THE TENNIS PARTY
Ida shook hands coldly enough with the lawyer, for whom she cherished a
dislike not unmixed with fear. Many women are by nature gifted with an
extraordinary power of intuition which fully makes up for their
deficiency in reasoning force. They do not conclude from the premisses
of their observation, they _know_ that this man is to be feared and
that trusted. In fact, they share with the rest of breathing creation
that self-protective instinct of instantaneous and almost automatic
judgment, given to guard it from the dangers with which it is
continually threatened at the hands of man’s over-mastering strength
and ordered intelligence. Ida was one of these. She knew nothing to Mr.
Quest’s disadvantage, indeed she always heard him spoken of with great
respect, and curiously enough she liked his wife. But she could not
bear the man, feeling in her heart that he was not only to be avoided
on account of his own hidden qualities, but that he was moreover an
active personal enemy.
They went into the dining-room, where the luncheon was set, and while
Ida allowed Mr. Quest to cut her some cold boiled beef, an operation in
which he did not seem to be very much at home, she came to a rapid
conclusion in her own mind. She had seen clearly enough from her
father’s face that his interview with the lawyer had been of a most
serious character, but she knew that the chances were that she would
never be able to get its upshot out of him, for the old gentleman had a
curious habit of keeping such unpleasant matters to himself until he
was absolutely forced by circumstances to reveal them. She also knew
that her father’s affairs were in a most critical condition, for this
she had extracted from him on the previous night, and that if any
remedy was to be attempted it must be attempted at once, and on some
heroic scale. Therefore, she made up her mind to ask her _bete noire_,
Mr. Quest, what the truth might be.
“Mr. Quest,” she said, with some trepidation, as he at last
triumphantly handed her the beef, “I hope you will forgive me for
asking you a plain question, and that, if you can, you will favour me
with a plain answer. I know my father’s affairs are very much involved,
and that he is now anxious to borrow some more money; but I do not know
quite how matters stand, and I want to learn the exact truth.”
“I am very glad to hear you speak so, Miss de la Molle,” answered the
lawyer, “because I was trying to make up my mind to broach the subject,
which is a painful one to me. Frankly, then—forgive me for saying it,
your father is absolutely ruined. The interest on the mortgages is a
year in arrear, his largest farm has just been thrown upon his hands,
and, to complete the tale, the mortgagees are going to call in their
money or foreclose.”
At this statement, which was almost brutal in its brief
comprehensiveness, Ida turned pale as death, as well she might, and
dropped her fork with a clatter upon the plate.
“I did not realise that things were quite so bad,” she murmured. “Then
I suppose that the place will be taken from us, and we shall—shall have
to go away.”
“Yes, certainly, unless money can be found to take up the mortgages, of
which I see no chance. The place will be sold for what it will fetch,
and that now-a-days will be no great sum.”
“When will that be?” she asked.
“In about six or nine months’ time.”
Ida’s lips trembled, and the sight of the food upon her plate became
nauseous to her. A vision arose before her mind’s eye of herself and
her old father departing hand in hand from the Castle gates, behind and
about which gleamed the hard wild lights of a March sunset, to seek a
place to hide themselves. The vivid horror of the phantasy almost
overcame her.
“Is there no way of escape?” she asked hoarsely. “To lose this place
would kill my father. He loves it better than anything in the world;
his whole life is wrapped up in it.”
“I can quite understand that, Miss de la Molle; it is a most charming
old place, especially to anybody interested in the past. But
unfortunately mortgagees are no respecters of feelings. To them land is
so much property and nothing more.”
“I know all that,” she said impatiently, “you do not answer my
question;” and she leaned towards him, resting her hand upon the table.
“Is there no way out of it?”
Mr. Quest drank a little claret before he answered. “Yes,” he said, “I
think that there is, if only you will take it.”
“What way?” she asked eagerly.
“Well, though as I said just now, the mortgagees of an estate as a body
are merely a business corporation, and look at things from a business
point of view only, you must remember that they are composed of
individuals, and that individuals can be influenced if they can be got
at. For instance, Cossey and Son are an abstraction and harshly
disposed in their abstract capacity, but Mr. Edward Cossey is an
individual, and I should say, so far as this particular matter is
concerned, a benevolently disposed individual. Now Mr. Edward Cossey is
not himself at the present moment actually one of the firm of Cossey
and Son, but he is the heir of the head of the house, and of course has
authority, and, what is better still, the command of money.”
“I understand,” said Ida. “You mean that my father should try to win
over Mr. Edward Cossey. Unfortunately, to be frank, he dislikes him,
and my father is not a man to keep his dislikes to himself.”
“People generally do dislike those to whom they are crushingly
indebted; your father dislikes Mr. Cossey because his name is Cossey,
and for no other reason. But that is not quite what I meant—I do not
think that the Squire is the right person to undertake a negotiation of
the sort. He is a little too outspoken and incautious. No, Miss de la
Molle, if it is to be done at all _you_ must do it. You must put the
whole case before him at once—this very afternoon, there is no time for
delay; you need not enter into details, he knows all about them—only
ask him to avert this catastrophe. He can do so if he likes, how he
does it is his own affair.”
“But, Mr. Quest,” said Ida, “how can I ask such a favour of any man? I
shall be putting myself in a dreadfully false position.”
“I do not pretend, Miss de la Molle, that it is a pleasant task for any
young lady to undertake. I quite understand your shrinking from it. But
sometimes one has to do unpleasant things and make compromises with
one’s self-respect. It is a question whether or no your family shall be
utterly ruined and destroyed. There is, as I honestly believe, no
prospect whatever of your father being able to get the money to pay off
Cossey and Son, and if he did, it would not help him, because he could
not pay the interest on it. Under these circumstances you have to
choose between putting yourself in an equivocal position and letting
events take their course. It would be useless for anybody else to
undertake the task, and of course I cannot guarantee that even you will
succeed, but I will not mince matters—as you doubtless know, any man
would find it hard to refuse a favour asked by such a suppliant. And
now you must make up your own mind. I have shown you a path that may
lead your family from a position of the most imminent peril. If you are
the woman I take you for, you will not shrink from following it.”
Ida made no reply, and in another moment the Squire came in to take a
couple of glasses of sherry and a biscuit. But Mr. Quest, furtively
watching her face, said to himself that she had taken the bait and that
she would do it. Shortly after this a diversion occurred, for the
clergyman, Mr. Jeffries, a pleasant little man, with a round and
shining face and a most unclerical eyeglass, came up to consult the
Squire upon some matter of parish business, and was shown into the
dining-room. Ida took advantage of his appearance to effect a retreat
to her own room, and there for the present we may leave her to her
meditations.
No more business was discussed by the Squire that afternoon. Indeed it
interested Mr. Quest, who was above all things a student of character,
to observe how wonderfully the old gentleman threw off his trouble. To
listen to him energetically arguing with the Rev. Mr. Jeffries as to
whether or no it would be proper, as had hitherto been the custom, to
devote the proceeds of the harvest festival collection (1 pound 18s.
3d. and a brass button) to the county hospital, or whether it should be
applied to the repair of the woodwork in the vestry, was under the
circumstances most instructive. The Rev. Mr. Jeffries, who suffered
severely from the condition of the vestry, at last gained his point by
triumphantly showing that no patient from Honham had been admitted to
the hospital for fifteen months, and that therefore the hospital had no
claim on this particular year, whereas the draught in the vestry was
enough to cut any clergyman in two.
“Well, well,” said the old gentleman, “I will consent for this year,
and this year only. I have been churchwarden of this parish for between
forty and fifty years, and we have always given the harvest festival
collection to the hospital, and although under these exceptional
circumstances it may possibly be desirable to diverge from that custom,
I cannot and will not consent to such a thing in a permanent way. So I
shall write to the secretary and explain the matter, and tell him that
next year and in the future generally the collection will be devoted to
its original purpose.”
“Great heavens!” ejaculated Mr. Quest to himself. “And the man must
know that in all human probability the place will be sold over his head
before he is a year older. I wonder if he puts it on or if he deceives
himself. I suppose he has lived here so long that he cannot realise a
condition of things under which he will cease to live here and the
place will belong to somebody else. Or perhaps he is only brazening it
out.” And then he strolled away to the back of the house and had a look
at the condition of the outhouses, reflecting that some of them would
be sadly expensive to repair for whoever came into possession here.
After that he crossed the moat and walked through the somewhat
extensive plantations at the back of the house, wondering if it would
not be possible to get enough timber out of them, if one went to work
judiciously, to pay for putting the place in order. Presently he came
to a hedgerow where a row of very fine timber oaks had stood, of which
the Squire had been notoriously fond, and of which he had himself taken
particular and admiring notice in the course of the previous winter.
The trees were gone. In the hedge where they had grown were a series of
gaps like those in an old woman’s jaw, and the ground was still
littered with remains of bark and branches and of faggots that had been
made up from the brushwood.
“Cut down this spring fell,” was Mr. Quest’s ejaculation. “Poor old
gentleman, he must have been pinched before he consented to part with
those oaks.”
Then he turned and went back to the house, just in time to see Ida’s
guests arriving for the lawn tennis party. Ida herself was standing on
the lawn behind the house, which, bordered as it was by the moat and at
the further end by a row of ruined arches, was one of the most
picturesque in the country and a very effective setting to any young
lady. As the people came they were shown through the house on to the
lawn, and here she was receiving them. She was dressed in a plain,
tight-fitting gown of blue flannel, which showed off her perfect figure
to great advantage, and a broad-brimmed hat, that shaded her fine and
dignified face. Mr. Quest sat down on a bench beneath the shade of an
arbutus, watching her closely, and indeed, if the study of a perfect
English lady of the noblest sort has any charms, he was not without his
reward. There are some women—most of us know one or two—who are born to
hold a great position and to sail across the world like a swan through
meaner fowl. It would be very hard to say to what their peculiar charm
and dignity is owing. It is not to beauty only, for though they have
presence, many of these women are not beautiful, while some are even
plain. Nor does it spring from native grace and tact alone; though
these things must be present. Rather perhaps it is the reflection of a
cultivated intellect acting upon a naturally pure and elevated
temperament, which makes these ladies conspicuous and fashions them in
such kind that all men, putting aside the mere charm of beauty and the
natural softening of judgment in the atmosphere of sex, must recognise
in them an equal mind, and a presence more noble than their own.
Such a woman was Ida de la Molle, and if any one doubted it, it was
sufficient to compare her in her simplicity to the various human items
by whom she was surrounded. They were a typical county society
gathering, such as needs no description, and would not greatly interest
if described; neither very good nor very bad, very handsome nor very
plain, but moving religiously within the lines of custom and on the
ground of commonplace.
It is no wonder, then, that a woman like Ida de la Molle was _facile
princeps_ among such company, or that Harold Quaritch, who was somewhat
poetically inclined for a man of his age, at any rate where the lady in
question was concerned, should in his heart have compared her to a
queen. Even Belle Quest, lovely as she undoubtedly was in her own way,
paled and looked shopgirlish in face of that gentle dignity, a fact of
which she was evidently aware, for although the two women were
friendly, nothing would induce the latter to stand long near Ida in
public. She would tell Edward Cossey that it made her look like a wax
doll beside a live child.
While Mr. Quest was still watching Ida with complete satisfaction, for
she appealed to the artistic side of his nature, Colonel Quaritch
arrived upon the scene, looking, Mr. Quest thought, particularly plain
with his solid form, his long thin nose, light whiskers, and square
massive chin. Also he looked particularly imposing in contrast to the
youths and maidens and domesticated clergymen. There was a gravity,
almost a solemnity, about his bronzed countenance and deliberate
ordered conversation, which did not, however, favourably impress the
aforesaid youths and maidens, if a judgment might be formed from such
samples of conversational criticism as Mr. Quest heard going on on the
further side of his arbutus.