  "I'd rather have a whole cab-driver to myself than share a peer of the realm with another woman," said Mrs. Darling. She had been in England eighteen months, and the shadow of her tragedy, which never bore very heavily, had lifted. She sat in a basket chair on the lawn at Puddlewood, dressed all in filmy white, and sipped tea with the Duchess of Pemberwell, her great-aunt, in the shade of one of Puddlewood's ancient oaks. In her lap lay an unopened copy of the Times. "Is he a cab-driver, then?" inquired the duchess, taking her literally. "Yes," Nina laughed, "a heavenly cab-driver. He threads the milky way. Some say aviator." "Oh, Nina!" "He's very nice, I assure you, my dear. Not an ounce of fat on him. All bone and sinew and nerve." "And—a Yankee," added the duchess belittlingly. "A free-born American," corrected her great-niece, "and with the loveliest accent. You should hear him say: 'Evah at you' se'vice, Miss' Dahling.' You'd fall in love with him yourself." "And this aviator person is yours exclusively?" "Undividedly. Isn't it nice?" "I think I should prefer Nibbetts myself; or Sir George Grey, or—well, scores I could name." "I dare say. You married the duke. Your taste speaks for itself, dear aunt." Though the duchess made no retort, she appeared annoyed. She poured herself a fresh cup of tea and sipped it in silence. Nina opened her paper. She was still turning the pages when his grace sauntered over, halted, and gazed for a moment at the spread tea-table. He was small, bald and peaked, with tiny black eyes like shoe-buttons. "There isn't any seed-cake," he complained. "I can't take tea without seed-cake. You know I never take tea without seed-cake, do I, Doody?" Doody was his pet name for his duchess. "No, you don't," she said. "It's too bad. There was only a little, and Nina ate it." Nina, who had not been listening, looked up. "What's that I ate?" she asked. "Doody says you ate all the seed-cake," explained the duke. "Oh, I believe I did. It was exceptionally good, too. I wish there had been more." "You don't wish it half as much as I," and there was a suspicion of querulousness in his grace's tone. "He's flying at Doncaster to-day," Nina observed, devouring the aviation news, and already forgetful of the duke and the seed-cake. "Who's flying?" he asked sharply. "Pierson," answered Nina. "My David." "Then I hope he jolly well breaks his neck," was the snapping rejoinder as his grace wheeled about and set off for the castle to admonish his housekeeper. Having exhausted the aviation news, Mrs. Darling turned to the American cables. Everything American now held for her a magnified interest. Presently she slapped the page out flatter and interestedly bent her head closer. "Fancy!" she exclaimed a moment later, sitting up straight. "He's been sentenced to fifteen years' imprisonment." "Your David?" asked the duchess indifferently. "Certainly not. He's poor but honest. J. Sprague Ramsay, of Chicago, the multimillionaire banker, whose wife and daughter I knew in India. I don't in the least understand it—it's for lending himself money from his own banks or something. It's too bad. Poor, poor Sibylla. And Jane was just coming to a marriageable age. It will spoil all her chances." "It should be a lesson to you, Nina. I should think you'd feel disgraced. You associated with the family of a convict. You must curb your indiscriminate freedom. You must, really." "Pooh!" cried her great-niece. "The Ramsays were charming. It wasn't their fault that J. Sprague borrowed more than he had a right to." Her great-aunt's disapproval of Americans in general and of the American aviator in particular, had the usual effect of disapproval when brought to bear on an independent spirit. It whetted Nina's ardor for the daring and intrepid David Pierson. She not only attended the meetings at which he flew, but on repeated occasions she flew with him. Her infatuation was the talk of her friends and her enemies. As a matter of fact the American was by no means a bad sort. He came of good, honest stock, was fairly well educated, and possessed a comfortable income from Kentucky tobacco plantations, which he had inherited. With the coming of autumn, however, the inevitable happened. He proposed marriage to the young widow who had led him to believe he had only to ask to be given. And Nina refused him flatly. David Pierson, however, was a distinctly different type from young Andrews. His eyes didn't grow misty and he didn't weep. He was, in fact, a distinctly different type from any of the men she had jilted or repulsed. He didn't storm and he didn't sulk. On the contrary, he caught hold of her shoulders and he shook her until her teeth chattered. And then, not in the least gently, he boxed both her ears, and walked out, leaving her in a towering rage. Out of sheer revenge, rather than for any other reason, she began almost at once to encourage the attentions of a certain cabinet minister. She let him hold her hand and send her books of amorous verses with marked stanzas. More than that, she invited veiled paragraphs in the society journals, hinting at a pending betrothal, and mailed each issue, blue-penciled, to the aviator's home address in Louisville. But with the cabinet minister Nina Darling went no further than she had with any of the others. She shunted him by making him madly jealous, first, and then openly casting him aside for one of the poets to whose passionate lines he had been the means of introducing her. In the next three years she ran sort of continuously amuck against the susceptible, strewing her world with broken, bleeding hearts. And all the while the one man for whom she would gladly have given her life looked on with a sneer and a cynic smile, and said harsh, cruel things to her and of her, in season and out. There were those who held that it was due in a large measure to Lord Kneedrock that the ugly mystery of poor Darling's horrid death was not permitted to rest in the grave with the victim. Still there may have been injustice in this, for there were still quite as many to say that Kneedrock shot him because he coveted Nina for himself, as there were that it was Nina or that it was suicide. Wherever two or three were gathered together in Vanity Fair, one was sure to hear the phrase: "Poor Darling!" and without waiting very long for it, either. Someone said "Poor Darling!" at Bellingdown, one day in late March, and as usual the Umballa tragedy was threshed out all over again, though it was nearly five years gone, and to separate a fresh grain of truth from the chaff was nigh hopeless. "Oh, Nina couldn't," Lady Bellingdown insisted. "I've seen a lot of her, and I could tell." Lord Waltheof, who was the "tame cat" of the household, a tall, slim, dark man, reminded her that Mrs. Darling couldn't remember what happened. "Oh, you're wrong about that, Wally," put in Charlotte Grey, the fair, thin bride of Sir George, who was up in town with Lord Bellingdown. "You're wrong about that. She didn't remember at first, but she does now. Nibbetts told me so. She remembers, but she doesn't speak of it. That is rather suspicious, you know." "She's a widow without a sorrow," Kitty Bellingdown declared. "She never loved Darling; we all know that." "She doesn't know what love is," asserted the bride, who was missing her husband terribly. "She has passion, but no affection." "Has she been casting sheeps' eyes at Shucks?" It was Waltheof who asked. "Shucks" was Sir George's nursery name. It is a mark of the bluest blood to carry some such absurd nursery cognomen from the nursery to Eton, or Harrow, or Winchester, and then on to one or the other of the universities. "She'd better not," Charlotte returned, her eyes snapping. "I—I didn't know." And Waltheof slyly pinched Lady Bellingdown's shoulder as he stood behind her chair. "I've always thought Nibbetts had a hand in it," Lord Waltheof ventured. "It was odd, his turning up just at that time, you must all admit that. Eight years he buried himself, God only knows where, and then all of a sudden he appears in Umballa, and the very next night poor Darling is mysteriously shot. Then back he comes to London and takes up the old life, just as if he had never been away and nothing had happened." Lady Kitty nodded. "That's perfectly true," she said. "Does any one know where he was?" "Yes," the tall man answered. "We all know generally. But only one man accurately. His solicitor was informed all the while. When I want a secret kept that's the man I'm going to employ." "I'd see him right away if I were you," suggested Charlotte, and Lady Bellingdown frowned. "I believe Nibbetts would marry Nina to-morrow if she'd say yes," Waltheof continued. "But she won't. She won't say yes to any man. Once was enough for her. That's flat." "If he cares so much for her he has a poor way of showing it. I've never heard him give her a civil word." The bride spoke out of the richness of her experience. "I'm certain she cares for him," averred Lady Bellingdown. "And he's a brute to her." "It's the crime that stands between them," Waltheof said with decision. "Nibbetts is queer. And it's that that's preyed on his mind until he's not quite all there, don't you know." "Everybody knows his father is queer," contributed their hostess. They dropped the subject after a while without getting a step further than when they started. But they didn't drop gossip. Dinghal, with his broken nose, would have been in his element at Bellingdown. But he was still in Umballa, suffering tortures from catarrh. "Caryll Carleigh's to be married on the twelfth." Lady Kitty flung the announcement to Lady Charlotte. "So soon?" "Yes. They've hurried it, because the girl's mother, who is the most restless of mortals, wants to go to China or somewhere. She's just back now from Egypt. Her daughter was with friends at Capri for the winter. That's where Caryll met her. They are Americans, you know." "So I heard. I do hope Caryll will be happy; but it is a risk. Americans are always divorcing. They're so lacking in repose." "He tells me she's adorable." "Oh, of course. Still he might, don't you think, have done better at home? English girls fit in so much better." "I dare say. But one never could advise Caryll. He's most exasperatingly headstrong." The young baronet was her nephew and she knew. "I've met Mrs. Veynol and her filly," Waltheof put in. It was after dinner, and he had been sipping liqueurs and smoking cigarettes alone in the dining-hall. "She's exasperatingly headstrong, too. Not my choice for a mother-in-law." Lady Bellingdown twisted her long neck to give him a smile. He was behind her chair as usual. "Caryll never met Mrs. Veynol until a week ago. It was all arranged by correspondence," she said. "Who was Veynol?" asked Charlotte Grey. "It seems to me I've heard the name, but—" "South African diamond man. She married him after a week's acquaintance at Cape Town, and he died in five months and left her a Mrs. Cr[oe]sus," Waltheof made clear. "The girl calls herself Veynol, too, but that isn't her name, of course." "Americans hold their names so lightly, don't they?" observed Charlotte. "George says they change them at the drop of the hat." "Due principally to the divorce courts and the bankruptcy laws," explained the man illuminatingly. "They're a rum lot out there." He had never been to America; but the average Briton invariably assumes a wisdom if he has it not, especially when conversing with the dependent sex. As events turned out, however, Rosamond Veynol didn't change her name again on the twelfth of April. For some reason which was not altogether made clear the wedding was postponed. The published report was that Miss Veynol was ill, but Miss Veynol was not ill in the least, as a number of eye-witnesses who saw her in Paris, where she was temporarily residing, stood ready to prove. There was no end of question, naturally, and there was no end of gossip. This condition lasted for three months. And then, to society's intense surprise, it received invitations for the nuptial ceremony at St. Margaret's, Westminster, and for the wedding breakfast at Mrs. Veynol's recently leased establishment in Park Lane. Lady Bellingdown was up in town for the express purpose of selecting a wedding gift, in which Lord Waltheof had kindly volunteered to assist—"Donty-Down," her lord and master, being in Paris just then—when she chanced upon Nina Darling coming out of a shop in New Bond Street and looking absolutely radiant. "The widow without a sorrow!" she exclaimed, grasping both her hands and kissing her through her veil. "I called you that the other day, and now I see how well it suits you." "If it was the other day you were wrong," Nina returned. "But to-day you are right. I feel as free as the robins in St. James's Park. I have just sent the most importunate of Austrian archdukes about his business, and I breathe freely for the first time in six weeks." "My dear, you are incorrigible. Aren't you ever going to make some deserving man happy?" "There is no such animal," declared this outrageous flirt. "I am a righteously avenging Nemesis. I dispense to man his just deserts." "You are la belle dame sans merci." "Tell me of Nibbetts, Mrs. Darling," Waltheof cut in suggestively. "I've not seen him in months." "Nor I," replied Nina. "He's been in Dundee. I hear he's in love with a Scotch lassie. I suspect she's a marmalade-maker." "Really!" exclaimed the tame cat, taking her seriously. "Too devilish bad!" "Yes. Isn't it? Fancy how tired he must get of smelling orange peel every time he kisses her hand!" She made a grimace and turned back to Kitty Bellingdown. "You didn't come up for the season? Why?" "I've been wretched. So upset over Caryll's affair. I hadn't the heart to face any one. But now it's all quite straightened out, you know, and I'm so glad for the boy's sake." "Do tell me what it was," Nina urged. "I heard the mother fell in love with him and was jealous of the girl." "No, it wasn't that," was the non-committal reply. "Odd, but I haven't seen Caryll since we were kiddies. How has he grown? Handsome?" "Oh, very. A sweet boy. He'd make any woman happy." "Then he's a phenomenon. I wish I might have met him." Waltheof laughed. "He seems to have had trouble enough," he said. But Sir Caryll Carleigh's troubles weren't over by any means. At the last minute the wedding invitations were recalled and the presents returned. A fortnight later his aunt received from him the following letter, dated from a village in Perthshire:
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