CHAPTER XVIII.

“To look at the fellow one would never give him credit for half the grit he has,” thought Strange as he glanced round for a cab at the street corner. “If I had money I should send him to Paris,” he went on as soon as he had settled himself comfortably, “the Kensington methods are no manner of use to him. It’s the deuce of a shame too, that he has to attempt 2finished work for a living when he should be swatting over the primaries; and that colour mania—that will get chronic and overgrow him, and then God help him!”

As it happened Lady Mary was at home and quite wide-awake. As a rule this was not the case until much later in the day, but just now various things combined to keep off sleep.

When Strange was announced, she was sitting well screened from the small bright fire, gazing in soft meditation at her plump white hands, with the corners of her mouth slightly drawn downwards, and her smooth round forehead wrinkled up in a way that would have gone to the heart of a stone to see in such a picture of comfort as she was made to be.

3“Humphrey!” she exclaimed, making a vain try at a spring and flopping down again limply, “Humphrey!”

“Myself and no other,” said Strange, receiving her kiss cheerfully, and settling himself into a chair after he had shaken it to see if it would bear. “I needn’t ask you how you are, Aunt Moll, you look just as you always did, like a catkin.”

“A what, Humphrey?” she enquired anxiously.

“A catkin, we used to call them goslings, soft, oval, pale gold, silky, fluffy masses—you have a weakness for adjectives I know, judging from the line in literature you patronize. The harshest wind has never been known to ruffle a gosling, it always skips them, they always feel warm to the touch, as if the sun were on them, they 4are delicious things. The sun is always on you, Aunt Moll, ain’t it?”

“Ah, Humphrey, you little know, you can make but a faint guess at my troubles, the death of my dear——”

“Aunt Moll, we’ll skip that!” interrupted Strange, with a twinkle.

He knew quite well what an unmixed relief the deceased peer’s removal was to all his kith and kin, more especially to his wife.

“If you recollect, before I went to Algeria we agreed to let my uncle rest undisturbed in his present retreat, which, from what we know of his past, must be unexceptionable—whatever his faults may have been no one can deny that he was a most exclusive person and had a very just notion of his position.”

5“Dear Humphrey! That flippancy! I had hoped that the many dangers you have experienced, the many times you have come face to face with death—and, Humphrey—with Eternity—would have brought the seriousness of life before your eyes.”

“Aunt Moll, the sight of you there in that chair brings that view of the case more clearly before me than ever the sight of death did.”

Lady Mary again looked anxious, her nephew always made her feel like that, his eyes seemed to rake her from stem to stern and to find some mute amusement in the process. Suddenly she gave a little start.

“What have I been thinking of?” she murmured. “Humphrey,” she began again, 6“we must speak of your prospects.”

She was bubbling over with them as it happened, besides, they would keep him off her.

“What are you thinking of doing now?”

“What I have always been thinking of doing and have never done yet, making the result of my face to face encounters with death—and Eternity—of some practical value to the world in general and to myself in particular, by filling my trousers’ pockets, which at this present moment contain one pound six and threepence, and that’s mostly due for beer.”

“Humphrey! Have you heard nothing? Your letters?”

“I never read them. For Heaven’s sake, speak, divulge, I’m ready for anything!”

7“Your great-uncle is dead—died last month. Before he went he confessed a heavy sin that had lain for years on his soul, poor dear creature. That great lanky son of his, about whom, as you know, I always had a nasty feeling, as if he were not altogether quite right, as if somehow he was not one of us. This now proves to have been a quite prophetic instinct, he turns out to be—ahem—illegitimate, and you, you, Humphrey, are the heir.”

“I say! It’s beastly hard lines on Tom!”

Strange was quite as staggered with the news, as any other younger son in his condition would have been. It vibrated through and through him, but as one cannot clothe thunder in harmonies any more than one can a tumultuous muddle of sensations 8in speech in the presence of a woman inclined to gush and stoutness, he swallowed his muddle and was flippant.

“Humphrey!” said Lady Mary with dignity, wondering a little if Humphrey himself were quite right. “This minute you have ten thousand a year, and you, my nephew, are Sir Humphrey Strange.”

“Am I? You’ll be astonished to hear I don’t feel a bit like it, I feel exactly as I did before. Is there any difference to the naked eye, if so, do you mind telling me?”

Lady Mary stirred uneasily and crossed her hands.

“Dear Humphrey!” she cried at last, with a soft wailing bleat, “I confess I did expect some show of proper feeling from you on this occasion. It is a shock 9to me to see you in your present frame of mind, it seems like flying in the face of Providence, and may end in bringing down a judgment on your head.”

Lady Mary sighed and continued, lowering her voice to a coo, “When I heard the news, Humphrey, I went down on my knees and prayed that my poor sinful uncle might be forgiven for foisting that counterfeit young man off on our family, and that you, my nephew, might face your responsibilities with a seriousness befitting the occasion. My dear, if you knew what it costs me to kneel, now that I have grown a little stout, you might perhaps appreciate this act.”

Humphrey grinned.

“Aunt Moll, my feelings are always too deep for expression, it would upset 10you for a month if I were to give you the merest glimpse of the emotions that are ravaging me this minute. These inward upheavals are frightfully wasting, your acts of prayer and thanksgiving are a fool to them—There doesn’t happen to be any tea going, does there?”

“Tea! Is it five o’clock? What can have happened? Pray ring. The misery I have to endure with servants! I wonder my hair isn’t even greyer than it is, and my poor face more worn.”

“Your hair is as brown as a nut, and there isn’t a crease in your dear, soft young face. What was wrong with you when I came in, the corners of your mouth were turned the wrong way?”

Lady Mary reflected as she made his tea.

11“Ah, it was Gwen, she has thrown aside another most unexceptionable match, the third in three months.”

“Gwen, what?”

“Gwen Waring, she is with me for the season.”

“Ah, that queer, sulky, imperturbable, long-legged girl, belonging to those wonderful young fossils at Waring Park. I shouldn’t have thought she’d have got the chance to throw over any match, let alone three unexceptionable ones——”

“Humphrey!”

“What’s up? Gru!—”

He sprang to his feet.

A tall superb girl with a face like a hothouse flower, was standing in the middle of the room, looking at him with a cool aloofness that made his blood run cold. 12She had heard every word, she must have, his voice was a big one.

This magnificent dominant creature, before whom he felt as a worm, was only an enlarged completed edition of the “sulky, long-legged” slip he used to catch fitful glances of, in his stays with his aunt.

If only he hadn’t classified her in such cool pleasant tones! It was not often the fellow felt at such a disadvantage. If the girl had made a joke now, or even looked as if she could make one! But she knew better than to joke, she had her tactics ready to her hand, and she was determined his impertinence should be brought home to him.

Her own classification never troubled her in the least, it was the good-humoured sneer at her parents which touched her. 13Was she always to suffer for being the product of such a house?

The next few minutes Strange felt younger than he had done for ten years.

“Lady Mary has been telling me of your good fortune,” she remarked kindly, sipping her tea, and looking at him in as motherly a way as so very splendid a person could look. “You must be quite excited—I suppose you are already making a hundred plans?

“I seem to know you quite well,” she went on, not giving him the chance to reply, “Lady Mary is always telling anecdotes of ‘her boy’, very entertaining ones they are too, and I should fancy characteristic.”

She helped herself to more cream and regarded him coolly.

14“When she reads prayers, she always makes a special and very full mention of you.”

Lady Mary winced abjectly and looked deprecatingly at her nephew, but his eyes were fastened on Gwen. His aunt felt she had escaped for once. She settled herself into her pillows, and wondered vaguely what would happen next.

She had a horrid feeling that there were breakers ahead somewhere, but as she never by any chance could see farther than her own nose, she decided not to make any effort at sighting them, but to drift on with faith.

“Very considerate of my aunt!” said Strange, in a pause.

“Oh, that is only one instance of her consideration and the least important. She 15has done much more than that for you, she is like John the Baptist without the skins and locusts, she has ‘been preparing the way before’ you, and you have only to appear to be mobbed, Sir Humphrey. There’s not a matron nor a maid in London who doesn’t babble of you; your name is rippling off a hundred tongues at this very minute; you are the hero of a hundred teas. All this came on after a long round of calls Lady Mary and I paid last Monday,” she continued, scanning him. “I had only heard your name before, in the outward world, that is—the Baronetcy never affected Lady Mary’s prayers and anecdotes, they were always with us—in a queer aside way, as if one hinted at dark things that had better not be unearthed. Ah, but that is all changed! You have no notion 16though how exhausting the process has been to Lady Mary.”

She stopped at last.

“No,” he said, looking at his aunt, “I certainly hadn’t perceived any symptoms of a cave-in about her. Monday, did you say, Miss Waring? Would you mind letting me have your visiting list for that day, Aunt Moll? I suppose I know some of the people, and my soul’s one desire for years has been to pose as an afternoon-tea hero. I shall just have time to get a foretaste of the joys this afternoon. Good-bye, Aunt Moll, pray don’t look anxious on my account, my morals are tough enough to run the gauntlet of all the teas in London, and my digestion is unimpaired. Good-bye, Miss Waring,” he said, bowing gravely in her direction, 17“thank you for standing by my aunt on Monday’s warpath, I am gratified to see you are in no sort of way exhausted by the process. Damnation!” he muttered as he got out into the street, “she smells of a hothouse with her overpowering beauty and her insolent airs, and that cool inexorable way of hers. Oh, Aunt Moll, you’ll rue the day you made me a by-word. To think I had to swallow all that, and let a girl bait me!”

He laughed aloud.

“And so I am the coming parti! Good Lord! I’ll be fine practice for the ‘sport,’ anyway they’ll find me shy game. I’ll go home, finish a chapter or two, dose Tolly, and then I’ll dine.

“Hullo!” he exclaimed suddenly, “things 18are looking up for Charlie, he can go to Paris now when he likes. I wonder how I can reduce his high stomach to seeing it in that light!”

CHAPTER XIX.

Strange found the preliminaries of his induction into the rôle of an English Squire even more unpleasant than he had expected.

During the period when he had read Roman law and knocked about the Courts with the hope of supplementing his income by the experience he picked up there, the technicalities of the law had bored him to excruciation point. Now, when they were brought specially to bear 20on him he found them more galling still, but being a wise man in his way, he shirked none of them, and took good care not to take a solitary step in the dark, till, by the time they had got him off their hands, the solicitors of the Stranges were in a position to congratulate themselves at last, on the fact of having found a whole man in the family.

He had gone the rounds of his duties doggedly and had found them insufferably dull, he had been down to Strange Hall, had left things there in trim, and had now flown back to London.

One afternoon in June he was standing in the shadow of a deep window, in one of his rooms in Piccadilly, lazily sharpening a pencil.

21He had plenty of work to do, but somehow he had no stomach for it, the change in his life had got into his bones, and had filled him with unrest and a certain loss of faith in himself. When at last after a long meditation, the truth of this broke upon him, it came with an audible and ample, “Damn!”

“I may as well give it up and amuse myself in a mild way,” he thought, after a hasty review of matters, “nothing can be too weak and vapid for my present condition—I feel flabby.”

A mild grunt at his back made him swing round. It was Tolly, just back from the dentist, of a deeper puce than usual, and with a terrible uncompromising row of glistening teeth shooting out aggressively between his thin lips.

22He gave a deferential duck, and stood on approval, with a laboured attempt at an appearance of modest deprecation.

“Turn round, Tolly,” said his master, “away from me, I can’t bear it all at once!”

He was shaking with silent laughter.

“How do you feel about them yourself, Tolly?”

“Fust-rate, sir—your wussup.”

Since his master’s rise in life he was much exercised as to the best terms by which to give him honour, and he varied them daily.

“I can bite nails, your wussup.”

“Ah! You mustn’t play fast and loose with these tusks as you might with ones bred and reared on the premises.”

“Lord! your wussup, I wouldn’t make 23that free, being, as they are your property, sir, besides, any fool can see as how they be the real bought article, money down, not your everyday common grinders. There weren’t a toff I met as didn’t mention ’em, I tried to keep ’em dark, sir.”

“I shall expect a good deal more from you,” said Strange, pointing the moral, “now you’re complete. If anyone calls to-day say I’m out and I won’t be home till night, and—take these to the post before I start,” he pointed to a big heap of notes on the table, “and don’t drop any of them, nor swallow your teeth.

“Twenty invitations in a week,” reflected Tolly’s master, “the first-fruits of my rise in life! they used to average six a week. I’ll go 24and see Lady Mary. Damn it all, why need a man lie to himself, I’ll go and see Miss Waring!”

And he went, and somehow the next day he went again, and the next, and the next after that. Then he and Gwen discovered a mutual passion for riding, not up and down the Row, that seemed as tame a pastime to the one as to the other, but in the early mornings out on the heath at Hampstead, or sometimes far out on the Surrey side.

Once they went as far as Surbiton, where they got drenched in a shower and had to take refuge and have tea in an old inn.

But it is not at all to be supposed that with all this intimacy those two got an inch nearer one another, they were 25intellectual companions, nothing more, not even to be called comrades.

Gwen neither evaded nor shirked conventions, she simply swept them aside, as she did her lovers. As for Strange, he felt her and the rides very distinctly a boon. She was an excellent flint to make sparks with, her ways of thought were so new, let alone startling, her modes of expression so quaint, her tongue so remarkably sharp, and she had such a brutal habit of speaking undiluted truths. For the once the two agreed, they disagreed at least three times, and a good pitched battle had to be fought to settle any question. The sponge was never by any chance thrown up, it was forced out of the hand of one or of the other of them. It was a most bracing and delightful experience for Gwen, 26it was so satisfactory and so absolutely free from mawkishness, and she reflected, with superb self-congratulation, that the man had just as little capacity for that phase as herself.

“She’s hard—hard as nails,” he reflected after an evening at Lady Mary’s, “and yet, she wasn’t made like that, I could swear. I wonder what the devil’s wrong with her eyes, and what’ll put them right? I believe, upon my word I do, that a baby might do the business for her. There’s not a man living that would have any effect upon them, and yet there are fellows going who would take that dewiness, for softness, hang it! it’s mere moisture, but—ah, well, the effect is magnificent!”

He took out his watch, but his hand shook so that he could not open it.

27“God forgive me!” he muttered, “this is awful! I have had a good deal in the way of education at women’s hands, but this is a new experience,” he remarked after a pause, grinning, and flicking a spot of ash off his coat, “her want of self-consciousness is next to ghastly, it has an uncanny sexless sort of air about it that gives one the shivers.”

The intellectual companionship continued unabated for ten more days, then one evening at the end of June, Gwen Waring told Strange that she and Lady Mary were going down into the country early in July.

When he got home that night he had a difficulty in mounting the stairs. When he succeeded, he got himself to the glass, and found he was white to the lips. He had 28had a shock—he had discovered, as he had turned out of Lady Mary’s softly-lighted hall into the street, that he loved the girl irretrievably, and with the knowledge came fear.

For a few minutes he leaned against the mantel-piece, his head sunk into his hands, then he raised himself with a sigh, threw off his light overcoat, and sat down to smoke, but he couldn’t draw a puff, then it struck him that he was numb with cold.

He looked at the grate with a purpose to make a fire lighting in his eyes, but with a shrug he shirked the trouble. He could not go to bed, that was out of the question; as for sitting there freezing, that was just as impossible. He must move, he must feel the life stir in him 29again. He stood up and shook himself, then a thought struck him, he hurried to his room, changed his clothes, and went out round the corner to the mews where he kept the horses he had brought up from Strange Hall.

He found the gear, saddled the freshest, and rode away through short cuts and byways, away from the noise and hurly-burly, out into the quiet of the country. Then he drew rein, pulled the mare aside on to a green strip flanking the road, and let her go her own pace. For a long time he gave her grace and smoked savagely.