"Not a bit of it!" Mrs. Dugdale cried. "Keep your seat, Agatha; no time to lose; on we go in a minute, when Duke has been to get his letters.

Here, Brian, my pet."--There had rushed out round her horse a cl.u.s.ter of infantine Dugdales.--"Lift Brian up here, Uncle Nathanael, and I'll give him a canter. Bravo! He's Pa's own boy, born for a rider! Come along, Auntie Agatha."

Agatha would willingly have followed down the street. She was amused by the daring of the mother and the boy, and amused especially by her new t.i.tle of "Auntie Agatha."

"Do let me go, Mr. Harper; I don't want to dismount, indeed."

"But I have something to say to you--just a few words. We must decide to-day about the house, you know."

"Never mind the house; I had rather not think about it." And the mere shadow of past vexation still vexed her. "Ah!" she added, entreatingly, "do be good to me--do let me enjoy myself for once!"

"I would not prevent you for the world." He dropped her bridle with a sigh, and turned back among his little nephews.

Fred had coaxed the horse from the groom, and Gus was bent on mounting; there was a dreadful struggle, and angry cries for Uncle Nathanael. In the midst of it Uncle Nathanael appeared, like an angel of peace, and setting the boys one behind another on his horse's back, led the animal up and down carefully.

Agatha looked after them, thinking how kind and good her husband was.

She wished she had not refused so hastily such a simple request; she began to think herself a wretch for ever contradicting him in anything.

The little party started again, increased by the arrival of the family carriage from Kingcombe Holm, wherein sat Mary and Eulalie. To these were speedily added the three young Dugdales, all in high glee. And it spoke well for the Miss Harpers, whom Agatha was disposed to like least of her husband's relatives, that they made very lenient and kindly aunts to those obstreperous boys.

Agatha was crossing the bridge which bounded South Street, trying to make her horse stand still while Mr. Dugdale pointed out the identical red cliff where the Danes drew up their ships, and laughing with Harrie at the notion of how terribly frightened the quiet souls in Kingcombe would be at such an incursion now, when Nathanael came on foot to his wife's side.

"Why did you start without speaking to me?"

"I could not help it; I thought you were gone. You will come after us soon?" And she felt angry with herself for having momentarily forgotten him.

"I will come when I have settled this business of the house. You understand, Agatha, I am obliged to decide to-day? You will not blame me afterwards?"

"Oh, no--no!" His extreme seriousness of manner jarred with her youthful spirits. She did not think or care about what he did, so that for this day only he let her be gay and happy. From some incomprehensible cause, his very love seemed to hang over her like a cloud, and so it had been from the beginning. She did so long to dash out into the sunshine of her careless, girlish life, and scamper over the beautiful country with Harrie Dugdale.

"Oh, no!" she repeated only wishing to satisfy him. "Take any house you like, and come onward soon; and oh, do let us be cheerful and merry!"

"We will!" His bright look as she patted his shoulder--a very venturesome act---gave her much cheer; and when, after she had cantered a good way down the road, she turned and saw him still leaning on the bridge looking after her, her heart throbbed with pleasure. Despite all his reserves and peculiarities, and her own conscious failings, there was one thing to which she clung as to a root of comfort that would never be taken away, and would surely bear blossom and fruit afterwards--the belief that her husband truly loved her.

[Ill.u.s.tration: On horseback p212]

"If so," she thought, "I suppose all will come right in time, and Agatha Harper will be as happy as, or happier than, Agatha Bowen."

So on she went, yielding to the delicious excitement of being on horseback. She was also much interested by the country round about, which appeared to her as old, desolate, and strange as if she had been a Thane's daughter riding across the moors to the gates of that renowned castle which, as Harrie declared, putting on the physiognomy of some school-child drawling out a history-lesson, "was celebrated for being the residence of the ancient Saxon kings."

"And this was the place," continued she in the same tone, pointing to an old gate-post--"this was the place where His Majesty's most ill.u.s.trious horse did stop when His Majesty's most sainted body was dragged along by the leg, in the stirrup, on account of the wound given him when he was a-drinking at the castle-door, by his stepmother, Queen Elfrida. All of which is to be seen to the present day."

Agatha first laughed at this comical view of the subject, then she felt a little repugnance at hearing that stern old tragedy so lightly treated. As she walked her horse along the road which might have been, and probably was, the very same Saxon highway as in those times, she thought of the wounded horseman dashing out from between those green hills and of the murdered body dropping slowly, slowly from the saddle, dragged in dust, and beat against stones, until the woman that loved him--for even a king might have had some woman that loved him--would not have known the face she thought so fair.

It was an idle fancy, but beneath it her tears were rising; chiefly for thinking, not of "The Martyr," but of the woman--whoever she was--(Agatha had not historical erudition enough to remember if King Edward had a wife)--to whom that day's tragedy might have brought a lifetime's doom. She began to shudder--to feel that she too was a wife--to understand dimly what a wife's love might come to be--also something of a wife's terrors. She wished--it was foolish enough, but she did wish that Nathanael had not been riding on horseback, or else that, in picturing to herself the dead head of the Martyr dragged along the road, she did not always see it with long fair hair. And then she wondered if these horrible fancies indicated the dawning of that feeling which she had deceived herself into believing she already possessed. Was she beginning to find out the difference between that quiet response to secured affection, that pleasant knowledge of being loved, and the strong, engrossing, self-existent attachment which Anne Valery described--the pa.s.sion which has but one object, one interest, one joy, in the whole wide world?

Was she beginning really _to love_ her husband?

The answer to that question involved so much, both of what had been, and what was yet to come, that Agatha dared not ponder over it.

"Mrs. Harper! Mrs. Harper!" She mused no longer, but hurried on after the Dugdales.

It was not to point out the Castle that Harrie had been so vociferous, but to show a place which she evidently deemed far more interesting.

"Do you see that white house far among the trees? That's where my Duke was born. He lived there in peace and quietness till he got acquainted with Uncle Brian, and came to Kingcombe Holm and fell in love with me."

"How did he do it? I want to know what is the fashion of such things in Dorset."

"How did Duke fall in love with me? Really I can't tell. I was fifteen or so--a mere baby! He first gave me a doll, and then he wanted to marry me!"

"But how did he make love, or 'propose' as they call it?" persisted Agatha, to whom the idea of Marmaduke Dugdale in that character was irresistibly funny.

"Make love? Propose? Bless you, my dear, he never did either! Somehow it all came quite naturally. We belonged to one another."

The very phrase Anne Valery had used! It made Nathanael's wife rather thoughtful. She wondered what was the feeling like, when people "belonged to one another."

But she had no time for meditation; for now the great grey ruin loomed in sight, and everybody, including the shouting boys in the carriage behind, was eager to point it out, especially when Agatha made the lamentable confession that she had never seen a ruined castle in her life before.

"And you might go all over England and not find such another as this,"

said Mr. Dugdale, riding up to her with a smile of great satisfaction.

"n.o.body thinks much of it in these parts, and few antiquarians ever come and poke about it. Perhaps it's as well. They couldn't find out more than we know already. But no!"--and his eye, taking in the n.o.ble old ruin arched over by the broad sky, a.s.sumed its peculiar dreamy expression--"We don't know anything. n.o.body knows anything about this wonderful world!"

Agatha looked around. On the top of a smooth conical hill, each side of which was guarded by other two hills equally smooth and bare, rose the wreck of the magnificent fortress, enough of the walls remaining to show its extent and plan. Its destroyer had been--not Father Time, who does his work quietly and gracefully--but that worse spoiler, man. Huge ma.s.ses of masonry, hurled from the summit, lay in the moat beneath, fixed as they had been for centuries, with vegetation growing over them.

Some of the walls, undermined and shaken from their foundations, took strange, oblique angles, yet refused to fall. Marks of cannon-b.a.l.l.s were indented on the stonework of the battered gateway, which still remained a gateway--probably the very same under which Queen Elfrida, "fair and false," had offered to her son the stirrup-cup.

The general impression left on the mind was not that of natural decay, solemn and holy, but of sudden destruction, coming unawares, and struggled against, as a man in the flower of life struggles with mortality. There was something very melancholy about the ruined fortress left on the hill-top in sight of the little town close below, where its desolation was unheeded. Agatha, sensitive, enthusiastic, and easily impressed, grew silent, and wondered that her companions could laugh so carelessly, even when pa.s.sing under the grey portal into the very precincts of the deserted castle.

"We shall not find a soul here," said Harrie; "scarcely anybody ever comes at this season, except when our Kingcombe Oddfellows' Club have a picnic on this bowling-green; or schoolboys get together and climb up the ivy to frighten the jackdaws--my husband has done it many a time--haven't you, Duke?"

"I see mamma," vaguely responded Duke, who was busy lifting his boys down from the carriage, with a paternal care and tenderness beautiful to see. He then, with one little fellow on his shoulder, another holding his hand, and a third clinging to his coat-tails, strode off up the green ascent, without paying the slightest attention to Mrs. Harper.

Which dereliction from the rules of politeness it never once came into her mind to notice or to blame.

"There they go! n.o.body minds me; it's all Pa!" said Mrs. Dugdale, with an a.s.sumption of wrath; a very miserable pretence, while her look was so happy and fond. "You see, Agatha, what you'll come to--after ten years'

matrimony!"

Agatha's heart was so full, she could not laugh but sighed, yet it was not with unhappiness.

He and Harrie wandered over the castle together, for the two Miss Harpers did not approve of climbing. The little boys and "Pa" reappeared now and then at all sorts of improbable and terrifically dangerous corners, and occasionally Mrs. Dugdale made frantic darts after them.

Especially when they were all seen standing on one of the topmost precipices, the father giving a practical scientific lesson on the momentum of falling bodies; in ill.u.s.tration of which Harrie declared he would certainly throw little Brian out of his arms, in a fit of absence of mind, thoroughly believing the child was a stone.

At last, when their excitement had fairly worn itself out, and even Mrs.

Dugdale's energetic liveliness had come to a dead stop in consequence of a fit of sleepiness and crossness on the part of Brian--Agatha roamed about the old castle by herself; creeping into all the queer nooks with a childish pleasure, mounting impa.s.sable walls so as to find the highest point of view. She always had a great delight in climbing, and in feeling herself at the top of everything.

It was such a strange afternoon too, grey, soft, warm, the sun having long gone in and left an atmosphere of pleasant cloudiness, tender and dim, the shadowing over of a fading day, which nevertheless foretells no rain, but often indicates a beautiful day to-morrow. Somehow or other, it made Agatha think of Miss Valery; nor was she surprised when, as suddenly as if she had dropped out of the sky, Anne was seen approaching.

"Let me help you up these stones. How good of you to come, and how tired you seem!"

"Oh no, I shall be rested in a minute. But I am not quite so young as you, my dear."

She came up and leaned against the ivy-wall that Agatha had climbed, which was on the opposite side of the hill to the bowling-green, the gathering-spot of the little party. It was a nook of thorough solitude and desolation, nothing being visible from it but the widely extended flat of country, looking seaward, though the sea itself was not in view.