HER LADYSHIP

“YES,” said my uncle, as he warmed himself before the library fire, “a young man of very considerable ability, I think. One might trust old Jonathan Frost to make no mistake about that. He might be led by family feeling—but not led astray! Hard-headed, and ambitious—for himself, I mean, apart from his business, the boy is. He’s different from the old man in that; the old man thought of nothing but his undertakings, he was just the most important part of their machinery. This boy’s got his eye on politics, he tells me. I’ve no doubt he’ll get on in them. Then, with a suitable wife——”

“Lady Arabella—or something of that sort?”

“Precisely. You catch my train of thought, Julius.” Sir Paget smiled his shrewdly reflective smile, as he continued:

“We may regard the Frost family, then, as made—in both its branches. Because my lady, with her possessions and her looks, is undoubtedly made already—indeed, ready-made.

We must move with the times—or at any rate after them. You’ve done it; you’re a commercial man yourself, and doing very well at it, aren’t you?”

“I hope to—after the war. I believe Sir Ezekiel means to keep me at home and put me in charge in London—if London’s still standing, I mean, of course. But I don’t feel it in my bones to rival the kin of Jonathan Frost.”

“Yes—a remarkable family. What do you make of the girl herself?”

“You’ve seen a lot more of her than I have. What do you?”

“Brain above the average, but nothing wonderful. Will very strong—she’s as tenacious as a limpet.”

“I should think so. But she’s got her feelings too, hasn’t she?”

“That’s the point on which I have some doubt. Well, study her for yourself. I think she’s worth it.” He was frowning a little as he spoke, as though his doubt troubled him, although he could give no very good reason for it. “However, she has lots of good qualities—lots,” he ended. He gave the impression of a man trying to reconcile himself to something, and finding his task difficult. He praised the Frost family in handsomely general terms, with hardly a reservation; yet with just the hint of one. It was as though Nina—and her cousin too, for that matter—just failed to give him complete satisfaction, just lacked something that his nature or his taste needed. I did not think that it was anything very serious—not anything that could be called moral, a matter of lack of virtue or presence of vice. It was rather a dourness, too much solidity, too little gayety, humor, responsiveness. The Frosts were perhaps not “out of working harness” enough. Did his mind insist on drawing a contrast? He had loved the girl of whom we did not speak.

Aunt Bertha’s attitude was different, as her letters had suggested. Her acute and eminently practical mind wasted no time in pining for ideals, or in indulging delicate dissatisfactions. It preferred to concentrate on the pleasant aspects of the attainable. One can’t expect everything in this world! And it may even be doubted whether the softer charms, the insidious fascinations, are desirable attributes in women (men, of course, never possess them, so that the question doesn’t arise there); don’t they bring more trouble than good to their possessors, or anyhow to other people? (To her dear Waldo?)

Perhaps they do. At any rate, it was by hints of this order that Aunt Bertha, having seen reason herself, sought to overcome the lingering sentimentalities, and perhaps memories, of Sir Paget.

“The kindness of the girl!” said Aunt Bertha. “All through her own trouble—and you know how she loved her father!—she never forgot us and our anxiety. She used to manage to see me almost every day; came with grapes—you know the Briarmount grapes?—or something, for Waldo, and cheered me up with a little talk. She may not gush, she may not splash about, but Nina has a heart of gold, Julius.”

“Then she’s gold all through, inside and out,” I said, rather flippantly.

“Men are often fools,” Aunt Bertha remarked—and I hope that the observation may be considered irrelevant. “They undervalue the real things that matter in a woman.”

“What’s the application of that? I’m sure that Waldo likes Lady Dundrannan very much.”

“Of course he does. And whatever my remark meant, it didn’t mean that Waldo is a fool. Waldo has grown a great deal wiser than he was. And for that very reason you’re turning up your nose at him, Julius!”

There her acumen came in. She defined in a single homely sentence the mental attitude against which I was struggling. It was true. I collapsed before Aunt Bertha’s attack.

“I’ll do my best to fall in love with her myself,” I promised.

“It won’t make any difference what you try,” was the best I got out of her in return for my concession.

All the same, her emotional volte-face continued to surprise me. She might, perhaps, well forget that she had loved and pitied Lucinda. Was it—well, decent—so entirely to forget that she had once heartily disliked Nina, and to call me a fool on the score that my feelings were the same as hers had been not much more than two years before? Besides, I did not dislike Nina. I merely failed (as Sir Paget failed) to find in her certain characteristics which in my judgment lend charm and grace to a woman. I tried to explain this to Aunt Bertha; she sniffed and went on knitting.

The young man, Captain Frost, anyhow, I did like; I took to him at once, and he, I think, to me. He was spending a brief Christmas holiday at Briarmount, with a certain Mrs. Haynes, a friend of Nina’s, for company or chaperon to the cousins. He was a tall, straight fellow, with a bright blue eye and fair curly hair. There was an engaging candor about him; he was candid about things as to which men are often not candid with one another—about his stupendous good luck and how he meant to take advantage of it; his ambitions and how he could best go about to realize them; his extremely resolute purpose to let nothing interfere with his realizing them. He was even candid about his affairs of the heart; and this was supreme candor, because it lay in confessing to me—an elder man to whom he would wish to appear mature at least, if not rusÉ—that he had never had any; a thing, as every man of the world knows (God forgive them!) much harder for any young man to own to than it would be to plead guilty to—or to boast of—half a dozen.

“But why haven’t you?” I couldn’t help asking. He was himself attractive, and he was not, I fancied, insusceptible to beauty; for example, he admired his cousin—at the respectful distance which her Ladyship set between them.

“Well, up to now I couldn’t have afforded to marry,” was his reply, given in all seriousness, as though it were perfectly explanatory, perfectly adequate. But it was so highly revealing that comment on it is needless.

“Well, now you can,” I said—I am afraid a little tartly.

“Yes; but it’s a matter needing careful consideration, isn’t it? An awful thing if a man makes a mistake!” His eyes, bright and blue, fixed themselves on mine in a glance which I felt to be “meaning.” “Your cousin, for instance, Major Rillington, was very nearly let in, wasn’t he?”

“Oh, you know about that, do you? Was it Lady Dundrannan who told you?”

He laughed. “Oh, no! It was Miss Fleming. And she didn’t tell me anything about who it was—only just that he’d had a lucky escape from a girl quite unworthy of him. She said I must remember the affair—it was all over London just before the war. But as I was in the works at Dundee at the time, and never read anything in the papers except racing and football, I somehow missed it; and when I asked Nina about it, she shut me up—told me not to talk scandal.”

“But I thought that she was fitting you for polite society!”

“That’s good—jolly good, Captain Rillington!” he was kind enough to say. “I shall tell Nina that; it’ll amuse her.”

He seemed disposed to take me for a Mentor—to think that I might supplement the social education which his cousin proposed to give him; that I might do the male, the club side, while she looked after the drawing-room department—or deportment. On the other hand, he instructed me rather freely on business, until he happened to gather—from Sir Paget—that in the piping times of peace I held a fairly good position in Ezekiel Coldston & Co., Ltd.; after which he treated me, if not with a greater, yet with a more comprehensive, respect. “That’s a big concern,” he remarked thoughtfully. “Of course you and we don’t come into competition at all—quite separate fields, aren’t they?”

“Oh, quite,” said I, tacitly thanking heaven for the fact.

As I have said, an engaging young man, and interesting. I wondered what he and life would make of one another, when they became better acquainted. Meanwhile our intimacy increased apace.

Human nature is, and apparently always has been, prone to poke fun at newly acquired greatness; I suppose that it hangs on the person stiffly, like a frock coat fresh from the tailor’s. If Lady Dundrannan wore her dignity and power rather consciously, she also wore them well. She made an imposing figure in her mourning; but her stateliness was pleasantly and variously tempered to suit the company in which she found herself. For Aunt Bertha and Sir Paget there was an infusion of the daughterly; for Captain Godfrey of the elder-sisterly. I myself still found in her that piquant directness of approach which, in an earlier moment of temerity, I have ventured to call her impudence; it seasoned and animated her grandeur. She was, behind her dignity, mockingly confidential; she shared a half-hidden joke with me. She was naturally impelled to share it, if there were anybody with whom she could; it was to her the spice of the situation. Not the situation itself, of course; that was to her entirely serious and all important; she was attached to Waldo with all her limpet tenacity, with all her solidity of purpose, with all the tenderness, moreover, of which her heart was capable; finally, with an intensity of straight downright passion, of which I know by hearsay, but should hardly have divined from her own demeanor. But the joke, though not the situation itself, was a lively element in it. She could not share it with Waldo, or Aunt Bertha, or Sir Paget; nor would she share it with young Godfrey Frost, since it hardly became the status of an elder sister. But she could and did share it with me. The joke, of course, was Lucinda.

It would have been a still better joke, had she known all that I knew about Madame Valdez, or Donna Lucinda Valdez, or Madame Chose’s needlewoman; she might not have been so ready to share it with me, had she known that I knew about the girl on the cliffs, passionately, shamefully sobbing in wounded love, pride, and spite. As matters stood to her knowledge, the joke was good enough, and yet fit to share. For here was she—the uninvited skeleton at the abortive feast—triumphant, in possession of the field, awaiting in secure serenity the fruition of her hopes. And so placed, moreover, that the attainment of her object involved no stooping; a queen bowing acquiescence from her throne is not said to stoop. Yes, here she was; here she was, with a vengeance; and—where was Lucinda?

Well, that was just what she wanted to know. Not in any uneasiness or apprehension, but in good, straight, honest, human, feminine curiosity and malice. Moreover, that was what, before we had been much together, she came to have a suspicion, an inkling, that I could tell her—if I would. This was no marvel of feminine intuition. It was my fault, or my mischief. It was my side of the joke, without which the joke would have been to me rather a grim one. I could not help playing with her curiosity, inciting and balking her malice.

She used to come to see Waldo almost every day, sitting with him an hour or more. Being a young woman of active habits, she generally came on foot, and, since he could not escort her home, that duty fell to my lot; we had several walks back from Cragsfoot to Briarmount, just as twilight began to fall on those winter evenings, her clear-cut, handsome features still showing up boldly above her rich dark furs. She really looked very much My Lady!

But it is one walk that stands out conspicuous in memory. It was the afternoon on which Waldo had asked her to be his wife—though I did not know it.

Up to now, when I had occasion to pronounce her name, I had called her Lady Dundrannan, and she had not protested, although she continued to use my Christian name, as she always had since Waldo, Arsenio, and Lucinda set the example. But on this day, when her title happened to fall from my lips, she turned to me with an amused smile:

“Don’t you think you might call me Nina? You used to. And, really, mayn’t I almost be considered one of the family now?”

“I don’t care about calling you Nina just because I used to, or just because you’re almost one of the family, Lady Dundrannan——”

“There you go again!” she protested.

“Well, I rather admire the name. It sounds wild, feudal, Caledonian. But I’ll call you Nina if you like me well enough.”

“I’ve always liked you quite well, though I don’t think you used to like me much.”

“Let bygones be bygones, Nina!”

“Well, they are, aren’t they?” she said, with quite undisguised meaning—and undisguised triumph too. I was stupid not to suspect the cause. “But I believe you’re sorry for it!”

“I was sorry for it, of course, at the time it happened. We were all of us—well, much more than sorry. Stunned! Aghast!”

“You do use big words over that girl,” remarked Lady Dundrannan.

“You’re letting yourself go this evening! Hitherto you’ve been more subtle in trying to get at what I think—or thought—of Lucinda.” Mark my own subtlety here! I substituted “thought” for “think”; and what she had been trying to get at was not what I thought of Lucinda, but what I knew about her—if anything. But I meant to lead her on; I gave her a smile with the words.

“If you felt all that about it, I should have thought you’d have tried to get some explanation out of her—or him. Something to comfort the family! You yourself might have acted as a go-between.”

“But they vanished.”

“Oh, people don’t vanish so completely as all that!”

“There’s the war, you know. We’ve all been busy. No time for useless curiosity.” I did not advance these pleas in a very convincing tone.

She looked at me suspiciously. “You’ve never heard a word from either of them?”

I took it that she meant to ask if I had received any letters. “Never,” said I—upon the assumption, truthfully.

“Where do you suppose Arsenio Valdez is?”

“I don’t know where he is. Fighting for Italy, I suppose. He was bound to end by doing that, though, of course, he’s by way of being a tremendous Clerical. In with the Black Nobility at Venice, you see.”

“Nobility, indeed! A scamp like that!”

Now she had no particular reason for enmity against Valdez; rather the contrary. But Waldo had, and she reflected Waldo, just as I thought that Waldo’s flavor of bitterness towards Lucinda reflected her quality of mind, the sharp edge of her temper.

“How do you account for what she did?” she asked me, with a touch of irritation and restlessness.

“‘Account for it!’ Love is unaccountable, isn’t it?” I remembered that Lucinda had used the words about herself.

“Doesn’t her mother ever hear from her?”

“I don’t know. I’m not in touch with that excellent woman. She has, I fancy, vanished from the ken of Cragsfoot as completely as her daughter.”

“I expect they’ve just gone under, that pair—Lucinda and Arsenio. Because they were just a pair, weren’t they?”

I seemed to hear an echo of Waldo’s “like to like.” Or more probably Waldo’s “like to like” was an echo of what I now heard.

“Oh, I don’t see why they should have. We may very likely knock up against them some day,” I remarked with a laugh.

It was still light enough for me to see a flash in her eyes as she turned quickly on me. “If you think I’m——” she exclaimed impetuously; but she pulled herself up, and ended with a scornful little laugh.

But of course she had not pulled herself up in time; I knew that she had been going to say “afraid,” and she knew that I knew it. Lucinda had avowed a feeling that it was not all over between herself and Nina yet. Something of a similar feeling seemed to find a place in Lady Dundrannan’s mind; she contemplated the possibility of another round in the fight—and she was not afraid of it. Or was she? Just a little—in her heart? I did not think that she need be, seeing the sort of man that Waldo was, knowing (as I now knew) Lucinda’s mind; knowing too, alas, Lucinda’s fate. But it was curious to find the same foreboding—if one could call it that—in both women.

“I really don’t see why you should think any more about Lucinda,” I said.

“I don’t think I need,” she agreed, with a smile that was happy, proud, and confident.

I looked her in the face, and laughed. She stopped, and held out her hand to me. As I took it she went on. “Yes, Waldo is telling the old people down there, and I’ll tell you here. We’re engaged, Julius; Waldo asked me this afternoon, and I said yes.”

“I hope you will believe that I congratulate you and him very sincerely, and, if I may, gladly welcome you into the family.”

“Without any arriÈre-pensÉe?” Her challenge was gay and good-humored.

“Absolutely! Why do you suspect anything else?”

“Well then, because you are—or were—fond of Lucinda.”

“Oh, you’ve got it out at last! But, even supposing so—and I’ve no reason for denying it—I’m not put to a choice between you, am I? Now at all events!”

“No,” she admitted, but with a plain touch of reluctance; she laughed at it herself, perhaps at her failure to conceal it. “Anyhow, you’ll try to like me, won’t you, Cousin Julius?”

“I do like you, my dear—and not a bit less because you don’t like Lucinda. So there!”

By now we were at the gates of Briarmount. I pointed to the house.

“You’ve got somebody else to tell your news to, in there. And you’d better tell him directly. I hope he’s not been cherishing vain hopes himself, poor boy!”

“Godfrey?” She laughed again. “Oh, nonsense! He’s just my little brother.”

“You’ve got two men to manage now. Your hands will be full, Nina.”

“Oh, I think I shall be equal to the task!”

“And, when you want, you can still unburden your mind to me about Lucinda.”

“I think I’ve done that! I shall take your advice and think no more about her. Good-night, Julius. I—I’m very happy!”

I watched her walk briskly up the Briarmount drive in the dusk. Certainly a fine figure of a girl; and one who improved on acquaintance. I liked her very much that afternoon. But she certainly did not like Lucinda! Put as mildly as possible, it came to that.