The Duchess walked with Letitia in the high-walled garden at Mandeleys, on the morning after her arrival. She appeared to be in a remarkably good temper.
"I have not the least intention of boring myself, my dear Letitia," she said, in reply to some conventional remark of her niece's. "So long as I get plenty of fresh air during the day, good plain food, and my bridge between tea and dinner, I am always contented. Let me see," she went on, coming to a standstill and pointing with her stick to the little belt of tall elm trees and the fir plantation behind, "Broomleys is that way, isn't it? Yes, I can see the house."
Letitia nodded, but only glanced in the direction her aunt indicated.
"And Mr. Thain? Do you find him a pleasant neighbour?"
Letitia looked deliberately the other way. It was just as well that her aunt should not see the flash in her eyes.
"We do not see much of him," she replied. "He gallops round the park every day like a lunatic, and he spends a great deal of time, I think, in his car."
"My dear," the Duchess said impressively, "David Thain may have his peculiarities, but he is really a most simple and sincere person. I was attracted to him upon the steamer simply because of his shyness, and a good thing for you, dear, that I was. It must make quite a difference to have Broomleys properly let to a man who can pay a good rent for it."
"We have never denied that," Letitia admitted drily. "We are keeping house now upon the first quarter's rent."
"Is it my fancy," her aunt continued, stooping to pick herself a sprig of lavender, "or do you really dislike Mr. Thain?"
"Intensely!" Letitia confessed with emphasis.
The Duchess was surprised.
"Well, really!" she exclaimed. "And to me he seems such a harmless, inoffensive person, absolutely without self-consciousness and not in the least bumptious."
"What on earth has he to be bumptious about?" Letitia scoffed. "He has simply made a lot of money out of other people."
"That shows brains, at least," her aunt reminded her.
"Cunning!" Letitia retorted.
The Duchess twirled the sprig of lavender between her fingers. She could not remember ever to have heard her niece so much in earnest.
"Well, I hope you don't feel too strongly about him," she said. "I must have him asked to dinner while I am here."
"We have anticipated your wishes," Letitia remarked. "He is coming to-night."
"I am very glad to hear it," was the satisfied reply. "I shall do my best to persuade him to come up to Scotland later on. There is nothing that Henry enjoys more than a little flutter in American railways. Perhaps he will help us to make some money."
"Personally," Letitia said slowly, "I should be very careful how I trusted Mr. Thain."
The Duchess was shocked.
"You carry your aversions too far, my dear," she remonstrated.
"Perhaps, I only know that he sold father a lot of shares which it is my profound conviction are entirely worthless."
"Sold your father shares?" the Duchess repeated. "I don't understand. How on earth could Reginald pay for any shares!"
"He gave what is called an acceptance," Letitia explained. "It falls due in about six weeks."
The Duchess smiled. She had a great idea of her own capacity for business.
"My dear," she said, "if between now and then the shares have not improved sufficiently for your father to make a profitable sale, Mr. Thain can extend the time of payment by renewing the bill."
"You have more confidence in Mr. Thain than I have," Letitia remarked drily.
Her aunt was a little puzzled. She decided to change the conversation.
"Where is Charles this morning?" she enquired.
"In the library with father. They are discussing possible settlements. I thought that sort of thing was always left to lawyers."
"I hope you are happier about your marriage than you seem," her aunt observed. "Charles is quite aparti, in a way, you know, although he is not rich."
"Oh, I suppose it may as well be Charles as any one else," Letitia assented, a little drearily.
The Duchess shook her head.
"You need a change, my dear," she declared. "I hate to hear you talk like that, especially as you are by way of being one of those single-minded young persons who must find everything in marriage or else be profoundly unhappy. I am not at all sure that you ought to have considered the question of marriage until you were in love."
"Thank you," Letitia retorted, "I have a horror of being an old maid."
Her aunt sighed.
"Now I come to think of it," she went on reminiscently, "there is a curious streak of fidelity, isn't there, in your father's character. You must take after him. It ought to make you very careful, Letitia. I don't want to say a word against Charles, but he doesn't carry his head quite so high as you do, you know. When are you going to announce your engagement?"
"As soon as he leaves here, I think."
"Hm! Is Charlie very much in love with you?"
"If he is, he hasn't mentioned it," Letitia observed. "Nowadays, men seem to reserve that sort of protestation for their musical comedy friends, and suggest a joint establishment, as a matter of mutual convenience, to us."
"Bitter, my dear—very bitter for your years!" her aunt sighed.
"What would you like to do this morning?" Letitia asked, abruptly changing the subject.
"I shall amuse myself," was the prompt reply. "First of all, I am going to undertake a little mission on Reginald's account. I am going over to talk to that ridiculous old man Vont. Afterwards, I shall walk across to Broomleys."
"Most improper!" Letitia remarked.
"My dear," her aunt reminded her, "I am nearly forty years old, although no one in the world would guess it if it were not for those wretched Court Guides. I look upon Mr. Thain as a sort of protégé of mine, and I have an idea that you are not being so nice to him as you might be."
"I do my best," Letitia replied, "and I really don't think he has anything to complain of."
The Duchess parted from her niece as they neared the house and proceeded to pay her first visit. She crossed the moat by the little handbridge, walked briskly across the intervening strip of park, and approached the little enclosure in which the cottage was situated. Richard Vont, seated in his usual corner of the garden, remained motionless at her approach. He neither rose nor offered any sort of greeting.
"Good morning, Vont," she said briskly, as she reached the paling.
He was looking at her fixedly from underneath his bushy grey eyebrows. He sat bolt upright in his chair, and he kept his hat upon his head.
"What do you want?" he demanded.
"My good man," she remonstrated, "you might as well be civil. Why don't you stand up and take off your hat? You know who I am."
"Yes, I know who you are," he replied, without moving. "You are Caroline, Duchess of Winchester. I keep my hat upon my head because I owe you no respect and I feel none. As to asking you in, no one of your family will ever, of my will, step inside these palings."
"You are a very obstinate old man, Vont," she said severely.
"I am what the Lord made me."
"Well," she continued, leaning slightly against the paling and looking down at him, "I came down here to say a few words to you, and I shall say them, unless you run away. You are one of those simple, ignorant men, Vont, who love to nurse an imaginary injustice until the idea that you have been wronged becomes so fixed in your brain that you haven't room for anything else there. This behaviour of yours, you know, is perfectly ridiculous."
Vont made no sign even of having heard her. She continued.
"You haven't even a grievance. My brother took your daughter away from her home. Under some conditions, that would have been a very reprehensible thing. As things turned out, it has been the making of the young woman. She has received a wonderful education, has been taken abroad, and has been treated with respect and consideration by every one. My brother has devoted a considerable portion of his lifetime to ensuring her happiness. She is now a contented, clever, talented and respected woman. If she had remained here, she would probably have become the wife-drudge of a farmer or a local tradesman. You are listening, Richard Vont?"
"Yes, I am listening!"
"If the Marquis had betrayed your daughter, taken her away and deserted her," she continued, "there might have been some justification for this theatrical attitude of yours. Under the present circumstances, there is none at all. Why don't you rid yourself of the idea, once for all, that you or your daughter have suffered any wrong? You've only a few years to live. Take up your work again. There is plenty to be done here. Go and mix with your old friends and live like a reasonable man. This brooding attitude of yours is all out of date. Put your Bible away, light a pipe, and set to work and kill some of the rabbits. The farmers are always complaining."
"You have a niece up yonder," Vont said, knitting his shaggy grey eyebrows and gazing steadfastly at his visitor, "a well-looking young woman, they say—Lady Letitia Thursford. Would you like her to live with a man and not be married to him?"
"Of course," the Duchess replied, "that is simply impertinent. If you are going to compare the doings of your very excellent yeomen stock with the doings of the Thursfords, you are talking and thinking like a fool. A few hundred years ago, it would have been your duty to have offered your womenkind to your master when you paid your rent. We have changed all that, quite properly, but not all the socialists who ever breathed, or all the democratic teachings you may have imbibed in America, can entitle you to talk of the Vonts and the Thursfords in the same breath."
The old man rose slowly to his feet. He leaned a little upon his stick, and pointed to Mandeleys.
"You are an ignorant, shameless woman," he said. "Get you home and read your Bible. If you want a last word to carry away with you, here it is. My daughter was just as much to me as the young woman who walked yonder with you in the garden is to her father. Let him remember that."
"But, you foolish person," she expostulated, "Lady Letitia enjoys all the advantages to which her station entitles her. Your daughter, with a mind and intelligence very much superior to her position, was employed in the miserable drudgery of teaching village children."
"Honest work," he replied, "hurts no one, unless they are full of sickly fancies. It's idleness that brings sin. They tell me you've new creeds amongst those in your walk of life, and a new manner of living. Live as you will, then, but let others do the same. I stand by the Book, and maybe, when your last days come, you will be sorry you cast it aside."
"So far as I remember," she reminded him, "the chief teaching of that Book is forgiveness."
"Your memory fails you, then," he answered grimly, "for what the Book preaches is justice to poor and rich alike."
The Duchess sighed. She was a good-hearted woman and full of confidence, but she recognised her limitations.
"My good man," she said, "I shall not argue with you any more. You won't believe it, but you are simply narrow and pig-headed and obstinate, and you won't believe that there may be a grain of reason in anybody else's point of view but your own. Just look at yourself! You can't be more than sixty-five or so, and you might be a hundred! You sit there nursing your grievance and thinking about it, while your whole life is running to seed. Why don't you get up and be a human being? Send for your daughter to come down and look after you—she'd come—and choke it all down. Put the Book away for a time, or read a little more of the New Testament and a little less of the Old. Come, will you be sensible, and I'll come in and shake hands with you, and we'll write your daughter together."
Vont was still leaning on his stick. Save that his eyebrows were drawn a little closer together, his expression was unchanged. Yet his visitor, though the sunshine was all around them, shivered.
"Did he send you here?"
"Of course not," she replied. "I came of my own accord. I remembered the days when you used to take me rabbiting and let me shoot a pheasant if there was no one about. You were a sensible, well-balanced man then. I came, hoping to find that there was a little of the old Richard Vont left in you."
"There is just enough of the old Richard Vont left," he said, "to send you back to where you came from, with a message, if you care to carry it. Tell him—your brother, the Lord of Mandeleys—that I am not sitting here of idle purpose, that I don't hear the voices around me for nothing, that I don't look day and night at Mandeleys for nothing. Tell him to make the most of the sun that shines to-day and the soft bed he lies on to-night and the woman he kisses to-morrow, for he is very close to the end. I am an old man, but I'm here to see the end. It has been promised."
The Duchess, brimful of common sense and good humour, brave as a lion and ready of tongue as she was, felt a little giddy, and clung to the rail as she crossed the little bridge over the moat. She looked back only once. Richard Vont remained standing just as she had left him—grim, motionless, menacing.
The Marquis glanced at the note which was handed to him at luncheon time, frowned slightly and handed it across to Letitia.
"What have you people been doing to Thain?" he asked a little irritably. "He doesn't want to come to dinner."
The Duchess and Sylvia, who had just arrived on her projected visit, made no attempt to conceal their disappointment. Letitia picked, up the note and read it indifferently.
"I am very sorry, aunt," she said. "I gave him all the notice I could."
"There is perhaps some misunderstanding," the Marquis remarked. "In any case, he would not know that you were here for so short a time, Caroline. After luncheon I will walk across and see him."
"I will go with you," the Duchess decided. "I should like to see Broomleys again. As a matter of fact, I meant to go there this morning, but I found one call enough for me."
They took their coffee in the garden. Letitia followed her father to a rose bush which he had crossed the lawn to examine.
"Dad," she asked, passing her hand through his arm, "have you had any good news?"
He shook his head.
"Why?"
"Because you look so much better. I think that motoring must agree with you."
He patted her hand.
"I rather enjoyed the drive," he admitted. "As a matter of fact, perhaps I am better," he went on.
"You haven't any good news about the shares, I suppose?" she asked hesitatingly.
For a moment he was grave.
"I have no news at all," he confessed, "or rather what news I have is not good. I put an enquiry through an independent firm of stockbrokers with whom I have had some transactions; and their reply coincided with the information already afforded to me."
Letitia glanced across the park, and her face darkened.
"Has it ever struck you," she asked, "that there is something peculiar about Mr. Thain in his attitude towards us—as a family, I mean?"
The Marquis shook his head.
"On the contrary," he replied, "I have always considered his deportment unimpeachable."
Letitia hesitated, pulled a rose to pieces and turned back with her father towards where the Duchess was reclining in a wicker chair.
"I dare say it's my fancy. Why don't you all go," she suggested, "and take Mr. Thain by storm? He can scarcely resist you, aunt, and Sylvia."
"Why don't you come yourself?" the Duchess asked.
"My duty lies here," Letitia observed, with a little smile towards Grantham, who had just strolled up with Sylvia.
The Duchess rose to her feet.
"Dear me, yes!" she acquiesced. "You two had better go off and have a long country walk. If I sit for long after luncheon, I always go to sleep; so come along, Reginald, we'll beard the lion in his den."
The Marquis glanced towards Sylvia, but she shook her head.
"I must see after my unpacking," she said, "but I should very much like Mr. Thain to come. Do try to persuade him."
The Duchess and her brother strolled up the garden and out of the postern gate into the park.
"That's a terrible old man of yours, Reginald," the former observed, glancing over her shoulder. "I never came across such a person off the boards at Drury Lane."
"He is an infernal nuisance," the Marquis grumbled. "It seems absurd, but he gets on my nerves. Day by day, there he sits, wet or fine. You can't see his lips move, but you can always feel sure that he is hunting up choice bits of damnation out of the Old Testament and hurling them across at me."
"I have come to the conclusion," his sister decided, "that he is out of his mind. An ignorant man who lives with one idea all his life is apt to lose his reason. He has never attempted any violence, has he?"
"Never," the Marquis replied, "but since you have mentioned it, Caroline, I always have a queer sensation when I am that side of the house. It is just about the distance to be picked off nicely with a rifle. I can't think why he doesn't do it—why he contents himself with abuse."
"I am going to consult Mr. Thain about him," his companion said. "A man of his robust common sense is much more likely to influence a lunatic like Vont than you or I.—So this is where our millionaire hermit is hidden," she went on, as they reached the gate. "Dear me, the place has changed!"
"It will soon be in order again," the Marquis observed. "Thain has a dozen men at work in the grounds, and he is having the rooms done up, one by one. He lives in the library, I think, and the bedroom over it."
They passed through the plantation and into the gardens. Thain was there, talking to one of the workmen. He came to meet them with a somewhat forced smile of welcome upon his lips.
"This is very unexpected," he declared, as he shook hands. "I should have called upon you this afternoon, Duchess."
"I should think so!" she replied severely. "Will you be so good as to tell me at once what you mean by refusing my niece's invitation to dine?"
He hesitated for a moment, then he smiled. There was something very attractive about his visitor's frank directness of speech and manner.
"I refused," he admitted, glancing around to where the Marquis was engaged in conversation with a gardener, "because I didn't want to come."
"But I am there, you stupid person!" she reminded him. "You are invited to dine with me! I know you don't get on with Lady Letitia, and I know you don't like large parties, but there are only half a dozen of us there, and I promise you my whole protection. Show me something at once. I want to talk to you. Those Dorothy Perkins roses will do, at the other end of the lawn."
He walked in silence by her side. She waited until they were well out of earshot.
"David Thain," she said, "have I shown an interest in you or have I not?"
"You have been extraordinarily kind," he confessed.
"And in return," she continued, "you have decided to avoid me. I won't have it. Are you afraid that I might want you to make love to me?"
He shook his head.
"I am sure you wouldn't find that amusing," he declared. "In the society of your sex I generally behave pretty well as your brother would do if he were dumped down in an office in Wall Street."
"I honestly believe that you are diffident," she admitted. "I never met a millionaire before who was, and at first I thought it was a pose with you. Perhaps I was mistaken. You really don't think, then, that you have any attraction apart from your millions?"
"I'm quite sure that I haven't," he answered bitterly.
"A love affair!" she exclaimed, looking into his face scrutinisingly. "And I knew nothing of it!—I, your sponsor, your lady confessor, your—well, heaven knows what I might not be if you would only behave decently! A love affair, indeed! That little yellow-haired chit, I suppose, who is down here raving about you all the time—Sylvia What's-her-name?"
He smiled.
"I know very little of Miss Sylvia Laycey," he said, "beyond the fact that she seems very charming."
"I suppose you ought to marry," she continued regretfully. "It seems a pity, but they'll never leave you alone till you do. What is your type, then? Sylvia Laycey is much too young for you. I suppose you know that."
"I don't think I have one," he answered.
"That's because I am married, of course," she went on. "If you were a sensible man, you would settle down to adore me and not think of anybody else at all. But you won't do it. You'll want to buy palaces and yachts and town houses and theatres, like all the rest of the superfluously rich, and you'll want a musical comedy star to wear your jewels, and a wife to entertain your friends."
"Well, you must admit that I haven't been in a hurry about any of these things yet," he observed.
She looked at him keenly.
"Look here, my young friend," she said, "you haven't made the one mistake I warned you against, have you? You haven't fallen in love with Letitia?"
He laughed almost brutally.
"I am not quite such a fool as that," he assured her.
"Well, I should hope not," she enjoined severely. "Besides, as a matter of fact, Letitia is engaged. Her young man is staying at Mandeleys now. Just answer me one question, David—why did you refuse that invitation to dinner?"
"Because I didn't feel like coming," he answered. "I thought it would probably be a large party, most of them neighbours, and every one would have to make an effort to entertain me because I am a stranger, and don't know their ways or anything about them."
"There you are again!" she exclaimed. "Just as sensitive as you can be, for all your millions! You'll come, David—please?"
"Of course I will, if you ask me like that," he assented.
She turned to her brother, who was approaching.
"Success!" she announced. "Mr. Thain has promised to dine. He refused under a misapprehension."
"We are delighted," the Marquis said. "At a quarter past eight, Mr. Thain."
Gossett in the country was a very different person from Gossett in Grosvenor Square. An intimate at Mandeleys was not at all the same thing as a caller in town, and David found himself welcomed that evening with a grave but confidential smile.
"The drawing-room here is closed for the present, sir," he observed, after he had superintended the bestowal of David's coat and hat upon an underling. "We are using the gallery on the left wing. If you will be so kind as to come this way."
David was escorted into a long and very lofty apartment, cut off from the hall by some wonderful curtains, obviously of another generation. The walls were hung with pictures and old-fashioned weapons. At the far end was a small stage, and at the opposite extremity a little box which had apparently at some time been used by musicians. Some large beech logs were burning in an open fireplace. The room contained nothing in the way of furniture except a dozen or so old-fashioned chairs and a great settee.
"These large rooms," Gossett explained, "get a little damp, sir, so his lordship desired a fire here."
He had scarcely disappeared when a door which led into the gallery was opened, and Lady Letitia came slowly down the stairs. The place was lit only by hanging lamps, and David's impression of her, as he turned around, were a little unsubstantial. All the way down the stairs and across that strip of floor, it seemed to him that he could see nothing but her face. She carried herself as usual, there was all the pride of generations of Mandeleys in her slow, unhurried movements and the carriage of her head. But her face.—David gripped at the back of one of the tall chairs. He made at first no movement towards her. This was the face of a woman into which he looked. The change there was so complete that the high walls seemed to melt away. It was just such a vision as he might have conceived to himself. Her words checked the fancies which were pouring into his brain. He became again the puzzled but everyday dinner guest.
"I am very glad that you have come, Mr. Thain," she said, giving him her hand, "and I am very glad indeed to see you alone, even if it is only for a moment, because I feel—perhaps it is my thoughts that feel—that they owe you an amende."
"You are very kind," he replied, a little bewildered. "I am glad to be here. What have you ever done which needs apology?"
"I spoke of my thoughts," she reminded him, with a little smile. "What I once thought, or rather feared, I am now ashamed of, and now that I have told you so I am more at ease."
She stood up by his side, little flashes of firelight lighting her soft white skin, gleaming upon the soft fabric of her gown. She wore no ornaments. The Mandeleys pearls, generally worn by the unmarried women of the family, were reposing in the famous vaults of a West End pawnbroker. Her strong, capable fingers were innocent of even a single ring, although upon her dressing table there was even at that moment reposing a very beautiful pearl one, concerning which she had made some insignificant criticism with only one object, an object which she refused to admit even to herself. David remained silent through sheer wonder. He had a sudden feeling that he had been admitted, even if for only these few moments, into the inner circle of her toleration—perhaps even more than that.
"I hurried down," she explained, "just to say these few words, and I see that I was only just in time."
The curtain had been raised without their noticing it, and the Duchess, with Grantham by her side, had entered. There was a slight frown upon the latter's forehead; the Duchess was humming softly to herself.
"Well, Sir Anthony, so you've kept your word," she said to David, when he had shaken hands with Grantham. "I can see quite well what the country is going to do for you, unless you are looked after. The amiable misanthrope is the part you have in your mind. Gracious! Motors outside! Have we got a party, Letitia?"
Letitia, who to David's keen observation seemed already to have lost something of that strange new quality which she had shown to him only a few moments ago, shook her head.
"The Vicar and Mrs. Vicar, and the Turnbulls, and Sylvia's father."
"I am not going to be bored," the Duchess declared firmly. "I insist upon sitting next to Mr. Thain. How pretty Sylvia looks! And what a becoming colour! Now listen to me, David Thain," she went on, drawing him a little on one side, "you are not to flirt with that child. It's like shooting them before they begin to fly. You understand?"
"Not guilty," David protested. "I can assure you that I am a passive victim."
"Silly little goose," the Duchess murmured under her breath, "waiting there for you to go and speak to her, with all sorts of sentimental nonsense shining out of her great eyes, too. I shall go and talk to old General Turnbull till the gong goes. Why we can't have dinner punctually with a small party like this, I can't imagine."
Sylvia was certainly glad to welcome David. Her father came up in a few moments and shook hands heartily.
"Still buy your own cutlets, eh, Mr. Thain?" he asked. "Jolly good cutlets they were, too!"
"I suppose you have a housekeeper and all sorts of things," Sylvia laughed, "and live in what they call regal magnificence."
David's protest was almost eager.
"I have a man and his wife who came down with me from London," he said, "and one or two servants—very few, I can assure you. Won't you come and try my housekeeping, Colonel, before you move on, and bring Miss Sylvia?"
"With pleasure, my boy," the Colonel declared. "We leave for town next Saturday. Any day between now and then that suits Sylvia."
Dinner was announced, and David found himself placed at a round table between the Duchess and Sylvia. The former looked around the banqueting hall with a shiver.
"Reginald," she protested, "why on earth do you plant us in the middle of a vault like this? Why on earth not open up some of the smaller rooms?"
The Marquis smiled deprecatingly. His extreme pallor of the last few days had disappeared. He seemed younger, and his tone was more alert.
"This room is really a weakness of mine," he confessed. "I like a vaulted roof, and I rather like the shadows. It isn't damp, if that is what you are thinking of, Caroline. We have had fires in it ever since we came down—timber being the only thing for which we don't have to pay," he added.
"It makes one feel so insignificant," the Duchess sighed. "If you were dining fifty or sixty people, of course, I should love it, but a dozen of us—why, we seem like spectral mites! Look at old Grand-Uncle Philip staring at us," she went on, gazing at one of the huge pictures opposite. "Pity you cannot afford to have electric light here, Reginald, and have it set in the frames."
"A most unpleasant idea!" her brother objected. "Confess, now, if you could see two rows of ancestors, all illuminated, looking at you while you ate, wouldn't it make you feel greedy?"
The conversation drifted away and became general. The Duchess leaned towards her neighbour.
"I think I am rather sorry I came here," she whispered.
"Why?" he asked.
"Because I find you disappointing. I thoroughly enjoyed discovering you upon the steamer. You were delightfully primitive, an absolute cave-dweller, but you quite repaid my efforts to make a human being of you. You were really almost as interesting when we first met in London. And now, I don't know what it is, but you seem to have gone thousands of miles away again. You don't seem properly human. Don't you like women, or have you got some queer scheme in your head which keeps you living like a man with his head in the clouds? Or are you in love?"
"I haven't settled down to idleness yet, perhaps," he suggested.
"Of course," she went on, "you ought to be in love with me, and miserable about it, but I am horribly afraid you aren't. I believe you have matrimonial schemes in your mind. I believe that your affections are so well-trained that they mean to trot all along the broad way to St. George's, Hanover Square."
"And would you advise something different?" he asked bluntly.
"My dear man, why am I here?" she expostulated. "I have a fancy for having you devoted to me. What I mean to do with it when I have captured your heart, I am not quite sure."
Every one was listening to a story which old General Turnbull was telling. Even Sylvia had leaned across the table. David turned and looked steadily into his companion's face.
"It seems to me," he said, "that only a very short time ago, Duchess, out of solicitude for my extreme ignorance, you warned me against setting my affections too high."
"I was speaking then of marriage," she replied coolly.
"I see! And yet," he went on, "I am not quite sure that I do see. Is there any radical difference between marriage and a really intimate friendship between a man and a woman?"
She smiled. Her slight movement towards him was almost a caress.
"My dear, unsophisticated cave-dweller!" she murmured. "Marriage is an alliance which lasts for all time. It is apt, is it not, to leave its stamp upon future generations. Great friendships have existed amongst people curiously diverse in tastes and temperament and position. A certain disparity, in fact, is rather the vogue."
"I begin to understand," he admitted. "That accounts for the curious club stories which one is always having dinned into one's ears, hatefully uninteresting though they are, of Lady So-and-So entertaining a great fiddler at her country house, or some other Society lady dancing in a singular lack of costume for the pleasure of artists in a borrowed studio."
"You are not nearly so nice-minded as I thought you were," the Duchess snapped.
"It is just my painful efforts to understand," he protested.
"Any one but an idiot would have understood long ago," she retorted.
David turned to his left-hand neighbour.
"The Duchess is being unkind," he said. "Will you please take some notice of me?"
"I'd love to," she replied. "I was just thinking that you were rather neglecting me. I want to know all about America, please, and American people."
"I am afraid," he told her, "that I know much more about America than I do about American people. All my life, since I left Harvard, I have been busy making money. I never went into Society over there. I never accepted an invitation if I could help it. When I had any time to spare I went and camped out, up in the Adirondacks, or further afield still, when I could. We had lots of sport, and we were able to lead a simple life, well away from the end of the cable."
"And you killed bears and things, I suppose?" she said. "How lucky that you are fond of sport! It makes living in England so easy."
He smiled.
"I am not so sure," he confessed, "that I should consider England quite so much of a sporting country as she thinks herself."
"What heresy!" the Marquis exclaimed, leaning forward.
"Of course, I didn't know that I was going to be overheard," David said good-humouredly, "but I must stick to it. I mean, of course, sport as apart from games."
"Shooting?" the Marquis queried.
"I am afraid I don't consider that shooting at birds, half of them hand-reared, is much of a sport," David continued. "Have you ever tried pig-sticking, or lying on the edge of a mountain after three hours' tramp, watching for the snout of a bear?"
Letitia had broken off her conversation with Lord Charles and was leaning a little forward. The Marquis nodded sympathetically.
"Hunting, then?"
David smiled.
"You gallop over a pastoral country on a highly-trained animal, with a pack of assistant hounds to destroy one miserable, verminous creature," he said. "Of course, you take risks now and then, and the whole thing looks exceedingly nice on a Christmas card, but for thrills, for real, intense excitement, I prefer the mountain ledge and the bear, or the rounding up of a herd of wild elephants."
"Mr. Thain preserves the instincts of the savage," the Duchess observed, as she sipped her wine. "Perhaps he may be right. Civilisation certainly tends to emasculate sport."
"The sports to which Mr. Thain has alluded," the Marquis pointed out, "are the sports of the stay-at-home Englishman. Most of our younger generation—those whose careers permitted of it—have tried their hand at big game shooting. I myself," he continued reminiscently, "have never felt quite the same with a shotgun and a stream of pheasants, since a very wonderful three weeks I had in my youth, tiger hunting in India.—I see that Letitia is trying to catch your eye, Caroline."
The women left the room in a little group, their figures merging almost into indistinctness as they passed out of the lighted zone. David's eyes followed Letitia until she had disappeared. Then he was conscious that a servant was standing with a note on a salver by his side.
"This has been sent down from Broomleys, sir," the man explained.
David took it and felt a sudden sinking of the heart. The envelope was thin, square and of common type, the writing was painstaking but irregular. There was a smudge on one corner, a blot on another. David glanced at the Marquis, who nodded and immediately commenced a conversation with Grantham. He tore open his message and read it:
"The time has arrived. I wait for you here."
He crushed the half-sheet of notepaper in his fingers and then dropped it into his pocket.
"There is no answer," he told the servant.
Grantham, who had been unusually silent throughout the service of dinner, slipped away from the room a few minutes before the other men. He found Letitia arranging a bridge table, and drew her a little on one side.
"Letitia," he said, "I am annoyed."
"My dear Charles," she replied, "was anything ever more obvious!"
"You perhaps do not realise," he continued, "that you are the cause."
She shrugged her shoulders.
"Well?"
"In the first place," he complained, "you are not wearing my ring."
"I thought I told you," she reminded him, "that I would prefer not to until we formally announced our engagement."
"Why on earth shouldn't we do that at once—this evening?" he suggested. "I can see no reason for delay."
"I, on the other hand, have a fancy to wait," she replied carelessly, "at least until your visit here is over.
"Your hesitation is scarcely flattering," he remarked with some irritation.
"Is there anything else you wish to say?" she enquired. "I really must get out those bridge markers."
He began to show signs of temper. Watching him closely for the first time, Letitia decided that he had most unpleasant-looking eyes.
"I should like to know the subject of your conversation with that Thain fellow when I came in this evening," he demanded.
"I am sorry," she said coolly. "We were speaking upon a private subject."
The anger in his eyes became more evident.
"Private subject? You mean to say that you have secrets with a fellow like that?"
"A fellow like that?" she repeated. "You don't like Mr. Thain, then?"
"Like him? I don't like him or dislike him. I think he ought to be very flattered to be here at all—and you are the last person in the world, Letitia, I should have expected to find talking in whispers with him, with your heads only a few inches apart. I feel quite justified in asking what that confidence indicated."
Letitia smiled sweetly but dangerously.
"And I feel quite justified," she retorted, "in refusing to answer that or any similar question. Are you going to play bridge, Charlie?"
"No!" he replied, turning away. "I am going to talk to Miss Laycey."
Sylvia was quite willing, and they soon established themselves on a settee. The Duchess, rather against her inclinations, was included in the bridge quartette. Letitia, having disposed of her guests, strolled over towards David, who was standing with his hands behind him, gloomily studying one of the paintings.
"I must show you our Vandykes, Mr. Thain," she said, leading him a little further away. "When these wonderful oil shares of yours have made us all rich, we shall have little electric globes round our old masters. Until then, I find it produces quite a curious effect to try one of these."
She drew an electric torch from one of the drawers of an oak cabinet and flashed a small circle of light upon the picture. Thain gave a little exclamation. The face which seemed to spring suddenly into life, looking down upon them with a faintly repressed smile upon the Mandeleys mouth, presented an almost startling likeness to the Marquis.
"Fearfully alike, all our menkind, aren't they?" she observed, lowering the torch. "Come and I will show you a Lely."
They passed further down the gallery. She looked at him a little curiously.
"Is it my fancy," she asked, "or have you something on your mind? The note which reached you contained no ill news, I hope?"
"I don't know," he answered, with unexpected candour. "I have a great deal on my mind."
"I am so sorry," she murmured.
They had reached the further end of the gallery now. She sank into the window seat and made room for him by her side. For a moment he looked out across the park. In the moonless night the trees were like little dark blurs, the country rose and fell like a turbulent sea. And very close at hand, ominously close at hand as it seemed to him, a bright light from Richard Vont's cottage was burning steadily.
"Let me ask you a question," he begged a little abruptly. "Supposing that you had given your word of honour, solemnly, in return for a vital service rendered, to commit a dishonourable action; what should you do?"
"Well, that is rather a dilemma, isn't it?" she acknowledged. "To tell you the truth, I can't quite reconcile the circumstances. I can't, for instance, conceive your promising to do a dishonourable thing."
"At the time," he explained, "it did not seem dishonourable. At the time it seemed just an act of justice. Then circumstances changed, new considerations intervened, and the whole situation was altered."
"Is it a monetary matter?" she enquired, "one in which money would make any difference, I mean?"
He shook his head.
"Money has nothing to do with it," he replied. "It is just a question whether one is justified in breaking a solemn oath, one's word of honour, because the action which it entails has become, owing to later circumstances, hideously repugnant."
"Why ask my advice?"
"I do not know. Anyhow, I desire it."
"I should go," she said thoughtfully, "to the person to whom I had bound myself, and I should explain the change in my feelings and in the circumstances. I should beg to be released from my word."
"And if they refused?"
"I don't see how you could possibly break your word of honour," she decided reluctantly. "It is not done, is it?"
He looked steadily down the gallery, through the darkened portion, to where the soft, overhead lights fell upon the two card tables. There was very little conversation. They could even hear the soft fall of the cards and Sylvia's musical laugh in the background. All the time Letitia watched him. The strength of his face seemed only intensified by his angry indecision.
"You are right," he assented finally. "I must not."
"Perhaps," she suggested, "you can find some way of keeping it, and yet keeping it without that secondary dishonour you spoke of. Now I must really go and see that my guests are behaving properly."
She rose to her feet. Sylvia's laugh rang out again from the far corner of the gallery, where she and Grantham were seated, their heads very close together. Letitia watched them for a moment tolerantly.
"I will recall my fiancé to his duty," she declared, "and you can go and talk nonsense to Sylvia."
"Thank you," he answered, "I am afraid that I am not in the humour to talk nonsense with anybody."
She turned her head slightly and looked at him.
"Sylvia is such an admirer of yours," she said, "and she has such a delightful way of being light-hearted herself and affecting others in the same fashion. If I were a man—"
"Yes?"
"I should marry Sylvia."
"And if I," he declared, with a sudden flash in his eyes, "possessed that ridiculous family tree of Lord Charles Grantham's—"
"Well?"
"I should marry you."
She looked at him through half-closed eyes. There was a little smile on her lips which at first he thought insolent, but concerning which afterwards he permitted himself to speculate. He stopped short.
"Lady Letitia," he pleaded, "there is a door there which leads into the hall. You don't expect manners of me, anyway, but could you accept my farewell and excuse me to the others? I have really a serious reason for wishing to leave—a reason connected with the note I received at dinner time."
"Of course," she answered, "but you are sure that you are well? There is nothing that we can do for you?"
He paused for a moment with his hand upon the fastening of the door.
"There is nothing anybody can do for me, Lady Letitia," he said. "Good-by!"
She stood for a moment, watching the door through which he had passed with a puzzled frown upon her face. Then she continued her progress down the room. Arrived at the bridge table, she stooped for a moment to look over her aunt's score.
"Finished your flirtation, my dear?" the latter asked coolly.
Letitia accepted the challenge.
"So effectually," she replied, "that the poor man has gone home. I am to present his excuses to every one."
The Duchess paused for a moment in the playing of her hand. Her brother, with unfailing tact, threw himself into the breach.
"I suppose," he said, "that we can scarcely realise the responsibilities which these kings of finance carry always upon their shoulders. They tell me that Mr. Thain has his telegrams and cables stopped in London by a secretary and telephoned here, just to save a few minutes. He receives sometimes as many as half a dozen messages during the night."
The Duchess continued to play her hand.
"After all," she remarked, "I fear that I shall not be able to ask Mr. Thain to Scotland. One would feel the responsibility so much if he were to lose anything he valued, by coming."