The Admiral's Daughter (19 page)

Mr. Wayland must have felt some awkwardness at seeing her, even though he had already heard of her presence at the castle from his patroness; and yet so enthralled was he by his own wooing of the great lady that he looked really happy to see her as he stood up, and bending his oily head, attempted to bestow a kiss upon her hand.

“Here is your good friend's daughter now,” pronounced Lady Ramblay, smiling with great condescension at her relative. “Mr. Wayland has just been telling me about his old parish.”

“Indeed? I hope you have not painted it too drearily, Mr. Wayland. A small country village will never bear comparison to such a vicarage as this, amid the noblest houses in the nation.”

Mr. Wayland now had the grace to flush and lower his eyes a little.

“I hope I have never been ungrateful, Miss Trevor,” said he. “A man of the cloth can never be too humble, nor thankful for whatever little blessings the Lord chooses to bestow upon his servant. And yet, it is at just such times as these that I am reminded of those memorable lines—‘Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the Earth.' Surely
I
have been rewarded for my long years of service—my meekness, if you like—in the personage of this great lady.”

Mr. Wayland had contrived to speak so as to ingratiate himself with the Viscountess while simultaneously making amends to Maggie for whatever she might have heard him say before he was aware of her presence. This he managed by many little twistings of his torso back and forth, leering alternately at one and then the other. Maggie was too overcome to say anything. She was forced to turn away with the pretense of finding a seat in order to hide her smiles.

A little silence ensued, while Maggie and the Vicar sat down and Lady Ramblay stroked her pet.

“Since you are such old friends,” she said at last, “I
suppose you have a great deal to talk about. You may do so at another time. I am sure,” she added, in what she must have considered the very height of gracious condescension, “my niece will be glad of a companion while she is here, Mr. Wayland. I am afraid she has not had much to occupy her since she came, though she has made herself very useful with poultices and the like.”

“Poultices!” exclaimed Mr. Wayland in amazement, and Maggie should have cried out likewise had she dared, for she could not remember having been so
much
occupied in all her life.

“I believe her ladyship refers to a most insignificant event, when I was able to assist the surgeon to bind up a gentleman's wound after a hunting accident,” explained Maggie.

“Oh, to be sure, my dear—you ought really to be a surgeon yourself! It is a pity such kind of occupations are not open to ladies of a certain type. A great pity, I have always thought, that they should be limited to governess-ships.”

Wayland stared back and forth between the ladies, blinking. He was unsure if he had heard aright, and a sudden fear of antagonizing one by ingratiating the other loomed up in his bosom. After a quite speedy calculation, however, he determined that it could do no harm to oil both seas. If, as it appeared, there was a quarrel between them, it would be safer than to unload all his guns on one target. He had oft, in any case, observed to anyone who would listen that the aristocracy behaved very differently from ordinary mortals. The usual laws of decorum did not hold to them, but were enlivened the more for the rest of humanity, by their more interesting ways. After a moment, he observed:

“I am sure I should be honored, Miss Trevor, if you would accompany me on a tour of the park sometime. I have been admiring it all the morning—it must be among the most glorious of its type in England.”

It was clear from Lady Ramblay's expression that he had struck the right note this time, and unwilling to give it up, he pursued it to its very limits. There followed a stream of superlatives, of “magnificent beauties,” “heights of elegance,” “perfection of form and flowers,” which might have awed another audience. As it was, however, Maggie
was too much accustomed to the clergyman's manner to be astonished, and Lady Ramblay too content with this volley of admiration to wish to see beyond the exterior of the idolator. Her several chins beat a happy little jig in time to the nodding of her head, and when she was most pleased, she absently plucked away at the fur of her pet until Maggie thought the creature should have none left upon its head.

Having disposed of the subject of parks—parks in general, their limitations and recommendations, other parks glimpsed by the Vicar, or read about, and, in particular, of course, Ramblay Park—Mr. Wayland moved on to the subject of domestic residences. There was first the vicarage to be praised, and held up favorably against the one he had had at Sussex (though this, in truth, was a hypocrisy, for Wayland, while he had not had time to observe much about his new home, had yet noted the absence of a maid's pantry and the paucity of bedchambers) and then the castle itself was held up for his eager admiration. He had not seen much of it to be sure—only the southern vista on his way across the park and that part of the castle he had glimpsed as he was shown into the morning room—and yet he had such a multitude of compliments for it that a stranger might have supposed he was speaking of Windsor. Lady Ramblay attended to all this with a look of increasing approbation upon her face, and when at last she was allowed a moment to speak, exclaimed—

“Why, I did not anticipate such a connoisseur of furnishings and architecture as you have proved yourself to be, Mr. Wayland! It has always been my experience that clergymen are generally ignorant of such things. Pray tell me, are you as ardent an admirer of
all
of Halsey's buildings?”

In point of fact, Mr. Wayland had never heard of Robert Halsey, the architect who had been commissioned to expand the original castle fifty years before. It had been on the tip of his tongue to suppose the place was built by one of the Adamses (for in truth it held a great resemblance in simplicity and harmonious balance to those famed brothers), but now he blinked once or twice and nodded his head emphatically.

“Why, yes!” cried he, hoping to make up for his lack of honesty with the enthusiasm of the lie. “I have ever held
him to be among the greatest artists we have had!” Whereupon Lady Ramblay commenced to interrogate him upon the finer points of several other of his castles, parks, and abbeys, and Wayland was thrown upon the mercy of his wits to respond.

As luck would have it, just at this point, while the Vicar was showing himself as ignorant of the general principles of architecture as he was uninterested in them, the Viscount returned from his walk and, hearing voices from the hall, came in. He stood for a moment silently in the doorway before letting his presence be known, regarding the little party assembled within. He had not meant to keep his presence hidden—the expression on his face attested to the fact that he had need of that moment to collect his wits, which a recent discovery had momentarily disarmed—but the moment afforded him a chance to see very nearly what Maggie had seen a little while before. Like her, he was struck instantly with the obsequious posture and expressions of the clergyman, and, like her, was torn between revulsion and amusement by them. But the sight of the Vicar endeavoring to salvage himself from the turn the conversation had taken could not hold his attention long. The Viscount's eyes wandered to the place where his cousin sat, her eyes cast down into her lap and a smile struggling to subdue itself about the corners of her mouth. The sight rendered him incapable of further irritation (for it must be hinted that Lord Ramblay had only recently been given cause for grave irritation, almost anger) and made him smile. Just at this moment Maggie looked up. She saw her cousin's bemused look and started. But in the instant before her eyes darted back to her hands, with a flush creeping up her cheeks, a glance had been exchanged between them so full of meaning, of mutual understanding—in short, the interplay of quick minds on common ground, amused and amazed by the same idea—that she was incapable of looking up again for a full minute. This was ample time for Lord Ramblay to recover himself, to cough, and to walk into the room.

Mr. Wayland jumped up at once, smiling all over his face. But there was no sign in Lord Ramblay's expression, as the clergyman was presented to him and made a series of bows and expostulations of joy, that he had seen anything to make him disapprove the fellow.

In the time Lord Ramblay had stood at the door, he had heard Mr. Wayland show himself to be a fool—not only innocent of any knowledge of architects and their trade, but so eager to please the Viscountess that he cared not whether he spoke the truth or a lie, if only it would please her. Now, with the gravest expression of interest upon his face, Lord Ramblay expressed his desire to continue the conversation he had interrupted and, taking a seat, took up his mother's interrogation. Lady Ramblay knew precious little more than the Vicar, though her knowledge of names and places was a little more extensive. But her son had interested himself from an early age in the art of buildings, and his questions were more difficult to answer. Mr. Wayland, had he a grain of sense, should now have thrown up his hands and admitted his own ignorance honestly. But his vanity was such that he would not give an inch, and in attempting to salvage himself from his present miserable position, he walked further and further into the trap.

Mr. Wayland, however, did not know there was a trap. Indeed, he never suspected that Lord Ramblay was listening to his replies with anything but the gravest approval, and this gave the Vicar so much courage that he at last ventured into a long eulogistic speech upon the merits of a certain castle in Dorset which Lord Ramblay had mentioned as among Halsey's finest buildings. The castle did not exist—had never been built or dreamed of—but of this fact Mr. Wayland remained in happy ignorance as he poured forth praise upon the interesting entrance, the curious circular wings, the noble and lofty central construction. Lord Ramblay led him further and further along, as a cat might lead a mouse before it at last determines to pounce. Maggie watched the game with mounting amusement, but soon a fear that Lord Ramblay's inevitable pounce might really kill the poor wretched Vicar made her fearful. She saw in the game a cruelty reminiscent almost of the scene she had so foolishly envisioned that very morning, sitting in the gazebo. But Lord Ramblay, evidently concluding that the game was itself sufficient amusement, did not take advantage of his victim. He stood up, instead, after a quarter of an hour, and with a little sideways smile at Maggie, said,

“I have been most happy to make your acquaintance, Mr. Wayland. My mother warned me we were to have a
most
unusual
replacement for old Mr. Congreve. I see now what she meant.”

Mr. Wayland bowed almost to the ground and said, with a smirk, “I suppose you are not used to thinking of the clergy as well versed in matters of culture and art, your lordship. It will be my very great privilege and honor to prove to you that such is not the case. It is possible, you see, to attend to heavenly matters without forsaking the most lofty mortal concerns.”

Smiling very broadly, Lord Ramblay expressed his eagerness to probe the Vicar's mind upon other matters, and to discover what his knowledge of Heaven must be like, if it was greater than his expertise in other fields. He retired quickly, saying he had work to do, and in that moment, Maggie liked him better than she had ever done since seeing his face for the first time at Dartmoor.

There are two sides, at least, to every question, and Maggie's mind just now was divided almost equally between a desire to dislike her cousin and to think well of him. His manner toward herself had been consistently generous since she had come to Ramblay Castle and, if he still retained a trace of that frigidity in his mien and voice which reminded her of Captain Morrison's description, she was disinclined to believe he was capable of outright cruelty. She could not be unconscious, either, of his admiration for herself, and as her vanity was no less than that of any other young woman, it inclined her to think the more of him. She had caught his eyes wandering toward her often in the last few days, and the curious smile in them when he caught her own glance was impossible to misinterpret. Yet there were too many difficulties with him to be sure of his thoughts. Where another man's admiration might be bold and clear as an open stretch of sea, Lord Ramblay's admiration was mixed—first, with censure, and second, with doubt. His eyes were too often brooding and dark for her to be certain of his thoughts and feelings. There wandered into his expression, just at those moments when she was most at ease with him, a look which made her almost shudder. It was not anger, and neither was it misery, and yet it had elements of both, combined with a fierceness Maggie had never witnessed even in her own father's look before. Whatever occupied his thoughts at
those moments carried him away from the present into some dark, brooding world of his own. It was a mystery Maggie would have given much to clarify, but which became the more perplexing as time went on.

Mr. Wayland stayed another quarter of an hour, until Lady Ramblay, growing restless, began to tap her hand upon the satin pillow and glance toward the door. Wayland had not much subtlety in his own nature, and a smaller hint would certainly not have sufficed him, but when he saw his patroness begin to cough and look annoyed, he rose to his feet and made his excuses. Before he left he secured Maggie's promise of accompanying him on an exploration of the park and the castle on the following day. It was proposed the Vicar should collect Miss Trevor beforehand for their walk. If anyone had suggested to Maggie a month before that she might one day eagerly anticipate an hour of Mr. Wayland's company, she should have put back her head and laughed. But by the following day she had reason to be eager, not simply for the company of an old acquaintance. . . .