'Margaret Tucker.' He stooped, and pressed her hand.'Sit down for a moment--one moment,' he said, pointing to the end of the seat, and taking the extremest further end for himself, not to discompose her.
She sat down.
'It is to ask a question,' he went on, 'and there must be confidence between us.You have saved me from an act of madness! What can I do for you?'
'Nothing, sir.'
'Nothing?'
'Father is very well off, and we don't want anything.'
'But there must be some service I can render, some kindness, some votive offering which I could make, and so imprint on your memory as long as you live that I am not an ungrateful man?'
'Why should you be grateful to me, sir?'
He shook his head.'Some things are best left unspoken.Now think.
What would you like to have best in the world?'
Margery made a pretence of reflecting--then fell to reflecting seriously; but the negative was ultimately as undisturbed as ever:
she could not decide on anything she would like best in the world; it was too difficult, too sudden.
'Very well--don't hurry yourself.Think it over all day.I ride this afternoon.You live--where?'
'Silverthorn Dairy-house.'
'I will ride that way homeward this evening.Do you consider by eight o'clock what little article, what little treat, you would most like of any.'
'I will, sir,' said Margery, now warming up to the idea.'Where shall I meet you? Or will you call at the house, sir?'
'Ah--no.I should not wish the circumstances known out of which our acquaintance rose.It would be more proper--but no.'
Margery, too, seemed rather anxious that he should not call.'Icould come out, sir,' she said.'My father is odd-tempered, and perhaps--'
It was agreed that she should look over a stile at the top of her father's garden, and that he should ride along a bridle-path outside, to receive her answer.'Margery,' said the gentleman in conclusion, 'now that you have discovered me under ghastly conditions, are you going to reveal them, and make me an object for the gossip of the curious?'
'No, no, sir!' she replied earnestly.'Why should I do that?'
'You will never tell?'
'Never, never will I tell what has happened here this morning.'
'Neither to your father, nor to your friends, nor to any one?'
'To no one at all,' she said.
'It is sufficient,' he answered.'You mean what you say, my dear maiden.Now you want to leave me.Good-bye!'
She descended the hill, walking with some awkwardness; for she felt the stranger's eyes were upon her till the fog had enveloped her from his gaze.She took no notice now of the dripping from the trees; she was lost in thought on other things.Had she saved this handsome, melancholy, sleepless, foreign gentleman who had had a trouble on his mind till the letter came? What had he been going to do? Margery could guess that he had meditated death at his own hand.Strange as the incident had been in itself; to her it had seemed stranger even than it was.Contrasting colours heighten each other by being juxtaposed; it is the same with contrasting lives.
Reaching the opposite side of the park there appeared before her for the third time that little old man, the foot-post.As the turnpike-road ran, the postman's beat was twelve miles a day; six miles out from the town, and six miles back at night.But what with zigzags, devious ways, offsets to country seats, curves to farms, looped courses, and triangles to outlying hamlets, the ground actually covered by him was nearer one-and-twenty miles.Hence it was that Margery, who had come straight, was still abreast of him, despite her long pause.
The weighty sense that she was mixed up in a tragical secret with an unknown and handsome stranger prevented her joining very readily in chat with the postman for some time.But a keen interest in her adventure caused her to respond at once when the bowed man of mails said, 'You hit athwart the grounds of Mount Lodge, Miss Margery, or you wouldn't ha' met me here.Well, somebody hey took the old place at last.'
In acknowledging her route Margery brought herself to ask who the new gentleman might be.
'Guide the girl's heart! What! don't she know? And yet how should ye--he's only just a-come.--Well, nominal, he's a fishing gentleman, come for the summer only.But, more to the subject, he's a foreign noble that's lived in England so long as to be without any true country: some of his letters call him Baron, some Squire, so that 'a must be born to something that can't be earned by elbow-grease and Christian conduct.He was out this morning a-watching the fog.
"Postman," 'a said, "good-morning: give me the bag." O, yes, 'a's a civil genteel nobleman enough.'
'Took the house for fishing, did he?'
'That's what they say, and as it can be for nothing else I suppose it's true.But, in final, his health's not good, 'a b'lieve; he's been living too rithe.The London smoke got into his wyndpipe, till 'a couldn't eat.However, I shouldn't mind having the run of his kitchen.'
'And what is his name?'
'Ah--there you have me! 'Tis a name no man's tongue can tell, or even woman's, except by pen-and-ink and good scholarship.It begins with X, and who, without the machinery of a clock in's inside, can speak that? But here 'tis--from his letters.' The postman with his walking-stick wrote upon the ground, 'BARON VON XANTEN'
