Nearly two years after Guy Firminger had spent that friendly hour in
Mrs. Gosselin's little garden in Hampshire this far-seeing woman was
enabled (by the return of her son, who at New York, in an English bank,
occupied a position they all rejoiced over--to such great things might
it duly lead), to resume possession, for the season, of the little
London house which her husband had left her to inhabit, but which her
native thrift, in determining her to let it for a term, had converted
into a source of income. Hugh Gosselin, who was thirty years old and at
twenty-three, before his father's death, had been dispatched to America
to exert himself, was understood to be doing very well--so well that his
devotion to the interests of his employers had been rewarded, for the
first time, with a real holiday. He was to remain in England from May to
August, undertaking, as he said, to make it all right if during this
time his mother should occupy (to contribute to his entertainment), the
habitation in Chester Street. He was a small, preoccupied young man,
with a sharpness as acquired as a new hat; he struck his mother and
sister as intensely American. For the first few days after his arrival
they were startled by his intonations, though they admitted that they
had had an escape when he reminded them that he might have brought with
him an accent embodied in a wife.
"When you do take one," said Mrs. Gosselin, who regarded such an
accident, over there, as inevitable, "you must charge her high for it."
It was not with this question, however, that the little family in
Chester Street was mainly engaged, but with the last incident in the
extraordinary succession of events which, like a chapter of romance, had
in the course of a few months converted their vague and impecunious
friend into a personage envied and honoured. It was as if a blight had
been cast on all Guy Firminger's hindrances. On the day Hugh Gosselin
sailed from New York the delicate little boy at Bosco had succumbed to
an attack of diphtheria. His father had died of typhoid the previous
winter at Naples; his uncle, a few weeks later, had had a fatal accident
in the hunting-field. So strangely, so rapidly had the situation cleared
up, had his fate and theirs worked for him. Guy had opened his eyes one
morning to an earldom which carried with it a fortune not alone
nominally but really great. Mrs. Gosselin and Mary had not written to
him, but they knew he was at Bosco; he had remained there after the
funeral of the late little lord. Mrs. Gosselin, who heard everything,
had heard somehow that he was behaving with the greatest consideration,
giving the guardians, the trustees, whatever they were called, plenty of
time to do everything. Everything was comparatively simple; in the
absence of collaterals there were so few other people concerned. The
principal relatives were poor Frank Firminger's widow and her girls, who
had seen themselves so near to new honours and comforts. Probably the
girls would expect their cousin Guy to marry one of them, and think it
the least he could decently do; a view the young man himself (if he were
very magnanimous) might possibly embrace. The question would be whether
he would be very magnanimous. These young ladies exhausted in their
three persons the numerous varieties of plainness. On the other hand Guy
Firminger--or Lord Beaupré, as one would have to begin to call him
now--was unmistakably kind. Mrs. Gosselin appealed to her son as to
whether their noble friend were not unmistakably kind.
"Of course I've known him always, and that time he came out to
America--when was it? four years ago--I saw him every day. I like him
awfully and all that, but since you push me, you know," said Hugh
Gosselin, "I'm bound to say that the first thing to mention in any
description of him would be--if you wanted to be quite correct--that
he's unmistakably selfish."
"I see--I see," Mrs. Gosselin unblushingly replied. "Of course I know
what you mean," she added in a moment. "But is he any more so than any
one else? Every one's unmistakably selfish."
"Every one but you and Mary," said the young man.
"And _you_, dear!" his mother smiled. "But a person may be kind, you
know--mayn't he?--at the same time that he _is_ selfish. There are
different sorts."
"Different sorts of kindness?" Hugh Gosselin asked with a laugh; and the
inquiry undertaken by his mother occupied them for the moment, demanding
a subtlety of treatment from which they were not conscious of shrinking,
of which rather they had an idea that they were perhaps exceptionally
capable. They came back to the temperate view that Guy would never put
himself out, would probably never do anything great, but might show
himself all the same a delightful member of society. Yes, he was
probably selfish, like other people; but unlike most of them he was,
somehow, amiably, attachingly, sociably, almost lovably selfish. Without
doing anything great he would yet be a great success--a big, pleasant,
gossiping, lounging and, in its way doubtless very splendid, presence.
He would have no ambition, and it was ambition that made selfishness
ugly. Hugh and his mother were sure of this last point until Mary,
before whom the discussion, when it reached this stage, happened to be
carried on, checked them by asking whether that, on the contrary, were
not just what was supposed to make it fine.
"Oh, he only wants to be comfortable," said her brother; "but he _does_
want it!"
"There'll be a tremendous rush for him," Mrs. Gosselin prophesied to her
son.
"Oh, he'll never marry. It will be too much trouble."
"It's done here without any trouble--for the men. One sees how long
you've been out of the country."
"There was a girl in New York whom he might have married--he really
liked her. But he wouldn't turn round for her."
"Perhaps she wouldn't turn round for _him_," said Mary.
"I daresay she'll turn round _now_," Mrs. Gosselin rejoined; on which
Hugh mentioned that there was nothing to be feared from her, all her
revolutions had been accomplished. He added that nothing would make any
difference--so intimate was his conviction that Beaupré would preserve
his independence.
"Then I think he's not so selfish as you say," Mary declared; "or at any
rate one will never know whether he is. Isn't married life the great
chance to show it?"
"Your father never showed it," said Mrs. Gosselin; and as her children
were silent in presence of this tribute to the departed she added,
smiling: "Perhaps you think that _I_ did!" They embraced her, to
indicate what they thought, and the conversation ended, when she had
remarked that Lord Beaupré was a man who would be perfectly easy to
manage _after_ marriage, with Hugh's exclaiming that this was doubtless
exactly why he wished to keep out of it.
Such was evidently his wish, as they were able to judge in Chester
Street when he came up to town. He appeared there oftener than was to
have been expected, not taking himself in his new character at all too
seriously to find stray half-hours for old friends. It was plain that he
was going to do just as he liked, that he was not a bit excited or
uplifted by his change of fortune. Mary Gosselin observed that he had no
imagination--she even reproached him with the deficiency to his face; an
incident which showed indeed how little seriously _she_ took him. He had
no idea of playing a part, and yet he would have been clever enough. He
wasn't even systematic about being simple; his simplicity was a series
of accidents and indifferences. Never was a man more conscientiously
superficial. There were matters on which he valued Mrs. Gosselin's
judgment and asked her advice--without, as usually appeared later, ever
taking it; such questions, mainly, as the claims of a predecessor's
servants, and those, in respect to social intercourse, of the
clergyman's family. He didn't like his parson--what was a fellow to do
when he didn't like his parson? What he did like was to talk with Hugh
about American investments, and it was amusing to Hugh, though he tried
not to show his amusement, to find himself looking at Guy Firminger in
the light of capital. To Mary he addressed from the first the oddest
snatches of confidential discourse, rendered in fact, however, by the
levity of his tone, considerably less confidential than in intention. He
had something to tell her that he joked about, yet without admitting
that it was any less important for being laughable. It was neither more
nor less than that Charlotte Firminger, the eldest of his late uncle's
four girls, had designated to him in the clearest manner the person she
considered he ought to marry. She appealed to his sense of justice, she
spoke and wrote, or at any rate she looked and moved, she sighed and
sang, in the name of common honesty. He had had four letters from her
that week, and to his knowledge there were a series of people in London,
people she could bully, whom she had got to promise to take her in for
the season. She was going to be on the spot, she was going to follow him
up. He took his stand on common honesty, but he had a mortal horror of
Charlotte. At the same time, when a girl had a jaw like that and had
marked you--really _marked_ you, mind, you felt your safety oozing away.
He had given them during the past three months, all those terrible
girls, every sort of present that Bond Street could supply: but these
demonstrations had only been held to constitute another pledge.
Therefore what was a fellow to do? Besides, there were other portents;
the air was thick with them, as the sky over battlefields was darkened
by the flight of vultures. They were flocking, the birds of prey, from
every quarter, and every girl in England, by Jove! was going to be
thrown at his head. What had he done to deserve such a fate? He wanted
to stop in England and see all sorts of things through; but how could he
stand there and face such a charge? Yet what good would it do to bolt?
Wherever he should go there would be fifty of them there first. On his
honour he could say that he didn't deserve it; he had never, to his own
sense, been a flirt, such a flirt at least as to have given anyone a
handle. He appealed candidly to Mary Gosselin to know whether his past
conduct justified such penalties. "_Have_ I been a flirt?--have I given
anyone a handle?" he inquired with pathetic intensity.
She met his appeal by declaring that he had been awful, committing
himself right and left; and this manner of treating his affliction
contributed to the sarcastic publicity (as regarded the little house in
Chester Street) which presently became its natural element. Lord
Beaupré's comical and yet thoroughly grounded view of his danger was
soon a frequent theme among the Gosselins, who however had their own
reasons for not communicating the alarm. They had no motive for
concealing their interest in their old friend, but their allusions to
him among their other friends may be said on the whole to have been
studied. His state of mind recalled of course to Mary and her mother the
queer talk about his prospects that they had had, in the country, that
afternoon on which Mrs. Gosselin had been so strangely prophetic (she
confessed that she had had a flash of divination: the future had been
mysteriously revealed to her), and poor Guy too had seen himself quite
as he was to be. He had seen his nervousness, under inevitable pressure,
deepen to a panic, and he now, in intimate hours, made no attempt to
disguise that a panic had become his portion. It was a fixed idea with
him that he should fall a victim to woven toils, be caught in a trap
constructed with superior science. The science evolved in an
enterprising age by this branch of industry, the manufacture of the trap
matrimonial, he had terrible anecdotes to illustrate; and what had he on
his lips but a scientific term when he declared, as he perpetually did,
that it was his fate to be hypnotised?
Mary Gosselin reminded him, they each in turn reminded him that his
safeguard was to fall in love: were he once to put himself under that
protection all the mothers and maids in Mayfair would not prevail
against him. He replied that this was just the impossibility; it took
leisure and calmness and opportunity and a free mind to fall in love,
and never was a man less open to such experiences. He was literally
fighting his way. He reminded the girl of his old fancy for pretending
already to have disposed of his hand if he could put that hand on a
young person who should like him well enough to be willing to
participate in the fraud. She would have to place herself in rather a
false position of course--have to take a certain amount of trouble; but
there would after all be a good deal of fun in it (there was always fun
in duping the world,) between the pair themselves, the two happy
comedians.
"Why should they both be happy?" Mary Gosselin asked. "I understand why
you should; but, frankly, I don't quite grasp the reason of _her_
pleasure."
Lord Beaupré, with his sunny human eyes, thought a moment. "Why, for
the lark, as they say, and that sort of thing. I should be awfully nice
to her."
"She would require indeed to be in want of recreation!"
"Ah, but I should want a good sort--a quiet, reasonable one, you know!"
he somewhat eagerly interposed.
"You're too delightful!" Mary Gosselin exclaimed, continuing to laugh.
He thanked her for this appreciation, and she returned to her
point--that she didn't really see the advantage his accomplice could
hope to enjoy as her compensation for extreme disturbance.