Trent's Trust

"It was so good of you to come," she said. "I thought you would imagine how I was feeling"—She stopped, as if she were conscious, as Randolph was, of a certain chill of unresponsiveness in the company, and said in an undertone, "Wait until we are alone." Then, turning with a slight color and a pretty dignity toward her friends, she continued: "Lady Ashbrook, this is Mr. Trent, an old friend of both my cousins when they were in America."

In spite of the gracious response of the ladies, Randolph was aware of their critical scrutiny of both himself and Miss Eversleigh, of the exchange of significant glances, and a certain stiffness in her guardian's manner. It was quite enough to affect Randolph's sensitiveness and bring out his own reserve.

Fancying, however, that his reticence disturbed Miss Eversleigh, he forced himself to converse with Lady Ashbrook—avoiding many of her pointed queries as to himself, his acquaintance with Sibyl, and the length of time he expected to stay in England—and even accompanied her to her carriage. And here he was rewarded by Sibyl running out with a crape veil twisted round her throat and head, and the usual femininely forgotten final message to her visitor. As the carriage drove away, she turned to Randolph, and said quickly,—

"Let us go in by way of the garden."

It was a slight detour, but it gave them a few moments alone.

"It was so awful and sudden," she said, looking gravely at Randolph, "and to think that only an hour before I had been saying unkind things of him! Of course," she added naively, "they were true, and the groom admitted to me that the mare was overdriven and Sir William could hardly stand. And only to think of it! he never recovered complete consciousness, but muttered incoherently all the time. I was with him to the last, and he never said a word I could understand—only once."

"What did he say?" asked Randolph uneasily.

"I don't like to say—it was TOO dreadful!"

Randolph did not press her. Yet, after a pause, she said in a low voice, with a naivete impossible to describe, "It was, 'Jack, damn you!'"

He did not dare to look at her, even with this grim mingling of farce and tragedy which seemed to invest every scene of that sordid drama. Miss Eversleigh continued gravely: "The groom's name was Robert, but Jack might have been the name of one of his boon companions."

Convinced that she suspected nothing, yet in the hope of changing the subject, Randolph said quietly: "I thought your guardian perhaps a little less frank and communicative to-day."

"Yes," said the young girl suddenly, with a certain impatience, and yet in half apology to her companion, "of course. He—THEY—all and everybody—are much more concerned and anxious about my new position than I am. It's perfectly dreadful—this thinking of it all the time, arranging everything, criticising everything in reference to it, and the poor man who is the cause of it all not yet at rest in his grave! The whole thing is inhuman and unchristian!"

"I don't understand," stammered Randolph vaguely. "What IS your new position? What do you mean?"

The girl looked up in his face with surprise. "Why, didn't you know? I'm the next of kin—I'm the heiress—and will succeed to the property in six months, when I am of age."

In a flash of recollection Randolph suddenly recalled the captain's words, "There are only three lives between her and the property." Their meaning had barely touched his comprehension before. She was the heiress. Yes, save for the captain!

She saw the change, the wonder, even the dismay, in his face, and her own brightened frankly. "It's so good to find one who never thought of it, who hadn't it before him as the chief end for which I was born! Yes, I was the next of kin after dear Jack died and Bill succeeded, but there was every chance that he would marry and have an heir. And yet the moment he was taken ill that idea was uppermost in my guardian's mind, good man as he is, and even forced upon me. If this—this property had come from poor Cousin Jack, whom I loved, there would have been something dear in it as a memory or a gift, but from HIM, whom I couldn't bear—I know it's wicked to talk that way, but it's simply dreadful!"

"And yet," said Randolph, with a sudden seriousness he could not control, "I honestly believe that Captain Dornton would be perfectly happy—yes, rejoiced!—if he knew the property had come to YOU."

There was such an air of conviction, and, it seemed to the simple girl, even of spiritual insight, in his manner that her clear, handsome eyes rested wonderingly on his.

"Do you really think so?" she said thoughtfully. "And yet HE knows that I am like him. Yes," she continued, answering Randolph's look of surprise, "I am just like HIM in that. I loathe and despise the life that this thing would condemn me to; I hate all that it means, and all that it binds me to, as he used to; and if I could, I would cut and run from it as HE did."

She spoke with a determined earnestness and warmth, so unlike her usual grave naivete that he was astonished. There was a flush on her cheek and a frank fire in her eye that reminded him strangely of the captain; and yet she had emphasized her words with a little stamp of her narrow foot and a gesture of her hand that was so untrained and girlish that he smiled, and said, with perhaps the least touch of bitterness in his tone, "But you will get over that when you come into the property."

"I suppose I shall," she returned, with an odd lapse to her former gravity and submissiveness. "That's what they all tell me."

"You will be independent and your own mistress," he added.

"Independent," she repeated impatiently, "with Dornton Hall and twenty thousand a year! Independent, with every duty marked out for me! Independent, with every one to criticise my smallest actions—every one who would never have given a thought to the orphan who was contented and made her own friends on a hundred a year! Of course you, who are a stranger, don't understand; yet I thought that you"—she hesitated,—"would have thought differently."

"Why?"

"Why, with your belief that one should make one's own fortune," she said.

"That would do for a man, and in that I respected Captain Dornton's convictions, as you told them to me. But for a girl, how could she be independent, except with money?"

She shook her head as if unconvinced, but did not reply. They were nearing the garden porch, when she looked up, and said: "And as YOU'RE a man, you will be making your way in the world. Mr. Dingwall said you would."

There was something so childishly trustful and confident in her assurance that he smiled. "Mr. Dingwall is too sanguine, but it gives me hope to hear YOU say so."

She colored slightly, and said gravely: "We must go in now." Yet she lingered for a moment before the door. For a long time afterward he had a very vivid recollection of her charming face, in its childlike gravity and its quaint frame of black crape, standing out against the sunset-warmed wall of the rectory. "Promise me you will not mind what these people say or do," she said suddenly.

"I promise," he returned, with a smile, "to mind only what YOU say or do."

"But I might not be always quite right, you know," she said naively.

"I'll risk that."

"Then, when we go in now, don't talk much to me, but make yourself agreeable to all the others, and then go straight home to the inn, and don't come here until after the funeral."

The faintest evasive glint of mischievousness in her withdrawn eyes at this moment mitigated the austerity of her command as they both passed in.

Randolph had intended not to return to London until after the funeral, two days later, and spent the interesting day at the neighboring town, whence he dispatched his exploring and perhaps hopeless letter to the captain. The funeral was a large and imposing one, and impressed Randolph for the first time with the local importance and solid standing of the Dorntons. All the magnates and old county families were represented. The inn yard and the streets of the little village were filled with their quaint liveries, crested paneled carriages, and silver-cipher caparisoned horses, with a sprinkling of fashion from London. He could not close his ears to the gossip of the villagers regarding the suddenness of the late baronet's death, the extinction of the title, the accession of the orphaned girl to the property, and even, to his greater exasperation, speculations upon her future and probable marriage. "Some o' they gay chaps from Lunnon will be lordin' it over the Hall afore long," was the comment of the hostler.

It was with some little bitterness that Randolph took his seat in the crowded church. But this feeling, and even his attempts to discover Miss Eversleigh's face in the stately family pew fenced off from the chancel, presently passed away. And then his mind began to be filled with strange and weird fancies. What grim and ghostly revelations might pass between this dead scion of the Dorntons lying on the trestles before them and the obscure, nameless ticket of leave man awaiting his entrance in the vault below! The incongruity of this thought, with the smug complacency of the worldly minded congregation sitting around him, and the probable smiling carelessness of the reckless rover—the cause of all—even now idly pacing the deck on the distant sea, touched him with horror. And when added to this was the consciousness that Sibyl Eversleigh was forced to become an innocent actor in this hideous comedy, it seemed as much as he could bear. Again he questioned himself, Was he right to withhold his secret from her? In vain he tried to satisfy his conscience that she was happier in her ignorance. The resolve he had made to keep his relations with her apart from his secret, he knew now, was impossible. But one thing was left to him. Until he could disclose his whole story—until his lips were unsealed by Captain Dornton—he must never see her again. And the grim sanctity of the edifice seemed to make that resolution a vow.

He did not dare to raise his eyes again toward her pew, lest a sight of her sweet, grave face might shake his resolution, and he slipped away first among the departing congregation. He sent her a brief note from the inn saying that he was recalled to London by an earlier train, and that he would be obliged to return to California at once, but hoping that if he could be of any further assistance to her she would write to him to the care of the bank. It was a formal letter, and yet he had never written otherwise than formally to her. That night he reached London. On the following night he sailed from Liverpool for America.

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