isn’t—not a penny. When my Aunt Julia married Sir Thomas the whole
frightful show was pretty well in pawn. So you see how it is.”
“Ever think of work?” asked Jimmy.
“Work?” said Lord Dreever reflectively. “Well, you know, I shouldn’t
mind work, only I’m dashed if I can see what I could do. I shouldn’t
know how. Nowadays you want a fearful specialised education, and so on.
Tell you what, though, I shouldn’t mind the Diplomatic Service. One of
these days I shall have a dash at asking my uncle to put up the money. I
believe I shouldn’t be half bad at that. I’m rather a quick sort of chap
at times you know. Lots of fellows have said so.”
He cleared his throat modestly, and proceeded.
“It isn’t only my Uncle Thomas,” he said; “there’s Aunt Julia too. She’s
about as much the limit as he is. I remember when I was a kid she was
always sitting on me. She does still. Wait till you see her. Sort of
woman who makes you feel that your hands are the colour of tomatoes and
the size of legs of mutton, if you know what I mean. And talks as if she
were biting at you. Frightful!”
Having unburdened himself of which criticism, he yawned, leaned back,
and was presently asleep.
It was about an hour later that the train, which had been taking itself
less seriously for some time, stopping at all stations of quite minor
importance, and generally showing a tendency to dawdle, halted again. A
board with the legend “Dreever” in large letters showed that they had
reached their destination.
The station-master informed Lord Dreever that her ladyship had come to
meet the train in the motor car, and was now waiting in the road
outside.
Lord Dreever’s jaw fell.
“Oh, Lord!” he said. “She’s probably motored in to get the afternoon
letters. That means she’s come in the runabout, and there’s only room
for two of us in that. I forgot to write that you were coming, Pitt. I
only wired about Hargate. Dash it, I shall have to walk.”
His fears proved correct. The car at the station-door was small. It was
obviously designed to seat four only.
Lord Dreever introduced Hargate and Jimmy to the statuesque lady in the
tonneau, and then there was an awkward silence.
At this point Spike came up, chuckling amiably, with a magazine in his
hand.
“Gee!” said Spike. “Say, boss, de mug what wrote dis piece must have bin
livin’ out in de woods. Say, dere’s a gazebo who wants to swipe de
heroine’s jools what’s locked in a drawer. So dis mug—what do you t’ink
he does?” Spike laughed shortly, in professional scorn. “Why——”
“Is this gentleman a friend of yours, Spennie?” inquired Lady Julia
politely, eyeing the red-haired speaker coldly.
“It’s——”
He looked appealingly at Jimmy.
“It’s my man,” said Jimmy. “Spike,” he added, in an undertone, “to the
woods. Chase yourself. Fade away.”
“Sure,” said the abashed Spike. “Dat’s right. It ain’t up to me to come
buttin’ in. Sorry, boss. Sorry, gents. Sorry, loidy. Me for the tall
grass.”
“There’s a luggage cart of sorts,” said Lord Dreever, pointing.
“Sure,” said Spike, affably. He trotted away.
“Jump in, Pitt,” said Lord Dreever. “I’m going to walk.”
“No, I’ll walk,” said Jimmy. “I’d rather. I want a bit of exercise.
Which way do I go?”
“Frightfully good of you, old chap,” said Lord Dreever. “Sure you don’t
mind? I do bar walking. Right-O! You keep straight on.”
Jimmy watched them out of sight and started to follow at a leisurely
pace. It certainly was an ideal afternoon for a country walk. The sun
was just hesitating whether to treat the time as afternoon or evening.
Eventually it decided that it was evening and moderated its beams. After
London the country was deliciously fresh and cool. Jimmy felt an
unwonted content. It seemed to him just then that the only thing worth
doing in the world was to settle down somewhere with three acres and a
cow and become pastoral.
There was a marked lack of traffic on the road. Once he met a cart and
once a flock of sheep with a friendly dog. Sometimes a rabbit would dash
out into the road, stop to listen, and dart into the opposite hedge, all
hind-legs and white scut. But except for these he was alone in the
world.
And gradually there began to be borne in upon him the conviction that he
had lost his way.
It is difficult to judge distance when one is walking but it certainly
seemed to Jimmy that he must have covered five miles by this time. He
must have mistaken the way. He had certainly come straight; he could not
have come straighter. On the other hand, it would be quite in keeping
with the cheap substitute which served the Earl of Dreever in place of a
mind that he should have forgotten to mention some important turning.
Jimmy sat down by the roadside.
As he sat there came to him from down the road the sound of a horse’s
feet trotting. He got up. Here was somebody at last who would direct
him.
“Halloa!” he said. “Accident? And, by Jove, a side-saddle!”
Jimmy stopped the horse, and led it back the way it had come. As he
turned the bend in the road he saw a girl in a riding-habit running
towards him. She stopped running when she caught sight of him, and
slowed down to walk.
“Thank you ever so much,” she said, taking the reins from him. “Dandy,
you naughty old thing!”
Jimmy looked at her flushed, smiling face, and stood staring. It was
Molly McEachern.
★ 12 ★
_Making a Start_
Self-possession was one of Jimmy’s leading characteristics, but for the
moment he found himself speechless. This girl had been occupying his
thoughts for so long that—in his mind—he had grown very intimate with
her. It was something of a shock to come suddenly out of his dreams and
face the fact that she was in reality practically a stranger. He felt as
one might with a friend whose memory has been wiped out. It went against
the grain to have to begin again from the beginning after all the time
they had been together.
A curious constraint fell upon him.
“Why, how do you do, Mr. Pitt?” she said, holding out her hand.
Jimmy began to feel better. It was something that she remembered his
name.
“It’s like meeting somebody out of a dream,” said Molly. “I have
sometimes wondered if you were real. Everything that happened that night
was so like a dream.”
Jimmy found his tongue.
“You haven’t altered,” he said; “you look just the same.”
“Well,” she laughed, “after all, it’s not so long ago, is it?”
He was conscious of a dull hurt. To him it had seemed years. But he was
nothing to her—just an acquaintance, one of a hundred. But what more, he
asked himself, could he have expected? And with the thought came
consolation. The painful sense of having lost ground left him. He saw he
had been allowing things to get out of proportion. He had not lost
ground. He had gained it. He had met her again and she remembered him.
What more had he any right to ask?
“I’ve crammed a good deal into the time,” he explained. “I’ve been
travelling about a bit since we met.”
“Do you live in Shropshire?” asked Molly.
“No. I’m on a visit—at least, I’m supposed to be; but I’ve lost the way
to the place, and I am beginning to doubt if I shall ever get there. I
was told to go straight on. I’ve gone straight on, and here I am, lost
in the snow. Do you happen to know whereabouts Dreever Castle is?”
She laughed.
“Why,” she said, “I’m staying at Dreever Castle myself.”
“What?”
“So the first person you meet turns out to be an experienced guide.
You’re lucky, Mr. Pitt.”
“You’re right,” said Jimmy slowly; “I am.”
“Did you come down with Lord Dreever? He passed me in the car just as I
was starting out. He was with another man and Lady Julia Blunt. Surely
he didn’t make you walk?”
“I offered to walk. Somebody had to. Apparently he had forgotten to let
them know he was bringing me.”
“And then he misdirected you! He’s very casual, I’m afraid.”
“Inclined that way, perhaps.”
“Have you known Lord Dreever long?”
“Since a quarter-past twelve last night.”
“Last night!”
“We met at the Savoy, and later on the Embankment. We looked at the
river together and told each other the painful stories of our lives, and
this morning he called and invited me down here.”
Molly looked at him with frank amusement.
“You must be a very restless sort of person,” she said. “You seem to do
a great deal of moving about.”
“I do,” said Jimmy. “I can’t keep still. I’ve got the go-fever, like the
man in Kipling’s book.”
“But he was in love.”
“Yes,” said Jimmy; “he was. That’s the bacillus, you know.”
She shot a quick glance at him. He became suddenly interesting to her.
She was at the age of dreams and speculations. From being merely an
ordinary young man with rather more ease of manner than the majority of
the young men she had met, he developed in an instant into something
worthy of closer attention. He took on a certain mystery and romance.
She wondered what sort of a girl it was that he loved. Examining him in
the light of this new discovery, she found him attractive. Something
seemed to have happened to put her in sympathy with him. She noticed for
the first time a latent forcefulness behind the pleasantness of his
manner. His self-possession was the self-possession of the man who had
been tried and has found himself.
At the bottom of her consciousness, too, there was a faint stirring of
some emotion, which she could not analyse, not unlike pain. It was
vaguely reminiscent of the agony of loneliness which she had experienced
as a small child on the rare occasions when her father had been busy and
distrait and had shown her by his manner that she was outside his
thoughts. This was but a pale suggestion of that misery, but
nevertheless there was a resemblance. It was a rather desolate, shut-out
sensation, half resentful.
It was gone in a moment. But it had been there. It had passed over her
heart as the shadow of a cloud moves across a meadow in the summer-time.
For some moments she stood without speaking. Jimmy did not break the
silence. He was looking at her with an appeal in his eyes. Why could she
not understand? She must understand.
But the eyes that met his were those of a child.
As they stood there the horse, which had been cropping in a perfunctory
manner at the short grass by the roadside, raised his head and neighed
impatiently. There was something so human about the performance that
Jimmy and the girl laughed simultaneously. The utter materialism of the
neigh broke the spell. It was a noisy demand for food.
“Poor Dandy!” said Molly. “He knows he’s near home, and he knows it’s
his dinner-time.”
“Are we near the castle, then?”
“It’s a long way round by the road, but we can cut across the fields.
Aren’t these English fields and hedges just perfect? I love them! Of
course I loved America, but——”
“Have you left New York long?” asked Jimmy.
“We came over here about a month after you were at our house.”
“You didn’t spend much time there, then?”
“Father had just made a good deal of money in Wall Street. He must have
been making it when I was on the _Mauretania_. He wanted to leave New
York, so we didn’t wait. We were in London all the winter. Then we went
over to Paris. It was there we met Sir Thomas Blunt and Lady Julia. Have
you met them? They are Lord Dreever’s uncle and aunt.”
“I’ve met Lady Julia.”
“Do you like her?”
Jimmy hesitated.
“Well, you see——”
“I know. She’s your hostess, but you haven’t started your visit yet, so
you’ve just got time to say what you really think of her before you have
to pretend she’s perfect.”
“Well——”
“I detest her,” said Molly crisply. “I think she’s hard and hateful.”
“Well, I can’t say she struck me as a sort of female Cheeryble Brother.
Lord Dreever introduced me to her at the station. She seemed to bear it
pluckily, but with some difficulty.”
“She’s hateful,” repeated Molly. “So is he—Sir Thomas, I mean. He’s one
of those fussy, bullying little men. They both bully poor Lord Dreever
till I wonder he doesn’t rebel. They treat him like a schoolboy. It
makes me wild. It’s such a shame. He’s so nice and good-natured. I am so
sorry for him.”
Jimmy listened to this outburst with mixed feelings. It was sweet of her
to be so sympathetic; but was it merely sympathy? There had been a ring
in her voice and a flush on her cheek which had suggested to Jimmy’s
sensitive mind a personal interest in the down-trodden peer. Reason told
him that it was foolish to be jealous of Lord Dreever. A good fellow, of
course, but not to be taken seriously. The primitive man in him, on the
other hand, made him hate all Molly’s male friends with an unreasoning
hatred. Not that he hated Lord Dreever. He liked him. But he doubted if
he could go on liking him for long if Molly were to continue in this
sympathetic strain.
His affection for the absent one was not put to the test. Molly’s next
remark had to do with Sir Thomas.
“The worst of it is,” she said, “father and Sir Thomas are such friends.
In Paris they were always together. Father did him a very good turn.”
“How was that?”
“It was one afternoon just after we arrived. A man got into Lady Julia’s
room while we were all out except father. Father saw him go into the
room, and suspecting something was wrong, went in after him. The man was
trying to steal Lady Julia’s jewels. He had opened the box where they
were kept, and was actually holding her rope of diamonds in his hand
when father found him. It’s the most magnificent thing I ever saw. Sir
Thomas told father he gave a hundred thousand dollars for it.”
“But surely,” said Jimmy, “hadn’t the management of the hotel a safe for
valuables?”
“Of course they had; but you don’t know Sir Thomas. He wasn’t going to
trust any hotel safe. He’s the sort of man who insists on doing
everything in his own way, and who always imagines he can do things
better for himself than anyone else can do them for him. He had had this
special box made, and would never keep the diamonds anywhere else.
Naturally the thief opened it in a minute. A clever thief would have no
difficulty with a thing like that.”
“What happened?”
“Oh, the man saw father and dropped the jewels, and ran off down the
corridor. Father chased him a little way, but, of course, it was no
good; so he went back and shouted and rang every bell he could see and
gave the alarm, but the man was never found. Still, he left the
diamonds. That was the great thing, after all. You must look at them
to-night at dinner. They really are wonderful. Are you a judge of
precious stones at all?”
“I am, rather,” said Jimmy; “in fact, a jeweller I once knew told me I
had a natural gift in that direction. And so, of course, Sir Thomas was
pretty grateful to your father?”
“He simply gushed. He couldn’t do enough for him. You see, if the
diamonds had been stolen I’m sure Lady Julia would have made Sir Thomas
buy her another rope just as good. He’s terrified of her, I’m certain.
He tries not to show it; but he is. And besides having to pay another
hundred thousand dollars, he would never have heard the last of it. It
would have ruined his reputation for being infallible and doing
everything better than anybody else.”
“But didn’t the mere fact that the thief got the jewels and was only
stopped by a fluke from getting away with them do that?”
Molly bubbled with laughter.
“She never knew. Sir Thomas got back to the hotel an hour before she
did. I’ve never seen such a busy hour. He had the manager up and
harangued him, and swore him to secrecy—which the poor manager was only
too glad to agree to, because it wouldn’t have done the hotel any good
to have it known. And the manager harangued the servants, and the
servants harangued each other, and everybody talked at the same time,
and father and I promised not to tell a soul; so Lady Julia doesn’t know
a word about it to this day. And I don’t see why she ever should; though
one of these days I’ve a good mind to tell Lord Dreever! Think what a
hold he would have over them! They’d never be able to bully him again.”
“I shouldn’t,” said Jimmy, trying to keep a touch of coldness out of his
voice. This championship of Lord Dreever, however sweet and admirable,
was a little distressing.
She looked up quickly.
“You don’t think I really meant to, do you?”
“No, no,” said Jimmy hastily. “Of course not.”
“Well, I should think so!” said Molly indignantly. “After I promised not
to tell a soul about it.”
Jimmy chuckled.
“It’s nothing,” he said, in answer to her look of inquiry.
“You laughed at something.”
“Well,” said Jimmy apologetically, “it’s only—it’s nothing really—only
what I meant is, you have just told one soul a good deal about it,
haven’t you?”
Molly turned pink. Then she smiled.
“I don’t know how I came to do it,” she declared. “It rushed out of its
own accord. I suppose it is because I know I can trust you.”
Jimmy flushed with pleasure. He turned to her and half halted, but she
continued to walk on.
“You can,” he said; “but how do you know you can?”
“Why,” she said—she stopped for a moment, and then went on hurriedly,
with a touch of embarrassment—“why, how absurd! Of course I know. Can’t
you read faces? I can. Look,” she said, pointing, “now you can see the
castle. How do you like it?”
They had reached a point where the fields sloped sharply downward. A few
hundred yards away, backed by woods, stood the grey mass of stone which
proved such a kill-joy of old to the Welsh sportsman during the peasant
season. Even now it had a certain air of defiance. The setting sun lit
up the waters of the lake. No figures were to be seen moving in the
grounds. The place resembled a palace of sleep.
“Well!” said Molly.
“It’s wonderful!”
“Isn’t it? I’m so glad it strikes you like that. I always feel as if I
had invented everything round here. It hurts me if people don’t
appreciate it.”
They went down the hill.
“By the way,” said Jimmy, “are you acting in these theatricals they are
getting up?”
“Yes. Are you the other man they were going to get? That’s why Lord
Dreever went up to London, to see if he couldn’t find somebody. The man
who was going to play one of the parts had to go back to London on
business.”
“Poor brute!” said Jimmy. It seemed to him at that moment that there was
only one place in the world where a man might be even reasonably happy.
“What sort of part is it? Lord Dreever said I should be wanted to act.
What do I do?”
“If you’re Lord Herbert, which is the part they wanted a man for, you
talk to me most of the time.”
Jimmy decided that the piece had been well cast.
The dressing-gong sounded just as they entered the hall. From a door on
the left there emerged two men—a big one and a little one—in friendly
conversation. The big man’s back struck Jimmy as familiar.
“Oh, father!” Molly called. And Jimmy knew where he had seen the back
before.
“Sir Thomas,” said Molly, “this is Mr. Pitt.”
The little man gave Jimmy a rapid glance—possibly with the object of
detecting his more immediately obvious criminal points; then, as if
satisfied as to his honesty, became genial.
“I am very glad to meet you, Mr. Pitt—very glad,” he said. “We have been
expecting you for some time.”
Jimmy explained that he had lost his way.
“Exactly. It was ridiculous that you should be compelled to
walk—perfectly ridiculous. It was gross carelessness of my nephew not to
let us know that you were coming. My wife told him so in the car.”
“I bet she did,” said Jimmy to himself. “Really,” he said aloud, by way
of lending a helping hand to a friend in trouble, “I preferred to walk.
I have not been on a country road since I landed in England.” He turned
to the big man and held out his hand. “I don’t suppose you remember me,
Mr. McEachern. We met in New York.”
“You remember the night Mr. Pitt scared away our burglar, father?” said
Molly.
Mr. McEachern was momentarily silent. On his native asphalt there are
few situations capable of throwing the New York policeman off his
balance. In that favoured clime _savoir-faire_ is represented by a
shrewd blow of the fist, and a masterful stroke with the truncheon
amounts to a satisfactory repartee. Thus shall you never take a
policeman of Manhattan without his answer. In other surroundings Mr.
McEachern would have known how to deal with the young man whom with such
good reason he believed to be an expert criminal. But another plan of
action was needed here. First and foremost of all the hints on etiquette
which he had imbibed since he entered this more reposeful life came this
maxim, “Never make a scene.” Scenes, he had gathered, were of all things
what polite society most resolutely abhorred. The natural man in him
must be bound in chains. The sturdy blow must give way to the honeyed
word. A cold “Really!” was the most vigorous retort that the best
circles would countenance.
It had cost Mr. McEachern some pains to learn this lesson, but he had
done it.
He shook hands and gruffly acknowledged the acquaintanceship.
“Really, really!” chirped Sir Thomas amiably. “So you find yourself
among old friends, Mr. Pitt.”
“Old friends,” echoed Jimmy, painfully conscious of the ex-policeman’s
eyes, which were boring holes in him.
“Excellent, excellent! Let me take you to your room. It is just opposite
my own. This way.”
They parted from Mr. McEachern on the first landing, but Jimmy could
still feel those eyes. The policeman’s stare had been of the sort which
turns corners, goes upstairs, and pierces walls.
★ 13 ★
_Spike’s Views_
Nevertheless, it was in a very exalted frame of mind that he dressed for
dinner. It seemed to him that he had awakened from a sort of stupor.
Life, so grey yesterday, now appeared full of colour and possibilities.
Most men who, either from choice or necessity, have knocked about the
world for any length of time are more or less fatalists. Jimmy was an
optimistic fatalist. He had always looked on fate not as a blind
dispenser at random of gifts good and bad, but rather as a benevolent
being with a pleasing bias in his favour. He had almost a Napoleonic
faith in his star. At various periods of his life—notably at the time
when, as he had told Lord Dreever, he had breakfasted on birdseed—he had
been in uncommonly tight corners, but his luck had always extricated
him. It struck him that it would be an unthinkable piece of bad
sportsmanship on Fate’s part to see him through so much and then to
abandon him just as he had arrived in sight of what was by far the
biggest thing of his life. Of course, his view of what constituted the
biggest thing in life had changed with the years. Every ridge of the
Hill of Supreme Moments in turn had been mistaken by him for the summit;
but this last, he felt instinctively, was genuine. For good or bad,
Molly was woven into the texture of his life. In the stormy period of
the early twenties he had thought the same of other girls, who were now
mere memories as dim as those of figures in a half-forgotten play. In
their case his convalescence had been temporarily painful, but brief.
Force of will and an active life had worked the cure. He had merely
braced himself up and firmly ejected them from his mind. A week or two
of aching emptiness, and his heart had been once more in readiness—all
nicely swept and done up—for the next lodger.
But in the case of Molly it was different. He had passed the age of
instantaneous susceptibility. Like a landlord who had been cheated by
previous tenants, he had become wary. He mistrusted his powers of
recuperation in case of disaster. The will in these matters, just like
the mundane “bouncer”, gets past his work. For some years now Jimmy had
had a feeling that the next arrival would come to stay, and he had
adopted, in consequence, a gently defensive attitude towards the other
sex. Molly had broken through this, and he saw that his estimate of his
willpower had been just. Methods which had proved excellent in the past
were useless now. There was no trace here of that dimly-consoling
feeling of earlier years that there were other girls in the world. He
did not try to deceive himself. He knew that he had passed the age when
a man can fall in love with any one of a number of types.
This was the finish, one way or the other. There was no second throw.
She had him. However it might end, he belonged to her.