CHAPTER XXXII
Wherein the Gallant Major rises from the Dead
So,for three several months, the summer shone gaily upon the town, and passed away over the edge of the world in happy fashion enough.
And Betty grew to some affection for the kindly rough man who was the clumsy lord of this elaborate house. And out of her liking grew an anxious and increasing fearfulness for the girls.
The rude father, hoping to polish diamonds, had sent the two girls to a smart school at Brighton; and they, for lack of association with his frank honesty of act and speech at home, and rebuffed by the dull stupidity of a dowdy mother who scarcely ever left her own room, and finding themselves balked by the discipline of school, had fallen into the realizing of their desires by crooked ways. Of their father’s qualities and open candour, of his frankness of statement, they had only kept an outward semblance that was little better than rudeness and bad manners, but it deceived their father and his blunt honest friends; it was thereby the more dangerous cloak for their intriguing and questionable habits. They had gone to school vulgar and tolerably honest; they had come back with some outward veneer of manners, with much swaggering disdain, the aping of masterfulness, a display of the lordly habit, and with souls utterly corrupt. They had gone to school with rough affection for their father; they had come back filled with critical contempt for him, ashamed of him, and at heart afraid of him—dreading that he should discover that theywereafraid of him and ashamed of him. The desires of their full red lips were without discipline, and fretted at restraint; and they fed their desires unstintingly and gave encouragement to every whim. They knew enough of the world to recognise at a glance that Betty was above them by habit and by breeding; they soon knew, by results, that her appearance with them anywhere gave them distinction. Their utter lack of all sense of honour embarrassed Betty at every turn. They lied like drudges; and, with the conceit of the weak, they affected an arrogance which they mistook for the habit of the master class, not seeing that they were wholly devoid of the courage which makes fearlessness of the truth the pronounced habit of the master class.
Betty, watching their father with keen eyes, saw that he, too, was strangely baffled.
He, poor man, looking to their old glad affection for him, which had been their girlish return for his large love of them, found instead, upon his hearth, that there were two critical young women in possession; realized that his rough endearments were coldly received.
He thought, as usual, that the fault was in his own manners.
The house, ordered by these girls in a spirit of lavish extravagance, reeked of wealth.
The young women, innocent of that courtesy to servants which makes of service an honourable act, were at constant and undignified bickering and war with those beneath them; and as they held always the winning card of dismissal, they never realized that the sullen obedience of the world below stairs was as insulting as open insolence; they still less realized that these sullen flunkies took revenge in spoliation, and that what remained of deference was a mockery and covert contempt. So it came about that the sneaks amongst the servants held the lower quarters of the house in their hands.
The young women now began to have social aspirations. They had a vague idea that there was some strange pleasure to be got in the mixing with and being seen with those who but gave them chill encouragement to friendship. But as it so chanced, their ambition for they knew not quite what, was fed by the sudden eagerness of women of high social position to trespass on the broad pages and in the social gossip of the columns of the widely read newspaper which Pompey Malahide held at his beck and will—a newspaper which diffused raucous opinions and created the thoughts of millions throughout the country. The girls found themselves courted. Their arrogance grew, and their strut and swagger increased. Malahide dined at great houses.
With the master-will of Doome to advise him, Malahide now found his position still further strengthened by the alliance with and friendship of his boy Horace, who had left Harrow and was going up to Oxford. His baffled affection for his girls turned to a passionate pride in his handsome son; and the boy, frank, honest, golden, gay, debonair, returned the old man’s affection, drilled him in the subtleties with gentleness, and watched over his father like a father.
The young fellow, with an astuteness that promised well for the rise of his house, was spending the summer with a Magdalen undergraduate, an old Harrow schoolfellow—a young lord whose father was in the Cabinet; in fact, Horace, with airy cheerfulness, was cementing friendships that might be of value to his father in the political life which he was contemplating for himself, and later on for his son.
The millionaire hungered for the lad; and, in his absence, he poured into Betty’s ears all his hopes for him, his pride in him, his affection for him.
And it was good to see that his pride in the lad’s aristocraticways was wholly undamped by any suspicion that the boy despised him—whereas with his girls he felt their despisings at every turn.
Betty had hoped, for his father’s sake, that the youth would come home for a few days before his term began at Oxford; but when he came she endured her severest trial.
Horace Malahide, fresh from the society of well-bred people, at once found himself at ease with Betty. His bright wit, his airy love of life, his frank ways, his affection and his care for his father, his patience and his delicacy in correcting him, won the esteem of the girl. And she, for a day or so, not knowing the attraction of her own beauty, enjoyed his companionship.
She realized, all at once, that he was ignoring his sisters. She found it impossible to withdraw herself from the position. Her sudden avoidances of him inflamed the youth’s desire for her companionship. He became a trial to her.
Then came letters sad with sighs. How the young dogs all take to the same water!
She found a fragment of the poetic pinned to her dressing-table, in which fragment was much rhyming of Modeyne with “I ween,” and tributes to “dainty shoulders chill, and cruel with disdainings keen,” and complaints of “ignorings of worship that any beauty who, less proud of mien, had been, must surely needs have seen.”
The dictionary had been ransacked for rhymes.
The lad was in the euphemistic stage of poetic debauchery; and Betty could never abide indifferent verse. He chose the surest way to this very desert of ignorings and shoulders chill and the like disdainings. The devil was in it for the lad all through.
So the poetic bugling sounded the trump of his rejection.
He went up to Oxford; and for close upon three days was well-nigh disconsolate.
The lad’s admiration, most unwitting of it, did the girl a sad disservice.
The unspoken verdict of their modish brother, in preferring this girl’s society to theirs, roused the ill-will of his neglected sisters; and the two young women, whilst their full red lips kissed Betty good-morning as sweetly as was their wont, took to tittle-tattling against her.
The tittle-tattle bred further tittle-tattle, unloosed suggestive and insinuating tongues, and at last Dame Gossip bumped up, giggling, against the doors ofThe Cock and Bullin Fleet Street.
The tavern vomited its secret.
The ghost of Major Modeyne arose from the dead and walked; and was seen in Park Lane.