A Mere Chance: A Novel. Vol. 1

"Dear horses!" she exclaimed, with an almost solemn rapture as she watched them straggle away. She would have liked to go up and pat them all, and caress their heaving flanks and their poor trembling noses, after all they had gone through. And then her face brightened as the winner came pacing back, dropping and lifting his beautiful head as he filled his lungs again; and when his jockey saluted the judge, she leaned forward over the railing and smiled a smile in acknowledgement of his prowess, which made that jockey think himself a hero for the rest of the day.

"And now," said Mr. Thornley, "there is nothing more at present: so we'll see how your aunt is getting on, and look for the Digbys." The Digbys were the people they expected to take back with them to Adelonga.

But even as he spoke he was arrested in his place by some of his many friends, who crowded the steps below him, wanting to have a few minutes' gossip about the race, or perhaps wanting to have a nearer view of her own pretty person, never seen in those parts before.

And while she waited she turned aside to have another amused look at the children in their merry-go-rounds, and the lads playing Aunt Sally, and all the simple festivities of the holiday-makers, whose proceedings she could so well survey from her present commanding position; and it was then that she saw for the first time a remarkable-looking horseman riding slowly through the crowd.

Her attention was attracted in the first place by the beauty of his horse – for in a small way she was a good judge of horses: and then she noticed that the equipment of that noble animal was slightly different from what she was accustomed to see.

She supposed it was an English saddle in which that tall man sat so square and straight; then she wondered why he wore his stirrup leathers so excessively long; and then lifted her glass and stared intently at his face. There was not much of this to see just now, even through a strong glass; for he wore a small, soft cap with a peak to it, low over his eyes, in which the sun was shining, and though his jaws were shaven and his brown throat bare, he had a heavy, drooping, reddish moustache, which was the largest she had ever seen.

He was riding in the direction of the judge's box, and as he came near she dropped her glass, and shrinking back shyly touched that potentate's arm. Mr. Thornley turned round, and the horseman took off his cap with a stately sort of careless courtesy, and revealed a clear-cut, keen-eyed, powerful, proud face, neither young nor old, rather thin and worn, and tanned and dried to leather-colour, which Rachel felt at once to be the most impressive face she had ever looked upon.

"Hullo!" cried Mr. Thornley, in an accent of profound amazement. "Why, I thought you were gone to Queensland!"

"I ought to have gone," the stranger replied. He had a quiet, cool voice, that nevertheless rang clear through all the noise about them. "I duly started yesterday, but we broke a trace, and I lost my train by two minutes."

"Two minutes! Well, that was hard lines. Are the Digbys here?"

"Yes."

"You are not going to make another start immediately, I suppose?"

"Not till next week, I think."

"Then you'll come back with us to-night?"

"Thanks."

Here he reined up his horse just beside Rachel's railing, and sent a furtive but searching glance up into her pretty blushing face.

"Allow me to introduce my wife's cousin, Miss Fetherstonhaugh," said Mr. Thornley, laying his hand on her shoulder with a paternal gesture. "Rachel, my dear – Mr. Roden Dalrymple."

CHAPTER IX.

A BLACK SHEEP

"WHO is Mr. Roden Dalrymple?" asked Rachel presently. Mr. Thornley was escorting her back to her aunt, and the person in question was riding across the ground – slowly, as he had come – in search of one of the grooms of his party, to whom he might deliver his horse to be stabled in the township until the return from Adelonga.

"Who is he?" repeated Mr. Thornley. "He is Mrs. Digby's brother. Nice little woman, Mrs. Digby. You will like her I know. I am very glad she has come."

"But what is he?" persisted Rachel, so absorbed in watching the tall rider swinging along at that stately, easy pace, with his long stirrups and his dangling rein, that she nearly tumbled over a couple of children who crossed her path. "Is he a Queensland squatter?"

"That is what he thinks of being," laughed Mr. Thornley, with an amused, half-mocking laugh. "He has taken up a big run with Jim Gordon, and they are going to live there and manage for themselves. A nice mess they'll make of it, I expect."

"Why?" inquired Rachel.

"Why? They know no more about it than you do. How should they? Oh, by the bye, yes; I suppose Dalrymple has dabbled in cattle a little – in that South American venture of his. But that experience won't benefit him much. He lost every penny he put into that business."

"Has he lived in South America?" asked Rachel.

"He has lived all over the world, I think. He's a rolling stone, my dear, that's what he is – with the proverbial consequences."

"Is he poor, then?"

"Poor as a church mouse. That is to say, he has got a bit of an estate somewhere in Scotland or Ireland – I really forget which – an old ruin of a house mortgaged to the chimney-pots, and a few starved farms, that bring him in a few odd hundreds now and again. He tries all sorts of queer schemes for mending his fortunes, but they never come to anything."

"Perhaps he is one of the unlucky ones – like my poor father," suggested Rachel.

"I don't know. I'm afraid he's a ne'er-do-weel. Judging from his past history – Jim Gordon knows all about him – he has no worse enemy than himself."

"What is his history?" Rachel asked the question with a vague sense of resentment against her prosperous host, who had probably never known misfortunes.

"Well, he was an only son, and I suppose spoilt – to begin with. He was brought up for the army – simply, as far as I can make out, from force of habit, because his father and no end of grandfathers had been soldiers before him – instead of being taught how to manage and improve that ramshackle old property of his.

"He was in a crack cavalry regiment; one of the worst of them – I mean for folly and extravagance; and he went no end of a pace, as if he had the Bank of England at his back, and got all his affairs into a mess; and then he got gambling at Newmarket. The story goes that he played a brother-officer for some woman that they were both in love with; and he staked everything he had in the world that he could lay his hands on, except that old land and house, which the law kept for his children. Fortunately, he is not married, nor ever likely to be."

"And he lost her?" said Rachel, in an awed whisper, with something very like tears in her eyes.

"Her? He lost more than ever she was worth, I'll be bound. He lost to that extent that he had to sell his commission to pay. The young fool! he must have been a raving lunatic."

"And what did he do then?" asked Rachel, taking out her handkerchief and blowing her nose ostentatiously.

"No one quite knows what he did for the first few years after he sold out. He lived in Paris most of his time, and knocked about on the continent, at Baden and those places – up to no good, you may be sure. Then he went to the Cape, hunting and amusing himself; and then to California, gold-digging; and then all about South America, trying farming or cattle-raising, or something of that sort; and then Digby went home and married his sister, and she persuaded him to come here."

"Has he been here long?"

"A year or two. He has lived with them most of the time – learning colonial experience of Digby, I suppose. She is awfully fond of him, that little woman. And Digby never says a word against him – for her sake, I suppose."

"Why should he say anything against him?" asked Rachel rather warmly. "He is doing nothing wrong now, is he?"

"Oh, no. He is older and wiser now, I daresay. Still – still – " and Mr. Thornley looked askance at the pretty young creature who was about to make this reprobate's acquaintance under his roof, and bethought him that he ought to secure her against temptation and danger – "still there's no doubt that he is rather a bad lot – what you would call a black sheep, you know, my dear – not the sort of man that it is desirable to be very intimate with."

Rachel blushed one of her ready blushes, and with such suddenness and vigour that Mr. Thornley feared he had accidentally made equivocal suggestions.

"I don't mean that he is not a gentleman – a thoroughly honourable gentleman," he explained hastily. "I don't know the rights of that Newmarket business, but in everything else, as far as I am aware, his moral character is as good as mine is; otherwise I should not ask him to Adelonga. I am only speaking of him as a man who has lived a sort of loose, extravagant, Bohemian kind of life, you know."

"I know," assented Rachel absently. Already his prudent tactics were having their natural effect. She was ready to champion the cause of this apparently friendless, as well as unfortunate man; in whom, had he been recommended to her favour, she might – I do not say she would, but she might – have felt only an ordinary unemotional interest; and she did not want to hear any more to his disparagement.

"Is that their buggy?" she asked, nodding in the direction of a covered waggonette which was now drawn up alongside the break – in which three ladies sat with Mrs. Hardy, while three gentlemen leaned in and talked to them.

"Yes," he replied, "and that is Mrs. Digby – that little woman in a brown hat. The one next her is Mrs. Hale, a neighbour of theirs – cousin of Digby's. The girl is Miss Hale. That's Digby with the big light beard. The little man is Hale. The man with a brown beard is Lessel – engaged to Miss Hale."

"Are they all coming to Adelonga?"

"They are. And I am wondering how we are going to stow them all. We can pack ten inside, with a little squeezing, but there is Dalrymple extra."

"I'll sit in the boot with the children."