The Lady Of The Pool
by
CHAPTER I
A FIRM BELIEVER
“I see Mr. Vansittart Merceron’s at the Court again, mamma.”
“Yes, dear. Lady Merceron told me he was coming. She wanted to consult him about Charlie.”
“She’s always consulting him about Charlie, and it never makes any difference.”
Mrs. Bushell looked up from her needlework; her hands were full with needle and stuff, and a couple of pins protruded from her lips. She glanced at her daughter, who stood by the window in the bright blaze of a brilliant sunset, listlessly hitting the blind-cord and its tassel to and fro.
“The poor boy’s very young still,” mumbled Mrs. Bushell through her pins.
“He’s twenty-five last month,” returned Millicent. “I know, because there’s exactly three years between him and me.”
The sinking rays defined Miss Bushell’s form with wonderful clearness. She was very tall, and the severe well-cut cloth gown she wore set off the stately lines of her figure. She had a great quantity of fair hair and a handsome face, spoilt somewhat by a slightly excessive breadth across the cheeks; as her height demanded or excused, her hands and feet were not small, though well shaped. Would Time have arrested his march for ever, there would have been small fault to find with Nature’s gifts to Miss Bushell; but, as her mother said, Millie was just what she had been at twenty-one; and Mrs. Bushell was now extremely stout. Millie escaped the inference by discrediting her mother’s recollection.
The young lady wore her hat, and presently she turned away from the window, remarking:
“I think I shall go for a stroll. I’ve had no exercise to-day.”
Either inclination, or perhaps that threatening possibility from which she strove to avert her eyes, made Millie a devotee of active pursuits. She hunted, she rode, she played lawn-tennis, and, when at the seaside, golf; when all failed, she walked resolutely four or five miles on the high-road, swinging along at a healthy pace, and never pausing save to counsel an old woman or rebuke a truant urchin. On such occasions her manner (for we may not suppose that her physique aided the impression) suggested the benevolent yet stern policeman, and the vicar acknowledged in her an invaluable assistant. By a strange coincidence she seemed to suit the house she lived in–one of those large white square dwelling’s, devoid of ornament, yet possessing every substantial merit, and attaining, by virtue of their dimensions and simplicity, an effect of handsomeness denied to many more tricked-out building’s. The house satisfied; so did Millie, unless the judge were very critical.
“I shall just walk round by the Pool and back,” she added as she opened the door.
“My dear, it’s four miles!”
“Well, it’s only a little after six, and we don’t dine till eight.”
Encountering no further opposition than a sigh of admiration–three hundred yards was the limit of pleasure in a walk to her mother–Millie Bushell started on her way, dangling a neat ebony stick in her hand, and setting her feet down with a firm decisive tread. It did not take her long to cover the two miles between her and her destination. Leaving the road, she entered the grounds of the Court and, following a little path which ran steeply down hill, she found herself by the willows and reeds fringing the edge of the Pool. Opposite to her, on the higher bank, some seven or eight feet above the water, rose the temple, a small classical erection, used now, when at all, as a summer-house, but built to commemorate the sad fate of Agatha Merceron. The sun had just sunk, and the Pool looked chill and gloomy; the deep water under the temple was black and still. Millie’s robust mind was not prone to superstition, yet she was rather relieved to think that, with the sun only just gone, there was a clear hour before Agatha Merceron would come out of the temple, slowly and fearfully descend the shallow flight of marble steps, and lay herself down in the water to die. That happened every evening, according to the legend, an hour after sunset–every evening, for the last two hundred years, since poor Agatha, bereft and betrayed, had found the Pool kinder than the world, and sunk her sorrow and her shame and her beauty there–such shame and such beauty as had never been before or after in all the generations of the Mercerons.