A BUSINESS CONVERSATION
Edith, who was not an early riser, breakfasted in her own room. At
half-past nine on the morning following Rupert’s arrival the maid as
usual brought up her tray, a newspaper—the _Morning Post_—and three
letters. Two of these were of a sort with which she was very familiar,
unpaid millinery bills, but the third was addressed in Lord Devene’s
unmistakable handwriting, that was of as hard and uncompromising an
appearance as his own face. Throwing aside the bills with a shrug of her
rounded shoulders, she opened her noble relative’s epistle. It was brief
and to the point:
Dear Edith,—Come round after breakfast if you can. I shall be in till
10.45, and wish to speak to you.—
Yours,
Devene.
“Bother!” she said, as she laid it down. “I shall have to scurry through
my dressing and take a cab. Well, he must pay for it. I wonder what he
wants.”
Lord Devene now lived at Grosvenor Square. Even in the minds of the most
progressive latter-day agnostics primeval superstitions are apt to
linger. Perhaps it was some sentiment of the sort which causes an
African savage to burn the hut where a death has occurred and build
himself a new one, that induced Lord Devene to sell the Portland Place
house after the tragic decease of his first wife, at far below its
value, and buy himself another, though it is fair to add that the reason
he gave for the transaction was the state of the domestic drains.
However this may have been, Lady Devene Number Two never slept in the
haunted chamber of Lady Devene Number One.
At 10.46 precisely Edith paid off her cab at the spacious steps of the
Grosvenor Square mansion.
“Is Lord Devene in?” she asked of the butler, the same quiet, dark
individual who had filled the office years ago in Portland Place.
“Yes, Miss Bonnythorne,” he answered respectfully; “but I was just
brushing his hat,” and he glanced doubtfully at the clock.
“Show me in, Talbot; he wishes to see me,” she said, and Talbot bowed in
acquiescence.
Although no orders had been given to that effect, it was understood in
this establishment that what Miss Bonnythorne desired was to be done.
A few seconds later she was ushered into the long library behind the
dining-room, at the end of which Lord Devene was engaged in stamping a
letter on a beautiful buhl writing-table near the window.
“Ah! my dear Edith,” he said, in his hard, clear voice, as she glided
slowly towards him, “you are only just in time. Another half-minute and
I should have been gone.”
“Half a minute is as good as a century,” she answered. “Lots of things
can happen in half a minute, Cousin George. One might die in it, for
instance.”
“Yes,” he replied, “or be born, which is worse, or commit a murder, or
engage oneself to be married, or as you justly remark, do lots of
things. Life is made up of half-minutes, isn’t it—most of them very bad
ones,” and he looked at her and smiled that peculiar smile of his which
never seemed to get away from the region of his mouth. Pleasant-natured
people generally smile with their eyes, others of a different character
from their lips alone, like a dog, which is apt to give a sarcastic air
to that variable and modified expression of inward satisfaction.
Lord Devene had changed a good deal since last we met him. Then he was
sandy-coloured, now he had become grey; indeed his peaked beard was
quite white. The wrinkles upon his face also had deepened very much, and
even in that not over-lighted room black crow’s-feet were visible
beneath his quick, restless eyes. Advancing age had laid its hand upon
him although he was barely sixty-three. Also, he had lost something of
his old defiant air; his iron will and resolution seemed to have
weakened beneath the attacks of circumstance. He hesitated sometimes and
looked at the other side of an argument; he was less sure of his deduced
facts, less resolute in their application to his private affairs.
“You look tired,” said Edith, as he came forward and kissed her cool,
pink cheek.
“Tired!” he exclaimed, with something like a groan and sinking into a
chair. “Would you not be tired if you had scarcely closed your eyes for
three nights? Edith, I can’t sleep, and I don’t know what is to be the
end of it, I don’t indeed.”
She threw an anxious glance at him, for these two, notwithstanding the
difference of their age and sex, were bound together by strong ties of
sympathy, and she was really grieved that he should be ill.
“I am so sorry,” she said, in a gentle voice. “Insomnia is a terrible
nuisance, but don’t trouble yourself too much about it, the fit will
pass off.”
“Yes,” he answered grimly, “it will pass off, because I shall take drugs
this evening. I always do the fourth night, though I hate them.”
“Those stuffs sometimes lead to accidents, Cousin George,” replied
Edith, pretending to be absorbed in tracing the flowers of the carpet
with the point of her umbrella, but really watching his weary face from
beneath her long eyelashes.
“Yes, they sometimes lead to accidents,” he repeated after her, “as I
have good reason to know. But after all, accidents are not always
undesirable. I daresay that life still seems a very pleasant thing to
you, Edith, yet others may think differently.”
“You ought not to, Cousin George, with your position and wealth.”
“I am old enough to know, Edith, that position and wealth, which you
rate so highly, do not necessarily spell happiness, or even content.
After all, what am I? A rich peer at whose name old women and clergymen
turn up their eyes, they don’t quite know why, and whom men are afraid
of because I can say sharp things—just one of the very common crowd of
rich peers, no more. Then for my private life. Nothing interests me now;
like the Roman Emperor I can’t find a new excitement, even horse-racing
and high stakes bore me. And at home, you know what it is. Well, I am
not the first man who has bought a cow and found that she can butt—and
bellow.”
Edith smiled, for the vigour of the allusion tickled her.
“You know my one hope,” he went on, almost with passion, “or if you
don’t, you are old enough and have brains enough to understand. I wanted
sons sprung from a quiet, solid stock, sons who could make some good use
of all this trash of titles and of riches which it is too late for me to
do myself; men who would bear an honourable name and do honourable
deeds, not fritter away their youth in pleasures as I did, or in what I
took for pleasures, their manhood in the pursuit of idle philosophies
that lead nowhere, and the accumulation of useless cash, and their old
age in regrets and apprehensions. I wanted sons, it was my one ambition,
but—” and he waved his hand through the empty air—“where are my sons?”
Now Edith knew Lord Devene to be a hard man where his interests were
concerned, wicked even, as the word is generally understood, as for
instance, Mrs. Ullershaw would understand it. Thus he would gibe at
morality and all established ideas, and of every form of religion make
an open mock. Yet at this moment there was something so pathetic, so
tragic even, about his aspect and attitude, that her heart, none of the
softest, ached for him. It was evident to her that his cold, calculated
system of life had utterly broken down, that he was exceedingly
unhappy—in fact, a complete failure; that although, as he had so often
demonstrated, there exists nothing in the world beyond the outward and
visible, of which our brain and bodies are a part, yet strong as he was
that nothing had been too much for him. He was conquered by a shadow,
and in its effects at least that shadow seemed very like the real and
solid thing which some folk call Fate, and others the Hand of God. The
idea disturbed Edith, it was unpleasant, as sickness and the thought of
death are unpleasant. Therefore, after the fashion of her nature, she
fled from it, and to turn the subject put the first question that came
into her mind:
“How is Tabitha to-day?”
Instantly all pathos, with the touch of dignity that was bred of it,
left him and he began to sneer.
“Thank you; that noble and exalted haus-frau appears to be very well.
Having paid her morning visit to the kitchen and scolded the cook for
extravagance until, I regret to say, she gave notice, she is now seated
in her dressing-gown reading a holy German work upon predestination,
from which she has been so good as to translate to me some passages that
appeared to her to bear directly upon my spiritual future. But I didn’t
send for you to talk about my wife and her grotesque views. Rupert
Ullershaw is back, is he not?”
She nodded.
“Tell me about him. What is he like?”
“Tall, strong, handsome in a kind of way, except for his untidy hair and
the lines upon his brow, which make him look as though he had been
trying to solve an acrostic for ten years, old looking for his age,
awkward in his manner and slow of speech.”
“A good portrait,” he said approvingly, “of the outside. Now for the
in.”
Edith rubbed her forehead, as was her manner when deliberating.
“That’s hard,” she answered, “for how can one describe what one doesn’t
understand? But I’ll try just to get him into my mind as I see him. I
think—well, I think that he is very much the sort of man you said just
now you would like your sons to be, if you had any.”
Lord Devene started as though something had pricked him.
“I beg pardon,” Edith added hurriedly. “I mean that he is thoroughly
industrious, conscientious, religious, and all the other good ‘ouses.’
Would you believe it? After he had gone to bed last night, he came
downstairs in an old ulster and undid a great box with a rope round it
in order to get a Bible out. I heard the noise, and thinking one of the
servants must be ill, or something, went to see what was the matter.
There at 2.30 a.m. I met him on the stairs in that costume, and a queer
couple we must have looked. I asked him what on earth he was doing with
the luggage. Thereon he calmly explained that by mistake he put his
Bible into the trunk he had in his cabin, and that as he did not like to
disturb me to borrow one at that time of night he had to go to find it,
and he showed me a large, frayed book which had been rebound, by himself
he remarked, with a deer’s skin. He added gravely that it was his custom
always to read a portion of the Scriptures—that’s what he said—before
going to bed, that he hadn’t missed doing so for years and wasn’t going
to now. I answered that was what I called true religion, and we parted.
I didn’t tell him how glad I was that he hadn’t knocked me up and asked
for a Bible, for upon my word, I don’t know where I should have found
one.”
Lord Devene laughed heartily, for Edith’s description of the scene
tickled his sense of humour.
“Why,” he said, “he ought to have married Tabitha,” “there would have
been a pair of them. I expect they will get on capitally together, as—”
and he checked himself, then added, “What an uncommonly queer fish he
must be, though he wasn’t always such a model youth. Well, whether
because of the Bible or in spite of it, Master Rupert has done very
well. He is a man with a career before him; there is no doubt of that—a
career, and in all probability,” and he sighed, “other things, for no
one can do without sleep for ever.”
She nodded her head again, but said nothing, seeing that there was more
to come.
“Is this military saint married by any chance?” he asked.
“Oh, no! certainly not.”
“Or engaged?”
“Not in the least, I imagine. I should say that he has scarcely spoken
to a woman for years. He seems so—so—”
“Is innocent the word you were looking for? Well, so much the better.
Look here, Edith, you’ve got to marry him.”
She made a droll little face and answered:
“This is very sudden—isn’t that the right thing to say? But might I ask
why?”
“For two reasons. Because it is to your interest, and, a better one
still, because I wish it.”
“Let me see,” said Edith. “What are you and I to each other? Second
cousins once removed, I think?”
“Yes; second cousins once removed, and more—friends,” he answered, with
slow emphasis.
“Well, has a second cousin once removed and a friend the right to tell a
woman whom she must marry?”
“Certainly, under the circumstances. This fellow will probably be my
heir; I must face that fact, for Tabitha will scarcely get over those
habits of hers now—at any rate, the doctors don’t think so. So I wish
him to marry someone for whom I have affection, especially as I expect
that notwithstanding his religious tomfooleries, etc., he is the sort of
man who makes a good husband.”
“And supposing the doctors are wrong about Tabitha?” asked Edith calmly,
for these two did not shrink from plain speaking.
“If so, you must still be provided for, and, my dear Edith, allow me to
remark that you are not quite a chicken, and, for some cause or other,
have not provided for yourself so far.”
“I don’t think I should live in any great luxury on Rupert’s pay,” she
suggested, “even if he were willing to share it with me.”
“Perhaps not; but on the day of your wedding with him I pay to the
account of your trustees £25,000, and there may be more, whatever
happens—when I get to sleep at last.”
“That is very kind and generous of you, Cousin George,” she answered,
with sincerity, “and I’m sure I don’t know why you should do it—for a
second cousin once removed. But why on my wedding-day with Rupert
particularly?”
“I have told you, because I wish it, and why not with him? Do you
dislike the man?”
She shrugged her shoulders. “I have not fallen in love; I am not given
that way.”
He looked her straight in the eyes.
“No,” he answered, “because you have always been ‘in love,’ as you call
it, with that rascal Dick. Now, don’t trouble to fence with me, for I
know. Dick can be communicative at times—after dinner.”
Edith did not try to fence, only she said, with some bitterness and
colouring a little:
“Then that’s the worst thing I have heard about him yet, which is saying
a good deal.”
“Yes; never trust a man who brags of his conquests. Listen, Edith! I
help Dick because he amuses me, and is useful. That’s why I am going to
make him a member of Parliament. Now I can’t prevent your marrying him,
if you like, and are fool enough, which to me is inconceivable. But if
you do, out goes Dick, and there will be no £25,000 paid to your
trustees.”
“That’s rather hard, isn’t it, Cousin George?”
“No; it is merciful. Edith, I will not allow you to marry that
worthless, unstable scamp of a fellow if I can help it, and for your own
sake, because I am fond of you.”
“I never said I wanted to marry him.”
“No; but because of him you don’t want to marry anybody else, which
comes to much the same thing, so far as your future is concerned.”
She thought a little while, rubbing her forehead as before, then
replied:
“Well, all this is very clear and outspoken, but I suppose that you
don’t expect an answer at once. Remember that Rupert himself may have
views. He is quite the sort of man who will not marry at all, on
principle. Also, you only have my account to go on, you have not seen
him yet since he was a boy. When you have, you may cease to think this
proposed—arrangement—desirable.”
“Quite true,” he answered. “You have a very logical mind. Bring him to
dinner here to-night, and we will talk the matter over again in a few
days’ time.”
Edith rose to go, but he stopped her.
“How is your banking account?” he asked.
“For all practical purposes I believe it has ceased to exist,” she
answered gravely, for the matter was one which really troubled her.
He smiled, and taking his book from a drawer, filled in a cheque.
“There,” he said; “that may help to keep the wolf from the door for a
little while, and I daresay you want some dresses.”
Edith looked at the cheque; it was for £250.
“You really are very kind to me,” she said, “and whoever may dislike
you, I don’t. I love you.”
“Me or the money?” he asked, lifting his eyebrows.
“You, you,” she answered, then kissed him and went away.
“I think,” reflected Lord Devene to himself, as the door closed behind
her, “this is almost the first time for over twenty years I ever heard
anybody say that to me who meant it. She must marry Rupert; it is her
great chance in life, and hasn’t she as much right to these good things
as that pious bear.”