disappeared, and left her blooming with the beauty her daughters had
reproduced. This delightful marriage had smoothed away every difficulty.
Sir Bruce was the "most charming fellow in England." That fact acted as
a charm in itself, it seemed. It was not necessary to go into details as
to the mollifying of tradespeople and rearranging of the entire aspect
of life at Curzon Street. When Agatha and Emily Fox-Seton met in town
for the first time--it was in the drawing room at South Audley
Street--they clasped each other's hands with an exchange of entirely new
looks.
"You look so--so _well_, Miss Fox-Seton," said Agatha, with actual
tenderness.
If she had not been afraid of seeming a little rudely effusive she would
have said "handsome" instead of "well," for Emily was sweetly blooming.
"Happiness is becoming to you," she added. "May I say how _glad_ I am?"
"Thank you, thank you!" Emily answered. "Everything in the world seems
changed, doesn't it?"
"Yes, everything."
They stood and gazed into each other's eyes a few seconds, and then
loosed hands with a little laugh and sat down to talk.
It was, in fact, Lady Agatha who talked most, because Emily Fox-Seton
led her on and aided her to delicate expansion by her delight in all
that in these days made up her existence of pure bliss. It was as if an
old-time fairy story were being enacted before Emily's eyes. Agatha
without doubt had grown lovelier, she thought; she seemed even fairer,
more willowy, the forget-me-not eyes were of a happier blue, as
forget-me-nots growing by clear water-sides are bluer than those grown
in a mere garden. She appeared, perhaps, even a little taller, and her
small head had, if such a thing were possible, a prettier flower-like
poise. This, at least, Emily thought, and found her own happiness added
to by her belief in her fancy. She felt that nothing was to be wondered
at when she heard Agatha speak of Sir Bruce. She could not utter his
name or refer to any act of his without a sound in her voice which had
its parallel in the light floating haze of blush on her cheeks. In her
intercourse with the world in general she would have been able to
preserve her customary sweet composure, but Emily Fox-Seton was not the
world. She represented a something which was so primitively of the
emotions that one's heart spoke and listened to her. Agatha was
conscious that Miss Fox-Seton had seen at Mallowe--she could never quite
understand how it had seemed so naturally to happen--a phase of her
feelings which no one else had seen before. Bruce had seen it since, but
only Bruce. There had actually been a sort of confidence between them--a
confidence which had been like intimacy, though neither of them had been
effusive.
"Mamma is so happy," the girl said. "It is quite wonderful. And Alix and
Hilda and Millicent and Eve--oh! it makes such a difference to them. I
shall be able," with a blush which expressed a world of relieved
affection, "to give them so much pleasure. Any girl who marries happily
and--and well--can alter everything for her sisters, if she _remembers_.
You see, I shall have reason to remember. I know things from experience.
And Bruce is so kind, and gay, and proud of their prettiness. Just
imagine their excitement at all being bridesmaids! Bruce says we shall
be like a garden of spring flowers. I am so glad," her eyes suddenly
quite heavenly in their joyful relief, "that he is _young_!"
The next second the heavenly relieved look died away. The exclamation
had been involuntary. It had sprung from her memory of the days when she
had dutifully accepted, as her portion, the possibility of being smiled
upon by Walderhurst, who was two years older than her father, and her
swift realisation of this fact troubled her. It was indelicate to have
referred to the mental image even ever so vaguely.
But Emily Fox-Seton was glad too that Sir Bruce was young, that they
were all young, and that happiness had come before they had had time to
tire of waiting for it. She was so happy herself that she questioned
nothing.
"Yes. It is nice," she answered, and glowed with honest sympathy. "You
will want to do the same things. It is so agreeable when people who are
married like to do the same things. Perhaps you will want to go out a
great deal and to travel, and you could not enjoy it if Sir Bruce did
not."
She was not reflecting in the least upon domestic circles whose male
heads are capable of making themselves extremely nasty under stress of
invitations it bores them to accept, and the inclination of wives and
daughters to desire acceptance. She was not contemplating with any
premonitory regrets a future in which, when Walderhurst did not wish to
go out to dinner or disdained a ball, she should stay at home. Far from
it. She simply rejoiced with Lady Agatha, who was twenty-two marrying
twenty-eight.
"You are not like me," she explained further. "I have had to work so
hard and contrive so closely that _everything_ will be a pleasure to me.
Just to know that I _never_ need starve to death or go into the
workhouse is such a relief that--"
"Oh!" exclaimed Lady Agatha, quickly and involuntarily laying a hand on
hers, startled by the fact that she spoke as if referring to a wholly
matter-of-fact possibility.
Emily smiled, realising her feeling.
"Perhaps I ought not to have said that. I forgot. But such things are
possible when one is too old to work and has nothing to depend on. You
could scarcely understand. When one is very poor one is frightened,
because occasionally one cannot help thinking of it."
"But now--now! Oh! how different!" exclaimed Agatha, with heartfelt
earnestness.
"Yes. Now I need never be afraid. It makes me so grateful to--Lord
Walderhurst."
Her neck grew pink as she said it, just as Lady Maria had seen it grow
pink on previous occasions. Moderate as the words were, they expressed
ardour.
Lord Walderhurst came in half an hour later and found her standing
smiling by the window.
"You look particularly well, Emily. It's that white frock, I suppose.
You ought to wear a good deal of white," he said.
"I will," Emily answered. He observed that she wore the nice flush and
the soft appealing look, as well as the white frock. "I wish--"
Here she stopped, feeling a little foolish.
"What do you wish?"
"I wish I could do more to please you than wear white--or black--when
you like."
He gazed at her, always through the single eyeglass. Even the vaguest
approach to emotion or sentiment invariably made him feel stiff and shy.
Realising this, he did not quite understand why he rather liked it in
the case of Emily Fox-Seton, though he only liked it remotely and felt
his own inaptness a shade absurd.
"Wear yellow or pink occasionally," he said with a brief, awkward laugh.
What large, honest eyes the creature had, like a fine retriever's or
those of some nice animal one saw in the Zoo!
"I will wear anything you like," she said, the nice eyes meeting his,
not the least stupidly, he reflected, though women who were affectionate
often looked stupid. "I will do anything you like; you don't know what
you have done for me, Lord Walderhurst."
They moved a trifle nearer to each other, this inarticulate pair. He
dropped his eyeglass and patted her shoulder.
"Say 'Walderhurst' or 'James'--or--or 'my dear,'" he said. "We are going
to be married, you know." And he found himself going to the length of
kissing her cheek with some warmth.
"I sometimes wish," she said feelingly, "that it was the fashion to say
'my lord' as Lady Castlewood used to do in 'Esmond.' I always thought it
nice."
"Women are not so respectful to their husbands in these days," he
answered, with his short laugh. "And men are not so dignified."
"Lord Castlewood was not very dignified, was he?"
He chuckled a little.
"No. But his rank was, in the reign of Queen Anne. These are democratic
days. I'll call you 'my lady' if you like."
"Oh! No--no!" with fervour, "I wasn't thinking of anything like that."
"I know you were not," he reassured her. "You are not that kind of
woman."
"Oh! how _could_ I be?"
"_You_ couldn't," good-naturedly. "That's why I like you."
Then he began to tell her his reason for calling at this particular
hour. He came to prepare her for a visit from the Osborns, who had
actually just returned from India. Captain Osborn had chosen, or chance
had chosen for him, this particular time for a long leave. As soon as
she heard the name of Osborn, Emily's heart beat a little quickly. She
had naturally learned a good deal of detail from Lady Maria since her
engagement. Alec Osborn was the man who, since Lord Walderhurst's
becoming a widower, had lived in the gradually strengthening belief that
the chances were that it would be his enormous luck to inherit the title
and estates of the present Marquis of Walderhurst. He was not a very
near relation, but he was the next of kin. He was a young man and a
strong one, and Walderhurst was fifty-four and could not be called
robust. His medical man did not consider him a particularly good life,
though he was not often ill.
"He's not the kind of chap who lives to be a hundred and fifty. I'll say
that for him," Alec Osborn had said at mess after dinner had made him
careless of speech, and he had grinned not too pleasantly when he
uttered the words. "The only thing that would completely wipe my eye
isn't as likely to happen to him as to most men. He's unsentimental and
level headed, and doesn't like marriage. You can imagine how he's
chivied by women. A fellow in his position couldn't be let alone. But he
doesn't like marriage, and he's a man who knows jolly well what he likes
and what he doesn't. The only child died, and if he doesn't marry again,
I'm in a safe place. Good Lord! the difference it would make!" and his
grin extended itself.
It was three months after this that the Marquis of Walderhurst followed
Emily Fox-Seton out upon the heath, and finding her sitting footsore and
depressed in spirit beside the basket of Lady Maria's fish, asked her to
marry him.
When the news reached him, Alec Osborn went and shut himself up in his
quarters and blasphemed until his face was purple and big drops of sweat
ran down it. It was black bad luck--it was black bad luck, and it called
for black curses. What the articles of furniture in the room in the
bungalow heard was rather awful, but Captain Osborn did not feel that it
did justice to the occasion.
When her husband strode by her to his apartment, Mrs. Osborn did not
attempt to follow him. She had only been married two years, but she knew
his face too well; and she also knew too well all the meaning of the
fury contained in the words he flung at her as he hurled himself past
her.
"Walderhurst is going to be married!" Mrs. Osborn ran into her own room
and sat down clutching at her hair as she dropped her face in her little
dark hands. She was an Anglo-Indian girl who had never been home, and
had not had much luck in life at any time, and her worst luck had been
in being handed over by her people to this particular man, chiefly
because he was the next of kin to Lord Walderhurst. She was a curious,
passionate creature, and had been in love with him in her way. Her
family had been poor and barely decently disreputable. She had lived on
the outskirts of things, full of intense girlish vanity and yearnings
for social recognition, poorly dressed, passed over and snubbed by
people she aspired to know socially, seeing other girls with less beauty
and temperament enjoying flirtations with smart young officers, biting
her tongue out with envy and bitterness of thwarted spirit. So when
Captain Osborn cast an eye on her and actually began a sentimental
episode, her relief and excitement at finding herself counting as other
girls did wrought itself up into a passion. Her people were prompt and
sharp enough to manage the rest, and Osborn was married before he knew
exactly whither he was tending. He was not pleased with himself when he
wakened to face facts. He could only console himself for having been
cleverly led and driven into doing the thing he did not want to do, by
the facts that the girl was interesting and clever and had a good deal
of odd un-English beauty.
It was a beauty so un-English that it would perhaps appear to its
greatest advantage in the contrasts afforded by life in England. She was
so dark, of heavy hair and drooping-lidded eyes and fine grained skin,
and so sinuous of lithe, slim body, that among native beauties she
seemed not to be sufficiently separated by marks of race. She had
tumbled up from childhood among native servants, who were almost her
sole companions, and who had taught her curious things. She knew their
stories and songs, and believed in more of their occult beliefs than any
but herself knew.
She knew things which made her interesting to Alec Osborn, who had a
bullet head and a cruel lower jaw, despite a degree of the ordinary good
looks. The fact that his chances were good for becoming Marquis of
Walderhurst and taking her home to a life of English luxury and
splendour was a thing she never forgot. It haunted her in her sleep. She
had often dreamed of Oswyth Castle and of standing amidst great people
on the broad lawns her husband had described feelingly during tropical
days when they had sat together panting for breath. When there had been
mention made of the remote, awful possibility that Walderhurst might
surrender to the siege laid to him, she had turned sick at the thought.
It made her clench her hands until the nails almost pressed into the
skin of her palms. She could not bear it. She had made Osborn burst into
a big, harsh laugh one day when she had hinted to him that there were
occult things to be done which might prevent ill luck. He had laughed
first and scowled afterwards, cynically saying that she might as well be
working them up.
He had not come out to India followed by regrets and affection. He had
been a black sheep at home, and had rather been hustled away than
otherwise. If he had been a more admirable kind of fellow, Walderhurst
would certainly have made him an allowance; but his manner of life had
been such as the Marquis had no patience with in men of any class, and
especially abhorred in men whom the accident of birth connected with
good names. He had not been lavish in his demonstrations of interest in
the bullet-headed young man. Osborn's personableness was not of a kind
attractive to the unbiassed male observer. Men saw his cruel young jowl
and low forehead, and noticed that his eyes were small. He had a good,
swaggering military figure to which uniform was becoming, and a kind of
animal good looks which would deteriorate early. His colour would fix
and deepen with the aid of steady daily drinking, and his features would
coarsen and blur, until by the time he was forty the young jowl would
have grown heavy and would end by being his most prominent feature.
While he had remained in England, Walderhurst had seen him occasionally,
and had only remarked and heard unpleasant things of him,--a tendency to
selfish bad manners, reckless living, and low flirtation. He once saw
him on the top of a bus with his arm round the waist of an awful,
giggling shop-girl kind of person, who was adorned with tremendous
feathers and a thick fringe coming unfrizzled with the heat and sticking
out here and there in straight locks on her moist forehead. Osborn
thought that the arm business had been cleverly managed with such
furtiveness that no one could see it, but Walderhurst was driving
solemnly by in his respectable barouche, and he found himself gazing
through his monocle directly at his relative, and seeing, from the
street below, the point at which the young man's arm lost itself under
the profusely beaded short cape. A dull flush rose to his countenance,
and he turned away without showing any sign of recognition; but he was
annoyed and disgusted, because this particular kind of blatantly vulgar
bad taste was the sort of thing he loathed. It was the sort of thing
which made duchesses of women who did alluring "turns" at music halls or
sang suggestive songs in comic opera, and transformed into the
chatelaines of ancient castles young persons who had presided at the
ribbon counter. He saw as little as possible of his heir presumptive
after this, and if the truth were told, Captain Alec Osborn was
something of a factor in the affair of Miss Emily Fox-Seton. If
Walderhurst's infant son had lived, or if Osborn had been a refined,
even if dull, fellow, there are ten chances to one his lordship would
have chosen no second marchioness.
Captain Osborn's life in India had not ended in his making no further
debts. He was not a man to put the brake on in the matter of
self-indulgence. He got into debt so long as a shred of credit remained
to him, and afterwards he tried to add to his resources by cards and
betting at races. He made and lost by turn, and was in a desperate state
when he got his leave. He applied for it because he had conceived the
idea that his going home as a married man might be a good thing for him.
Hester, it seemed not at all improbable, might accomplish something with
Walderhurst. If she talked to him in her interesting semi-Oriental way,
and was fervid and picturesque in her storytelling, he might be
attracted by her. She had her charm, and when she lifted the heavy lids
of her long black eyes and fixed her gaze upon her hearer as she talked
about the inner side of native life, of which she knew such curious,
intimate things, people always listened, even in India, where the thing
was not so much of a novelty, and in England she might be a sort of
sensation.
Osborn managed to convey to her gradually, by a process of his own, a
great deal of what he wanted her to do. During the months before the
matter of the leave was quite decided, he dropped a word here and there
which carried a good deal of suggestion to a mind used to seizing on
passing intimations. The woman who had been Hester's Ayah when she was a
child had become her maid. She was a woman with a wide, silent
acquaintance with her own people. She was seldom seen talking to anyone
and seldom seemed to leave the house, but she always knew everything.
Her mistress was aware that if at any time she chose to ask her a
question about the secret side of things concerning black or white
peoples, she would receive information to be relied upon. She felt that
she could have heard from her many things concerning her husband's past,
present, and future, and that the matter of the probable succession was
fully comprehended by her.
When she called her into the room after recovering outwardly from her
hour of desperation, she saw that the woman was already aware of the
blow that had fallen upon the household. What they said to each other
need not be recorded here, but there was more in the conversation than
the mere words uttered, and it was one of several talks held before Mrs.
Osborn sailed for England with her husband.
"He may be led into taking into consideration the fact that he has cut
the ground from under a fellow's feet and left him dangling in the air,"
said Osborn to his wife. "Best thing will be to make friends with the
woman, hang her!"
"Yes, Alec, yes," Hester Osborn answered, just a little feverishly. "We
must make friends with her. They say she is a good sort and was
frightfully poor herself."
"She won't be poor now, hang her!" remarked Captain Osborn with added
fervour. "I should like to break her neck! I wonder if she rides?"
"I'm sure she has not been well enough off to do anything like that."
"Good idea to begin to teach her." And he laughed as he turned on his
heel and began to walk the deck with a fellow passenger.
It was these people Lord Walderhurst had come to prepare her for.
"Maria has told you about them, I know," he said. "I dare say she has
been definite enough to explain that I consider Osborn altogether
undesirable. Under the veneer of his knowledge of decent customs he is a
cad. I am obliged to behave civilly to the man, but I dislike him. If he
had been born in a low class of life, he would have been a criminal."
"Oh!" Emily exclaimed.
"Any number of people would be criminals if circumstances did not
interfere. It depends a good deal on the shape of one's skull."
"Oh!" exclaimed Emily again, "do you think so?"
She believed that people who were bad were bad from preference, though
she did not at all understand the preference. She had accepted from her
childhood everything she had ever heard said in a pulpit. That
Walderhurst should propound ideas such as ministers of the Church of
England might regard as heretical startled her, but he could have said
nothing startling enough to shake her affectionate allegiance.
"Yes, I do," he answered. "Osborn's skull is quite the wrong shape."
But when, a short time after, Captain Osborn brought the skull in
question into the room, covered in the usual manner with neatly brushed,
close-cropped hair, Emily thought it a very nice shape indeed. Perhaps a
trifle hard and round-looking and low of forehead, but not shelving or
bulging as the heads of murderers in illustrated papers generally did.
She owned to herself that she did not see what Lord Walderhurst
evidently saw, but then she did not expect of herself an intelligence
profound enough to follow his superior mental flights.
Captain Osborn was well groomed and well mannered, and his demeanour
towards herself was all that the most conventional could have demanded.
When she reflected that she herself represented in a way the possible
destruction of his hopes of magnificent fortune, she felt almost
tenderly towards him, and thought his easy politeness wonderful. Mrs.
Osborn, too! How interesting and how beautiful in an odd way Mrs. Osborn
was! Every movement of her exceeding slimness was curiously graceful.
Emily remembered having read novels whose heroines were described as
"undulating." Mrs. Osborn was undulating. Her long, drooping, and dense
black eyes were quite unlike other girls' eyes. Emily had never seen
anything like them. And she had such a lonely, slow, shy way of lifting
them to look at people. She was obliged to look up at tall Emily. She
seemed a schoolgirl as she stood near her. Emily was the kind of
mistaken creature whose conscience, awakening to unnecessary remorses,
causes its owner at once to assume all the burdens which Fate has laid
upon the shoulders of others. She began to feel like a criminal herself,
irrespective of the shape of her skull. Her own inordinate happiness and
fortune had robbed this unoffending young couple. She wished that it had
not been so, and vaguely reproached herself without reasoning the matter
out to a conclusion. At all events, she was remorsefully sympathetic in
her mental attitude towards Mrs. Osborn, and being sure that she was
frightened of her husband's august relative, felt nervous herself
because Lord Walderhurst bore himself with unrelated courtesy and kept his
monocle fixed in his eye throughout the interview. If he had let it drop
and allowed it to dangle in an unbiassed manner from its cord, Emily
would have felt more comfortable, because she was sure his demeanour
would have appeared a degree more encouraging to the Osborns.
"Are you glad to be in England again?" she asked Mrs. Osborn.
"I never was here before," answered the young woman. "I have never been
anywhere but in India."
In the course of the conversation she explained that she had not been a
delicate child, and also conveyed that even if she had been one, her
people could not have afforded to send her home. Instinct revealed to
Emily that she had not had many of the good things of life, and that she
was not a creature of buoyant spirits. The fact that she had spent a
good many hours of most of her young days in reflecting on her ill-luck
had left its traces on her face, particularly in the depths of her
slow-moving, black eyes.
They had come, it appeared, in the course of duty, to pay their respects
to the woman who was to be their destruction. To have neglected to do so
would have made them seem to assume an indiscreet attitude towards the
marriage.
"They can't like it, of course," Lady Maria summed them up afterwards,
"but they have made up their minds to lump it as respectably as
possible."
"I am _so_ sorry for them," said Emily.
"Of course you are. And you will probably show them all sorts of
indiscreet kindnesses, but don't be too altruistic, my good Emily. The
man is odious, and the girl looks like a native beauty. She rather
frightens me."
"I don't think Captain Osborn is odious," Emily answered. "And she _is_
pretty, you know. She is frightened of us, really."