"I really shouldn"t be worth talking to now," laughed Meadows; "this heat has made me so sleepy. To-night--or after tea--by all means!"
Lady Dunstable looked annoyed.
"I am expecting the Duke"s party at tea," she said peremptorily. "This will be my only chance to-day."
"Then let"s put it off--till to-morrow!" said Meadows, as he rose, still smiling. "It is most kind of you, but I really must write my letters, and my brains are pulp. But I will escort you through the garden, if I may."
His hostess turned sharply, and walked back towards the front of the house where Sir Luke and Mr. Frome, a young and rising Under-Secretary, were waiting for her. Meadows accompanied her, but found her exceedingly ungracious. She did, however, inform him, as they followed the other two towards the exit from the garden, that she had come to the conclusion that the subject he was proposing for his second series of lectures, to be given at Dunstable House during the winter, "would never do."
"Famous Controversies of the Nineteenth Century--political and religious." The very sound of it was enough to keep people away! "What people expect from you is talk about _persons_--not ideas. Ideas are not your line!"
Meadows flushed a little. What his "line" might be, he said, he had not yet discovered. But he liked his subject, and meant to stick to it.
Lady Dunstable turned on him a pair of sarcastic eyes.
"That"s so like you clever people. You would die rather than take advice."
"Advice!--yes. As much as you like, dear lady. But--"
"But what--" she asked, imperatively, nettled in her turn.
"Well--you must put it prettily!" said Meadows, smiling. "We want a great deal of jam with the powder."
"You want to be flattered? I never flatter! It is the most despicable of arts."
"On the contrary--one of the most skilled. And I have heard you do it to perfection."
His daring half irritated, half amused her. It was her turn to flush.
Her thin, sallow face and dark eyes lit up vindictively.
"One should never remind one"s friends of their vices," she said with animation.
"Ah--if they _are_ vices! But flattery is merely a virtue out of place--kindness gone wrong. From the point of view of the moralist, that is. From the point of view of the ordinary mortal, it is what no men--and few women--can do without!"
She smiled grimly, enjoying the spar. They carried it on a little while, Meadows, now fairly on his mettle, administering a little deft though veiled castigation here and there, in requital for various acts of rudeness of which she had been guilty towards him and others during the preceding days. She grew restive occasionally, but on the whole she bore it well. Her arrogance was not of the small-minded sort; and the best chance with her was to defy her.
At the gate leading on to the moor, Meadows resolutely came to a stop.
"Your letters are the merest excuse!" said Lady Dunstable. "I don"t believe you will write one of them! I notice you always put off unpleasant duties."
"Give me credit at least for the intention."
Smiling, he held the gate open for her, and she pa.s.sed through, discomfited, to join Sir Luke on the other side. Mr. Frome, the Under-Secretary, a young man of Jewish family and amazing talents, who had been listening with amus.e.m.e.nt to the conversation behind him, turned back to say to Meadows, at a safe distance--"Keep it up!--Keep it up!
You avenge us all!"
Presently, as she and her two companions wound slowly up the moor, Sir Luke Malford, who had only arrived the night before, inquired gaily of his hostess:
"So she wouldn"t come?--the little wife?"
"I gave her every chance. She scorned us."
"You mean--"she funked us." Have you any idea, I wonder, how alarming you are?"
Lady Dunstable exclaimed impatiently:
"People represent me as a kind of ogre. I am nothing of the kind. I only expect everybody to play up."
"Ah, but you make the rules!" laughed Sir Luke. "I thought that young woman might have been a decided acquisition."
"She hadn"t the very beginnings of a social gift," declared his companion. "A stubborn and rather stupid little person. I am much afraid she will stand in her husband"s way."
"But suppose you blow up a happy home, by encouraging him to come without her? I bet anything she is feeling jealous and ill-used. You ought--I am sure you ought--to have a guilty conscience; but you look perfectly brazen!"
Sir Luke"s banter was generally accepted with indifference, but on this occasion it provoked Lady Dunstable. She protested with vehemence that she had given Mrs. Meadows every chance, and that a young woman who was both trivial and conceited could not expect to get on in society. Sir Luke gathered from her tone that she and Mrs. Meadows had somewhat crossed swords, and that the wife might look out for consequences. He had been a witness of this kind of thing before in Lady Dunstable"s circle; and he was conscious of a pa.s.sing sympathy with the pleasant-faced little woman he remembered at Crosby Ledgers. At the same time he had been Rachel Dunstable"s friend for twenty years; originally, her suitor. He spent a great part of his life in her company, and her ways seemed to him part of the order of things.
Meanwhile Meadows walked back to the house. He had been a good deal nettled by Lady Dunstable"s last remark to him. But he had taken pains not to show it. Doris might say such things to him--but no one else.
They were, of course, horribly true! Well--quarrelling with Lady Dunstable was amusing enough--when there was room to escape her. But how would it be in the close quarters of a yacht?
On his way through the garden he fell in with Miss Field--Mattie Field, the plump and smiling cousin of the house, who was apparently as necessary to the Dunstables in the Highlands, as in London, or at Crosby Ledgers. Her role in the Dunstable household seemed to Meadows to be that of "shock absorber." She took all the small rubs and jars on her own shoulders, so that Lady Dunstable might escape them. If the fish did not arrive from Edinburgh, if the motor broke down, if a gun failed, or a guest set up influenza, it was always Miss Field who came to the rescue. She had devices for every emergency. It was generally supposed that she had no money, and that the Dunstables made her residence with them worth while. But if so, she had none of the ways of the poor relation. On the contrary, her independence was plain; she had a very free and merry tongue; and Lady Dunstable, who snubbed everybody, never snubbed Mattie Field. Lord Dunstable was clearly devoted to her.
She greeted Meadows rather absently.
"Rachel didn"t carry you off? Oh, then--I wonder if I may ask you something?"
Meadows a.s.sured her she might ask him anything.
"I wonder if you will save yourself for a walk with Lord Dunstable.
Will you ask him? He"s very low, and you would cheer him up."
Meadows looked at her interrogatively. He too had noticed that Lord Dunstable had seemed for some days to be out of spirits.
"Why do people have sons!" said Miss Field, briskly.
Meadows understood the reference. It was common knowledge among the Dunstables" friends that their son was anything but a comfort to them.
"Anything particularly wrong?" he asked her in a lowered voice, as they neared the house. At the same time, he could not help wondering whether, under all circ.u.mstances--if her nearest and dearest were made mincemeat in a railway accident, or crushed by an earth-quake--this fair-haired, rosy-cheeked lady would still keep her perennial smile. He had never yet seen her without it.
Miss Field replied in a joking tone that Lord Dunstable was depressed because the graceless Herbert had promised his parents a visit--a whole week--in August, and had now cried off on some excuse or other. Meadows inquired if Lady Dunstable minded as much as her husband.
"Quite!" laughed Miss Field. "It is not so much that she wants to see Herbert as that she"s found someone to marry him to. You"ll see the lady this afternoon. She comes with the Duke"s party, to be looked at."
"But I understand that the young man is by no means manageable?"
Miss Field"s amus.e.m.e.nt increased.