Flora Thangue had extracted all the particulars of the death and suicide from Lady Victoria--who knew nothing, however, of the tragic cause of both--and imparted them to Isabel, whose mind, in consequence, was free of morbid curiosity. She had also read the newspapers. The speculations and veiled hints of the sensational sheets had not interested her, but she had pondered deeply over leaders in the more dignified organs, which had abounded in comment upon the changed conditions in the meteoric career of the young man who was no longer Elton Gwynne, but a peer of the realm.
"Do you mind it so awfully much?" she asked, after a short silence during which they had both smoked absently and gazed at the fire.
"What?" Gwynne turned the cold surprise of his eyes upon her. "Losing two of the four people I cared most for on earth?"
"Of course not. Being suddenly made a peer and having to begin all over.
You never will be called Elton Gwynne again, and you will have as much trouble educating the public up to your new name as if you were emerging from obscurity for the first time."
The words, brutally direct, rolled away the last clouds of his lethargy.
He vividly realized that he had been skulking before the closed shutters of his understanding, accepting the new conditions with but the dulled surface of his brain.
Now his naked soul stared at her out of his white face and tortured eyes, and she looked away. She had not believed that he could be racked with feeling of any sort, and it was as if she heard him cry: "Oh, G.o.d!
Oh, G.o.d!" although his lips were silent.
But she did not change the subject.
"I suppose you haven"t seen the newspapers," she said. "I cut out all the editorials and paragraphs I thought would interest you. One of the big dailies, I forget which, said that the interruption of your career was a greater political tragedy than Parnell"s or Lord Randolph Churchill"s."
"Do they say that?" asked Gwynne, eagerly. "Well, G.o.d knows, it is a tragedy for me."
"Don"t you like being a peer the least little bit? I am too feminine, possibly too American, not to see a certain picturesqueness in a t.i.tle, especially in such a pretty one as yours; and there is no doubt that you are a more imposing figure in the eyes of the world to-day than you were a week ago. Are you really indifferent to that side of it?"
"Am I? One does such a lot of self-posing and self-imposition. There are few things in this world that gratify a man"s vanity more than being a peer of Great Britain, and, no doubt, had I happened to be born without what you might call a fighting ambition, and certain abilities, I should--barring natural grief--feel that I was one of the favorites of destiny--that is to say if I had a commensurate income. The fact that I must let the Abbey and Capheaton, and after portioning off all the unmarried women of the family, shall have barely enough left to keep up my flat in Charles Street, may have something to do with my absence of enthusiasm. But--yes--I _am_ sure of myself!" he burst out. "I am the most miserable man on earth to-night, and the reason is not that I have lost two good friends, but because my career is ruined, broken off in the middle."
"You could become a militant Liberal peer."
"Paradoxes don"t happen to appeal to me. And the only chance for a genuine fighter is the House of Commons. Besides, it is impossible for a man to be a peer and remain a true Liberal. Power, and inherited influence, and exalted social position have a deadly insinuation. I don"t believe any man is strong enough to withstand them. There is never an hour that a peer is not reminded of his difference from the ma.s.s of humanity; and human nature is too weak to resist complacency in the end--long before the end. And complacency is the premature old age of the brain and character. If this tragedy had not occurred, even if my grandfather had lived on for fifteen years more, as there was every reason to believe he would, I might have gone on that much longer before discovering weak points in my character. Now G.o.d knows what I shall develop."
"Have you made any plans?"
"Plans? I hadn"t faced the situation until you spoke."
"You have weak spots like other people, of course. You would be a horrid prig if you hadn"t. But you surely must know if your Liberalism is sincere, ingrained. There is no question that you are a hopeless aristocrat in essentials. But so have been certain of America"s greatest patriots--Washington and Hamilton, for instance. I do not see that it matters. One can hold to what seems to me the first principles of advanced civilization--that hereditary monarchy is an insult to self-respecting and enlightened men--without wishing to a.s.sociate with those that offend grammar and good taste. Education, intellect, breeding, would create an aristocracy among anarchists on a desert island--supposing any possessed them; and in time it would become as intolerant of liberties as if it harked back to the battle of Hastings.
There is no plant that grows so rapidly in the human garden as self-superiority, and it is ridiculous only when watered by nothing more excusable than the arbitrary social conditions that exist in the United States. I don"t see that the qualities you have inherited should interfere with your ability to see the justice and rationality of self-government."
"They do not!" She seemed to beat his thoughts into their old coherent and logical forms. "Whatever may have been the various motives that impelled me into the Liberal party in the beginning, there is no question that I have become even more extreme and single-minded than I have let the world know. Perhaps it is my American blood, although I never thought of that before. At all events, had the time been ripe I should have devoted all the gift for leadership I now possess, and all the power I could build up, to overturning monarchy in this country and establishing a republic. There! I never confessed as much to a living soul, but I think you have bewitched me, for I never have been less--or more--myself!"
"With yourself as President?"
"Sooner or later--the sooner the better. But I waste no time in dreams, my fair cousin--although I have something of a tendency that way. It was enough that I had a great and useful career before me and might have gone into history as the prime factor of the great change."
"Well, that is over," said Isabel, conclusively. "There is only one thing left you and that is to come over and be an American."
"What?" He stared, and then laughed. "Ah!"
"You will have all the fighting you want over there. You will have to work twenty times harder than you ever did here, for your accent, your personality, the thirty years you have lived out of the country you were born in, all will be against you. You will have to be naturalized in spite of your birth--I happen to know of a similar case in my father"s practice--and that will take five years. In those five years you will encounter all the difficulties that strew the way of the foreigner who would gain the confidence of the shrewd American people--they are most characteristic in the small towns and farming districts. You will win because you were born to win, but you will learn for the first time what it is to stand and fight absolutely alone--for if they learn of your exalted birth they will but distrust you the more; and you will taste the sweets of real success for the first time in your life. In spite of your youth and enthusiasm, there is in you a vein of inevitable cynicism, for you have had far too much experience of the flatterer and the toady. You are too honest not to confess that if you had been born John Smith there would have been no editorial comments of any sort upon the tragic end of your relatives, and the great world would have taken as little notice of your abilities until you had compelled its unwilling attention by many more years of hard work. America will take you for exactly what you are and no more. But you will have to become more American than the Americans; although you may continue to say "ain"t it"
and "it"s me" and drop your final gs, because those are all the hall-marks of the half-educated in the United States, and will rather help you than otherwise. Of course you will a.s.sume charge of your own ranch, for that will not only give you plenty to do, but it will be the quickest way of becoming one of the people; and after you have been out in all weathers for a year or two, turned a dark brown down to your chest, ridden a loping horse on a Mexican saddle, talked politics on street corners and in saloons, left your muddy or dusty wagon once a week at the Rosewater hitching-rail while you transact business in a linen duster, or yellow oil-skin overalls and rubber boots, you will feel so American--Californian, to be exact--that the mere memory of this formal cut-and-dried Old World will fill you with ennui."
There was a glint of laughter in Gwynne"s eyes, but they were widely open and very bright.
"I see! You are determined to make a convert of me. You began the night of your arrival. I suspect you of having come over on a crusade."
"That was the moment of inspiration--that first night. I won"t deny that I have thought a great deal about it since--of little else since I read those editorials."
He leaned back and regarded the sole of his shoe as if it were a familiar. "That is a large order," he said, in a moment. "Colossal!
There might be worse solutions. And the life of a cow-boy, for a while at least--"
"Don"t delude yourself. You would not be the least bit of a cow-boy.
You wouldn"t even look picturesque--if you did you might be sorry.
You would just be a plain northern California rancher. Of course you would have all the riding you wanted, but there are no round-ups worth speaking of on a ranch the size of Lumalitas. And probably you would continue to let sections of it to men that wanted to raise cattle or horses on a small scale. You had better devote yourself to the dairy and to raising hay and grain, and turn about five hundred acres into a chicken-ranch--nothing pays like that."
He threw back his head and laughed as heartily as if death and disaster had never been.
"From the English hustings and the greatest parliamentary body the world has ever known to chickens and b.u.t.ter in California! From Capheaton to Rosewater, oil-skin overalls and a linen "Duster!" Oh, Lord! Oh, Lord!
But give me a comprehensive idea of the place, in your own inimitable unvarnished diction. That will keep the ghosts off, at all events."
XVIII
Julia Kaye was one of those women designed by nature for the role of a Valerie Marneffe, or of that astute Parisian"s bourgeoise and more romantic daughter, Emma Bovary; but tossed, in the gamble of the fates, into a setting of respectable opulence, where her instincts for prey were trimmed of their crudities, and the vehemence of her pa.s.sions subdued by the opportunity to gratify all other whims and desires.
Her father, born in the sooty alley of a manufacturing town in the north of England, had run away to sea in his boyhood, deserted in the port of New York, starved, stolen, peddled, washed dishes in cheap restaurants, shovelled snow, tramped to Chicago, starved and peddled and shovelled again, finally found a position with a firm of wholesale druggists. He attended a night school, proved himself a lad of uncommon sharpness, and in less than a year was first packing and then dispensing drugs. Five years later he was drawing a large salary, and at the age of thirty he had opened a retail drug store of his own.
It was during his earlier period of comparative leisure and peace of mind that he began to test the inventive faculty that had p.r.i.c.ked him in small but significant ways during his boyhood. His first inventions were of a minor importance, although they increased his income and were permanently remunerative; but when he turned the torch of his genius upon the fatal antipathies of vermin, his success was so deservedly rewarded that he was a millionaire in less than three years. He returned to England, and, avoiding the alley of inglorious memory, courted and won the daughter of a manufacturer, his ambition driving him to compel social recognition in his native city. It soared no higher, but his wife, now no longer one of a large family, but with the income of a generous millionaire at her disposal, was open to higher promptings; and he to conversion. They moved to London and laid their plans with some skill.
But although London can stand a good deal in the cause of resupply and novelty, the violence of Mrs. Tippett"s accent, and the terrible solecisms of a gentleman whose education had begun in a Lancashire alley and finished in the business purlieus of Chicago, who had acquired the American vice of brag in its acutest form, and who, when in his cups, shouted and spat and swore, were more than the most enterprising among them had been called upon to endure. The social ambitions of the Tippetts were so definitely quenched that the indignant millionaire threatened to return to Chicago. But Mrs. Tippett moved him firmly to Brighton, where, in the course of time, she toned him down. They made their way slowly into society of a sort, and attracted the attention of the public. There was no law to prevent them from dining at the fashionable hotels, where Paris gowns could not pa.s.s un.o.bserved; and their turnouts were irreproachable.
Mrs. Tippet, an astute woman, by this time had realized that hers was not the destiny of the social star, and she concentrated her hopes and ambitions upon her one child, an uncommonly clever little girl. This child grew up in a luxury that would have stifled even her precocious mind had it not been for the rigid laws of the school-room. Her governesses and tutors were selected with a sharp eye to the number of t.i.tles in their reference-books, but dismissed promptly if they were unworthy of their hire. Later, the little Julia was sent to a distinguished school near Paris, where, with an eye to her future well-being, remarkable in one so young, she divided her affectionate affluence among the few whose exalted station made them worth the while of a maiden with an indefinite future.
These friends did not prove as useful as she had hoped. At home there were her parents to terrify theirs, and although she visited at several chateaux, and more than one t.i.tle was laid at her gilded feet, she made up her mind to read her name in Burke.
She took her parents for a tour round the world with a view to polishing off their lingering idiosyncrasies, and her chance came in India, where she buried them both. They succ.u.mbed to cholera, and the kindly wife of the viceroy, to whom she had had the forethought to secure a letter, sent for her to come to Simla and remain as her guest until she found courage and a chaperon for the return to England. Here she met Captain, the Honorable Augustus Kaye, heir to an ancient barony, chivalrous, impressionable, and hard-up. They were married with the blessings of old friends and new, and, to do her full justice, she made him a good wife according to her lights. She was quite insanely in love with him at first, for he looked like one of Ouida"s guardsmen, and his pedigree was so long, and so varied with romantic historic episode, that she was fully a week committing it to memory.
When he left the army and they had returned to England--via Paris--she had the wardrobe and establishment of a princess, the right to dine at the Queen"s table, and not a relative in London. She was immoderately happy, and during the five years of her wedded life she exhausted the first strength of her affections, buried her feminine caprice, and whatever of impulse youth may have clung to as its right. When Gussy Kaye died, the predominant feeling in her bosom was rage at his inconsiderateness in leaving the world before his father, and nothing behind him but a courtesy prefix which she could not even use on her cards.
She opened her soul to searching, and decided that five years of love were quite enough for any woman, and that her attentions hereafter should be directed towards the highest worldly success obtainable with brains, talents, and wealth. To be merely a rich woman in the right set did not come within measurable distance of her ambition"s apex, and she determined to gratify her pa.s.sionate self-love by becoming a personality.
She had long since simulated the repose of the high-born Englishwoman, until, like all imitators, she far surpa.s.sed her models, and her manners were marked not so much by the caste of Vere de Vere as by an almost negative stolidity. This at least provided her with an unruffled front for trying occasions--others besides the Arcots were insensible of her offerings--which in the United States of America would have been admiringly characterized as "nerve." This manner became solidified after her popular husband"s death, and if it was generally referred to as "aplomb" or "poise," allowances must be made for the poverty of the average vocabulary.
It is not difficult for a clever, handsome, correct, and wealthy woman to reach and hold a distinctive position even in London, that world"s headquarters of individualities. In addition to a judiciously lavish hospitality, it is only necessary to personalize intelligently, and this Mrs. Kaye did with an industry that would have carried her to greatness had she been granted a spark of the divine fire. She cultivated the great and the fashionable in art, letters, and the drama, mixed them tactfully with her t.i.tles, attended the banquets of the ruling cla.s.s in Bohemia attired flatteringly in her best, and founded a society for the study of Leonardo da Vinci. She became intimate with several royal ladies, who were charmed with her endless power to amuse them and her magnificent patronage of their charities; and she formed close relations with other dames but a degree less exalted, and generally more discriminating. She cultivated a witty habit of speech, the society of cabinet ministers, and her _chef_ was a celebrity. Her gowns would have been notable in New York, and she was wise enough to avoid eccentricity and openly to regard all forms of sensationalism with a haughty disdain.
Her att.i.tude to men was equally well-advised. Detrimentals and ineligibles never so much as came up for inspection; she had a far-reaching sense of selection and a proper notion of the value of time. Therefore, the many that had the run of her luxurious mansion contributed personally to her prestige, and she flattered herself that her particular band was little less distinguished than the Royal Household. And they invariably found her witty, entertaining, or, like Madame Recamier, ready to listen "avec seduction." Her knowledge of politics was practically unbounded.
In such moments as she happened to be alone with any of her swains, she became distractingly personal, inviting, gently repelling, afforded dazzling glimpses of possibilities awaiting time and the man: so accomplishing the double purpose of agreeably t.i.tillating her own depths and wearing the halo of a well-behaved Circe. Altogether her success was what it always must be when brains and ambition, money and a cold heart are allied; but it was small wonder if the head of the daughter of the House of Tippett was a trifle turned and certain of her perceptions were blunted.
Although ofttimes large with complacency, she by no means lost sight of her original purpose to wed a coronet, and if she endured four years of widowhood it was merely because she knew that she could afford to wait for transcendence. This she had finally run to earth in Lord Brathland, imminent heir to a dukedom, and personally more agreeable to her than any man in London. That he was notoriously inconstant but added zest to the chase, and it was, perhaps, the illusion she at times achieved of a certain resemblance to the ladies of his preference that finally overcame his intense aversion from respectability. He had offered himself to her on the day of his undoing.