Chapter 21 - Page 2

across the moors for a day without
fatigue, who had the eye of a hawk and a spirit so gay and untiring--a
man might range the world with her and know joy every moment. 'Twas
ordained that all she did or said should seem a call to him and should
bring visions to him, and there was many an hour when he thanked Heaven
she seemed so free from fault, since if she had had one he could not
have seen it, or if he had seen, might have loved it for her sake. But
she had none, it seemed, and despite all her strange past was surely
more noble than any other woman. She was so true--he told himself--so
loyal and so high in her honour of the old man who loved her. Had she
even been innocently light in her bearing among the men who flocked
about her, she might have given her lord many a bitter hour, and seemed
regardless of his dignity; but she could rule and restrain all,
howsoever near they were to the brink of folly. As for himself, Osmonde
thought, all his days he had striven to be master of himself, and felt
he must remain so or die; but he could have worshipped her upon his
knees in gratitude that no woman's vanity tempted her to use her
powers and loveliness to shake him in his hard won calmness and lure
him to her feet. He was but man and human, and vaunted himself upon
being no more.

There had been for some months much talk in town of the rapid downfall
of the whilom favourite of Fashion, Sir John Oxon. But a few weeks
before the coming happiness of the old Earl of Dunstanwolde was made
known to the world, there had been a flurry of gossip over a rumour
that Sir John, whose fortunes were in a precarious condition, was about
to retrieve them by a rich marriage. A certain Mistress Isabel Beaton,
a young Scotch lady, had been for a year counted the greatest fortune
in the market, and besieged by every spendthrift or money-seeker the
town knew. Not only was she heiress to fine estates in Scotland, but to
wealth-yielding sugar plantations in the West Indies. She was but
twenty and had some good looks and an amiable temper, though with her
fortune, had she been ugly as Hecate, she would have had more suitors
than she could manage with ease. But she was not easily pleased, or of
a susceptible nature, and 'twas known she had refused suitor after
suitor, among them men of quality and rank, the elegant and decorous
Viscount Wilford, among others, having knelt at her feet, and--having
proffered her the boon of his lofty manner and high accomplishments
--having been obliged to rise a discarded man, to his amazement and
discomfort. The world she lived in was of the better and more
respectable order, and Jack Oxon had seen little of it, finding it not
gay and loose enough for his tastes, but suddenly, for reasons best
known