“I wish to goodness,” remarked the Reverend Sigismund Taylor rubbing the bridge of his nose with a corner of the Manual, “that the Vicar had never introduced auricular confession. It may be in accordance with the practice of the Primitive Church, but—one does meet with such very curious cases. There’s nothing the least like it, in the Manual.”
He opened the book and searched its pages over again. No, the case had not been foreseen. It must be included in those which were “left to the discretion of the priest.”
“It’s a poor Manual,” said Mr. Taylor, throwing it down and putting his hands in the pocket of his cassock. “Poor girl! She was quite distressed, too. I must have something to tell her when she comes next week.”
Mr. Taylor had, in face of the difficulty, taken time to consider, and the penitent had gone away in suspense. To represent oneself as a dressmaker—well, there was nothing very outrageous in that; it was unbecoming, but venial, to tell sundry fibs by way of supporting the assumed character—the Manual was equal to that; but the rest of the disclosure was the crux. Wrong, no doubt, was the conduct—but how wrong? That made all the difference. And then there followed another question: What ought to be done? She had asked for advice about that also, and, although such counsel was not strictly incumbent on him, he felt that he ought not to refuse it. Altogether he was puzzled. At eight-and-twenty one cannot be ready for everything; yet she had implored him to consult nobody else, and decide for her himself. “I’ve such trust in you,” she had said, wiping away an incipient teardrop; and, although Mr. Taylor told her that the individual was nothing and the Office everything, he had been rather gratified. Thinking that a turn in the open air might clear his brain and enable him better to grapple with this very thorny question, he changed his cassock for a long tailed coat, put on his wide awake, and, leaving the precincts of St. Edward Confessor, struck across Park Lane and along the Row. He passed several people he knew, both men and women: Mrs. Marland was there, attended by two young men, and, a little farther on, he saw old Lord Thrapston tottering along on his stick. Lord Thrapston hated a parson, and scowled at poor Mr. Taylor as he went by. Mr. Taylor shrank from meeting his eye, and hurried along till he reached the Serpentine, where he stood still for a few minutes, drinking in the fresh breeze. But the breeze could not blow his puzzle out of his brain. Was it a crime, or merely an escapade? What had she said to the young man? What had her feelings been or become towards the young man? Moreover, what had she caused the young man’s feelings to be for her? When he came to think it over, Mr. Taylor discovered, with a shock of surprise, that on all these distinctly material points the confession had been singularly incomplete. He was ashamed of this, for, of course, it was his business to make the confession full and exhaustive. He could only plead that, at the moment, it had seemed thorough and candid—an unreserved revelation. Yet those points did, as a fact, remain obscure.
“I wish I knew a little more about human nature,” sighed Mr. Taylor: he was thinking of one division of human nature, and it is likely enough that he knew next to nothing of it.
A hand clapped him on the shoulder, and, with a start, he turned round. A tall young man, in a new frock-coat and a faultless hat, stood by him, smiling at him.
“What, Charlie, old fellow!” cried Taylor; “where do you spring from?”
Charlie explained that he was up in town for a month or two.
“It’s splendid to meet you first day! I was going to look you up,” he said.
Sigismund Taylor and Charlie had been intimate friends at Oxford, although Charlie was, as time counts there, very considerably the junior. For the last two or three years they had hardly met.
“But what are you up for?”
“Oh, well, you see, my uncle wants me to get called to the Bar, or something, so I ran tip to have a look into it.”
“Will that take a month?”
“Look here, old fellow, I’ve got nothing else to do—I don’t see why I shouldn’t stretch it to three months. Besides, I want to spend some time with my ancestors.”
“With your ancestors?”
“In the British Museum: I’m writing a book about them. Queer lot some of them were, too. Of course I’m specially interested in Agatha Merceron; but I suppose you never heard of her.”
Mr. Taylor confessed his ignorance, and Charlie, taking his arm, walked him up and down the bank, while he talked on his pet subject. Agatha Merceron was always interesting, and just now anything about the Pool was interesting; for there was one reason for his visit to London which he had not disclosed. Nettie Wallace had, when he met her one day, incautiously dropped a word which seemed to imply that the other Agatha was often in London. Nettie tried to recall her words; but the mischief was done, and Charlie became more than ever convinced that he would grow rusty if he stayed always at Langbury Court. In fact, he could suffer it no longer, and to town he went.
For a long while Sigismund Taylor listened with no more than average interest to Charlie’s story, but it chanced that one word caught his notice.
“She comes out of the temple,” said Charlie, in the voice of hushed reverence with which he was wont to talk of the unhappy lady.
“Out of where?” asked Mr. Taylor.
“The temple. Oh, I forgot, the temple is—” and Charlie gave a description which need not be repeated.
Temple! temple! Where had he heard of a temple lately? Mr. Taylor cudgelled his brains. Why—why—yes, she had spoken of a temple. She said they met in a temple. It was a strange coincidence: the word had struck him at the time. But then everybody knows that, at a certain period, it was common enough to put up these little classical erections as a memorial or merely as an ornament to pleasure-grounds. It must be a mere coincidence. But—Mr. Taylor stopped short.
“What’s up?” asked Charlie, who had finished his narrative, and was now studying the faces of the ladies who rode past.
“Nothing,” answered Mr. Taylor.
And really it was not much—taken by itself, entirely unworthy of notice; even taken in conjunction with the temple, of no real significance, that he could see. Still, it was a whimsical thing that, as had just struck him, Charlie’s spectre should be named Agatha. But it came; to nothing: how could the name of Charlie’s spectre have anything to do with that of his penitent?
Presently Charlie, too, fell into silence. He beat his stick moodily against his leg and looked glum and absent.
“Ah, well,” he said at last, “poor Agatha was hardly used: she paid part of the debt we owe woman.”
Mr. Taylor raised his brows and smiled at this gloomily misogynistic sentiment. He had the perception to grasp in a moment what it indicated. His young friend was, or had lately been, or thought he was likely to be, a lover, and an unhappy one. But he did not press Charlie. Confessions were no luxury to him.
Presently they began to walk back, and Charlie, saying he had to dine with Victor Button, made an appointment to see Taylor again, and left him, striking across the Row. Taylor strolled on, and, finding Mrs. Marland still in her seat, sat down by her. She was surprised and pleased to hear that Charlie was in town.
“I left him at home in deep dumps. You’ve never been to Langbury Court, have you?”
Taylor shook his head.
“Such a sweet old place! But, of course, rather dull for a young man, with nobody hut his mother and just one or two slow country neighbors.”
“Oh, a run ‘ll do him good.”
“Yes; he was quite moped;” and Mrs. Marland glanced at her companion. She wanted only a very little encouragement to impart her suspicions to him. It must, in justice to Mrs. Marland, be remembered that she had always found the simplest explanation of Charlie’s devotion to the Pool hard to accept, and the most elaborate demonstration of how a Canadian canoe may be upset unconvincing.
“You’re a great friend of his, aren’t you?” pursued Mrs. Marland. “So I suppose there’s no harm in mentioning my suspicions to you. Indeed, I daresay you could be of use to him—I mean, persuade him to be wise. I’m afraid, Mr. Taylor, that he is in some entanglement.”
“Dear, dear!” murmured Mr. Taylor.
“Oh, I’ve no positive proof, but I fear so—and a very undesirable entanglement, too, with someone quite beneath him. Yes, I think I had better tell you about it.”
Mr. Taylor sat silent and, save for a start or two, motionless while his companion detailed her circumstantial evidence. Whether it was enough to prove Mrs. Marland’s case or not—whether, that is, it is inconceivable that a young man should go to any place fourteen evenings running, and upset a friend of his youth out of a canoe, except there be a lady involved, is perhaps doubtful; but it was more than enough to show Mr. Sigismund Taylor that the confession he had listened to was based upon fact, and that Charlie Merceron was the other party to those stolen interviews, into whose exact degree of heinousness he was now inquiring. This knowledge caused Mr. Taylor to feel that he was in an awkward position.
“Now,” asked Mrs. Marland, “candidly, Mr. Taylor, can you suppose anything else than that our friend Charlie was carrying on a very pronounced flirtation with this dressmaker?”
“Dressmaker?”
“Her friend was, and I believe she was too. Something of the kind, anyhow.”
“You—you never saw the—the other person?”
“No; she kept out of the way. That looks bad, doesn’t it? No doubt she was a tawdry vulgar creature. But a man never notices that!”
At this moment two people were seen approaching. One of them was a man of middle height and perhaps five-and-thirty years of age; he was stout and thick-built; he had a fat face with bulging cheeks; his eyes were rather like a frog’s; he leant very much forward as he walked, and swayed gently from side to side with a rolling swagger; and as his body rolled, his eye rolled too, and he looked this way and that with a jovial leer and a smile of contentment and amusement on his face. The smile and the merry eye redeemed his appearance from blank ugliness, but neither of them indicated a spiritual or exalted mind.
By his side walked a girl, dressed, as Mrs. Marland enviously admitted, as really very few women in London could dress, and wearing, in virtue perhaps of the dress, perhaps of other more precious gifts, an air of assured perfection and dainty disdain. She was listening to her companion’s conversation, and did not notice Sigismund Taylor, with whom she was well acquainted.
“Dear me, who are those, I wonder?” exclaimed Mrs. Marland. “She’s very distinguie.”
“It’s Miss Glyn,” answered he.
“What—Miss Agatha, Glyn?”
“Yes,” he replied, wondering whether that little coincidence as to the Agatha’ would suggest itself to anyone else.
“Lord Thrapston’s granddaughter?”
“Yes.”
“Horrid old man, isn’t he?”
“I know him very slightly.”
“And the man—who’s he?”
“Mr. Calder Wentworth.”
“To be sure. Why, they’re engaged, aren’t they? I saw it in the paper.”
“I’m sure I don’t know,” said Mr. Taylor, in a voice more troubled than the matter seemed to require. “I saw it in the paper too.”
“He’s no beauty, at any rate; but he’s a great match, I suppose?”
“Oh, perhaps it isn’t true.”
“You speak as if you wished it wasn’t. I’ve heard about Mr. Wentworth from Victor Sutton—you know who I mean?” and Mrs. Marland proceeded to give some particulars of Calder Wentworth’s career.
Meanwhile that gentleman himself was telling Agatha Glyn a very humorous story. Agatha did not laugh. Suddenly she interrupted him.
“Why don’t you ask me more about it?”
“I thought you’d tell me if you wanted me to know,” he answered.
“You are the most insufferable man. Don’t you care in the least what I do or where I go?”
“Got perfect confidence in you,” said Calder politely.
“I don’t deserve it.”
“Oh, I daresay not; but it’s so much more comfortable for me.”
“I disappeared—simply disappeared—for a fortnight; and you’ve never asked where I went, or what I did, or—or anything.”
“Haven’t I? Where did you go?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“There, you see! What the dickens was the good of my asking?”
“If you knew what I did I suppose you’d never speak to me again.”
“All right. Keep it dark then, please.”
“For one tiling, I met—No, I won’t.”
“I never asked you to, you know.”
They walked on a little way in silence.
“Met young Sutton at lunch,” observed Calder. “He’s been rusticating with some relations of old Van Merceron’s. They’ve got a nice place apparently.”
“I particularly dislike Mr. Sutton.”
“All right. He sha’n’t come when we’re married. Eh? What?”
“I didn’t speak,” said Miss Glyn, who had certainly done something.
“Beg pardon,” smiled Calder. “Victor told me rather a joke. It appears there’s a young Merceron, and the usual rustic beauty, don’t you know—forget the name—but a fat girl, Victor said, and awfully gone on young Merceron. Well, there’s a pond or something——”
“How long will this story last?” asked Miss Glyn with a tragic air.
“It’s an uncommon amusing one,” protested Calder. “He upset her in the pond, and——”
“Do you mind finishing it some other time?”
“Oh, all right. Thought it’d interest you.”
“It doesn’t.”
“Never knew such a girl! No sense of humor!” commented Calder, with a shake of his head and a backward roll of his eye towards his companion.
But it makes such a difference whether a story is new to the hearer.
Two worlds and half a dozen industries had conspired to shower gold on Calder Wentworth’s head. There was land in the family, brought by his grandmother; there was finance on the paternal side (whence came a Portuguese title, carefully eschewed by Calder); there had been a London street, half a watering-place, a South African mine, and the better part of an American railway. The street and the watering-place remained; the mine and the railway had been sold at the top of the market. About the same time the family name became Wentworth—it had been Stripes, which was felt to be absurd—and the family itself began to take an exalted place in society. The rise was the easier because, when old Mr. Stripes-Wentworth died, young Mr. Calder S. Wentworth became the only representative; and a rich young bachelor can rise lightly to heights inaccessible to the feet of less happily situated folk. It seemed part of Providence’s benevolence that when Lady Forteville asked how many ‘Stripes women’ there were, the answer could be ‘None’; whereupon the countess at once invited Mr. Calder Wentworth to dinner. Calder went, and rolled his frog’s eyes with much amusement when the lady asked him to what Wentworths he belonged, for, as he observed to Miss Glyn, whom he had the pleasure of escorting, his Wentworths were an entirely new brand, and Lady Forteville knew it as well as if she had read the letters patent and invented the coat-of-arms.
“Mr. Wentworth—Mr. Merceron,” said Victor Sutton, with a wave of his hand.
“I believe I know an uncle of yours—an uncommon clever fellow,” said Calder, unfolding his napkin and glancing round the dining-room of the Themis Club.
“Oh, Uncle Van? Yes, we consider him our——”
“Leading article? Quite so. I’ve heard a bit about you too—something about a canoe, eh?”
Charlie looked somewhat disturbed.
“Oughtn’t Sutton to have told me? Well, it’s too late now because I’ve told half a dozen fellows.”
“But there’s nothing to tell.”
“Well, I told it to old Thrapston—you don’t know him, do you? Cunningest old boy in London. Upon my honor, you know, I shouldn’t like to be like old Thrapston, not when I was getting old, you know. He’s too——”
“Well, what did he say?” asked Victor.
“He said what you never had the sense to see, my boy; but I expect Mr. Merceron won’t be obliged to me for repeating it.”
“I should like to hear it,” said Charlie, with necessary politeness.
“Well, it’s not me, its old Thrapston; and if you say it’s wrong, I’ll believe yon. Old Thrapston—hang it, Victor, that old man ought to be hanged! Why, only the other day I saw him——”
“Do stick to the point,” groaned Victor.
“All right. Well, he said, ‘I’ll lay a guinea there was a’—and he winked his sinful old eye, you know, for all the world like a what-d’ye-call-it in a cathedral one of those hideous—I say, what is the word, Victor? I saw ‘em when Agatha took me—beg pardon, Merceron?”
Was the world full of Agathas? If so, it would be well not to start whenever one was mentioned. Charlie recovered himself.
“I think you must mean a gargoyle,” he said, wondering who this Agatha might be.
“Of course I do. Fancy forgetting that! Gargoyle, of course. Well, old Thrapston said, ‘I’ll lay a guinea there was a woman in that dashed summer house, Calder, my boy.’”
Victor Button’s eyes lighted with a gleam,
“Well, I’m hanged if I ever thought of that! Charlie, you held us all!”
“Bosh!” said Charlie Merceron. “There was no one there.”
“All right. But there ought to have been, you know—to give interest to the position.”
“Honor bright, Charlie?” asked Victor Sutton.
“Shut up, Sutton,” interposed Calder, “He’s not in the Divorce Court, Let’s change the subject.”
Charlie was in a difficulty, but the better course seemed to be to allow the subject to be changed, in spite of the wink that accompanied Calder’s suggestion.
“All right,” said Victor. “How is Miss Glyn, Wentworth?”
“Oh, she’s all right. She’s been in the country for a bit, but she’s back now.”
“And when is the happy event to be?”
Calder laid down his knife and fork and remarked deliberately:
“I haven’t, my dear boy, the least idea.”
“I should hurry her up,” laughed Sutton.
“I’d just like—now I should just like to put you in my shoes for half an hour, and see you hurry up Agatha.”
“She couldn’t eat me.”
“Eat you? No, but she’d flatten you out so that you’d go under that door and leave room for the jolly draught there is all the same.”
Sutton laughed complacently.
“Well, you’re a patient man,” he observed. “For my part, I like a thing to be off or on.”
It came to Charlie Merceron almost as a surprise to find that Victor’s impudence—he could call it by no other name—was not reserved for his juniors or for young men from the country; but Calder took it quite good-humoredly, contenting himself with observing, “Well, it was very soon off in your case, wasn’t it, old fellow?”
Sutton flushed.
“I’ve told you before that that’s not true,” he said angrily.
Calder laughed.
“All right, all right. We used to think, once upon a time, Merceron, you know, that old Victor here was a bit smitten himself; but he hasn’t drugged my champagne yet, so of course, as he says, it was all a mistake.”
After dinner the three separated. Victor had to go to a party. Calder Wentworth proposed to Charlie that they should take a stroll together with a view to seeing whether, when they came opposite to the door of a music-hall, they would ‘feel like’ dropping in to see part of the entertainment. Charlie agreed, and, having lit their cigars, they set out. He found his now friend amusing, and Calder, for his part, took a liking for Charlie, largely on account of his good looks; like many plain people, he was extremely sensitive to the influence of beauty in women and men alike.
“I say, old fellow,” he said, pressing Charlie’s arm as if he had known him all his life, “there was somebody in that summer-house, eh?”
Charlie turned with a smile and a blush. He felt confidential.
“Yes, there was, only Victor——”
“Oh, I know. I nearly break his head whenever he mentions any girl I like.”
“You know what he’d have thought—and it wasn’t anything like that really.”
“Who was she, then?”
“I—I don’t know.”
“Oh, I don’t mean her name, of course. But what was she?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where did she come from?”
“London, I believe.”
“Oh! I say, that’s a queer go, Merceron.”
“I don’t know what to think about it. She’s simply vanished,” said poor Charlie, and no one should wonder if his voice faltered a little. Calder Wentworth laughed at many things, but he did not laugh now at Charlie Merceron. Indeed he looked unusually grave.
“I should drop it,” he remarked. “It don’t look—well—healthy.”
“Ah, you’ve never seen her,” said Charlie.
“No, and I tell you what—it won’t be a bad thing if you don’t see her again.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re just in the state of mind to marry her.”
“And why shouldn’t I?”
Mr. Wentworth made no answer, and they walked on till they readied Piccadilly Circus. Then Charlie suddenly darted forward.
“Hullo, what’s up?” cried Calder, following him.
Charlie was talking eagerly to a very smart young lady who had just got down from an omnibus.
“By Jove! he can’t have found, her!” thought Calder.
It was not the unknown, but her friend Nettie Wallace, whom Charlie’s quick eye had discerned; and the next moment Willie Prime made his appearance. Charlie received them both almost with enthusiasm, and the news from Lang Marsh was asked and given. Calder drew near, and Charlie presented his friends to one another with the intent that he might get a word with Nettie while Calder engrossed her fiances attention.
“Have—have you heard from Miss Brown lately?” he was just beginning, when Calder, who had been looking steadily at Nettie, burst out:
“Hullo, I say, Miss Wallace, we’ve met before, haven’t we? You know me, don’t you?”
Nettie laughed.
“Oh, yes, I know you, sir. You’re—-”
She paused abruptly, and glanced from Charlie to Calder, and back from Calder to Charlie. Then she blushed very red indeed.
“Well, who am I?”
“I—I saw you at—at Miss Glyn’s, Mr. Wentworth.”
“‘Course you did—that’s it;” and, looking curiously at the girl’s flushed face, he added: “Don’t be afraid to mention Miss Glyn; Mr. Merceron knows all about it.”
“All about it, does he, sir?” cried Nettie. “Well, I’m glad of that. I haven’t been easy in my mind ever since.”
Calder’s conformation of eye enabled him to express much surprise by facial expression, and at this moment he used his power to the full.
“Awfully kind of you, Miss Wallace,” said he, “but I don’t see where your responsibility comes in. Ever since what?”
Nettie shot a glance of inquiry at Charlie, but here too she met only bewilderment.
“Does he know that Miss Glyn is—-” she began.
“Engaged to me? Certainly.”
“Oh!”
Willie stood by in silence. He had never heard of this Miss Glyn. Charlie, puzzled as he was, was too intent on Miss Brown to spend much time wondering why Miss Glyn’s affairs should have been a trouble to Nettie.
“You’ll let me know if you hear about her, won’t you?” he asked in a low voice.
Nettie gave up the hope of understanding. She shook her head.
“I’ll ask her, if I see her, whether she wishes it,” she whispered back; and, with a hasty good-night, she seized Willie’s arm and hurried him off. Charlie was left alone with Calder.
“What the deuce did she mean?” asked Calder.
“I don’t know,” answered Charlie.
“Where did you meet her?”
“Oh, down at home. The fellow she was with is a son of a tenant of ours; she’s going to marry him.”
“She’s a nice little girl, but I’m hanged if I know what she meant.”
And, as the one was thinking exclusively of Agatha Glyn, and the other spared a thought for no one but Agatha Brown, they did not arrive at an explanation.
One result, however, that chance encounter had. The next morning Miss Agatha Glyn received a letter in the following terms:
“Madam:—I hope you will excuse me intruding, but I think you would wish to know that Mr. Charles Merceron is in London, and that I met him this evening with Mr. Wentworth. As you informed me that you had passed Mr. Merceron on the road two or three times during your visit to Lang Marsh, I think you may wish to be informed of the above. I may add that Mr. Merceron is aware that you are engaged to Mr. Wentworth, but I could not make out how far he was aware of what happened at Lang Marsh. I think he does not know it. Of course you will know whether Mr. Wentworth is aware of your visit there. I should be much obliged if you would be so kind as to tell me what to say if I meet the gentlemen again. Mr. Merceron is very pressing in asking me for news of you. I am to be married in a fortnight from the present date, and I am, Madam, yours respectfully, Nettie Wallace.”
“In London, and with Calder!” exclaimed Agatha Glyn. “Oh dear! oh dear! oh dear! What is to be done? I wish I’d never gone near the wretched place!”
Then she took up the letter and reread it.
“He and I mustn’t meet, that’s all,” she said.
Then she slowly tore the letter into very small pieces and put them in the waste-paper basket.
“Calder has no idea where I was,” she said, and she sat down by the window and looked out over the Park for nearly ten minutes.
“Ah, well! I should like to see him just once again. Dear old Pool.” said she.
Then she suddenly began to laugh—an action only to be excused in one in her position, and burdened with her sins, by the fact of her having at the moment a peculiarly vivid vision of Millie Bushell going head first out of a canoe.
The first Viscount Thrapston had been an eminent public character, and the second a respectable private person; the third had been neither. And yet there was some good in the third. He had loved his only son with a fondness rare to find; and for ten whole years, while the young man was between seventeen and twenty-seven, the old lord lived, for his sake, a life open to no reproach. Then the son died, leaving a lately married wife and a baby-girl, and Lord Thrapston, deprived at once of hope and of restraint, returned to his old courses, till age came upon him and drove him from practice into reminiscence. Mrs. Glyn had outlived her husband fifteen years and then followed him, fairly snubbed to death, some said, by her formidable father-in-law. The daughter was of sterner stuff, and early discovered for herself that nothing worse than a scowl or a snarl was to be feared. On her, indeed, descended a relic of that tenderness her father had enjoyed, and Agatha used to the full the advantages it gave her. She knew her own importance. It is not every girl who will be a peeress in her own right, and she amused her grandfather by calmly informing him that it was not on the whole a subject for regret that she had not been a boy. “You see,” said she, “we get rid of the new viscounty, and it’s much better to be Warmley than Thrapston.”
The fact that she was some day to be ‘Warmley’ was the mainspring of that hairbrained jaunt to Lang Marsh in company with Nettie Wallace. Nettie was the daughter of Lord Thrapston’s housekeeper, and the two girls had been intimate in youth, much as Charlie Merceron and Willie Prime had been at the Court; and when Nettie, scorning servitude, set up in life for herself, Agatha gave her her custom and did not withdraw her friendship. In return, she received an allegiance which refused none of her behests, and a regard which abolished all formality between them, except when Nettie got a pen in her hand and set herself to compose a polite letter. The expedition was, of course, to see the Court—the old home of the Warmleys, for which Agatha felt a sentimental attraction. She had told herself that some day, if she were rich (and, Lord Thrapston not being rich, she must have had some other resource in her mind), she would buy back Langbury Court and get rid of the Mercerons altogether. There were only a widow and a boy, she had heard, and they should have their price. So she went to the Court in the business-like mood of a possible purchaser (Calder could afford anything), as well as in the romantic mood of a girl escaped from every-day surroundings and plunging into a past full of interest to her. Had not she also read of Agatha Merceron? And in this mixed mood she remained till one evening at the Pool she had met ‘the boy’, when the mood became more mixed still. She dared not now look back on the struggles she had gone through before her meeting with the boy became first a daily event, and then the daily event. She had indulged herself for once. It was not to last; but for once it was overpoweringly sweet to be gazed at by eyes that did not remind her of a frog’s, and to see swiftly darting towards her a lithe straight figure crowned with a head that (so she said) reminded her of Lord Byron’s. But alas! alas! why had nobody told her that the boy was like that before she went? Why did her grandfather take no care of her? Why did Calder never show any interest in what she did? Why, in fine, was everybody so cruel as to let her do exactly what she liked, and thereby get into a scrape like this?
One thing was certain. If that boy were in London, she must avoid him. They must never meet. It was nonsense for Mr. Sigismund Taylor to talk of making a. clean breast of it—of a dignified apology to Charlie, coupled with a no less dignified intimation that their acquaintance must be regarded as closed. Mr. Taylor knew nothing of the world. He even wanted her to tell Calder! No. She was truly and properly penitent, and she hoped that she received all he said in that line in a right spirit; but when it came to a question of expediency, she would rather have Mrs. Blunt’s advice than that of a thousand Mr. Taylors. So she wrote to Mrs. Blunt and asked herself to lunch, and Mrs. Blunt, being an accomplished painstaking hostess, and having no reason to suppose that her young friend desired a confidential interview, at once cast about for some one whom Agatha would like to meet. She did not ask Calder Wentworth—she was not so commonplace as that—but she invited Victor Sutton, and, delighting in a happy flash of inspiration, she added Mr. Vansittart Merceron. The families were connected in some way, she knew, and Agatha certainly ought to know Mr. Merceron.
Accordingly, when Agatha arrived, she found Victor, and she had not been there five minutes before the butler, throwing open the door, announced “Mr. Merceron.”
Uncle Van had reached that state of body when he took his time over stairs, and between the announcement and his entrance there was time for Agatha to exclaim, quite audibly, “Oh!”
“What’s the matter, dear?” asked Mrs. Blunt; but Uncle Van’s entrance forbade a reply, and left Agatha blushing but relieved.
Was she never to hear the end of that awful story? It might be natural that, her hereditary connection with the Mercerons being disclosed, Mr. Vansittart should discourse of Langbury Court, of the Pool, and of Agatha Merceron; but was it necessary that Victor Sutton should chime in with the whole history of the canoe and Miss Bushell, or joke with Mr. Merceron about his nephew’s ‘assignations’? The whole topic seemed in bad taste, and she wondered that Mrs. Blunt did not discourage it. But what horrible creatures men were! Did they really think it impossible for a girl to like to talk to a man for an hour or so in the evening without——?
“You must let me bring my nephew to meet Miss Glyn,” said Uncle Van graciously to his hostess. “She is so interested in the family history that she and Charlie would get on like wildfire. He’s mad about it.”
“In fact,” sniggered Victor (Miss Glyn always detested that man), “so interested that, as you hear, he went to meet Agatha Merceron every evening for a fortnight!”
“You’ll be delighted to meet him, won’t you, Agatha? We must arrange a day,” said Mrs. Blunt.
“Calder knows him,” added Victor.
“He’s an idle young dog,” said Uncle Van, “but a nice fellow. A little flighty and fanciful, as boys will be, but no harm in him. You mustn’t attach too much importance to our chaff about his meetings at the Pool, Miss Glyn; we don’t mean any harm.”
Agatha tried to smile, but the attempt was not a brilliant success. She stammered that she would be delighted to meet Mr. Charles Merceron, swearing in her heart that she would sooner start for Tierra del Fuego. But her confession to Mrs. Blunt would save her, if only these odious men would go. They had had their coffee, and their liqueurs, and their cigarettes. What more, in Heaven’s name, could even a man want to propitiate the god of his idolatry?
Apparently the guests themselves became aware that they were trespassing, for Uncle Van, turning to his hostess with his blandest smile, remarked, “I hope we’re not staying too long. The fact is, my dear Mrs. Blunt, you’re always so kind that we took the liberty of telling Calder Wentworth to call for us here. He ought to have come by now.”
Mrs. Blunt declared that she would be offended if they thought of going before Calder came. Agatha rose in despair: the confession must be put off. She held out her hand to her hostess. At this moment the door-bell rang.
“That’s him,” said Victor.
“Sit down again for a minute, dear,” urged Mrs. Blunt.
There was renewed hope for the confession. Agatha sat down. But hardly had she done so before the strangest presentiment came over her. She heard the door below open and shut, and it was borne in upon her mind that two men had entered. How she guessed it, she could not tell, but, as she sat there, she had no doubt at all that Charlie Merceron had come with Calder Went worth. Escape was impossible, but she walked across to the window and stood there, with her back to the door.
“Mr. Wentworth!” she heard, and then, cutting the servant short, came Calder’s voice.
“I took the liberty—-” he began: and she did not know how he went on, for her head was swimming.
“Agatha! Agatha, dear!” called Mrs. Blunt.
Perforce she turned, passing her hand quickly across her brow. Yes! It was so. There he stood by Calder’s side, and Calder was saying, “My dear Agatha, this is Charlie Merceron.”
She would not look at Charlie. She moved slowly forward, her eyes fixed on Calder, and bowed with a little set smile. Luckily people pay slight attention to one another’s expressions on social occasions, or they must all have noticed her agitation. As it was, only Calder Wentworth looked curiously at her before he turned aside to shake hands with Uncle Van.
Then she felt Charlie Merceron coining nearer, and, a second later, she heard his voice.
“Is it possible that it’s you?” he asked, in a low tone.
Then she looked at him. His face was pale and his eyes eagerly straining to read what might be in hers.
“Hush!” she whispered. “Yes. Hush! hush!”
“But—but he told me your name was Glyn?”
“Yes.”
“And he says you’re engaged to him.”
Agatha clasped her hands, and Calder’s voice broke in, between them: “Come along, Merceron, we’re waiting for you.”
“They’ve got into antiquities already,” smiled Mrs. Blunt. “You must come again, Mr. Merceron, and meet Miss Glyn. Mustn’t he, Agatha?”
Agatha threw one glance at him.
“If he will,” she said.
Charlie pulled himself together, muttered something appropriate, and shuffled out tinder his uncle’s wing. Mr. Vansittart was surprised to find him a trifle confused and awkward in society.
Outside the house, Charlie ranged up beside Calder “Wentworth, leaving Uncle Van and Sutton together.
“Well, what do you think of her?” asked Calder.
Charlie gave no opinion. He asked just one question:
“How long have you been engaged to her?”
“How long? Oh, let’s see. About—yes, just about a year. I never knew that there was a sort of connection between you and her—sort of relationship, you know. I ain’t strong on the Peerage.”
“A sort of connection!” There was that in more senses than the one Calder had been told of by Uncle Van. There was a connection that poor Charlie thought Heaven itself had tied on those summer evenings by the Pool, which to strengthen and confirm forever he had sallied from his home, like a knight in search of his mistress the world over in olden days. And he found her—such as this girl must be! Stay! He did not know all yet. Perhaps she had been forced into a bond she hated. He knew that happened. Did not stories tell of it, and moralists declaim against it? This man—this creature, Calder Wentworth—was buying her with his money, forcing himself on her, brutally capturing her. Of course! How could he have doubted her? Charlie dropped Calder’s arm as though it had been made of red-hot iron.
“Hullo!” exclaimed that worthy fellow, unconscious of offence.
Charlie stopped short. “I can’t come,” he said. “I—I’ve remembered an engagement;” and without more he turned away and shot out of sight round the nearest corner.
“Well, I’m hanged!” said Calder Wentworth, and, with a puzzled frown, he joined his other friends.