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 THE FIRST VIOLIN

 _A NOVEL._

 BY JESSIE FOTHERGILL,

 _Author of "A March in the Ranks," Etc._

     *       *       *       *       *

 NEW YORK
 THE FEDERAL BOOK COMPANY
 PUBLISHERS




THE FIRST VIOLIN.




CHAPTER I.

MISS HALLAM.


"Wonderful weather for April!" Yes, it certainty was wonderful. I fully
agreed with the sentiment expressed at different periods of the day by
different members of my family; but I did not follow their example and
seek enjoyment out-of-doors--pleasure in that balmy spring air.
Trouble--the first trouble of my life--had laid her hand heavily upon
me. The world felt disjointed and all upside-down; I very helpless and
lonely in it. I had two sisters, I had a father and a mother; but none
the less was I unable to share my grief with any one of them; nay, it
had been an absolute relief to me when first one and then another of
them had left the house, on business or pleasure intent, and I, after
watching my father go down the garden-walk, and seeing the gate close
after him, knew that, save for Jane, our domestic, who was caroling
lustily to herself in the kitchen regions, I was alone in the house.

I was in the drawing-room. Once secure of solitude, I put down the
sewing with which I had been pretending to employ myself, and went to
the window--a pleasant, sunny bay. In that window stood a small
work-table, with a flower-pot upon it containing a lilac primula. I
remember it distinctly to this day, and I am likely to carry the
recollection with me so long as I live. I leaned my elbows upon this
table, and gazed across the fields, green with spring grass, tenderly
lighted by an April sun, to where the river--the Skern--shone with a
pleasant, homely, silvery glitter, twining through the smiling meadows
till he bent round the solemn overhanging cliff crowned with mournful
firs, which went by the name of the Rifted or Riven Scaur.

In some such delightful mead might the white-armed Nausicaa have
tossed her cowslip balls among the other maids; perhaps by some such
river might Persephone have paused to gather the daffodil--"the fateful
flower beside the rill." Light clouds flitted across the sky, a waft of
wind danced in at the open window, ruffling my hair mockingly, and
bearing with it the deep sound of a church clock striking four.

As if the striking of the hour had been a signal for the breaking of a
spell, the silence that had prevailed came to an end. Wheels came
rolling along the road up to the door, which, however, was at the other
side of the house. "A visitor for my father, no doubt," I thought
indifferently; "and he has gone out to read the funeral service for a
dead parishioner. How strange! I wonder how clergymen and doctors can
ever get accustomed to the grim contrasts amid which they live!"

I suffered my thoughts to wander off in some such track as this, but
they were all through dominated by a heavy sense of oppression--the
threatening hand of a calamity which I feared was about to overtake me,
and I had again forgotten the outside world.

The door was opened. Jane held it open and said nothing (a trifling
habit of hers, which used to cause me much annoyance), and a tall woman
walked slowly into the room. I rose and looked earnestly at her,
surprised and somewhat nervous when I saw who she was--Miss Hallam, of
Hallam Grange, our near neighbor, but a great stranger to us,
nevertheless, so far, that is, as personal intercourse went.

"Your servant told me that every one was out except Miss May," she
remarked, in a harsh, decided voice, as she looked not so much at me as
toward me, and I perceived that there was something strange about her
eyes.

"Yes; I am sorry," I began, doubtfully.

She had sallow, strongly marked, but proud and aristocratic features,
and a manner with more than a tinge of imperiousness. Her face, her
figure, her voice were familiar, yet strange to me--familiar because I
had heard of her, and been in the habit of occasionally seeing her from
my very earliest childhood; strange, because she was reserved and not
given to seeing her neighbors' houses for purposes either of gossip or
hospitality. I was aware that about once in two years she made a call at
our house, the vicarage, whether as a mark of politeness to us, or to
show that, though she never entered a church, she still chose to lend
her countenance and approval to the Establishment, or whether merely out
of old use and habit, I knew not. I only knew that she came, and that
until now it had never fallen to my lot to be present upon any of those
momentous occasions.

Feeling it a little hard that my coveted solitude should thus be
interrupted, and not quite knowing what to say to her, I sat down and
there was a moment's pause.

"Is your mother well?" she inquired.

"Yes, thank you, very well. She has gone with my sister to Darton."

"Your father?"

"He is well too, thank you. He has a funeral this afternoon."

"I think you have two sisters, have you not?"

"Yes; Adelaide and Stella."

"And which are you?"

"May; I am the second one."

All her questions were put in an almost severe tone, and not as if she
took very much interest in me or mine. I felt my timidity increase, and
yet--I liked her. Yes, I felt most distinctly that I liked her.

"May," she remarked, meditatively; "May Wedderburn. Are you aware that
you have a very pretty north-country sounding name?"

"I have not thought about it."

"How old are you?"

"I am a little over seventeen."

"Ah! And what do you do all day?"

"Oh!" I began, doubtfully, "not much, I am afraid, that is useful or
valuable."

"You are young enough yet. Don't begin to do things with a purpose for
some time to come. Be happy while you can."

"I am not at all happy," I replied, not thinking of what I was saying,
and then feeling that I could have bitten my tongue out with vexation.
What could it possibly matter to Miss Hallam whether I were happy or
not? She was asking me all these questions to pass the time, and in
order to talk about something while she sat in our house.

"What makes you unhappy? Are your sisters disagreeable?"

"Oh, no!"

"Are your parents unkind?"

"Unkind!" I echoed, thinking what a very extraordinary woman she was and
wondering what kind of experience hers could have been in the past.

"Then I can not imagine what cause for unhappiness you can have," she
said, composedly.

I made no answer. I repented me of having uttered the words, and Miss
Hallam went on:

"I should advise you to forget that there is such a thing as
unhappiness. You will soon succeed."

"Yes--I will try," said I, in a low voice, as the cause of my
unhappiness rose up, gaunt, grim and forbidding, with thin lips curved
in a mocking smile, and glittering, snake-like eyes fixed upon my face.
I shivered faintly; and she, though looking quickly at me, seemed to
think she had said enough about my unhappiness. Her next question
surprised me much.

"Are you fair in complexion?" she inquired.

"Yes," said I. "I am very fair--fairer than either of my sisters. But
are you near-sighted?"

"Near sight_less_," she replied, with a bitter little laugh. "Cataract.
I have so many joys in my life that Providence has thought fit to temper
the sunshine of my lot. I am to content myself with the store of
pleasant remembrances with which my mind is crowded, when I can see
nothing outside. A delightful arrangement. It is what pious people call
a 'cross,' or a 'visitation,' or something of that kind. I am not pious,
and I call it the destruction of what little happiness I had."

"Oh, I am very, very sorry for you," I answered, feeling what I spoke,
for it had always been my idea of misery to be blind--shut away from the
sunlight upon the fields, from the hue of the river, from all that "lust
of the eye" which meets us on every side.

"But are you quite alone?" I continued. "Have you no one to--"

I stopped; I was about to add, "to be kind to you--to take care of you?"
but I suddenly remembered that it would not do for me to ask such
questions.

"No, I live quite alone," said she, abruptly. "Did you think of offering
to relieve my solitude?"

I felt myself burning with a hot blush all over my face as I stammered
out:

"I am sure I never thought of anything so impertinent, but--but--if
there was anything I could do--read or--"

I stopped again. Never very confident in myself, I felt a miserable
sense that I might have been going too far. I wished most ardently that
my mother or Adelaide had been there to take the weight of such a
conversation from my shoulders. What was my surprise to hear Miss Hallam
say, in a tone quite smooth, polished, and polite:

"Come and drink tea with me to-morrow afternoon--afternoon tea I mean.
You can go away again as soon as you like. Will you?"

"Oh, thank you. Yes, I will."

"Very well. I shall expect you between four and five. Good-afternoon."

"Let me come with you to your carriage," said I, hastily. "Jane--our
servant is so clumsy."

I preceded her with care, saw her seated in her carriage and driven
toward the Grange, which was but a few hundred yards from our own gates,
and then I returned to the house. And as I went in again, my
companion-shadow glided once more to my side with soft, insinuating,
irresistible importunity, and I knew that it would be my faithful
attendant for--who could say how long?




CHAPTER II.

"Traversons gravement cette mechante mascarade qu'on appelle le monde"


The houses in Skernford--the houses of "the gentry," that is to say--lay
almost all on one side an old-fashioned, sleepy-looking "green" toward
which their entrances lay; but their real front, their pleasantest
aspect, was on their other side, facing the river which ran below, and
down to which their gardens sloped in terraces. Our house, the vicarage,
lay nearest the church; Miss Hallam's house, the Grange, furthest from
the church. Between these, larger and more imposing, in grounds beside
which ours seemed to dwindle down to a few flower-beds, lay Deeplish
Hall, whose owner, Sir Peter Le Marchant, had lately come to live there,
at least for a time.

It was many years since Sir Peter Le Marchant, whose image at this time
was fated to enter so largely and so much against my will into all my
calculations, had lived at or even visited his estate at Skernford. He
was a man of immense property, and report said that Deeplish Hall, which
we innocent villagers looked upon as such an imposing mansion, was but
one and not the grandest of his several country houses. All that I knew
of his history--or rather, all that I had heard of it, whether truly or
not, I was in no position to say--was but a vague and misty account; yet
that little had given me a dislike to him before I ever met him.

Miss Hallam, our neighbor, who lived in such solitude and retirement,
was credited with having a history--if report had only been able to fix
upon what it was. She was popularly supposed to be of a grim and
decidedly eccentric disposition. Eccentric she was, as I afterward
found--as I thought when I first saw her. She seldom appeared either in
church or upon any other public occasion, and was said to be the deadly
enemy of Sir Peter Le Marchant and all pertaining to him. There was some
old, far-back romance connected with it--a romance which I did not
understand, for up to now I had never known either her or Sir Peter
sufficiently to take any interest in the story, but the report ran that
in days gone by--how far gone by, too, they must have been!--Miss
Hallam, a young and handsome heiress, loved very devotedly her one
sister, and that sister--so much was known as a fact--had become Lady Le
Marchant: was not her monument in the church between the Deeplish Hall
and the Hallam Grange pews? Was not the tale of her virtues and her
years--seven-and-twenty only did she count of the latter--there
recorded? That Barbara Hallam had been married to Sir Peter was matter
of history: what was not matter of history, but of tradition which was
believed in quite as firmly, was that the baronet had ill-treated his
wife--in what way was not distinctly specified, but I have since learned
that it was true; she was a gentle creature, and he made her life
miserable unto her. She was idolized by her elder sister, who, burning
with indignation at the treatment to which her darling had been
subjected, had become, even in disposition, an altered woman. From a
cheerful, open-hearted, generous, somewhat brusque young person, she had
grown into a prematurely old, soured, revengeful woman. It was to her
that the weak and injured sister had fled; it was in her arms that she
had died. Since her sister's death, Miss Hallam had withdrawn entirely
from society, cherishing a perpetual grudge against Sir Peter Le
Marchant. Whether she had relations or none, friends or acquaintance
outside the small village in which she lived, none knew. If so, they
limited their intercourse with her to correspondence, for no visitor
ever penetrated to her damp old Grange, nor had she ever been known to
leave it with the purpose of making any journey abroad. If perfect
silence and perfect retirement could hush the tongues of tradition and
report, then Miss Hallam's story should have been forgotten. But it was
not forgotten. Such things never do become forgotten.

It was only since Sir Peter had appeared suddenly some six weeks ago at
Deeplish Hall, that these dry bones of tradition had for me quickened
into something like life, and had acquired a kind of interest for me.

Our father, as vicar of the parish, had naturally called upon Sir Peter,
and as naturally invited him to his house. His visits had begun by his
coming to lunch one day, and we had speculated about him a little in
advance, half jestingly, raking up old stories, and attributing to him
various evil qualities of a hard and loveless old age. But after he had
gone, the verdict of Stella and myself was, "Much worse than we
expected." He was different from what we had expected. Perhaps that
annoyed us. Instead of being able to laugh at him, we found something
oppressive, chilling, to me frightful, in the cold, sneering smile which
seemed perpetually hovering about his thin lips--in the fixed, snaky
glitter of his still, intent gray eyes. His face was pale, his manners
were polished, but to meet his eye was a thing I hated, and the touch of
his hand made me shudder. While speaking in the politest possible
manner, he had eyed over Adelaide and me in a manner which I do not
think either of us had ever experienced before. I hated him from the
moment in which I saw him looking at me with expression of approval. To
be approved by Sir Peter Le Marchant, could fate devise anything more
horrible? Yes, I knew now that it could; one might have to submit to the
approval, to live in the approval. I had expressed my opinion on the
subject with freedom to Adelaide, who to my surprise had not agreed
with me, and had told me coldly that I had no business to speak
disrespectfully of my father's visitors. I was silenced, but unhappy.
From the first moment of seeing Sir Peter, I had felt an uncomfortable,
uneasy feeling, which, had I been sentimental, I might have called a
presentiment, but I was not sentimental. I was a healthy young girl of
seventeen, believing in true love, and goodness, and gentleness very
earnestly; "fancy free," having read few novels, and heard no gossip--a
very baby in many respects. Our home might be a quiet one, a poor one, a
dull one--our circle of acquaintance small, our distractions of the most
limited description imaginable, but at least we knew no evil, and--I
speak for Stella and myself--thought none. Our father and mother were
persons with nothing whatever remarkable about them. Both had been
handsome. My mother was pretty, my father good-looking yet. I loved them
both dearly. It had never entered my head to do otherwise than love
them, but the love which made the star and the poetry of my quiet and
unromantic life was that I bore to Adelaide, my eldest sister. I
believed in her devotedly, and accepted her judgment, given in her own
peculiar proud, decided way, upon every topic on which she chose to
express it. She was one-and-twenty, and I used to think I could lay down
my life for her.

It was consequently a shock to me to hear her speak in praise--yes, in
praise of Sir Peter Le Marchant. My first impulse was to distrust my own
judgment, but no; I could not long do so. He was repulsive; he was
stealthy, hard, cruel, in appearance. I could not account for Adelaide's
perversity in liking him,