FOR the next two hours, Thorpe's thoughts were almost wholly occupied
with various phases of the large subject of domestic service. He seemed
suddenly to have been transported to some region populated exclusively
by clean-shaven men in brown livery. One of these was holding a spirited
horse outside the station, and when Lord Plowden had taken the reins,
and Thorpe had gathered the rugs about his knees and feet, this menial
silently associated himself with the young man who had accompanied them
from town, on the back seat of the trap. With these people so close
behind him, Thorpe felt that any intimate conversation was out of the
question. Indeed, talk of any sort was not invited; the big horse burst
forth with high, sprawling strides upon a career through the twilight,
once the main road was reached, which it taxed all Plowden's energies
to regulate. He kept up a continual murmuring monologue to the
animal--“So--so--quiet, my pet,--so--so--easy, my beauty---so--so”--and
his wrists and gloved hands were visibly under a tremendous tension of
strain, as they held their own against the rigid arched neck and mouth
of steel. Thorpe kept a grip on the side of the trap, and had only a
modified pleasure in the drive. The road along which they sped seemed,
in the gathering dusk, uncomfortably narrow, and he speculated a good
deal as to how frightened the two mutes behind him must be. But silence
was such a law of their life that, though he strained his ears, he could
not so much as hear them sigh or gasp.
It seemed but a very few minutes before they turned off, with but the
most fleeting diminution of pace, upon a private road, which speedily
developed into an avenue of trees, quite dark and apparently narrower
than ever. Down this they raced precipitately, and then, coming out all
at once upon an open space, swung smartly round the crescent of a gravel
road, and halted before what seemed to be the door of a greenhouse.
Thorpe, as he stood up in the trap, got an uncertain, general idea of a
low, pale-coloured mansion in the background, with lights showing behind
curtains in several widely separated windows; what he had taken to be a
conservatory revealed itself now to be a glass gallery, built along the
front of the central portion of this house.
A profusion of hospitable lights--tall wax-candles in brackets among the
vines against the trellised wall--gave to this outlying entrance what
the stranger felt to be a delightful effect. Its smooth tiled floor,
comfortably bestrewn with rugs, was on a level with the path outside.
There were low easy-chairs here, and a little wicker table bearing books
and a lady's work-basket. Further on, giant chrysanthemum blooms were
massed beneath the clusters of pale plumbago-flowers on the trellis.
Directly in front, across the dozen feet of this glazed vestibule, the
broad doorway of the house proper stood open--with warm lights glowing
richly upon dark woods in the luxurious obscurity within.
What Thorpe noted most of all, however, was the servants who seemed to
swarm everywhere. The two who had alighted from the trap had contrived
somehow mysteriously to multiply themselves in the darkness. All at once
there were a number of young men--at the horse's head, at the back
and sides of the trap, at the first doorway, and the second, and
beyond--each presenting such a smooth-faced, pallid, brown-clad replica
of all the others that Thorpe knew he should never be able to tell them
apart.
Lord Plowden paused for a moment under the candle-light to look at
his watch. “We did it in a bit over eight minutes,” he remarked, with
obvious satisfaction. “With four people and heavy roads that's not so
bad--not so bad. But come inside.”
They moved forward through the wide doorway into an apartment the like
of which Thorpe had not seen before. It was a large, square room, with
a big staircase at the end, which separated and went off to right and
left, half-way up its visible course. Its floor was of inlaid woods, old
and uneven from long use, and carpeted here and there by the skins of
tigers and leopards. There were many other suggestions of the chase
about the room: riding boots, whips, spurs, and some stands of archaic
weapons caught the eye at various points; the heads of foxes and deer
peeped out on the blackened panels of the walls, from among clusters of
hooks crowded with coats, hats, and mackintoshes. At the right, where a
fire glowed and blazed under a huge open chimney-place, there were low
chairs and divans drawn up to mark off a space for orderly domestic
occupation. The irregularity of every thing outside--the great table in
the centre of the hall strewn with an incongruous litter of caps, books,
flasks, newspapers, gloves, tobacco-pouches; the shoes, slippers,
and leggings scattered under the benches at the sides--all this
self-renewing disorder of a careless household struck Thorpe with a
profound surprise. It was like nothing so much as a Mexican ranch--and
to find it in the ancestral home of an English nobleman, filled to
overflowing with servants, amazed him.
The glances that he cast about him, however, were impassive enough. His
mind was charged with the ceaseless responsibility of being astonished
at nothing. A man took his hat, and helped him off with his coat.
Another moved toward the staircase with his two bags.
“If you will follow Pangbourn,” said his host, indicating this second
domestic, “he will look after you. You would like to go up and change
now, wouldn't you? There's a fire in your room.”
Thus dismissed, he went up the stairs in the wake of his portmanteaus,
taking the turning to the left, and then proceeding by a long, low
passage, round more than one corner, to what he conceived to be a wing
of the house. The servant ushered him into a room--and, in despite of
himself, he sighed with pleasure at the sight of it. The prettiest and
most charming of rooms it seemed to him to be--spacious and quaintly
rambling in shape, with a delicately-figured chintz repeating the dainty
effects of the walls upon the curtains and carpet and bed-hangings and
chair-covers, and with a bright fire in the grate throwing its warm,
cozy glow over everything. He looked at the pictures on the walls, at
the photographs and little ornaments on the writing desk, and the high
posts and silken coverlet of the big bed, and, secure in the averted
face of the servant, smiled richly to himself.
This servant, kneeling, had unstrapped and opened the new bags. Thorpe
looked to see him quit the room, this task accomplished, and was
conscious of something like dismay at the discovery that he intended to
unpack them as well. Pangbourn began gravely to unwrap one paper parcel
after another and to assort their contents in little heaps on the sofa
beside him. He did it deftly, imperturbably, as if all the gentlemen he
had ever seen carried their belongings in packages done up by tradesmen.
Thorpe's impulse to bid him desist framed itself in words on the tip of
his tongue--but he did not utter these words. After circling idly, hands
in pockets, about the man and the bags for a little time, he invented
something which it seemed better for him to say.
“I don't know what you'll be able to make of those things,” he remarked,
casually. “My man has been buying them today--and I don't know what he
mayn't have forgotten. My whole outfit of that sort of thing went astray
or was stolen at some station or other--the first part of the week--I
think it must have been Leeds.”
“Yes, sir,” said Pangbourn, without emotion. “They're very careless,
sir.”
He went on impassively, shaking out the black garments and spreading
them on the bed, laying out a shirt and tie beside them, and arranging
the razors, strop, and brushes on the dressing-table. He seemed to
foresee everything--for there was not an instant's hesitation in the
clock-like assiduity of his movements, as he bestowed handkerchiefs, in
one drawer, socks in another, hung pyjamas before the fire, and set
the patent-leather pumps against the fender. Even the old Mexican
shooting-suit seemed in no way to disconcert him. He drew forth its
constituent elements as with a practised hand; when he had hung them up,
sombrero and all, in the wardrobe against the wall, they had the
trick of making that venerable oaken receptacle look as if it had been
fashioned expressly for them.
Thorpe's earlier uneasiness quite lost itself in his admiration for
Pangbourn's resourceful dexterity. The delighted thought that now
he would be needing a man like this for himself crossed his mind.
Conceivably he might even get this identical Pangbourn--treasure though
he were. Money could command everything on this broad globe--and why not
Pangbourn? He tentatively felt of the coins in his pocket, as it became
apparent that the man's task was nearing completion--and then frowned
at himself for forgetting that these things were always reserved for the
end of a visit.
“Will you dress now, sir?” asked Pangbourn. His soft, distinct
enunciation conveyed the suggestion of centuries of training.
“Eh?” said Thorpe, finding himself for the moment behind the other's
thought.
“Shall you require me any further, sir?” the man reframed the question,
deferentially.
“Oh! Oh--no,” replied Thorpe. “No--I'll get along all right.”
Left to himself, he began hurriedly the task of shaving and dressing.
The candles on either side of the thick, bevelled swinging mirror
presented a somewhat embarrassing contrast to the electric light he
was used to--but upon second thought he preferred this restrained
aristocratic glimmer.
He had completed his toilet, and was standing at the bay-window, with
his shoulder holding back the edge of the curtain, looking out upon the
darkened lawn and wondering whether he ought to go downstairs or wait
for someone to summon him, when he heard a knock at his door. Before
he could answer, the door opened, and he made out in the candle-and
firelight that it was Lord Plowden who had come in. He stepped forward
to meet his host who, clad now in evening-clothes, was smoking a
cigarette.
“Have they looked after you all right?” said Plowden, nonchalantly.
“Have a cigarette before we go down? Light it by the candle. They never
will keep matches in a bedroom.”
He seated himself in an easy-chair before the fire, as he spoke, and
stretched out his shining slippers toward the grate. “I thought I'd tell
you before we went down”--he went on, as Thorpe, with an elbow on the
mantel, looked down at his handsome head--“my sister has a couple of
ladies visiting her. One of them I think you know. Do you remember on
shipboard a Miss Madden--an American, you know--very tall and fine, with
bright red hair--rather remarkable hair it was?”
“I remember the lady,” said Thorpe, upon reflection, “but we didn't
meet.” He could not wholly divest his tone of the hint that in those
days it by no means followed that because he saw ladies it was open to
him to know them.
Lord Plowden smiled a little. “Oh, you'll like her. She's great fun--if
she's in the mood. My mother and sister--I had them call on her in
London last spring--and they took a great fancy to her. She's got no
end of money, you know--at least a million and a half--dollars,
unfortunately. Her parents were Irish--her father made his pile in the
waggon business, I believe--but she's as American as if they'd crossed
over in--what was it, the 'Sunflower'?--no, the 'Mayflower.' Marvelous
country for assimilation, that America is! You remember what I told
you--it's put such a mark on you that I should never have dreamt you
were English.”
Thorpe observed his companion, through a blue haze of smoke, in silence.
This insistence upon the un-English nature of the effect he produced was
not altogether grateful to his ears.
“The other one,” continued Plowden, “is Lady Cressage. You'll be
interested in her--because a few years ago she was supposed to be the
most beautiful woman in London. She married a shocking bounder--he
would have been Duke of Glastonbury, though, if he had lived--but he was
drowned, and she was left poor as a church mouse. Oh! by the way!” he
started up, with a gleam of aroused interest on his face--“it didn't in
the least occur to me. Why, she's a daughter of our General Kervick. How
did he get on the Board, by the way? Where did you pick him up?”
Thorpe bent his brows in puzzled lines. “Why, you introduced me to him
yourself, didn't you?” he asked, slowly.
Plowden seemed unaffectedly surprised at the suggestion, as he turned it
over in his mind. “By George! I think you're right,” he said. “I'd quite
forgotten it. Of course I did. Let me see--oh yes, I reconstruct it
readily enough now. Poor old chappie--he needs all he can get. He was
bothering her about money--that was it, I remember now--but what an
idiot I was to forget it. But what I was saying--there's no one else but
my mother and sister, and my brother Balder. He's a youngster--twenty or
thereabouts--and he purports to be reading for his exams for the Army.
If they opened his head, though, I doubt if they'd find anything but
cricket and football, unless it might be a bit of golf. Well--that's the
party. I thought you might like to have a notion of them in advance. If
you've finished your cigarette”--he threw his own into the grate, and
rose as he spoke--“we may as well be moving along. By the way,” he
concluded, as they walked toward the door, “I've an idea that we won't
say anything, just at the moment, about our great coup. I should like to
keep it as a little surprise--for my mother and sister, you know.”
Some two hours later, Thorpe found the leisure and the restored
equanimity needful for a dispassionate survey of his surroundings. He
had become temporarily detached from the group over by the fireplace in
the big drawing-room and was for the first time that evening very much
at his ease. It was all much simpler, upon experiment, than he had
feared. He stood now in a corner of the ornate apartment, whither he had
wandered in examining the pictures on the walls, and contemplated with
serenity the five people whom he had left behind him. He was conscious
of the conviction that when he rejoined them, it would be on a
new footing of assured equality. He knew now the exact measure of
everything.
The Hon. Balder Plowden--a tall, heavily-built youth, with enormous
shoulders and thick, hard hands, and pale straw-coloured hair and brows
and eyelashes--had amiably sauntered beside him, and was elucidating for
his benefit now, in slow, halting undertones, some unfathomable mystery
connected with the varying attitude of two distinct breeds of terriers
toward rats. Across the room, just within reach of the flickering ruddy
firelight from the hearth, the American guest, Miss Madden, was seated
at the piano, playing some low and rather doleful music. Thorpe bent
his head, and assumed an air of attention, but in truth he listened
to neither the Honourable Balder nor the piano. His thoughts were
concentrated jealously upon his own position in this novel setting. He
said to himself that it was all right. Old Lady Plowden had seemed
to like him from the start. The genial, if somewhat abstracted,
motherliness of her welcome had been, indeed, his sheet anchor
throughout the evening. She had not once failed to nod her head and
smile and twinkle her little kind eyes through their spectacles at him,
whenever by word or look he had addressed her. Nor did his original
half-suspicion, that this was her manner to people in general, justify
itself upon observation. She was civil, even excessively civil, to the
other two guests, but these ladies did not get the same eager and intent
smile that he could command. He reasoned it out that Plowden must have
said something pleasant to his mother about him--perhaps even to
the point of explaining that he was to be the architect of their
fortunes--but he did not like to ascribe all her hospitable warmth
to that. It was dear to him to believe that she liked him on his own
merits--and he did believe it, as his softened glance rested upon her
where she sat almost facing him in her padded, wicker chair--small,
white-haired, rosy-cheeked, her intelligent face radiating a kind of
alert placidity which somehow made him feel at home.
He had not been as much at home with the others. The Honourable Balder,
of course, didn't count; nobody paid attention to him, and least of all
a busy Rubber King. He gave not much more heed to the American--the tall
young woman with the red hair and the million and a half of dollars. She
was plainly a visitor like himself, not at all identified with the inner
life of the household. He fancied, moreover, that she in no way desired
to be thus identified. She seemed to carry herself with a deliberate
aloofness underlying her surface amiability. Then he had spoken his few
words with her, once or twice, he had got this effect of stony reserve
close beneath her smile and smooth words. True, this might mean only
that she felt herself out of her element, just as he did--but to him,
really it did not matter what she felt. A year ago--why, yes, even a
fortnight ago--the golden rumour of millions would have shone round
her auburn hair in his eyes like a halo. But all that was changed.
Calculated in a solidified currency, her reported fortune shrank to a
mere three hundred thousand pounds. It was a respectable sum for a woman
to have, no doubt, but it did nothing to quicken the cool indifference
with which he considered her.
The two other young women were different. They were seated together on a
sofa, so placed as regarded his point of view, that he saw only in
part the shadowed profiles of the faces they turned toward the piano.
Although it was not visible to him, the posture of their shoulders told
him that they were listening to the music each holding the other's
hand. This tacit embrace was typical in his mind of the way they hung
together, these two young women. It had been forced upon his perceptions
all the evening, that this fair-haired, beautiful, rather stately Lady
Cressage, and the small, swarthy, round-shouldered daughter of the
house, peering through her pince-nez from under unduly thick black
brows, formed a party of their own. Their politeness toward him had been
as identical in all its little shades of distance and reservation as if
they had been governed from a single brain-centre. It would be unfair
to them to assume from their manner that they disliked him, or were even
unfavourably impressed by him. The finesse of that manner was far too
delicate a thing to call into use such rough characterizations. It was
rather their action as a unit which piqued his interest. He thought he
could see that they united upon a common demeanour toward the American
girl, although of course they knew her much better than they knew
him. It was not even clear to him that there were not traces of this
combination in their tone toward Plowden and the Honourable Balder. The
bond between them had twisted in it strands of social exclusiveness, and
strands of sex sympathy.
He did not analyze all this with much closeness in his thoughts, but the
impressions of it were distinct enough to him. He rather enjoyed
these impressions than otherwise. Women had not often interested him
consecutively to any large degree, either in detail or as a whole. He
had formulated, among other loose general notions of them, however, the
idea that their failure to stand by one another was one of their gravest
weaknesses. This proposition rose suddenly now in his mind, and claimed
his attention. It became apparent to him, all at once, that his opinions
about women would be henceforth invested with a new importance. He had
scarcely before in his life worn evening dress in a domestic circle
which included ladies--certainly never in the presence of such
certificated and hall-marked ladies as these. His future, however,
was to be filled with experiences of this nature. Already, after this
briefest of ventures into the new life, he found fresh conceptions of
the great subject springing up in his thoughts. In this matter of women
sticking together, for example--here before his eyes was one of the
prettiest instances of it imaginable. As he looked again at the two
figures on the sofa, so markedly unlike in outward aspect, yet knit
to each other in such a sisterly bond, he found the spectacle really
touching.
Lady Cressage had inclined her classic profile even more toward the
piano. Thorpe was not stirred at all by the music, but the spirit of
it as it was reflected upon this beautiful facial outline--sensitive,
high-spirited, somewhat sad withal--appealed to something in him. He
moved forward cautiously, noiselessly, a dozen restricted paces,
and halted again at the corner of a table. It was a relief that the
Honourable Balder, though he followed along, respected now his obvious
wish for silence. But neither Balder nor anyone else could guess that
the music said less than nothing to his ears--that it was the face that
had beckoned him to advance.
Covertly, with momentary assurances that no one observed him, he studied
this face and mused upon it. The white candle-light on the shining wall
beyond threw everything into a soft, uniform shadow, this side of the
thread of dark tracery which outlined forehead and nose and lips and
chin. It seemed to him that the eyes were closed, as in reverie; he
could not be sure.
So she would have been a Duchess if her husband had lived! He said
to himself that he had never seen before, or imagined, a face which
belonged so indubitably beneath a tiara of strawberry leaves in
diamonds. The pride and grace and composure, yes, and melancholy, of
the great lady--they were all there in their supreme expression. And
yet--why, she was no great lady at all. She was the daughter of his
old General Kervick--the necessitous and haughtily-humble old military
gentleman, with the grey moustache and the premature fur coat, who did
what he was told on the Board without a question, for a pitiful three
hundred a year. Yes--she was his daughter, and she also was poor.
Plowden had said so.
Why had Plowden, by the way, been so keen about relieving her from her
father's importunities? He must have had it very much at heart, to
have invented the roundabout plan of getting the old gentleman a
directorship. But no--there was nothing in that. Why, Plowden had even
forgotten that it was he who suggested Kervick's name. It would have
been his sister, of course, who was evidently such chums with Lady
Cressage, who gave him the hint to help the General to something if he
could. And when you came to think of it, these aristocrats and
military men and so on, had no other notion of making money save by
directorships. Clearly, that was the way of it. Plowden had remembered
Kervick's name, when the chance arose to give the old boy a leg up, and
then had clean forgotten the circumstance. The episode rather increased
his liking for Plowden.
He glanced briefly, under the impulse of his thought, to where the peer
sat, or rather sprawled, in a big low chair before the fire. He was so
nearly recumbent in it, indeed, that there was nothing to be seen of
him but an elbow, and two very trim legs extended to the brass fender.
Thorpe's gaze reverted automatically to the face of General Kervick's
daughter. He wondered if she knew about the Company, and about him,
and about his ability to solidify to any extent her father's financial
position. Even more, upon reflection, he wondered whether she was very
fond of her father; would she be extremely grateful to one who should
render him securely comfortable for life? Miss Madden rose from the
piano before Thorpe noted that the music had ceased. There came from
the others a soft but fervent chorus of exclamations, the sincerity and
enthusiasm of which made him a little ashamed. He had evidently been
deaf to something that deeply moved the rest. Even Balder made remarks
which seemed to be regarded as apposite.
“What IS it?” asked Lady Cressage, with obvious feeling. “I don't know
when anything has touched me so much.”
“Old Danish songs that I picked up on the quai in Paris for a franc or
two,” replied Miss Madden. “I arranged and harmonized them--and, oddly
enough, the result is rather Keltic, don't you think?”
“We are all of us Kelts in our welcome to music--and musicians--like
this,” affirmed Lord Plowden, who had scrambled to his feet.
With sudden resolution, Thorpe moved forward and joined the
conversation.