The clever author of "Mine is Thine" lays it down as an axiom that
nothing so completely transforms the average sensible man into a
consummate idiot for the time being as an _arriere pensee_; and it is an
axiom the soundness of which all observation goes to prove.
Geoffry Vallance, if not passing brilliant, was endowed with average
sense and more than average assurance, yet when he found himself seated
opposite Yseulte at the luncheon table in accordance with that young
lady's father's impromptu invitation, his wits were somewhat befogged.
Not to put too fine a point upon it, he was distressingly conscious of
feeling an ass, and, worse still, of looking one. His conversation,
normally lucid, and, like the brook, apt to "go on for ever," was now a
little incoherent, jerky, and limited in area; his demeanour, normally
self-possessed, not to say a trifle assertive, was now constrained,
spasmodic, and painfully apprehensive of saying or doing the wrong
thing.
The poor fellow was over head and ears in love, which blissful state
developed a new phase in his character--a self-consciousness and a
diffidence which no one would have suspected to lie hidden there. Eager
to show at his best in the eyes of Yseulte and her father, he, of course
showed at his worst. It never occurred to him--it does not to most men
under the circumstances--that heroic qualities are not essential to the
adequate looking after of multifold dress baskets and hand luggage at
the railway station or on board the Channel packet; that a Greek profile
is hardly requisite to the unmurmuring liquidation of milliners' bills,
or the torso of a Milo to the deft fulfilment of the _role_ of domestic
poodle. These considerations did not occur to him, but a wretched
consciousness of his own deficiencies in appearance and attainments did,
and now to this was added the recollection of that ridiculous position
they had seen him in only a day or two ago, and which had lain heavily
on his mind ever since.
"Too great a fool ever to be a knave" had been Mr Santorex's dictum,
not meaning thereby that Geoffry was a dunce or a blockhead, the fact
being that he was a hard reader and expected to take high honours at the
end of the ensuing term. But in other matters, field sports and real
_savoir vivre_, he was something of a duffer. Yet though father and
daughter disliked the residue of the house of Vallance, they entertained
a sort of good-humoured kindness towards Geoffry, who was at worst a
muff, and good-natured, and with no harm in him. And of this feeling
poor Geoffry had an inkling.
A little chaff about Muggins' bull, and Yseulte, seeing that the topic
was distressful to the hero of the adventure, good-naturedly turned it;
for in spite of her previously expressed disinclination for showing any
civility towards the Vallances that day, she seemed quite to have
forgiven them as far as Geoffry was concerned, and was as kind to him as
ever. The plant, by the way, which had served as pretext for this
visit, was a fraud of the first water, but Mr Santorex, while showing
its worthlessness as a specimen, had not only spared, but even
flattered, the feelings of the donor, for, thorough cynic as he was at
heart, in his practice he was a very tolerant man where the wretched
little tricks and subterfuges of mediocrity in distress were concerned,
always provided that these were not intended to serve as a cloak to
knavery. When they were, his merciless predilection for, and powers of,
dissection had full indulgence.
The hereditary searing-iron must have found place in his daughter's
composition, though untempered by the experience of years and maturity.
For there was something of feline cruelty in the way in which, when
luncheon was over, she lured poor Geoffry out into the garden, talking
serenely in that beautifully modulated voice of hers, as, every action
full of unconscious grace, she bent down to pluck a flower here, or
raise a drooping plant there; or looking up into his face now and then
with such a straight glance out of her grand eyes as to make the poor
fellow fairly tremble with bewilderment, and stammer and stutter in his
attempts to express himself, until he was pitiable to behold. But
though ashamed of the impulse, Yseulte was unable wholly to resist it.
This poor-spirited adorer of hers--was he not standing in another's
place, smugly enjoying and thriving upon what had been reft from its
rightful owner by a pitiful and underhanded trick--a trick which, though
legally permissible, was morally as complete an act of deliberate fraud
as any for which men were sent into penal servitude? That photograph,
you see, had fired a new train of thought in the girl's adventurous
mind. It was a splendid face, that which looked at her from the bit of
faded cardboard. Its strong, reckless expression had seemed to haunt
her ever since. She had never seen anything like it. And it was that
of an injured and ill-used man; a man, too, with a vein of real heroism
running through his character, and therefore unlike other men; for had
not her father expressed his conviction that this man was suffering
wrongfully, was a beggar for life, rather than speak the word which
should inculpate someone else? She looked at her stuttering, flurried
admirer there present, and turned away to hide a contemptuous curl of
the lip; she thought of the defrauded and absent one--whose place he had
usurped--wandering destitute over the earth, and her feelings were
strangely stirred. Yet the former she knew well, his failings and his
good points; the latter she had only seen in a portrait--and an old and
faded portrait at that. Was she going to fall in love with an old and
faded portrait? Well, it was beginning to look uncommonly as if she
might.
Geoffry was on tenterhooks. They were alone, and likely so to be left
for some little while longer at any rate. Should he try his fate?
Anything was better than this suspense. He would.
Alas for the defeat of praiseworthy enterprise! The words would not
come. He pounced upon a flower which Yseulte had been toying with and
had thrown down, and while stuttering over the discarded blossom as a
preliminary, a well-known and silky voice behind the pair made him start
and redden like a child detected in the forbidden jam-cupboard.
"Ah, there you are, Geoffry. We thought you were being well taken care
of by our good friends here, so we didn't wait lunch for you. How are
you, Yseulte? My young people will be here soon. I left them on the
road, or just starting."
It is doubtful whether Geoffry's feelings towards his sire were
affectionate just then. Yseulte, however, felt that the latter's
presence was rather welcome. Her adorer's embarrassment portended
something she preferred to avoid. So she welcomed the reverend squire
quite cordially.
A gleam of colour on the lawn and the sound of voices betokened the
arrival of the rest of the family, and lo--Lucy and Agnes and Cecilia
and Anastasia, tennis-racquet in hand and arrayed in white flannels or
scarlet flannels, or blue flannels, and crowned with hats of stupendous
dimensions. They were all fair, blue-eyed girls, passable-looking if
somewhat expressionless, very much alike, and numbering just a year
apiece between their ages.
No great cordiality existed between these young ladies and Yseulte
Santorex, as we have said; still, society has its duties, and leaving
the latter to fulfil the provisions of this threadbare truism on the
sunny lawn at Elmcote, wave we our magic wand to transport the reader to
a very different scene.