Mosscrop had not the heart to breakfast alone in his deserted lodgings.
The impulse to get away mastered him on the instant of its appearance. He strode forth as if delay were fraught with sore perils. At a shabby luncheon-bar in the Strand below he consumed a cup of abominable coffee and a dry sausage-roll in the same nervous haste. The barmaid in attendance was known to him. She annoyed him now by displaying in her manner the assumption that he wished to laugh and joke with her as usual. He glowered at her instead, and met her advances to conversation with a curt nod.
“You must have got out of the wrong side of the bed this morning,” she commented loftily.
“Very likely,” he answered with cold brevity, counting out the necessary coppers and turning on his heel.
Outside he seemed to himself to choose the direction of his steps quite at random. He walked slowly, trying to fasten his brain down to the task of conjecturing what on earth it all meant. Alas, his mind was as empty as those desolate rooms up at the top of Dunstan’s Inn. The power of coherent speculation had left him. It was hardly possible even to arrange in decent sequence the details of what had happened. An indefinitely sweeping rage at destiny in general oppressed all his faculties. He muttered meaningless oaths under his breath as he went along, directed at an intangible “it” which was equally without form and personality, a mere abstract symbol of the universal beastliness of things.
The notion of cursing Vestalia did not suggest itself. So far as he had any intelligible thoughts about her, they were instinctively exculpatory. She seemed indeed to have behaved stupidly, but it must have been under a misapprehension of some sort. Something perverse had happened to lead her off into a foolish course of action. He resolutely declined to open his mind to any other view of her. She must have quitted the Inn for some reason which wholly satisfied her sense of honourable conduct. What was this reason? Had she conjured it up out of her own meditations, or had it been furnished to her from an external source?
All at once he stopped short, mental and bodily progress alike arrested by a striking thought. “Damnhim!” he murmured to himself, as he turned this new idea over. How that it had come to him, he fairly marvelled at the dulness which had failed to discover it at the beginning. It was as plain as the nose on one’s face—the Earl had bidden Vestalia to begone. “Ah, that miserly, meddling fool of a Drumpipes!” he groaned, between clenched teeth.
This laying bare of the mystery brought no consolation. The day was as irretrievably ruined, the tender little romance as ruthlessly crushed, as ever. A certain doubtful solace seemed to offer itself in the shape of a quarrel with Drumpipes, but Mosscrop shook his head despondently at it. What good would that do? And for that matter, how should one go to work to quarrel with that tough-hided, fatuous, conceited, dense-witted, imperturbable, and impenetrable idiot? He would never even perceive that the attempt was being made. David piled up in reverie the loathly epithets upon the over-large bald head of his friend with a savage satisfaction. “You preposterous clown!” he snarled at the burly blond image of the absent nobleman in his mind’s eye. “You gratuitous and wanton ass! Oh, you unthinkable duffer!”
And somehow there was after all a kind of relief in these comminatory exercises. The dim light of a possible diversion began to filter through the storm-cloud of Mosscrop’s wrath. He was still bitterly depressed, and furious as well, of course, but self-possession was returning to him, and with it the capacity for planning and ordering his movements. It occurred to him that he ought to do something to turn his thoughts temporarily at least from this world-weary sadness.
Up on the opposite corner his eye caught the legend “Savoy Street.” He stared at the small sign, perched above the dingy brick cornice of the first-floor, for a moment with an unreflecting gaze. Then he turned and walked briskly down the steep hillside thoroughfare, and into the courtyard of the great hotel which, like the street and the quarter, commemorates in its name the first of a long and steadfast line of needy Continental princes whose maintenance the British tax-payer has found himself fated to provide.
At the desk, he wrote out a card and sent it up as an accompaniment to the inquiry whether Mr. Laban Skinner was in or not.
No, it was reported presently; Mr. Skinner had gone out—but the young lady was in.
David pondered this unexpected intelligence. “Did she tell you that she was in?” he asked the boy, suspiciously.
Yes; she had done so.
Mosscrop discovered that he had been quite unprepared for this. He knit his brows and ruminated upon it. His impression had been at the time that the girl disliked him, or at least disliked the proposition which her absurd father had made. It seemed to him, moreover, that he disliked, her in turn. She had stared rudely at poor Vestalia—but then it should be remembered in fairness that all women did that to one another. Her attitude towards him had been ostentatiously apathetic, almost to the point of insolence; and yet he recalled that in that moment when he had caught her unawares, she had been displaying a notable interest in what was going on. The notion that there had been a sort of challenge underlying the mask of studied indifference she had presented to him returned to his mind. And he still needed diversion, too, as much as ever.
“If you will show the way,” he said to the boy at this juncture.
The lift bore them a long distance upward, quite to the roof it seemed. David formed the impression that rents must be cheap at that altitude; hut when he took the first glance round the sitting-room into which he found himself presently ushered, the idea vanished.
It was a large and imposingly-appointed room, exhaling, as it were, an effect of high-priced luxury. The broad windows at the front came down to the floor, and opened upon a balcony. There were awnings hung outside to ward off the sunshine, and this threw the whole apartment into a mellow twilight, contrasting sharply with the brightness of the corridor Mosscrop had just quitted.
He looked about him, hesitatingly, to make sure that there really was no one in the room. The glimpse of some white drapery fluttering against the edge of a chair out on the balcony caught his eye, and he moved across to the nearest open window. The noble prospect of the Thames viewed from this height impressed itself with great vividness upon his mind, even in advance of his perception that he had indeed found Miss Skinner. He looked downward with a gaze which embraced both the girl and the river, and for a moment they preserved an equally unconscious aspect.
The young lady then lifted her head, sidewise, and acknowledged Mosscrop’s presence by a slow drooping movement of her black lashes. “How do you do?” she remarked, placidly. “Bring out a chair for yourself.”
He did as he was told, and seated himself near the balustrade, so that he partially faced her; but he looked again at the wonderful picture below, to collect his thoughts.
“I had no idea it was so magnificent up here,” he said at last.
“Indeed,” commented his companion. It was impossible to say whether the remark was in the nature of an exclamation or an inquiry. Mosscrop found himself compelled to glance up, if only to determine this open question.
The realisation that she was extremely well worth looking at swept over him like a flood, at the instant of his lifting his eyes. It suited her to be hare-headed, and to wear just the creamy white cashmere house-gown that he beheld her in. The glossy plaits and masses of her hair were wonderful. In the softened, tinted half-shadow of the awning her dark skin glowed with a dusky radiance which fascinated him. Her mien was as imperious as ever, but it suggested now an empress disposed to play, a sultana whose inclination was for amusement.
“Did you come up to see the view? I daresay it is even better from the leads. You call them leads here, don’t you? Your novels always do, I know.”
This speech of hers, languidly delivered, had its impertinent side, without doubt, but Mosscrop caught in its tone a not unamiable intention. She did not smile in response to the puzzled questioning of his swift glance, but he convinced himself none the less that it was a pleasantry. He noted in this instant of confused speculation that she had a book in her lap—a large, red-covered volume with much gilt on the binding—and that she kept a finger in it to mark some particular place.
“Your father was good enough to ask me to call,” he reminded her, with gentleness.
“I asked for him, and I——”
“You are disappointed to find him out?” Yes; there could be no doubt she was amusing herself. “Oh, that depends,” ventured David, with temerity.
The girl surveyed him at her leisure. “If I remember aright,” she said, “you were invited conditionally. You were to come, or rather to communicate with us, if you decided to close with my father’s offer. So I suppose you’ve made up your mind to accept.”
“Well, I should like to talk more about it; get a clearer idea of what was proposed.”
“My father takes great pains in expressing himself. I should have said his explanation was as full as anything could well be on this earth.”
“To speak frankly,” replied David, “I got the idea that you didn’t care much about your father’s scheme—in fact, that you disliked it. That’s what I wanted to be clear about. It would be ridiculous for me to be going round, delivering instructive lectures to you on antiquities and ruins and so forth, and you hating me all the while for a bore and a nuisance. It would place us both in a false position.”
“And you can’t stand false positions, eh?”
Mosscrop rose. “I’m afraid I can’t stand this one, at all events,” he answered, with dignified brevity.
“Oh, you mustn’t think of going!” his hostess protested, with a momentary ring of animation in her voice. “My father’s liable to return any minute, and he’d be greatly put out to find he’d missed you.”
“I could wait for him in the reception room downstairs,” he suggested, moodily—“or, for that matter, I don’t know that it’s very important that we should meet at all.”
“I don’t call that a bit polite,” she commented.
“I’m afraid your standards of politeness are beyond me,” he began, formally. Then the absurdity of the thing struck him, and he grinned in a reluctant fashion. “Do you really want me to stay?” he asked, with the spirit of banter in his tone.
“Oh that depends,” she mocked back at him. “If you can be amusing, yes.”
“Just how amusing must I be?” He propped into his chair again, and this time laid his hat aside.
“Oh, say as much so as you were yesterday with the young lady of the butter-coloured hair. I think that would about fill the bill.”
Mosscrop ground his teeth with swift annoyance. Then he chuckled in a mood of saturnine mirth. Finally he sighed, and dolefully shook his head.
“Ah, yesterday!” he mourned, drawing a still deeper breath.
“You were extremely entertaining, then,” pursued the other, ignoring his emotions. “Do you find yourself—as a usual thing, I mean—varying a good deal from day to day? I ask entirely from curiosity. I’ve never met anyone before in precisely your position.”
“No, I should think not!” he assented, with gloomy emphasis. “I can well believe that my position is unique in the history of mankind. Such grotesque luck could scarcely repeat itself. But I beg your pardon—it isn’t a thing that would interest you; I had no business to mention it at all.”
“It was I who mentioned it, I believe,” she corrected him calmly.
There was obvious meaning in her insistence. He looked up at her in vague surprise, the while he mentally retraced the steps by which the conversation had reached this point. There was undoubtedly a very knowing expression in her eyes. Clearly she had meant to associate Vestalia with what she described as his position—the position which she deemed so unusual; it was equally plain that she desired him to understand that she did so. It was impossible that she should know anything of what had happened. He searched his memory, and made sure that no personal hint of any sort had drifted into that rambling discourse of his in the Assyrian corridors, which the Americans had more or less overheard. What then was she talking about?
Ah, what indeed? She lay back in her chair, and met his gaze of bewildered interrogation with a fine show of composure. She looked at him tranquilly through lazy, halfclosed eyelids. His suspicions discerned beneath the passive surface of this regard animated under-currents of ironical amusement and triumph. There was nothing overt upon which he could found the challenge to an explanation, but as he continued to scrutinise her, he could fancy that her whole presence radiated the suggestion of repressed glee. Whatever the mystery might be, she was extracting great delight from her possession of a clue to it.
“Yes, itwasyou who mentioned my position,” he remarked, groping lamely for some sure footing on which to redress his disadvantage. “I don’t know that! quite follow you; wherein do you find my position, as you term it, so exceptional?
“You yourself have boasted that it couldn’t be matched in all history,” she reminded him. Her tone was casual enough, but the sense of sport began to gleam unmistakably in her eyes.
“Now you argue in a circle,” he remonstrated, with a shade of professional acerbity in his voice. “Your remark came before mine, and hence cannot possibly have been based upon my subsequent comment. If I may be permitted the observation, they seem to teach logic but indifferently in the United States.”
“Oh, that is why we came here,” retorted the girl, with ostentatiousnaïveté. The conceit pleased her so much that she bent forward, and assumed the manner of one communicating an important fact. “That is why I had my father make you an offer at once. You know, most professors, and teachers, and so on, are so hard to understand. But the moment I laid eyes on you I said, ‘There’s a man that I can see through as if he were plate-glass; I can read him like a book.’ And, of course, that must be the most valuable of all qualities in an instructor.”
“So I am entirely transparent, am I? I present no secrets to your gaze?” Mosscrop spoke like one in whom pique and a sense of the comical struggled for mastery. “Then I cannot do better than beg you to tell me some things about myself. Why, for example, do I sit here patiently and submit to be laughed at, heckled, satirised, and generally bully-ragged by a young lady, whose title to do these things is not in the least apparent to me?”
“Why, don’t you remember? You’re waiting for papa.”
“And incidentally providing his offspring, in theinterim, with much harmless and chaste entertainment,” put in Mosscrop, drily. “I am charmed to have diverted you so successfully. It occurs to me, since you are so readily amused, that you must have been wofully bored before I made my happy appearance.”
“Oh, quite the contrary,” exclaimed the girl, with a sudden stress in her tone, which hinted that this was what she had been waiting for. She opened the volume, as she spoke, at the place marked by her finger. “I was reading in the Peerage, you know. It is a most entrancing book. I am never dull when I am reading about earls and things.”
“I have heard that the work enjoys a remarkable popularity in your country,” David remarked, sourly.
“There is such romance in it!” she went on, in mock rhapsody; “it makes such appeals to the imagination! It puts you at once in an atmosphere of chivalry, of knightly adventures and exploits, of tournaments and chain-armour, and courts of love——”
“And of divorce, and bankruptcy, too,” he interposed. “Don’t forget those.”
The girl looked grave for a moment, and nodded her head as if in relenting apology. Then she recovered her high spirits by as swift a transition.
“And such splendid old names as you get, too!” she continued, with her eyes on the open page. “Listen to this, for example. Could anything be finer?”
DRUMPIPES, Earl of. (Sir Archibald-Coro-nach-Dugal-Strathspey-Malcolm- Linkhaw) Viscount Dunfugle of Inverdummie, and Baron Pilliewillie of Slug-Angus, Morayshire, all in the peerage of Scotland, and a Baronet of Nova Scotia. Born August 24th, 1866. Succeeded his grandfather as 19th Earl January 10th, 1888. Married May 2nd, 1890, Janet-Eustasia-Marjory, 3rd daughter of the Master of Craigie-whaup by his wife, the Hon. Tryphena Pincock (who deceased March 6th, 1879), elder daughter of the 4th Baron Dubb of Kilwhissel. Seat, Skirl Castle, near Lossiewink, Elgin. Club, Wanderers.
She read it all with marked deliberation and distinctness of utterance. When she finished, silence reigned for some time on the balcony.
“Well, am I not right?” she asked at last, lifting her head, and flashing the full richness of her black eyes into Mosscrop’s face. “Don’t you admit the inspiration of such names?”
David answered in a hesitating, dubious manner. “I am more curious about the source—and scope—ofyourinspiration,” he said.
“Unhappily, it cannot be pretended thatyouare transparent. You confront me with an opacity against which my feeble wits beat in vain. I can see that it is known to you that I know Drumpipes. But why this fact should assume in your mind such portentous and mysterious dimensions, and why you should treat it with the air of one who has unearthed a great conspiracy, a terrible secret, I can’t for the life of me comprehend.”
“Ah, you are more complicated than I had thought,” she replied. “I did not imagine you would keep up the defence so long.”
“Me?—a defence? never,” cried David, incited in some vague way by this remark to an accession of assurance. “I defend nothing. I surrender with eagerness. I roll myself at your feet, Miss Skinner. All I crave in return is that you will put a label on my submission. It may be weak, but I should dearly like to know what it is that I am abandoning.”
“What I should suggest that you give up is your attempt to deceive me—us—as to your identity.”
“Ah! am I indeed someone else, then? Upon my word, I can’t congratulate the other fellow.”
“You wrote your name down for my father yesterday, and again on this card here this morning, as Mosscrop—David Mosscrop.”
He assented by a nod, and allowed the beginnings of an abashed and contrite look to gather upon his face.
“Well, it just happened that, the moment I first laid eyes on you, I knew who you really were. By the merest accident, your picture had been shown to me—by a gentleman who knows you intimately, and is indeed distantly related to you—on shipboard coming over. I recognised you instantly, there in the Museum, and I made papa speak to you. I was curious to see what you would say and do.”
“I’m afraid you were disappointed. Did you think I would shout and dance, or what?” He struggled with some degree of success to speak impassively.
“I had never met any one before in your position in life, and I had the whim to experiment on my own account.” She said this as if defending her action to herself more than to her auditor.
“And may I have my little whim gratified too?” he asked. “I am extremely curious to know how you like your experiment as far as you have got with it.”
She did not answer immediately, and he occupied the interval by an earnest mental scuffle after some clue to what she was driving at. He knew of no man who possessed his portrait—at least among those who went down to the sea in ships. He had had no photograph taken for years, to begin with. A distant relation of his, she had said, and on a very recent voyage from America. Who the deuce could it be? What acquaintance of his had been of late in America? All at once the answer leaped upward in his mind. He laughed aloud, with an abruptness which took him not less than his companion by surprise. But then a puzzled scowl overshadowed the grin on his countenance. He saw a little way farther into the millstone, but that was all.
“I hope you don’t regret your experiment,” he repeated. “It would have been simpler, perhaps, if your father had mentioned that you were friends of Mr. Linkhaw’s. That in itself would have been an ample introduction.”
“Perhaps we should have done so, had you been alone.” Her tone was cool to the verge of haughtiness.
He rapidly considered what this might mean. Her remark clearly indicated that Vestalia’s presence had seemed to her reprehensible. Why? There was some intricacy here which he could not fathom. That confounded Drumpipes had told her—what? Eureka! He had it! The picture that she had seen was a little cheap ambrotype of Drumpipes and himself, standing together, which had been made by a poor devil of a wayside photographer, two Derby days before. Undoubtedly that was what the Earl had shown her—the only one he could have shown her. And—why of course—Drumpipes had pointed him, David, out as the Earl. What his motive could have been, heaven only knew, but this was palpably the key to the riddle.
He grasped this key with decision, on the instant. He straightened himself, frowned a little, and laboriously stiffened the tell-tale muscles about his mouth.
“I don’t think I quite like this notion of Linkhaw’s babbling about me and my affairs,” he said, with austerity.
“Oh, I assure you,” she protested, anxiously, “he was very cautious. He only gave the most sparing answers to my questions. I had to literally drag things from him.”
“But what business had he showing my picture about to begin with? He shall hear what I think of it! Men’s allowances have been stopped for less than that.”
“It will be very unjust indeed if you visit it upon him,” the girl urged, almost tremulously; “it was all my fault. I asked him one day if he had ever met a nobleman, and he, quite as a matter of course, mentioned that one of his own relatives was an Earl. One day, later, he was showing me a little tin-type of himself, and he merely said that you were the other person in the picture, that was all.”
“And then you proceeded to drag things from him. I believe that was your phrase,” remarked David, in a severe tone. The sensation of having this proud and insolent beauty in a tremor of entreaty before him was very delightful.
“Naturally, I asked him questions,” she replied, with a little more spirit. “Earls don’t grow on every bush with us. And for that matter, why, goodness me! he did nothing but praise you from morning till night. By his account, one would think butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth. He made you out a regular saint. I was quite prepared to see you with a halo round your head—and instead, I——”
She stopped short, with a confused and deprecatory smile. David, noting it, rejoiced that he had taken a peremptory tone about the garrulous Linkhaw.
“Instead, you discovered that I was a mere flesh and blood mortal like the rest.” He permitted himself to unbend, and even to smile a little, as he furnished this conclusion to her sentence. “Was it a very painful disillusionment?”
“Oh, I’ve read and heard enough about the lives that your class lead here in Europe,” she replied, with a marked reversion toward her former manner. “I don’t pretend that I was really surprised.”
David assumed a judicial expression. “Considering the way we are brought up, and the temptations that are thrust upon us,” he said, impartially, “I would not say that we are so much worse than other men.”
“But you are pretty bad—that you must admit.”
Before David had satisfactorily framed the admission expected of him, the sound of an opening door and of footsteps came from within.
“It is papa,” whispered the girl, leaning forward in a confidential manner. “I’m going to tell him.”
“I see no valid objection,” answered David, with dignity.
As the balcony was too small for another chair, and Mr. Skinner did not come to the window, his daughter led her guest into the sitting-room.
“Papa,” she said, “you will recall the gentleman whom we met yesterday at the British Museum.”
Mr. Skinner lifted to its place thepince-nezwhich depended on a gold thread from the lapel of his carefully-buttoned frock-coat, and scrutinised the person indicated in a painstaking manner.
“Ah, yes, indeed,” he said, continuing his gaze, but with no salutation, and no offer of the hand.
“It’s so dark in here, I don’t believe you do,” she remarked, to cover the awkwardness of the moment. “The sun has gone now, any way,” and she moved back and put a hand upon the awning-cord.
“Permit me,” said David, hurrying to her side, and pulling at the shade.
“He’s out of sorts about something,” the girl murmured furtively. “Don’t mind it; just leave him to me.”
In the brightened light, Mr. Skinner’s demeanour seemed no more cordial. He regarded his visitor with a doubtful glance, and gave indications of a sense of embarrassment in his presence. The daughter, however, was in no respect dismayed by her responsibility.
“Papa,” she said with brisk decision, “it was all a joke yesterday. Our friend was so amused by your offer yesterday——”
“I beg your pardon, Adele,” the father interposed ceremoniously, “but it becomes immediately incumbent upon me to express my dissent. To obviate any possible misconception, it should be explicitly stated that, although it is true that the task of formulating the proposal to which you allude did undoubtedly devolve upon me, the proposition itself, both in spirit and suggestion, originated in your own consciousness.”
“All right,” she hurriedly went on, “have it anyway you like. The point is that this gentleman thought it was funny, and so he capped it with his own little joke by pretending to be some one else. He made up that name he gave you on the spur of the moment, just for sport. He came here this morning, just to explain. He was nervous about the deception, innocent though it was. Papa, let me introduce to you Mr. Linkhaw’s relation, of whom he spoke so often, you know—the Earl of Drumpipes.”
Mr. Skinner took in this intelligence with respectful deliberation. He bowed meanwhile, and, after a moment’s deferential hesitation, shook hands in a formal way with David, and motioned him to a seat.
“Sir,” he began, picking his phrases with even greater care, “you will excuse me if I do not address you as ‘My Lord,’ since it is a form of words which I cannot bring myself to regard as seemly when employed by one human being toward another; but I gather from my daughter’s explanation that your statements yesterday concerning your identity were conceived in a spirit of pleasantry. Under ordinary circumstances, sir, the revelation that an entirely serious and decorous suggestion of mine had been received with hilarity might not convey to my mind an exclusively flattering impression. But I do not, sir, close my eyes to the fact that a wide gulf of usage and custom, and, I might say, of principles, separates a simple Jeffersonian Democrat like myself from the professor of an hereditary European dignity. I am therefore able, sir, to accept, with comparatively few reservations, the explanation which you have tendered to my daughter, and vicariously, as I understand it, to me.”
David repressed a groan, and hastily cast about in his mind for a decent pretext for flight. “I assure you that it greatly relieves me to find you so courteously magnanimous,” he said. “I merely yielded to the playful impulse of the moment; and as your daughter has so kindly told you, I made haste thereafter to repair my error, when its possible misinterpretation occurred to me.” He bowed again, in response to the other’s solemn genuflection, and looked toward the door.
“I should be pleased, sir,” Mr. Skinner said, “if you would honour us by remaining to luncheon.”
“Ah, I should have liked that so much,” answered David, with fervour, “but unhappily I have an engagement at Marlborough House. It will be no end of a bore, but it can’t be helped. An invitation there, you know, is equivalent to a command. That is one of the drawbacks of a monarchy—but of course every system has its weak points.”
“That is a generalisation,” returned Mr. Skinner, “to which I am not prepared to give unmeasured adhesion. I will explain to you, sir, briefly, the reasons which dictate my hesitation to entirely——”
“I’m afraid, Mr. Skinner, that I must tear myself away,” put in David, anxiously consulting his watch. “The Prince never forgives a fellow being late. He has to live so much on a time-table himself, you know, forever catching trains, and changing his uniforms, and turning up at the exact minute all over the place, laying corner-stones, and opening docks and unveiling statues, and so on, that it makes him intolerant of other people’s lapses. And he’s got a fearful memory for that sort of thing.”
“I assume that you speak of the Heir Apparent,” commented the other. “Am I to understand that you live in a state of personal subjection—that a nobleman in your position, for example, contemplates with apprehension the contingency of causing even the most trivial and transitory displeasure to the personage alluded to?”
“Apprehension, my dear sir? Positive horror! Ah, you little know the reality! Thoughtless people see us from the outside, and they lightly imagine that our lives are one ceaseless round of luxurious gaiety and gilded pleasure. They fancy that to have titles, to bear hereditary distinctions, to fill high places at Court, must be the sum of human happiness. Of course, I suppose we do have a better time than the average, but we pay a price for it. We smile, it is true, but there is always a shudder beneath the smile. A mere breath, a suspicion, the veriest paltry whim of royal disfavour, and we might better never have been born! And so,” he finished with an uneasy graciousness, “you will understand my abrupt leavetaking now.”
“I promise myself on another occasion, sir,” said Mr. Skinner, with more warmth, “the privilege of discussing these topics with you at length. I do not deny that I am myself, to-day, somewhat preoccupied, and lacking in the power of intellectual concentration. Another occasion, I trust, will find me better fitted to bestow upon these subjects the alertness of comprehension and clarity of judgment which their importance demands. At the moment, I confess my mind is burdened with another matter.”
“O, papa—you haven’t gone and lost your letter of credit!” The girl intervened with accents of alarm.
The old gentleman shook his head, and smiled in a dubious fashion. “No,” he replied, hesitatingly, “it is merely that I—I have been enjoined to secrecy about a very curious and interesting revelation which has been made to me, and concealment is profoundly alien to my nature. The necessity for maintaining a mysterious reserve weighs upon me, sir, with unaccustomed oppression.”
“It is something that you have learned this morning?” demanded the daughter. “I’ll make you tell me as soon as we’re alone.”
“Ah, that cannot be,” the father answered. “My faith has been honourably pledged, and must be scrupulously observed.”
“But surely it couldn’t have been stipulated thatIwas not to know,” she urged. “That would be absurd. And besides, who knows of even my existence over here?”
“Incomprehensible as it may appear to your perceptions,” responded Mr. Skinner, “it happens that you were particularly alluded to in the terms of the confidential compact imposed upon me.”
“Then you had no business to enter into it at all,” she replied, vigorously. “Papa, I am surprised at you!”
There was something in his thoughts which lit the old gentleman’s dry countenance with a transient gleam of enjoyment. “I hazard the humble opinion that your surprise will be appreciably augmented when, at the proper time, the truth shall have been revealed to you.” He turned, with the flicker-ings of a whimsical smile in his eye, to their guest. “It is an extraordinary coincidence, sir; but you are also in a manner associated with the occult event to which I may not at present more pointedly refer.”
David musingly looked the old gentleman in the eye. “Yes, I know,” he answered; “but I agree with you that it should not be divulged to your daughter. As you have said, we men of the world are in duty bound to keep a decent veil drawn over certain phases of life. I am quite with you in that, sir; we cannot sufficiently respect and guard the sweet-minded innocence of our young ladies.”
Mr. Skinner looked hard at the nobleman, and drew up his slender figure. “My memory, sir,” he announced stiffly, “fails to recall any observation resembling in the slightest degree, either in form or sentiments, that which you have ascribed to me. Forgive me, sir, if I venture to further remind you that I have no desire to regard myself, or to be regarded, as a man of the world, in the sense in which I understand that term to be used by the aristocratic class in Great Britain.”
The young lady seemed to share her father’s feelings in the matter. “You must remember, Lord Drumpipes,” she put in, coldly, “that our standards in such things are not yours. I daresay it seems natural enough to one in your position, and with your antecedents and associations, that a venerable, white-haired old gentleman should have disgraceful secrets which he ought to conceal from his family; but we take a different view of the meaning of the word ‘gentleman,’ and of the obligations which it involves.”
“Ah, now I have offended you!” cried David, with a show of remorse. “I assure you that my only thought was to help your good father out of a fix. If I have done wrong, I beg you will put it down to my overeagerness to be of assistance. And now,” he stole a dismayed glance at his watch, “now I really must run. Good-bye! Good-bye, Mr. Skinner. Remember that I count upon that famous discussion with you. And you may rely entirely upon my discretion—in the matter of your secret, you know.”
Father and daughter stood for a moment, gazing at the door behind which their noble guest had disappeared. Then the girl turned her eyes with decision upon the author of her being.
“Papa,” she said, with calm resolution, “what did he intend to convey by his remarks about this secret of yours?”
“Why, Adele,” the other protested, faltering a little under her look, “you yourself repudiated, in the most eloquent and unanswerable words, the bare suggestion that I could possibly be animated by the desire to cloak any unworthy deed or incident from your observation.”
“That was forhisbenefit,” she replied, tranquilly. “I was determined that he should know what we thought ofhiscode of morals. But that does not at all affect the question of what you have been doing. Do I understand that you are going to insist on refusing to tell me where you have been, whom you have seen, what your so-called secret is about?”
“Adele!” he urged, “I really must preserve a reticence as to the essential details of the matter in question—perhaps only for a few days—at least until the obligation of secrecy is removed. You would not have me recreant to my plighted faith, would you?”
“But what business had you going and making her any such promise?”
“Her!” Mr. Skinner said, feebly smiling; “you jest, my dear Adele. How can you conceivably imagine it was a ‘her’?”
“I don’t imagine; I know,” responded the daughter, with a hard, dry smile. “You have been seeing that yellow-haired girl that Lord Drumpipes had with him at the Museum yesterday. The letter which summoned you forth this morning was from her. You made some paltering excuses to me, and went out to meet her—and you won’t look me in the eye and deny it.”
In truth he did not take up her challenge. He hung his head, looked away, and shuffled with his feet. “All I am at liberty to say,” he remarked at last, with visible emotion, “is that my grief at being compelled to rest temporarily under the unwelcome shadow of your suspicion is, to some slight extent, mitigated by the consciousness that when you know all you will do ample justice to the probity of my motives and the honourable character of my actions. I might even go further, and express the conviction that the outcome will be of a nature to afford you unalloyed personal satisfaction.”
“That may all be,” returned Adele; “but, in the meantime, you don’t go out in London any more by yourself!”
Mosscrop laughed to himself as he ran down the stairs of the hotel. The spirit of mirth remained with him while he more slowly ascended the flight of steps, and the dingy passage and covered by-way leading up to the Strand. It was the most comical thing he had ever heard of, and he chuckled again and again during the climb. But upon the bustling crowded thoroughfare it somehow ceased to seem so funny, or at least its value as a source of entertainment began to diminish rapidly. He found his mind reverting irresistibly to the disappointment of the early morning. The image of Vestalia rose upon his mental vision, and would not go away. He brooded over it as he walked, and recognised that intervening incidents and personalities had in no sense dimmed his interest in it. He pictured her wonderful hair again, her bright-faced smile, her dear little airs and graces, with a yearning emptiness of heart.
The luncheon obtainable at the Barbary Club was even more unpalatable than usual, which was saying much. The familiar fact that the waiters were Germans struck him afresh, and took on the proportions of an international grievance. There were some fellows upstairs playing at what they supposed was whist. He stood for a while over the shoulders of a couple of the gamesters, and noted, with a cynical eye, the progress of their hot rivalry as to which should contribute the larger incapacity and the finer stupidity to the losing of the rubber. When they asked him if he wanted to cut in, he turned away with a snort of derisive scorn.
Over in the billiard-room there were only the marker and the member who played far worse than anybody else in the club. David sourly consented to occupy himself with this egregious outsider, and was beaten by him. The result was so clearly due to accident that he laid some money on the next game. Again the duffer fluked like mad, and won, and in a third game his luck was of such a glaring character, that Mosscrop could not refrain from loud comment. This his antagonist resented. They parted with harsh words, and Mosscrop, cursing the hour when it first occurred to him to identify himself with such a squalid pot-house, hastened angrily to shake its dust from his feet.
He made his way, by devious streets whose old book-stalls for once beckoned him in vain, to Bloomsbury and the Museum. A kind of idea had grown up unobtrusively in the background of his thoughts, that possibly he might find Vestalia there. It assumed the definite outlines of an expectation as soon as he entered the building. When he stood in the reading-room itself, and began a systematic scrutiny of its radiating rows of readers, it was with as much confidence as if he had come by appointment. The failure to discover her disturbed and annoyed him. He made a slow tour of the inner circle, then another of the broader outer ring, and suffered no one of the professed students to escape his examining eye.
What a crew they were! He had never realised it before. His hostile inspection laid bare the puerile devices of the young fools who came by concerted arrangement, took down books at random, and, sitting close together, carried on clandestine flirtations under the sightless mask of literature. He glowered with a newly-informed vision at the extraordinary females whom no one had planned to meet—the lone women with eccentric coiffures and startling costumes, who emerge from heaven knows where, and mysteriously gather here in quest of something which it seems incredible that even heaven should be able to define. Observing now the vacuous egotism of their flutterings and posturings in other people’s way, the despairing clutch at public attention made by their outlandish vestiture and general get-up, David’s thoughts settled grimly upon the fact that there were lands, the seats of ancient civilizations, where superfluous female children were drowned at birth. Here, he reflected, with sullen irony, we teach them to read and write, and build and stock a vast reading-room for them instead. His mood preferred the Ganges to the Thames.
There was more pathos in the spectacle of another class of habitual attendants—the poor, shabby, hungry serfs of the quotation merchant. Mosscrop knew the genus by sight, and in other times had had amusement from their contemplation. How a sombre rage possessed him as he beheld them toiling unintelligently, hopelessly, under the lash of starvation. He watched one of the slave-drivers for a while, a short, red man, of swollen spiderish aspect, who moved about keeping these sweated wretches at their toil, now doling out a few pence to one who could remain erect unnourished not a minute longer, and who slunk out forthwith with a wolfish haste, now withering some other with whispered reproaches of threats. Mosscrop longed to go and break this creature’s neck, or at the very least to kick him, with loud curses and utmost contumely, from the room.
He went out himself, instead, animated by a freshening spirit of resentment at the futility of existence. From sheer force of habit, he dawdled in front of shop-windows, turned over hooks and prints in one after another of his accustomed resorts for second-hand merchandise, and otherwise killed time till the dinner hour. But he did it all without any inner pretence that the process afforded him consolation. Even when he met some fellows from the Temple, in Chancery Lane, and joined them in a series of visits to ancient bars in the vicinity, where they all stood at wearisome length, and argued with intolerable inconsequence about wholly irrelevant matters over their drinks, his thoughts maintained a moody concentration upon the theme of his personal unhappiness. The stray contributions which he offered to the general conversation were all of an acrid, not to say truculent, character. He had a sort of dour satisfaction in the utterance of offensive gibes and bitter jokes. Twice the threat of an altercation arose, in consequence of these ill-natured comments of his, and David sullenly welcomed the imminent quarrel; but the intervention of the others, without any help from him, cleared the atmosphere again. Even the peacemakers, however, evinced the opinion that he was behaving badly, and nodded cheerful adieus when at last he declared that they were a parcel of uninspired loons, with whom he marvelled to find himself consuming valuable time. They lifted their glasses at him mockingly as he strode away, with the gleam of an unexpressed “good riddance!” in their eyes.
The consciousness that he had made himself disagreeable to these fellows had its uses as a counter-irritant to his inner self-disgust. It rendered solitude at least a trifle more supportable. He bought a novel, and read it beside his plate at Simpson’s, where the heavy joints and weighty old ale just fitted his mood. The book was one which the papers were talking of for the moment. David reflected grimly as he skimmed the opening chapters that Vestalia had asked him why he didn’t write a Scotch novel. They were all the vogue, she said, and while the fashion lasted, it was nonsense for any Scotchman to pretend that he could not profitably occupy his leisure time. He had replied, with some flippancy, that his imaginative powers might compass the construction of a tale, hut were unequal to the task of inventing also a whole dialect to tell it in. How, as the whim returned to him, his fancy parodied a title for this unborn work. How would “A Goddess, Some Merely Ordinary Fools and Lord Drumpipes” do?
Ah! that Drumpipes! David paid his bill, lit a cigar, and sallied forth, suddenly informed with the notion of going to the Inn, and having it out with the Earl. He doubled up his fists as he hurried along.
The top floor at Dunstan’s was wrapped in darkness. Mosscrop knocked and kicked first at “Mr. Linkhaw’s” door to make sure that no one was in, then opened his own, and struck a light. The apartment wore still in his eyes the chill desolation of aspect which he remembered from the morning. There had been a change in the weather, and the suggestion of a fire was in the damp air. He put on his loose jacket and slippers, recalling sadly as he did so the vision he had beheld only twenty-four hours before, of that pretty little ermined footgear on the fender beside his, in front of the glowing grate. He brought out the decanter and a glass, and sighed deeply.
Then all at once he caught sight of something white in the letter box. In the same instant he was tearing open a stamped envelope, addressed in a large, strange hand which yet he knew so well, and excitedly striving to gulp in the meaning of the whole written page before him, without troubling to read the lines in their sequence. Yes, it was from her, and—yes, it contained words of kindness and even of tenderness which shone brilliantly forth here and there from the context. He pulled himself together, and walking over to the light, began resolutely at the beginning.
“Dear Mr. Mosscrop,—I hope you were notverymuch disappointed at finding me gone this morning, or rather, I hope youwerea little disappointed, but will not be so any longer when you get this explanation. I don’t know either that it can be called an explanation, for it doesn’t seem to me that I am at all able to explain even to myself, much less to you.
“The fact is that you were so kind and so sweet to me, that I simplyhadto do what I have done. I saw it all, after we had parted. Under the circumstances, and especially considering the delicate and noble manner in which you had treated me, it was theonly thingI could do!
“I should have left a message for you in your letter-box, but there was not a scrap of paper, not even a book out of which I could tear a fly-leaf, in Mr. Linkhaw’s room, nor writing materials of any sort. I have bought this paper at the stationer’s, and am writing this note in an hotel writing-room.
“The dear dressing-bag, and the other beautiful things which I owe to you, I took away with me because it would have broken my heart to leave them, and I felt sure you would be glad to have me take them. Every time I look at them, and all other times too, I shall think of the best man I ever knew or dreamed of. Somethingvery importanthas occurred, which may turn out to be of thegreatest possible advantageto me. It is veryuncertainas yet, and I cannot tell you about it at present, but soon I hope to be able to do so.
“In the meantime, please believe in my undying gratitude. Vestalia.”
David drew a long breath, poured a drink for himself, lit his pipe, and sat down to read the letter all over again. He arrived slowly at the conclusion that he was glad she had written it—but beyond that his sensations remained obstinately undefined. The girl had disappeared behind a thick high wall which his imagination was unequal to the task of surmounting. A few stray facts assumed a certain distinctness in his mind: she had evidently gone off quite of her own accord, and she had appreciated the spirit of his attitude towards her the previous day, and she had encountered on this, the following day, something or somebody which might bring her good luck. What kind of good luck? he wondered.
There was an implied promise in her words that he should be informed when this mysterious beneficence assumed shape. This had very little comfort in it for him. In fact, he found he rather hated the idea of her enjoying good luck in which he had no share.
Suppose instead that it didn’t come off. Would she return to him then, or at least let him know, so that he might hasten forward again as her special providence?
Ah, that is what he had wanted to be—her providence. The notion of doing everything for her, of being the source of all she had, of foreseeing her wants, inventing her pleasures, ministering joyfully to the least of her sweet little caprices—the charm of thisrôlefascinated him more than ever. He recalled in detail the emotions of delight he had experienced in buying things for her. By some law which he recognised without analysing, the greatest pleasure had arisen from the purchase of the articles which she needed most. There had been only a moderate and tempered ecstasy in paying for champagne, but oh, the bliss of buying her boots, and those curling-irons, and the comb! He thrilled again with it, in retrospect. What would it have been to see her clad entirely in garments of his providing?
But the cage was empty—the bird had flown. Would she come back again? Was there really the remotest hint of such a possibility in her letter?
No. He read it still again, and shook his head at the fender with a despairing groan. The gloom of his reverie benumbed his senses. He let his pipe go out, and suffered the glass at his elbow to remain untouched, as he sat with his sad thoughts for company, and did not even hear the footsteps which presently ascended the stairs.
A soft little knock at the door startled him from his meditations. He stood up, with his heart fluttering, and lifted his hand in wonderment to his brow. Had he been asleep and dreaming?
The dainty tapping on the panel renewed itself. David moved as in a trance toward the door.