The book Miss Farrow held in her hand was an amusing book, the latest
volume of some rather lively French memoirs, but she put it down after a
very few moments, and, leaning forward, held out her hands to the fire.
They were not pretty hands: though small and well-shaped, there was
something just a little claw-like about them; but they were very white,
and her almond-shaped nails, admirably manicured, gleamed in the soft
red light.
Yes, in spite of this stupid little _contretemps_ about Pegler, she was
glad indeed that circumstances over which she had had rather more
control than she liked to think had made it impossible for her to go out
to Monte Carlo this winter. She had been sharply vexed, beside herself
with annoyance, almost tempted to do what she had never yet done--that
is, to ask Lionel Varick, now so delightfully prosperous, to lend her a
couple of hundred pounds. But she had resisted the impulse, and she was
now glad of it.
After all, there's no place like dear old England at Christmas time. How
much nicer, too, is a bachelor host than a hostess! A bachelor host? No,
not exactly a bachelor host, for Lionel Varick was a widower. Twice a
widower, if the truth were known. But the truth, fortunately, is not
always known, and Blanche Farrow doubted if any other member of the
circle of friends and acquaintances he had picked up in his
adventurous, curious life knew of that first--now evidently by him
almost forgotten--marriage. It had taken place years ago, when Varick
was still a very young man, and to a woman not of his own class. They
had separated, and then, rather oddly, come together again. Even so, her
premature death had been for him a fortunate circumstance.
It was not Varick who had told Blanche Farrow of that painful episode of
his past life. The story had come to her knowledge in a curious,
accidental fashion, and she had thought it only fair to tell him what
she had learned--and then, half reluctantly, he had revealed something
of what he had suffered through that early act of folly. But they had
only spoken of it once.
Varick's second marriage, Miss Farrow was almost tempted to call it his
real marriage, the news of which he had conveyed to his good friend in a
laconic note, had surprised her very much.
The news had found her far away, in Portugal, where, as just a few
English people know, there is more than one Casino where mild gambling
can be pursued under pleasant conditions. Blanche Farrow would have been
hurt if someone had told her that in far-away Portugal Lionel Varick and
his affairs had not meant quite so much to her as they would have done
if she had been nearer home. Still, she had felt a pang. A man-friend
married is often a man-friend marred. But she had been very glad to
gather, reading between the lines of his note, that the lady in question
was well off. Varick was one of those men to whom the possession of
money is as essential to life as the air they breathe is to most human
beings. Till this unexpected second marriage of his he had often been
obliged to live on, and by, his wits.
Then, some months later--for she and Varick were not given to writing to
one another when apart, their friendship had never been of that
texture--she had received a sad letter from him saying that his wife was
seriously ill. The letter had implied, too, that he ought to have been
told, before the marriage had taken place, that his wife's family had
been one riddled with consumption. Blanche had written back at once--by
that time she was a good deal nearer home than Portugal, though still
abroad--asking if she could "do anything?" And he had answered that no,
there was nothing to be done. "Poor Milly" had a horror of sanatoriums,
so he was going to take her to some quiet place on the south coast. He
had ended his note with the words: "I do not think it can last long now,
and I rather hope it won't. It is very painful for her, as well as for
me." And it had not lasted very long. Seven weeks later Miss Farrow had
read in the first column of the _Times_ the announcement: "Millicent,
only daughter of the late George Fauncey, of Wyndfell Hall, Suffolk, and
the beloved wife of Lionel Varick."
She had been surprised at the addition of the word "beloved." Somehow it
was not like the man she thought she knew so well to put that word in.
That was just over a year ago. But when she had met Varick again she had
seen with real relief that he was quite unchanged--those brief months of
wedded life had not apparently altered him at all. There was, however,
one great difference--he was quite at ease about money. That was
all--but that was a great deal! Blanche Farrow and Lionel Varick had at
any rate one thing in common--they both felt a horror of poverty, and
all that poverty implies.
Gradually Miss Farrow had discovered a few particulars about her
friend's dead wife. Millicent Fauncey had been the only child of a
rather eccentric Suffolk squire, a man of great taste, known in the art
world of London as a collector of fine Jacobean furniture, long before
Jacobean furniture had become the rage. After her father's death his
daughter, having let Wyndfell Hall, had wandered about the world with a
companion till she had drifted across her future husband's path at an
hotel in Florence.
"What attracted me," Lionel Varick had explained rather awkwardly on the
only occasion when he had really talked of his late wife to Blanche
Farrow, "was her helplessness, and, yes, a kind of simplicity."
Blanche had looked at him a little sharply. She had never known Lionel
attracted by weakness or simplicity before. All women seemed attracted
by him--but he was by no means attracted by all women.
"Poor Milly didn't care for Wyndfell Hall," he had gone on, "for she
spent a very lonely, dull girlhood there. But it's a delightful place,
and I hope to live there as soon as I can get the people out to whom it
is now let. 'Twon't be an easy job, for they're devoted to it."
Of course he had got them out very soon, for, as Blanche Farrow now
reminded herself, Lionel Varick had an extraordinary power of getting
his own way, in little and big things alike.
It was uncommonly nice of Lionel to have asked her to be informal
hostess of his first house party! Unluckily it was an oddly composed
party, not so happily chosen as it might have been, and she wondered
uneasily whether it would be a success. She had never met three of the
people who were coming to-night--a Mr. and Miss Burnaby, an
old-fashioned and, she gathered, well-to-do brother and sister, and
their niece, Helen Brabazon. Miss Brabazon had been an intimate friend,
Miss Farrow understood the only really intimate friend, of Lionel
Varick's late wife. He had spoken of this girl, Helen Brabazon, with
great regard and liking--with rather more regard and liking than he
generally spoke of any woman.
"She was most awfully kind to me during that dreadful time at Redsands,"
he had said only yesterday. And Blanche had understood the "dreadful
time" referred to the last weeks of his wife's life. "I've been to the
Burnabys' house a few times, and I've dined there twice--an infamously
bad cook, but very good wine--you know the sort of thing?"
Remembering that remark, Blanche now asked herself why Lionel had
included these tiresome, old-fashioned people in his party. Then she
told herself that it was doubtless because the niece, who lived with
them, couldn't leave them to a solitary Christmas.
Another guest who was not likely to add much in the way of entertainment
to the party was an enormously rich man called James Tapster. Tapster
was a cynical, rather unpleasant person, yet on one occasion he had
helped Varick out of a disagreeable scrape.
If the host had had his way there would also have been in the party a
certain Dr. Panton. But at the last moment he had had to "chuck." There
was a hope, however, that he might be able to come after Christmas. Dr.
Panton was also associated with the late Mrs. Varick. He had attended
her during the last long weeks of her life.
Blanche Farrow's face unconsciously brightened as she remembered Sir
Lyon Dilsford. He was an intelligent, impecunious, pleasant kind of man,
still, like his host, on the sunny side of forty. Sir Lyon was "in the
City," as are now so many men of his class and kind. He took his work
seriously, and spent many hours of each day east of Temple Bar. By way
of relaxation he helped to run an Oxford College East-End Settlement. "A
good chap,"--that was how Blanche summed him up to herself.
Lionel had asked her if she could think of any young people to ask, and
she had suggested, with some hesitation, her own niece, Bubbles Dunster,
and Bubbles' favourite dancing partner, a young man called Bill
Donnington. Bubbles had arrived at Wyndfell Hall two days ago.
Donnington had not been able to leave London till to-day.
Bubbles? Blanche Farrow's brows knit themselves as she thought of her
niece, namesake, and godchild.
Bubbles was a strange girl, but then so many girls are strange nowadays!
Though an only child, and the apple of her widowed father's eyes, she
had deliberately left her home two years ago, and set up for herself in
London, nominally to study art. At once she had become a great
success--the kind of success that counts nowadays. Bubbles' photograph
was always appearing in the _Sketch_ and in the _Daily Mirror_. She was
constantly roped in to help in any smart charity affair, and she could
dance, act, and sell, with the best. She was as popular with women as
with men, for there was something disarming, attaching, almost elfish,
in Bubbles Dunster's charm. For one thing, she was so good-natured, so
kindly, so always eager to do someone a good turn--and last, not least,
she had inherited her aunt's cleverness about clothes! She dressed in a
way which Blanche Farrow thought ridiculously _outré_ and queer, but
still, somehow, she always looked well-dressed. And though she had never
been taught dressmaking, she could make her own clothes when put to it,
and was always willing to help other people with theirs.
Hugh Dunster, Bubbles' father, did not often favour his sister-in-law
with a letter, but she had had a letter from him three days ago, of
which the most important passage ran: "I understand that Bubbles is
going to spend Christmas with you. I wish you'd say a word to her about
all this spiritualistic rot. She seems to be getting deeper and deeper
into it. It's impairing her looks, making her nervous and almost
hysterical--in a word, quite unlike herself. I spoke to her some time
ago, and desired her most earnestly to desist from it. But a father has
no power nowadays! I have talked the matter over with young Donnington
(of whom I sometimes suspect she is fonder than she knows), and he quite
agrees with me. After all, she's a child still, and doesn't realize what
_vieux jeu_ all that sort of thing is. I insisted on reading to her
'Sludge, the Medium,' but it made no impression on her! In a sense I've
only myself to thank, for I used to amuse myself in testing her amazing
thought-reading powers when she was a little girl."
Bubbles had now been at Wyndfell Hall two whole days, and so far her
aunt had said nothing to her. Somehow she felt a certain shyness of
approaching the subject. In so far as she had ever thought about it--and
she had never really thought about it at all--Miss Farrow regarded all
that she knew of spiritualism as a gigantic fraud. It annoyed her
fastidiousness to think that her own niece should be in any way
associated with that kind of thing. She realized the temptation it must
offer to a clever girl who, as her father truly said, had had as a child
an uncanny power of thought-reading, and of "willing" people to do what
she liked.
Blanche Farrow smiled and sighed as she stared into the fire. How the
world had changed! She could not imagine her own father, though he had
been far less conventional than was Hugh Dunster, talking her over with
a young man.
Poor Bill Donnington! Of course he was devoted to Bubbles--her slave, in
fact. Blanche had only seen him once; she had thought him sensible,
undistinguished, commonplace. She knew that he was the third or fourth
son of a worthy North-country parson--in other words, he "hadn't a bob."
He was, of course, the last man Bubbles would ever think of marrying.
Bubbles, like most of her set, was keenly alive to the value of money.
Bubbles, as likely as not, would make a set, half in fun, half in
earnest, at James Tapster!
To tell the truth, Miss Farrow had not forgotten Bubbles when she had
assented to Lionel Varick's suggestion that rich, if dull-witted, James
Tapster should be included in the party.
* * * * *
In what was called the moat garden of Wyndfell Hall, twilight was
deepening into night. But Lionel Varick, who was now pacing up and down
the broad path which followed the course of the moat, could still see,
sharply outlined against the pale winter sky, the vision of tranquil
beauty and the storehouse of archaeological and antiquarian interest
which was now his home.
By his special orders the windows had been left uncurtained. There were
lights in a great number of the rooms--indeed, the lower part of the
house was brilliantly illuminated. But as the windows in the beautiful
linen-panelled hall were diamond-paned, the brilliance was softened, and
there was something deliriously welcoming, almost fairy-like, in the
picture the old house presented to its new owner's eager gaze.
After a while he stayed his steps near the narrow brick bridge which
spanned the moat where a carriage road connected the domain of Wyndfell
Hall with the outside world, and, as he stood there in the gathering
twilight, he looked a romantic figure. Tall and well-built, he took,
perhaps, an almost excessive care over his dress. Yet there was nothing
effeminate or foppish about his appearance.
A follower of that now forgotten science, phrenology, would have been
impressed by Lionel Varick's head. It was large and well-shaped, with a
great deal of almost golden hair, now showing a white thread or two,
which did not, however, detract from his look of youth. He had a fine
broad forehead; deep, well-set grey eyes; and a beautiful, sensitive
mouth, which he took care not to conceal with a moustache. Thus in
almost any company he would have looked striking and distinguished--the
sort of man of whom people ask, "Who is that standing over there?"
Varick was a man of moods--subject, that is, to fits of exultation and
of depression--and yet with an amazing power of self-control, and of
entirely hiding what he felt from those about him.
To-night his mood was one of exultation. He almost felt what Scots call
"fey." Something seemed to tell him that he was within reach of the
fruition of desires which, even in his most confident moments, had
appeared till now wildly out of any possibility of attainment. He came,
on both his father's and his mother's side, of people who had lived for
centuries the secure, pleasant life of the English county gentry. But
instead of taking advantage of their opportunities, the Varicks had gone
not upwards, but steadily downwards--the final crash having been owing
to the folly, indeed the far more than folly, as Lionel Varick had come
to know when still a child, of his own father.
Lionel's father had not lived long after his disgraceful bankruptcy. But
he had had time to imbue his boy with an intense pride in the past
glories of the Varick family. So it was that the shabby, ugly little
villa where his boyhood had been spent on the outskirts of a town famous
for its grammar-school, and where his mother settled for her boy's sake
after her husband's death, had been peopled to young Varick with visions
of just such a country home as was this wonderful old house now before
him.
No wonder he felt "fey" to-night. Everything was falling out as he had
hoped it would do. He had staked very high--staked, indeed, all that a
man can stake in our complex civilization, and he had won! In the whole
wide world there was only one human being who wished him ill. This was
an elderly woman, named Julia Pigchalke, who had been his late wife's
one-time governess and companion. She had been his enemy from the first
day they had met, and she had done her utmost to prevent his marriage to
her employer. Even now, in spite of what poor Milly's own solicitor
called his "thoughtful generosity" to Miss Pigchalke, the woman was
pursuing Varick with an almost insane hatred. About six months ago she
had called on Dr. Panton, the clever young medical man who had attended
poor Mrs. Varick during her last illness. She had formulated vague
accusations against Varick--accusations of cruelty and neglect of so
absurd a nature that they refuted themselves. Miss Pigchalke's behaviour
was the more monstrous that she had already received the first fifty
pounds of the hundred-pound pension her friend's widower had arranged to
give her.
In a will made before her marriage, the late Mrs. Varick had left her
companion two thousand pounds, and though the legacy had been omitted
from her final will, Varick had of his own accord suggested that he
should allow Miss Pigchalke a hundred a year. She had begun by sending
back the first half-yearly cheque; but she had finally accepted it!
To-night he reminded himself with satisfaction that the second fifty
pounds had already been sent her, and that this time she would evidently
make no bones about keeping the money.
Making a determined effort, he chased her sinister image from his
thoughts, and turned his mind to the still attractive woman who was
about to act as hostess to his Christmas party.
His keen face softened as he thought of Blanche Farrow. Poor, proud,
well-bred and pleasant, poor only in a relative sense, for she was the
only unmarried daughter of an Irish peer whose title had passed away to
a distant cousin. Miss Farrow could have lived in comfort and in
dignity on what income she had, but for one inexplicable failing--the
more old-fashioned and severe of her friends and relatives called it a
vice.
Soon after she had come into the enjoyment of her few hundreds a year,
some rich, idle acquaintance had taken Blanche to Monte Carlo, and
there, like a duck to water, she had taken to play! Henceforth
gambling--any kind of gambling--had become her absorbing interest in
life. It was well indeed that what fortune she had was strictly settled
on her sisters' children, her two brothers-in-law being her trustees.
With one of them, who was really wealthy, she had long ago quarrelled.
With the other, now a widower, with only a life interest in his estate,
she was on coldly cordial terms, and sometimes, as was the case now,
acted as chaperon to his only child, her niece and namesake, Bubbles
Dunster.
Blanche Farrow never begged or borrowed. When more hard hit than usual,
she retired, alone with her faithful maid, to some cheap corner of the
Continent; and as she kept her money worries to herself, she was well
liked and popular with a considerable circle.
Such was the human being who in a sense was Lionel Varick's only close
friend. They had met in a strange way, some ten years ago, in what Miss
Farrow's sterner brother-in-law had called a gambling hell. And, just as
we know that sometimes Satan will be found rebuking sin, so Blanche
Farrow had set herself to stop the then young Lionel Varick on the
brink. He had been in love with her at that time, and on the most
unpleasant evening when a cosy flat in Jermyn Street had been raided by
the police, he had given Blanche Farrow his word that he would never
play again; and he had kept his word. He alone knew how grateful he had
cause to be to the woman who had saved him from joining the doomed
throng who only live for play.
And now there was still to their friendship just that delightful little
touch of sentiment which adds salt and savour to almost every relation
between a man and a woman. Though Blanche was some years older than
Lionel, she looked, if anything, younger than he did, for she had the
slim, upright figure, the pretty soft brown hair, and the delicate,
finely modelled features which keep so many an Englishwoman of her type
and class young--young, if not in years, yet young in everything else
that counts. Even what she sometimes playfully called her _petit vice_
had not made her haggard or worn, and she had never lost interest in
becoming, well-made clothes.
Blanche Farrow thought she knew everything there was to know about
Lionel Varick, and, as a matter of fact, she did know a great deal no
one else knew, though not quite as much as she believed. She knew him to
be a hedonist, a materialist, a man who had very few scruples. But not
even to herself would she have allowed him to be called by the ugly name
of adventurer. Perhaps it would be truer to say--for she was a very
clever woman--that even if, deep in her heart, she must have admitted
that such a name would have once suited him, she could now gladly tell
herself that "all that" lay far behind him. As we have seen, he owed
this change in his circumstances to a happy draw in the lottery of
marriage, a draw which has so often turned an adventurer of sorts into a
man of substance and integrity.