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| Notes: | Synopsis of previous chapters previously placed at the head of this instalment (Chapters 10-11) |
SYNOPSIS OF PRECEDING CHAPTERS.
edit(Placed at the head of this instalment (Chapters 12-13)
Common opinion said that Lord Lvnborough ought never to have had a peerage and forty thousand a year; he ought to have had a pound a week and a back bedroom in Bloomsbury. Then he would have become an eminent man; as it was, he turned out only a singularly erratic individual. Miss Gilletson had been studying the local paper, which appeared every Saturday, and reached Nab Grange on the following morning. She uttered an exclamation and read out to the Marchesa: "'Lord Lynborough, accompanied by his friend, Mr. Leonard Stabb, the well-known authority on prehistoric remains, and Mr. Roger Wilbraham, his private secretary, arrived at the Castle on Friday.'" Helena Vittoria Maria Antonia, Marchesa di San Servolo, was now in her twenty-fourth year. Born of an Italian father and an English mother, she had bestowed her hand on her paternal country, but her heart remained in her mother's. She was early left a widow stepmother of adult Italian offspring—owner for life of an Apennine fortress. She liked the fortress, but disliked the stepchildren, and England—her mother's home—presented itself in the light of refuge. Nab Grange was in the market. It had served for a family dower-house, till a bad race-meeting had induced the squire of the day to sell it to a Mr. Cross of Leeds. The Crosses held and the Marchesa bought it a year before Lord Lynborough came home. Now, it had long been the custom for residents at the Castle to gain the beach by a short cut through the grounds of Nab Grange, but the Marchesa would have preferred that strangers should not pass across her property, in full view of her windows, without her permission, and thus it happened that on a Sunday morning in June, Captain Irons and Mr. Stillford, walking back through the Scarsmoor grounds from Fillby church, found the gate leading from the road into the Grange meadows securely padlocked. Lord Lynborough wrote a formal letter of remonstrance, with a request to her Excellency to have the kindness to order that the padlock and other obstacles should be removed, and concluding: "He will be obliged by this being done before eight o'clock to-morrow morning—at which time Lord Lynborough intends to proceed by Reach Path to the sea in order to bathe." The plot thickens as the members of the two households become further acquainted by various meetings incidental to the polite warfare that is maintained. Miss Gilletson, for instance, is quite won over to the enemy's side after a meeting with Lord Lynborough over the family tombs and brasses in the village church, and the Marchesa herself cannot help making friends with Mr. Roger Wilbraham, and by the time a village cricket match is played the two households are sufficiently acquainted to inspire Lord Lynborough with the hope that the haughty Marchesa has been left to lunch alone "on the other side of the field," but he finds her ladyship merrily entertaining his own henchmen, Wilbraham and Stabb, and is forced to realise that he is "not the only expert in the art of driving wedges." Disaffection develops rapidly among the members of both house-parties, so that both Lord Lynborough and the Marchesa incur the criticism of their own guests for their manner of prolonging the quarrel. In the previous instalment Lady Norah Mountliffey has gone to see Lord Lynborough on a little embassage of her own. Our artist here shows her being escorted back by Roger Wilbraham. Further correspondence passes with a view to some compromise as to the use of the disputed pathway.