I was sitting in my own room, writing to the Reverend Mother, to tell
her of my return home, when I heard the toot of a horn and raising my
eyes saw a motor-car coming up the drive. It contained three gentlemen,
one of them wore goggles and carried a silver-haired terrier on his
knees.
A little later Nessy MacLeod came to tell me that Lord Raa and his party
had arrived and I was wanted immediately.
I went downstairs hesitatingly, with a haunting sense of coming trouble.
Reaching the door of the drawing-room I saw my intended husband for the
first time--there being nothing in his appearance to awaken in me the
memory of ever having seen him before.
He was on the hearthrug in front of the fire, talking to Betsy Beauty,
who was laughing immoderately. To get a better look at him, and at the
same time to compose myself, I stopped for a moment to speak to the
three gentlemen (the two lawyers and Lord Raa's trustee or guardian) who
were standing with my father in the middle of the floor.
He was undoubtedly well-dressed and had a certain air of breeding, but
even to my girlish eyes he betrayed at that first sight the character of
a man who had lived an irregular, perhaps a dissipated life.
His face was pale, almost puffy, his grey eyes were slow and heavy, his
moustache was dark and small, his hair was thin over his forehead, and
he had a general appearance of being much older than his years, which I
knew to be thirty-three.
His manners, when I approached him, were courteous and gentle, almost
playful and indulgent, but through all their softness there pierced a
certain hardness, not to say brutality, which I afterwards learned (when
life had had its tug at me) to associate with a man who has spent much
of his time among women of loose character.
Betsy Beauty made a great matter of introducing us; but in a drawling
voice, and with a certain play of humour, he told her it was quite
unnecessary, since we were very old friends, having made each other's
acquaintance as far back as ten years ago, when I was the prettiest
little woman in the world, he remembered, though perhaps my manners were
not quite cordial.
"We had a slight difference on the subject of kisses. Don't you remember
it?"
Happily there was no necessity to reply, for my father came to say that
he wished to show his lordship the improvements he had been making, and
the rest of us were at liberty to follow them.
The improvements consisted chiefly of a new wing to the old house,
containing a dining room, still unfurnished, which had been modelled, as
I found later, on the corresponding room in Castle Raa.
With a proud lift of his white head my father pointed out the beauties
of his new possession, while my intended husband, with his monocle to
his eye, looked on with a certain condescension, and answered with a
languid humour that narrowly bordered on contempt.
"Oak, sir, solid oak," said my father, rapping with his knuckles on the
tall, dark, heavy wainscoting.
"As old as our hearts and as hard as our heads, I suppose," said Lord
Raa.
"Harder than some, sir," said my father.
"Exactly," said Lord Raa in his slow drawl, and then there was general
laughter.
The bell rang for luncheon, and we went into the plain old dining room,
where Aunt Bridget placed her principal guest on her right and told him
all about her late husband, the Colonel, his honours and military
achievements.
I could see that Lord Raa was soon very weary of this, and more than
once, sitting by his side, I caught the cynical and rather supercilious
responses to which, under the gloss of his gracious manners, Aunt
Bridget seemed quite oblivious.
I was so nervous and embarrassed that I spoke very little during
luncheon, and even Aunt Bridget observed this at last.
"Mary, dear, why don't you speak?" she said.
But without waiting for my reply she proceeded to explain to his
lordship that the strangest change had come over me since I was a child,
when I had been the sauciest little chatterbox in the world, whereas now
I was so shy that it was nearly impossible to get a word out of me.
"Hope I shall be able to get one word out of her, at least," said his
lordship, whereupon Aunt Bridget smiled significantly and Betsy Beauty
burst into fits of laughter.
Almost before the meal was over, my father rose from his seat at the
head of the table, and indicating the lawyers who sat near to him, he
said:
"These gentlemen and I have business to fix up--money matters and all
that--so I guess we'll step into the library and leave you young people
to look after yourselves."
Everybody rose to leave the room.
"All back for tea-time," said Aunt Bridget.
"Of course you don't want _me_," said Betsy Beauty with a giggle, and at
the next moment I was alone with his lordship, who drew a long breath
that was almost like a yawn, and said:
"Is there no quiet place we can slip away to?"
There was the glen at the back of the house (the Cape Flora of Martin
Conrad), so I took him into that, not without an increasing sense of
embarrassment. It was a clear October day, the glen was dry, and the air
under the shadow of the thinning trees was full of the soft light of the
late autumn.
"Ah, this is better," said his lordship.
He lit a cigar and walked for some time by my side without speaking,
merely flicking the seeding heads off the dying thistles with his
walking stick, and then ruckling it through the withered leaves with
which the path was strewn.
But half way up the glen he began to look aslant at me through his
monocle, and then to talk about my life in Rome, wondering how I could
have been content to stay so long at the Convent, and hinting at a
rumour which had reached him that I had actually wished to stay there
altogether.
"Extraordinary! 'Pon my word, extraordinary! It's well enough for women
who have suffered shipwreck in their lives to live in such places, but
for a young gal with any fortune, any looks . . . why I wonder she
doesn't die of _ennui_."
I was still too nervous and embarrassed to make much protest, so he went
on to tell me with what difficulty he supported the boredom of his own
life even in London, with its clubs, its race-meetings, its dances, its
theatres and music halls, and the amusement to be got out of some of the
ladies of society, not to speak of certain well-known professional
beauties.
One of his great friends--his name was Eastcliff--was going to marry the
most famous of the latter class (a foreign dancer at the "Empire"), and
since he was rich and could afford to please himself, why shouldn't he?
When we reached the waterfall at the top of the glen (it had been the
North Cape of Martin Conrad), we sat on a rustic seat which stands
there, and then, to my still deeper embarrassment, his lordship's
conversation came to close quarters.
Throwing away his cigar and taking his silver-haired terrier on his lap
he said:
"Of course you know what the business is which the gentlemen are
discussing in the library?"
As well as I could for the nervousness that was stifling me, I answered
that I knew.
He stroked the dog with one hand, prodded his stick into the gravel with
the other, and said:
"Well, I don't know what your views about marriage are. Mine, I may say,
are liberal."