The Brown Mask | Page 7

we have witnessed to-day?"
"I must confess I enjoyed Judge Marriott hugely," was the answer, "and
the prisoner was a man, I'll say that for him. I almost regret not having
had the honour of being stopped by him. I grant you he was interesting,
and played his part gallantly."
"Doomed to die on the gallows! Do you call that playing a part?"
"My dear," and Lady Bolsover touched the girl's arm, "did I not know
your ancestry I should imagine your father a scurvy Puritan and your
mother a kitchen wench given to long hymns and cant of a Sunday. Are
you sure this cavalier of yours was not some miserable sniveller who
found time to favour you with a sermon? He disappeared so hastily that
it would seem he was ashamed of himself."
The girl did not answer, and if the colour came into her cheeks at the
memory of what the man had said to her, Lady Bolsover was too
amused at her own conjecture to notice it.
There are those who are so intent upon living that they have little time
to think. Lady Bolsover was of these. The hour that did not hold some
excitement in it wearied her and made her petulant. Her husband, dead
these ten years, had been amongst the enthusiastic welcomers of
Charles at his Restoration, and his wife had from first to last been a
well-known figure in the Court of the Merry Monarch. That she was no
beauty, rather than because she possessed any great strength of
character, probably accounted for the fact that she enjoyed no peculiar
fame in that dissolute company. As she could not be the heroine of an
intrigue, it pleased her to consider herself too great a dame for such

affairs, and she was fully persuaded that she might count her lovers by
the score, even now, had she so desired. As she had no very definite
character, so she had no real convictions. Charles was dead, and James
was King. Many changes were imminent, and Lady Bolsover was
waiting to see in which direction the wind blew. Her nature, perhaps,
was to hate Puritans and all their ways, but, if necessary to her own
well-being, she would easily be able to love them and curse all
Catholics. She was not really bad at heart, but she was a strange
companion for Barbara Lanison.
Some few months ago Sir John Lanison, of Aylingford Abbey in
Hampshire, Lady Bolsover's brother and Barbara's uncle and sole
guardian since the death of her parents, had suggested that his sister
should take charge of his ward for a little while. Practically she knew
nothing of London, he said, and it was time she did. Sir John declared
that he did not want it to be said that he had hidden his niece away at
the Abbey so that no man should have a chance of seeing her. He had
known prettier women, but she was well enough, and where her face
failed to attract her ample fortune would.
"She's got more learning than is needful for a girl, to my mind," he told
his sister; "but that kind of nonsense will be knocked out of her as soon
as she understands her value as a woman. Send her back with all the
corners rounded, my dear Peggy--that is what I want."
Lady Bolsover had done her best, but the result was not very
satisfactory. Barbara had convictions which her aunt was powerless to
undermine, and seemed to set such a value upon herself that no man
was able to make the slightest impression on her. She had barely
refrained from laughing outright at the compliments of recognised wits,
and half a dozen gallants with amorous intentions had been baffled and
put to shame. Lord Rosmore, whose way with a woman was
pronounced irresistible, had declared her adorable, but impossible, and
Judge Marriott had promised Lady Bolsover a very handsome gratuity
if she could persuade her niece to favour him and become his wife.
Barbara Lanison could not be unconscious of the sensation she
caused--a woman never is--but she sometimes studied the reflection in

her mirror, and tried to discover the reason. Quite honestly she failed.
She was not dissatisfied with the reflection, in its way it was pleasing,
she admitted, but she had not supposed that it was of the kind that
would appeal to men, and to such a variety of men. The women who
usually pleased them were so different. It even occurred to her that
there might be something in herself, in her behaviour, which was not
quite nice, and that her real attraction lay in this, an idea which proved
that her estimate of the men who came to her aunt's house was not a
very