CHAPTER VIIA THROWBACK
CHERITON entered, bearing a small parcel, with a certain ostentation.
“Caroline,” said he, “as I was coming out of Truefitt’s I remembered that for the first time in forty years I had forgotten to give you a present on your birthday. Last year I gave you a Bible. This year I have brought you this.”
He cut the string of the parcel, and handed the present to Caroline Crewkerne.
With a grim, but not ungrateful, inclination of the second-best turban, the recipient began to relieve the present of its numerous trappings. A small but expensive hand-glass was exposed to view.
“Thank you, Cheriton. A very charming present.”
“I hope it pleases you, my dear Caroline,” said Cheriton, with quite thebelair. “You have so long defied time that I felt a memento of his impotence might appeal to you.”
“Thank you, Cheriton,” said the redoubtable Caroline. “It is very kind to remember an old woman.”
“A woman is as old as she looks,” said Cheriton, “as Byron says.”
“Byron?”
“I ascribe every truism to Byron. It confers a factitious importance, which at the same time is perfectly safe. Everybody pretends to have read Byron, yet nobody has.”
“Burden has read him, I believe.”
Miss Burden sighed romantically.
Lord Cheriton shook his finger at Miss Burden with arch solemnity.
“No boy under the age of twenty should be permitted to smoke cigarettes,” said he. “And no woman under forty should be permitted to read Byron.”
Caroline Crewkerne snorted.
“By the way,” said Cheriton, “now I am here, I must pay homage to my duchess.”
He took a half turn in the direction of the sofa. Miss Perry was still seated upon it in her pensive attitude. She was still gazing into vacancy, and she was somewhat in the shadow.
Immediately to the left of Miss Perry, intervening between her and Aunt Caroline, was the object that claimed for the moment the whole of Cheriton’s attention. Rightly so, indeed, for it was nothing less than one of the world’s masterpieces. It was a full-length portrait in a massive gilt frame: a truly regal canvas in the full meridian splendor of English art. Under the picture, in bold letters, was the magic legend, “Araminta, Duchess of Dorset, by Gainsborough.”
Araminta, Duchess of Dorset, was a young girl inher teens, in an inordinately floppy hat of the period. Her countenance, ineffably simple, was a glamor of pink and white; her lips were slightly parted; the wonderful blue eyes were gazing into vacancy; and one finger was unmistakably in her mouth.
Cheriton, having fixed his glass with some elaboration, slowly backed a few paces, and yielded to the pose he always affected in the presence of this noble work.
In silence he stood to absorb the poetry, the innocence, the appeal of youth. He sighed profoundly.
“Caroline,” he said, “I would give a whole row of Georgiana Devonshires for this. In my humble judgment it has never been equaled.”
“Grandmamma Dorset wears well,” said Caroline, with a grim chuckle.
“It ought to be called ‘Simplicity’; it ought to be called ‘Innocence.’ Upon my word of honor, Caroline, I always feel when I look at the divine Araminta that I want to shed tears.”
Caroline Crewkerne snorted.
“Cheriton,” said she, “I have noticed that when a man begins life as a cynic he invariably ends as a sentimentalist.”
“Caroline,” said her old friend, sighing deeply, “you are a pagan. You have no soul.”
“Burden has a soul,” said the contemptuous Caroline. “In my opinion she would be better without it.”
“How ironical it is,” said Cheriton, “that you,who distrust art so profoundly, should have such a masterpiece in your drawing-room.”
“I am given to understand that a committee would like to buy it for the nation,” said the owner of the masterpiece, with a gleam of malice.
“Caroline, you promised years ago that if the time ever came when money could buy Araminta she should go to Cheriton House.”
“Well, the time has not come yet.”
“When it does come, I shall hold you to your promise.”
While Cheriton continued his examination of Gainsborough’s masterpiece, Caroline Crewkerne said to her gentlewoman—
“Burden, get my spectacles.”
Cheriton turned away from the picture at last. Naturally enough his gaze alighted on the sofa. Sitting in the center thereof was the wonderful Miss Perry. She was still at Slocum Magna. She had got to her third slice of bread and jam. Polly was pouring out a second sensible cup. Dearest Papa had just made one of his jokes. Charley and Milly were conducting an argument as to who was entitled to the cake with the currants in it. Miss Perry’s blue eyes were unmistakably moist; and although she was not actually sucking her finger, there could be no doubt that at any moment she might begin to do so. And the inverted vegetable basket that crowned her seemed to flop more than ever.
It was no wonder that Cheriton gave a little exclamation. A lover of beauty in all its manifestations,he had an eye for nature as well as for art. And here, side by side with Gainsborough’s masterpiece, making due allowance for a number of trifling details which did not in the least affect the subject, was an almost exact replica of that immortal work. Cheriton, in spite of his foibles, had the seeing eye. Notwithstanding the cobbled boots, the print frock, and the cloak with the hood, one thing was clear. Here was Araminta, Duchess of Dorset, in the flesh.
He swung round to his old friend with the glass leaping out of his eye.
“Caroline,” he cried, “a throwback!”
That old woman gazed through her spectacles at the occupant of the sofa. Miss Perry, still at Slocum Magna, was debating seriously whether a fourth slice of bread and jam was within the range of practical politics.
“Cheriton,” said Caroline, coolly, “I believe you are right.”
Surprise and enthusiasm began to work great havoc with the amateur of the fine arts.
“Upon my word,” said he, “it is the most wonderful thing I have ever seen in my life. A pretty trick of old Mother Nature’s.”
“Don’t be a coxcomb, Cheriton,” said Caroline, warningly.
“A perfect throwback!” said that amateur.
Once more his gaze was brought to bear on the distracting occupant of the sofa, whose hair was the color of daffodils and whose eyes reminded him of thesky of Italy. He approached her with anempressementthat was tremendous.
“I have no need to ask,” said he, “whether the famous duchess is a kinswoman.”
Miss Perry returned from Slocum Magna with a little start. She removed her finger from her lip, yet her thoughts were not of famous duchesses.
In the meantime the redoubtable Caroline said nothing. All the same she was watching everything with those relentless eyes of hers.
Miss Perry exhibited neither surprise nor embarrassment at being summoned so peremptorily from Slocum Magna by such a magnificent specimen of the human race. Perhaps her wonderful blue eyes opened a little wider and she may or she may not have hoisted a little color; but it really seemed as though her thoughts were more concerned with bread and jam than with Lord Cheriton.
“Will you pardon an old worshiper of your famous ancestress if he asks your name?” said he. “I hope and believe it is a legitimate curiosity.”
Miss Featherbrain made an effort to cease wool-gathering. She smiled with a friendliness that would have disarmed a satyr.
“My name is Araminta,” she drawled in her hopelessly ludicrous manner, “but they call me Goose because I amrathera Sil-lay.”
Cheriton gave a chuckle of sheer human pleasure. He was to be pardoned for feeling that a new delight had been offered to an existence which had long exhausted every æsthetic form of joy.
“Your name is Araminta,” he repeated by a kind of hypnotic process, “but they call you Goose because you arerathera silly.”
Miss Perry rewarded Lord Cheriton with an indulgent beam. It assured him that he had had the good fortune to interpret her correctly. It was not easy for that connoisseur to withdraw his enchanted gaze. However, at last he contrived to do so. He turned to his old friend.
“Caroline,” said he, “the fairies have fulfilled my wish. I have always wanted to meet a Gainsborough in the flesh and to hear what she had to say for herself. And now I have done so I know why Gainsborough painted ’em.”
“Faugh!” said the old lady, vigorously, “sentimentality is the national bane.”
“No, Caroline,” said Cheriton, sadly, “you’ve no soul. Why don’t you present me?”
“My niece, Miss Perry,” said Caroline. “Lord Cheriton, my old friend.”
“Oh, how do you do?” said Miss Perry, shooting forth her hand in her own private and particular manner to Aunt Caroline’s old friend. “I hope you are quite well.”
The manner in which Cheriton enclosed the ample paw of Miss Perry, which nevertheless, speaking relatively, contrived to appear long and slender, in his own delicately manicured fingers was almost epic.
“Miss Perry,” said he, “this is a great moment in my life.”
“Don’t be a coxcomb, Cheriton,” said Caroline Crewkerne with great energy.
No one made fuller use than that old woman of the privilege accorded to age of being as rude as it pleases. But it was so necessary that the wearer of the vegetable basket should not get notions under it before she had been in Hill Street an hour.
“My dear Miss Perry,” said Cheriton, with the magniloquent air with which he asked an occasional question in the Hereditary Chamber, “are you acquainted with the vast metropolis?”
“I have always lived at Slocum Magna,” said Miss Perry with perfect simplicity.
“Really,” said my lord, with an insincere surprise. “By the way, whereisSlocum Magna?”
Doubtless owing to the fact that she was a duke’s granddaughter, Miss Perry had excellent if somewhat rustic breeding. Brains were not her strong point, but she had been long enough in London to anticipate almost instinctively Lord Cheriton’s inquiry. Moreover, her astonishment at the ignorance of London people was softened by the friendly indulgence she extended to everybody on the slightest pretext.
“Slocum Magna,” said Miss Perry, without the least appearance of didacticism, “is the next village to Widdiford. They haven’tquitegot the railway at Widdiford yet, don’t you know, but it is only three miles away.”
The absence of the railway at Widdiford appeared to decide Cheriton upon his course of action. Withthe air of a man whose mind is quite made up, he addressed the fair inhabitant of Slocum Magna, North Devon.
“As an old friend of your accomplished aunt’s,” said he, “of many years’ standing, I feel that during your sojourn in the vast metropolis it is only wise and right that I should act, as it were,in loco parentis.”
Although Miss Perry’s papa was a very good classic, he had been unable to communicate his excellence in the dead languages to his second daughter. Miss Perry made no secret of the fact that she had an earnest desire for a little more enlightenment.
“A sort of combination, you know,” said Cheriton, lucidly, “of a courier and a cicerone and a sincere well-wisher. One feels sure it will help you at first to have some one to guide you through the traffic.”
“Burden is quite competent to see that she doesn’t get run over,” said the accomplished aunt of Miss Perry.
“Also, my dear Miss Perry,” said Cheriton, mellifluously, “you may require a little advice occasionally from a man of the world. The vast metropolis is full of pitfalls for your sex.”
“We have poachers at Slocum Magna,” said Miss Perry.
“The metropolis is different,” said Cheriton. “I regret to say it harbors every known form of wickedness.”
Miss Perry’s eyes opened so wide that they seemed to magnetize my lord.
“Are there r-r-robbers?”
“A great number. They lurk in every thoroughfare. If you are really unacquainted with the vast metropolis I urgently recommend advice and protection.”
“How splendid!” said Miss Perry. “I shall write to tell Muffin.”
“Would it be an unpardonable curiosity if one inquired who is Muffin?”
“My sister, don’t you know; her name is Elizabeth really. But we call her Muffin because she israthera ragamuffin.”
“Your family appears to be a singularly interesting one, if one may presume to form an estimate.”
“Papa says we are none of us very bright, but we are all of us very healthy, except Doggo, who has had the mange twice.”
My lord found it necessary to repeat the dictum of Miss Perry’s papa. He then sat down beside her in a truly paternal manner.
“Tell me about your papa,” said he, musically. “I am immensely interested in him. One feels one ought to have so many things in common with such a papa as yours.”
“Papa is just as sweet——” began Miss Perry, with a perfectly delightful fervency. But she got no farther.
Aunt Caroline uplifted an immutable finger.
“Araminta,” said she, “it is time you went up to dress. Burden, take her to her room.”
Miss Perry rose at once with a docility that was charming. She bestowed her most frankly indulgent beam upon Lord Cheriton, and quitted the drawing-room in Miss Burden’s custody.
Cheriton screwed his glass into his astonished eye to gaze after such magnificence.
“A goddess!” said he. “Juno! A great work of nature.”
He prepared to take his leave.
“I am afraid, Caroline,” said he, “your memory begins to fail a little.”
“Rubbish.”
“Do you know how long it is since you asked me to dine with you?”
“You refused three times running. I am determined that no human being shall refuse a fourth.”
“Well, you know,” said Cheriton, coolly, “you were just a little difficult the last twice I dined with you, and the wine was abominable. And with all that excellent claret that you have, and that ’63 port, and that really priceless madeira—really, Caroline, considering what your cellar can do if it chooses, the wine was unpardonable. Still, I am in no sense a vindictive man. I’ll dine with you this evening.”
“Thank you, Cheriton,” said Caroline, dryly. “Eight o’clock.”
“Eight o’clock.”
My lord took his leave with a jauntiness that recalled the vanished era of his youth.
Two hours later the noble earl was back in HillStreet. He looked particularlysoignéin the choicest of evening clothes. They fitted his corseted form to perfection.
“Where is the fair Miss Araminta?” said he, yielding his arm to his hostess.
“My niece is dining upstairs this evening,” said Caroline Crewkerne.
Profoundly distrusting the appearance of the sherry and the claret, the guest made a modest demand for whisky and soda. The fare was scanty, but what there was of it was not ill cooked. Also Caroline was not so tiresome as he had anticipated. Doubtless she was a little exhilarated by the doings of the day. She was a very sharp-witted old woman. Her shrewdness had already foreseen that the appearance of a highly original niece in a somewhat moribundménagemight bring renegades back to Hill Street craving pardon. A glimpse of the immediate future was afforded by the spectacle of a peculiarly spick and span Cheriton seated between Miss Burden and herself.
The turn of events lent an old-time pungency to what had once ranked as the most malicious tongue in London.
“Upon my honor,” said the enchanted guest, “my dear Caroline, you are quite at your high-water mark this evening.”
Caroline valued that kind of compliment, and she acquiesced in it grimly. Cheriton’s remark was quite sincere; and in order to attest hisbona fideshe told a story that caused Miss Burden to spill the salt, whileonly the intervention of a miracle averted a more signal disaster to the claret.
Cheriton was duly rewarded. By the time they had got to the mahogany—Caroline Crewkerne was a stickler for old fashions—the hostess said in an aside to Mr. Marchbanks, “The madeira and the ’63 port wine.”
There can be little doubt that Cheriton was sustained throughout a not particularly exhilarating function by the hope of seeing the peerless Miss Araminta in the drawing-room afterwards. In this, however, he was disappointed. The tardy minutes passed, but Miss Araminta did not appear. At last in desperation he was moved to inquire—
“Where hides the reluctant fair?”
“Speak English, Cheriton.”
“The adorable Miss Perry.”
“The creature is in bed,” said Caroline, incisively. “It is a long journey from Slocum Magna for a growing girl.”
“Is one given to understand that she made the whole journey in a single day?”
“In something under twenty-four hours, I believe,” said Caroline. “Express trains travel at such a remarkable rate in these days.”
In the circumstances there was only one thing for Cheriton to do, and this he did. He took his leave.
In the privacy of his hansom on the way to the Gaiety Theatre he ruminated exceedingly.
“That old woman,” he mused, “has got all the trumps in her hand again. A disagreeable old thing,but she does know how to play her cards when she gets ’em.”
The stall next to Cheriton’s was in the occupation of no less a person than George Betterton.
“Hallo, George,” said he; “you in London!”
“Ye-es,” said George, heavily. He did not seem to be altogether clear upon the point. “The War Office people are in their usual mess with the Militia.”
“Butsheis at Biarritz.”
“I have another one now,” said George, succinctly.
The noise and flamboyance of the ballet rendered further conversation undesirable. However, Cheriton took up the thread of discourse at the end of the act.
“George,” said he, with considerable solemnity, “like myself you have grown old in the love of art.”
George’s assent was of the gruffest. Cheriton was going to be a bore as usual.
“You remember that Gainsborough of Caroline Crewkerne’s?”
“Ye-es,” said George. “I offered her twenty thousand pounds for it for the Cheadle Collection.”
“Did you, though! Well, mind you don’t renew the offer. The refusal of it was promised to me in Crewkerne’s lifetime.”
George began to gobble furiously. He looked as though he wanted to call some one a liar.
“Well, it’s too soon to quarrel over it,” said Cheriton, pacifically, “because she doesn’t intend to part with it to anybody at present.”
“She’s a perverse old woman,” said George, “and age don’t improve her.”
“I mentioned her Gainsborough,” said Cheriton, who was on the rack of his own enthusiasm, “because a very odd thing has happened. The original of that picture has found her way into Hill Street.”
“What! Grandmother Dorset!” said George, contemptuously. “Why, she’s been in her grave a hundred years.”
“An absolute throwback has turned up at Hill Street,” said Cheriton, impressively. “If you want to see a living and breathing Gainsborough walking and talking in twentieth-century London call on Caroline Crewkerne some wet afternoon.”
George Betterton was not at all æsthetically minded. But like so many of his countrymen he always had a taste for “something fresh.”
“I will,” he said. And he spoke as if he meant it.
Then it was that Cheriton grew suddenly alive to the magnitude of his indiscretion. Really he had acted with consummate folly! He had a clear start of all the field, yet through an unbridled natural enthusiasm and a lifelong love of imparting information he must needs within an hour set one of the most dangerous men in England upon the scent.
George Betterton had his limitations, but where the other sex was concerned he was undoubtedly that, as Cheriton had reason to know. A widower of nine-and-fifty, who had buried two wives without finding an heir to his great estates, there was little doubt that he meant to come up to the scratch for the third time, although to be sure of late his courses had notseemed to lead in that direction. But Caroline Crewkerne, who knew most things, seemed quite clear upon the point.
Yes, George Betterton’s “I will” had a sinister sound about it. Cheriton himself was five-and-sixty and a bachelor, and in his heart of hearts he had good reason to believe that he was not a marrying man. He had long owed his primal duty to a position in the world; and, to the scorn of his family and the amusement of his friends, he had not yet fulfilled it. He was too fond of adventures, he declared romantically—a confession that a man old enough to be a grandfather ought to be ashamed to make, declared the redoubtable Caroline, with her most fearsome snort. More than once, it is true, Cheriton had fancied he had seen the writing on the wall. But when his constitutional apathy permitted him to examine it more closely, he found it had been written for some one else.
However, he had come away from Hill Street that evening in such a state of suppressed enthusiasm, that in his present mood he was by no means sure that he had not seen the writing again. It was certainly odd that a man with his record and at his time of life should have any such feeling. But there is no accounting for these things. Therefore he left the theater with an idea taking root in him that he had been guilty of an act of gross folly in blowing the trumpet so soon. Why should he help to play Caroline’s game? He should have left it to her to summon this Richmond to the field.
“Caroline will lead him a dance, though,” mused Cheriton on the threshold of Ward’s. “And I know how to handle the ribands better than he does. He’s got the mind of a dromedary, thank God!”
In the meantime the cause of these reflections was lying very forlorn and very wide-awake in the most imposing chamber in which she had ever slept. The bed was large, but cold; the chintz hangings were immaculate, but unsympathetic; the engravings of classical subjects and of august relations whom she had never seen with which the walls were hung, the austere magnificence of the furniture, and the expensive nature of the bric-à-brac, made Miss Perry yearn exceedingly for the cheerful simplicity of Slocum Magna.
Almost as far back as Miss Perry could remember, it had been given to her before attempting repose to beat Muffin over the head with a pillow. But in this solemn piece of upholstery, which apparently had been designed for an empress, such friendly happenings as these were out of the question.
However, she had Tobias with her. The wicker basket was on a little lacquered table beside her bed; and as she lay, with a slow and silent tear squeezing itself at regular intervals out of her blue eyes, she had her right hand resting firmly but affectionately on the lid of Tobias’s local habitation. That quaint animal, all unconscious of the honor done to him, was wrapped in slumber, with his ugly brown nose tucked under his lean brown paws.
Thus was Miss Perry discovered at a quarter toeleven that evening when Miss Burden entered to embrace her.
“I want to go home to Slocum Magna,” said Miss Perry, with a drawl and a sob whose united effect must have been supremely ridiculous had it not been the offspring of legitimate pathos.
Miss Burden offered her the consolation of one intimately acquainted with pathos. Every night for many long and weary years she had longed to go home to her own rustic hermitage, which, however, had no existence outside her fancy.
“Dearest Araminta,” said Miss Burden, caressing her affectionately, “you will soon get used to the strangeness.”
“I want to go home to Slocum Magna,” sobbed Miss Perry.
“I am sure you are a good and brave and noble girl,” said Miss Burden, who believed profoundly in goodness and bravery and nobility.
“Papa said I was,” sobbed Miss Perry, settling her hand more firmly than ever upon the basket of Tobias.
“To-morrow you will feel happier, Araminta dearest,” said Miss Burden, bestowing a final hug upon the distressed Miss Perry.
Miss Burden was guilty of saying that which she did not believe, but let us hope no one will blame her.