I
IN the meantime Cousin Marjorie and Cousin Blanche enjoyed their ride very much. It was the one thing they really did enjoy in London.
They were two ordinary young women, yet even so late in the Old World’s history as the year 1913, their own private cosmos could not quite make up its mind to regard them in that light. Cousin Marjorie and Cousin Blanche had surprisingly little to say for themselves. They were modest, unassuming girls, without views or ideas, very proper, very dull, absurdly conventional; in the eyes of some people as plain as the proverbial pikestaff, passably good-looking in the sight of others; in fact, a more commonplace pair of young women would have been hard to find anywhere, yet deep in the hearts of the Ladies Dinneford was the sure faith that the world at large did not subscribe to any such opinion.
It was not merely that they rode rather well. They passed other members of their sex in the Row that morning who rode quite as well as themselves. No, proficiency in the saddle, the one accomplishment they could boast, of which they were unaffectedly modest, was far from explaining the particular angle at which the world chose to view them. Not that in any way they were fêted or acclaimed. As far as the vast majority of their fellow-creatures were concerned they were not people to look at twice. But here and there a glance of recognition or curiosity would greet them, winged by a smile, now of mere interest, now of an irony faintly perceptible.
Life had been very kind to Cousin Marjorie and Cousin Blanche, yet they did not look conspicuously happy. With both hands it had lavished upon them its material best, but the gifts of fortune were taken as a matter of mere personal right. Providence owed it to the order of things they stood for. Far from being grateful, they were a little bored by its attentions. Moreover, these young women had not learned to regard people to whom the fairies had been less kind with either insight or sympathy. Their judgments were objective, therefore they were a little hard, a little lacking in tolerance.
II
“The stage!” said Marjorie with a straight-lipped smile, a rather famous part of her importance.
“You think so?” said Blanche sleepily. But she was not at all sleepy, else she would not have been able to handle the Tiger, a recent purchase, in the way she was doing at the moment.
“No mistaking it, my dear.”
“Good-looking, though,” lisped the somnolent Blanche, giving the Tiger a very shrewd kick with a roweled heel. “Reminds me of some one.”
The Tiger, worried by a bit that he didn’t like, and greatly affronted by the heel of his new mistress, which he liked still less, then began to behave in a way which for some little time quite forbade any further discussion of the subject.
For the rest of the morning, however, it was never far from the minds of these ladies. Two or three times they caught sight in the distance of Jack and his charge. A striking-looking girl, but she didn’t in the least know how to ride. And somehow from that fact Blanche and Marjorie seemed to draw spiritual consolation.
At twelve o’clock they left the Park. The policeman at the gate pulled himself together and regarded them respectfully. An elderly lady in a high-hung barouche of prehistoric design, drawn by a superb pair of horses and surmounted by a romantic-looking coachman and footman, called out to them in a remarkably strident voice as they passed her, “I am coming to luncheon.”
“Bother!” said Marjorie to Blanche.
“Bother!” said Blanche to Marjorie.
They went along Park Lane, as far as Mount Street, turned up that bleak thoroughfare, took the second turning to the right, and finally entered the courtyard of the imposing residence known as Bridport House. Before its solemn portals they dismounted with the help of the smart groom. In the act of doing so they encountered a tall, rather distinguished-looking man, who was coming down the steps. He was about forty-two, clean-shaven, with sandy hair; and his clothes had an air of such extreme correctness as to suggest that they had been donned for a special occasion.
The departing visitor bowed elaborately to the two ladies, but each returned the greeting with an abbreviated nod, backed by an intent smile peculiarly her own. There might be courtesy carried to the verge of homage on the one side, but on the other was an aloofness cold and quizzical.
As soon as Blanche and Marjorie had gained the ample precincts of Bridport House each looked demurely at the other, and then yielded a laugh, which seemed to mean a great deal more than it expressed.
“Been to see papa, I suppose,” said Blanche, as she waddled duck fashion towards a white marble staircase of grandiose design, whose cinquecento air could not save it from a slight suspicion of the rococo.
“My dear!” came Marjorie’s crescendo.
Again they looked at each other, again their laughter snarled and crackled not unpleasantly.
At one o’clock luncheon was announced. Ten minutes later a well-bathed and carefully re-clothed Marjorie and a Blanche to match entered an enormous dining-room, which, in spite of its profusion of servants in livery, had the air of a crypt.
“Good morning, father. Very pleasant to see you down.”
Each word of Blanche was charmingly punctuated by a little pause, which might have been taken for filial regard by those who heard it. But the rather acid-looking gentleman, who sat at the head of the table, with a face like a cameo a little out of drawing, and a bowl of arrowroot in front of him, paid such slight attention to Blanche that she might not have spoken at all.
“Good morning, Aunt Charlotte,” said Marjorie coolly, taking up her own cue. She surveyed the other occupants of the table with a quietly ironical eye. And then as she seated herself at her leisure, as far as she could get from the object of her remarks, she proceeded in the peculiar but remarkably agreeable voice which she had in common with her father and sisters: “Odd we should run into you coming out of the Park.”
“Why odd?” said Aunt Charlotte, an elderly, large-featured blonde, whose theory of life was as far as possible not to cherish illusions on any subject. “I always go in at twelve, you always come out at twelve. Nothing odd about it. Thank you!”
“Thank you,” meant, “Yes, I will take claret.” It also meant, “Get on with your luncheon, Marjorie, and don’t be absurd. Life is too complicated nowadays for such small talk as yours to interest an intelligent person.”
Aunt Charlotte, if not consciously rude, was by nature exceedingly dominant. For twenty-five years, in one way or another, Bridport House had known her yoke. She was the Duke’s only surviving sister, and she lived in Hill Street, among the dowagers. Her status was nil, but her love of power was so great that she had gained an uncomfortable ascendancy in the family councils. While free to admire Aunt Charlotte’s wisdom, which was supposed to be boundless, the Dinneford ladies dislike her in the marrow of their bones. But Fate had played against them. Their father had been left a widower with a young family, and from the hour of his loss his sister had taken upon herself to mother it. She had done so to her own satisfaction, but the objects of her regard bore her no gratitude. From Sarah, who was thirty-nine, to Marjorie, who was twenty-eight, they were ever ready to try a fall with Aunt Charlotte.
As for their father, he had an active dislike of her. He had cause, no doubt. More than once he had tried to break the spell of her dominion, but somehow it had always proved too strong for him. It was not that he was a weak man altogether, but there is a type born to female tyranny, an affair of the stars, of human destiny. Charlotte despised her brother. In her view he was a lath painted to look like iron, but insight into character was not her strength. She owed her position in the family to dynamic power, to force of will; but in her own mind it was always ascribed to the fact that she acted invariably from the highest motives.
“Muriel not here,” said the conversational Marjorie, looking across the table to Sarah.
“Gone to the East End, I believe, to one of her committees.”
It would have been nearer the truth for the eldest flower, who was dealing with a recalcitrant fragment of lobster in a masterful manner, to have said that Muriel had gone to luncheon at Hayes with the Penarths. But Sarah, who did not approve of Muriel, and still less of the Penarths, was content with a general statement whose flagrant inaccuracy somehow crystallized her attitude towards them both. Muriel had become frankly impossible. The higher expediency could no longer take her seriously.
But there are degrees of wisdom, even among the elect. Sarah’s place was assured at Minerva’s Court, but Marjorie and Blanche were wiser perhaps in matters equine than in other things. Where angels feared to tread Blanche, at any rate, for reasons of her own, had sometimes been known to butt in. A classical instance was about to be furnished.
“Do tell me.” Blanche suddenly looked Sarah straight in the eyes. “Has Sir Dugald been to see father?”
There was a long moment’s pause in which Sarah maintained a stranglehold upon the lobster, while Lady Wargrave and the Duke, who knew they were being “ragged” by a past mistress in the art, glared daggers down the table.
“I believe so,” said Sarah in an exceedingly dry voice, followed by a hardly perceptible glance at the servants.
III
Over the coffee cups, in the solemn privacy of the blue drawing-room, the Dinneford ladies grew a little less laconic. They were in a perfect hurricane of great events. Even they, who seldom use two words if one would suffice, had to make some concession to the pressure of history.
“His mother, I understand,” said Aunt Charlotte, seating herself massively in the center of her floridly Victorian picture, “kept the village shop at Ardnaleuchan.”
“Then I’ve bought bull’s-eye peppermints of her,” said Sarah, with a touch of acid humor which somehow became her quite well.
“But it’s so serious”—Lady Wargrave stirred her coffee. “Still he’s been given the Home Office—so she thinks she moves with the times, no doubt.”
“Has been given the Home Office?” said Blanche, suddenly achieving an air of intelligence.
“The papers say so,” said Sarah dryly. “But I don’t think that excuses him.”
“Or Muriel,” interpolated Aunt Charlotte with venom. “What did your father say to the man?”
“He was deplorably rude, I believe—even for father. He said the man had the hide of a rhinoceros, so obviously he had tested it.”
“All very amazing. It is charity to assume that Muriel is out of her mind.”
“One can’t be sure,” said Sarah weightily. “She says he has such a good head that one day he must be Prime Minister. After all, she will be a Prime Minister’s wife!”
“But a Radical Prime Minister’s wife!”
“He may rat,” said Sarah, with judicious optimism.
“He may,” said Lady Wargrave, looking down her long nose. “But there never was a matter in which I felt less hopeful. What does your father think?”
“The man’s a red rag. Don’t you remember the shameful way he attacked poor father on the Land Question two years ago? What was it he called him in the House of Commons?”
“‘The Great Panjandrum, with little round button on top,’” quoted the solemn Marjorie, whose chief social asset was an amazing memory.
“And after that he dares to come here!” Aunt Charlotte quivered majestically. “Didn’t your father kick him downstairs?”
“I think he would have done—but for his infirmity,” said Sarah judicially.
“I had forgotten his gout, poor man. At least, I hope he ordered the servants to throw the creature into the street.”
“One hardly does that, does one?—with his Majesty’s Secretaries of State,” said Blanche, whose sleepy voice had an odd precision which made each word bite like an acid.
Aunt Charlotte hooded her eyes like a cobra to look at Blanche. But she didn’t say anything. Only experts could handle Blanche, and even these must abide the whim of the goddess opportunity.
“After all, why fuss?” continued Blanche with a muted laugh which had the power of annoying all the other ladies extremely. “If one has to marry one might as well marry a Prime Minister.”
This was such a sublime expression of the obvious, that even Lady Wargrave, who contested everything on principle, was dumb before it. Blanche was therefore able to retire in perfect order to the comatose, her natural state. But in the next moment she reëmerged, so that a little private thunderbolt she had been diligently nursing through the whole luncheon might shake the rather strained peace of the blue drawing-room. She was quite sure that it would be a pleasure to launch it when the moment came. A sudden pause in the great topic of Muriel’s affaire told her it had now arrived.
“We saw Jack riding with that girl.” So sleepy was the voice of Blanche as it made this announcement that it seemed a wonder she could keep awake.
“What girl?” Aunt Charlotte walked straight into Blanche’s little trap.
“Oh, you didn’t know.” Blanche suppressed a yawn. “It’s a rather long story.”
Still it had to be told. And Blanche, just able to keep awake, told it circumstantially. The Tenderfoot—the heir’s own name for himself, which Blanche made a point of using in conversation with Aunt Charlotte because that lady considered it vulgar—had been seen at the Savoy with a girl, he had been seen in the Park with a girl, he had been seen motoring with a girl; in fact, he had been going about with a girl for several weeks.
“And you never told me,” said Lady Wargrave with the air of a tragedy queen. She looked from Blanche to Sarah, from Sarah to Marjorie. A light of sour sarcasm in the eye of the eldest flower was all the comfort she took from the survey.
“Who is the girl? Tell me.”
Blanche inclined to think an actress. But she was not sure.
“Inquiries will have to be made at once.” Already Aunt Charlotte was a caldron of energy. “Steps will have to be taken. It is the first I have heard of it. But I feel I ought to have been told sooner.”
Blanche fearlessly asked why.
“Why!” Aunt Charlotte gave a little snort. At such a moment mere words were futile. Then she said, “I shall go at once to your father.”
“But what can he do?”
“Do?” Aunt Charlotte gave a second little snort. Mere words again revealed their limitations.
“Yes?” Blanche placidly pursued the Socratic method, to the increasing fury of Aunt Charlotte.
“He can tell him what he thinks of him and threaten to cut off supplies.”
“Much he’ll care for that!” The cynicism of Blanche revolted Aunt Charlotte.
That lady, whose forte, after all, was plain common sense, knew that Blanche was right. But in spite of that knowledge, the resolute energy which made her so much disliked impelled her to go at once to lay the matter before the head of the house.
Lady Wargrave found her brother in the smaller library, long dedicated by custom to his sole use. It was one of the less pretentious and therefore least uncomfortable rooms in a house altogether too large to be decently habitable.
For many years the Duke had been at the mercy of a painful malady which had taken all the pleasure out of his life. He was nearly seventy now, a man strikingly handsome in spite of a sufferer’s mouth and eyes weary with pain and cynicism. When his sister entered the room she found him deployed on an invalid chair, the Quarterly Review on a book-rest in front of him, and a wineglass containing medicine at his elbow. And to Lady Wargrave’s clear annoyance, a tall, gray-haired, rather austere-looking, but decidedly handsome woman, stood by the Adam chimney-piece, a bottle in one hand, a teaspoon in the other.
“Perhaps you will be kind enough to leave us, Mrs. Sanderson,” said Lady Wargrave, in a tone which sounded needlessly elaborate.
Harriet Sanderson, without so much as a temporary relaxation of muscle of her strong face, withdrew at once very silently from the room. The bottle and the teaspoon went with her.
As soon as the door had closed Lady Wargrave said, “Johnnie, once more I feel bound to protest against the presence of the housekeeper in the library. If the state of your health really calls for such attention I will engage a trained nurse.”
The Duke took up the Quarterly Review with an air of stolid indifference.
“I’ll get one at once,” she persisted. “There’s a capable person who nursed Mary Devizes.”
The Duke seemed unwilling to discuss the question, but at last, yielding to pressure, he said in a tone of dry exasperation:
“Mrs. Sanderson is quite capable of looking after me. She understands my ways, I understand hers.”
“No one doubts her competence.” The rejoinder was tart and hostile. “But that is hardly the point. The library is not the place for the housekeeper.”
“I choose to have her here. In any case it is entirely my affair.”
“People talk.”
“Let ’em.”
“It’s an old quarrel, my friend.” Growing asperity was in the voice of Charlotte. “You know my views on the subject of Mrs. Sanderson. We none of us like the woman. Considering the position she holds she has always taken far too much upon herself.”
The Duke shook his head. “I must be the judge of that,” he said.
“But surely it is a matter for the women of your family.”
“With all submission, it’s a matter for me. I find the present arrangement entirely satisfactory, and I don’t recognize the right of anyone to interfere.”
The Duke’s tone grated like a file upon his sister’s ear. This was an ancient quarrel that in one form or another had been going on for very many years. The housekeeper at Buntisford and more recently at Bridport House had been a thorn in the flesh of Charlotte almost from the day her sister-in-law died, but the Duke had always been Mrs. Sanderson’s champion. Time and again her overthrow had been decided upon by the ladies of the Family, but up till now the perverse determination of his Grace had proved too much for them and all their careful schemes.
They had reached the usual impasse. Therefore, for the time being, Charlotte had once more to swallow her feelings. Besides, other matters were in the air, matters of an interest more vital if of a nature less permanent.
As a preliminary it was necessary to glance at Muriel and her vagaries, before coming to grips with the even more momentous affair which had just been brought to Lady Wargrave’s notice. In answer to his sister’s, “What have you said to Maclean?” the Duke, who had swallowed most of the formulas and had digested them pretty thoroughly, expressed himself characteristically.
“I told him that before I could even begin to consider the question he would have to rat.”
“Was that wise?” said Charlotte, frowning. “Why commit oneself to the possibility of having to take the man seriously?”
Her brother laughed. “He’s a very sharp fellow. A long Scotch head, abominably full of brains. If we could get him on our side perhaps he might pull us together.”
“You know, of course, that his mother kept the village shop at Ardnaleuchan?”
“So he tells me.”
“Do you like the prospect of such a son-in-law?”
“Frankly, Charlotte, I don’t. A tiresome business at the best of it. But there it is.”
“Ought one to treat it so coolly?”
His Grace laid the Quarterly Review on the book-rest and plucked a little peevishly at the tuft of hair on his chin.
“The times are changing, you see. We are on the eve of strange things. Still, I took the liberty of telling him that as long as he remained a Radical and went up and down the country blackguarding me and mine, I should refuse to know him.”
“And what said our fine gentleman?”
“He was amused. Whether he takes the hint remains to be seen. In any event it commits us to nothing.”
Charlotte shook a dubious head. “You’re shaping for a compromise, my friend. And in my view this is not a case for one.”
“If she is set on marrying the brute what’s going to stop her?”
The question was meant for a poser and a poser it proved. Somehow it left no ground for argument. Therefore, without further preface or apology, Lady Wargrave turned to a matter of even more vital consequence.
IV
By an odd chain of events, Jack Dinneford was heir apparent to the dukedom of Bridport. In the course of a brief twelve months two intervening lives had petered out. One had been Lyme, the Duke’s only surviving son, who at the age of thirty-five had been killed in a shooting accident—a younger son, never a good life, had died some years earlier—the other had been the Duke’s younger brother, who six months ago had died without male issue. The succession in consequence would now have to pass to an obscure and rather neglected branch of the family, represented by a young man of twenty-four, the son of a Norfolk parson.
Jack’s father, at the time of his death, had held a family living. A retiring, scholarly man, he had never courted the favors of the great, and the great, little suspecting that their vicarious splendors might one day be his, had paid him little attention. Blessed with progeny of the usual clerical abundance and without means apart from his stipend, the incumbent of Wickley-on-the-Wold had been hard set to educate his children in a manner becoming their august lineage. Even Jack, the eldest of five, had to be content with four years at one of the smaller public schools. It was true that afterwards he had the option of Oxford or Sandhurst, but by the time the young man had reached the age of nineteen he had somehow acquired an independence of character which did not take kindly to either.
One fine day, with a spare suit of clothes and a hundred pounds or so in his pocket, he set out in the most casual way to see the world, and to make his fortune. He went to Liverpool, shipped before the mast as an ordinary seaman for the sake of the experience, and made the voyage round the Horn to San Francisco. For the next two years he prospected up and down the Americas earning a living, picking up ideas, and enlarging his outlook by association with all sorts and conditions of men, and finally invested all the capital he could scrape together in a business in Vancouver.
After eighteen months of the new life came the news of his father’s death. The brothers and sisters it seemed were rather better provided for than there had been reason to expect. At any rate, Mabel and Iris would have a roof over their heads, Bill had passed into Sandhurst, and Frank was at Cambridge. Therefore Jack, little guessing what Fate had in store, decided to stay as he was, in the hope that in a few years he would have made his pile. He had a taste for hard work, and the new land offered opportunities denied by the old.
Some months later he received an urgent summons to return home. He had suddenly and unexpectedly become next of kin to the Duke of Bridport. The news was little to the young man’s taste. He was very loth to give up a growing business for a life of parasitic idleness under the ægis of the titular great. But the circumstances seemed to make it imperative. The powers that were had not the slightest doubt that it was his bounden duty to go into training at once. He must fit himself for the dizzy eminence to which it had pleased Providence to call him.
Sadly enough the tiro sold out, returned to England, and in due course reported himself at Bridport House. It was the first time he had been there. He was such a distant kinsman that he had never taken the ducal connection seriously.
The family’s reception of the Tenderfoot—his own humorous name for himself—amused him considerably, yet at the same time it filled him with a subtle annoyance. Five fruitful years out West had made him an iconoclast. He saw with awakened eyes the arid and sterile pomposities which were doing their best to put the old land out of the race. Bridport House was going to spell boredom and worse for Jack Dinneford.
Still the Duke, as became a man of the world, soon got to the root of the trouble, and having the welfare of a time-honored institution at heart, was at pains to deal with the novice tactfully. All the same, he was far from being pleased by the tricks of Providence. But he made the young man an allowance of two thousand a year, and exhorted him not to get into mischief; and the Dinneford ladies, who were prepared to be kind to the Tenderfoot and to be more amused by his “originality” than they confessed to each other, chose some rooms for him in Arlington Street, looked after his general welfare, and began to make plans for the future of Bridport House. Aunt Charlotte took him at once under an ungracious wing, and found him a bear-leader in the person of her nephew Wrexham, a subaltern of the Pinks, a picturesque young man, reputed a paragon of all the Christian virtues, and a martyr to a sense of duty.
From this model of discretion the tiro soon received a hint. Cousin Sarah owned to thirty-eight in the glare of Debrett, Cousin Muriel had other views apparently, but there remained Cousin Blanche and Cousin Marjorie—the heir could take his choice, but the ukase had gone forth that one of them it must be.
The Tenderfoot did not feel in a marrying mood just then, but he had chivalry enough not to say so to his mentor, who as the messenger of Eros began to disclose quite a pretty turn of humor. It was not seemly to offer advice in such a delicate matter, but Blanche was a nailer to hounds, although she never kept awake after dinner, while Marjorie’s sphere was church decoration in times of festival, in the course of which she generally had an affaire with a curate.
Face to face with a problem which in one way or another was kept ever before his eyes, the poor Tenderfoot seemed to feel that if wive he must in the charmèd circle, and the relentless Wrexham assured him that it was a solemn duty, perhaps there was most to be said for Cousin Marjorie. She was not supremely attractive it was true. The Dinneford girls, one and all, were famous up and down the island for a resolute absence of charm. And the Dinneford frontispiece, imposing enough in the male, when rendered in terms of the female somehow seemed to lack poetry. Still Cousin Marjorie was not yet thirty and her general health was excellent.
The heir had now been settled in Arlington Street six months. And with nothing in the world to do but learn to live a life which threatened to bore him exceedingly, time began to hang upon his hands. Moreover, the prospect of having presently to lead Cousin Marjorie to the altar merely increased a sense of malaise. Here was an arbitrary deepening of the tones of a picture which heaven knew was dark enough already. For a modern and virile young man, life at Bridport House would only be tolerable under very happy conditions. To be yoked, willy-nilly, to one of its native denizens for the rest of one’s days, seemed a hardship almost too great to be borne.
While the Tenderfoot was in this frame of mind, which inclined him to temporize, he decided to put off the dark hour as long as he could. And then suddenly, while still besieged by doubt, the hypnotic Princess Bedalia swam into his ken.
V
“It was bound to happen,” said Lady Wargrave. “That young man has far too much time on his hands. A thousand pities he didn’t go into the army.”
“Too old, too old.” Her brother frowned portentously. “This promises to be a very tiresome business. Charlotte, I must really ask you to lose no time in seeing that the fellow marries.”
It was now Charlotte’s turn to frown. And this she did as a prelude to a frankness which verged upon the brutal.
“All very well, my friend, but perhaps you’ll tell me how it’s to be done. Neither Marjorie nor Blanche has the least power of attraction. They’re hopeless. And please remember this young man has been five years in America.”
“I would to God he had stayed there!”
The futile outburst of his Grace set Charlotte glowering like a sibyl. She was constrained to own that it was all intensely annoying. He was a common young man. He had none of the Dinneford feeling about things.
“Quite so, Charlotte.” The ducal irritation was growing steadily. “But don’t rub it in. That won’t help us. Let us think constructively. You see the trouble is that this fellow has a rather democratic outlook.”
“Then I’m afraid there’s no remedy,” said Charlotte, “unless the girls have the brains to help us, which, of course, they haven’t.”
His Grace became more thunderous. “Let us hope he’ll have the good feeling to try to look at things as we do,” he said after a rather arid pause.
“I’m not sure that we’ve a right to expect it,” was the frank rejoinder.
“Why not?”
“His branch of the family has no particular cause to be grateful to us.”
“Our father gave his father a living, didn’t he?” said the Duke sharply.
“Yes, but nothing else—unless it was a day’s shooting now and again, which he didn’t accept.”
“I don’t see what else he could have given him.”
“An eye ought to have been kept on this young man.”
“You can depend upon it, Charlotte, many things would have been ordered differently had there been reason to suppose that this confounded fellow would be next in here. As it is we have to make the best of a sorry business.”
“Sorry enough,” Charlotte admitted. “There I am with you. But I’ll have inquiries made about this chorus girl. And in the meantime, Johnnie, perhaps you will speak to him firmly and quietly without losing your temper.”
“And my last word to you, Charlotte,” countered his Grace, “is to see that he loses no time in marrying.”
“Easy, my friend, to issue a ukase.” And the redoubtable Charlotte smiled grimly.
VI
Soon after four the same afternoon Jack returned to Broad Place in the garb of civilization. He was in great heart. Milly had some good-natured chaff to offer as to Mary’s need of sticking plaster. But the young man turned this persiflage aside with such a serious air that the quick-witted Milly knew it for an omen. Having learned the set of the wind she soon found a pretext for leaving them together.
Milly’s sense of a coming event, which her sudden flight from the room had seemed to make the more inevitable, was shared by Mary. Somehow she felt that the moment of moments had come. This thing had to be. But as a hand brown and virile quietly took hers in a strong grip, she began almost bitterly to deplore the whole business. And yet, when all was said, she was absolutely thrilled. He was so truly a man that a girl, no matter what her talent and quality, could hardly refrain from pride in his homage.
There was no beating about the bush.
“Will you marry me?” he said.
She grew crimson. How she had dreaded that long foreseen question! Days ago common sense and worldly prudence had coldly informed her that there could only be one possible answer. The case of Milly herself had furnished a sinister parallel. And the sensitive, perhaps over-sensitive pride of one who had begun at the bottom of the ladder, revolted from all the ensuing complications. Such a situation seemed now to involve her in mysteries far down within, at the very core of being—mysteries she had hardly been aware of until that moment.
Again the question. She looked away, quite unable just then to meet his eyes. Her will was strong, her determination clear, but in spite of herself a deadly feeling crept upon her that she was a bird in a snare. Certain imponderables were in the room. The life forces were calling to each other; there was a curious magnetism in the very air they breathed.
She had meant and intended “No,” but every instant made that little word more difficult to utter. A dominant nature had stolen the keys of her heart before she knew it. And as she fought against the inevitable, a subtle trick of the ape on the chain in the human breast, weighed the scales unfairly. Cousin Blanche and Cousin Marjorie were flung oddly, irrelevantly, fantastically, upon the curtain of her mind. The challenge of their ironical eyes was like a knife in the flesh. And then that private, particular devil, of whose existence, until that moment, she had been unaware, suddenly forced her to take up the gage those eyes had flung.
VII
“Do tell me!” cried Milly the breathless.
The sight of a lone, troubled Mary in the little sitting-room, the look on her face as she twisted a handkerchief into knots and coils had been too much for Milly. She was a downright person and the silence of Mary was so trying to a forthcoming nature that the query at the tip of Milly’s tongue seemed likely to burn a hole in it.
“Has he—have you—did he——?” The demand was indelicate, but it sprang from the depths as Milly measured them. Suddenly she saw tears.
“I am so glad, I am so very glad!”
Mary smiled, but the look in her eyes had the power to startle the affectionate Milly.
“He is the luckiest man I know, but he is such a dear that he deserves to be.” It was a peculiarity of Mary’s that she didn’t like kissing, but Milly in a burst of loyal affection was guilty of a sudden swoop upon her friend.
“Oh, don’t,” said Mary, in a voice from which all the accustomed gayety was gone.
Milly gazed in consternation.
“You—you have not refused him?”
“No.” And then there came a sudden flame. “I’m a selfish, egotistical wretch.”
“As long as you have not refused him,” said Milly, breathing again. “All the same, I call you a very odd girl.”
But Mary was troubled, Milly perplexed.
“You ought to be the happiest creature alive. What’s the matter?”
“I’m thinking of his friends.”
“If they choose to be stupid, it’s their own lookout.”
“It mayn’t be stupidity,” said Mary, giving her handkerchief a bite. “I know nothing about him, except——”
“Except?”
“That he’s above me socially.”
“I wouldn’t worry about that if I were you,” said Milly robustly. “If they like to be snobs it’s their own funeral.”
But Mary, having burned her boats, was afflicted now by Cousin Blanche and Cousin Marjorie. They were looking down upon her from their tall horses. It was not that she feared them in the least, but she knew that lurking somewhere in an oddly constituted mind was a certain awe of the things for which they stood.
“I can’t explain my feelings,” said Mary. “I only know they are horribly real. I feel there’s a gulf between Jack and me—and a word won’t bridge it.” And her voice trailed off miserably.
“That’s weak,” said Milly severely. “I know what you mean, but you exaggerate the difference absurdly. Sonny is miles above me socially, but I’ll make him as good a wife as any of his own push, see if I don’t—if he gives me the chance! And in some ways I can make him a better.”
“How?”
“Because I began right down there.” Milly pointed to the carpet. “I know the value of things, I shall be able to see that no one takes advantage of him, whereas a girl who has been spoon-fed all her life couldn’t do that.”
The honest Mary had to allow that there was something to be said for the point of view, yet she would not admit that it covered all the facts of the case.
“Please don’t suppose my ideas have anything to do with you and Lord Wrexham.” Her gravity made Milly feel quite annoyed. “I am merely thinking of myself. And there’s something in me, for which I can’t account, which says that it may be wrong, it may be wickedly wrong, for me to marry Jack.”
“It certainly will be if that’s how you look at it,” said Milly scornfully. “Why not make the most of your luck? I’m sure it’s right. After all Providence knows better than anybody. And Jack knows he’s got to be a duke.”
“Got to be what?” Mary jumped out of her chair.
“You didn’t know?”
“Of course, I didn’t.” She was simply aghast. In a state of excitement which quite baffled Milly, she paced the room.
“You odd creature!” The mantle of the arch dissembler had now descended upon Milly.
Truth to tell, she and her mother had had a shrewd suspicion of Mary’s ignorance. They had learned from Wrexham that Jack Dinneford, owing to a series of deaths in a great family, had quite unexpectedly become the next-of-kin to the Duke of Bridport. Such a prospect was so little to the young man’s taste that as far as he could he always made a point of keeping the skeleton out of sight. Rightly or wrongly he had not said a word to Mary on the subject, and she with a pride a little overstrained, no doubt, had allowed herself no curiosity in regard to his worldly status. For whatever it might be it was obviously far removed from that of a girl of no family who had to get her own living as well as she could.
The news was stunning. As Mary walked about the room the look on her face was almost tragic.
“I think you ought to have told me,” she said at last.
“We thought you knew,” was Milly’s reply. This was a deliberate story. Mrs. Wren and herself in discussing the romantic news had concluded the exact opposite. But out of a true regard for Mary’s welfare, as they conceived it, they had decided to let her find out for herself. She was such an odd girl in certain ways that mother and daughter felt that the real truth about Jack Dinneford might easily prove his overthrow. Thus with a chaste conscience Milly now lied royally.
Mary, alas! was so resentful of the coup of fortune and her friends, that for a moment she was tempted to fix a quarrel on Milly. But Milly’s cunning was too much for her. She stuck to the simple statement that she thought she knew. There was no gainsaying it. And if blame there was in the matter it surely lay at the door of her own proud self.
Mary was still in the throes of an unwelcome discovery when Mrs. Wren came into the room. The appearance of that lady seemed to add fuel to the flame. Her felicitations, a little overwhelming in their exuberance, were in nowise damped by the girl’s dejection. To Mrs. Wren such an attitude of mind was not merely unreasonable, it was unchristian. To call in question the highest gifts of Providence betrayed a kink in a charming character.
“Fancy, my dear—a duchess. You’ll be next in rank to royalty.”
It was so hard for the victim to smother the tempest within that for the moment she dare not trust herself to speak.
“You’re very naughty,” said Mrs. Wren. “Why, you ought to offer up a prayer. You’ve had success too easily, the road has been too smooth. If you’d had a smaller talent and you’d had an awful struggle to get there, you’d know better than to crab your luck.”
A strong will now came to Mary’s aid. And the calm force of her answer, when at last she was able to make it, astonished Milly and her mother. “That’s one side of the case, Mrs. Wren,” she said in a new tone. “But there’s another, you know.”
“There is only one side for you, my dear,” said the older woman stoutly. “Take your chances while you may—that’s my advice. Your luck may turn. You’ll not always be what you are now. Suppose you have a bad illness?”
“I’m thinking of his side of the case.” The tone verged upon sternness.
“You have quite enough to do to think of your own. Don’t throw chances away. I have had forty years’ experience of a very hard profession, and even you top sawyers are on very thin ice. And remember, the cards never forgive. Girls who have a lone hand to play, mustn’t hold their heads too high. If they do they’ll live to regret it. And you mustn’t think these swells can’t box their own corner. They’ve nothing to learn in looking after Number One. A girl of your sort is quite equal to any of these drawing-room noodles and Mr. Dinneford knows that better than I do.”
“But that’s impossible. I can never be as they are.”
“You needn’t let that worry you. A lot of stuck-up dunces that all the world kow-tows to!”
“It isn’t that I think they are nicer or cleverer or wiser than other people. But they are born to certain things, they have been bred to them for generations, and it surely stands to reason that they are better at their own game than a mere outsider can hope to be.”
“Fiddle-de-dee!” said Mrs. Wren. “I hope you are not such a goose as to take swelldom at its own valuation. It’s all a bluff, my dear. Your humble servant, Jane Wren, could have been as good a duchess as the best of ’em if she had been given the chance. I don’t want to be fulsome, my dear, but I’ll back a girl of your brains against Lady Agatha Fitzboodle or any other titled snob.”
“But I don’t want to be pitted against anybody!”
“That’s nonsense.” Mrs. Wren shook a worldly-wise head. “As for being an outsider, a girl can’t be more than a lady just as a man can’t be more than a gentleman. And if you are a lady and have always gone straight you needn’t fear comparison with the highest in the land.”
Mary shook a head of sadness and perplexity.
“Somehow it doesn’t seem right to mix things in that way,” she said.
“It’s the only way that keeps ’em going,” said Mrs. Wren scornfully. “And well they know it. At least nature knows it. Look at Wrexham! Do you mean to say that his inbred strain wouldn’t be improved by Milly? And it’s the same with you and Mr. Dinneford. It’s Nature at the back of it all. It’s the call of the blood. If these old families keep on intermarrying long enough dry rot sets in.”
Mary stood a picture of woe.
“You odd creature!” said Mrs. Wren. “I’ve never met a girl with such ideas as yours. I really believe you are quite as narrow and as prejudiced as Lady Agatha Fitzboodle. To hear you talk one would think you believed rank to be a really important matter.”
Incredulous eyes were opened upon the voluble dame.
“Of course it is.” But the girl’s solemnity was a little too much.
“My dear!” A gust of ribald laughter overwhelmed her. “Hasn’t it ever struck you that the so-called aristocracy racket is all a bluff?”
“Surely, it can’t be.” The tone was genuine dismay.
“Every word of it, my dear. There’s only one thing behind it and that’s money. If Wrexham ever sticks a coronet on the head of my Milly and robes her in ermine she’ll be the equal of any in the land, just as old Bill Brown who was in the last birthday honors is as good a peer as the best of ’em now that his soap business has brought him into Park Lane. I knew Bill when he hadn’t a bob. It’s just a matter of L.S.D. As for the frills, they are all my eye and Elizabeth Martin. When my Milly gets among them, it won’t take her a week to learn all their tricks. They are just so many performing dogs.”
“You don’t understand, you don’t understand!” The tone was tragic.
VIII
A night’s reflection convinced the girl that there was only one thing to be done. The engagement must end. But as she soon found, it was easier to make the resolve than to carry it out. To begin with, it was terribly irksome, in present circumstances, to give effect to her decision and to back it with reasons.
Her début in the Row had been so successful that a ride had been arranged for the next morning. But it was spoiled completely by the specter now haunting her. In what terms could she tell him that she had changed her mind? How could she defend a proceeding so unwarrantable?
It was not until later in the day, when they took a stroll under the trees in the Park, that she forced herself to grasp the nettle boldly.
Jack, as she had foreseen, was immeasurably astonished. He called, at once, for her reasons. And they were terribly difficult to put into words. At last she was driven back upon the cardinal fact that he had concealed his true position.
He repudiated the charge indignantly. In the first place, he had taken it for granted that she knew his position, in the second, he always made a point of leaving it as much as possible outside his calculations.
“But isn’t that just what one oughtn’t to do?” she said, as they took possession of a couple of vacant chairs.
“To me the whole thing’s absurd,” was the rejoinder. “It’s only by the merest fluke that I have to succeed to the title, and I find it quite impossible to feel about things as Bridport House does. The whole business is a great bore, and if a way out could be found I’d much rather stay as I am.”
“But isn’t that just a wee bit selfish, my dear—if you don’t think me a prig?”
“If you are quite out of sympathy with an antediluvian system, if you disbelieve in it, if you hate it in the marrow of your bones, where’s the virtue in sacrificing yourself in order to maintain it?”
“Noblesse oblige!”
“Yes, but does it? A dukedom, in my view, is just an outworn convention, a survival of a darker age.”
“It stands for something.”
“What does it stand for?—that’s the point. There’s no damned merit about it, you know. Any fool can be a duke, and they mostly are.”
Mary, if a little amused, was more than a little shocked.
“I’m sure it’s not right to think that,” she declared stoutly. “I would say myself, although one oughtn’t to have a say on the subject, that it’s the duty of your sort of people to keep things going.”
“They are not my sort of people. I was pitchforked among them. And if you don’t believe in them and the things it is their duty to keep going what becomes of your theory, Miss Scrupulous?”
“But that’s Socialism,” said Mary with solemn eyes.
“No, it’s the common sense of the matter. All this centralization of power in the hands of a few hard-shells like my Uncle Albert—he’s not my uncle really—is very bad for the State. He owns one-fifth of Scotland, and the only things he ever really takes seriously are his meals and his health.”
“He stands for something all the same.”
The young man laughed outright.
“I know I’m a prig.” The blushing candor disarmed him. “But if one has a great bump of reverence I suppose one can’t help exaggerating one’s feelings a little.”
“I suppose not,” laughed the young man. And then there was a pause. “By jove,” he said at the end of it, “you’d be the last word in duchesses.”
“You won’t get Bridport House to think so.”
“So much the worse for Bridport House. Of course, I admit it has other views for me. But the trouble is, as always in these close corporations, they haven’t the art of seeing things as they are.”
Mary shook a troubled head, but the argument seemed to find its way home.
“The truth of the matter is,” he suddenly declared, “you are afraid of Bridport House.”
Without shame she confessed that Bridport House was bound to be very hostile, and was there not every reason for such an attitude? Jack, however, would not yield an inch upon that count, or on any other if it came to that. He was a primitive creature in whom the call of the blood was paramount. Moreover, he was a very tenacious fellow. And these arguments of hers, strongly urged and boldly stated, did not affect his point of view. The ban of Fortune was purely artificial, it could not be defended. She was fain, therefore, to carry the war to the enemy’s country. But if she gently hinted a change of egotism he countered it astutely with the subtler one of sentimentalism. Each confessed the other partially right, but so far from clearing the air it seemed to make the whole matter more complex. The upshot was that he called upon her to find a valid reason, otherwise he refused point-blank to give her up.
“Just think,” he said, tracing her name on the gravel with a walking-stick, “how hollow the whole business is. How many of Uncle Albert’s ‘push’ have married American wives without a question? And why do they, when they wouldn’t think of giving English girls of the same class an equal chance? In the first place, for the sake of the dollars, in the second, because it is so easy for them to shed their relations and forget their origin.”
But so wide was the gulf between their points of view that mere argument could not hope to bridge it. If she was in grim earnest, so was he; moreover she had entered into a compact he was determined she should fulfill. Before consenting to release her she would have to show very good cause at any rate.
Suddenly, in the give-and-take of conflict, Laxton came into her mind. The memory of Beaconsfield Villas, the whimsical creatures of another orbit, and the childhood which now seemed ages away, fired her with a new idea. She would take him to see the humble people among whom she had been brought up.