"Made me happy. Isn"t that enough to do?"
They stopped again, under a gas-lamp. It was fortunate so few persons were about.
"George, I have a confession to make. It was not you who fell in love with me, it was I who fell in love with you."
"Dora!"
"It is true. It was at Lady Brentford"s ball. I saw you there for the first time. I fell in love with you--at sight. You see, when your turn came, you did not make up your mind more rapidly than I had done. It was a case of Goethe"s mutual affinity! I saw you at other houses. I went to them on purpose to see you, but I took care never to be introduced to you."
"Why?"
"You know that I am the great Sarah, George. But when I found that you had come to the very hotel at which I was stopping, I formed a little plot. I changed my quarters, I dropped the Freemantle, and became Miss Hardy. Then--_then_ I thrust myself right into your path, and--and it was all soon over. Are you sorry, George?"
"Sorry! But--but about those notes?"
"You goose! They came from me. I knew you had been betting, and I knew that you had lost. I didn"t want to lose you for a pound or two. But when you told me that you would not owe your salvation to a woman"s money--not knowing who the woman was--why, then I sent you the "tip"
for Ceruleans instead. It was the best thing that I ever did, for it brought me you."
Mr Coventry took off his hat. He wiped his brow. He seemed to be turning matters over in his mind.
"I shall always call you Dora."
"Call me what you please."
"Darling!"
XII
MAGICAL MUSIC
CHAPTER I--APOSTLE SPOONS
Miss Macleod pa.s.sed the newspaper to her nephew. "Look at that," she said. She had her finger on an advertis.e.m.e.nt. He looked at it. This is what he read:--
"A clergyman, having a large family entirely dependent on him, is compelled to sacrifice a unique set of apostle spoons. Twelve large, twelve small, silver-gilt, in handsome case. Being in urgent want of money, a trifle will be accepted. Quite new. Would make a handsome present. Approval willingly. Letters only, Pomona Villa, Ladbroke Grove, W."
"What do you think of it?" inquired the lady.
The Rev. Alan smoothed the paper with his hand.
"Not much," he ventured to remark.
"Put on your hat and come with me. I"m going to buy them."
"My dear aunt!"
"They will do for a wedding present for Clara Leach. Other people can marry, if you can"t."
The Rev. Alan sighed. He had been having a bad quarter of an hour. He was a little, freckled, sandy-haired, short-sighted man: one of those short-sighted men whose spectacles require continually settling in their place on the bridge of the nose. Such as he was, he was the only hope of an ancient race--the only male hope, that is.
The Macleods of Pittenquhair predated the first of the Scottish kings.
Fortunately for themselves they postdated them as well.
For a considerable portion of their history, the members of that time-honoured family had been compelled, in the Sidney-Smithian phrase, to cultivate their greatness on a little oatmeal--for want of cash to enable them to indulge in any other form of cultivation. But in these latter days they had grown rich, owing to a fortunate matrimonial speculation with a Chicago young lady whose father had something to do with hogs. The lady"s name was Biggins--Cornelia P.
Biggins--the P. stood for Pollie, which was her mother"s name, the "front" name came from history. The particular Macleod who had married her had been christened David. He devoted a considerable portion of his wife"s fortune to buying up the ancient lands of the Macleods, in the neighbourhood of Pittenquhair and thereabouts. In his person he resolved that the ancient family glories should reappear--and more.
But in these cases it is notorious that man only proposes--his wife never bore him a child. To make matters worse, he only outlived Mrs Macleod six months, so that he never had a decent chance to try his luck again.
David had a brother. Being a childless man, and desirous to restore the ancestral grandeur, one would have thought that he would have left his wealth to his brother, who wanted it if ever a man did yet. But, unfortunately, Alan was not only an irredeemable scamp--which might have been forgiven him, for David was by no means spotless--but also the two brothers hated each other with a truly enduring brotherly hatred. Nor had Alan improved matters by making public and unpleasant allusions to hogs and swine, not only on the occasion of David"s marriage, but on many occasions afterwards. So it came to pa.s.s that when David was gathered to his fathers, his brother"s name was not even mentioned in his will. All his wealth was left to his sister Janet.
In course of time Alan died abroad--very much abroad, and in more senses than one. Then, for the first time, Janet appeared upon the scene. She paid for her brother"s funeral, and took his only child, a boy, back with her to England. The child"s mother, who was nothing and n.o.body, had died--charitable people said, murdered by her husband--soon after her infant"s birth. So his aunt was the only relation the youngster had.
Janet was a spinster. She had ideas of her own, and plenty of them.
Her dominant idea was that in her nephew the family sun should rise again in splendour. But alas for the perversity of fate! The boy pa.s.sed from a public school to the university, and from the university--after a struggle, in which he showed himself, in a lymphatic sort of way, as obstinate as one of Mrs David"s father"s pigs--into the church. This was bad enough for a son of his father, and the heir to Pittenquhair and ten thousand pounds a year, but what followed was infinitely worse. He became a ritualist of the ritualists--more Roman than the Romans--and the motto which he nailed to the mast was "Celibacy of the clergy"!
Her nephew"s conduct almost drove Miss Janet mad. Two wives she might have forgiven--but none! In season and out of season she preached to him the duty of marriage; but what she regarded as a duty he regarded as a crime. She spoke of an heir for Pittenquhair; his thoughts were of something very different indeed. To speak of disinheriting him was to pander to his tastes. The income from his curacy was seventy pounds a year--and he lived on it. The money sent him by his aunt he surrendered to the Church and to the poor. What availed it to preach of disinheritance to a man who behaved like that?
And yet, in his own peculiar way, he was a good nephew to his aunt. He was the meekest, ugliest, shyest, awkwardest of men. His curacy was at a place on the Suffolk coast called Swaffham-on-Sea. From these wilds he was perpetually being summoned by his aunt to attend on her in her house in town. Although--possibly because he was that kind of man--these visits were anything but occasions of pleasure, he generally obeyed the summons. On the present occasion it was the second day of his stay under his aunt"s hospitable roof in Cadogan Place. From the moment of his arrival she had continually reviled him.
She had suggested as wives some two-score eligible young women, from earls" daughters to confectioners" a.s.sistants. She had arrived at that state of mind in which, if he would only marry, she would have welcomed a cook. In his awkward, stammering way, he had vetoed them all. Then she had rated him for an hour and three-quarters by the clock. Finally, exhausted by her efforts, she had caught up the paper in a rage. The Rev. Alan watched her in silence as she read it, fingering a little book of prayers he had in his waistcoat pocket.
All at once she had thrust the advertis.e.m.e.nt sheet of the paper underneath his nose, with the exclamation--
"Look at that!"
He looked at it, and had read the advertis.e.m.e.nt reproduced above.
"Don"t sit there like a stuck dummy," observed Miss Macleod, whose English, in her moments of excitement, was more than peculiar. "Go and get the thing that you call a hat! Hat!" Miss Macleod sniffed; "if you had appeared in the streets in _my_ days with such a thing on your head, people would have thought that Guy Fawkes"s day was come again."
The Rev. Alan was still studying the paper.
"But, my dear aunt, you are not seriously thinking of paying any attention to such an advertis.e.m.e.nt as that?"
"And why not? Isn"t the man a clergyman?"
"I can"t think that a priest--"
"A priest!" cried Miss Macleod, to whom the word was as a red rag to a bull. "Who spoke about a priest?"
The Rev. Alan went placidly on--
"--under any circ.u.mstances would advertise apostle spoons for sale."
"Who asks you what you think? Put on your hat and come with me."
"There is another point. The advertis.e.m.e.nt says "letters only"; there is evidently an objection to a personal call."