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I must wait to find another lady, and she will be Countess of Dunstanwolde." He bore himself composedly until they had exchanged the final courtesies and parted for the night, and having mounted the stairs had passed through the long gallery which led him to his apartments.
"You did not," he cried, with an oath, and then laughed scornfully. "The letter lies in ashes on the hearth," she said. "'Twas burned unopened. Do not ride so close, Sir John, and do not play the madman and the beast with the wife of my Lord Dunstanwolde." "'The wife!" he answered. "'My lord! 'Tis a new game this, and well played, by God!"
'There is not one of ye, she says, 'not one among ye who is man and big enough! Such impudence was never yet in woman born! And the worst on't is, she is right damn her! she's right." "Yes," said my Lord Dunstanwolde with a clouded face. "'Tis a Man who would win her young and beautiful and strong strong!" "She needs a master!" cried Twemlow. "Nay," said Roxholm "a mate."
None will spare her. She will be like a hare let loose with every pack in the county set upon her to hunt her to her death." "Ah!" the exclamation broke forth as if involuntarily from my Lord Dunstanwolde, and Roxholm, turning with a start, saw that he had suddenly grown pale. "You are ill!" he cried. "You have lost colour!" "No! No!" his lordship answered hurriedly, and faintly smiling.
"She is no joke," Osmonde answered, with a faint, cold smile. "'Tis plain enough 'tis true what is said the men all lose their hearts to her. We thought your Grace was adamant" with simpering roguishness. "The last two years I have spent with the army in Flanders," said my lord Duke, "and her Ladyship of Dunstanwolde is the wife of my favourite kinsman."
In such weather my Lord Dunstanwolde and his young kinsman sometimes paced whole mornings away together, and 'twas on such an occasion that there first entered into Roxholm's life that which later filled and ruled it and was its very self.
They turned together and looked at it in some wonder that her ladyship of Dunstanwolde should have any connection with it. 'Twas indeed a big hole, and looked as if the plaster of the wall under the sill had been roughly broken and hacked. "Ay," said the host, "'tis a queer thing and came here in a strange way, being made by a gentleman's sword, and he either wild with liquor or with rage.
So when men talked of Lady Dunstanwolde 'twas not unnatural that, this story having been bruited about, they should talk also of Jack Oxon, and since they talked to each other, the rumour reached feminine ears which pricked themselves at once; and when my lord Duke of Osmonde came to town and went into the world, he also heard discussions of Sir John Oxon.
And at all these times, as also at all others, she knew that she but shared her own love and dazzled admiration with my Lord Dunstanwolde, whose tenderness, being so fed by his lady's unfailing graciousness of bearing and kindly looks and words, grew with every hour that passed. They held one night a splendid assembly at which a member of the Royal House was present.
He looked up at it as he drove, and at the fresh early summer greenness of the huge trees and thick grass in the parks and gardens; and when his equipage rolled into the court at Dunstanwolde House, he smiled to himself for pleasure to see its summer air, with the lacqueys making excuse to stand outside in the brightness of the day, little Nero, the black negro page, sunning himself and his pugs and spaniels on the plot of grass at the front, and the windows thrown open to let in the soft fresh air, while the balconies before the drawing-room casements were filled with masses of flowers yellow and white perfumed things, sent up fresh from the country and set in such abundance that the balconies bloomed like gardens.
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