In a World Within a World
"I'd rather have a whole cab-driver to myself than share a peer of the
realm with another woman," said Mrs. Darling.
She had been in England eighteen months, and the shadow of her tragedy,
which never bore very heavily, had lifted.
She sat in a basket chair on the lawn at Puddlewood, dressed all in
filmy white, and sipped tea with the Duchess of Pemberwell, her
great-aunt, in the shade of one of Puddlewood's ancient oaks. In her lap
lay an unopened copy of the _Times_.
"Is he a cab-driver, then?" inquired the duchess, taking her literally.
"Yes," Nina laughed, "a heavenly cab-driver. He threads the milky way.
Some say aviator."
"Oh, Nina!"
"He's very nice, I assure you, my dear. Not an ounce of fat on him. All
bone and sinew and nerve."
"And--a Yankee," added the duchess belittlingly.
"A free-born American," corrected her great-niece, "and with the
loveliest accent. You should hear him say: 'Evah at you' se'vice, Miss'
Dahling.' You'd fall in love with him yourself."
"And this aviator person is yours exclusively?"
"Undividedly. Isn't it nice?"
"I think I should prefer Nibbetts myself; or Sir George Grey, or--well,
scores I could name."
"I dare say. You married the duke. Your taste speaks for itself, dear
aunt."
Though the duchess made no retort, she appeared annoyed. She poured
herself a fresh cup of tea and sipped it in silence. Nina opened her
paper.
She was still turning the pages when his grace sauntered over, halted,
and gazed for a moment at the spread tea-table. He was small, bald and
peaked, with tiny black eyes like shoe-buttons.
"There isn't any seed-cake," he complained. "I can't take tea without
seed-cake. You know I never take tea without seed-cake, do I, Doody?"
Doody was his pet name for his duchess.
"No, you don't," she said. "It's too bad. There was only a little, and
Nina ate it."
Nina, who had not been listening, looked up.
"What's that I ate?" she asked.
"Doody says you ate all the seed-cake," explained the duke.
"Oh, I believe I did. It was exceptionally good, too. I wish there had
been more."
"You don't wish it half as much as I," and there was a suspicion of
querulousness in his grace's tone.
"He's flying at Doncaster to-day," Nina observed, devouring the aviation
news, and already forgetful of the duke and the seed-cake.
"Who's flying?" he asked sharply.
"Pierson," answered Nina. "My David."
"Then I hope he jolly well breaks his neck," was the snapping rejoinder
as his grace wheeled about and set off for the castle to admonish his
housekeeper.
Having exhausted the aviation news, Mrs. Darling turned to the American
cables. Everything American now held for her a magnified interest.
Presently she slapped the page out flatter and interestedly bent her
head closer.
"Fancy!" she exclaimed a moment later, sitting up straight. "He's been
sentenced to fifteen years' imprisonment."
"Your David?" asked the duchess indifferently.
"Certainly not. He's poor but honest. J. Sprague Ramsay, of Chicago, the
multimillionaire banker, whose wife and daughter I knew in India. I
don't in the least understand it--it's for lending himself money from
his own banks or something. It's too bad. Poor, poor Sibylla. And Jane
was just coming to a marriageable age. It will spoil all her chances."
"It should be a lesson to you, Nina. I should think you'd feel
disgraced. You associated with the family of a convict. You must curb
your indiscriminate freedom. You must, really."
"Pooh!" cried her great-niece. "The Ramsays were charming. It wasn't
their fault that J. Sprague borrowed more than he had a right to."
Her great-aunt's disapproval of Americans in general and of the American
aviator in particular, had the usual effect of disapproval when brought
to bear on an independent spirit. It whetted Nina's ardor for the daring
and intrepid David Pierson.
She not only attended the meetings at which he flew, but on repeated
occasions she flew with him. Her infatuation was the talk of her friends
and her enemies.
As a matter of fact the American was by no means a bad sort. He came of
good, honest stock, was fairly well educated, and possessed a
comfortable income from Kentucky tobacco plantations, which he had
inherited.
With the coming of autumn, however, the inevitable happened. He proposed
marriage to the young widow who had led him to believe he had only to
ask to be given. And Nina refused him flatly.
David Pierson, however, was a distinctly different type from young
Andrews. His eyes didn't grow misty and he didn't weep. He was, in fact,
a distinctly different type from any of the men she had jilted or
repulsed. He didn't storm and he didn't sulk.
On the contrary, he caught hold of her shoulders and he shook her until
her teeth chattered. And then, not in the least gently, he boxed both
her ears, and walked out, leaving her in a towering rage.
Out of sheer revenge, rather than for any other reason, she began almost
at once to encourage the attentions of a certain cabinet minister. She
let him hold her hand and send her books of amorous verses with marked
stanzas.
More than that, she invited veiled paragraphs in the society journals,
hinting at a pending betrothal, and mailed each issue, blue-penciled, to
the aviator's home address in Louisville.
But with the cabinet minister Nina Darling went no further than she had
with any of the others. She shunted him by making him madly jealous,
first, and then openly casting him aside for one of the poets to whose
passionate lines he had been the means of introducing her.
In the next three years she ran sort of continuously amuck against the
susceptible, strewing her world with broken, bleeding hearts. And all
the while the one man for whom she would gladly have given her life
looked on with a sneer and a cynic smile, and said harsh, cruel things
to her and of her, in season and out.
There were those who held that it was due in a large measure to Lord
Kneedrock that the ugly mystery of poor Darling's horrid death was not
permitted to rest in the grave with the victim.
Still there may have been injustice in this, for there were still quite
as many to say that Kneedrock shot him because he coveted Nina for
himself, as there were that it was Nina or that it was suicide.
Wherever two or three were gathered together in Vanity Fair, one was
sure to hear the phrase: "Poor Darling!" and without waiting very long
for it, either.
Someone said "Poor Darling!" at Bellingdown, one day in late March, and
as usual the Umballa tragedy was threshed out all over again, though it
was nearly five years gone, and to separate a fresh grain of truth from
the chaff was nigh hopeless.
"Oh, Nina couldn't," Lady Bellingdown insisted. "I've seen a lot of her,
and I could tell."
Lord Waltheof, who was the "tame cat" of the household, a tall, slim,
dark man, reminded her that Mrs. Darling couldn't remember what
happened.
"Oh, you're wrong about that, Wally," put in Charlotte Grey, the fair,
thin bride of Sir George, who was up in town with Lord Bellingdown.
"You're wrong about that. She didn't remember at first, but she does
now. Nibbetts told me so. She remembers, but she doesn't speak of it.
That is rather suspicious, you know."
"She's a widow without a sorrow," Kitty Bellingdown declared. "She never
loved Darling; we all know that."
"She doesn't know what love is," asserted the bride, who was missing her
husband terribly. "She has passion, but no affection."
"Has she been casting sheeps' eyes at Shucks?" It was Waltheof who
asked. "Shucks" was Sir George's nursery name. It is a mark of the
bluest blood to carry some such absurd nursery cognomen from the nursery
to Eton, or Harrow, or Winchester, and then on to one or the other of
the universities.
"She'd better not," Charlotte returned, her eyes snapping.
"I--I didn't know." And Waltheof slyly pinched Lady Bellingdown's
shoulder as he stood behind her chair.
"I've always thought Nibbetts had a hand in it," Lord Waltheof ventured.
"It was odd, his turning up just at that time, you must all admit that.
Eight years he buried himself, God only knows where, and then all of a
sudden he appears in Umballa, and the very next night poor Darling is
mysteriously shot. Then back he comes to London and takes up the old
life, just as if he had never been away and nothing had happened."
Lady Kitty nodded. "That's perfectly true," she said. "Does any one know
where he was?"
"Yes," the tall man answered. "We all know generally. But only one man
accurately. His solicitor was informed all the while. When I want a
secret kept that's the man I'm going to employ."
"I'd see him right away if I were you," suggested Charlotte, and Lady
Bellingdown frowned.
"I believe Nibbetts would marry Nina to-morrow if she'd say yes,"
Waltheof continued. "But she won't. She won't say yes to any man. Once
was enough for her. That's flat."
"If he cares so much for her he has a poor way of showing it. I've never
heard him give her a civil word." The bride spoke out of the richness of
her experience.
"I'm certain she cares for him," averred Lady Bellingdown. "And he's a
brute to her."
"It's the crime that stands between them," Waltheof said with decision.
"Nibbetts is queer. And it's that that's preyed on his mind until he's
not quite all there, don't you know."
"Everybody knows his father is queer," contributed their hostess.
They dropped the subject after a while without getting a step further
than when they started. But they didn't drop gossip. Dinghal, with his
broken nose, would have been in his element at Bellingdown. But he was
still in Umballa, suffering tortures from catarrh.
"Caryll Carleigh's to be married on the twelfth." Lady Kitty flung the
announcement to Lady Charlotte.
"So soon?"
"Yes. They've hurried it, because the girl's mother, who is the most
restless of mortals, wants to go to China or somewhere. She's just back
now from Egypt. Her daughter was with friends at Capri for the winter.
That's where Caryll met her. They are Americans, you know."
"So I heard. I do hope Caryll will be happy; but it is a risk. Americans
are always divorcing. They're so lacking in repose."
"He tells me she's adorable."
"Oh, of course. Still he might, don't you think, have done better at
home? English girls fit in so much better."
"I dare say. But one never could advise Caryll. He's most exasperatingly
headstrong." The young baronet was her nephew and she knew.
"I've met Mrs. Veynol and her filly," Waltheof put in. It was after
dinner, and he had been sipping liqueurs and smoking cigarettes alone in
the dining-hall. "She's exasperatingly headstrong, too. Not my choice
for a mother-in-law."
Lady Bellingdown twisted her long neck to give him a smile. He was
behind her chair as usual. "Caryll never met Mrs. Veynol until a week
ago. It was all arranged by correspondence," she said.
"Who was Veynol?" asked Charlotte Grey. "It seems to me I've heard the
name, but--"
"South African diamond man. She married him after a week's acquaintance
at Cape Town, and he died in five months and left her a Mrs. Croesus,"
Waltheof made clear. "The girl calls herself Veynol, too, but that isn't
her name, of course."
"Americans hold their names so lightly, don't they?" observed Charlotte.
"George says they change them at the drop of the hat."
"Due principally to the divorce courts and the bankruptcy laws,"
explained the man illuminatingly. "They're a rum lot out there."
He had never been to America; but the average Briton invariably assumes
a wisdom if he has it not, especially when conversing with the dependent
sex.
As events turned out, however, Rosamond Veynol didn't change her name
again on the twelfth of April. For some reason which was not altogether
made clear the wedding was postponed.
The published report was that Miss Veynol was ill, but Miss Veynol was
not ill in the least, as a number of eye-witnesses who saw her in Paris,
where she was temporarily residing, stood ready to prove.
There was no end of question, naturally, and there was no end of gossip.
This condition lasted for three months. And then, to society's intense
surprise, it received invitations for the nuptial ceremony at St.
Margaret's, Westminster, and for the wedding breakfast at Mrs. Veynol's
recently leased establishment in Park Lane.
Lady Bellingdown was up in town for the express purpose of selecting a
wedding gift, in which Lord Waltheof had kindly volunteered to
assist--"Donty-Down," her lord and master, being in Paris just
then--when she chanced upon Nina Darling coming out of a shop in New
Bond Street and looking absolutely radiant.
"The widow without a sorrow!" she exclaimed, grasping both her hands and
kissing her through her veil. "I called you that the other day, and now
I see how well it suits you."
"If it was the other day you were wrong," Nina returned. "But to-day you
are right. I feel as free as the robins in St. James's Park. I have just
sent the most importunate of Austrian archdukes about his business, and
I breathe freely for the first time in six weeks."
"My dear, you are incorrigible. Aren't you ever going to make some
deserving man happy?"
"There is no such animal," declared this outrageous flirt. "I am a
righteously avenging Nemesis. I dispense to man his just deserts."
"You are _la belle dame sans merci_."
"Tell me of Nibbetts, Mrs. Darling," Waltheof cut in suggestively. "I've
not seen him in months."
"Nor I," replied Nina. "He's been in Dundee. I hear he's in love with a
Scotch lassie. I suspect she's a marmalade-maker."
"Really!" exclaimed the tame cat, taking her seriously. "Too devilish
bad!"
"Yes. Isn't it? Fancy how tired he must get of smelling orange peel
every time he kisses her hand!" She made a grimace and turned back to
Kitty Bellingdown. "You didn't come up for the season? Why?"
"I've been wretched. So upset over Caryll's affair. I hadn't the heart
to face any one. But now it's all quite straightened out, you know, and
I'm so glad for the boy's sake."
"Do tell me what it was," Nina urged. "I heard the mother fell in love
with him and was jealous of the girl."
"No, it wasn't that," was the non-committal reply.
"Odd, but I haven't seen Caryll since we were kiddies. How has he grown?
Handsome?"
"Oh, very. A sweet boy. He'd make any woman happy."
"Then he's a phenomenon. I wish I might have met him."
Waltheof laughed. "He seems to have had trouble enough," he said.
But Sir Caryll Carleigh's troubles weren't over by any means. At the
last minute the wedding invitations were recalled and the presents
returned. A fortnight later his aunt received from him the following
letter, dated from a village in Perthshire:
DEAR AUNT KITTY: I'm up here spearing salmon and all that sort of
thing, don't you know, and trying to forget. It was a beastly
cropper--this wedding mess--and I've gone to pieces over it, for I
did love Rosamond awfully. Such a ripping girl! Twenty thousand a
year in her own right, too, left her by that diamond chap, just for
taking his rotting name. Sounds like a disinfectant or some chemist
stuff to me. Veynol. Pah!
However, she decided at the last minute that she liked it better
than Carleigh, and there you are. And here am I, most fearfully cut
up. I'll never get over it. I jolly well know I sha'n't. It is a
sickener, I can tell you, and I'm thinking strongly of going in for
the church--joining some order or brotherhood or some such silly
old thing.
One thing I am sure of. I'll never look a woman in the face again.
I hate the whole bally lot. Of course, you're not in this, you
know--for you have been a good sort all through. Regular top-hole,
you are. But I mean other women--girls--and all that rubbishy lot.
And now, dearest and best of aunties, I've a favor to ask. This
mess-up, you know, has cost me a pretty penny, and the truth is,
I'm stony. Do send me a tenner by return of post. I'll pay you back
when I sell the engagement ring. It's ripping. It is really.
Your affectionate but heart-broken nephew,
CARYLL.