Mosscrop turned the spring-lock noiselessly, and drew the door open with caressing gentleness. His eyes had intuitively prepared themselves to discern the slender form of Vestalia in the dim light of the passage. They beheld instead, with bewildered repulsion, a burly masculine bulk. Wandering upward in angry confusion from the level on which they had expected her dear face, they took in the fatuous, moon-like visage of Lord Drumpipes.
“Dear God!” groaned David, in frank abandonment to disgust.
“I came up quietly this time,” said the Earl. “You made such a row about my being noisy last night, I thought to myself, ‘Now, anything to please Davie! I’ll steal up like a mouse in list-slippers.’”
David scowled angry impatience at him. “Who the deuce cares whatyoudo?” he demanded, roughly. “You might have marched up with a Salvation Army band, for all it matters to me.”
“Ah,” said Drumpipes, placidly pushing his way past Mosscrop through the open door. “Well, give me a drink, Davie, man, and then tell me all about it. Where may the lady be at the present moment?”
Mosscrop came in, and produced another glass with a gloomy air. He watched the Earl seat himself in the biggest chair and help himself from the decanter, and light his pipe, all in moody silence. “She’s gone away,” he said at last, coldly.
“And a good job, too!” remarked the other. “Distrust all yellow-hair, Davie! Have you been in my place and seen what that woman did? There was my Athabaska moose actually torn from the wall, and pulled to bits on the floor! It’s a matter of fifty shillings, or even more, Davie. Considering what you’d already spent on her, I call that heartless behaviour on her part. She must be a bad sort indeed to take all you would give her, and fool you to the top of your bent, and then wantonly destroy property that she knew you’d have to make good, before she took French leave. Ah, women are not given that kind of hair for nothing! You’re well out of a thankless mess, Davie.”
Mosscrop looked musingly at his friend. He smiled a little to himself, and then sighed as well. A calmer temper returned to him. “I don’t take your view of it, Archie,” he said, almost gently. “I have been as sad about it as a child who’s lost its pet, but I’m less disconsolate than I was. Some compensations occur to me—and besides, I have a letter from her. It came to-night, and from its tone——”
“Burn it, man, burn it!” the other adjured him, with eager fervour. “Drive the whole business from your mind! If you’ll give me your solemn word, Davie, not to see her again”—the Earl paused, to invest his further words with a deeper gravity—“if you’ll promise faithfully to have no more to do with her, I’ll forgive you the moose. I said fifty shillings, but I doubt your getting a good job much under three pounds. Well, then, if you say the word, I’ll pocket that loss. Hang it all, you’re my boyhood friend, and I’d go to a considerable length to save you from a dangerous entanglement of this sort. Although it was by no means an ordinary head. Man, I fair loved that moosie!”
Mosscrop’s smooth-shaven and somewhat sallow visage had gradually lost its melancholy aspect. A cheerful grin began now to play about the corners of his mouth. “Archie,” he said with an affectation of exaggerated seriousness, “a moose more or less is not worth mentioning by comparison with the situation which is about to confront you. I know the particular beast you speak of. It was not up to much. The fur was dropping out in patches on its neck, one of its eyes was loose, and the red paint on the nostrils was oxidized. You would not have got twelve-and-six for it anywhere in the world. But if it had been the choicest trophy that was ever mounted, and then its value were multiplied a hundred-fold, it would still be a waste of your time to give it a second thought. Graver matters demand your attention, Archie.”
The Earl’s countenance lengthened, and he set down his glass. He apparently did not trust himself to speak, but stared in alarmed inquiry at his friend.
“As you said a while ago,” pursued David, with vexatious deliberation, “we have been pals from boyhood. My father was your grandfather’s man of business, and was your factor till his death. You and I played together before we were breeched. We went to school together, and I spent more holidays at Skirl with you than I did at home. So I know the ins and outs of your family and its affairs practically as well as you do. I know your sisters——”
“You don’t mean that Ellen has given up her Zenana mission work in Burmah, and returned here to England?” Drumpipes interposed, with a convulsive catch in his breath.
“No; the Lady Ellen, so far as I know, is still peacefully occupied in harrowing up the domestic life of the Orient in her well-known and most effective manner.”
“Well, anything elsemustbe a minor evil,” said the Earl, with an accent of relief. “Whichever of the rest of them it is, Davie, I tell you at the outset that I wash my hands of the business. My sisters rendered the first twenty-five years of my life a torment upon earth. They bullied me out of all peace in life as a youngster; they made my rotten marriage for me; they took my money and then blackened my character in reward; they——”
“Oh, I know all those gags by heart,” interposed Mosscrop. “They’re really very decent bodies, those sisters of yours; if they had a fault, it was in believing that they could make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. But it’s not about them at all that I was speaking. The point is, Archie, that I have made the acquaintance of Mr. Laban Skinner and his extremely attractive daughter.”
The Earl took in this intelligence with ponderous slowness. He sipped at his glass in silence, and then stared for a little at his friend. “Well, what is there so alarming about that?” he demanded at last, roughening his voice in puzzled annoyance. “They’re respectable people, aren’t they? And what the deuce are you driving at, anyway?”
“Ah, if you take that tone with me, old man, I pull out of the affair at once.”
Drumpipes scowled. “What affair? How do you know there is any affair! And what business have you got being in it, if there is an affair? You’re over-officious, my friend. You take too much on yourself.”
Mosscrop laughed with tantalising enjoyment in his eyes. “Confess that you think of making a Countess of the lady.”
“Well, and what if I do?” the Earl retorted. “Damn it all, man, I haven’t to ask your leave, have I? And, come now, I put it to you straight, have you ever seen a finer woman in your life?”
David lifted his brows judicially, and held his head to one side. “Oh, I’m not saying she’s amiss—in externals,” he admitted.
“Man, she’s wonderful! Just wonderful!” cried the other. “Did you mind her walk? It is as if she’d never been outside a palace in her life. And the face, the eyes, the colour, the figure—what Queen in Europe can match them? Man, since I first laid eyes on her, I’ve not been myself at all. The thought of her bewitches me. I hardly know what I’m doing. I’ve been to-day to my tailor’s, and I gave him orders that fair took his breath away. The most expensive clothes, and even furs, I ordered with as light a heart as if it were a matter of sixpences. The man knows me from childhood, and he gazed at me as if I was clean daft. He was shaking his head to himself when I came away. Oh, I’m quite a different person, I assure you. I literally hurl money about me, nowadays.”
“You must indeed be in love,” said Moss-crop. “The father—he gives one the notion of a man of wealth.”
The Earl’s face glistened. “He’s in the Standard Oil Company!” he whispered, impressively.
This fact created an atmosphere of dignified solemnity for itself. The two men looked at each other gravely for a while, saying nothing. Then the Earl, with a contemplative air, refilled his glass.
“She is the most beautiful woman I’ve ever known,” he said, earnestly; “and I think she will marry me.”
“Physical beauty and Standard Oil do make an alluring combination,” remarked David philosophically; “but——”
“Oh, there are no ‘buts,’” Drum-pipes insisted. “She’s as fine in mind and temper as she is in body. I’m very particular about intellect, as you know, and I’ve studied her closely. She has a very sound brain, Davie—for a woman. But how on earth did you come to stumble upon them?”
Mosscrop did not explain. “The thing that impressed me about her, curiously enough,” he said, with tranquil discursiveness, “was her extremely democratic aversion to our ranks and hereditary titles. She and her father seem to be the most violent anti-aristocrats I ever knew.”
“Yes, thatisa trifle awkward,” the Earl admitted. “I don’t think it’s more than skin-deep with the old man, but Adele—that’s her name, as beautiful as herself, isn’t it?—she’s tremendously in earnest about it. That has rather queered my pitch—I haven’t told them, you know, about the title and all that. They know me just as simple Mr. Linkhaw.”
“‘Simple’ is so precisely the word,” commented Mosscrop.
“Well, what was I to do?” the other protested in self-defence. “I was travelling under that name in Kentucky—went there to look at a big sale of thoroughbreds, you know—and met the father, and then I met the girl, and they had me to their house in the country—a magnificent place, by George—and she had so much to say against the classes here, and took such a strong position against titles and all that—why, Iwouldhave been a juggins to tell her at the start; and after, it gradually occurred to me that I wouldn’t say anything at all, but just go on and win her as plain Mr. Linkhaw. Then I could be sure I was being loved for myself alone, couldn’t I?”
“Your sentimentality is most touching,” said David; “but I fear it will cost you heavily.”
“Oh, by the way, yes,” remarked Drum-pipes, collecting his thoughts; “you said something awhile ago about there being a bother of some sort. What is it?” Then an idea occurred to him, and he lifted his head eagerly. “You haven’t gone and blabbed about me, have you—told her who I was, and all that?”
“Quite the contrary,” smiled David. “It was she who recognisedmeat once as the Earl of Drumpipes. It seems you showed her my picture on shipboard, and told her who I was, and all about me. Do you recall the incident?”
The Earl nodded, foolishly. “It’s my confounded imagination,” he groaned. “I’m always making an ass of myself like that. God only knows why I should have gone out of my way to invent that idiotic rubbish. But you get awfully bard up for conversation on shipboard, you know. And so it all came out, and she’s chuckling to think what a clumsy liar and guy I made of myself—and I’ve gone and ordered all those clothes—and——”
“Be reassured, most noble Thane,” cried David, gaily. “There has been no disclosure. Nothing came out. I accepted the situation. I did not for an instant betray you. I said, ‘Certainly: Iamthe Earl of Drumpipes,’ without so much as the flicker of an eyelid. There’s friendship for you, if you like.”
“And did she believe—” the Earl began to ask. Then he choked with rising mirth, gasped, rolled about in his chair, and finally burst forth in resounding laughter. “She thinks you—you”—he started out again, and once more went off in loud merriment. “It’s the funniest thing I ever heard of,” he murmured at last, restoring his composure with difficulty, and grinning at Mosscrop through eyes wet with joyful tears.
“It delights me to see how keenly the humorous aspect of the matter appeals to you,” observed David, “because there is another phase of it which may seem to be deficient in gaiety.”
“No; you as the Earl, that’s too funny!” persisted Drumpipes, with a fresh outbreak of laughter. But this somehow rang a little false at the finish. A half-doubtful look came into his eyes, and sobered his countenance. “But you’ll stand by me in this thing, old man, now that you’ve begun it, won’t you?” he asked, in in an altered tone.
“But I didn’t begin it,” David pointed out calmly. “You began it yourself, and she took it up of her own accord. I’ve simply sacrificed myself in your interest. I stood still, and heard my motives aspersed, my character vilified, my objects in life covered with contumely, all on account of your hereditary crimes, and took it all like a lamb. But to assume that I’m going to do this again, or indefinitely, is another matter. I don’t mind submitting to a single temporary humiliation for a friend’s sake, but to make a profession of it is too much. If it were even a decent fullblown peerage it might be different, but to be traduced for nothing better than a Scotch title—no, thank you!”
“You’re not the friend I took you for,” commented the Earl, in depressed tones. “For that matter,” he added, defiantly, “we were Pilliewillies in Slug-Angus before the Campbells were ever heard of, or the Gordons had learnt not to eat their cattle raw. And no Linkhaw has ever said to a Mosscrop, ‘I see you’re in a hole and I’ll leave you there.’”
David smiled. “No, you would always give a hand—for a fixed price. Well, Archie, I’m not saying I won’t see you through all this, but there must be conditions. And there must be a plan. What on earth do you intend to do?”
“Well, my idea is,” the other answered, hesitatingly, “that I should ask her to be my wife while she still supposes I am merely Mr. Linkhaw. She is like all American girls in this, that she believes entirely in love matches. So if she will marry me as Mr. Linkhaw, it will signify that she loves me. Very well then, that being the case, I can say to her afterward that I ventured upon a trifling deception, solely to have the chance to win the woman I wanted, and to make sure that I was being loved for myself alone. And then, hang it all, I don’t believe it lies in any woman’s skin to be angry at finding that she’s been made a countess unawares. If I said I was an Earl and turned out not to be one, then she’d have a grievance, but it’s the other way about.”
“Precisely,” put in David, “that particular ignominy is reserved for me. But suppose she doesn’t accept you.”
“That’s hardly worth supposing. It’s as good as understood between us, I think, that she will accept me.”
“But then suppose she jilts you, after you disclose to her that you are not plain Mr. Linkhaw.”
“If that’s well managed, I’m not afraid of it, either. You see, her father’s not an out-and-out American. He was really born in England, and went out there as a boy. That’s a very curious thing, you know. Englishmen who go there, and like the place, get to be more American than the Yankees are themselves. But they don’t change their blood, do they? And women are pretty much alike, too, whatever their blood may be. They’re all organised to stand a coronet on the corner of their pocket handkerchiefs. No, it’ll be all right, if only you stay by me.”
“Ah, now we come to realities,” said Moss-crop, genially. “It’ll be rather an expensive business, Archie. I have very high notions, my friend, as to the scale on which an Earl should comport himself. I could not dream of doing the thing on the thrifty and contracted basis which suits you. The task is a difficult one to me. I shall have to sit and look entirely devoid of mental sensations of any sort for hours at a time. I know nothing of football and cricket, and have not the name of a single jockey on my tongue; this will render conversation an embarrassing matter for me. I shall suffer continually from the knowledge that I am being regarded as a vicious fool, a rake, a gambler, and libertine of the most heartless description, and this will wear a good deal on my nerves. Compensation of some sort I must have. Now, I entertain the theory that a nobleman should never have any small change about him at all. Tips to waiters I would make a great point of. They should invariably be of gold. To slip a sovereign into a hall-porter’s hand is also a valuable action. His subsequent demeanour gives the cue to the attitude of the whole visible world toward you. A four-in-hand to Brighton is good substantial form, too, if enough pains be taken with the outfit. A private hansom in town is, of course, indispensable. I realise, Archie,” he concluded’ apologetically, “that I am not displaying a specially comprehensive grasp of the requirements of rank. I can only think of a few things now, on the spur of the moment; but I will concentrate all my energies on the task once I take it up in earnest. You may trust me to rise to the occasion. I will be a nobleman that mere baronets will turn round in the street to look after.”
Drumpipes exhibited a wan and troubled smile. “You’d have your joke, Davie, out of any man’s distress,” he said, weakly.
“Joke!” cried Mosscrop. “You make a woful error there, Archie. Never was man more serious.”
“But there’d be no opportunity for you to spend money, or display yourself,” urged the other. “Not, of course, that I would begrudge a pound or two, more or less, if there were a real need of it. But in this case, the whole point is that you should lie low, and not be seen any more. There is no necessity that she should meet you again. In fact, the more I think of it, the clearer it is that she shouldn’t. It might spoil everything, don’t you see?”
“Oh no, my lad!” rejoined David, cheerfully. “I’m not of the hermit variety of aristocrat. I’m the kind of Earl who’s on the spot, and who lets people know that he is present. I will have rings on my fingers and bells on my toes. I will—why, let me see!”
His face brightened at some wandering thought. “Why, man, I have a birthday in six days’ time! That’s it, the 24th. I knew there was the difference of a year lacking a week between us. She read it to me this morning out of the peerage—August 24th. Very well, then, I will celebrate the anniversary as it has never been celebrated before. I will provide an entertainment for my immediate friends upon a scale befitting my position and the importance of the event commemorated. What do you think of a special saloon-carriage to Portsmouth, and a dinner on my yacht, eh? One could be hired and manned for the occasion, and a staff of cooks and servants sent down from an hotel here. Or could you get them in Portsmouth? Does anything more appropriate occur to you?”
“Go on with your jest,” replied the other, sullenly. “All I can say is, it’s in damned bad taste, though. Here I am in this predicament, and you pour vinegar into my wounds instead of oil.”
“Standard Oil, I assume that you refer to. No, you shall have the oil, Archie. You shall be my guest on the occasion, and you shall meet Mr. and Miss Skinner. We four will constitute the party; and I will provide such an engaging spectacle of the nobleman, the bearer of hereditary dignities and titles, seen close at hand among his intimate friends, that the lady will be moved to admiration. She will say, ‘Ah, I never guessed before how delightful an Earl could be, how perfect in manners, how admirable in tact, how superb in his capacity as host.’ I will reconcile her to the aristocracyen bloc.”
“Say, you know,” interposed Drumpipes, “I’m not sure there isn’t something in that.”
“Something in it? My dear sir, it’s rammed with fructifying probabilities. I give this party, and I do it as an Earl should do things. I exert myself to fascinate this transatlantic twain. I lead their imaginations captive to my hereditary seductiveness. I make them feel that to be the guests of an Earl is more than beauty and fine raiment and Standard Oil. I excite them to a warm glow of tenderness toward feudalism, a mood that melts at mere thought of the mediaeval. At that psychological moment you jump in and intimate that you’re something of an Earl yourself—and there you are!”
Drumpipes nodded approving comprehension, while he pondered the project thus outlined. “I’m not sure I don’t like the scheme,” he repeated. “It’s risky, though. She’s fearfully keen of scent, that girl is. If you didn’t play it for all you were worth, every minute, she’d twig the thing like a shot. You’d leave her with me a good deal, wouldn’t you, and devote yourself to the old man? That would be the safest, you know.”
“That would hardly do. It wouldn’t be in character. When an Earl is giving a party, and there is a beautiful young woman about, he doesn’t go and talk with windy old fossils in frock-coats. It would look unnatural. It might as like as not excite suspicion. And now you’d better clear out. I want to go to bed.”
The Earl rose, stood irresolute for a moment, and then put a hand on Mosscrop’s shoulder. “Davie,” he said gravely, “there’s one thing you must remember. You’re not a good man to handle money—if I didn’t know your forbears, I’d never credit your being a Scot at all—remember, laddie, that those lawyers have run up terrible bills against me, and farm values have all dropped in the most fearful fashion, and I’ve not kept so tight a hand on the purse-strings of late, myself, as usual, and so do this thing as moderately——”
“Oh, you be damned!” laughed Mosscrop, and pushed him from the room.
When he was alone, the notion of going to bed seemed to have lost its urgency. He lighted his pipe, and sat down to read Vesta-lia’s letter once again.
At breakfast, three mornings later, Mr. Laban Skinner and his daughter dallied over their plates, and sent the waiter out again with some asperity when he, taking it for granted they must have finished the meal, came in to clear the table.
Each had been reading a letter, from the early morning mail.
“It is an invitation from the Earl of Drumpipes,” remarked the father, regarding his daughter over hispince-nez, “expressing, in what I am constrained to describe as somewhat abrupt and common-place terms, his desire that we should consider ourselves as his guests during the entire day upon the approaching 24th instant, the occasion being the anniversary of his birth.” He handed over the note for her inspection as he spoke. “The impression which his phraseology produces upon me,” he added, “is that of one performing a perfunctory act of courtesy to foreigners of his acquaintance, to whom he extends the ceremonial proffer of a hospitality which he assumes will be declined.”
“Oh, not at all, papa,” commented Adele, briefly glancing at the note. “All noblemen write in that formal way. It is a part of their bringing-up. No; he wants us to come, right enough. I have a letter here from Mr. Linkhaw, explaining the thing. Of course it was a suggestion of his.”
“I venture the hope,” said Mr. Skinner, “that he improves the opportunity to also explain the otherwise unintelligible fact that during an entire week we have had neither ocular evidence nor any other tangible manifestation of his presence upon this side of the Atlantic. I do not hesitate to avow my surprise at what, after his manifold and, I might say, even importunate professions of eagerness to place his services at our disposal in London, I find myself unable to refrain from regarding as his indifference to our—our being here.”
“No,” said Adele, confidently, “it’s all right. He was kept longer in Scotland than he expected—very urgent family business of some sort—and only arrived in London a couple of days ago, and has been up to his eyes in work since he came. Besides,” she continued with a little smile, “he is very frank; he says he has no clothes fit to go about in London with, but his tailor is working at some new ones for him day and night, and they are promised for the 23d, so that at the birthday party next day——”
“I am far from presuming, Adele,” interrupted the father, gravely, “to ascribe to you a deficiency or obtuseness of perception where considerations of delicacy are involved; but I think I am warranted in pointing out that at home, at least in the social environment to which you have been from your infancy accustomed, a young gentleman would intuitively eschew a subject of this nature in his correspondence with a young lady.”
“Oh, they’re different here,” explained the daughter, with nonchalance. “They talk quite openly over here of lots of things which we never dream of mentioning. You remember that lady in front of us at the theatre last night—when the men in their dress suits came over to talk with her between the acts—how she told them right out, that although it was so hot she had to fan herself all the while, still her legs felt quite shivery. Now, a speech like that would stand Louisville on its head, let alone Paris, Kentucky, but here it passes without the slightest notice. It’s the custom of the country. I rather like it myself.”
Mr. Skinner sighed, and pecked timorously at his egg with a spoon. “I am not wanting, I trust, in tolerance for the natural divergences of habit and manner which distinguish the widely-separated branches of the Anglo-Saxon race, or in a desire to accommodate myself to their peculiarities when I confront them in the course of foreign travel; but I with difficulty bring myself to contemplate with satisfaction the method of partaking of a soft-boiled egg which obtains favour in these islands. To my mind, the negation of the principle of a centre of gravity involved in the construction of this egg cup, combined with the objectionably inadequate dimensions of the spoon——”
“Dig it out on to your plate, then; the waiter won’t come in again till I ring,” suggested the daughter.
“I prefer the alternative of abstention,” he answered. “The spectacle of stains upon the cloth or upon the plate would be equally suggestive to the servant’s scrutiny.”
He rose as he spoke. Adele, gathering up the letters, did likewise, and rang the bell.
Mr. Skinner, having glanced out at the river panorama from the balcony window for a little, and then looked over the market columns of a newspaper, turned again to his daughter.
“I gather that we are to accept the invitation of the Earl of Drumpipes,” he remarked, tentatively.
Adele nodded. “Why, of course,” she said; “that’s to be the formal beginning of everything. It is intended to make our position here perfectly regular. Lord Drumpipes is the head of Mr. Linkhaw’s family. It is entirely becoming that he should take the initiative in recognising us.”
“Ah yes, in recognising us,” he repeated. “I suppose, Adele, it would be futile for me to recur to the question whether you have sufficiently weighed the opposing considerations with regard to Mr. Linkhaw, and the——”
“Mercy, yes!” interposed Adele, with promptitude. “Don’t let’s have that all over again. I’ve quite settled everything in my own mind.”
“Since I was afforded the opportunity of personally observing and conversing with the Earl of Drumpipes,” pursued the father, “and of thus forming authoritative conclusions as to the British nobility in general, I have devoted much thought to the subject. While I do not suggest that my well-known views upon the aristocratic institution, as a whole, have undergone any perceptible transformation, I do not shrink from the admission that the thought of being connected by marriage with the bearer of an hereditary title no longer presents itself to me in such repulsive colours as was formerly the case. If, therefore, with your undoubted advantages, it should occur to you to entertain the idea of a possible alliance with the nobility, I would not have you feel that my convictions formed a necessarily insuperable barrier to——“,
“No, no!” the daughter broke in, with a laugh. “I’ll promise to disregard your convictions as much as you like. But now I want you to go out, and kill time by yourself somewhere till luncheon. I want to be left alone. Thereissome place where elderly American gentlemen can go, isn’t there, without getting into mischief? Oh yes, you must go, and not just downstairs to hang about the hotel entrance, but straight away somewhere. Why? My dear papa, I have my secrets as well as you.”
“But that secret of mine,” he protested feebly, “I assure you, Adele, that it is really nothing at all. That is, it does involve matters both interesting and important; but the fact that I am precluded from mentioning them is in the nature of a pure accident, and wholly without significance.”
“Good-bye till luncheon time,” answered Adele, with affable firmness. “And mind you quit the premises.”
Mr. Skinner found his hat, smiled dubiously at his daughter, and without further parley took himself off.
Adele, left alone, looked at the watch in her girdle, and compared its record with that of the ornate clock on the mantel. She took up the paper and ran an aimless eye over one page after another. Then she walked about with a restless movement, pausing from time to time to bend a frowning yet indifferent inspection upon the scene spread out beyond the balcony.
At last there came a tap on the door, and at sound of this, even as she called out a clear, commanding “Come!” she withdrew all signs of perturbation, or of emotion of any sort, from her beautiful dark countenance.
It was Vestalia who entered the room—Vestalia, clad in daintily unpretentious and becoming garments, neatly gloved, and with much radiant self-possession upon her pretty face. She paused upon the threshold, nodded rather than bowed to her hostess, and let a little smile sparkle in her eyes and play about her rosebud of a mouth.
“Your father does not succeed very well in keeping his secrets, I observe,” she remarked, pleasantly, by way of an overture to conversation.
“Won’t you please to be seated,” said Adele, with exaggerated calmness. She herself took a chair, and slowly surveyed her visitor as she went on: “My father has no secrets from me. He tries to have—once in a blue moon—but it doesn’t come off. I may tell you frankly, however, that he has in this case told me nothing. I found your address, and other information, in looking through his pockets. I am under no obligation to tell you this: I simply feel like it, that’s all. I hate dissimulation.”
“And I suppose you have your things made up without pockets,” suggested Vestalia, amiably.
Adele put some added resolution into her glance. “I wrote asking you to call,” she said coldly, “because it became a nuisance not to know what you were up to.”
“Ah,” replied Vestalia, “it looks as if your father must have destroyed some of our correspondence. How thoughtless of him!”
Miss Skinner paused, and knitted her queenly brows a trifle. She did not seem to be getting on. “I have no wish to waste time in trying to be funny,” she avowed, after some hesitation. “Now that you are here, have you any objection to telling me why you swore my father to keep a secret from me?”
“Oh, just a whim of mine, nothing more,” Vestalia assured her, lightly. “I frequently have notions like that, that I can’t in the least account for.”
“No, you had a reason,” insisted the other, with gravity. “And you must tell me what it was. I have been frank with you.”
“And I will not be behind you in candour,” said Vestalia, as if won by an appeal to her better self. “It was because you looked at me in the Museum as if you thought my hair was dyed.”
“Well, so it is, isn’t it?” demanded Adele, bluntly.
“Upon my honour, no!” the other replied. “And now you look at me as if you thought that that wasn’t much to swear by. It’s possible that you do not realise it, but your eyes leave something to be desired in the matter of politeness.”
“I’m afraid that’s true,” Adele assented. “I have an effect of looking very hard at things, simply because I’m near-sighted. I ought to wear glasses, but they do not suit me.”
“Yes,” said Vestalia, with a meditative look, “it would be a pity for you to put them on. Theywoulddetract from your face. It is very beautiful as it is—for a dark style.”
“Sometimes I feel that I am almost tired of being dark,” confessed Adele. “Your hair is the most wonderful thing I ever saw. I could see that your gentleman-friend at the Museum admired it immensely.”
“Oh yes, he said so repeatedly,” Vestalia replied, with a demure display of pleasure at the recollection.
Again there was a little pause. Then Miss Skinner essayed another opening. “Your name—Peaussier—would indicate French extraction,” she remarked. “And French people are so very dark, as a rule, aren’t they? My mother was a Creole—from Louisiana, you know—and I suppose that accounts for my colour.”
“Well, my mother was Scotch,” explained Vestalia, “and they are sandy.”
“The Scotch gentleman that you were with at the Museum—he was decidedly a dark man,” suggested Adele, with a casual manner.
“Now that I think of it, so he was,” said Vestalia.
The measured and ceremonious ticking of the expensive clock on the mantel had the silence to itself for a space, while the two ladies looked at each other.
“So you won’t tell me anything?” Miss Skinner exclaimed at last.
“The trouble is, don’t you see, that I am quite in the dark as to what you want to know. If you will tell me just what was in your father’s pockets, I can judge then what gaps exist in your information.”
Adele laughed aloud. “I believe you are really a tip-top good fellow, in spite of everything,” she declared. “Do tell me what it is you are doing! I assure you you’re utterly wrong in thinking that I am a person to guard against, to keep secrets from. Come, don’t you see how much I really like you? And you won’t trust me! I suppose it is the blonde temperament, suspicious and unresponsive and calculating. Or no, I don’t mean that, you know I don’t, but you might repose more confidence in me, when I have told you everything.”
“Everything?” murmured Vestalia, sweetly.
“About papa’s pockets, you know.”
“Ah, yes.”
“It was all your fault,” urged Adele. “It was you who drove me to it. And if you don’t tell now, goodness only knows what crimes I may not be driven to commit, in addition.”
“Let me hasten to avert this woful catastrophe,” cried Vestalia. “The matter is simplicity itself. I am by profession, trade, whatever you call it, a tracer of pedigrees, genealogies. I served my apprenticeship under an American lady, who worked entirely for American customers. She is dead now, and the business is broken up, and I have been idle for a long time. When I saw your father and heard his name, a thought occurred to me. I know a good deal about the Skinners in England.”
“Papa was born in England himself, you know,” interposed Adele, with rising interest.
“Yes, I know,” Vestalia went on. “As I said, I have exceptional sources of information about the family, and it occurred to me that very likely he would be glad to have the records searched, and a full pedigree drawn up. I wrote to him, accordingly—he had mentioned this hotel—and I came and saw him downstairs in the reception-room, and he seemed delighted with the idea, and gave me a commission at once. What was more important still, he was kind enough to pay me something in advance. It came just at the moment to—to supply a very urgent want, too, I can tell you.”
“Ah, poor girl!” said Adele, tenderly. “But why on earth were you afraid thatIshould know? I don’t believe your story about the hair, you know.”
“Really itwasthat,” protested Vestalia. “I could see that you didn’t like me. Iwasafraid of you—that is, of your prejudicing your father against me. And if you only knew how desperately I was in need of the job! Don’t you remember, you did look very sharply at me.”
“If I did, it was because I was surprised to—to—see who you were with.”
“How do you mean?” queried Vestalia, puzzled. “We were both entire strangers to you, surely.”
“No. I recognised the gentleman from a picture I had seen of him. I had a kind of idea that he was not precisely a nice gentleman for you to be with.”
“Then you had a preposterous and wickedly mistaken kind of idea,” said Vestalia, with decision. “There isn’t a truer or nobler-spirited gentleman on this earth than he is. I have reason to know what I say. If anybody has told you otherwise, you have been lied to, that’s all.”
“Dear, dear, how much you are in earnest,” cried Adele. “You must bemyfriend, and defend me behind my back like that, too. If he liked your hair immensely, why, so do I.”
“Don’t let us joke about him,” put in Vestalia, with seriousness. “I feel very keenly about my obligation to him. He saved my life—and—and I’d rather talk about something else. We were speaking of the Skinners—and their pedigree.”
Adele assented, with an inclination of the head, to the diversion, though her eyes retained their gleam of surprised curiosity. “Yes, the Skinners,” she said, vaguely.
“I can trace them up to Sir Theobald Skinner, Knight, who obtained a grant of the Abbey lands of Coggesthorpe, Suffolk, in 1541—who in turn was the grandfather of Walter Skinner, who married Elizabeth, daughter and co-heir of John Banstock, Esquire, of Meechy, Norfolk, and became first Lord Gunser.”
Adele pricked up her ears. “What is that? Are we related to the nobility? Oh, that is what papa meant by something interesting and important! Who would have supposed he could be so sly? Oh, sure enough, that would account for——” She broke off short, and smiled, first knowingly to herself, then with frank cordiality to Vestalia. “Oh, go on,” she urged. “Tell me about our lords.” Vestalia shook her head. “We—that is, you have no lords nowadays,” she admitted, ruefully. “The Gunser peerage became extinct in the male line nearly two hundred years ago. The collateral branches of the family sank to be yeomen on the soil their ancestors had owned—some of them became even peasants, agricultural labourers. There are no prosperous or polite Skinners nowadays—exceptyourimmediate branch.”
“And even I haven’t got polite eyes,” laughed Adele. “Yes, I remember papa telling how poor his people were. He hardly knew the taste of meat, he said, till he went to America as a boy. And so you have traced all his relations out. Are there any cousins or near connections living now, do you know? He had a brother older than himself, Abram was his name, I fancy, and he enlisted in the army and went to the dogs, I think. At least, father never heard of him afterward.”
“He is dead,” Vestalia re-assured her. “He did go to the dogs, as you say. He had some sons, but they are dead too.”
“And so there were actually Skinners in the peerage!” mused Adele, aloud. The thought seemed to excite her. She rose and looked at herself in the mirror, over Vestalia’s head. The latter stood up as well.
“Oh, must you be going?” said Adele. “There was so much I wanted to say to you. We must meet soon again. I am going to insist upon that. You see, I know absolutely no one over here of my own sex, except you. It will be different in a few days, now, but that won’t make any difference with my liking you. Oh, yes—I wanted to ask you—do you know a Mr. Linkhaw?”
Vestalia looked blankly at her interrogator for a moment, then flushed a little and smiled confusedly. “I have heard the name,” she replied, “but I have never seen the gentleman bearing it.”
Adele drew her brows together in a half-frown. “He is a great friend of the gentleman who was with you at the Museum,” she said, doubtingly.
“Yes, I gathered that,” answered Vestalia. “It was in that way that I heard the name.”
“Really, how curiously we two are mixed up together!” cried the other, with dawning impatience. “You could tell me ever so many things that I am dying to know, if you only chose to. It is provoking to have to grope about in the dark like this. And you won’t even get vexed with me, and talk back. Even that way I might learn something—and we could make it up afterward, as easy as not.”
“Ah, but that is what I came resolved under no circumstances to do,” explained Ves-talia, with affable placidity. “Nothing would tempt me to get vexed with you.”
“Suppose I insisted upon talking unpleasantly about the gentleman at the Museum,” suggested Adele, with potential malice in her tone.
“I don’t say you can’t grieve me and hurt me, but you can’t make me angry with you. You see, I know things which you don’t know, which would entirely alter your views about me, and about other matters, if you were aware of them. So it would be unfair in me to blame you for remarks made in ignorance of the truth.”
“But it is precisely against this ignorance that I protest with all my might!” said Adele with vehemence. “It is that that is unfair. It makes me ridiculous.”
“I don’t see the sense of it myself,” agreed Vestalia, simply. “I always thought it would be the simplest course to tell you everything at once. Or no—what have I said?” she hastened to add, in deprecation of the other’s kindling eye; “I didn’t feel that way at first. It was I who originally suggested that you shouldn’t be told, at the start. Iwasafraid of you, you know. But now I feel quite differently. I would gladly have you know everything—but your father has other views. It is his secret, now, much more than it is mine. I don’t think there is any reason why I shouldn’t tell you that much.”
“Oh-h!” groaned Adele, in wrath at her helplessness. “Well, tell me this, anyway, how long is this tomfoolery to be kept up?”
“No, don’t ask me,” answered Vestalia, sympathetically at last. “I don’t know. I can only say that I’m as tired of it now as you are. I wish you would believe that. It would make me easier in my mind.”
“Well, I do believe it, then,” the dark girl replied, with impulsive readiness. “Oh, and something occurs to me that I daresay youcantell me. You remember the day at the Museum. Well, the gentleman who was with you called here next day, papa having in the meantime seen you secretly, downstairs. Now, papa seemed clearly annoyed with that gentleman, when he came up and found him here. Now, why was that?”
Vestalia reflected. It was evident enough that the question honestly puzzled her. “All I can think of,” she replied, after consideration, “is that your father had taken it for granted that this gentleman was my husband—and when it came out in our interview that he wasn’t then your father questioned me very closely about him, and it happened that it was a subject upon which I couldn’t very well tell him much, and I daresay he formed an unfavourable opinion of Mr. Mosscrop on that account. That is the only explanation I can think of. I know he said he thought it would be well for me not to see him again, or even hold communication with him—but I did write him a letter that very day all the same.” It was Adele’s turn to ponder. “But why,” she began, hesitatingly, “why should papa take it upon himself to tell you what to do and not to do? What business is it of his? And, if he disliked the thing, why should he remain friendly to you, and snub the gentleman you call Mr. Mosscrop? Not that he minded it, or that it amounted to anything, but it puzzles me that papa should behave in that curious fashion.”
“Yes, it would have been more natural to show the woman the cold shoulder, and think nothing amiss of the man,” assented Vestalia, gravely. “I quite agree with you there.”
“Well, thatisthe way of the world, isn’t it?” put in Adele, in apologetic tones. “Don’t dream that I suggest anything wrong.”
“Oh no,” said the other patiently, but with a note of weariness in her voice. “It doesn’t matter, one way or the other.”
“You love him, then?” Adele’s black eyes glowed with a sudden kindly warmth which went to Vestalia’s heart.
“Oh, how can I tell you?” she faltered. “It is all so stupid—and I am so unhappy? He was goodness itself to me, and he must think that I behaved like a brute—a common girl of the streets—or meaner still, for at least it’s said they havesomesense of gratitude. He came like Providence itself to help me, when I was absolutely starving and turned out of doors like a dog—and Iwasgrateful, and yet here he must be thinking that I’m the very scum of the earth!”
She gazed at her companion out of swimming eyes, and for answer Adele kissed her.
“I will go now,” she stammered, hastily, as if the caress had further unnerved her. “I’ve stayed longer than I meant. Yes, I will come again—if you tell your father that I’ve been, and he says I may come.”
“I’d like to see him say anything else!” cried the young lady from Paris, Kentucky. “The idea!”
And when the door had closed upon Vestalia, this dark beauty clenched her hands, and strode indignantly about the room, and repeated between set teeth, “The very idea!”