V
Seven years and some months had passed since Rosalys spoke as above-written. And never a sound of Jim.
As she had mentally matured under the touch of the gliding seasons, Miss Ambrose had determined to act upon the hint Jim had thrown out to her as to the practical nullity of their marriage-contract if they simply kept indifferent hemispheres without a word. She had never written to him a line; and he had never written a line to her.
He might be dead for all that she knew: he possibly was dead. She had taken no steps to ascertain anything about him, though she had been aware for years that he was no longer in the Army-list. Dead or alive he was completely cut off from the county in which he and she had lived, for his father had died a long time before this, his house and properties had been sold, and not a scion of the line of Durrant remained in that part of England.
Rosalys had readily imbibed his ideas of their mutual independence; and now, after the lapse of all these years, had acted upon them with the surprising literalness of her sex when they act upon advice at all.
Mrs. Ambrose, who had distinguished herself no whit during her fifty years of life saving by the fact of having brought a singularly beautiful girl into the world, had passed quietly out of it. Rosalys’ uncle had succeeded his sister-in-law in the possession of the old house with its red tower, and the broad paths and garden-lands; he had been followed by an unsatisfactory son of his, last in the entail, and thus unexpectedly Rosalys Ambrose found herself sole mistress of the spot of her birth.
People marvelled somewhat that she continued to call herself Miss Ambrose. Though a woman now getting on for thirty she was distinctly attractive both in face and in figure, and could confront the sunlight as well as the moonbeams still. In the manner of women who are yet sure of their charms she was fond of representing herself as much older than she really was. Perhaps she would have been disappointed if her friends had not laughed and contradicted her, and told her that she was still lovely and looked like a girl. Lord Parkhurst, anyhow, was firmly of that contradictory opinion; and perhaps she cared more for his views than for anyone else’s at the present time.
That distinguished sailor had been but one of many suitors; but he stirred her heart as none of the others could do. It was not merely that be was brave, and pleasing, and had returned from a late campaign in Egypt with a hero’s reputation; but that his chivalrous feelings towards women, originating perhaps in the fact that he knew very little about them, were sufficient to gratify the most exacting of the sex.
His rigid notions of duty and honour, both towards them and from them, made the blood of Rosalys run cold when she thought of a certain little episode of her past life, notwithstanding that, or perhaps because, she loved him dearly.
“He is not the least bit of a flirt, like most sailors,” said Miss Ambrose to her cousin and companion, Miss Jennings, on a particular afternoon in this eighth year of Jim Durrant’s obliteration from her life. It was an afternoon with an immense event immediately ahead of it; no less an event than Rosalys’ marriage with Lord Parkhurst, which was to take place on the very next day.
The local newspaper had duly announced the coming wedding in proper terms as “the approaching nuptials of the beautiful and wealthy Miss Ambrose of Ambrose Towers with a distinguished naval officer, the Lord Parkhurst.” There followed an ornamental account of the future bridegroom’s heroic conduct during the late war. “The handsome face and figure of Lord Parkhurst,” wound up the honest paragraphist, “are not altogether unknown to us in this vicinity, as he has recently been visiting his uncle, Colonel Lacy, High Sheriff of the County. We wish all prosperity to the happy couple, who have doubtless a brilliant and cloudless future before them.”
This was the way in which her acceptance of Durrant’s views had worked themselves out. He had said; “After seven years of mutual oblivion we can marry again if we choose.”
And she had chosen.
Rosalys almost wished that Lord Parkhurst had been a flirt, or at least had won experience as the victim of one, or many, of those precious creatures, and had not so implicitly trusted her. It would have brought things more nearly to a level.
“A flirt! I should think not,” said Jane Jennings. “In fact, Rosalys, he is almost alarmingly strict in his ideas. It is a mistake to believe that so many women are angels, as he does. He is too simple. He is bound to be disappointed some day.”
Miss Ambrose sighed nervously. “Yes,” she said.
“I don’t mean by you tomorrow! God forbid!”
“No.”
Miss Ambrose sighed again, and a silence followed, during which, while recalling unutterable things of the past, Rosalys gazed absently out of the window at the lake, that some men were dredging, the mud left bare by draining down the water being imprinted with hundreds of little footmarks of plovers feeding there. Eight or nine herons stood further away, one or two composedly fishing, their grey figures reflected with unblurred clearness in the mirror of the pool. Some little water-hens waddled with a fussy gait across the sodden ground in front of them, and a procession of wild geese came through the sky, and passed on till they faded away into a row of black dots.
Suddenly the plovers rose into the air, uttering their customary wails, and dispersing like a group of stars from a rocket; and the herons drew up their flail-like legs, and flapped themselves away. Something had disturbed them; a carriage, sweeping round to the other side of the house.
“There’s the doorbell!” Rosalys exclaimed, with a start. “That’s he, for certain! Is my hair untidy Jane? I’ve been rumpling it awfully, leaning back on the cushions. And do see if my gown is all right at the back—it never did fit well.”
The butler flung open the folding-doors and announced in the voice of a man who felt that it was quite time for this nonsense of calling to be put an end to by the more compact arrangement of the morrow:
“Lord Parkhurst!”
A man of middle size, with a fair and pleasant face, and a short beard, entered the room. His blue eyes smiled rather more than his lips as he took the little hand of his hostess in his own with the air of one verging on proprietorship of the same, and said: “Now, darling; about what we have to settle before the morning! I have come entirely on business, as you perceive!”
Rosalys tenderly smiled up at him. Miss Jennings left the room, and Rosalys’ sailor silently kissed and admired his betrothed, till he continued:
“Ah—my beautiful one! I have nothing to give you in return for the immeasurable gift you are about to bestow on me—excepting such love as no man ever felt before! I almost wish you were not quite so good and perfect and innocent as you are! And I wish you were a poorer woman—as poor as I—and had no lovely home such as this. To think you have kept yourself from all other men for such an unworthy fellow as me!”
Rosalys looked away from him along the green vistas of chestnut and beeches stretching far down outside the windows.
“Oswald—I know how much you care for me: and that is why I—hope you won’t be disappointed—after you have taken me tomorrow for good and all! I wonder if I shall hinder and hamper you in your profession. Perhaps you ought to marry a girl much younger than yourself—your nature is so young—not a maturing woman like me.”
For all answer he smiled at her with the confiding, fearless gaze that she loved.
Lord Parkhurst stayed on through a paradisical hour till Miss Jennings came to tell them that tea was in the library. Presently they were reminded by the same faithful relative and dependent that on that evening of all evenings they had promised to drive across to the house of Colonel Lacy, Lord Parkhurst’s uncle, and one of Rosalys, near neighbours, and dine there quietly with two or three intimate friends.