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5. Name: Class: Date:
Unit G Inserting and Working with Images
Cengage Learning Testing, Powered by Cognero Page 1
1. You add an image to a web page by linking to a separate file.
a. True
b. False
ANSWER: True
POINTS: 1
REFERENCES: 170
2. The GIF file type does not support transparent pixels.
a. True
b. False
ANSWER: False
POINTS: 1
REFERENCES: 170
3. The most widely supported graphics formats are GIF, JPEG, and PNG.
a. True
b. False
ANSWER: True
POINTS: 1
REFERENCES: 170
4. Like span elements, img elements are embedded elements by default.
a. True
b. False
ANSWER: False
POINTS: 1
REFERENCES: 172
5. HTML5 includes the semantic figure element to mark images that add information to a web page.
a. True
b. False
ANSWER: True
POINTS: 1
REFERENCES: 176
6. You use the background-repeat property when you want to specify one or more properties related to background listed
in a specific order.
a. True
b. False
ANSWER: False
POINTS: 1
REFERENCES: 175
7. An img element can contain text.
6. Name: Class: Date:
Unit G Inserting and Working with Images
Cengage Learning Testing, Powered by Cognero Page 2
a. True
b. False
ANSWER: True
POINTS: 1
REFERENCES: 173
8. Only Firefox supports opacity values for images.
a. True
b. False
ANSWER: False
POINTS: 1
REFERENCES: 180
9. Most visual user agents display the value of the title attribute as floating text when a user moves the mouse pointer over
the associated element.
a. True
b. False
ANSWER: True
POINTS: 1
REFERENCES: 179
10. You can add a link to an image in an HTML document by enclosing the img element in an a element.
a. True
b. False
ANSWER: True
POINTS: 1
REFERENCES: 180
11. The size of a bitmap image is measured in inches, which are the individual dots that make up the image.
_________________________
ANSWER: False - pixels
POINTS: 1
REFERENCES: 170
12. Images can currently be represented electronically in two ways: as bitmaps or as properties.
_________________________
ANSWER: False - vectors
POINTS: 1
REFERENCES: 170
13. More recently, the Super Vector Graphics (SVG) format has seen wider support in browsers; it is optimal for encoding
line art. _________________________
ANSWER: False - Scalable
POINTS: 1
7. Name: Class: Date:
Unit G Inserting and Working with Images
Cengage Learning Testing, Powered by Cognero Page 3
REFERENCES: 170
14. You add an image to an HTML document using the one-sided img element. _________________________
ANSWER: True
POINTS: 1
REFERENCES: 172
15. To apply both a background color and a background image, you can use a single shorthand display property.
_________________________
ANSWER: False - background
POINTS: 1
REFERENCES: 181
16. The value for the background property always starts with the text “http”. _________________________
ANSWER: False - url
POINTS: 1
REFERENCES: 182
17. The HTML code associated with an image that specifies one or more shapes using sets of coordinates and that
provides a link target for each shape is referred to as hotsopt. _________________________
ANSWER: False - image map
POINTS: 1
REFERENCES: 142
18. A(n) favicon is a custom icon associated with a web page that appears in the address bar and on the bookmark or
favorites menu and bar.
ANSWER: True
POINTS: 1
REFERENCES: 186
19. As a general rule, alt text should describe an image without adding additional information, as this text is intended to
be able to substitute for the image. _________________________
ANSWER: True
POINTS: 1
REFERENCES: 178
20. The title attribute is generally used to provide explanation or additional information if a user seeks it out.
_________________________
ANSWER: True
POINTS: 1
REFERENCES: 179
21. You can use HTML to incorporate images into your Web pages and specify CSS ____ to affect the way user agents
display the images.
a. elements b. properties
8. Name: Class: Date:
Unit G Inserting and Working with Images
Cengage Learning Testing, Powered by Cognero Page 4
c. commands d. applications
ANSWER: b
POINTS: 1
REFERENCES: 170
22. A ____ image represents an image as a grid of dots and specifies the color of each dot.
a. vector b. bitmap
c. layout d. static
ANSWER: b
POINTS: 1
REFERENCES: 170
23. A ____ graphic encodes the appearance of a graphic as geometric shapes.
a. vector b. bitmap
c. layout d. static
ANSWER: a
POINTS: 1
REFERENCES: 170
24. The three most widely used image formats on the web are all different types of ____ encoding.
a. vector b. bitmap
c. Both A and B. d. Neither A nor B.
ANSWER: b
POINTS: 1
REFERENCES: 170
25. The ____ format, named for the Joint Photographic Experts Group that created it, is optimized for images that contain
many colors, such as photographs.
a. JPEG b. JPG
c. Either A or B. d. Neither A nor B.
ANSWER: c
POINTS: 1
REFERENCES: 170
26. ____ works best for art that contains limited numbers of colors and areas with defined borders between areas.
a. PNG b. GIF
c. JPG d. JPG
ANSWER: a
POINTS: 1
REFERENCES: 170
27. PNG, short for Portable ____ Graphics, was originally designed as a free alternative to GIF when GIF usage required
licensing fees.
a. Native b. Network
9. Name: Class: Date:
Unit G Inserting and Working with Images
Cengage Learning Testing, Powered by Cognero Page 5
c. New d. Natural
ANSWER: b
POINTS: 1
REFERENCES: 170
28. A(n) ____ file can be displayed at different dimensions with no decrease in quality.
a. GIF b. JPEG
c. SVG d. All of the above.
ANSWER: c
POINTS: 1
REFERENCES: 170
29. All bitmap images are created to be displayed at a set ____.
a. resolution b. size
c. Both A and B. d. Neither A nor B.
ANSWER: c
POINTS: 1
REFERENCES: 170
30. Resolution, measured in ____, specifies how close the dots in the bitmap should appear on the output.
a. dots per inch b. dots per ion
c. dots per impression d. dots per image
ANSWER: a
POINTS: 1
REFERENCES: 170
31. The standard resolution for display on a monitor is ____ dpi.
a. 36 b. 72
c. 144 d. 256
ANSWER: b
POINTS: 1
REFERENCES: 170
32. The size of a bitmap image is measured in ____, which are the individual dots that make up the image.
a. ions b. pixels
c. inches d. impressions
ANSWER: b
POINTS: 1
REFERENCES: 170
33. While a vector graphic can be scaled larger or smaller with no change in quality, bitmap graphics display optimally
only at their original, or ____, length and width.
a. native b. natural
c. intended d. final
10. Name: Class: Date:
Unit G Inserting and Working with Images
Cengage Learning Testing, Powered by Cognero Page 6
ANSWER: a
POINTS: 1
REFERENCES: 170
34. SVG graphics are written in a(n) ____ language similar to XML.
a. standard b. export
c. markup d. concurrent
ANSWER: c
POINTS: 1
REFERENCES: 171
35. You add an image to an HTML document using the one-sided img element. The element must include the ____
attribute whose value is the path and filename of the image file to display.
a. src b. http
c. html d. alt
ANSWER: a
POINTS: 1
REFERENCES: 172
36. You add an image to an HTML document using the one-sided img element. The element must include the ____
attribute which specifies text to display in case the image is unavailable or needs to be read in user agents by software
such as screen readers.
a. utf b. alt
c. src d. http
ANSWER: b
POINTS: 1
REFERENCES: 172
37. Values for the width and height attributes of an img element are always expressed in ____.
a. centimeters b. inches
c. pixels d. percent
ANSWER: c
POINTS: 1
REFERENCES: 172
38. The coordinates for an image map are measured from the ____ and _____ edges of the image.
a. top, right b. top, left
c. bottom, right d. bottom, left
ANSWER: b
POINTS: 1
REFERENCES: 182
39. Each linked area in an image map is know as a(n) ____ .
a. link b. shape
11. Name: Class: Date:
Unit G Inserting and Working with Images
Cengage Learning Testing, Powered by Cognero Page 7
c. alt image d. hotspot
ANSWER: d
POINTS: 1
REFERENCES: 182
40. In addition to specifying a color as the background for a web page or web page element, you can provide a path and
filename for a background image using the ____ property.
a. image-filename b. background-image
c. path-filename d. path-image
ANSWER: b
POINTS: 1
REFERENCES: 174
41. By changing the ____ of an image, you can increase its contrast with other page elements or make it more closely
match a site’s design.
a. size b. alignment
c. opacity d. filename
ANSWER: c
POINTS: 1
REFERENCES: 180
42. To associate caption text with an img element, you place the text in a ____ element that is nested within the figure
element for the image.
a. captext b. figtext
c. textcaption d. figcaption
ANSWER: d
POINTS: 1
REFERENCES: 178
43. Hotspots can be ____ shapes.
a. rectangular b. polygonal
c. circular d. All of the above.
ANSWER: d
POINTS: 1
REFERENCES: 184
44. A favicon is a graphic file 16 pixels in width by ____ pixels in height.
a. 16 b. 32
c. 64 d. 128
ANSWER: a
POINTS: 1
REFERENCES: 187
45. You can specify a favicon for all the pages on a Web site by using the ____ format.
12. Name: Class: Date:
Unit G Inserting and Working with Images
Cengage Learning Testing, Powered by Cognero Page 8
a. .img b. .jpg
c. .txt d. .ico
ANSWER: d
POINTS: 1
REFERENCES: 186
Unholy Vault Designs/Shutterstock.com
Photo/Sasha Vodnik
46. Referring to the figure above, the icon on the tab, next to the words “Lakeland Reeds Bed & Br..” is a(n)____ icon
known as a favicon.
a. custom b. standard
c. animated d. temporary
ANSWER: a
POINTS: 1
REFERENCES: 186
47. Referring to the figure above, you know this file was opened _____.
a. from a local file b. from a web server
c. either a or b d. neither a nor b
ANSWER: c
POINTS: 1
REFERENCES: 186
48. Referring to the figure above, if you want to specify a different favicon on an individual page you should use the ____
element to reference the appropriate file.
a. alt b. root
c. path d. link
ANSWER: d
POINTS: 1
REFERENCES: 187
13. Name: Class: Date:
Unit G Inserting and Working with Images
Cengage Learning Testing, Powered by Cognero Page 9
Unholy Vault Designs/Shutterstock.com
49. Referring to the figure above, the text “The Sun Room” under the picture is a ____.
a. figure caption b. figure callout
c. Web caption d. Web callout
ANSWER: a
POINTS: 1
REFERENCES: 178
50. Referring to the figure above, the linked text “The Sun Room” was created by nesting the ____ element inside a
figcaption element.
a. link b. fig
c. a d. div
ANSWER: a
POINTS: 1
REFERENCES: 180
14. Name: Class: Date:
Unit G Inserting and Working with Images
Cengage Learning Testing, Powered by Cognero Page 10
Unholy Vault Designs/Shutterstock.com
51. Referring to the figure above, a tall narrow background image was repeated or ____ to fill the entire screen.
a. tiled b. rolled
c. embedded d. reversed
ANSWER: a
POINTS: 1
REFERENCES: 174
16. Name: Class: Date:
Unit G Inserting and Working with Images
Cengage Learning Testing, Powered by Cognero Page 11
52. Referring to the figure above, which figure is displayed at its native length and width?
a. lower-left image b. lower-middle image
c. lower-right image d. none
ANSWER: b
POINTS: 1
REFERENCES: 171
53. Referring to the figure above, the bottom-right picture shows the image displayed ____.
a. larger than its native size b. smaller than its native size
c. at its native size d. on an older browser
ANSWER: a
POINTS: 1
REFERENCES: 171
54. Referring to the figure above, which image(s) would require more data to be downloaded than is needed to display a
quality image?
a. lower-left image b. lower-middle image
c. lower-right image d. both a and c
ANSWER: a
POINTS: 1
REFERENCES: 171
55. Referring to the figure above, which image(s) results in the best balance of file size and quality.
a. lower-left image b. lower-middle image
17. Name: Class: Date:
Unit G Inserting and Working with Images
Cengage Learning Testing, Powered by Cognero Page 12
c. lower-right image d. both a and c
ANSWER: b
POINTS: 1
REFERENCES: 171
Case-Based Critical Thinking Question
Kristin coaches a high school hockey team and has started a website to showcase the players.
56. Kristin wants to show lots of photographs on the website. The best format for her to use is the ________ format
because it is optimized for colorful images.
a. JPEG b. GIF
c. PNG d. SVG
ANSWER: a
POINTS: 1
REFERENCES: 170
TOPICS: Critical Thinking
57. Kristin wants to include drawn diagrams (limited colors, defined borders) illustrating the players and their
positions. She wants the diagrams to be displayed at different dimensions with no decrease in quality. To do this, she
should choose the ____ format.
a. JPEG b. JPG
c. GIF d. SVG
ANSWER: d
POINTS: 1
REFERENCES: 170
TOPICS: Critical Thinking
58. Before she uses the SVG format, Kristin researches browser support. The following browser offers high support of
SVG: ____.
a. Chrome b. Safari
c. Opera d. All of the above.
ANSWER: d
POINTS: 1
REFERENCES: 171
TOPICS: Critical Thinking
Case-Based Critical Thinking Question
John wants to add related text to images on his Lawn Care business website.
59. John discovers that most visual users display the title attribute as ____ text that is shown when a user moves the
mouse pointer over the associated element.
a. hyperlinked b. secondary
c. floating d. hovering
ANSWER: c
18. Name: Class: Date:
Unit G Inserting and Working with Images
Cengage Learning Testing, Powered by Cognero Page 13
POINTS: 1
REFERENCES: 179
TOPICS: Critical Thinking
60. John also finds out that he can nest an img element inside a(n) ____ element to align it horizontally.
a. div b. block-level
c. span d. alignment
ANSWER: b
POINTS: 1
REFERENCES: 172
TOPICS: Critical Thinking
61. Referring to the figure above, what was added using the background property?
ANSWER: background color and image
background color and background image
color and image
POINTS: 1
REFERENCES: 175
62. A(n) ________________ image represents an image as a grid of dots and specifies the color of each dot.
ANSWER: bitmap
POINTS: 1
REFERENCES: 170
63. A(n) ___________________ graphic encodes the appearance of a graphic as geometric shapes.
ANSWER: vector
POINTS: 1
REFERENCES: 170
64. You use the _____ property to set how transparent an image is.
ANSWER: opacity
POINTS: 1
REFERENCES: 180
19. Name: Class: Date:
Unit G Inserting and Working with Images
Cengage Learning Testing, Powered by Cognero Page 14
65. To create a multi-sided hotspot, you should set the shape value to _________.
ANSWER: poly
POINTS: 1
REFERENCES: 185
66. User agents have a default behavior of ___________________ small background images, meaning that the images are
displayed repeatedly both across and down a page to fill up the browser window.
ANSWER: tiling
POINTS: 1
REFERENCES: 174
67. The standard CSS3 syntax uses the “___________________” property with a decimal value from 0 (fully transparent)
to 1 (fully opaque).
ANSWER: opacity
POINTS: 1
REFERENCES: 180
68. Optimizing your use of the figcaption element and the alt and title attributes of the image tag requires examining the
purpose of any image-related text you want to add to your web pages. When are each of the text labeling methods (alt
text, caption, and title) most commonly used?
ANSWER: As a general rule, alt text should describe an image without adding additional information, as this text is
intended to be able to substitute for the image.
A caption can add information not provided by surrounding page content.
The title attribute is generally used to provide explanation or additional information if a user seeks it out.
POINTS: 1
REFERENCES: 179
TOPICS: Critical Thinking
69. Why is the text you provide using the alt attribute for an image important? Please give three tips for creating useful alt
text.
ANSWER: Why is alt text important: The text you provide using the alt attribute for an image is an important
accessibility element for your Web site. It’s also significant from a usability perspective for users who
are unable to download the image or who choose to browse without images.
Tips (students should include three tips):
For graphics that include text, the text should be included in the value of the alt attribute, along with a
description if it adds useful information.
Photos and other graphics without text should include a description of the image in the alt value.
Because there are many ways to describe any given image, it’s important to identify what aspect or
aspects of a graphic are relevant to the Web page, and focus on those aspects.
If a graphic is merely presentational and doesn’t add information to the Web page, include the alt
attribute with nothing between the quotes. This lets screen readers know that the element isn’t conveying
information and that they can skip it.
POINTS: 1
20. Name: Class: Date:
Unit G Inserting and Working with Images
Cengage Learning Testing, Powered by Cognero Page 15
REFERENCES: 172
TOPICS: Critical Thinking
70. What is the benefit of styling an image with opacity? Using CSS3 syntax, what would be the code to set the “opacity”
property at 50%.
ANSWER: 1) By changing the opacity of an image, you can increase its contrast with other page elements or make
it more closely match a site’s design.
2) The standard CSS3 syntax uses the “opacity” property with a decimal value from 0 (fully transparent)
to 1 (fully opaque). To set 50% opacity, you could use the code: opacity: 0.5;
POINTS: 1
REFERENCES: 180
TOPICS: Critical Thinking
Match each term with the appropriate definition.
a. bitmap image
b. vector graphic
c. PNG
d. JPEG or JPG
e. GIF
REFERENCES: 170
71. Originally designed as a free alternative to GIF
ANSWER: c
POINTS: 1
72. Represents an image as a grid of dots and specifies the color for each dot
ANSWER: a
POINTS: 1
73. Optimal format for photographs
ANSWER: d
POINTS: 1
74. Works best with art with limited colors and defined borders between areas
ANSWER: e
POINTS: 1
75. Encodes the appearance of a graphic as geometric shapes
ANSWER: b
POINTS: 1
22. "Does my godmother like him?—he's her land-agent, isn't he?"
"Madam!" cried Doctor McKirdy indignantly, "Madam has never
wasted a thought upon him,—why should she?"
He looked quite angrily at his companion. Barbara was still
smiling: a delicate colour, the effect of walking against the wind, had
come into her face.
"They're all alike," growled the doctor to himself, "just mention a
young man to a young woman and smiling begins," but the harsh
judgment, like most harsh judgments, was singularly at fault. Poor
Barbara was waking up to life again, ready to take pleasure in the
slightest matter which touched her sense of humour. The doctor,
however, had become seriously uneasy. Why this strange interest in
the Boringdons? Mrs. Rebell now belonged to the Priory, and so was
surely bound to adopt without question all his, Alexander McKirdy's,
views and prejudices. Her next words fortunately gave him the
opening he sought.
"I suppose there are many young ladies at Chancton?"
"There is just one," he said, brightening, "a fine upstanding lass.
The father of her is General Thomas Kemp. May-be you've heard of
him, for he's quite a hero, Victoria Cross and a' that, though the
fools about here don't recognise him as such."
"No," said Barbara, "I never heard of the heroic General Kemp."
Her eyes were brimming over with soft laughter. Living with her
parents first in one and then in another continental town, she had
had as a young girl many long solitary hours at her disposal, and she
had then read, with keen zest, numberless old-fashioned novels of
English life. This talk seemed to bring back to her mind many a
favourite story, out of which she had tried in the long ago to
reconstruct the England she had then so longed to know. Ah! now
23. she must begin novel-reading again! And so she said, "I suppose
that Oliver Boringdon is in love with the General's daughter."
Doctor McKirdy turned and looked at her, amazed and rather
suspicious; "you show great prescience—really remarkable
prescience, Ma'am. I was just about explaining to you that there is
no doubt something like a kindness betwixt them. There's another
one likes her, a Captain Laxton, but they say she won't have aught
to say to him."
"Oh no! she must be true to Mr. Boringdon, and then, after a long
engagement,—oh! how wise to have a long engagement,"—Barbara
sighed instinctively—"they will be married in the little church which I
look down upon from my stone balcony? and then—why then they
will live happy ever after!"
"No, no, I cannot promise you that," said Doctor McKirdy gruffly,
"that would be forecasting a great deal too much!"
Even as he spoke the deeply rutted path was emerging abruptly
on a vast expanse of rolling uplands. They were now on the open
down; Barbara laid a detaining hand on the old Scotchman's arm,
and looked about her with enraptured eyes. Before her, to the east,
lay a dark oasis, a black-green stretch of fir plantation, redeemed a
hundred years ago from the close cropped turf, and a large white
house looked out from thence up the distant sea. To the north, some
three miles away, rose the high sky-line. A dense wood, said to be
part of the primeval forest, crept upwards on a parallel line. There,
so says tradition, Boadicea made her last stand, and across this
down a Roman road still asserts the final supremacy of the imperial
force.
A sound of voices, of steady tramping feet, broke the exquisite
stillness. Towards them, on the path which at a certain point sharply
converged from that on which Doctor McKirdy and Barbara stood,
advanced Fate, coming in the shape of two men who were in sharp
contrast the one to the other.
24. Oliver Boringdon—dark, upright, steady-eyed—had still something
of the Londoner and of the Government official about his
appearance. His dark, close-cropped hair was covered by a neat cap
which matched his serge coat and knickerbockers. His companion,
James Berwick, looked—as indeed he was—far more a citizen of the
world. He was bare-headed, his fair hair ruffled and lifted from his
lined forehead by the wind; his shooting clothes, of rough tweed and
ugly yellow check colouring, were more or less out of shape. He was
smoking a huge pipe, and as he walked along, with rather ungainly
steps—the gait of a man more at home in the saddle than on foot—
he swung an oak stick this way and that, now and again throwing it
in the air and catching it again—a trick which sorely tried the
patience of his staider companion.
When they reached the nearest point to Doctor McKirdy and Mrs.
Rebell, the one took off his cap and the other waved his stick
vigorously by way of greeting. Indeed Berwick, as Doctor McKirdy
very well saw, would have soon lessened the ten yards space
between the two groups, but Boringdon, looking before him rather
more straightly than before, was already walking on.
"Well," said the doctor, "you have now had your wish, Ma'am: that
was Mr. Oliver Boringdon, and the other is his fidus Achates, Mr.
James Berwick: he's a conceited loon if you like. But then he's more
reason to be so! Now what d'ye think they reminded me of as they
walked along there?"
"I don't know," faltered Barbara. She was still feeling as if a
sudden blast of wind had beaten across her face—such had been the
effect of the piercing, measuring glance of the man whom she took
to be Oliver Boringdon. No doubt the over-bold look was excused by
the fact that he recognised in her his sister's friend. Barbara flushed
deeply; she was wondering, with acute discomfort, what account of
her, and of her affairs, Grace Johnstone—impetuous, indiscreet
Grace—had written to her mother and brother? Oh! surely she could
be trusted to have kept secret certain things she knew—things which
25. had been discovered by the Johnstones, and admitted by Barbara in
her first moments of agonised relief from Pedro Rebell's half-crazy ill-
usage.
"Well, I'll tell you what the sight of the two of them suggested to
me," went on Doctor McKirdy, "and in fact what they exactly
appeared like, just now,——" he hesitated a moment, and then with
manifest enjoyment added, "The policeman and the poacher! That's
what any stranger might well ha' taken them for, eh?" But Barbara
had given no heed to the bold gazer's more drab companion.
26. CHAPTER III.
"Mates are chosen marketwise
Coolest bargainer best buys,
Leap not, nor let leap the heart;
Trot your track and drag your cart,
So your end may be in wool
Honoured and with manger full."
George Meredith.
Mrs. Boringdon, sitting in the drawing-room at Chancton Cottage,
looked, in spite of her handsome dress and her manner and
appearance of refinement, strangely unsuited to the place in which
she found herself. Even the Indian tea-table—one of the few pieces
of furniture added to the room by its present occupant, and now
laden with substantial silver tea-pot, cream-jug, and sugar-basin
burnished to their highest point of brilliancy—was out of keeping
with its fragile charm. The room, indeed, had been scarcely altered
since it had been furnished, some sixty years before, as a maiden
retreat for one of Madame Sampiero's aunts, the Miss Lavinia Rebell
of whom tradition still lingered in the village, and whose lover had
been killed in the Peninsular War.
On her arrival at Chancton Mrs. Boringdon would have dearly
liked to consign the shabby old furniture, the faded water-colours
and colour prints, to some unhonoured lumber-room of the Priory,
but even had such desecration been otherwise possible, the new
mistress of Chancton Cottage was only too well aware that she
lacked the means to make the old-fashioned house what she would
have considered habitable. Indeed, she had been thankful to learn
that the estate agency offered to her son through the intermediary
27. of his friend, James Berwick, carried with it the use of a fully
furnished house of any sort.
Whenever Mrs. Boringdon felt more than usually dissatisfied and
critical of the furnishings of the rooms where she was fated to spend
so much of her time—for she had no love of the open air—she tried
to remind herself that this phase of her life was only temporary; that
soon—her son thought in two or three years, but Berwick laughed at
so prudent a forecast—the present Government would go out, and
then "something" must surely be found for her clever Oliver.
To-day, her son had brought his friend back to lunch, and the two
young men had stayed on in the dining-room and in the little
smoking-room beyond, talking eagerly the one with the other. As the
mother sat in her drawing-room patiently longing for her cup of tea,
but content to wait Oliver's good pleasure—or rather that of James
Berwick—she could hear the voices rising and falling, and she
rejoiced to think of the intimacy which those sounds betokened.
Mrs. Boringdon was one of the many in whom the mere
possession of wealth in others excites an almost hypnotic feeling of
interest and goodwill. When in his presence—nay, when simply even
in his neighbourhood—she never forgot that her son's intimate friend
and one-time chief, James Berwick, was an enormously rich man.
That fact impressed her far more, and was ever more present to her
mind, than the considerable political position which his personality
and his wealth together had known how to win for him. When with
Berwick Mrs. Boringdon was never wholly at ease, never entirely her
cool, collected self. And now this afternoon, sitting there waiting for
them to come in and join her, she wondered for the thousandth time
why Oliver was not more amenable to his important friend—why he
had not known how to make himself indispensable to James
Berwick. Had there only been about him something of the sycophant
—but Mrs. Boringdon did not use the ugly word—he would never
have been allowed to slip into this backwater. She was one of the
few remaining human beings who believe that everything is done by
28. "influence," and she had never credited her son's assurance that no
"job" was in the least likely to be found for him.
His mother's love for Oliver was tempered by fear; she was keenly
desirous of keeping his good opinion, but of late, seeing how almost
intolerable to him was the position he had accepted, she had been
sorely tempted to speak—to point out to him that men in the
position of James Berwick come to expect from those about them
something like subserviency, and that then they often repay in lavish
measure those who yield it them.
At last the dining-room door opened and the two men came in.
"Well," cried Berwick, "we've thrashed out the whole plan of
campaign! There's never anything like a good talk with Oliver to
confirm me in my own opinion! It's really absurd he should stick on
here looking after the Chancton cabbages, dead and alive—but he's
positively incorruptible! I'm thinking of starting a newspaper, Mrs.
Boringdon, and to coax him into approval—also, I must say, to
secure him a little freedom—I offered him the editorship, but he
won't hear of it."
Berwick had thrown himself as he spoke into a low chair, which
creaked ominously under his weight. How indignant would Mrs.
Boringdon have felt had any other young man, looking as James
Berwick now looked, his fair hair tossed and rumpled with the
constant ruffling of his fingers, come and thrown himself down in
this free and easy attitude on one of the few comfortable chairs in
Chancton Cottage! But his hostess smiled at him very indulgently,
and turned a look of gentle reproach at her son's stern dark face.
"An editorship," she said, vaguely, "that sounds very nice. I
suppose it would mean going and living in London?" Her quick mind,
darting this way and that, saw herself settled in a small house in
Mayfair, entertaining important people, acting perhaps as hostess to
Berwick's friends and supporters! She had once been able to render
him a slight service—in fact, on two occasions he had been able to
29. meet a friend, a lady, in her drawing-room. In doing what she had
done Mrs. Boringdon had lowered herself in her own eyes, and she
had had the uncomfortable sensation that she had lost in his some
of the prestige naturally attaching to his friend's mother, and yet, for
all she knew, these interviews might have been of a political nature.
Women now played a great part in politics. Mrs. Boringdon preferred
to think that the fair stranger, concerning whose coming to her
house there had been so much mystery, had been one of these.
Her son's next words rudely interrupted her pleasant dream.
"The ownership of a newspaper," Oliver was saying abruptly, "has
never yet been of any use to a politician or statesman, and has
certainly prevented some from getting into the Cabinet," and he
named two well-known members of Parliament who were believed to
be financially interested in certain important journals. "It isn't as if
you wanted what the Americans call a platform," he went on. "No
man is more sure of a hearing than you are yourself. But just now,
the less you say the more you will be listened to when the moment
comes for saying it!"
The speaker was walking up and down the narrow room, looking
restless and impatient, with Berwick smiling lazily up at him, though
evidently rather nettled at the frank, unasked-for advice.
Mrs. Boringdon judged the moment had come to intervene. "I
hear that Lord Bosworth and your sister are back at Fletchings, and
that they are expecting a good many people down—" She added, in
a tone of apology, "Chancton, as you know, has half-a-dozen Court
newsmen of its own."
"To me"—Berwick had jumped up and was helping himself to
sugar, to cake, with the eager insouciance of an intimate—"to me
Chancton always has been, what it is now more than ever, the most
delightful spot on earth! I know that Oliver doesn't agree with me,
but even he, Mrs. Boringdon, ought to enjoy the humours of the
place. What other village can offer such a range of odd-come-shorts,
30. of eccentrics? Where else in these prosaic days can one see
gathered together in one spot our McKirdys, our Vipens——"
"Our Mrs. Turkes," said Oliver slily. He came forward smiling, good
humour restored, and took his share of the good things his mother
had provided.
"Oh! yes," said Berwick, rather hastily, "of course we must throw
in my foster-mother—in fact, I'm sure she would be deeply offended
at being left out! And then, there's another thing I think I can claim
for Chancton. Here one may always expect to come across the
unexpected! To-day whom should we meet, Mrs. Boringdon, but
McKirdy, wrapped in his historic plaid and snuff-coloured hat, and
accompanied by a nymph, and an uncommonly attractive nymph
too!"
Mrs. Boringdon looked gently bewildered. "A nymph!" she
exclaimed, "do you mean a lady? What an extraordinary thing!"
Berwick looked across at his hostess and grinned. Now and again
Oliver's mother actually reminded this whimsical young man of
Mistress Quickly, and it was an added delight to picture to himself
her surprise and horror if only she had known what was in his mind.
But Boringdon was frowning. "Nonsense!" he said, irritably, "From
what I could see, she was simply a very oddly dressed young
woman! McKirdy has always been fond of making friends with the
summer visitors, and he always prefers strangers to acquaintances. I
must say the doctor is one of the Chancton characters with whom I,
for one, could well dispense! He was really insolent to me yesterday,
but there is no redress possible with an old man like that. His latest
notion is that I must only communicate with Madame Sampiero
through him!"
James Berwick turned round, and Mrs. Boringdon thought he
looked annoyed; he always chose to regard everything and
everybody connected with the Priory as his very particular concern.
31. "I must be off now," he said, "Arabella has several people arriving
this afternoon, and I ought to be there to look after them. Walk with
me as far as the great gates, old fellow?"
But Boringdon shook his head. "Sorry I can't," he said, shortly,
"but I'm expecting one of the village boys to come in any minute.
Kemp promised me to talk to him, to try and persuade him to enlist,
and he's coming up to tell me the result."
"Then you're not returning to the Priory to-night, Mr. Berwick?" a
note of delicate reserve had come into Mrs. Boringdon's voice; she
never, if she could help it, referred to the Priory or to the Priory's
mistress.
"No, I'm still at Chillingworth. But I expect to be over just for the
night to-morrow. Then I'm off for a month's yachting."
Oliver came back from the hall door and sat down. His mother
saw with a pang how tired and how discouraged he looked. "I
think," she said, "that you might have done, dear, what Mr. Berwick
asked you to do—I mean, as to seeing him back part of the way to
Fletchings. That village lad could have waited for you—and—I
suppose it was all a joke about the new paper and the editorship?"
"Oh! no, he's thinking of it," he said. "I suppose, mother, you
never heard of the Craftsman, the paper in which the great Duke of
Berwick's friend, Lord Bolingbroke, wrote. Some fellow has been
talking to him about it, and now he thinks he would like to
resuscitate it. Incredible that so shrewd a man should sometimes
choose to do such foolish things, actuated, too, by the silliest of
sentimental motives! If I were he, I should feel anything but proud
of my descent from the Stuarts. However, I hope I've choked him off
the whole idea."
32. As he caught her look of fresh disappointment, he added, with a
certain effort, "I'm afraid, mother, that you've as little reason to like
Chancton as I have. Sometimes I wonder if we shouldn't do better to
throw it all up and go to London. I certainly don't want to edit any
paper for Berwick, but I dare say I could get work, literary work of
sorts; and, after all, I should be far more in touch there with the
things I really care about."
His tone of dejection went to her heart, but she answered, not
the last, but the first sentence he had uttered. "You are right," she
said, rather slowly, "I do not like Chancton any better than you do,
but I shall always be glad we came here, if only because it has
brought us in contact with the Kemps—or perhaps I should say with
their daughter."
Oliver looked up at his mother uneasily; he was aware that with
her a confidence was rarely spontaneous.
"I wonder," she said, and turning she fixed her eyes on the fire,
away from his face, "I have often been tempted to wonder lately, my
dear boy, what you really think of Lucy—how you regard her? Pray
do not answer me if you would rather not do so."
Boringdon hesitated. His mother's words, her extreme frankness,
took him completely by surprise; for a moment he felt nearer to her
than he had done for years. Still, he was glad that she went on
staring into the fire, and that he was safe from meeting the acute,
probing glance he knew so well.
"You've asked me a very difficult question," he said at last—"one I
find almost impossible to answer truly."
Mrs. Boringdon's hands trembled. She also felt unwontedly
moved. She had not expected so honest a confession.
But Oliver was again speaking, in a low, preoccupied voice.
"Perhaps we have not been wise, you and I, in having so—so"—his
33. lips sought to frame suitable words—"so charming a girl," he said at
last, "constantly about the house. I have certainly become fond of
Lucy—in fact, I think I may acknowledge to you, mother, that she is
my ideal of what a girl should be." How odd, how inadequate, how
priggish his words sounded to himself! Still he went on, with
gathering courage, "But no one knows better than you do how I am
situated. For what I am pleased to call my political ambitions, you
have already made sacrifices. If I am to do what I wish with my life,
such a marriage—indeed, any marriage, for years to come—would
be for me quite out of the question. It would mean the
condemnation of myself to such a life as that I am now leading, and
I do not feel—perhaps I ought to be ashamed of not feeling—that
my attraction to Miss Kemp is so strong as to make me desirous of
giving up all I have striven for."
Mrs. Boringdon made no reply. She still stared on into the fire; a
curious look, one of perplexity and hesitation, had come over her
face.
"Mother!" he cried, and the tone forced her to look round at him,
"surely you don't think—it is not your impression that Lucy——"
"I think she has become very fond of you," said Mrs. Boringdon
deliberately. "But I confess that I have sometimes thought that she
seemed fonder of me than of you." She smiled as she spoke, but to
Boringdon this was no smiling matter—indeed, it was one which to
his mind could scarcely be discussed with decency by himself and his
mother. Then a vision of Lucy Kemp, steady, clear-eyed Lucy, almost
too sensible—so the people at Chancton, he knew, regarded her to
be—came to his help. "No, no," he said, with a sudden sense of
relief, "I'm quite sure, mother, that any feeling—I mean the kind of
feeling of which we are speaking—has been entirely on my side! We
will be more careful. I am willing to admit that I have been foolish."
But Mrs. Boringdon scarcely heard what he was saying. She who
so seldom doubted as to her course of action, was now weighing the
34. pros and cons of what had become to her a matter for immediate
decision. Unfortunately her son's next words seemed to give her the
opening she sought.
"Sometimes I am tempted to think"—Oliver had got up, he was
leaning against the mantel-piece, looking down into his mother's
face—"Sometimes, I say, I am tempted to think that after all money
is the one important thing in life! When I look back to how I
regarded James Berwick's marriage—he once accused me of
condemning what he did, and I could not deny that I had done so—I
see how much more wise he was than I. Why, to him that marriage
which so shocked me was the turning point—ay, more, that money,
together, perhaps, with his wife's death, steadied him—amazingly—I
refer of course to his intellectual standpoint, and to his outlook on
life! And you, mother—you've always thought more of money than
I've ever done. But even you once thought that it could be too
dearly purchased."
Mrs. Boringdon reddened. Her son's words gratified her. She was
aware that he was alluding to an offer of marriage which she herself
had unhesitatingly rejected at a time when her daughter was still in
the schoolroom, and her son at Charterhouse. Her middle-aged
wooer had been a man of some commercial standing and much
wealth, but "not a gentleman," so the two pitiless young people had
decided, and Mrs. Boringdon, her children believed, had not
hesitated for a moment between a life of poor gentility and one of
rather vulgar plenty.
"Oh! yes," she said slowly, "money can certainly be too dearly
purchased. But still, you on your side, you and your sister Grace,
have always thought far too little of it. Of late I have sometimes
wondered, Oliver, if you knew—whether you are aware"—for the life
of her she could not help the sudden alteration in her measured
voice—"that our dear little friend, Lucy Kemp, is something of an
heiress—that in four years time, when she is five-and-twenty, that is,
there will be handed over to her £25,000?"
35. And then, while her son listened to her in complete silence, giving
no clue as to how he regarded the information, she explained her
knowledge as having come to her from an absolutely sure source,
from a certain Miss Vipen, the chartered gossip of Chancton, whose
information could be trusted when actual facts were in question.
Even after Mrs. Boringdon had done speaking, Oliver still sat on,
resting his head on his hands. "I wonder if Laxton knows of this?" he
said at last. "What a brute I should think him if he does!" and Mrs.
Boringdon felt keenly, perhaps not unreasonably, irritated. Her son's
words also took her by surprise—complete silence would have
satisfied her, but this odd comment on the fact she had chosen to
reveal was very different from what she had expected.
But when, some three hours later, the mother and son had
finished their simple dinner, and Oliver announced to his mother that
he must now go down to the Grange for half an hour in order to
consult General Kemp over that village lad whose conduct was giving
Oliver so much trouble, Mrs. Boringdon smiled. Her son caught the
smile and it angered him. How utterly his mother misunderstood
him, how curiously little they were in sympathy the one with the
other!
As he left the house she heard the door bang, and sitting in the
drawing-room knitting him a pair of silk socks, she allowed her smile
to broaden till it transformed her face almost to that likeness which
Berwick sometimes saw in her, to that of a prim Mistress Quickly.
Boringdon did not go straight down to the Grange. Instead, after
having groped his way through the laurel hedges and so into the
moonlit road, he turned to the left, and struck out, making a long
round before seeking the house for which he was bound.
36. Both his long talk with Berwick, and the short, strange
conversation with his mother, had disturbed and excited him,
bringing on a sudden nostalgia for the life he had left, and to which
he longed so much to get back. During his eager discussion with the
man whom he regarded as being at once his political chief and his
political pupil, Chancton and its petty affairs had been forgotten, and
yet now, to-night, he told himself with something like dismay that
even when talking to Berwick he had more than once thought of
Lucy Kemp. The girl had become his friend, his only confidante: into
her eager ears he had poured out his views, his aspirations, his
hopes, his ambitions, sure always of sympathy, if not of complete
understanding. A bitter smile came over his face—no wonder Mrs.
Boringdon had so often left them together! Her attitude was now
explained.
Boringdon had no wish to pose, even to himself, as a Don
Quixote, but, in his views as to the fitting relationship of the sexes,
he was most punctilious and old-fashioned, perhaps lacking the
essential nobility which would have been required in such a man as
himself to accept a fortune, even from a beloved hand. What, take
Lucy's £20,000—or was it £25,000—in order to start his bark once
more on the perilous political sea? How little his mother understood
him if she seriously thought he could bring himself to do such a
thing, and in cold blood!
As he strode along in the darkness, there came back to his mind
the circumstances connected with an experience in his life which he
had striven not unsuccessfully to forget,—the passion of feeling he
had wasted, when little more than a boy, on James Berwick's sister.
Those men and women who jeer at first love have surely never
felt its potent spell. Twelve years had gone by since Boringdon had
dreamed the dream which had to a certain extent embittered and
injured the whole of his youth. What a fool he had been! But, on the
other hand, so he remembered now, how little he had thought—if
37. indeed he had thought at all—as to any question connected with
Arabella Berwick's fortune or lack of it!
Miss Berwick had been mistress of her uncle's house, that Lord
Bosworth who was a noted statesman as well as a man of rank: of
course she must have money, so Boringdon in his young simplicity
had thought, and certainly that belief had been no bar to what he
had brought himself tremblingly to believe might come to pass. The
beautiful girl, secure in her superior altitude of twenty-five years of
life, and an already considerable knowledge of the world, had taken
up the clever boy, her brother's Oxford friend, with pretty
enthusiasm. She had liked him quite well enough to accept smilingly
his adoration, to allow that he should amuse her (so he had realised
ever since) in the intervals of a more serious love affair. Well, as he
reminded himself to-night, they had been quits! Small wonder
indeed that even now, after twelve years had gone by, the
recollection of certain bitter moments caused Boringdon to quicken
his footsteps!
To-night it all came back to him, in a flood of intolerable
memories. It had been late in the season, on the eve—or so he had
thought—of his dream's fruition, during the last days of his first
spring and summer in London after he had gone down from Oxford.
Some merciful angel or some malicious devil—he had never quite
known which—had caused him, one Sunday afternoon, while
actually on the way to Bosworth House, to turn into Kensington
Gardens.
There, in a lonely grassy by-way among the trees, where he had
turned aside to think in solitude of his beautiful lady, he had
suddenly come on her face to face,—on Arabella Berwick, on his
goddess, on the woman whose every glance and careless word had
been weighed by him with anxious thought,—finding her in such a
guise that for a moment he had believed that his mind, his eyes,
were playing him some evil trick.
38. Miss Berwick, her eyes streaming with tears, was clinging to a
man's arm; and, what made the scene the more unreal, the more
incredible, to the amazed onlooker, Boringdon knew the man quite
well, and had often, in his young importance, looked down on him
as being so much less intimate at Bosworth House than he was
himself. The man into whose plain, powerful face Arabella Berwick
was gazing with such agonised intensity was Daniel O'Flaherty, an
Irish barrister, but lately come to practise at the English Bar, a Paddy
whose brogue—so Berwick had assured his friend Boringdon—you
could cut with a knife, but who was, he had added good-naturedly,
said by many people to be a clever fellow!
And now Oliver was walking straight upon them,—on O'Flaherty
and Arabella Berwick. He stopped short, staring with fascinated,
horror-stricken eyes, making no effort to pass by, to show the
decent hypocrisy he should have shown; and what he heard made it
only too easy to reconstitute the story. Miss Berwick had also
dreamed her dream, and she was now engaged in deliberately
putting it from her.
At last the man had cut the painful scene short, but not before
Boringdon had seen the woman, whom he had himself set on so
high a pedestal, fling her arms round her companion's neck in one
last agonised attempt to say good-bye. It was the Irishman, of
whom Boringdon had made such small account in his own mind,
who at last—with the measured dignity born of measureless grief
and loss—led her towards the spectator whom he vaguely
recognised as one of James Berwick's younger friends. "Perhaps you
will kindly take Miss Berwick home?" and then he had turned and
gone, and she who had renounced him, taking no heed of
Boringdon, had stood and gazed after him as long as he remained in
sight.
During the walk back to Bosworth House it had been Boringdon's
lot to listen while his companion told him, with a sort of bald
simplicity, the truth.
39. "I love him, Mr. Boringdon, with all my heart—with all my body—
with all my soul! But certain things are impossible in this world,—
apart from everything else, there is the fact that for the present we
are both penniless. He admits that often years go by before a man
situated as he is makes any real way at the Bar. I ought not to have
allowed it to come to this! I have been a fool,—a fool!" She had tried
to smile at him. "Take example by me, Mr. Boringdon, never allow
yourself to really care. It's not worth it!"
She had gone on, taking very little notice of him, talking as if to
herself—"Of course I shall never marry, why should I? I have James,
—till now I have never cared for anything but James." Then at last
had come a word he had felt sorely. Arabella Berwick had looked at
him with something like fear in her eyes,—"You will not say anything
of this to my brother, Mr. Boringdon? I trust to your honour,"—much
as she might have spoken to a schoolboy, instead of to a man—a
man, as he angrily reminded himself, of one-and-twenty!
How well he remembered it all still, and yet what a long time ago
all that happened! He himself had altered, incredibly, in these short
years. O'Flaherty was no longer an unknown, uncouth Irishman: he
had won a place even in the Berwicks' high little world: steady,
moderate adherence to his country's unpopular cause had made him
something of a personage even in the House of Commons, and he
was known to be now earning a large,—nay, a huge,—income at the
Bar. Of the two men who at one and the same moment had loved
Arabella Berwick, it was he who had forged ahead, Oliver Boringdon
who had lagged behind.
And the heroine of the adventure? She was still what all those
about her, with the possible exception of these two men, had always
thought her to be—the accomplished, rather cold, brilliant woman of
the world, content to subordinate exceptional intellectual gifts to the
exigencies of her position as mistress of her uncle's house; bending
her fine mind to the problem of how to stretch Lord Bosworth's
always uncertain and encumbered income to its furthest possible
40. limit, for one of Miss Berwick's virtues had always been a great
horror of debt. More, she had so fashioned her life during the last
ten years that she was regarded by many shrewd observers as being
quite as remarkable a person as her brother—in fact, where he was
concerned, the power behind the throne. She loved, too, to exercise
her power, to obtain good places for her favourites, to cause some
humble climber of the ladder of fame to leap at one bound several of
the hard intervening bars. It was admitted that the only strong
feeling finding place in her heart was love of her brother, James
Berwick, and for him, in a worldly sense, she had indeed done well.
Since that afternoon, twelve years before, Miss Berwick and Oliver
Boringdon had never been on really cordial terms. She had at first
tried, foolishly, to make a friend of him, a confidant, but he had not
been possessed of the requisite amount of philosophy, and she had
drawn back mortified at the condemnation, even at the dislike,
which she had read in his eyes.
Very early Berwick had said to his friend, "I don't know what has
happened to my sister and yourself, old fellow, but it will not make
any difference to us, will it?" But, as Boringdon was well aware, it
had made a difference. The sister's influence was on the whole
always thrown in against that of the friend. It had certainly not been
with Miss Berwick's goodwill that Boringdon had been offered,
through her brother's intermediary, work which would bring him
within two miles of Lord Bosworth's country house; but Oliver
Boringdon was very rarely at Fletchings, and never without a direct
invitation from its mistress.
As so often happens, the stirring of heart depths brings up to the
surface of the mind more than one emotion. Had it not been for his
mother's smile, Boringdon would not now have turned into the
Grange gate, but it was his great wish that what had been said this
41. day should make no difference to his relations with the Kemps—
save, of course, that of making him personally more prudent in the
one matter of his indulging in Lucy's society.
Alas for Boringdon's good resolutions! He had meant that this
evening call at the Grange should be of a purely business character,
and at the door he asked only for General Kemp.
"The master's upstairs with Mrs. Kemp. She's got a chill, but I'll
tell him you're here, sir," and Oliver had been shown as a matter of
course into the panelled parlour where Lucy sat reading alone. The
very sight of the girl seemed to bring with it peace—restored in
subtle measure the young man's good opinion of himself. And then
she seemed so simply, so unaffectedly glad to see him! Within the
next hour, he was gradually brought to tell her, both of the long talk
with Berwick—Lucy had proved an apt student of political economy
within the last year—even of the proposed newspaper and the
editorship, of which the offer, coming from anyone else, would, he
said, "have tempted me."
"Ah! but you think Mr. Berwick ought not to start such a paper—
that it might do him harm?" Lucy looked up with quick intelligent
eyes.
Boringdon had scarcely said so,—in so many words,—yet, yet—
certainly yes, that was what he had meant, and so, "Exactly!" he
exclaimed; "and if I don't join in, the scheme will probably come to
nothing." Lucy allowed her softened gaze to linger on the face of the
man who had gradually made his way into her steadfast heart. How
good, how noble he was, she thought, and, how unconscious of his
own goodness and nobility!
The girl was in that stage of her mental development when the
creature worshipped must necessarily appear heroic. Two men now
fulfilled Lucy's ideal—the one was her father, the other Oliver
Boringdon. Poor Laxton, with his humble passion for herself, his half-
pretended indifference to the pleasures and duties of the British
42. officer's life in time of profound peace, his love of hunting and rough
out-door games,—all seemed to make him most unheroic in Lucy's
eyes. She was dimly aware that Captain Laxton's love for her was
instinctive, that he was attracted in spite of himself; and the
knowledge perplexed and angered her. She knew well, or thought
she knew well, the sort of woman with whom the young soldier
ought to have fallen in love,—the well-dressed, amusing, "smart"
(odious word, just then coming into fashion!) type of girl, whom he
undoubtedly, even as it was, much admired. But Oliver Boringdon—
oh! how different would be the natural ideal of such a man.
Lucy was only now beginning to see into her own heart, and she
still believed that her regard for Boringdon was "friendship." Who
could hesitate as to which was the better part—friendship with
Boringdon, or marriage with Laxton?
"I—I want to ask you something." Lucy's heart was beating fast.
"Yes, what is it?" He turned sharply round.
"I've been reading the life of Edmund Burke."
He bent forward eagerly. "It's interesting, isn't it?"
"Yes, yes, indeed it is! But I want to ask you why a hundred years
have made such a change? Why it is that now a young man who has
every aptitude for political life——" Lucy hesitated, the words were
not really her own, they had been suggested—almost put into her
mouth—by Oliver's mother.
"Yes?" he said again, as if to encourage her.
"Why such a person cannot now accept money from—from—a
friend, if it will help him to be useful to his country?"
"You mean"—he went straight to the point—"why cannot I take
money from James Berwick?" He was looking at her rather grimly.
43. He had not thought that Mrs. Boringdon would find the girl so apt a
pupil.
Poor Lucy shrank back. "Forgive me," she said, in a low tone, "I
should not have asked you such a question."
"You have every right," he said, impulsively. "Are we not friends,
you and I? Perhaps you did not know that this was an old quarrel
between my mother and myself. Berwick did once make me such an
offer, but I think you will see—that you will feel—with me that I
could not have accepted it."
General Kemp, coming down half an hour later, found them still
eagerly discussing Edmund Burke, and so finding, told himself, and a
little later told his wife, that the world had indeed changed in the
last thirty years, and that he, for his part, thought the old ways of
love were better than the new.
45. "Il est plus aisé d'être sage pour les autres que de
l'être pour
soi-même."
La Rochefoucauld.
Chancton Priory had been, from his earliest boyhood, even more
James Berwick's home than was his uncle's house over at Fletchings,
and it was incomparably dearer to him in every sense than
Chillingworth, which came to him from his dead wife, together with
the huge fortune which gave him such value in Mrs. Boringdon's
eyes. The mistress of the Priory had always lavished on Lord
Bosworth's nephew a measure of warm affection which she might
just as reasonably have bestowed on his only sister, but Miss Berwick
was not loved at Chancton Priory, and, being well aware that this
was so, she rarely came there. Indeed, her brother's real love for the
place, and for Madame Sampiero, was to her somewhat inexplicable:
she knew that at the Priory he felt far more at home than he was at
Fletchings, and the knowledge irked her.
In truth, to James Berwick one of the greatest charms of
Chancton Priory had come to be the fact that when there he was
able almost to forget the wealth which had come to him with such
romantic fulness when he was only four-and-twenty. Madame
Sampiero, Doctor McKirdy, and Mrs. Turke never seemed to
remember that he was one of the richest men in the kingdom, and
this made his commerce with them singularly agreeable.
Certain men and women have a curious power of visualising that
fifth dimension which lies so near and yet so far from this corporeal
world. For these favoured few, unseen presences sometimes seem
to cast visible shadows—their intuition may now and then be at
46. fault, but on the other hand, invisible guides will sometimes lead
them into beautiful secret pastures, of which the boundaries are
closely hidden from those of their fellows who only cultivate the
obvious. It was so with James Berwick, and, as again so often
happens, this odd power—not so much of second sight as of
divination—was quite compatible with much that was positive,
prosaic, and even of the earth earthy, in his nature and character. He
attributed his undoubted gift to his Stuart blood, and was fond of
reminding himself that the Old Pretender was said always to
recognise a traitor when approached by one in the guise of a loyal
servant and friend.
On the afternoon following that spent by him at the Boringdons',
Berwick walked across to Chancton from Fletchings. He came the
short way through the Priory park—that which finally emerged by a
broad grass path into the lawn spreading before the Elizabethan
front of the great mass of buildings. As he moved across, towards
the porch, he thought the fine old house looked more alive and less
deserted than usual, and having passed through the vestibule, and
so into the vast hall, he became at once aware of some influence
new to the place.
He looked about him with an eager, keen glance. A large log fire
was burning in the cavernous chimney, but then he knew himself to
be expected: to that same cause he attributed the rather unusual
sight of a china bowl full of autumn flowers reflected in the polished
mahogany round table, on which, as he drew near, he saw three
letters, addressed in McKirdy's stiff clear handwriting, lying ready for
the post. Berwick, hardly aware of what he was doing, glanced idly
down at them: then, as he moved rather hastily away, he lifted his
eyebrows in surprise—one was addressed to his sister, Miss Arabella
Berwick, at Fletchings; yet another, with every possible formality of
address, to the Duchess of Appleby and Kendal, at Halnakeham
Castle; while the third bore the name of another great lady living
some ten miles from Chancton, and to whom—Berwick would have
been ready to lay any wager—no communication had been sent from
47. the Priory for some twenty odd years, though both she and the
kindly Duchess had in the long ago been intimate with Madame
Sampiero.
Once more Berwick looked round the hall, and then, abruptly,
went out again into the open air, and so made his way across at
right angles to a glass door giving direct access to a small room
hung with sporting prints and caricatures, unaltered since the time it
had been the estate room of Madame Sampiero's father. Here, at
least, Berwick felt with satisfaction, everything was absolutely as
usual. He went through into a narrow passage, up a short steep
staircase to the upper floor, and so to the old-fashioned bedroom
and dressing-room which no one but he ever occupied, and which
were both still filled with his schoolboy and undergraduate treasures.
There was a third room on each of the floors composing the two-
storied building which had been added to the Priory some fifty years
before, and these extra rooms—two downstairs, one upstairs—were
sacred to Mrs. Turke.
There, as Berwick well knew, she cherished the mahogany cradle
in which she had so often rocked him to sleep: there were
photographs of himself at every age, to which, of late years political
caricatures had been added, and there also were garnered the
endless gifts he had made and was always making to his old nurse.
James Berwick had been sadly spoilt by the good things life had
heaped on him in almost oppressive lavishness, but no thought of
personal convenience would have made him give up, when at the
Priory, these two rooms—this proximity to the elderly woman to
whom he was so dear, and who had tended him so devotedly
through a delicate and fretful childhood.
As he walked about his bedroom, he looked round him well
pleased. A good fire was burning in the grate, still compassed about
with a nursery fender, and his evening clothes, an old suit always
kept by him at Chancton, were already laid out on the four-post bed.
Everything was exactly as he would have wished to find it; and so
48. seeing, he suddenly frowned, most unreasonably. Why was it, he
asked himself, that only here, only at the Priory, were things done
for him as he would have always wished them to be—that is,
noiselessly, invisibly? His own servants over at Chillingworth never
made him so comfortable! But then, as he was fond of reminding
himself, he was one of those men who dislike to be dependent on
others. A nice regard, perhaps, for his own dignity had always
caused him to dispense with the services of the one dependant to
whom, we are told, his master can never hope to be a hero.
There came a knock, a loud quavering tap-tap on the door.
Berwick walked forward and opened it himself, then put his arms
round Mrs. Turke's fat neck, and kissed her on each red cheek. The
mauve and white striped gown was new to him, but each piece of
handsome jewellery set about the substantial form had been his gift.
"Well, Turke! well, old Turkey! it's an age since I've seen you all! I
was in the village for a moment yesterday——"
"For a moment? Fie, Mr. James, I know all about it, sir! You was
at the Cottage for hours!"
"Well, I really hadn't a minute to come over here! But make me
welcome now that I am come, eh Turkey?"
"Welcome? Why, bless you, sir, you know well enough that you're
as welcome as flowers in May! We have missed you dreadful all this
summer! I can't think why gentlemen should want to go to such
outlandish spots: I looked out the place in 'Peter Parley,' that I did,
and I used to shake in my bed when I thought of all you must be
going through, when you might be at home, here, with everything
nice and comfortable about you."
"I'll tell you what we'll do, Turkey—you can tell McGregor to lay
dinner in the business room to-night, and you shall have it with me."
As if struck by a sudden idea, he added, "And we'll have beans
and bacon!"
49. Mrs. Turke went off into a fit of laughter. "In October!" she cried.
"Why, my lamb, where's all your fine learning gone to? Not but what,
thanks to glass and the stoves, the fruits of the earth do appear at
queer times nowadays, but it would be a sin to waste glass and
stoves on beans!"
Berwick was not one whit abashed, "If we can't have broad
beans, we can have toasted cheese. My sister has got a French chef
at Fletchings, and luncheon to-day was—well, you know, Turkey!"
"I know, sir, just kickshaws! Taking the bread out of honest
Englishwomen's mouths. I'd chef him!" and Berwick realised from
the expression of her face that Mrs. Turke thought to chef was
French for to cook.
But there was a more important matter now in hand to be
discussed, and she said slily, "You'll have better company than me
to-night, Mr. James,—you'll have to put on your company manners,
sir, for there's a lady staying here now, you know."
"A lady?" he cried, "the devil there is!"
"You remember Mr. and Mrs. Richard Rebell, surelye? They were
here constant,—now let me see, a matter of twenty-five years ago
and more, when you, Mr. James, were ten years old, my dear."
"What?" he said, his tone suddenly altering, "do you mean—
surely you cannot mean that poor Richard Rebell's daughter is
staying here—in the Priory?—now?"
"Yes, that's just what she is doing—staying."
"Oh!" he said, in an altered voice, "perhaps after all I had better
go back to Chillingworth to-night." He added abruptly, "She married
(her name is Barbara, isn't it?) one of the West Indian Rebells. Is he
here too?"
50. Mrs. Turke folded her hands together, and shook her head sadly,
but with manifest enjoyment. It was well that Mr. James knew
nothing, and that it had been her part to tell the great news. "Oh no,
we never mention him; his name is never heard! From what I can
make out from the doctor,—but you know, Mr. James, what he's like,
—the poor young lady, I mean Mrs. Rebell, has been most unlucky,
matrimonially speaking; just like—you know who, sir——"
"Oh! she's left her husband, has she? It seems to run in the
family. Has she been here long, Turkey?"
"Only since the day before yesterday. But Madam has already
took to her wonderful: she does the morning reading now."
"I should think that would be a great improvement on McKirdy's.
But, by the way, isn't McKirdy jealous?"
Mrs. Turke shook her finger at the speaker. "That's only your fun
now, Mr. James! What call would the doctor have to be such a thing
as jealous? Fie! Besides, he's quite taken to her himself."
"Why then, the girl we saw with McKirdy yesterday must have
been Mrs. Rebell! A tall, dark, slim creature, eh, Turkey? Very oddly
dressed?" He turned and looked hard at his old nurse; she, in return,
gave her nurseling a quick shrewd glance from out of her bright little
eyes.
"She's not what I call dressed at all," she said, "I never did see a
young lady so shabby, but there, out in those hot climates——" she
paused tolerantly. "Never mind; we'll soon make that all right.
Madam set Léonie to work at once. As for looks," Mrs. Turke bridled,
"Mrs. Rebell favours her poor papa more than she does her poor
mamma," she said, primly, "but she's a very pleasant-spoken young
lady. I do think you'll like her, Mr. James; and if I was you, sir, I
would make up my mind to stay to-night and to be kind to her. I
don't think you'll want much pressing——"
51. Again she gave him that quick shrewd look which seemed to say
so much more than her lips uttered. Sometimes Berwick felt an
uncomfortable conviction that very little he thought and did
remained hidden from his old nurse. To-night, as Mrs. Turke had felt
quite sure he would do, he made up his mind to remain at Chancton
Priory and to follow, in this matter of Mrs. Rebell, the advice given
him.
Meanwhile, the subject of their discussion was sitting on a stool at
the foot of her godmother's couch. It was strange how two days of
constant communion with this stricken woman had impressed
Barbara Rebell with a sense of Madame Sampiero's power of
protecting and sheltering those over whom was thrown the mantle
of her affection. The whole of Barbara's past life, her quiet
childhood, her lonely girlhood, even the years she had spent with
Pedro Rebell, had accustomed her to regard solitude as a normal
state, and she now looked forward eagerly to what so many would
have considered the long dull stretch of days spread out before her.
All she desired, but that most ardently, was to become dear,—she
would whisper to herself, perhaps necessary,—to Madame Sampiero.
The physical state others might have regarded with repugnance and
horror produced no such effect on Barbara's mind and imagination.
All the tenderness of a heart long starved, and thrown back on itself
and on the past, was now beginning to be lavished on this paralysed
woman who had made her so generously welcome, and who, she
intuitively felt, was making so great and so gallant a stand against
evil fortune.
Even to-night Mrs. Rebell, coming into the room, had been struck
by the mingled severity and splendour of Madame Sampiero's
appearance. The white velvet gown, the black lace cross-over, and
the delicate tracery of the black coif heightened the beauty of the
52. delicate features,—intensified the fire in the blue eyes, as a brighter
scheme of colouring had not known how to do.
Léonie—the lean, clever-looking, deft-fingered French maid who
had grown old in the service of her mistress—stood by the couch
looking down at her handiwork with an air of pride: "Madame a
voulu faire un petit bout de toilette pour Monsieur Berwick," she
explained importantly. Poor Barbara was by now rather nervously
aware that there was something about her own appearance to-night
which did not please her godmother. Indeed, sitting there, in this
lofty room full of beautiful and extremely ornate pieces of furniture
and rich hangings, she felt acutely conscious that she was, as it
were, out of the picture. Words were not needed to tell her that, for
some mysterious reason, her godmother wished her to look well
before this Mr. James Berwick, who, if Mrs. Turke was to be believed,
seemed to come and go so often at the Priory, but regarding whom,
she, Barbara, felt as yet no interest.
Almost involuntarily she answered the critical expression which
rested on the clear-cut face. "I care so little how I look,—after all
what does it matter?"
But more quickly than usual she realised the significance of the
murmured words, "Nonsense, child, it does matter, very much!" and
she divined the phrase, "A woman should always try to look her
best." Barbara smiled as Léonie joined in with "Une jolie femme doît
sa beauté à elle-même," adding, in response to another of those
muffled questioning murmurs, "Mais oui, Madame, Monsieur
Boringdon a dû venir avec Monsieur Berwick."
Mrs. Rebell looked up rather eagerly; if Oliver Boringdon were to
be there this evening, and if outward appearance were of such
consequence as these kind people, Madame Sampiero and the old
Frenchwoman, seemed to think, then it was a pity that one of the
only two people whom she had wished to impress favourably at
Chancton should see her at a disadvantage.
53. Again came low murmurs of which the significance entirely
escaped Barbara, but which Léonie had heard and understood:
quickly the maid went across the great room, and in a moment her
brown hands had pulled open a deep drawer in the Buhl wardrobe
which had once adorned the bed chamber of the last Queen of
France. Now Léonie was coming back towards her mistress' couch,
towards Barbara, her arms laden with a delicate foam of old lace.
A few minutes of hard work with a needle and white thread,
much eager chatter of French, and Barbara's thin white silk gown
had been transformed from a straight and, according to the fashion
of that day, shapeless gown, into a beautiful and poetic garment.
A gleam of amused pleasure flashed across Madame Sampiero's
trembling lips and wide open blue eyes: she realised that a little
thought, a little trouble, would transform her god-daughter, if not
into a beauty, then into a singularly distinguished and attractive-
looking young woman.
Like most beautiful people, Barbara Sampiero had always been
generous in her appreciation of the beauty of others, and she would
have been pleased indeed had Richard Rebell's daughter turned out
as lovely as had been her mother,—lovely with that English beauty of
golden hair and perfect colouring. But Barbara's charm, so far at
least, seemed of the soul rather than of the body, and, recognising
this fact, Madame Sampiero had at first felt disappointed, for her
own experience—and in these matters a woman can only be guided
by her own personal experience—was that in this world beauty of
body counts very much more in obtaining for those who possess it
their heart's desire than does beauty of soul.
The mistress of Chancton Priory had hesitated painfully before
allowing Doctor McKirdy to write the letter which had bidden Barbara
54. Rebell come to England. The old Scotchman, who to her surprise
had urged Madame Sampiero to send for her god-daughter,
regarded the coming of Barbara as a matter of comparatively small
moment. If the experiment was not successful, well then Mrs. Rebell
could be sent away again; but the mistress of the Priory knew that
to herself the coming of Richard Rebell's daughter must either bring
something like happiness, and the companionship for which she
sometimes craved with so desperate a longing, or the destruction of
the dignified peace in which she had known how to enfold herself as
in a mantle.
For a few days, Barbara's fate had indeed hung in the balance,
and could money have taken the place of the shelter asked for, it
would have been sent in ample measure. At last what had turned
the balance and weighed down the scale had been a mere word said
by Mrs. Turke—a word referring incautiously to James Berwick as the
probable future owner of Chancton Priory.
Hearing that word, the present owner's trembling lips had closed
tightly together. So that was what they were all planning? That the
Priory should be, in the fulness of time, handed over to James
Berwick, to be added to the many possessions he had acquired by
the sale of himself—Madame Sampiero, discussing the matter in the
watches of her long night, did not choose and pick her words—by
that of his young manhood, and of his already growing political
reputation, to a sickly woman, older than himself, whose death had
been the crowning boon she had bestowed on her husband.
And so Chancton, which Madame Sampiero loved with so
passionate an affection, was meant to take its place, as if by chance,
at the end of the long list of Berwick's properties—that list which all
who ran might read in those books of reference where the
mightiness of Lord Bosworth's nephew was set forth—after
Chillingworth, after the town house, after Churm Paddox,
Newmarket, even after the property he had inherited from his own
father in France. The thought whipped her as if with scorpions—
55. perhaps the more so that for one moment, in the long ago, at a time
when Barbara Sampiero wished to share everything with the man
she loved, and before little Julia, that enfant de miracle, was born,
she had seriously thought of making Lord Bosworth's nephew her
heir. But his marriage had revolted her profoundly, and had, of
course, made the questions of his future and his career, which had
at one time been a matter for anxious thought on the part of his
uncle and political godfather, more than secure. Well, indeed, had
he, or rather his sister Arabella, feathered James Berwick's nest!
Like most lonely wealthy women, Madame Sampiero had made
and destroyed many wills in the course of her life, but since the
death of her child she had made no new disposition of her property.
Let the place go to any Rebell who could establish his or her claim to
it—such had been her feeling. But while Barbara's short, pitiful, and
yet dignified letter still remained unanswered, and while Mrs. Turke's
incautious word still sounded in her ears, she had sent for her
lawyer, and, after making a will which surprised him, had dictated to
Doctor McKirdy the letter bidding Mrs. Rebell come and take up her
permanent home at Chancton.
And now—ah! even after only very few hours of Barbara's
company, Madame Sampiero lay and trembled to think how nearly
she had let this good thing which had suddenly come into her
shadowed life slip by. All her life through she had acted on impulse,
and often she had lived to regret what she had done, but this time,
acting on what was to be, so she had assured herself, the last
memorable impulse of her life, her instinct had guided her aright.
What Barbara had felt, on the first morning when she wandered
about the beautiful old house, her god-mother had since also
experienced, with increasing regret and self-reproach. Why had she
not sent for the girl immediately after Richard Rebell's death? Why
had she allowed the terrible grief and physical distress which then
oppressed her to prevent the accomplishment of that act of
humanity and mercy? True, poor Barbara had already met the man
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