I
THE next morning was a busy one for his Grace, and it also marked a tide in the affairs of Bridport House. Soon after ten the ball opened with the inauspicious arrival of Lady Wargrave. The head of the Family had just unfolded his newspaper and put on his spectacles when her ladyship was announced.
As the redoubtable Charlotte entered the room, the hard glitter of her eyes and the forward thrust of a dominant chin were ominous indeed. Bitter experience made her brother only too keenly alive to these portents.
Without any beating about the bush she came at once to the point.
“What’s this I hear, Johnnie? Sarah tells me you have revoked that woman’s notice.”
“Woman!” temporized his Grace. “What woman?” The tone was velvet.
She glowered at him.
“There’s only one woman in this household, my friend.”
The Duke laid down his Times with an air of extremely well assumed indifference. Were the parish pump and the minor domesticities all she could find to interest her, while all sorts of Radical infamies played Old Harry with the British Constitution?
Lady Wargrave, however, was well inured to this familiar gambit.
“Come, Johnnie,” she said tartly, “don’t waste time. The matter’s too serious. Sarah says you have asked Mrs. Sanderson to stay on.”
“Yes, I have asked her to be good enough to reconsider her decision,” said his Grace in the slightly forensic manner of the gilded chamber.
“On what grounds, may one ask?”
“I merely put it to her”—he now began to choose each word with a precision that made his sister writhe—“that she was indispensable to the general comfort and well-being of a man as old and gout-ridden as myself.”
“Did you, indeed!”
It was a facer. And yet it might have been foreseen. Perhaps the ladies had been a little too elated by their coup de main; or, had they assumed too confidently that at last they had made an end of a shameless intriguer?
Yes, a facer. Charlotte could have slain her brother. He had given away the whole position. It was the act of a traitor. In a voice shaken with anger she proceeded in no measured terms to tell him what she thought of him.
His Grace bore the tirade calmly and with fortitude. He had an instinct for justice—long a source of inconvenience to its possessor!—which now insisted that there was something to be said for the enemy point of view. Still he might not have borne its presentment so patiently had Charlotte not shown her usual cunning. “She did not speak for herself,” she was careful to assure him, “but for the sake of the Family as a whole.” The presence of this woman at Bridport House could no longer be tolerated.
To this the Duke said little, but he committed himself to the statement that Mrs. Sanderson was much maligned and that they all owed a great deal to her devotion.
This was too much for Charlotte. She bubbled over. “You must be mad!” Her voice was like the croak of a raven.
“Personally,” rejoined his mellifluous Grace, “I am particularly grateful that she has consented to stay on.”
“You’re mad, my friend.”
“So are we all.” His Grace folded the Times imperturbably.
Lady Wargrave was defeated. She abruptly decided to drop the subject. However, she did not quit the room until one last bolt had been winged at her adversary, yet in order to propel it she had to impose an iron restraint on her feelings.
“Before I go”—she turned as she got to the door—“there’s something else I should like to say. Jack’s mother is in town and is staying with me. Like all the Parington’s she has plenty of sense. She will welcome the Marjorie arrangement—thinks it quite providential—has told her son so—and she looks to you as the head of the Family to see that it doesn’t miscarry.”
Her brother’s ugly mouth and explosive eyes were not lost upon Charlotte, but before he could reply she had made a strategic retirement. Did these futile women expect him to play the matrimonial agent? The mere suggestion was infuriating, yet well he knew the extreme urgency of the matter. The whole situation called for great delicacy. A combination of subtle finesse and iron will was needed if the institution to which he pinned his faith was not to be shaken to its foundations.
II
Lady Wargrave had gone but a few minutes when Jack arrived at Bridport House. He had to inform his kinsman that Mary Lawrence would appear at twelve o’clock.
The Duke was in a vile temper. Charlotte had fretted it already; moreover, the disease from which he suffered had undermined it long ago; and at the best of times the mere sight of this young Colonial, with his wild ideas, was about as much as he could bear. However, he was too astute a man and far too well found in the ways of his world not to be able to mask his feelings on an occasion of this magnitude. The fellow was a perpetual source of worry and annoyance, yet so much was at stake that the Duke, in order to deal with him, summoned all the bonhomie of a prospective father-in-law. If anything could have bridged the gulf such tones of honey must surely have done so.
Jack, however, was in no mood to accept soft speeches, no matter how flattering to the self-esteem of a raw Colonial! He was determined to put all to the touch. These people must learn the limit of their power. And as it was the Tenderfoot’s habit to leave nothing to chance he began with the bold but simple declaration that nothing would induce him to give up the finest girl in the country. And he hoped when Mary appeared at twelve o’clock his kinsman would bear in mind that very important fact.
Months ago his Grace had begun to despair of the rôle of the modern Chesterfield. Even since the young ass had first reported himself at Bridport House, very sound advice, based on intimate knowledge and first-hand experience, had been lavished upon him. The best had been done to correct the republican ideas he had gathered in the western hemisphere. He lacked nothing in the way of counsel and precept. But the seed had fallen on unreceptive soil, nay, on ground singularly barren. From the first the novice had shown precious little inclination to heed the fount of wisdom.
The Duke asked the young man to look at the matter in a common sense way. He would have an extraordinarily difficult place to fill; therefore, it was his clear duty to trust those who knew the ropes. The lady of his choice was a case for experts. Special qualities, inherited aptitudes were needed in the wife he married! Surely he must realize that?
The Tenderfoot said bluntly that he did and that Mary Lawrence had them.
His Grace managed to hold a growing impatience in check. But the answer of the novice had revealed such a confusion of ideas that it was hard to treat it seriously.
“Unless a woman has been born to the thing and bred up in it, how can she hope to be equal to the task?”
“Plenty of ’em are,” said the Tenderfoot. “Anyhow they seem to make a pretty good bluff at it.”
His Grace shook a somber head.
“You can’t deny that the Upper Crust is always being recruited from the people underneath.”
“Immensely to the detriment of the Constitution,” said his Grace forensically.
“It won’t be so in this case,” said the Tenderfoot. “Any family is devilish lucky that persuades Mary Lawrence to enter it. She’s a very exceptional girl. And when you see her, sir, I’m sure you’ll say so.”
“A young woman of ability, no doubt.” The Duke was growing irritated beyond measure, yet he was determined to give no hint of his frame of mind. “These—these bohemians always are. But if you’ll allow me to say so, the mere fact that she is ready to undertake responsibilities of which she can know nothing proves the nature of her limitations.”
The hit was so palpable that Jack felt bound to counter it as well as he could. But his eagerness to do so led him into a tragic blunder. “That’s where you do her an injustice,” he said, not giving himself time to weigh his words. “She didn’t know that she might have to be a duchess when she promised to marry me.”
The folly of such a speech was apparent to the young man almost before it was uttered. A sudden heightening of a concentrated gaze made him curse his own damnable impetuosity. He saw at once that the admission would be used against him; moreover, an intense desire that Mary should have fair play led him into further pitfalls. “The odd thing is,” he said in his blunderer’s way, “that she happens to see things here at the angle at which you see them, sir. At least, I always tell her so.”
His kinsman smiled. “That gives us hope at any rate.” And he even showed a glint of cheerfulness.
The Tenderfoot had a desire to bite off his tongue. He felt himself floundering deeper and deeper into a morass. A sickening sensation crept upon him that he had put himself at the mercy of this crafty old Jesuit.
“Now, sir, don’t go taking an unfair advantage of anything I may have told you.” The sheer impotence of such a speech served only to emphasize his tragic folly.
By now there was a sinister light in the eyes of his Grace. The unlucky Tenderfoot could hardly stifle a groan of vexation. Only a born idiot would have taken pains to put such a weapon in the hands of the enemy!
Overcome by a sudden hopeless anger the young man rose from his chair and fled the room. His course was not stayed until he had passed headlong down the white marble staircase and out of doors into a golden morning of July. For the next two hours he ranged the Park grass. It was the only means he had of working off an irritation and self-disgust that were almost unbearable.
III
Youth and inexperience might have put a weapon into the hand of his Grace, yet when the clock on the chimneypiece struck twelve he was in a very evil mood. The task before him was not at all to his taste; and the more he considered it the less he liked the part he had now to play.
From various sources he had heard enough of the girl to stimulate his curiosity. Apart from a lover’s hyperbole, of which he took no account whatever, impartial observers, viewing her from afar, had commented upon her; moreover, there was the extremely piquant nature of her antecedents. She was a niece of the faithful Sanderson, she was also the daughter of a police constable.
The Duke was apt to plume himself that his instinct for diplomacy amounted to second nature. But, he ruefully reflected, his powers in this direction were likely to be tested to the full. His task seemed to bristle with difficulties. Bridport House was no place for a young woman of this kind, but it was not going to be an easy matter to tell her that in just so many words. The best he had to hope for was that she would prove a person of common sense.
When at five minutes past the hour Miss Lawrence was announced, for one reason or another, the Duke was in a state of inconvenient curiosity. And as if the mere circumstances of the case did not themselves suffice, a chain of odd and queer reflections chose to assail his mind at the very moment of her appearance.
It was terribly inconvenient for his Grace to rise from his chair, mainly for the reason that one swollen, snowbooted foot reclined at ease on another. But with an effort that wrung him with pain he contrived to stand up.
“Please don’t move,” said a voice deep, clear, and musical, while he was still in the act of rising. “Oh, don’t—please!”
But without making any immediate reply the Duke poised himself as well as he could on one foot, more or less in the manner of an emu, and bowed rather grimly. The dignity of the whole proceeding was perhaps slightly over-emphasized, it was almost as if he intended to overawe his visitor with the note of the grand seigneur.
Whether this was the case or not the bow was returned; and slight as it was, it had a dignity that matched his own. Also it was touched ever so gently with humor. A pair of gravely-searching eyes met the hooded, serious, half-ironical orbs of his Grace.
“Nice of you to come and see an invalid,” he said slowly, very slowly, with a good deal of manner.
“A great pleasure,” she smiled from the topmost inch of her remarkable height.
While these brief, and on his part decidedly painful maneuvers had been going on, the man of the world had been busily seeking something of which so far he had not been able to find a trace. In manner and bearing there was not a flaw.
Already the expert’s eye had been struck by a look of distinction that was extraordinary. She was undoubtedly handsome, nay, more than handsome; she had the subtle look of race which gives to beauty a cachet, a quality of permanence. Her height was beyond the common, but every line of the long, slim frame was a thing of elegance, of molded delicacy. She was perhaps a shade too thin, but it gave her an indefinable style which charmed, in spite of himself, this shrewd, instructed observer. Then her dress and her hat, her neat gloves and boots, although they were models of reticence, were all touched by a subtle air of fashion which seemed somehow to reflect their wearer.
The “Chorus Girl” was in the nature of a surprise. The Duke indicated a chair, on the edge of which she perched, straight as a willow, her chin held steadily, her amused eyes veiled with a becoming gravity. As the Duke painfully reseated himself he felt a cool scrutiny upon him. And that very quality of coolness was a little provocative. In the circumstances of the case it had hardly a right to be there. To himself it was most proper, but in this young woman, a police constable’s daughter, who earned her living in the theater, a little embarrassment of some kind would have been an added grace. If anything however she had more composure than he; and in spite of the charm and the power of a personality that was vivid yet clear-cut, he could not help resenting the fact just a little.
When at last he had slowly resettled himself on his two chairs he turned eyes of ironical power full upon her. Yes, she was amazingly handsome, and she reminded him strangely of a face he had seen. “I wonder if you know why I have asked you to be so kind as to come here,” were the first words he spoke. And he seemed to weigh each one very carefully before he uttered it.
“I think I do, at least I think I may guess.” The note of absolute frankness was so much more than he had a right to look for that it pleased him more than it need have done.
“Well?” he said, with a gentleness in his voice of which he was not aware.
“I’m afraid I’ve been causing a lot of trouble.” The tone of regret was so perfectly sincere that it threw him off his guard. He had not expected this, nay, he had looked for something totally different. The girl was a lady, no matter what her private circumstances might be, and with a sudden deep annoyance he felt that it was going to be supremely difficult to say in just so many words what he had to say.
To his relief, however, she seemed with the flair of her sex at once to divine his difficulty. This splendid-looking old man, every inch of whom was grand seigneur, poor old snowboot included! was already asking mutely for her help in a situation that she knew he must dislike intensely. In his odd silence, in the defensive arrogance of his manner there was appeal to her own fineness. She could not help feeling an instinctive sympathy with this old grandee, who at the very outset was finding himself unequal to the task imposed upon him by the circumstances of the case.
They entered on a long pause, and it was left to her to break it.
“I didn’t know when I promised to marry Jack that he would be the next Duke of Bridport,” she said very slowly at last.
The simple speech was intended to help him, a fact of which he was well aware. And with a sense of acute annoyance he felt a latent chivalry begin to stir him; it was a chord that she, of all people, had no right to touch.
“Didn’t you?” he said; and in the grip of this new emotion it would have been not unpleasant to add “My dear.”
“Of course I’m much to blame,” she went on, encouraged by his tone. “I realize that one ought to have made inquiries.”
He was clearly puzzled. From under heavily knitted brows his keen eyes peered at her. “But why?” An instinct for fair play framed the question on her behalf.
A note of pain entered the charming voice. “Oh, one ought,” she said. “It was one’s duty to know who and what he was and all about him.”
“Forgive me if I don’t altogether agree.” In spite of himself he was being conquered by this largeness and magnanimity. So fully was he prepared for something else that he was now rather at a loss. “In any case,” he said, “the fault hardly seems to be yours.”
“It is kind of you to say that.” A pair of wide eyes, long-lashed and luminous, which seemed oddly familiar, raked him with a wonderful candor. “But I seem to be giving enormous trouble to others—trouble it would have been easy to spare them.”
Again his Grace dissented. Surprise was growing, along with that other, that even more inconvenient emotion which was now driving him hard.
“Don’t overlook your own side of the case,” he was constrained to say.
“Oh, yes, there’s that—but one doesn’t like to insist on it.”
“Why not?”
“The other is so much more important.”
She felt his deep eyes searching hers, but except a little veiled amusement, they had nothing to conceal.
“I am by no means sure that it is.” To his own clear annoyance, the fatal instinct for justice began to take a hand in his overthrow. “As the matter has been represented to me there is no doubt, if you took it to a court of law, that you would get substantial damages.”
“As if one could!” She suddenly crimsoned.
“If I have hurt you in any way, I beg your pardon,” he said at once with a simple humility for which she honored him. “After all, if you decide not to marry my relation you give up a position which most people allow to be exceptional.”
“Yes—but if one has never aspired to it!”
He grew more puzzled.
“Can you afford to be so fastidious?—if you don’t think the question impertinent?”
“I have my living to earn,” she said very simply, “but of course I don’t want that to enter into the case.”
“Naturally. Of course. Let me put another question—if it is not impertinent?” The eyes of the Duke had now a grave amusement, but they had also something else. “I suppose you care a good deal for this young man?”
She simply stared at him in a kind of bewilderment.
Such an answer, unexpectedly swift, nobly complete, seemed to disconcert him a little.
“And—and without a word you give him up for the sake of other people?”
“Yes—if they insist upon it.”
“If they insist upon it!” He shook his head at her in rather uneasy surprise.
“I have told Jack that I cannot marry him unless he has your full consent.”
Again the wide gray eyes looked out fearlessly upon the rather bewildered gentleman. They could hardly refrain from a smile at his growing perplexity. But there was something other than perplexity in his tone when at last he said, “You know of course that I cannot possibly give it.”
“Of course not.”
“You give up your young man—simply because of that?”
The unhesitating reply seemed to increase his surprise. This girl was taking him into deeper places than he had ever been in before. He shook his head at her in a whimsical fashion which she thought quite charming. “It hardly does, you know, to be too bright and good for human nature’s daily food,” he said with a softness in his deep voice, which was enchanting.
“Oh, I’m very far from being that.” She smiled and shook her head. “I won’t own that I’m as bad as all that—at least I hope I’m not.”
“But if you insist on being so uncommonly self-sacrificing, you’re in danger, aren’t you?”
“One can’t call it self-sacrifice altogether.”
“Afraid of being bored, eh?”
“I could never be bored with Jack,” she said gravely. “But I don’t see why one should pat oneself on the back for trying to live up to one’s principles.”
“Principles! May I ask what principles are involved in a case of this kind?”
“‘Do unto others as you would be done by.’ It’s rather priggish, I admit, but it’s a splendid motto, if only one is equal to it. As a rule it is much too much for me, but in this case I want to do my best to live up to it.”
“There you go again.” The old man shook an amused finger at her. “Why it’s altruism, there’s no other word for it.”
“It’s common sense—if one is able to think through to it.”
“And that is why,” he said, with almost the air of a father, “you give up your young man—simply because of that?”
She nodded. But her smile was rather drawn.
“Tell me, Miss Lawrence”—the curiosity of his Grace was mounting to a pitch that enabled him to match her frankness with his own—“why are you so sure that you will be unacceptable here?”
“It stands to reason, I’m afraid. If I lived at Bridport House and the future head of the Family married the housekeeper’s niece, I should be bound to look on it as a perfectly hopeless arrangement.”
He honored this candor. Choosing his words with great delicacy, he could but pay homage to such clear-sighted honesty. “I only hope you will not blame us too much,” he said finally, with an odd change of voice.
“I don’t blame you at all. You are as you are. If I lived here I am sure those would be my feelings.”
The old man was touched by this generosity. Lest he should overrate it, however, she added quickly with a flash of pride, “Besides, I should simply hate to go where I was not wanted.”
Patrician to the bone, he admired that, too. Every inch of her rang true. Somehow it had become terribly difficult to treat her in the only way the circumstances permitted. But no matter what his private feelings, he must hold them in check.
“Well, I think, Miss Lawrence,” he said, with a return to the dryness of the man of the world, “you ought to congratulate yourself that you don’t live here.” But suddenly his voice trailed off. “You would not be half so fine as you are”—after all, he couldn’t conceal that a deeply-stirred old man was speaking—“had you been born and bred in a hot-house.”
She flushed at the unexpected words. Quite suddenly her eyes brimmed with tears.
“If I have said anything that wounds I humbly apologize,” he said, with a gentleness that to her was adorable.
“Oh, no! It is only that I had not expected to have such a compliment paid me.”
“Well, it’s a sincere one.” As he looked at her strange thoughts came into his mind; his voice began to shake in a queer way. “And it is paid you by an old man who is not very wise and not very happy.” As he continued to look at her his voice underwent further surprising changes. “I wish we could have had you with us. There is not one of us here fit to tie your shoe-lace, my dear.”
Such a speech gave pain rather than pleasure. She saw him a feudal chieftain, the head of a sacred order. Was it quite fit and proper that he should speak in that way to the humblest of his vassals? She would never be able to forget his words, but in that room, with the spirit of place enfolding her like some exquisite garment, she could almost have wished that they had not been uttered.
Suddenly she rose to go. As he regarded her in all the salient perfection of mind and mansion, it seemed too bitterly ironical that he should bar the door against her. Why were they not on their knees thanking heaven for such a creature!
“You must forgive us, even if Fate is not likely to,” he said, thinking aloud.
“Please don’t let us look at it in that way,” was the quick rejoinder. “We all have our places in the world. And, after all, one ought to remember that it is very much easier to be Mary Lawrence than to be Duchess of Bridport.”
The old man shook his head dolefully, and then, in spite of her earnest prayer that he should stay as he was, he rose with a great effort to say good-by. The deeply-lined face was a complex of many emotions as he did so.
In the very act of taking leave, her eyes, magnetized by the room itself, strayed round it almost wistfully. Somehow it meant so much that they hardly knew how to tear themselves away. Involuntarily the Duke’s eyes followed hers to a masterpiece among masterpieces on the farther wall. He could trace all that was in her mind, and the knowledge seemed to increase his pain and his perplexity.
“There’s something wonderful in this room,” she said, half to herself. “Something one can’t put into words. It’s like nothing else. I suppose it’s a kind of harmony.”
The Duke didn’t speak, but slowly brought back his eyes to look at her. His favorite room held treasures of many kinds, yet as he well knew he was wantonly casting away a gem rarer than any in his collection. His eyes were upon a noble profile instinct with the dignity of an old race. Here was artistry surer, even more exquisite than Corot’s. He could not repress a sigh of vexation.
Unwilling to part with her, he still detained her even when she had turned to go. “One moment, Miss Lawrence,” he said. “Do these things speak to you?” Near his elbow was a wonderful cabinet of Chinese lacquer which housed a collection of old French snuffboxes. He opened it for her inspection, and with a little air of connoisseurship she gazed at the rarities within.
“They are lovely,” she said eagerly.
“Honor me by choosing one as a token of my gratitude.”
She hesitated to take him at his word, but he was so much in earnest that it would have seemed unkind to refuse.
“May I choose any one of them?”
“Please. And I hope you will do me the honor of choosing the best.”
Put on her mettle she brought instinct rather than knowledge to bear on a fine collection, and chose a charming Louis Quinze.
“You have a flair,” said the Duke, laughing. “That is the one. I am so glad you found it. I should not like you to have less than the best. Good-by!” Again he took her hand and his voice had a father’s affection in it. Then he pressed the bell, opened the door, and ushered her into the care of a servant with an air of solicitude which she felt to be quite extraordinary. As he did so he apologized with a humility that seemed almost excessive for his inability to accompany her downstairs.
IV
As soon as the girl had gone, the Duke returned painfully to his chair. He was now the prey of very odd sensations, and they began to crystallize at once into emotion as deep as any he had ever felt. Something had happened at this interview which left him now with a feeling of numb surprise. The entrance of this girl into that room had brought something into his life, her going away had taken something out of it. Almost in the act of meeting a subtle bond had seemed to arise between them. It was as if each had a sixth sense in regard to the other. Their minds had marched so perfectly together that it was hard to realize that this was the first time they had met. This rare creature had touched cords which had long been forgotten, even had they been known to exist, in the slightly dehumanized thing he called himself.
Shaken as he had never been in his life, his mind was held by the thought of her long after she had gone. Mystified, disconcerted, rather forlorn, a harrowing idea was beginning to torment him. At last he could bear it no longer. Rising from his chair with a stifled impatience, he made his way out of the room leaning heavily upon his stick. He went along the corridor as far as the head of the central staircase. Here he stood a long while in contemplation of a large, rather florid picture by Lawrence. The subject was a young woman of distinguished beauty, a portrait of his famous grandmother, the wife of Bridport’s second duke. Apart from her appearance, which had been greatly celebrated, she had had a reputation for wit and charm; her memoirs of the ’Thirties had long taken rank as a classic; and no annals of the time were complete without the mention of her name.
The prey of some very unhappy thoughts, the Duke stood long immersed in the picture before him. The resemblance he sought to trace had grown so plain that it provoked a shiver. The line of the cheek, the shape of the eyes, the curve of the chin, the poise of the head on the long and slender throat were identical with the living replica he had just seen.
At last he returned to his room and rang the bell. To the servant who answered it, he said: “Ask Mrs. Sanderson to come to me.”
The summons was promptly obeyed. But as Harriet came into the room she bore a small tray containing a wine-glass, a teaspoon, and a bottle of medicine. At the sight of these the Duke made a grimace like a petulant child.
“I am sure the new medicine does you a great deal of good.” The tone was quite maternal in its tenderness.
“You think so?” The words were dubious; all the same her voice and look seemed to have an odd power of reassurance.
“Oh, yes, I think there can be no doubt of it.” She measured the dose gravely.
“Well, I take your word, I take your word.” And he drank the bitter draught.
She put back the glass on the tray, but as she was about to leave the room she was abruptly detained. “Don’t go,” he said. “Sit and let us talk a little.”
She sat down.
“Did you know,” he said, and the unexpectedness of the words threw her off her guard, “that I have just had a visit from—from your niece?”
“Mary!” She clutched her dress. “Mary—here!” A sudden tide of crimson flowed in the startled face. But the next instant it had grown white. “No, I didn’t know,” she said. And then, her soul in her eyes, she waited for his next words.
There was one stifling moment of silence, then he said: “Of course you know what is in my mind?”
She nodded, not trusting herself to speak.
While he searched his memory silence came again, and now it had the power to hurt them both. “Haven’t you always led me to believe,” he said in a voice of curious intensity, “that she was a nurse in a hospital?”
Harriet did not reply at once. But at last she said, “Yes, I have always wanted you to think so.”
He looked at her white face, and suddenly checked the words that rose to his tongue. Whatever those may have been, there was an immense solicitude in his manner when he spoke again. “It is not for me,” he said, “to question anything you may have said, or anything you may have done.”
“I did everything I could to carry out your wishes.” Her voice trembled painfully. “And I—I——”
“And you didn’t like to tell me,” he said gently.
“Yes. I couldn’t bear to tell you that she had insisted on choosing the life of all others you would have the least desired for her.”
“Don’t think that I complain,” he said. “I know you must have had a good reason. You have always been very considerate. But it looks as if the stars in their courses have managed to play a scurvy trick.”
“That they have!” Once more the swift color flowed over a fine face.
Suddenly she pressed her fingers to her eyelids to repress the quick tears.
“Never mind,” he said. “The gods have been a little too much for us, but things might have been worse.”
Tearfully she agreed.
“The other day when I talked with that excellent fellow, your brother-in-law, it didn’t occur to me who this girl really was. I don’t think I was ever told that she had been adopted by your family.”
“No,” said Harriet, very simply.
“Do your friends know the truth of the matter?”
“I don’t think they have a suspicion—not of the real truth,” she said slowly.
“Has anyone?”
“Not a soul that I know of.”
“The girl herself, is she also in ignorance?”
“She knows, I believe, that she is only the adopted child of my sister and her husband, but I don’t think she has gone at all deeply into the matter.”
“Tell me this”—the mere effort of speech seemed to cost him infinite pain—“do you think there is a means open to anyone of learning the truth at this time of day?”
“My brother-in-law knew from the first that the child was mine, but I feel sure the real truth can never come out now.”
Impassive as he was, a shade of evident relief came into his face. But the look of strain in his eyes deepened to actual pain as he said, “No doubt we ought to be glad that it is so. At the same time, I think you’ll agree, that we have a duty to face which may prove extraordinarily difficult.”
Harriet did not speak, but suddenly she bent her head in a quivering assent.
“You see,” he said slowly, “we can no longer burke the fact that something is due to the girl herself.”
Harriet’s eyes suddenly filled with an intensity of suffering he could not bear to look at.
“You know the position, of course?” he said gently, after a pause.
“I know she has promised to marry Mr. Dinneford.”
“But only if I give my consent.”
“I am sure that is right.” A note of relief came into her tone. “She has done exactly as one could have wished.”
“If one could only see the thing as clearly as you do!” he said with a reluctant shake of the head. “At any rate let us try to be as just as the circumstances will allow us to be.”
“Can we hope to do justice and not hurt other people?”
“I’m afraid that’s impossible, as things are. But for a moment let us try to consider the whole matter from her point of view. Perhaps you’ll allow me to say at once that the course you insisted on taking seems to have justified itself completely. She is a girl to be proud of; and she appears to be living a happy and useful life. One sees now how wise it was not to take half-measures. She has been allowed to fight her own battle with the gifts of the good God, and the result does your foresight the highest credit.”
The judicial words, very simply uttered, brought a flood of color to the pale cheeks. But listening with bent head, she did not look up, nor did she say a word in reply.
“The heroic method has proved to be the right one, but I think now we have to be careful not to take any unfair advantage of that fact. It’s a terribly difficult case, but as far as we can we ought not to overlook what is due to the girl herself.”
“But the others!” said Harriet with fear in her eyes.
“Yes, a terribly difficult situation.” The Duke sighed. “But for the moment let us try to see the matter simply as it affects her. She has been made to suffer a grievous injustice so that others might benefit. The question is, must she still be made to sacrifice herself?”
Harriet had no answer to give. The long silence which followed was almost unendurable in its intensity.
“Well?” he said at last, as he looked at her white face.
She shook her head mutely, unable to speak, unable to meet his eyes. Tears crept again along her eyelids.
“You wish me to decide?”
“Yes,” she said at last.
He looked at her now with the light of pity in his face. Not at once did he speak, and when he did it was with a clear, a too-clear perception of the impotence of his words.
“The truth is,” he said, “the problem is beyond me.”