good looks; I was like that myself, before I married your father, Gus.”
“My dear mother, granted that Halcyon’s gifts, both physical and mental,
are not”—the Earl coughed—“not of the kind best calculated to impress
and win upon a romantic, willful girl!... He is, to speak plainly——”
“A hideous little Troglodyte,” nodded the Dowager, over her interminable
Shetland-wool knitting.
“Odd, considering that his mother, when Lady Flora MacCodrum, was, with
the sole exception of myself, the handsomest young woman presented in
the Spring of 1845.”
“Mother,” said Lord Beaumaris, “delightful as your reminiscences
invariably are, Alaric is waiting to resume.”
“I had merely intended to suggest,” said Alaric, twirling his eyeglass
by its black ribbon and turning his demure drab-colored countenance and
balefully glittering left eye upon the Earl and the Dowager in turn,
“that the Duke of Halcyon, like the rhubarb of Susanna’s infancy, should
be rendered tolerable, agreeable, and even desirable to our dear girl’s
palate, by being forbidden and withheld. Ask him here in September for
the partridge shooting—as I understand you think of doing—but let him
appear, not in his own character as a young English Peer of immense
wealth and irreproachable reputation, but as one of those literary and
artistic Ineligibles, who are encouraged by Society to take every
liberty with it—short of marrying its cousins, sisters, or daughters.
Let him encourage his hair to grow—wear a velvet coat, a flamboyant
necktie, and silk stockings in combination with tweed knickerbockers.
Let him pay attention to Susanna—as marked as he chooses. And do you,
for your part”—he fixed Lord Beaumaris with his gleaming left
eye—“discourage those attentions, and lose no opportunity of impressing
upon your daughter that she is to discourage them too. Given this
tempting opportunity of manifesting her independent spirit, you will
find—or I know nothing of Susanna—that it will be pull baker, pull
devil. And I know which will pull the hardest!”
Lord Beaumaris rose to his feet in superb indignation. He struck the
attitude in which he had posed for his portrait, by Millais, which hung
at the upper end of the library, representing him in the act of
delivering his maiden speech in Parliament—an address advocating the
introduction of footwarmers into the Upper House, and opened upon
Alaric:
“Your proposal—I do not hesitate to say it—is audacious. You
deliberately expect that I—I, Gustavus Templebar Bloundle-Abbott
Bloundle, ninth Earl of Beaumaris, and head of this ancient
family—should stoop to carry out a deception—and upon my only child.
That I should take advantage of her willful youth, her undisciplined
temper, to——”
“To bring about a match that will set every mother’s mouth watering, and
secure your daughter’s son a dukedom, and a hundred and thirty thousand
a year.... That’s so, and I guess,” said Lady Beaumaris, “you’ll do it,
Gus! You’re a representative English peer, it’s true, but on my side
you’ve Yankee blood in you, and the grandson of Elijah K. Van Powler
isn’t going to back out of a little bluff that’s going to pay. No, sir!”
The Dowager ran her knitting-needles through her wool ball, and rolled
up her work briskly. “He’ll do it, Alaric,” she said with conviction.
“Mother,” exclaimed the Earl in desperation. “You were my father’s
choice, and Heaven forbid that I should fail in respect towards a lady
whom he honored with his hand. But when you suggest that to bring about
this most desirable union, I should wallow, metaphorically, in dirt——”
“It’s pay dirt, Gus,” said the Dowager. “A hundred and thirty thousand a
year, my boy!”
“Mother!” cried Lord Beaumaris. “If I brought myself to grovel to such
infamy, do you suppose for one moment Halcyon——”
“That Halcyon would tumble to the plot? There are no flies on Halcyon,”
said the Dowager, “and you bet he’ll worry through—velvet coat, orange
necktie, forehead, curls, and all!”
“Then do I understand,” said Lord Beaumaris helplessly, “that I am to
ask him to accept my hospitality in a character that is not his own, and
appear at my table in a disguise! The idea is inexpressibly loathsome,
and I cannot imagine in what character he could possibly appear.”
“As a painter—of the fashionable fresco brand—engaged if you like to
decorate your new ballroom!” put in Alaric in his level expressionless
tones.
“But he can’t paint!” said the Dowager. “That’s where we’re going to
buckle up and collapse. He can’t paint worth a cent! That takes brain,
and Halcyon isn’t overstocked with ’em, I must allow.”
“Get a man who has the brain and the ability to do the work,” said the
imperturbable Alaric.
“Deception on deception!” groaned Lord Beaumaris.
“I have the very fellow in my eye,” pursued Alaric: “Remarkable clever
A.R.A., and a kinsman of your own. Perhaps you have forgotten him,” he
continued, as Lord Beaumaris stiffened with polite inquiry, and the
Dowager elevated her handsome and still jetty eyebrows into
interrogative arches; “perhaps—it’s equally likely—you never heard of
him, but at least you remember his mother, Janetta Bloundle?”
“She married a person professionally interested in the restoration of
Perpendicular churches,” said Lord Beaumaris, “and though I cannot now
recall his name, I remember hearing of his death, and forwarding a
brief, condolatory postcard to his widow.”
“Who joined him, wherever he is, six months ago.”
“Dear me!” said Lord Beaumaris, “that is quite too regrettable. However,
it is too late in the day to send another postcard addressed to the
surviving members of the family.”
“There is only a son,” said Alaric, “and he is the rising artist to whom
I suggest that you should offer a commission. He is strong in fresco,
and has just executed a series of wall cartoons for the new Naval and
Military Idiot Asylum, which will carry his name down to the remotest
posterity.”
“Might—I—ah!—ask his name?” said Lord Beaumaris.
“Wopse,” responded Alaric.
Lord Beaumaris shuddered.
“And the Christian prefix?” He closed his eyes in readiness for the
coming shock.
“Halcyon.”
Lord Beaumaris opened his eyes, and the Dowager uttered a slight snort
of astonishment.
“A relationship existing upon the mother’s side between young Wopse and
the ducal house of Halcyon,” said Alaric, twirling his eyeglass faster:
“it is not surprising that the poor lady should have improved upon the
homespun Anglo-Saxonism of Wopse by the best means in her power. At any
rate the young fellow is well-looking and well-bred enough to carry both
names in a creditable fashion.”
“You’ve taken considerable of a time about making it,” said Lady
Beaumaris, “but I’m bound to say your suggestion ain’t worth shucks.
Given the real artistic and Bohemian article to nibble at, is a girl
like Susanna likely to swallow the imitation article? I guess not!”
“I concur entirely with my mother, Alaric,” said Lord Beaumaris. “You
propose, in the person of this young man, to introduce an element of
danger into our limited September house-party.”
“You could let this Mr. Wopse live in the garden _châlet_, and
commission the keeper’s wife to attend to him,” said the Dowager, “but
even then, how are you to make sure that——”
“That Susanna does not associate with him? There is a simple method of
divesting the young man of all attraction for a young creature of our
dear girl’s temperament,” said Alaric, “but for several reasons I shrink
from recommending its selection.”
“Pray mention it,” said Lord Beaumaris, with an uneasy laugh.
“Let’s hear it!” said Lady Beaumaris.
“You have only,” said Alaric, with great distinctness, “to call this
young fellow by his Christian name; to let him take Lady Beaumaris in to
dinner; to put him up in your best room—the Indian chintz suite—and
generally to foster the idea——”
“That he is the Duke of Halcyon!” cried the Dowager. “My stars! what a
Palais Royal farce to be played under this respectable old roof.”
“You suggest a double—a doubly-infamous and objectionable deception! Not
a word more.... I will not hear it!” Lord Beaumaris rapped decidedly on
the table, rose in agitation, and strode on creaking patent leathers to
the door. “The question is closed forever,” said he, turning upon the
threshold. “Let no one refer to it again in my——”
The door, which had occasionally creaked throughout this discussion,
smartly opened from without, and acting upon the Earl’s offended person
as a battering-ram, caused him to run forwards smartly, tripping over
the edge of the worn, but still splendid Turkey carpet. Lord Beaumaris
saved himself by clinging to the high back of an ancestral chair, upon
the seat of which he subsided, as the tall young figure of his daughter
appeared on the threshold, her Tam-o’-shanter cap, her long yellow
locks, and her red golfing jacket shining with moisture, her fresh
cheeks red with the cold kisses of the March winds.
“It began to snow like Happy Jack,” said Susanna, pulling off her rough
beaver gauntlet gloves, “so I came home. Well, have you all done
plotting? You look like conspirators—all—with the exception of Alaric.”
This was true, for while the Earl, his mother, and three other members
of the family council, whom we have not found it necessary to describe,
wore an air of somewhat guilty perturbation, the drab-colored, mild
countenance of Alaric, its diabolical left eye now blandly shuttered
with its tinted eyeglass, alone appeared guiltless and unmoved.
“We’ve been discussing the September house-party,” explained this
Catesby, as Susanna sat upon the elbow of his chair and affectionately
rumpled his sparse, light-colored locks.
“And husbands for me!” said Susanna, half throttling Alaric with her
strong young arm.
“Susanna!” cried her father. “I am surprised! I say no more than that I
am surprised!”
“And I say,” retorted Susanna, in clear, defiant, ringing accents, as
she swayed herself to and fro upon her narrow perch, “that it is
_beastly_ to be expected to marry just because money has got to be
brought into the family. Of course I _shall_ marry one day—I don’t want
to study law, or be a hospital nurse like that idiotic Laura Penglebury.
But I don’t want to be a married woman until I’m tired of being a girl.
I want to have lots of fun and do lots of things, and see lots of
people, and make my mind up for my own self. And——”
Lord Beaumaris, who had long been fermenting, frothed over. “When you
form an alliance, my child, you will form it with my sanction and my
approval, and the husband you honor with your hand will be a person
selected and approved of by me. By me! I will choose for you——”
“And suppose I choose for myself afterwards!” cried Susanna, blue fire
flashing from her defiant eyes.
“_Every woman is at heart_—ahem!” muttered Alaric, as Lord Beaumaris
strove with incipient apoplexy. Susanna continued, with a whimper in her
voice:
“The young men you and grandmother point out to me as nice and eligible,
and all that, are simply awful. They have no chins, or too much, and no
teeth, or too many, and they don’t talk at all, or they gabble all the
time, about nothing. They never read, they don’t care for Art or
Poetry—they aren’t interested in anything but Bridge and racing; and if
you told them that Beethoven composed the ‘Honeysuckle and the Bee,’ or
that Chopin wrote ‘When I Marry Amelia,’ they’d believe you. They like
married women better than girls, and people who dance at theaters better
than the married women——”
“Pet, you’d better go to Mademoiselle.... Ask her, with my love, to fix
you up some French history to translate,” Lady Beaumaris suggested.
“I should prefer a Gallic verb,” Lord Beaumaris amended. “I marry in
accordance with my parents’ wishes. Thou marriest in accordance with thy
parents’ wishes. He marries—and so on! And make a solid schoolroom tea
while you are about it, my child,” he continued, as Susanna bestowed a
parting strangle upon Alaric, kicked over a footstool, and rose to leave
the room. “For I fear we are to be deprived of your society at dinner
this evening.”
Susanna’s lovely red underlip pouted; her blue eyes clouded with tears.
She flashed a resentful look at her sire, and went out.
“She is not manageable by any ordinary methods,” said Lord Beaumaris,
running his forefinger round the inside of his collar, and shaking his
head. “In such a case Contumacy must be combated with Craft, and
Defiance met with Diplomacy. Alaric, regrettable as is the course you
have counseled us to pursue, I feel inclined to adopt it.... I shall
write to-night to make an appointment on Wednesday with the Duke of
Halcyon at the Peers’ Club, and—I shall be obliged if you will, at your
early convenience—favor me with the address of the young man Wopse.”
II
The garden _châlet_ was damp; it had been raining, and the glittering
appearance of the walls betrayed the fact. “As though a bally lot of
snails had been dancin’ a cotillon on ’em!” said the Duke of Halcyon. He
yawned dismally as he opened the casement and leaned out, looking, in
his gaudily-hued silken night-suit, like a tulip drooping from the
window-sill. Then the keeper’s wife came splashing up the muddy path
carrying a tray covered with a mackintosh, and the knowledge that his
breakfast would presently be set before him, and set before him in a
lukewarm, flabby, and tepid condition, caused Halcyon to groan. But
presently, when bathed, shaved, and attired in a neat knickerbocker suit
of tawny-orange velveteen, with green silk stockings and tan shoes,
salmon-colored silk shirt, rainbow necktie, and Panama, he issued,
cigarette in mouth, from the _châlet_, and strolled in the direction of
the newly-restored west wing, his Grace’s equanimity seemed restored. He
even hummed a tune, which might have been “The Honeysuckle and the Bee”
or “God Save the King,” as he mounted the short, wide, double flight of
marble steps that led from the terrace, and, pushing open the glazed
swing-doors, entered the ballroom, the entire space of which was filled
by a bewildering maze of ropes and scaffolding, as though a giant spider
had spun a cobweb in hemp and pine. A smell of turpentine and size was
in the air, and a paint-table occupied a platform immediately under the
skylight dome, the sides of which were already filled in with outlines,
transferred from cartoons designed by the artist engaged to ornament the
apartment. That gentleman, arrayed in a blue canvas blouse and wearing a
deerstalker cap on the back of a well-shaped head, was actively engaged
in washing in the values of a colossal nude figure-group with a bucket
of sepia and a six-foot brush. He whistled rather queerly as his bright
eye fell upon the intruder.
“You’re there, are you?” said the Duke unnecessarily. “Shall I come up?”
“If you can!” said Halcyon Wopse, with a decided smile, that revealed a
very complete set of very white teeth. “But, to save time, perhaps I had
better come down to you.” And the painter swung himself lightly down
from stage to stage until he reached the ground-level of his august
relative.
“Put what you’ve got to tell me as clearly as you can,” said the Duke.
“I never was a sap at Eton, and the classical names of these Johnnies
you’re thingambobbing on the what’s-a-name rather queer me.”
“The design outlined on the plaster in the central space on the
left-hand side of the skylight dome,” said Wopse, A.R.A., “is the
‘Judgment of Paris.’ The three figures of the rival goddesses are
completely outlined, but, as you see, Paris is only roughly blocked in.”
“I don’t see a city,” said the Duke with some annoyance. “I only see a
bit of a man. And, as for being block-tin——”
“Paris was a man—or, rather, a youth,” said Halcyon Wopse, quoting—
“‘Fair and disdainfully lidded, the Shepherd of Ida,
Holding the golden apple, desired of——’”
“Hold on! When people get spouting it knocks me galley-west,” said the
Duke. “Just tell me plainly what the beggar was to judge? Goddesses? I
savvy! And which of ’em took the biscuit—I mean the apple? Venus? Right
you are! That’s as much as I can hold at one time, thanky!”
“Sorry if I’ve over-estimated the extent of the accommodation,” said
Halcyon Wopse, smiling and lighting a cigar.
“One of the Partagas. Now, hang it,” said the Duke, “that is infernally
stupid of my man.”
“Of my man, you mean,” corrected the painter.
“I begin to think,” said the Duke, “that I have, in falling in with the
absurd plot, cooked up by that old footler, Beaumaris, and swopping
characters with a beg—with an artist fellow like you, in order to take
the fancy of a long-haired, long-legged colt of a girl——”
“I presume you allude to Lady Lymston?” put in the painter coldly.
“Of course. I say, in tumblin’ to the idea and embarkin’ in the game,
I’ve made an ass of myself,” said the Duke. “As for you, you’re in
clover.”
“Say nettles,” sighed the painter.
“Passin’ under my name——”
“Pardon,” said the painter. “The name is my own. And let us say, simply,
that in changing identities with your Grace in order to enable your
Grace to cast a glamour of artistic romance over a very ordinary——”
“Eh?” interjected the Duke.
“Situation,” continued the painter. “In doing this I have laid up for
myself a considerable store of regret.”
“Regret! Why, hang you! You’re chalkin’ up scores the whole bally time!”
shrieked the Duke, stamping his tan shoes on the canvas-protected
parquet. “Beaumaris’s guests—only a few purposely selected fogies and
duffers, who don’t count, it’s true—believe you to be me. They flatter
you and defer to you. You take the Dowager in to dinner, and I’m left to
toddle after with Susanna’s French governess. I’m out of everything—and
obliged to talk Art, bally Art—from mornin’ till night! While you—you’ve
ridden to cub-hunts on my mounts—driven my motor-cars and bust my
tires——”
“And very bad ones they are,” said the painter.
“You ride infernally well, and show off before the field at Henworthy
Three Gates, where the hardest riders in the county hang back. You ain’t
afraid of a trappy take-off—you weren’t built for a broken neck,”
screeched the incensed Peer. “You play golf too, and win the Coronation
Challenge Cup for the Lymston Club, takin’ seven holes out of the
eighteen, and holin’ the round in the score of sixty-eight.”
“It was my duty to maintain the honor of your Grace’s rank once I had
consented to assume it,” said the painter with a bow.
“And you’re a dead shot, confound you, knockin’ the birds over right and
left, and getting a par. in every sportin’ newspaper for a record bag of
four hundred. You’re a polo player too—hit a ball up and down the field
and through the goals at each end, and look as if you didn’t care
whether the ladies applauded you or not, da—hang you! And you must own
to bein’ a bit of a cricketer, and consent to play in the County Match
on Thursday, and I wouldn’t like to bet against your chances of makin’ a
big score—an all-round admirable what’s-a-name of a fellow like you!”
“Perhaps you’d better not,” the painter remarked calmly, knocking off
the ash of his cigar. “But I should be glad to know the reason for this
display of temper on your Grace’s part, all the same,” he added. “If I
rode like a tailor and shot like a duffer, hit your ponies’ legs instead
of the ball, and played cricket like a German governess at a girls’
boarding-school, I could understand——”
“Don’t you understand when I get back into my own skin again, I’ll have
to live up to the reputation you’ve made me?” yelled Halcyon. “I could
pass muster before because nobody looked for anything. But now....”
“And what of my reputation? I think I heard you telling Susanna——”
“Susanna!” echoed the Duke.
“She is Susanna to your Grace. Did I not hear you telling her that
Chiaroscuro was an Italian painter of the Cinquecento—who, you said, was
a Pope who patronized Art! You went on to say that Chiaroscuro lived on
hard eggs, and designed carnival cars, and that Benvenuto Cellini won
the Gold Cup at Ascot Race Meeting in ’91.”
“Look here, we won’t indulge in mutual recriminations. It’s beastly bad
form!” said the Duke. “And though you can ride and all that, I never
said I thought you could paint for nuts! In fact, between ourselves, I
don’t half like havin’ these spooks on the ceilin’ set down to me.” He
twisted his sandy little moustache, and fixed his eyeglass in his eye,
and started. “Here’s Lady Lymston comin’ over the lawn with a whole pack
of dogs, to ask me how I’ve got on since yesterday.”
“Take my blouse!” The painter denuded himself of the turpentiny garment,
appearing in a well-cut tweed shooting-suit.
“Get into that rag! Not me, thanks! Hand over your brush, and give me a
leg up on that scaffoldin’, like a good chap. I’d better be discovered
at work, I suppose,” said his Grace of Halcyon, as he slowly mounted to
the platform under the dome.
He had just reached it when Susanna’s fresh young voice was heard
outside calling to her dogs, and a moment later she appeared. Her fair
cheeks were flushed, her blue eyes were bright with exercise. She wore a
rough gray skirt, which, if less abbreviated than of yore, still showed
a slim, arched foot and suggested a charming ankle. Her white silk
blouse was confined by a Norwegian belt, and a loose _beret_ cap of
black velvet crowned her yellow head, its silken riches being now
disposed in a great coil, through which a silver arrow was carelessly
thrust. She started and reddened from her temples to the edge of lace at
her round throat when the tweed-clad figure of the painter caught her
eye, and gave him her hand with an indifference which was too
ostentatious.
“I didn’t know you were interested in Art,” she said.
“Oh yes!” responded the painter. “At least, if this can be called Art,”
he added modestly.
“’Ssh!” warned Susanna. “He is up there, and will hear you.”
“He?” echoed the painter, reveling in the blush.
“Did I hear my name?” called the Duke sweetly, from above. “Hulloa, Lady
Lymston, that you? Come to record progress? As you see, we’re going
strong.” His six-foot brush menaced a Juno’s draperies, a gallipot of
size upset, trickled its contents through the planking; his velveteen
coat-tails placed Paris in peril, as he turned his back to the cartoon
and resting his hands upon his knees, assumed a stooping attitude, and
peered waggishly down over the edge of the scaffolding at Susanna.
“Take care—you!” shouted the painter, forgetting his aristocratic
_rôle_.
“My foot is on my native thingumbob, ain’t it, Lady Lymston?” said the
owner of the small, cockneyfied, grinning countenance above. “How do you
like the wax-works? This is the”—he flourished the six-foot brush
perilously—“this is the Judgment of Berlin.”
“Paris!” prompted the false Duke hoarsely.
“He is trying to joke,” said Susanna, in an undertone. “Don’t discourage
him.”
“I should think that would be difficult,” remarked Wopse grimly.
“Papa tries to be crushing, and Cousin Alaric’s rudeness is simply
appalling,” said Susanna, in a confidential undertone. “And grandmother
walks over him as though he were a beetle—no! she would run away from a
thing like that—I should say an earwig or a snail, so one feels bound to
be a _little_ nice.”
“If only out of opposition!” said the painter, with a keen look of
intelligence, at which Susanna blushed again.
“He is idiotic when he tries to be funny about Art—and mixes up names
and dates—and tells you that Titian sang in opera and Rubens is a
popular composer. But he can paint, and Alaric Orme thinks he will be
President of the Academy one day. These cartoons are splendidly bold and
effective.”
“You think so! Wait till I’ve colored these girls up a bit,” said the
Duke, catching the end of the sentence. “Then you’ll——” He dipped his
brush and advanced it, dripping with cobalt, towards the group of
goddesses.
“Don’t touch them!” shouted Wopse, in agony.
“Why not?” asked Susanna.
“I don’t know. Excuse me, Lady Lymston, I believe the smell of this size
isn’t wholesome,” Wopse stammered. “I’ll get out into the air.” He
bolted.