_Wherein the Gallant Major rises from the Dead_
So, for three several months, the summer shone gaily upon the town, and
passed away over the edge of the world in happy fashion enough.
And Betty grew to some affection for the kindly rough man who was the
clumsy lord of this elaborate house. And out of her liking grew an
anxious and increasing fearfulness for the girls.
The rude father, hoping to polish diamonds, had sent the two girls to
a smart school at Brighton; and they, for lack of association with
his frank honesty of act and speech at home, and rebuffed by the dull
stupidity of a dowdy mother who scarcely ever left her own room, and
finding themselves balked by the discipline of school, had fallen into
the realizing of their desires by crooked ways. Of their father’s
qualities and open candour, of his frankness of statement, they had
only kept an outward semblance that was little better than rudeness
and bad manners, but it deceived their father and his blunt honest
friends; it was thereby the more dangerous cloak for their intriguing
and questionable habits. They had gone to school vulgar and tolerably
honest; they had come back with some outward veneer of manners, with
much swaggering disdain, the aping of masterfulness, a display of the
lordly habit, and with souls utterly corrupt. They had gone to school
with rough affection for their father; they had come back filled with
critical contempt for him, ashamed of him, and at heart afraid of
him--dreading that he should discover that they _were_ afraid of him
and ashamed of him. The desires of their full red lips were without
discipline, and fretted at restraint; and they fed their desires
unstintingly and gave encouragement to every whim. They knew enough of
the world to recognise at a glance that Betty was above them by habit
and by breeding; they soon knew, by results, that her appearance with
them anywhere gave them distinction. Their utter lack of all sense of
honour embarrassed Betty at every turn. They lied like drudges; and,
with the conceit of the weak, they affected an arrogance which they
mistook for the habit of the master class, not seeing that they were
wholly devoid of the courage which makes fearlessness of the truth the
pronounced habit of the master class.
Betty, watching their father with keen eyes, saw that he, too, was
strangely baffled.
He, poor man, looking to their old glad affection for him, which
had been their girlish return for his large love of them, found
instead, upon his hearth, that there were two critical young women in
possession; realized that his rough endearments were coldly received.
He thought, as usual, that the fault was in his own manners.
The house, ordered by these girls in a spirit of lavish extravagance,
reeked of wealth.
The young women, innocent of that courtesy to servants which makes of
service an honourable act, were at constant and undignified bickering
and war with those beneath them; and as they held always the winning
card of dismissal, they never realized that the sullen obedience of
the world below stairs was as insulting as open insolence; they still
less realized that these sullen flunkies took revenge in spoliation,
and that what remained of deference was a mockery and covert contempt.
So it came about that the sneaks amongst the servants held the lower
quarters of the house in their hands.
The young women now began to have social aspirations. They had a vague
idea that there was some strange pleasure to be got in the mixing
with and being seen with those who but gave them chill encouragement
to friendship. But as it so chanced, their ambition for they knew not
quite what, was fed by the sudden eagerness of women of high social
position to trespass on the broad pages and in the social gossip of the
columns of the widely read newspaper which Pompey Malahide held at his
beck and will--a newspaper which diffused raucous opinions and created
the thoughts of millions throughout the country. The girls found
themselves courted. Their arrogance grew, and their strut and swagger
increased. Malahide dined at great houses.
With the master-will of Doome to advise him, Malahide now found his
position still further strengthened by the alliance with and friendship
of his boy Horace, who had left Harrow and was going up to Oxford.
His baffled affection for his girls turned to a passionate pride in
his handsome son; and the boy, frank, honest, golden, gay, debonair,
returned the old man’s affection, drilled him in the subtleties with
gentleness, and watched over his father like a father.
The young fellow, with an astuteness that promised well for the rise of
his house, was spending the summer with a Magdalen undergraduate, an
old Harrow schoolfellow--a young lord whose father was in the Cabinet;
in fact, Horace, with airy cheerfulness, was cementing friendships that
might be of value to his father in the political life which he was
contemplating for himself, and later on for his son.
The millionaire hungered for the lad; and, in his absence, he poured
into Betty’s ears all his hopes for him, his pride in him, his
affection for him.
And it was good to see that his pride in the lad’s aristocratic ways
was wholly undamped by any suspicion that the boy despised him--whereas
with his girls he felt their despisings at every turn.
Betty had hoped, for his father’s sake, that the youth would come home
for a few days before his term began at Oxford; but when he came she
endured her severest trial.
Horace Malahide, fresh from the society of well-bred people, at once
found himself at ease with Betty. His bright wit, his airy love of
life, his frank ways, his affection and his care for his father, his
patience and his delicacy in correcting him, won the esteem of the
girl. And she, for a day or so, not knowing the attraction of her own
beauty, enjoyed his companionship.
She realized, all at once, that he was ignoring his sisters. She
found it impossible to withdraw herself from the position. Her sudden
avoidances of him inflamed the youth’s desire for her companionship. He
became a trial to her.
Then came letters sad with sighs. How the young dogs all take to the
same water!
She found a fragment of the poetic pinned to her dressing-table,
in which fragment was much rhyming of Modeyne with “_I ween_,” and
tributes to “_dainty shoulders chill, and cruel with disdainings
keen_,” and complaints of “_ignorings of worship that any beauty who,
less proud of mien, had been, must surely needs have seen_.”
The dictionary had been ransacked for rhymes.
The lad was in the euphemistic stage of poetic debauchery; and Betty
could never abide indifferent verse. He chose the surest way to this
very desert of ignorings and shoulders chill and the like disdainings.
The devil was in it for the lad all through.
So the poetic bugling sounded the trump of his rejection.
He went up to Oxford; and for close upon three days was well-nigh
disconsolate.
The lad’s admiration, most unwitting of it, did the girl a sad
disservice.
The unspoken verdict of their modish brother, in preferring this girl’s
society to theirs, roused the ill-will of his neglected sisters;
and the two young women, whilst their full red lips kissed Betty
good-morning as sweetly as was their wont, took to tittle-tattling
against her.
The tittle-tattle bred further tittle-tattle, unloosed suggestive and
insinuating tongues, and at last Dame Gossip bumped up, giggling,
against the doors of _The Cock and Bull_ in Fleet Street.
The tavern vomited its secret.
The ghost of Major Modeyne arose from the dead and walked; and was seen
in Park Lane.