The Admiral's Daughter (31 page)

Maggie flushed.

“I—I hope you do not mind!” was all she could mumble. “We were just laughing at the tin soldiers!”

“At the tin soldiers? Dear me—
I
do not think they are very amusing. Their faces are very dour, and their arms stick down on either side in a most unnatural fashion.”

Lord Ramblay gazed gravely at his son. “Do you think them funny, James?”

James, not knowing what was required of him, only stared back. Neither lady, standing awkwardly beside his bed, knew what to say.

“He did a moment ago, Lord Ramblay,” said Maggie, suddenly overcome with anger at this father who could so swiftly dampen their victory—had not he seen his son laugh, had not he seen how changed he was?

But Lord Ramblay, still with the same grave expression, gazed back and forth between his son and Maggie with a reproachful look.

“How dare you,” he breathed, “how dare you find anything so funny when I am not here to laugh as well?”

And now a huge smile came over his face, and tears sprang into his eyes. A nervous titter issued from the child's lips, which was instantly changed into an outright cry of joy when Lord Ramblay, with a suddenness that surprised everyone, fell down upon the little bed and seized the child in his arms. There followed such a tangle of limbs, such an intensity of happiness and pride on every side, that no words are capable of describing them. Let us simply say that Maggie, having once recovered from her shock, could only stand back and laugh, and smile, and nod her head, with the tears pouring down her cheeks, and her heart so full that she thought it would break.

After a little while, when the Viscount's first explosion of emotion was spent and he had sat up and pushed his tangled hair out of his eyes, and covered up his child carefully, he turned to Maggie, and in a voice made hoarse with feeling, said: “I have you to thank for this, Cousin. No other woman is capable of such a miracle.”

On hearing her demur, he only continued, “No—no, I shall not hear you contradict me. It is perfectly true—you have brought joy into the house again!”

A short time after the enactment of this little scene, two figures could be seen walking down one of the garden paths that led into the deer park. Well wrapped up against the inclemencies of the weather—for it was now the first day of December, and a few flakes of snow were falling from the sky in token of the approaching season—Maggie was oblivious to the chill. Her mittens and her cape, however, were not half so responsible for this apparent indifference as the words of her companion. She listened with every nerve in her body, but at last, when Lord Ramblay stopped speaking, she replied,

“I cannot—indeed—I shall not attempt to conceal the very great honor you do me, Lord Ramblay. To hear these words spoken by you, of all men, is certainly astonishing, and more gratifying than I can say. And yet I cannot accept you—no, please hear me out. I am sensible of your feelings, and as that is true, I cannot allow you to go on. In short—I cannot be your wife.”

Lord Ramblay regarded his cousin for a long moment.

“How—that is, if you do not object, would you be so kind as to tell me why not?”

Maggie nodded, but walked on a little further in silence, endeavoring to collect her thoughts before she spoke.

“Indeed, you have every right to know the reasons I cannot accept, and there are several. The first—and by far the most important, from my own view—is that I believe you are not asking me to be
your wife
, but rather the mother of your child. I am sure that I have not the eloquence required to convey to you my feelings about your son—he is everything dear to me: precious and dear. I would do a great deal for him, but even for
him
, I cannot consent to be the wife of a man who does not love me.”

Lord Ramblay had listened to this speech very attentively, but, on hearing this last phrase, he looked relieved, and smiled broadly.

“Oh! Is that all!”

“Is that
all
, did you say?!”

“Yes,” nodded the Viscount, kicking a little pebble beneath his feet in a victorious gesture. “It is all, and I am exceeding happy to hear so, for I must tell you that I loved you from the first moment I saw you, and my feelings have done nothing but deepen since. From that first glimpse I had of you standing at the bottom of the stairs, with your defiant—and oh, so irritating—attitude, my heart was lost. If there had been any doubt about it, it was laid to rest when I saw you fail to tremble on seeing my mother. And since that time, through all the reasons I have had to resent you bitterly, I have only grown more attached to your impudent, maddening ways. Even when I discovered that you had been gadding about with Captain Morrison——”

Maggie, whose heart had skipped a beat on hearing the first part of this and then begun to do a little outraged dance, now absolutely froze.

“Captain Morrison! You know about Captain Morrison!” she gasped.

But Lord Ramblay was gazing at her with a droll expression on his face.

“My dear Maggie—I shall call you Maggie now, if you don't object—I certainly know a great deal more than you would like me to. I know about your foolish infatuation with the man—I shall call it foolish, because I have some previous knowledge of the man's character. And yet I cannot
really condemn it altogether, for Morrison has always had an immense power over the weaker sex, especially when they were in ignorance of his true nature. In point of fact, it was only when I discovered that you knew him that I began to understand your bizarre conduct toward
me
—since you came to the castle, I have not had two minutes' rest, endeavoring to make out the reason for your dislike of me. It would have been the cause of some uneasiness in any case, for I did really wish to make up for our family's quarrel—but in view of my own feelings toward you, it was
most
inconvenient that you should hate me.”

Maggie gaped back at his ironic smile.

“How—how did you find out?”

Lord Ramblay felt in the pocket of his cape, and drew forth a thick letter.

“It was largely on account of you, my dear girl,” he smiled. “I went to London chiefly for the purpose of conferring with my mother upon the subject we were just discussing. I had hoped to persuade her that you were not just such a little frazzle-brain as you appeared to be, and that your father had had some justification for not replying to my first overture, some five years ago—a thing which she has yet to forgive him for.”

Hear Maggie was forced to interrupt, in order to explain the misapprehension she had been under as to the cause of Lord Ramblay's later coolness, upon hearing which, the Viscount's face lit up in comprehension, and a laugh escaped him.

“What!” cried he. “You never knew about the first letter? By God! I thought surely
you
had been the force behind its being ignored! Well, well—I can begin to understand a little
now
why you were so quick to think ill of me! In truth, that was my greatest predicament, for I could not understand how a slimy eel like Morrison could have got his first opportunity to persuade you!”

Maggie still had no absolute proof that Captain Morrison was a slimy eel, however, and she begged for a further elaboration. Lord Ramblay was all eagerness to give it to her—and, handing the letter over, which was discovered to be from Miss Haversham, declared that “all the intricacies of the matter were in that.”
He
would just give her a briefer narrative, and one less encumbered by female subtleties.

“In short, I went yesterday to visit Blanche Haversham, with your letter in my hand. I was not in the best spirits, for my mother could not be persuaded to think well of you, or to approve our marriage. Naturally, this did not in the least change my
own
mind, but it is always pleasant to have the blessing of one's parent in such a kind of case. Your friend Miss Haversham offered me very little comfort, for she was immensely distracted with some other matter, and kept pacing up and down the drawing room as if she was caged, barely attending to anything I said. She seemed of two minds about telling me what was upsetting her so, for she kept beginning to speak and then stopping herself. At length I rose to go, having unburdened my overflowing heart to the unfeeling girl, and gave her your letter, mentioning that you had called it ‘urgent.'

“At once her manner changed. She gave the letter one glance, and commanded me sharply to stay in my chair till she had looked it over. Obedient to the end, I sat patiently, while her mouth worked in shock, amazement and, at last, in anger. She gave a cry and demanded to know whether I was aware you had become on intimate terms with Morrison?

“I must tell you that upon hearing this, I was absolutely dumbfounded. Even before I saw all the ramifications of the thing, I was horror-struck. In order for you to understand why, I shall interrupt myself to tell you the history of my acquaintance with the Captain.”

Now Lord Ramblay, who had hitherto spoken with a lightness almost approaching amusement, and whose eyes had been sparkling with delight at amazing his cousin so, grew suddenly grave. They had by this time walked into a little bowery corner of the park, which in the spring must have been lovely with light and shadow and greenery but now was barren and brown, the branches of the willows shuddering in a chilly breeze. Inquiring if his companion was cold, he invited her to sit down upon a stone bench, protected by a hedge from the wind. They were soon arranged together on the seat, and having pulled the hood of her cloak a little closer about Maggie's face, Lord Ramblay recommenced:

“It is not a tale I delight in the telling of,” he began, with a very solemn look, “and yet I cannot leave you in ignorance of it any longer. It is one of those matters which,
having once gone by, ought by right to be buried as deep as possible out of sight and mind. Only in such a case as we have now before us is there merit in dragging it up again—for the tragedy of others has no benefit at all, if it cannot help to prevent the same kind of unhappiness occurring again.

“As you know, I was lately married. You may have thought it odd that no more mention is made of it by myself or my family, and that we behave as much as possible as though the marriage had not taken place, more so than is thought usual, even where the wife has died an early and an unhappy death. Indeed, my wife's death was more tragic even than an early demise usually is—for she was as innocent as a child, and as sweet. She deserved only the best and gentlest kind of life, and yet fortune must have frowned more cruelly upon her than it is accustomed to doing, for Anna was carried off not only sick in body, but unhappy in her mind. That such was the case, shall be forever a subject of torment for me. I do not believe I could have eased her spirit any more than I did, but I cannot believe there was not something more I could have done to have prevented her unhappiness before it came about.

“Anna was the daughter of a rich West Indian merchant, whose lands make up nearly a third of all the property in the islands. She came to London upon her seventeenth birthday to be presented to Society. It was in that, her first, and eminently triumphant season, that I met her. I was instantly in love with her. Had I been older, I might have had some other considerations besides her beauty, her sweetness, her gentleness—I might have looked for the kind of mind and heart that should have been a just companion for my own, not only in youth, but in middle, and in old age. I might have seen at once that we two had nothing in common—neither tastes nor temperament—and that our ideas of life were perfectly opposed. Be that as it may, I loved her. I was twenty-five, and heady with life. I thought nothing of the future, but supposed our courtship, with its secret meetings and whispered confidences, would last forever. Against the advice of my family and friends, I married her, and despite the knowledge I quickly gained of her, I should have been her faithful and loving husband forever, had not fortune intervened.

“Shortly after the wedding day, we set up in a house in London belonging to my father. There Anna was used to receiving her friends. She had them in large quantity, and they were all devoted to her. But they were not the sort of people I should have liked her to know. Women of much older years and greater experience, officers and court dandies, streamed in and out of her private apartments all day and half the night. When I suggested that so much society was distasteful to me—for I would never have intimated that her friends were not of the proper kind—she laughed and teased me, saying I was as dull as all her friends would have her believe. I tried in every way I could to impress upon her the importance of her station as my wife. That she should live a restrained and a decorous kind of life, at least in the public eye, was every wise desirable. She scoffed at the idea that she should hide her real tastes from the world—within six months she had become as worldly as her friends, as capable of cynicism, and completely unlike the girl I had fallen in love with. Still, I was determined to defend her against the world, and, if need be, against the criticism of my own family. And then at last the solution seemed to present itself—Anna was with child. She could not go out into society any more, and her condition confined her as much as possible to home.

“I thought it was the luckiest stroke in the world, for it provided me a valid excuse to require her at home, and I hoped the birth of a child would tame her spirits a little. But Anna was exceeding vexed. She did not wish a child yet, she said—and refused, until the very last moment, to modify her life in any way. When she grew too large to be seen in public, she came willingly to the country, for she could not bear the idea of being glimpsed as she was, and called it ‘a great hole in her life.' She lived out the last months of her confinement with hardly any interest in anything. She never spoke of the forthcoming child, never hoped for anything save to be back in town with her acquaintances. She avoided me as much as possible for having put her in such an unhappy state, and began to loathe everything about myself or my family. All she ever talked of was going back to London, all she ever wondered was what balls were being given, and what fashions worn in the
ton.
Naturally I hoped all this would change the moment she saw her child—I have heard it is often the
case with women. But, as the day grew closer, she was more and more in dread of it, and bemoaned the day she had ever been married.