CHAPTER XVII.

Old Donnie and Lady Jane.

"Can you tell me, child, anything about that horrible fat old Frenchman, who has begun to speak English since his return?" asked Lady Jane Lennox of Beatrix, whom she stopped, just touching her arm with the tip of her finger, as she was passing. Lady Jane was leaning back indolently, and watching the movements of M. Varbarriere with a disagreeable interest.

"That's Monsieur Varbarriere," answered Beatrix.

"Yes, I know that; but who is he--what is he? I wish he were gone," replied she.

"I really know nothing of him," replied Beatrix, with a smile.

"Yes, you do know something about him: for instance, you know he's the uncle of that handsome young man who accompanied him." This Lady Jane spoke with a point which caused on a sudden a beautiful scarlet to tinge the young girl's cheeks.

Lady Jane looked at her, without a smile, without archness, with a lowering curiosity and something of pain, one might fancy, even of malignity.

Lady Jane hooked her finger in Beatrix's bracelet, and lowering her eyes to the carpet, remained silent, it seemed to the girl undecided whether to speak or not on some doubtful subject. With a vague interest Beatrix watched her handsome but sombre countenance, till Lady Jane appearing to escape from her thoughts, with a little toss of her beautiful head and a frown, said, looking up--

"Beatrix, I have such frightful dreams sometimes. I am ill, I think; I am horribly nervous to-night."

"Would you like to go to your room? Maybe if you were to lie down, Lady Jane--"

"By-and-by, perhaps--yes." She was still stealthily watching Varbarriere.

"I'll go with you--shall I?" said Beatrix.

"No, you shan't," answered Lady Jane, rudely.

"And why, Lady Jane?" asked Beatrix, hurt and surprised.

"You shall never visit my room; you are a good little creature. I could have loved you, Beatrix, but now I can't."

"Yet I like you, and you meet me so! why is this?" pleaded Beatrix.

"I can't say, little fool; who ever knows why they like or dislike? I don't. The fault, I suppose, is mine, not yours. I never said it was yours. If you were ever so little wicked," she added, with a strange little laugh, "perhaps I could; but it is not worth talking about," and with a sudden change from this sinister levity to a seriousness which oscillated strangely between cruelty and sadness, she said--

"Beatrix, you like that young man, Mr. Strangways?" Again poor Beatrix blushed, and was about to falter an exculpation and a protest; but Lady Jane silenced it with a grave and resolute "_Yes--you like him_;" and after a little pause, she added--"Well, if you don't marry _him_, marry no one else;" and shortly after this, Lady Jane sighed heavily.

This speech of hers was delivered in a way that prevented evasion or girlish hypocrisy, and Beatrix had no answer but that blush which became her so; and dropping her eyes to the ground, she fell into a reverie, from which she was called up by Lady Jane, who said suddenly--

"What can that fat Monsieur Varbarriere be? He looks like Torquemada, the Inquisitor--mysterious, plausible, truculent--what do you think? Don't you fancy he could poison you in an ice or a cup of coffee; or put you into Cardinal Ballue's cage, and smile on you once a year through the bars?"

Beatrix smiled, and looked on the unctuous old gentleman with an indulgent eye, comparatively.

"I can't see him so melodramatically, Lady Jane," she laughed. "To me he seems a much more commonplace individual, a great deal less interesting and atrocious, and less like the abbot."

"What abbot?" said Lady Jane, sharply, "Now really that's very odd."

"I meant," said Beatrix, laughing, "the Abbot of Quedlinberg, in Canning's play, who is described, you know, as very corpulent and cruel."

"Oh, I forgot; I don't think I ever read it; but it chimed in so oddly with my dreams."

"How, what do you mean?" cried Beatrix, amused.

"I dreamed some one knocked at night at my door, and when I said 'come in,' that Monsieur Varbarriere put in his great face, with a hood on like a friar's, smiling like--like an assassin; and somehow I have felt a disgust of him ever since."

"Well, I really think he would look rather well in a friar's frock and hood," said Beatrix, glancing at the solemn old man again with a little laugh. "He would do very well for Mrs. Radcliff's one-handed monk, or Schedone, or some of those awful ecclesiastics that scare us in books."

"I think him positively odious, and I hate him," said Lady Jane, quietly rising. "I mean to steal away--will you come with me to the foot of the stair?"

"Come," whispered Beatrix; and as Lady Jane lighted her candle, in that arched recess near the foot of the stair, where, in burnished silver, stand the files of candles, awaiting the fingers which are to bear them off to witness the confidences of toilet or of dejection, she said--

"Well, as you won't take me with you, we must part here. Good-night, Lady Jane."

Lady Jane turned as if to kiss her, but only patted her on the cheek, and said coldly--

"Good-bye, little fool--now run back again."

When Lady Jane reached the gallery at the top of the staircase, she, too, saw Donica Gwynn seated where Varbarriere had spoken to her.

"Ha! Donica," cried she suddenly, in the accents of early girlhood, "I'm so glad to see you, Donica. You hardly know me now?"

And Lady Jane, in the light of one transient, happy smile, threw her jewelled arms round the neck of the old housekeeper, whose visits of weeks at a time to Wardlock were nearly her happiest remembrances of that staid old mansion.

"You dear old thing! you were always good to me; and I such a madcap and such a fury! Dull enough now, Donnie, but not a bit better."

"My poor Miss Jennie!" said old Donica Gwynn, with a tender little laugh, her head just a little on one side, looking on her old pet and charge with such a beautiful, soft lighting up of love in her hard old face as you would not have fancied could have beamed there. Oh! most pathetic mystery, how in our poor nature, layer over layer, the angelic and the evil, the mean and the noble, lie alternated. How sometimes, at long intervals, in the wintriest life and darkest face, the love of angels will suddenly beam out, and show you, still unwrecked, the eternal capacity for heaven.

"And grown such a fine 'oman--bless ye--I allays said she would--didn't I?"

"You always stood up for me, old Donnie Don. Come into my room with me now, and talk. Yes--come, and talk, and talk, and talk--I have no one, Bonnie, to talk with now. If I had I might be different--I mean better. You remember poor mamma, Donnie--don't you?"

"_Dear!_ to be sure--yes, and a nice creature, and a pretty--there's a look in your face sometimes reminds me on her, Miss Jennie. And I allays said you'd do well--didn't I?--and see what a great match, they tell me, you a' made! Well well! and how you _have_ grown!--a fine lady, bless you," and she laughed so softly over those thin, girlish images of memory, you'd have said the laugh was as far away and as sad as the remembrance.

"Sit down, Donnie Don," she said, when they had entered the room. "Sit down, and tell me everything--how all the old people are, and how the old place looks--you live there now? _I_ have nothing to tell, only I'm married, as you know--and--and I think a most good-for-nothing creature."

"Ah, no, pretty Miss Jane, there was good in you always, only a little bit hasty, and _that_ anyone as had the patience could see; and I knowed well you'd be better o' that little folly in time."

"I'm not better, Donnie--I'm worse--I _am_ worse, Donnie. I know I am--not better."

"Well, dear! and jewels, and riches, and coaches, and a fine gentleman adoring you--not very young, though. Well, maybe all the better. Did you never hear say, it's better to be an old man's darling than a young man's slave?"

"Yes, Donnie, it's very well; but let us talk of Wardlock--and he's _not_ a fine man, Donnie, who put that in your head--he's old, and ugly, and"--she was going to say stupid, but the momentary bitterness was rebuked by an accidental glimpse of the casket in which his splendid present was secured--"and tell me about Wardlock, and the people--is old Thomas Jones there still?"

"No, he's living at Glastonhowe now, with his grandson that's married--very happy; but you would not believe how old he looks, and they say can't remember nothink as he used to, but very comfortable."

"And Turpin, the gardener?"

"Old Turpin be dead, miss, two years agone; had a fit a few months before, poor old fellow, and never was strong after. Very deaf he was of late years, and a bit cross sometimes about the vegetables, they do say; but he was a good-natured fellow, and decent allays; and though he liked a mug of ale, poor fellow, now and then, he was very regular at church."

"Poor old Turpin dead! I never heard it--and _old_? he used to wear a kind of flaxen wig."

"Old! dearie me, that he was, miss, you would not guess how old--there's eighty-five years on the grave-stone that Lady Alice put over him, from the parish register, in Wardlock churchyard, bless ye!"

"And--and as I said just now about my husband, General Lennox, that he was old--well, he _is_ old, but he's a good man, and kind, and such a gentleman."

"And you love him--and what more is needed to make you both happy?" added Donica; "and glad I am, miss, to see you so comfortably married--and such a nice, good, grand gentleman; and don't let them young chaps be coming about you with their compliments, and fine talk, and love-making."

"What do you mean, woman? I should hope I know how to behave myself as well as ever Lady Alice Redcliffe did. It is _she_ who has been talking to you, and, I suppose, to every one, the stupid, wicked hag."

"Oh, Miss Jennie, dear!"