Skelton’s sufferings to her. Bob, who considered the master of Deerchase the first person in the universe, and the butler of Deerchase the second, gloried, after the manner of his race, in the magnitude of everything—even their misfortunes—that befell the Skeltons.

“Miss Belindy, Mr. Skelton�—this was an innovation in title; but Bob Skinny considered Skelton much too grand to be spoken of simply as “Marse Richard�—“Mr. Skelton he is de mos’ distrusted you ever see. He ain’ eat a mou’full for two weeks lars’ Sad’day, an’ he ain’ sleep a wink for a mont’!�

“La, Bob, he’ll be ill if he doesn’t eat or sleep.�

“De Skeltons dey kin go ’dout eatin’ an’ sleepin’ more’n common ev’yday folks,� responded Bob, with dignity.

“Maybe,� said Mrs. Shapleigh sympathetically, “a course of tansy tea would cure him if his spirits are so bad; and if he’d put some old nails in a stone jar and pour some water on them, and take it three times a day, it is as good a tonic as he could find. And if he won’t go out of the library to take any exercise, if you’d persuade him to swing a flat-iron about in either hand, it would expand his lungs and do for exercise.�

None of these suggestions, however, reached young Skelton, shut up in the library, raging like a wild creature.

In a month or two, however, he appeared again, looking exactly as he always had looked, and nobody dared to cast a sympathising glance upon him.

About that time a political pamphlet appeared anonymously. It made a tremendous sensation. It was, for its day, wildly iconoclastic. It pointed out the defects in the social system in Virginia, and predicted, with singular force and clearness, the uprooting of the whole thing unless a change was inaugurated from within. It showed that navigation and transportation were about to be revolutionised by steam, and that, while great material prosperity would result for a time, it meant enormous and cataclysmal changes, which might be destructive or might be made almost recreative.

This pamphlet set the whole State by the ears. On the hustings, in the newspapers, in private and in public, it was eagerly discussed. Even the pulpiteers took a shy at it. The authorship was laid at the door of every eminent man in the State and some outside, and it suddenly came out that it was written by the black-eyed, disappointed boy locked up in the Deerchase library.

The commotion it raised—the storm of blame and praise—might well have turned any head. Its literary excellence was unquestioned. Skelton was considered an infant Junius. But if it produced any effect upon him, nobody knew it, for there was not the smallest elation in his manner, or, in fact, any change whatever in him.

“That pamphlet ends my guardianship,� remarked old Tom Shapleigh shrewdly, “although the boy is still ten months off from his majority.�

Mr. Shapleigh had been vainly trying to get young Skelton to attend the University of Virginia, but at this time, without consulting his guardian, Skelton betook himself to Princeton. To say that old Tom was in a royal rage is putting it very mildly. He felt himself justified in his wrath, but was careful to exercise it at long range—in writing furious letters, to which Skelton vouchsafed no reply. Nevertheless old Tom promptly cashed the drafts made on him by his ward. At Princeton Skelton apparently spent his time reading French novels, smoking, and studying problems in chess; but at the end of two years it was discovered that he had made a higher average than had ever been made by any man at the university except Aaron Burr. As if content with this, however, Skelton left without taking his degree. But about that time he published a pamphlet under his own name. The title was Voices of the People. Its success was vast and immediate, even surpassing that of its predecessor. He was now twenty-two years old, his own master, graceful, full of distinction in his air and manner. The greatest things were expected of him.

CHAPTER III.

So far, Skelton was a magnificent promise. He remained at Deerchase a year, which he spent chiefly in improving the house and grounds, which were already beautiful. This gave him a very good excuse for keeping strictly to himself. Then he determined to go to Europe. His old flame, Mrs. Jack Blair, now lived at Newington, and every time she looked out of her windows she could see the noble brick pile of Deerchase. The house was a fine old colonial mansion, with walls three feet thick, and numbers of large and lofty rooms. Skelton added to it with great taste, and had his grounds laid out by a famous landscape gardener. Newington was very shabby; and if Mrs. Blair had been an envious woman—which she was not—she might have suffered many pangs because of the contrast between the two places. Mrs. Shapleigh declared that Skelton’s only object in improving Deerchase was to spite Mrs. Blair. But it certainly spited Mrs. Shapleigh dreadfully. She was seized with a desire that Belfield should rival Deerchase. Now, the Shapleighs were very well off, and Belfield was a large and handsome country house, but there was no rivalling Deerchase in the matter. Skelton had dollars where old Tom Shapleigh had dimes. Whenever Mrs. Shapleigh would start the subject of improving Belfield, Mr. Shapleigh would become so totally and obstinately deaf that there was no making him hear at all; so, as Mrs. Shapleigh was a much-indulged woman, she went to work on her own book to do landscape gardening, and to make Belfield as smart as Deerchase. The effect was fearful and wonderful. A Chinese pagoda was clapped on to one wing of the Belfield house. This was meant for a tower. Much red velvet furniture was bought, and old Tom paid the bills, grinning sardonically as he did it.

“I declare, Mr. Shapleigh,� Mrs. Shapleigh bewailed, “you’ve got no feeling for your own flesh and blood. There’s nothing more likely than that Sylvia will one day marry Richard Skelton, and then if we don’t furnish up some and improve the place, everybody will say she never was accustomed to anything until she went to Deerchase.�

Mr. Shapleigh declined to weep over this terrible prospect. Then came the ornamentation of the grounds. Mrs. Shapleigh’s idea of decorative art was a liberal supply of fresh paint of every hue of the rainbow. She had an elaborate affair of knobs and latticework, painted a vivid green, put up in the river between Deerchase and Belfield, in place of the old water fence of posts and rails. A fence of some sort was necessary to keep the cattle from wading down the salt marshes and following the river shore into forbidden fields. The cows came tramping placidly down the marshy creek until they got to the wonderful water fence, where they turned tail and trotted rapidly off, their frightened calves bleating after them. The picturesque, unpainted bridge across the creek was metamorphosed into a highly ornate construction with a summerhouse in the middle, expressly designed for Sylvia, who was then in short frocks, and Skelton to do their courting in eventually. Never was there such general overhauling and painting. The pigeon house was painted red and the turnstiles blue. When everything was done, and Mrs. Shapleigh was felicitating herself that Richard Skelton could no longer have the satisfaction of thinking Deerchase was unsurpassed, Skelton could not look toward Belfield without laughing, nor could anybody else, for that matter.

Skelton spent a full year at Deerchase, and just as he had brought the house and grounds to perfection this sudden idea of going to Europe possessed him. It was a great undertaking in those days. He had nobody to consult, nobody knew he was going, and nobody would grieve for him except some of the older house servants. Although Skelton was an indulgent master, he never exchanged a word with his negroes, who were entirely managed by overseers. The afternoon before he left he was on the river in his boat. It was a cloudy September day. Usually the scene was full of light and glow—the broad, bright river, the cheerful homesteads, his own beautiful Deerchase, and not even Mrs. Shapleigh, had been able to spoil the fair face of Nature with her miscalled ornamentation; but on that day it was dull and inexpressibly gloomy. A grey mist folded the distant landscape. The river went sullenly to the sea. Afar off in the marshes could be heard the booming of the frogs—the most doleful of sounds—and the occasional fugitive cry of birds going south rang shrilly from the leaden sky.

Skelton sailed up and down, almost up to Newington, and down again to Lone Point—a dreary, sandy point, where three tall and melancholy pine trees grew almost at the water’s edge, and where the river opened widely into the bay. He felt that strange mixture of sadness and exultation which people felt in those far-off days when they were about to start for distant countries. There was not a soul in sight, except in the creek by the water fence; Sylvia Shapleigh was standing barefooted, with her skirts tucked up. Her shoes and stockings lay on the bank. She had on a white sunbonnet, much beruffled, and was holding something down in the water with a forked stick.

She was then about twelve years old, with a delicate, pretty, thoughtful face, and beautiful grey eyes. So unlike was she to her father and mother that she might have been a changeling.

Skelton guessed at once what she was after. She was catching the crabs that came up to feed in these shallow, marshy creeks; but after pinning her crab down she was evidently in a quandary how to get at him. As Skelton watched her with languid interest she suddenly gave a faint scream, her sunbonnet fell off into the water, and she stood quite still and began to cry.

Skelton ran the boat’s nose ashore within twenty yards of her, and, jumping out, went to her, splashing through the water.

“Oh, oh!� screamed poor Sylvia, “my foot—he’s got my foot!�

Skelton raised her small white foot out of the water, and in half a minute the crab was dexterously “spancelled� and thrown away, but there was a cruel mark on the child’s foot, and blood was coming. She looked at Skelton with wide, frightened eyes, crying bitterly all the time.

“Come, my dear,� said Skelton, soothingly, “let me pick you up and carry you home.�

“I d-d-don’t want to go home,� wailed Sylvia.

“But something must be done for your foot, child.�

“Then take me to Deerchase, and let Mammy Kitty do it.�

Skelton was puzzled by the child’s unwillingness to go home. But Sylvia soon enlightened him.

“If I g-go home mamma will scold me, and she will cry over me, and make me keep on crying, and that will make my head ache; and if I can get s-something done for my foot—�

“But won’t your mother be frightened about you if I take you to Deerchase?� asked Skelton.

“No—ooo—oo!� bawled Sylvia, still weeping; “she lets me stay out until sundown. And she’ll make such a fuss over my foot if I go home!�

Determination was expressed in every line of Sylvia’s tearful, pretty face. Skelton silently went back to the shore, got her shoes and stockings, went to his boat and brought it up, Sylvia meanwhile keeping up a furious beating of the water with her forked stick to frighten the crabs off. Skelton lifted her in the boat, and they sailed along to the Deerchase landing. Sylvia wiped her feet on the curtain of her sunbonnet, put on her stockings and one shoe, and nursed the injured foot tenderly. Skelton lifted her out on the little stone pier he had had built, and then proceeded to take down the sail and tie the boat.

“I think,� said Sylvia calmly, “you’ll have to carry me to the house.�

“Hadn’t you better let me send for my calèche and pair for you?� gravely asked Skelton.

“Oh, no,� cried Sylvia briskly, and Skelton without a word picked her up and walked across the grassy lawn to the house. She was very light, and, except for flapping her wet sunbonnet in his face, he had no objection whatever to her. He carried her up the steps into the hall, and then turned her over to Mammy Kitty, who wrapped her foot in wet cabbage-leaves. Skelton went to the library. Presently, Bob Skinny’s woolly head was thrust in the door.

“Please, sah, Mr. Skelton, de young lady say will you please to come d’yar?�

Skelton, smiling at himself, rose and went back to the hall. Sylvia was perched on one foot, like a stork.

“I think,� she said, “if you’ll give me your arm I can walk around and look at the pretty things. Whenever I’ve been here with mamma she has always asked so many questions that I didn’t like to ask any myself.�

“You may ask any questions you like,� replied Skelton, still smiling. He never remembered exchanging a word with the child before. He had taken for granted that she was her mother’s own daughter, and as such he had no wish to cultivate her.

But Sylvia was not at all like her mother. She limped around the hall, looking gravely at the portraits.

The Skeltons were a handsome family, if the portraits could be believed. They were all dark, with clear-cut faces and high aquiline noses like Skelton’s, and they were all young.

“We have some portraits, you know,� remarked Sylvia, “but they are all old and ugly. Now, all of these are of pretty little girls and boys or handsome young ladies.�

“The Skeltons are not a long-lived family,� said Skelton. “They generally die before forty. Here is one—Janet Skelton—a little girl like you. She died at eighteen.�

Sylvia turned her grey eyes full of a limpid green light towards him pityingly.

“Aren’t you going to live long?�

“Perhaps,� replied Skelton, smiling.

“I think,� said Sylvia calmly, after a while, “if I were grown up I should like to live here.�

“Very well,� answered Skelton, who at twenty-two thought the twelve-year-old Sylvia a toddling infant; “as I intend to be an old bachelor, you may come and be my little sister. You may have my mother’s room—here it is.�

He opened a door close by, and they entered a little sitting room, very simple and old-fashioned, and in no way corresponding to the rest of the house. It had whitewashed walls above the wainscoting, and the furniture was in faded yellow damask.

“I intend to let this room remain as it is, to remind me that I was once a boy, for this is the first room I remember in the Deerchase house.�

Sylvia looked around with calmly contemptuous eyes.

“When I come to Deerchase to live I shall make this room as fine as the rest. But I must go home now. I can get my shoe on, and perhaps mamma won’t notice that I limp a little. You’d better take me in the boat, so I can get back to the house from the river shore.�

Skelton, who thought it high time she was returning, at once agreed. As he lifted her out of the boat on the Belfield shore a sudden impulse made him say:

“Sylvia, can you keep a secret?�

“Of course I can,� answered Sylvia promptly.

“Then—I am going away to-morrow morning, to be gone a year, perhaps longer. This is the last sail I shall take upon the river for a long, long time.�

Sylvia’s eyes were full of regret. Although she had seen Skelton at a distance nearly every day of her life when he was at Deerchase, and had also seen him upon the rare occasions that visits were exchanged between the two places, yet he had all the charm of a new and dazzling acquaintance to her. She never remembered speaking a word with him before, but there was a delightful intimacy between them now, she thought. She expressed her regret at his going so volubly that Skelton was forced to laugh; and she wound up by flinging her arms around his neck and kissing him violently. At this Skelton thought it time to leave. His last glimpse of Sylvia was as she stood swinging her wet, white sunbonnet dolefully on the sandy shore.

That night a terrible storm came up. It flooded all the low-lying fields, swept over the prim gardens at Deerchase, and washed away a part of the bridge between Deerchase and Belfield. When, at daylight in the morning, Skelton, with Bob Skinny, left Deerchase, everything was under water, and trees and shrubs and fences and hedges bore witness of the fury of the wind and the rain. Skelton’s last view of Deerchase was a gloomy one. He meant then to be gone a year; he remained away fifteen years.

CHAPTER IV.

Meanwhile things went on placidly enough around the silent and uninhabited Deerchase. The negroes worked the plantation under the overseer’s management, and the house was well cared for, as well as the grounds. Every year there was an alarm that Skelton was coming home, but he never came. At last, like a thunderclap, came the news that he was married to an English woman of rank and wealth.

Sylvia Shapleigh was then eighteen, pretty and full of romance. That one interview with Skelton had been with her the dividing line between childhood and womanhood. She brooded over it, and as she grew older she fell in love with an imaginary Skelton, who was to come home and make her the grandest lady in the county. She began to look upon Deerchase as her own, and could picture vividly to herself her gay and splendid life there. She was haughty to the young squires who openly admired her, and secretly declared herself meat for their masters. She was proud and spirited to the last degree, and it seemed to her in her arrogance and inexperience, that Nature had destined her for something great; and what could be greater than to be Mrs. Richard Skelton?

When the news came of Skelton’s marriage, Mrs. Shapleigh was luckily away from home on a visit of several days. Sylvia, on hearing of the marriage, rose and went to her own room, where she gave way to a passion of disappointment as acute as if the bond between Richard Skelton and herself were a real one, instead of the mere figment of a child’s imagination. It made no difference that it was wholly baseless and fanciful. In that simple and primitive age, romantic young things like Sylvia had plenty of time and opportunity to cultivate sentiment. The only really splendid thing she ever saw in her life was Deerchase, and she saw it whenever she chose to turn her eyes toward it. She knew nothing of the power of new scenes to make one forget the old ones, and the extreme prettiness of the story that she made up for Skelton and herself charmed her. But then came this sudden disillusion. In the twinkling of an eye her castle in Spain fell, to rise no more.

But Sylvia, in common with most people who possess thinking and feeling powers of a high order, had also a great fund of sound good sense, which came to her rescue. She learned to smile at her own childish folly, but it was rather a sad and bitter smile: the folly was childish, but the pain was startlingly real. She did not like to look at Deerchase after that, because it brought home to her how great a fool she had been. And then, having lost that illusion—sad to say—she had no other to take its place. Nothing is more intolerable to a young, imaginative soul than to be turned out of the fairy kingdom of fancy. It is all theirs—palaces, smiling courtiers, crown jewels, and all—and they revel in a royal summer time. Then, some fine day, the pretty dream melts away and leaves a black abyss, and then Common Sense, the old curmudgeon, shows himself; and when, as in Sylvia’s case, the palace would be rebuilt, the flattering courtiers recalled, the recollection of the pain of its destruction is too keen. Driven by common sense, Sylvia concluded to live in the real world, not in the imaginary one. This wise resolve was a good deal helped by the grotesque form the same picture that had been in her mind took in Mrs. Shapleigh’s. Sylvia could not help laughing any more than Mr. Shapleigh could when Mrs. Shapleigh was all for his sending a letter to Skelton, reproaching him for his “shameful treatment of Sylvia.�

The worthy woman had got all the particulars of that odd, childish visit out of Sylvia, and bewailed herself as follows:

“Was there ever such a poor, unlucky creature as I! Here for eighteen years I’ve had but one single, solitary idea in my head, and that was to see Sylvia mistress of Deerchase; and all through your fault, Mr. Shapleigh, in not throwing them together when you were Richard Skelton’s guardian, I am a heart-broken and disappointed woman. But now that I’ve had this awful blow, it’s as little as you can do to improve the house and put me up a new wing, as I’ve often asked you.�

“Put you up a new swing?� asked Mr. Shapleigh, becoming very deaf. “Now, Belinda, what on earth do you want with a swing at your time of life? You’ll be wanting a skipping-rope next.�

Mr. Shapleigh’s deafness was so obstinate regarding the proposed new wing that Mrs. Shapleigh was unable to make him understand her.

Within six months came another startling piece of information. Skelton’s wife had died, and had left him a great fortune upon condition that he did not marry again.

This nearly drove Mrs. Shapleigh crazy, and Mrs. Shapleigh, in turn, nearly drove Mr. Shapleigh crazy. Between the propriety and excellence of Mrs. Skelton’s dying and the abominable means she took to prevent Sylvia from marrying Skelton—for, of course, the whole scheme was levelled at Sylvia—Mrs. Shapleigh was at a loss whether to consider the dead woman as her best friend or her greatest enemy. Sylvia by that time had grown sensible. She had learned in that first ridiculous yet terrible experience the dangers of her splendid imagination and intense emotions, and resolved upon learning to govern both—and Sylvia had a good strong will of her own. She even smiled as she thought how tremendously she had concerned herself, at the time of Skelton’s marriage, about what really did not concern her in the least.

Still Skelton did not come home. The old expectations of his coming intellectual achievements had by no means vanished. He had given such extraordinary promise! But there was time enough—he was not yet thirty. He was known to be studying at the German universities. He still kept up his interest in his Virginia affairs, and, although on the other side of the water, he even had a fine racing stable organised under the charge of Miles Lightfoot, who was a cross between a gentleman and a “leg.� Racing was the sport in those days, and the Campdown Jockey Club had just been started upon an imposing basis. Skelton became a liberal subscriber, and Miles Lightfoot was understood to have carte blanche in the great affair of making Skelton’s stable the finest one in the State. Whatever Skelton did he must do better than anybody else, and, since his large access of fortune, money was less than ever an object to him. Skelton always heard with pleasure of his successes on the turf, and Miles Lightfoot found out by some occult means that his own excellent place and salary, from a professional point of view, depended upon Skelton’s horses always beating Jack Blair’s. For Skelton never forgot a friend or an enemy.

At first this rivalry between Skelton’s stable and what Jack Blair modestly called his “horse or two� was a joke on the courthouse green and the race track. But when ten years had passed, and Jack Blair had been steadily losing money all the time on account of matching his horses against Skelton’s, it had ceased to be a joke. Blair had more than the average man’s pugnacity, and having early suspected that Skelton meant to ruin him, it only aroused a more dogged spirit of opposition in him. Old Tom Shapleigh in the beginning urged Blair to draw out of the fight, but Blair, with a very natural and human aggressiveness, refused. Elizabeth at first shared Blair’s confidence that he could beat Skelton’s horses as easily as he had run away with Skelton’s sweetheart, but she soon discovered her mistake. Blair was a superb farmer. He had twelve hundred acres under cultivation, and every year the bags of wheat marked “Newington� commanded a premium in the Baltimore market. But no matter how many thousand bushels of wheat Blair might raise, that “horse or two� ate it all up.

There were two Blair children, Hilary and little Mary. Elizabeth Blair was full of ambition for her boy. He was to be educated as his father had been, first at William and Mary, afterwards at the University of Virginia. But she discovered that there was no money either to send the boy to school or to employ a tutor at home. Mrs. Blair bore this, to her, dreadful privation and disappointment with courage, partly born of patience and partly of a woman’s natural vanity. Blair never ceased to impress upon her that since Skelton chose to harbour his revenge all those years, that he—Blair—could not refuse to meet him, particularly as he had carried off the prize matrimonial in the case. Blair had the most winning manner in the world. When he would tip his wife’s chin up with his thumb, and say, “Hang it, Bess, I’ll meet Skelton on the race track, in the hunting field, anywhere he likes, and take my chances with him as I did before: I had tremendous odds against me then, but Fortune favoured me,� Elizabeth would feel an ineffable softness stealing over her towards her husband. Not many wives could boast of that sort of gallantry from their husbands. Blair was not disposed to underrate his triumph over Skelton. Every defeat of his “horse or two� was met by a debonair laugh, and a reminder, “By Jove, his horses may leg it faster than mine, but I beat him in a better race and for a bigger stake than any ever run on a race course!�

This keeping alive of the old rivalry contained in it a subtile flattery to Elizabeth. But Blair himself was well calculated to charm. He was fond of a screeching run after the hounds, as Skelton contemptuously said, but he was a gentleman from the crown of his head to the sole of his foot. He might not give Hilary a tutor, or Mary a governess, but his children never heard him utter a rude word to their mother or any one else, or saw him guilty of the smallest gaucherie in word or deed. His negroes adored him, his horses came at his voice, his dogs disputed with his children for the touch of his hand. He knew all the poetry and romance existing, and a great many other things besides.

It was easy enough to understand why he was the pet and darling of women—for the sex is discerning. Your true woman’s man is always a good deal of a man. This was the case with Jack Blair, in spite of his fatal fondness for a certain ellipse of a mile and a quarter, upon which he had lost more money than he cared to own up to. But, at least, there was no deceit about Blair. Elizabeth often implored him to promise her never to bet at the races, never to bet at cards, and a great many other things; but he always refused. “No,� he said, “I’ll make no promise I can’t keep. I may not be the best husband in the world, but at least I’ve never lied to you, and I don’t propose to put myself in the way of temptation now.�

It was true that he had never even used a subterfuge towards her. But Elizabeth was haunted by a fear that Blair thought lightly of money obligations, and that inability to pay was not, to him, the terrible and disgraceful thing it was to her. Then, she was tormented by a perfectly ridiculous and feminine jealousy. For all she was a clever enough woman, in the matter of jealousy and a few other trifles of that kind all women are fools alike. This amused Blair hugely, who had a smile and a soft word and a squeeze of the hand for every woman in the county, Mrs. Shapleigh included, but who was the soul of loyalty to Elizabeth. If only he would give up horse racing! for so Elizabeth came to think to herself when the mortgages multiplied on Newington, and after every fall and spring meeting of the Jockey Club she was called upon to sign her name to something or other that Blair paid her for in the tenderest kisses. But there seemed to be a sort of fatality about the whole thing. Blair was thought to be the best judge of horses in the county, yet he rarely had a good horse, and more rarely still won a race. Something always happened at the last minute to upset his triumph. Like all men who are the willing victims of chance, Blair was a firm believer in luck. Everybody knows, he argued, that luck ebbs and flows. The more he lost on the Campdown course, the more he was eventually bound to win on that very course. Elizabeth, with her practical woman’s wit, did not believe at all in luck, but she believed in Blair, which was the same thing in that case. The county was a great one for racing, and at Abingdon Church every Sunday, the affairs of the Jockey Club were so thoroughly discussed by gentlemen sitting around on the flat tombstones during sermon-time, that the formal meetings were merely perfunctory. This way of turning church into a club meeting sincerely distressed the clergyman, the Rev. Mr. Conyers.

CHAPTER V.

Mr. Conyers was one of the county gentry by birth, but it seemed as if the whole theory of heredity, as well as tradition, fell through in his case. The people had been used to jolly parsons, who rode to hounds and could stand up to their bottles of port quite as well as the laity. Indeed, it was reported that Mr. Conyer’s predecessor upon occasions only got to church in time to hustle his cassock on over his hunting jacket and breeches. But Conyers was more soul and spirit than body. He grew up tall, pale, slender, with but one wish on earth—to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ. He was an ascetic by nature—an ascetic among people whose temperaments were sybaritic, and to whom nature and circumstance cried perpetually, “Eat, drink, and be merry.� They were a very honest and chivalrous people, but their spiritual part had been feebly developed. Religion to them meant morality. To Conyers it meant morality and the whole question of man’s relations to his Maker besides.

Conyers fancied that when he had begun his scholastic training for the ministry he would enter upon that course of enlightenment of the soul for which he longed. He was cruelly disappointed. He got a great deal of morality still, a little weak theology, and a general recommendation from his ecclesiastical superiors not to be too curious. He was astute enough to see that morality was one thing and religion another, but that as long as he maintained a high standard of personal behaviour he would be allowed a fearful liberty in his beliefs. It was not an age or a place of religious enquiry, and Conyers found that all the excellent young men prepared with him for the ministry, were perfectly well satisfied with historical and biblical explanations which, to him, appeared grotesquely insufficient. When his soul craved a knowledge of the Christian religion from its beginning, and when he would have studied it from the point of sincere belief in regard to its scope, design, and its effect on man, he was expected to confine his investigations within an inconceivably narrow range. Although knowing instinctively the difference between moral practices and religious beliefs, Conyers was too earnest a lover of moral beauty to put faith in any except a good man, and he early found that some very bad men were the fountain head of certain of his beliefs. He did not lack either courage or good parts, but he lacked knowledge dreadfully, and there was no fountain open to him. But the seal of the Levite was put upon him at his birth; tormented with doubts, longings, and terrible questionings, he must still preach the Word. He kept his burning thoughts to himself, and received ordination from highly moral men who had never thought enough to harbour a doubt. He went back to his native county an ordained clergyman, to begin what he believed to be his labour in his Master’s vineyard. But never had shepherd such a flock. When he tried to teach them spiritual things, they resented it as an attack on their morals. Old Tom Shapleigh, who was a vestryman, embodied the prevailing sentiment in his reply to Conyers when the clergyman tried to find out old Tom’s spiritual attitude.

“Now, look here, Conyers, I’ve known you ever since you were born, and I was a regular communicant in Abingdon church before your father married your mother. I was married by a bishop—yes, zounds, sir, by a bishop!—and pretty dear it cost me in more ways than one. I don’t ill-treat my wife, or starve my negroes, or cheat my neighbour, and, further than that, you have nothing to do. Spiritual attitude be hanged! Go after the women if you want to talk that sort of thing.�

Some of the women, notably Mrs. Blair, had a tender, religious sentiment that was grateful to poor Conyers, going blindly upon his way. But he could not accept the popular doctrine that only women had any spiritual side. To him the great fundamental facts of existence—the soul, the future life, all the mysterious hopes and fears of poor humanity concerning that future life—were problems that no thinking man could thrust aside. But when he tried to penetrate further than Mrs. Blair’s simple belief, her daily reading of the Bible to her children and servants, he found that he only startled and confused her. When he tried to get at the master of the house, Blair flatly refused to have anything to say regarding the state of his soul. The men like old Tom Shapleigh guyed Conyers; the men of finer fiber, like Jack Blair, avoided him. When Mr. Conyers, meeting Blair in the road, tried to talk religion to him, Blair put spurs to his horse and galloped off, laughing. When Conyers came to Newington on the same errand Blair announced to his wife that it was useless.

“I’ll be shot if any parson living shall meddle with my religion! I don’t mind a little sermonising from you, my dear, and you know I made an agreement with you that if you’d let me smoke in the drawing-room I’d stand a chapter in the Bible every night; and the fact is, a man will take a little religious dragooning from his wife or his mother without grumbling. But when it comes to a man’s trying it—why, Conyers is an ass, that’s all.�

Poor Conyers, repulsed on every side, knew not what to do. He found but one person in the whole community willing to think on the subject of religion, although the women were usually quite ready enough to feel. This was Sylvia Shapleigh. But Sylvia wanted to be instructed.

“Tell me,� she said, “what is true? The Bible puzzles me; I can’t understand it. Do you?�

Conyers remained silent.

“I see the necessity for right living, Mr. Conyers, for right feeling; but—there is something more. I know it as well as you.�

Conyers’s glance sought Sylvia’s. Usually his eyes were rather cold and expressionless, but now they were full of a strange distress, an untold misery. Here was the first human being who had ever asked him for knowledge, and he was as helpless to answer her as a little child. And he aspired to be a teacher of men! He went home and studied furiously at some expurgated copies of the Fathers he possessed, and at a few more or less acute commentaries upon them: they did not give him one ray of light. He had two or three one-sided histories of the Reformation: these he read, and cast them aside in disgust. The readiness with which creeds were made, changed, made again, in the fifteenth century had always astounded and disheartened him. The old, old difficulty came back to him—provision was made everywhere for man’s moral nature, and he earnestly believed that provision had been made for man’s spiritual nature, but he could not find that provision in the narrow sphere to which his learning and his observation was confined. But cast, as he was, upon a vast and unknown sea of doubt, and feeling that he knew nothing, and could explain nothing, he confined himself to a plain and evangelical style of preaching and an ascetic strictness of life. He made some vain appeals for help from his ecclesiastical superior, the bishop, but the bishop plainly did not understand what Conyers was after, and bade him rather sharply to cease from troubling. He reminded Conyers of what a good salary Abingdon church paid him, and in what a very agreeable and hospitable community his lot was cast. As for the salary, it was very good on paper. But the laity had a fearful power over the clergy, for all of a clergyman’s comfort depended upon whether he made himself agreeable to his parishioners or not. Conyers found this the most harrowing, debasing, unapostolic circumstance in all his long list of miseries. He earned a living, but he had trouble in getting it. He was distinctly unpopular, and one of his first acts after taking charge of the parish was calculated to foment his unpopularity. He had scruples about slavery, as he had about everything, for he was a man tormented by a devil of scrupulosity. He had inherited five negroes, and these he set free and commended them to God. The result was appalling. Of the five, two became confirmed criminals, two died of exposure and neglect of themselves, and one was hanged for murder. The planters, seeing their own well-fed, well-cared-for slaves around them, pointed to Conyers’s experiment with triumph. That was what freeing a lot of irresponsible half-monkeys meant! This humble tragedy haunted Conyers night and day, and almost drove him mad. Conyers had not been a young man when he was ordained, but after this he lost every vestige of youth. There were cruel hollows in his face, and his strange eyes grew more and more distressed in their expression. Nevertheless, he would not abandon any one of his theories and principles. The people were far from vindictive. On the contrary, they were singularly amiable and easy-going; and had they been any less easy-going, pastor and people would certainly have parted company. It would have required a concerted effort to get rid of him, and Conyers, although he would cheerfully have given up his daily bread for conscience’ sake, yet could not bear to part with his dream of being a teacher and preacher. And he knew what a discredited clergyman meant. So, alternately harassed with doubts and fixed in a dull despair, he presented that spectacle which the heathen philosopher declared to be the most touching sight in the world—a good man in adversity. His adversity had a practical side to it, too. As his congregation did not like him, they were lax about paying his salary. The pastors they were used to complained readily enough when the stipend was not forthcoming and drummed up delinquents briskly, which was a very good and wholesome thing for the delinquents; and it had not been so very long ago since the heavy hand of the law was laid upon parishioners who were forgetful of this. But the people waited for Conyers to remind them of what they owed, and he would rather have starved by inches than have asked them for a penny. So in this hospitable, delightful parish he was miserably, desperately poor. The only thing he wanted of his parishioners was what was due him, and that was the only thing they would not give him, for they were not ungenerous in other ways, and occasionally sent him bottles of Madeira when the rectory roof was leaking, and old Tom Shapleigh sent him regularly every winter a quarter of beef, which spoiled before the half of it was eaten. Conyers still took comfort in the tender emotional religion of some of the women, but Sylvia Shapleigh, whose restless mind traversed mental depths and heights unknown to most women, was the one, single, solitary person in the world who really understood why it was that Conyers was not a happy man. Sylvia herself, with a great flow of spirits and much wit and a ridiculously overrated beauty, was not happy either. Her good looks were overrated because she was so charming; but as she passed for a beauty it was all one. She had, it is true, a pair of lovely grey eyes, and a delicate complexion like a March primrose, and her walk was as graceful as the swallow’s flight. She was getting perilously fast out of her twenties, and there was apparently no more prospect of her marrying than at eighteen. Yet, just as people always expected Skelton to perform some wonderful intellectual achievement, so they still expected Sylvia to make a great match.

At last, fifteen years after Skelton had left Deerchase, he returned to it as suddenly as he left it. He brought with him Bob Skinny, who had become a perfect monster of uppishness, airs, and conceit; Bulstrode, who was understood to be a remarkable scholar and Skelton’s assistant in preparing the great work that was to revolutionise the world; and Lewis Pryor, a black-eyed boy whom Skelton represented to be the orphan child of a friend of his, a professor at Cambridge. People were still talking about Skelton’s wonderful promise. He was then getting on towards forty years old, and had not written a line since “Voices of the People.� The subject he was engaged upon for his wonderful forthcoming book was not precisely known, but it was understood to be a philosophical work, which would not leave the Christian religion a leg to stand upon.

CHAPTER VI.

When Skelton’s arrival was known it made a tremendous sensation. Mrs. Blair turned a beautiful rosy red when Blair brought the news home. At thirty-five she was still girlish-looking, and her dark eyes were as bright as ever.

“Ah, my girl,� cried Blair, with his offhand tenderness, “Skelton has never forgiven me for getting ahead of him with you; but if he had got ahead of me—why, damme, I’d have broken his neck for him long before this!�

Sylvia Shapleigh felt a little ashamed, as she always did at the mention, or even the mere thought, of Skelton—she had been such a very, very great fool! and she had a lively apprehension of her mother’s course upon the occasion, which was fully justified by events.

“Mr. Shapleigh,� began Mrs. Shapleigh one evening, the very first week after Skelton’s arrival at Deerchase, “you will have to go and call upon Richard Skelton, for it would break my heart if I did not see some of those elegant things he has brought home in that pile of boxes that came up from the wharf to-day.�

“Certainly, my love, I shall call to see him. As his former guardian, I feel it incumbent; but, really, the fellow always interested me, for all his confounded supercilious airs.�

“Well, Mr. Shapleigh, you seem to have altogether forgotten his treatment of Sylvia; and that English wife of his put it out of his power to marry again, just to spite my poor child.�

Luckily Sylvia was out of the room during this; but just then she entered, with a book in her hand, and seated herself at the round mahogany table in the corner of the room, upon which a tall lamp burned with shaded softness. Mrs. Shapleigh wisely dropped that branch of the subject when Sylvia appeared.

“Anyhow, Mr. Shapleigh,� resumed Mrs. Shapleigh, “we shall be obliged to ask Richard Skelton to dinner. We can’t get out of that.�

“Very well, my darling love, we will have Skelton to dinner.�

“But, Mr. Shapleigh, how can we possibly have Richard Skelton to dinner, when he is accustomed to so much elegance abroad? And although we live as well as any people in the county, yet it is nothing to what he will have at Deerchase.�

“Then, my life, we won’t have Skelton to dinner.�

“Now, Mr. Shapleigh, how you talk! You contradict yourself at every other word.—Sylvia, what have you to say on the subject? I declare, you read so much you don’t know anything. The simplest thing seems to puzzle you.�

“Not at all, mamma!� cried Sylvia, with spirit, and bringing her book together with a clap. “Have Mr. Skelton to dinner, by all means—just as we would have the Blairs, or any other of the neighbours. I don’t care a fig for his elegance. We are just as good as the Skeltons any day; and any one of us—papa, or you, or I—is twice as good-looking as Mr. Skelton.�

Sylvia was fond of disparaging Skelton both to herself and to other people.

“Sylvia! Sylvia, my child!� screamed Mrs. Shapleigh; “your vanity is very unladylike, and, besides, it is sinful, too. Nobody ever heard me say such a thing, although I had a much greater reputation for good looks than you ever had. But if my glass pleased me, I never said anything.�

“You very seldom say anything, my love,� remarked old Tom, quite gravely.

“Well, Mr. Shapleigh, I hope the next time you get married you will marry a loquacious woman, and then, perhaps, you’ll long for your poor, dear, humble Belinda. But to get back to the dinner. Of course, we must have everything just as nearly like the way they have it at Deerchase as possible, although how on earth we can have things the least like they do at Deerchase, even if I put out every piece of glass and silver I have in the world, is more than I can tell. But whom shall we ask? That queer person that Richard Skelton brought home to write his book—Mr. Bulstrode?�

“Yes, by all means,� cried old Tom, grinning. “He looks to me likely to be an ornament to society.�

“And Mr. and Mrs. Blair?�

“Exactly, my love. Blair and Skelton hate each other like the devil; and Mrs. Blair jilted Skelton, and I daresay has been sorry for it ever since. Oh, yes, we’ll have the Blairs, madam.�

“And Mr. Conyers?�

“Gadzooks, madam, you’re a genius! Skelton doesn’t believe in hell in the next world, and Conyers is trying to make a little hell of his own in Abingdon parish; so they will do excellently well together.�

“Mr. Shapleigh, you don’t mean to tell me that Richard Skelton doesn’t believe in hell?� asked Mrs. Shapleigh in a shocked voice.

“I do, indeed, my sweet. I’m not sure that he believes in a personal devil, or the horns and the hoofs, or even the tail.�

“Good gracious, Mr. Shapleigh!� cried Mrs. Shapleigh in much horror and distress. “If Mr. Skelton doesn’t believe in a hell, we might as well give up asking him to dinner, because the bishop is coming next month, and he’ll be certain to hear of it; and what will he say when he hears that we have been entertaining a person like Richard Skelton, who flies in the face of everything the bishop says we ought to believe!�

Mr. Shapleigh shook his head with waggish despair, and declared the dinner was out of the question. This, of course, renewed Mrs. Shapleigh’s determination to have it, who reflected that, after all, the bishop might not hear of it, or perhaps he might die before his annual visitation came off—she had heard he had something the matter with his liver, anyhow.

Sylvia listened to the discussion calmly—she was used to this kind of thing; and as her father and mother never grew at all angry in these matrimonial tiffs, she did not mind them, having had a lifetime to become accustomed to them. But she felt acutely anxious about meeting Skelton, and, in a feminine way, about the dinner. She wanted everything to go off well, but with a person as wonderful as Mrs. Shapleigh, it was not safe to count on anything.

In due time old Tom called at Deerchase, and was received by Skelton with more courtesy and deference than ever before in his life. Skelton met him in the library—a part of the building erected the first year after Skelton left Princeton. It was a noble room, and from the floor to the lofty ceiling were books, books, books. Old Tom had never seen so many books together in his life before.

Skelton had changed but little. As a young man he had looked middle-aged; as a middle-aged man he looked young. His hair had a few grey threads in it, and Mrs. Shapleigh’s eager eye discovered a small place on the top of his head, about as big as a half dollar, where the hair was getting thin; but it took Mrs. Shapleigh to find this out—Mr. Shapleigh didn’t observe it at all. Skelton’s only remarkable feature were his eyes, which were as black and soft and fascinating as ever. His manner had lost all of its early superciliousness—he knew too much then to be anything but simple and unassuming. But undoubtedly there was something imposing in his personality. He greeted old Tom cordially, and inquired after Mrs. Shapleigh and little Sylvia.

“You mean tall Sylvia, I presume,� said old Tom, laughing. “She is nearly as tall as I am, and deucedly pretty, if I have any eyes. Pardon an old man’s fondness, Skelton.�

“No apology is needed. I am sure she is a lovely young woman; but I begin to realise how many milestones I have passed when I think of her as a woman grown.�

“She’s more than grown; she has been of a marriageable age for some years—but a proud creature she is. She gives all sorts of flippant reasons for refusing good matches; but the fact is, nobody is quite good enough for her ladyship—so Sylvia thinks.�

“A proud, pretty creature she gave promise of being. However, we can’t understand them—the simple creature, man, is no match for the complex creature, woman.�

“O Lord, no!� Mr. Shapleigh brought this out with great emphasis, having in mind Mrs. Shapleigh and what he had heard of Skelton’s late wife, who had put the very most effectual barrier he knew against her husband’s marrying again.

“But now, Skelton,� continued Mr. Shapleigh, earnestly, “we are looking forward to that something great which you are destined to do. No man I know of—including those fellows Burke and Sheridan—ever gave greater promise than you. By George! I shall never forget to my dying day the state of public feeling after the publication of that first pamphlet of yours. You would have been nominated to Congress by acclamation had you been twenty-one years old.�

A flush rose in Skelton’s dark face. That early triumph had been the bugbear of his whole life.

“I regard that as a very crude performance,� he said curtly. “It happened to have a peculiar aptness—it struck a particular conjunction. That was the real reason of its success.�

“Then do something better,� cried old Tom.

“I hope to, some day,� answered Skelton.

They were sitting in the embrasure of the library window. It was in a glorious mid-summer, and the trees wore their greenest livery.

The bright pink masses of the crape myrtle trees glowed splendidly, and at the foot of the large lawn the broad, bright river ran laughing in the sun. The yellow noonday light fell directly upon Skelton’s face—his olive complexion, his clear-cut features; there was not an uncertain line in his face. His lean, brown, sinewy hand rested on the arm of his chair. Old Tom, facing him, was a complete contrast—a keen-eyed man, for all he was a country squire, his fresh, handsome old face shining above his ruffled shirt-front and nankeen waistcoat.

“You’ve got a pretty good array of literary fellows about you,� said old Tom, waving his stick around the library, which not even the July sun could make bright, but which glowed with the sombre beauty that seems to dwell in a true library.

“Yes,� answered Skelton, “but I have an old fellow that is worth all the books to me—Bulstrode; he is a Cambridge man—carried off honours every year without turning a hair, and was classed as a wonder. But, you know, when God makes a genius he spoils a man. That’s the way with Bulstrode. He’s a perfectly worthless dog as far as making a living and a respectable place in society goes. He is simply a vulgarian pumped full of knowledge and with the most extraordinary powers of assimilation. He can’t write—he has no gift of expression whatever. But I can give him ten words on a slip of paper, and in half an hour he can give me every idea and every reference upon any possible subject I demand. He is not a bad man; on the contrary, he has a sort of rude honour and conscience of his own. He refused orders in the English Church because he knew himself to be unfit. Besides looking after my books, he is tutor to Lewis Pryor, the son of an old friend and tutor of mine, the Rev. Thomas Pryor.�

Skelton brought all this out in his usual calm, easy, man-of-the-world manner. At that moment the boy passed across the lawn very close to the window, where he stopped and whistled to his dog. Never were two pairs of eyes so alike as Skelton’s and this boy’s. Old Tom, turning his glance from the boy to Skelton, noticed a strange expression of fondness in Skelton’s eyes as he looked at the boy.

“A very fine-looking youngster,� said old Tom. “What are you going to do with him?�

“Educate him,� answered Skelton, the indifference of his tone flatly contradicting the ineffably tender look of his eyes. “Bulstrode was made his guardian by one of those freaks of dying people. Pryor knew Bulstrode as well as I do, and he also knew that I would do a good part by the boy; but for some reason, or want of reason, he chose to leave the boy in Bulstrode’s power. However, as Bulstrode is in my power, it does not greatly matter. The boy has a little property, and I intend giving him advantages. His father was a university man, and Lewis shall be too.�

“I am afraid you will find the county dull after your life abroad,� said old Tom, abruptly quitting the subject of Lewis Pryor.

“Not at all. I have felt for some years the necessity of settling down to work, if I ever expect to do anything. Travelling is a passion which wears itself out, just as other passions do. I can’t understand a man’s expatriating himself forever. It is one of the benefits of a landed gentry that the soil grasps it. Nothing has such a hold on a man as land. It is one of the good points of our system. You see, I now admit that there is something good in our system, which I denied so vehemently before I was old enough to vote.�

“Yes,� answered Mr. Shapleigh. “Land, land, land! That’s the cry of the Anglo-Saxon all over the world. That’s why it is they are the dominant people; that’s why it is that they cannot exist on terms of equality with any other race whatever.�

“True,� said Skelton. “All races that come in contact with them are held in bondage of some sort. Rule or ruin is the destiny of the Anglo-Saxon everywhere.�

Skelton had not asked a single question about anybody in the county. This did not surprise old Tom, who was prepared to tell him a great deal had Skelton manifested the slightest curiosity. When he rose to go Skelton very civilly and gracefully thanked him for his care and guardianship, and made some slight, laughing apology for his own insubordination.

“No thanks at all—no thanks at all are due,� answered old Tom jovially. “I rather enjoyed managing such a property, and I flatter myself it did not decrease in my hands. As for managing you—ha! ha!—I admit that was a flat failure. So you brought back that black rascal, Bob Skinny?�

“Oh, yes; and I daresay some fine morning the other negroes will take him out and hang him to a tree outside my bedroom window. The fellow is perfectly intolerable—can find nothing good enough for him at Deerchase. He is a natural and incorrigible liar; and, worse still, he has learned to play on what he calls the ‘fluke,’ and between playing the ‘fluke,’ and telling unconscionable lies about his travels, he is a nuisance. The housekeeper told me, this morning, there would be a mutiny soon among the house servants if Bob wasn’t suppressed. But the dog knows his value to me, and presumes upon it, no doubt.�

Then came the invitation to dinner at Belfield, which Skelton accepted politely, but he would do himself the honour to call on Mrs. Shapleigh and his little friend Sylvia beforehand.

The call was made, but neither of the ladies was at home. A day or two after, old Tom Shapleigh had occasion to go on an errand about their joint water rights, to Deerchase, and Mrs. Shapleigh went with him. Then, too, as by a singular fate, Skelton was out riding about the plantation. But Bulstrode and Lewis happened to be in the hall, and Mrs. Shapleigh, who was dying with curiosity, alighted and went in on their invitation.

Old Tom immediately began to talk to Bulstrode, while Mrs. Shapleigh bestowed her attentions on Lewis, much to his embarrassment. Suddenly, in the midst of the murmur of voices, Mrs. Shapleigh screeched out:

“La!�

“What is it, my dear?� asked old Tom, expecting to hear some such marvel as that the floor was beautifully dry rubbed, or that Skelton had cut down a decaying cedar near the house.

“Did you ever see such a likeness as that between this boy and that picture of Richard Skelton’s father over yonder?�

Every eye except Lewis’s was turned towards the portrait. Skelton had had all of his family portraits touched up by a competent artist, who had practically done them over. The portrait was of a boy dressed in colonial costume, with his hair falling over a wide lace collar. He was about Lewis’s age, and the likeness was indeed extraordinary. It was hung in a bad light though, and if it had been designed to keep it out of sight its situation could not have been better.

Bulstrode glanced quickly at Lewis. The boy’s eyes were bent upon the ground and his whole face was crimson. Old Tom was glaring at Mrs. Shapleigh, who, however, prattled on composedly:

“Of course, I recollect Mr. Skelton very well; but as he was at least thirty before I ever knew him, he had outgrown those clothes, and looked a good deal more than fifteen or sixteen. But it is certainly the most wonderful—�

“My love,� cried old Tom in a thundering voice, “look at those Venetian blinds. If you’d like some to your drawing-room I’ll stand the expense, by Gad!�

This acted on poor, good Mrs. Shapleigh’s mind like a large stone laid before a rushing locomotive. It threw her completely off the track, and there was no more danger of her getting back on it. But Bulstrode observed that Lewis Pryor did not open his mouth to say another word during the rest of the visit. As soon as the Shapleighs left, Lewis took his dog and disappeared until late in the afternoon. When he came in to dinner he avoided Bulstrode’s eyes, and looked so woe-begone that Bulstrode felt sorry for him. However, Skelton knew nothing of all this, and it so happened that he did not meet the Shapleighs, or, indeed, any of the county people, until the day of the dinner at Belfield. Blair meanwhile had called too, but, like the Shapleighs, had found Skelton out on the plantation, and eagerly professed to be unable to wait for his return home; so that the day of the dinner was the first time that the Shapleighs, or, indeed, any of the county people, had seen Skelton.

Mrs. Shapleigh had heard that Skelton dined late, so she named six o’clock for the dinner—a perfectly preposterous hour at that period of the nineteenth century. She also managed to have three men to wait at dinner by pressing into the service James, the coachman and gardener. James was an inky-black object, who, with a pair of large white cotton gloves on, was as helpless as a turtle on his back. However, Mrs. Shapleigh was a first-class housekeeper, and the dinner was sure to be a good one—so Sylvia comforted herself. Skelton quite truthfully said it was the best dinner he had seen since he left Virginia—turtle soup, oysters in half a dozen ways, a royal display of fish, a saddle of venison, wild ducks and woodcock and partridges, a ham cured with hickory ashes and boiled in two quart bottles of old Tom Shapleigh’s best champagne. There were, besides, a great many and-so-forths, but Skelton did not say that he enjoyed the dinner particularly, and so saved his reputation for truth.

As a matter of fact, he regarded it as something worse than a bore. He shrewdly suspected that Elizabeth Blair would be there, and it would be his first meeting with her after that awkward little contretemps of so many years ago—for he had managed to avoid her during that solitary year he spent at Deerchase. In fact, everybody invited to the dinner was in more or less trepidation.

Skelton arrived punctually at six o’clock, and Bulstrode was with him. Everybody else, though, had taken six o’clock to mean half-past five, and were promptly on hand. It was not quite dusk, and the purple twilight was visible through the open windows, but the wax candles were lighted and glowed softly in the mellow half-light.

Old Tom greeted Skelton cordially, and so did Mrs. Shapleigh, who had temporarily buried the hatchet, and who comforted herself by thinking how awfully sorry Skelton would be that he couldn’t marry Sylvia when he saw her and heard her play on the guitar and sing. Mrs. Shapleigh herself was still beautiful; the face that had blinded old Tom thirty years before to the infinite silliness of the woman who owned it had not lost its colour or regularity. But its power to charm faded with its first youth. Stranger than the power of beauty is the narrow limits to which it is restricted. These ideas passed through Skelton’s mind as he saw Mrs. Shapleigh the first time in fifteen years. Sylvia, though, without one half her mother’s beauty, possessed all the charm and grace the older woman lacked. Skelton glanced at her with calm though sincere approval. She was very like the little girl who had swung her white sunbonnet at him, although he knew she must be quite twenty-seven years old; but in her grey eyes was a perpetual girlish innocence she could never lose. Then came the difficult part—speaking to Mr. and Mrs. Blair. Mrs. Blair complicated the situation by blushing suddenly and furiously down to her white throat when Skelton took her hand. Skelton could cheerfully have wrung her neck in rage for her blushing at that moment. She was changed, of course, from seventeen, but Skelton thought her rather improved; she had gained colour and flesh without losing her slenderness. Jack Blair had got very middle-aged looking, to Skelton’s eyes, and his youthful trimness and slimness were quite gone; but nobody had found it out except Skelton. Then there was the long, thin parson with the troubled eyes. Bulstrode was as awkward as a walrus in company, and glanced sympathetically at James, black and miserable, whose feelings he quite divined.

Sylvia in the course of long years had been forced to acquire quite an extraordinary amount of tact, in order to cover the performances of Mrs. Shapleigh, and she found she had use for all of it. Mrs. Shapleigh, however, was completely awed by the deadly civility with which Skelton received all of her non sequiturs, and soon relapsed into a blessed silence.

This gave Sylvia a chance to take Skelton off very dexterously in a corner.

“I am so glad to see Deerchase inhabited again,� she said in her pretty way. “It is pleasant to see the smoke coming out of the chimneys once more.�

“It is very pleasant to be there once more,� answered Skelton. “After all, one longs for one’s own roof. I did not think, the afternoon you paid me that interesting visit, that fifteen years would pass before I should see the old place again.�

“Ah, that visit!� cried Sylvia, blushing—blushing for something of which Skelton never dreamed. “I daresay you were glad enough to get rid of me. What inconceivable impertinence I had!�

“Is the crab’s bite well yet?�

“Quite well, thank you. And have you remembered that all these years?�

“Perfectly. I never had such a startling adventure with a young lady before or since.�

There is something peculiarly charming in the simplicity of people who are something and somebody in themselves. Sylvia realized this when she saw how Skelton’s way of saying ordinary things lifted them quite above the ordinary.

How easy and natural he made it all! she thought. And she had expected the great, the grand, the wonderful Skelton to talk like one of Mr. Addison’s essays. What a thing it was to travel and see the world, to be sure! That was why Skelton was so easy, and put her so much at ease too.

Skelton, meanwhile, was in no enviable frame of mind. Elizabeth Blair’s presence brought back painful recollections. He remembered some foolish threats he had made, and he thought, with renewed wonder and disgust, how he had walked the library floor at Deerchase, night after night, in frightful agitation, afraid to look toward the table drawer where his pistols lay for fear of the horrible temptation to end it all with a pistol shot. She was a sweet enough creature, but no woman that ever lived was worth half the suffering he had undergone for her. After all, though, it was not so much regret for her as it was rage that another man should supplant him. The same feeling waked suddenly and powerfully within his breast. He had always despised Blair, and he found the impulse just as strong as ever—a fellow who spent his days galloping over fields and bawling after dogs preferred to him, Richard Skelton! Nevertheless, he went up and talked pleasantly and naturally to Elizabeth, and inquired, as in duty and politeness bound, after the whole Armistead tribe. Elizabeth was the only one of them left, and Skelton listened gravely while she told him freely some family particulars. He had heard of Hilary and little Mary, and expressed a wish that Hilary should be friends with his own protégé, Lewis Pryor. He carefully repeated what he had told Mr. Shapleigh about Lewis; but Mrs. Blair said no word of encouragement, and then dinner was ready, and Skelton went out with Mrs. Shapleigh on his arm.

Sylvia, from motives of prudence, placed herself next him on the other side. Having a humorous knack, Sylvia could very often turn Mrs. Shapleigh’s speeches into the safe channel of a joke. At the other end of the table old Tom had beside him Mrs. Blair, who was quite a pet of his. Skelton, with infinite tact, talked as if he had been one of them for the last fifteen years, instead of having been indulging in all sorts of startling adventures abroad while they were vegetating in the country.

The conversation pretty soon got on racing, for the Campdown course was to them their opera, drive, lecture, concert—everything, in short, except the church. Conyers was quite out of this conversation, and was used to being so. Bulstrode likewise found it a bore, and took refuge in gulping down glass after glass of sherry, port, madeira, champagne—any and every thing that came to hand. But he did not enjoy it, although old Tom’s cellar was not to be despised. He feared and revered a good woman, and the presence of the ladies took all the taste out of the wine and utterly disconcerted him. He had often said to Skelton: “Curse me, if I can drink comfortably in the presence of women. They are a standing rebuke to such old ruffians as I.� Skelton, however, entered into the spirit of the racing talk as if it were of the greatest possible moment. But it was a very delicate one in Blair’s presence. Too often had Skelton’s colours—black and yellow—come in ahead of Blair’s blue jackets and white caps. Skelton and Blair, though, each showed a gentlemanly obliviousness of all this.

Skelton, however, chose to admire a certain colt of old Tom Shapleigh’s in a way that made Blair prick up his ears.

“I was walking across your pasture the other day—trespassing, in fact, as I have half forgotten my own land—when I saw that black horse of yours—�

“Alabaster!� cried Sylvia. “He is so black that I could not find a name black enough for him, so I went by the rule of contrary. He is to be my riding horse.�

“Yes,� groaned old Tom ruefully, “Sylvia says she will have him. He isn’t a full thoroughbred, but he has some good blood in him, and I wanted to sell him to somebody, like our friend Blair here, who would find out how much speed there is in him, for he has it unquestionably. But he pleases my girl, and she proposes to keep me out of a snug sum of money in order that she may have a fine black horse to ride. Zounds! Skelton, I’m the most petticoat-ridden man in this county.�

“No horse is too good for Miss Shapleigh,� answered Skelton, with gallantry; “but if she could be persuaded that another horse, with a coat as smooth and a tail as long as Alabaster’s, could carry her, I should like to see a match between him and that long-legged bay of mine—Jaybird, I believe, is his name.�

Now Jaybird was the gem of Skelton’s stable, and had beaten everything against which she had been matched since her début, so that to say that Alabaster possibly had too much foot for her, at once put the black horse in the category of great horses.

“If you can persuade Sylvia to let me sell him, I’d be delighted,� said old Tom, with his cheery laugh; “but I’ll not answer for your success with her. Women are mysterious creatures, my dear Skelton.�

“Undoubtedly they are,� replied Skelton gravely. “Miss Shapleigh wants Alabaster because she wants Alabaster. Nothing could be more conclusive.�

“You are quite right,� said Sylvia airily; “and when we cease to be mysterious and inconsequent we shall cease to charm.�

“Whateley, the old dunderhead, says,� began Bulstrode in his deep, rich voice, and with perfect seriousness, “that women are always reaching wrong conclusions from the right premises, and right conclusions from the wrong premises�; at which everybody laughed, and Sylvia answered:

“Then, as our premises are always wrong, our conclusions must be always right. Mr. Skelton, I shall keep Alabaster.�

“And my horse, Jaybird, will keep his reputation,� said Skelton, with his slight but captivating smile.

The instant Skelton said this Blair was possessed with the desire to own Alabaster. The idea of such a horse being reserved for a girl’s riding! It was preposterous. Racing in those days was by no means the fixed and formal affair it is now. It was not a business, but a sport, and as such each individual had great latitude in the way he followed it. Matches were among the commonest as well as among the most interesting forms it took, and a match between Jaybird and Alabaster struck Blair as of all things the most desirable; and in an instant he resolved to have Alabaster, if the wit of man could contrive it. He would show old Tom the weakness, the wickedness, of his conduct in letting himself be wrapped around Sylvia’s little finger in that way, and, if necessary, he would try his persuasive powers on Sylvia herself. Women were not usually insensible to his cajolery.

None of the women at the table took much interest in the talk that followed. Mrs. Blair saw instinctively that Blair’s passion for horses was being powerfully stimulated by Skelton’s presence and talk about the Campdown course, which she secretly considered to be the bane of her life. But she was too proud to let any one—Skelton least of all—see how it troubled her. She even submitted to be drawn into the conversation, which the men at the table were too well bred to leave the women out of, for by little references and joking allusions they were beguiled into it. Blair teased Sylvia about her unfailing faith in a certain bay horse with a long tail, on account of which she had lost sundry pairs of gloves. Mrs. Shapleigh reminded Mr. Shapleigh of a promise he had made her that she should one day drive four horses to her carriage.

“I said four horses to your hearse, my dear,� cried old Tom. “I always promised you the finest funeral ever seen in the county, and, by Jove, you shall have it if I have to mortgage every acre I’ve got to do it!�

“Old wretch!� whispered Elizabeth to Mr. Conyers, while Jack Blair called out good-naturedly:

“I swear, if you hadn’t the best wife in the world, you would have been strangled long years ago.�

“I daresay I would,� answered old Tom frankly. In those robust days gentlemen used stronger language than in the present feeble time, and nobody was at all shocked at either Mr. Shapleigh’s remark or Jack Blair’s commentary. There was a jovial good humour about old Tom which took the sting out of his most outrageous speeches. But as the talk about racing flowed on, Elizabeth Blair grew paler and paler. Jack Blair’s fever was upon him, and Skelton, whether consciously or not, was fanning the flame. Skelton said, in a very modest way—for he was too great a man in the community to need to be anything but modest—that his interests in racing being much greater than ever, as he was then on the spot, he should double his subscription to the club. As it was known that his subscription was already large, this created a flutter among the gentlemen.

“Of course I can’t double my subscription in the debonair manner of Mr. Skelton,� said Blair with an easy smile, “but I don’t mind saying that I shall raise it very considerably.�

At that moment Mrs. Blair caught Skelton’s eyes fixed on her pityingly—so she imagined—and it spurred her to show him that she was not an object of commiseration, and that Jack Blair had no domestic rod in pickle for him on account of that last speech.

“Now, if you change your mind,� she said playfully to her husband, “don’t lay it on your wife, and say she wouldn’t let you, for here I sit as meek as a lamb, not making the slightest protest against any of these schemes, which, however, I don’t pretend to understand in the least.�

“My dear,� cried Blair, his face slightly flushed with wine and excitement, “don’t try to pretend, at this late day, that you do not dragoon me. My subjugation has been county talk ever since that night you slipped out of the garden gate and rode off with me in search of a parson.�

A magnetic shock ran through everybody present at this. Blair, in saying it, glanced maliciously at Skelton. That paid him back for Oriole beating Miss Betsy, and Jack-o’-Lantern romping in ahead of Paymaster, and various other defeats that his “horse or two� had met with from the black and yellow.

In an instant the talk began again very merrily and promptly. Blair looked audaciously at his ease, but Skelton was not a whit behind him in composure. He turned, smiling, to Sylvia, and said: