The Queen of Hearts

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Her fresh young lips touched my old withered cheek first, and
then Owen's; a soft, momentary shadow of tenderness, that was
very pretty and becoming, passing quickly over the sunshine and
gayety of her face as she saluted us. The next moment she was on
her feet again, inquiring "who the wonderful man was who built
The Glen Tower," and wanting to go all over it immediately from
top to bottom.

As we took her into the house, I made the necessary apologies for
the miserable condition of the lean-to, and assured her that, ten
days later, she would have found it perfectly ready to receive
her. She whisked into the rooms--looked all round them--whisked
out again--declared she had come to live in the old Tower, and
not in any modern addition to it, and flatly declined to inhabit
the lean-to on any terms whatever. I opened my lips to state
certain objections, but she slipped away in an instant and made
straight for the Tower staircase.

"Who lives here?" she asked, calling down to us, eagerly, from
the first-floor landing.

"I do," said Owen; "but, if you would like me to move out--"

She was away up the second flight before he could say any more.
The next sound we heard, as we slowly followed her, was a
peremptory drumming against the room door of the second story.

"Anybody here?" we heard her ask through the door.

I called up to her that, under ordinary circumstances, I was
there; but that, like Owen, I should be happy to move out--

My polite offer was cut short as my brother's had been. We heard
more drumming at the door of the third story. There were two
rooms here also--one perfectly empty, the other stocked with odds
and ends of dismal, old-fashioned furniture for which we had no
use, and grimly ornamented by a life-size basket figure
supporting a complete suit of armor in a sadly rusty condition.
When Owen and I got to the third-floor landing, the door was
open; Miss Jessie had taken possession of the rooms; and we found
her on a chair, dusting the man in armor with her cambric
pocket-handkerchief.

"I shall live here," she said, looking round at us briskly over
her shoulder.

We both remonstrated, but it was quite in vain. She told us that
she had an impulse to live with the man in armor, and that she
would have her way, or go back immediately in the post-chaise,
which we pleased. Finding it impossible to move her, we bargained
that she should, at least, allow the new bed and the rest of the
comfortable furniture in the lean-to to be moved up into the
empty room for her sleeping accommodation. She consented to this
condition, protesting, however, to the last against being
compelled to sleep in a bed, because it was a modern
conventionality, out of all harmony with her place of residence
and her friend in armor.

Fortunately for the repose of Morgan, who, under other
circumstances, would have discovered on the very first day that
his airy retreat was by no means high enough to place him out of
Jessie's reach, the idea of settling herself instantly in her new
habitation excluded every other idea from the mind of our fair
guest. She pinned up the nankeen-colored traveling dress in
festoons all round her on the spot; informed us that we were now
about to make acquaintance with her in the new character of a
woman of business; and darted downstairs in mad high spirits,
screaming for Matilda and the trunks like a child for a set of
new toys. The wholesome protest of Nature against the artificial
restraints of modern life expressed itself in all that she said
and in all that she did. She had never known what it was to be
happy before, because she had never been allowed, until now, to
do anything for herself. She was down on her knees at one moment,
blowing the fire, and telling us that she felt like Cinderella;
she was up on a table the next, attacking the cobwebs with a long
broom, and wishing she had been born a housemaid. As for my
unfortunate friend, the upholsterer, he was leveled to the ranks
at the first effort he made to assume the command of the domestic
forces in the furniture department. She laughed at him, pushed
him about, disputed all his conclusions, altered all his
arrangements, and ended by ordering half his bedroom furniture to
be taken back again, for the one unanswerable reason that she
meant to do without it.

As evening approached, the scene presented by the two rooms
became eccentric to a pitch of absurdity which is quite
indescribable. The grim, ancient walls of the bedroom had the
liveliest modern dressing-gowns and morning-wrappers hanging all
about them. The man in armor had a collection of smart little
boots and shoes dangling by laces and ribbons round his iron
legs. A worm-eaten, steel-clasped casket, dragged out of a
corner, frowned on the upholsterer's brand-new toilet-table, and
held a miscellaneous assortment of combs, hairpins, and brushes.
Here stood a gloomy antique chair, the patriarch of its tribe,
whose arms of blackened oak embraced a pair of pert, new deal
bonnet-boxes not a fortnight old. There, thrown down lightly on a
rugged tapestry table-cover, the long labor of centuries past,
lay the brief, delicate work of a week ago in the shape of silk
and muslin dresses turned inside out. In the midst of all these
confusions and contradictions, Miss Jessie ranged to and fro, the
active center of the whole scene of disorder, now singing at the
top of her voice, and now declaring in her lighthearted way that
one of us must make up his mind to marry her immediately, as she
was determined to settle for the rest of her life at The Glen
Tower.

She followed up that announcement, when we met at dinner, by
inquiring if we quite understood by this time that she had left
her "company manners" in London, and that she meant to govern us
all at her absolute will and pleasure, throughout the whole
period of her stay. Having thus provided at the outset for the
due recognition of her authority by the household generally and
individually having briskly planned out all her own forthcoming
occupations and amusements over the wine and fruit at dessert,
and having positively settled, between her first and second cups
of tea, where our connection with them was to begin and where it
was to end, she had actually succeeded, when the time came to
separate for the night, in setting us as much at our ease, and in
making herself as completely a necessary part of our household as
if she had lived among us for years and years past.

Such was our first day's experience of the formidable guest whose
anticipated visit had so sorely and so absurdly discomposed us
all. I could hardly believe that I had actually wasted hours of
precious time in worrying myself and everybody else in the house
about the best means of laboriously entertaining a lively,
high-spirited girl, who was perfectly capable, without an effort
on her own part or on ours, of entertaining herself.

Having upset every one of our calculations on the first day of
her arrival, she next falsified all our predictions before she
had been with us a week. Instead of fracturing her skull with the
pony, as Morgan had prophesied, she sat the sturdy, sure-footed,
mischievous little brute as if she were part and parcel of
himself. With an old water-proof cloak of mine on her shoulders,
with a broad-flapped Spanish hat of Owen's on her head, with a
wild imp of a Welsh boy following her as guide and groom on a
bare-backed pony, and with one of the largest and ugliest
cur-dogs in England (which she had picked up, lost and starved by
the wayside) barking at her heels, she scoured the country in all
directions, and came back to dinner, as she herself expressed it,
"with the manners of an Amazon, the complexion of a dairy-maid,
and the appetite of a wolf."

On days when incessant rain kept her indoors, she amused herself
with a new freak. Making friends everywhere, as became The Queen
of Hearts, she even ingratiated herself with the sour old
housekeeper, who had predicted so obstinately that she was
certain to run away. To the amazement of everybody in the house,
she spent hours in the kitchen, learning to make puddings and
pies, and trying all sorts of recipes with very varying success,
from an antiquated cookery book which she had discovered at the
back of my bookshelves. At other times, when I expected her to be
upstairs, languidly examining her finery, and idly polishing her
trinkets, I heard of her in the stables, feeding the rabbits, and
talking to the raven, or found her in the conservatory,
fumigating the plants, and half suffocating the gardener, who was
trying to moderate her enthusiasm in the production of smoke.

Instead of finding amusement, as we had expected, in Owen's
studio, she puckered up her pretty face in grimaces of disgust at
the smell of paint in the room, and declared that the horrors of
the Earthquake at Lisbon made her feel hysterical. Instead of
showing a total want of interest in my business occupations on
the estate, she destroyed my dignity as steward by joining me in
my rounds on her pony, with her vagabond retinue at her heels.
Instead of devouring the novels I had ordered for her, she left
them in the box, and put her feet on it when she felt sleepy
after a hard day's riding. Instead of practicing for hours every
evening at the piano, which I had hired with such a firm
conviction of her using it, she showed us tricks on the cards,
taught us new games, initiated us into the mystics of dominoes,
challenged us with riddles, an even attempted to stimulate us
into acting charades--in short, tried every evening amusement in
the whole category except the amusement of music. Every new
aspect of her character was a new surprise to us, and every fresh
occupation that she chose was a fresh contradiction to our
previous expectations. The value of experience as a guide is
unquestionable in many of the most important affairs of life;
but, speaking for myself personally, I never understood the utter
futility of it, where a woman is concerned, until I was brought
into habits of daily communication with our fair guest.

In her domestic relations with ourselves she showed that
exquisite nicety of discrimination in studying our characters,
habits and tastes which comes by instinct with women, and which
even the longest practice rarely teaches in similar perfection to
men. She saw at a glance all the underlying tenderness and
generosity concealed beneath Owen's external shyness,
irresolution, and occasional reserve; and, from first to last,
even in her gayest moments, there was always a certain
quietly-implied consideration--an easy, graceful, delicate
deference--in her manner toward my eldest brother, which won upon
me and upon him every hour in the day.

With me she was freer in her talk, quicker in her actions,
readier and bolder in all the thousand little familiarities of
our daily intercourse. When we met in the morning she always took
Owen's hand, and waited till he kissed her on the forehead. In my
case she put both her hands on my shoulders, raised herself on
tiptoe, and saluted me briskly on both checks in the foreign way.
She never differed in opinion with Owen without propitiating him
first by some little artful compliment in the way of excuse. She
argued boldly with me on every subject under the sun, law and
politics included; and, when I got the better of her, never
hesitated to stop me by putting her hand on my lips, or by
dragging me out into the garden in the middle of a sentence.

As for Morgan, she abandoned all restraint in his case on the
second day of her sojourn among us. She had asked after him as
soon as she was settled in her two rooms on the third story; had
insisted on knowing why he lived at the top of the tower, and why
he had not appeared to welcome her at the door; had entrapped us
into all sorts of damaging admissions, and had thereupon
discovered the true state of the case in less than five minutes.

From that time my unfortunate second brother became the victim of
all that was mischievous and reckless in her disposition. She
forced him downstairs by a series of maneuvers which rendered his
refuge uninhabitable, and then pretended to fall violently in
love with him. She slipped little pink three-cornered notes under
his door, entreating him to make appointments with her, or
tenderly inquiring how he would like to see her hair dressed at
dinner on that day. She followed him into the garden, sometimes
to ask for the privilege of smelling his tobacco-smoke, sometimes
to beg for a lock of his hair, or a fragment of his ragged old
dressing-gown, to put among her keepsakes. She sighed at him when
he was in a passion, and put her handkerchief to her eyes when he
was sulky. In short, she tormented Morgan, whenever she could
catch him, with such ingenious and such relentless malice, that
he actually threatened to go back to London, and prey once more,
in the unscrupulous character of a doctor, on the credulity of
mankind.

Thus situated in her relations toward ourselves, and thus
occupied by country diversions of her own choosing, Miss Jessie
passed her time at The Glen Tower, excepting now and then a dull
hour in the long evenings, to her guardian's satisfaction--and,
all things considered, not without pleasure to herself. Day
followed day in calm and smooth succession, and five quiet weeks
had elapsed out of the six during which her stay was to last
without any remarkable occurrence to distinguish them, when an
event happened which personally affected me in a very serious
manner, and which suddenly caused our handsome Queen of Hearts to
become the object of my deepest anxiety in the present, and of my
dearest hopes for the future.

CHAPTER IV.

OUR GRAND PROJECT.

AT the end of the fifth week of our guest's stay, among the
letters which the morning's post brought to The Glen Tower there
was one for me, from my son George, in the Crimea.

The effect which this letter produced in our little circle
renders it necessary that I should present it here, to speak for
itself.

This is what I read alone in my own room:

"MY DEAREST FATHER--After the great public news of the fall of
Sebastopol, have you any ears left for small items of private
intelligence from insignificant subaltern officers? Prepare, if
you have, for a sudden and a startling announcement. How shall I
write the words? How shall I tell you that I am really coming
home?

"I have a private opportunity of sending this letter, and only a
short time to write it in; so I must put many things, if I can,
into few words. The doctor has reported me fit to travel at last,
and I leave, thanks to the privilege of a wounded man, by the
next ship. The name of the vessel and the time of starting are on
the list which I inclose. I have made all my calculations, and,
allowing for every possible delay, I find that I shall be with
you, at the latest, on the first of November--perhaps some days
earlier.

"I am far too full of my return, and of something else connected
with it which is equally dear to me, to say anything about public
affairs, more especially as I know that the newspapers must, by
this time, have given you plenty of information. Let me fill the
rest of this paper with a subject which is very near to my
heart--nearer, I am almost ashamed to say, than the great triumph
of my countrymen, in which my disabled condition has prevented me
from taking any share.

"I gathered from your last letter that Miss Yelverton was to pay
you a visit this autumn, in your capacity of her guardian. If she
is already with you, pray move heaven and earth to keep her at
The Glen Tower till I come back. Do you anticipate my confession
from this entreaty? My dear, dear father, all my hopes rest on
that one darling treasure which you are guarding perhaps, at this
moment, under your own roof--all my happiness depends on making
Jessie Yelverton my wife.

"If I did not sincerely believe that you will heartily approve of
my choice, I should hardly have ventured on this abrupt
confession. Now that I have made it, let me go on and tell you
why I have kept my attachment up to this time a secret from every
one--even from Jessie herself. (You see I call her by her
Christian name already!)

"I should have risked everything, father, and have laid my whole
heart open before her more than a year ago, but for the order
which sent our regiment out to take its share in this great
struggle of the Russian war. No ordinary change in my life would
have silenced me on the subject of all others of which I was most
anxious to speak; but this change made me think seriously of the
future; and out of those thoughts came the resolution which I
have kept until this time. For her sake, and for her sake only, I
constrained myself to leave the words unspoken which might have
made her my promised wife. I resolved to spare her the dreadful
suspense of waiting for her betrothed husband till the perils of
war might, or might not, give him back to her. I resolved to save
her from the bitter grief of my death if a bullet laid me low. I
resolved to preserve her from the wretched sacrifice of herself
if I came back, as many a brave man will come back from this war,
invalided for life. Leaving her untrammeled by any engagement,
unsuspicious perhaps of my real feelings toward her, I might die,
and know that, by keeping silence, I had spared a pang to the
heart that was dearest to me. This was the thought that stayed
the words on my lips when I left England, uncertain whether I
should ever come back. If I had loved her less dearly, if her
happiness had been less precious to me, I might have given way
under the hard restraint I imposed on myself, and might have
spoken selfishly at the last moment.

"And now the time of trial is past; the war is over; and,
although I still walk a little lame, I am, thank God, in as good
health and in much better spirits than when I left home. Oh,
father, if I should lose her now--if I should get no reward for
sparing her but the bitterest of all disappointments! Sometimes I
am vain enough to think that I made some little impression on
her; sometimes I doubt if she has a suspicion of my love. She
lives in a gay world--she is the center of perpetual
admiration--men with all the qualities to win a woman's heart are
perpetually about her--can I, dare I hope? Yes, I must! Only keep
her, I entreat you, at The Glen Tower. In that quiet world, in
that freedom from frivolities and temptations, she will listen to
me as she might listen nowhere else. Keep her, my dearest,
kindest father--and, above all things, breathe not a word to her
of this letter. I have surely earned the privilege of being the
first to open her eyes to the truth. She must know nothing, now
that I am coming home, till she knows all from my own lips."

Here the writing hurriedly broke off. I am only giving myself
credit for common feeling, I trust, when I confess that what I
read deeply affected me. I think I never felt so fond of my boy,
and so proud of him, as at the moment when I laid down his
letter.

As soon as I could control my spirits, I began to calculate the
question of time with a trembling eagerness, which brought back
to my mind my own young days of love and hope. My son was to come
back, at the latest, on the first of November, and Jessie's
allotted six weeks would expire on the twenty-second of October.
Ten days too soon! But for the caprice which had brought her to
us exactly that number of days before her time she would have
been in the house, as a matter of necessity, on George's return.

I searched back in my memory for a conversation that I had held
with her a week since on her future plans. Toward the middle of
November, her aunt, Lady Westwick, had arranged to go to her
house in Paris, and Jessie was, of course, to accompany her--to
accompany her into that very circle of the best English and the
best French society which contained in it the elements most
adverse to George's hopes. Between this time and that she had no
special engagement, and she had only settled to write and warn
her aunt of her return to London a day or two before she left The
Glen Tower.

Under these circumstances, the first, the all-important necessity
was to prevail on her to prolong her stay beyond the allotted six
weeks by ten days. After the caution to be silent impressed on me
(and most naturally, poor boy) in George's letter, I felt that I
could only appeal to her on the ordinary ground of hospitality.
Would this be sufficient to effect the object?

I was sure that the hours of the morning and the afternoon had,
thus far, been fully and happily occupied by her various
amusements indoors and out. She was no more weary of her days now
than she had been when she first came among us. But I was by no
means so certain that she was not tired of her evenings. I had
latterly noticed symptoms of weariness after the lamps were lit,
and a suspicious regularity in retiring to bed the moment the
clock struck ten. If I could provide her with a new amusement for
the long evenings, I might leave the days to take care of
themselves, and might then make sure (seeing that she had no
special engagement in London until the middle of November) of her
being sincerely thankful and ready to prolong her stay.

How was this to be done? The piano and the novels had both failed
to attract her. What other amusement was there to offer?

It was useless, at present, to ask myself such questions as
these. I was too much agitated to think collectedly on the most
trifling subjects. I was even too restless to stay in my own
room. My son's letter had given me so fresh an interest in Jessie
that I was now as impatient to see her as if we were about to
meet for the first time. I wanted to look at her with my new
eyes, to listen to her with my new ears, to study her secretly
with my new purposes, and my new hopes and fears. To my dismay
(for I wanted the very weather itself to favor George's
interests), it was raining heavily that morning. I knew,
therefore, that I should probably find her in her own
sitting-room. When I knocked at her door, with George's letter
crumpled up in my hand, with George's hopes in full possession of
my heart, it is no exaggeration to say that my nerves were almost
as much fluttered, and my ideas almost as much confused, as they
were on a certain memorable day in the far past, when I rose, in
brand-new wig and gown, to set my future prospects at the bar on
the hazard of my first speech.

When I entered the room I found Jessie leaning back languidly in
her largest arm-chair, watching the raindrops dripping down the
window-pane. The unfortunate box of novels was open by her side,
and the books were lying, for the most part, strewed about on the
ground at her feet. One volume lay open, back upward, on her lap,
and her hands were crossed over it listlessly. To my great
dismay, she was yawning--palpably and widely yawning--when I came
in.

No sooner did I find myself in her presence than an irresistible
anxiety to make some secret discovery of the real state of her
feelings toward George took possession of me. After the customary
condolences on the imprisonment to which she was subjected by the
weather, I said, in as careless a manner as it was possible to
assume:

"I have heard from my son this morning. He talks of being ordered
home, and tells me I may expect to see him before the end of the
year."

I was too cautious to mention the exact date of his return, for
in that case she might have detected my motive for asking her to
prolong her visit.

"Oh, indeed?" she said. "How very nice. How glad you must be."

I watched her narrowly. The clear, dark blue eyes met mine as
openly as ever. The smooth, round cheeks kept their fresh color
quite unchanged. The full, good-humored, smiling lips never
trembled or altered their expression in the slightest degree. Her
light checked silk dress, with its pretty trimming of
cherry-colored ribbon, lay quite still over the bosom beneath it.
For all the information I could get from her look and manner, we
might as well have been a hundred miles apart from each other. Is
the best woman in the world little better than a fathomless abyss
of duplicity on certain occasions, and where certain feelings of
her own are concerned? I would rather not think that; and yet I
don't know how to account otherwise for the masterly manner in
which Miss Jessie contrived to baffle me.

I was afraid--literally afraid--to broach the subject of
prolonging her sojourn with us on a rainy day, so I changed the
topic, in despair, to the novels that were scattered about her.

"Can you find nothing there," I asked, "to amuse you this wet
morning?"

"There are two or three good novels," she said, carelessly, "but
I read them before I left London."

"And the others won't even do for a dull day in the country?" I
went on.

"They might do for some people," she answered, "but not for me.
I'm rather peculiar, perhaps, in my tastes. I'm sick to death of
novels with an earnest purpose. I'm sick to death of outbursts of
eloquence, and large-minded philanthropy, and graphic
descriptions, and unsparing anatomy of the human heart, and all
that sort of thing. Good gracious me! isn't it the original
intention or purpose, or whatever you call it, of a work of
fiction, to set out distinctly by telling a story? And how many
of these books, I should like to know, do that? Why, so far as
telling a story is concerned, the greater part of them might as
well be sermons as novels. Oh, dear me! what I want is something
that seizes hold of my interest, and makes me forget when it is
time to dress for dinner--something that keeps me reading,
reading, reading, in a breathless state to find out the end. You
know what I mean--at least you ought. Why, there was that little
chance story you told me yesterday in the garden--don't you
remember?--about your strange client, whom you never saw again: I
declare it was much more interesting than half these novels,
_because_ it was a story. Tell me another about your young days,
when you were seeing the world, and meeting with all sorts of
remarkable people. Or, no--don't tell it now--keep it till the
evening, when we all want something to stir us up. You old people
might amuse us young ones out of your own resources oftener than
you do. It was very kind of you to get me these books; but, with
all respect to them, I would rather have the rummaging of your
memory than the rummaging of this box. What's the matter? Are you
afraid I have found out the window in your bosom already?"

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