"This is the home of my ancestors," I said, "and it makes me glad to think they amount to something--own real estate--and keep their venerable heads above water."
"So this is the home of your ancestors," she said.
"It"s holy ground to me," I said.
"Fancy!" she exclaimed.
"At least I think it is," I went on, "though we haven"t any proofs beyond the fact that Fyles has always been a family name with us back to the Colonial days. I"m named Fyles myself--Fyles ffrench-- and we, like the Castle people--have managed to retain our little f throughout the ages."
She looked at me so incredulously that I handed her my card.
Mr. Fyles ffrench,
Knickerbocker Club.
She turned it over in her fingers, regarding me at the same time with flattering curiosity.
"How do you do, kinsman?" she said, holding out her hand. "Welcome to old England!"
I took her little hand and pressed it.
"I am the daughter of the house," she explained, "and I"m named Fyles too, though they usually call me Verna."
"And the little f, of course," I said.
"Just like yours," she returned. "There may be some capital F"s in the family, but we wouldn"t acknowledge them!"
"What a fellow-feeling that gives one!" I said. "At school, at college, in business, in the war with Spain when I served on the Dixie, my life has been one long struggle to preserve that little f against a capital F world. I remember saying that to a chum the day we sank Cervera, "If I am killed, Bill," I said, "see that they don"t capital F me on the scroll of fame!""
"A true ffrench!" exclaimed Beauty with approval.
"As true as yourself," I said.
"Do you know that I"m the last of them?" she said.
"You!" I exclaimed. "The last!"
"Yes," she said, "when my father dies the estates will pa.s.s to my second cousin, Lord George Willoughby, and our branch of the family will become extinct."
"You fill me with despair," I said.
"My father never can forgive me for being a girl," she said.
"I can," I remarked, "even at the risk of appearing disloyal to the race."
"Fyles," she said, addressing me straight out by my first name, and with a little air that told me plainly I had made good my footing in the fold, "Fyles, what a pity you aren"t the rightful heir, come from overseas with parchments and parish registers, to make good your claim before the House of Lords."
"Wouldn"t that be rather hard on you?" I asked.
"I"d rather give up everything than see the old place pa.s.s to strangers," she said.
"But I"m a stranger," I said.
"You"re Fyles ffrench," she exclaimed, "and a man, and you"d hand the old name down and keep the estate together."
"And guard the little f with the last drop of my blood," I said.
"Ah, well!" she said, with a little sigh, "the world"s a disappointing place at best, and I suppose it serves us right for centuries of conceit about ourselves."
"That at least will never die," I observed. "The American branch will see to that part of it."
"It"s a pity, though, isn"t it?" she said.
"Well," I said, "when a family has been carrying so much dog for a thousand years, I suppose in common fairness it"s time to give way for another."
"What is carrying dog?" she said.
"It"s American," I returned, "for thinking yourself better than anybody else!"
"Fancy!" she said, and then with a beautiful smile she took my hand and rubbed it against the hound"s muzzle.
"You mustn"t growl at him, Olaf," she said. "He"s a ffrench; he"s one of us; and he has come from over the sea to make friends."
"You can"t turn me out of the park after that," I said, in spite of a very dubious lick from the n.o.ble animal, who, possibly because he couldn"t read and hadn"t seen my card, was still a prey to suspicion.
"I am going to take you back to the castle myself," she said, "and we"ll spend the day going all over it, and I shall introduce you to my father--Sir Fyles--when he returns at five from Ascot."
"I could ask for nothing better," I said, "though I don"t want to make myself a burden to you. And then," I went on, a little uncertain how best to express myself, "you are so queer in England about--about----"
"Proprieties," she said, giving the word which I hesitated to use.
"Oh, yes! I suppose I oughtn"t to; indeed, it"s awful, and there"ll be lunch too, Fyles, which makes it twice as bad. But to- day I"m going to be American and do just what I like."
"I thought I ought to mention it," I said.
"Objection overruled," she returned. "That"s what they used to say in court when my father had his famous right-of-way case with Lord Piffle of Doom; and from what I remember there didn"t seem any repartee to it."
"There certainly isn"t one from me," I said.
"Let"s go," she said.
There didn"t seem any end to that park, and we walked and walked and rested once or twice under the deep shade, and took in a mouldy pavilion in white marble with broken windows, and a Temple of Love that dated back to the sixteenth century, and rowed on an ornamental water in a real gondola that leaked like sixty, and landed on a rushy island where there was a sun-dial and a stone seat that the Druids or somebody had considerately placed there in the year one, and talked of course, and grew confidential, until finally I was calling her Verna (which was her pet name) and telling her how the other fellow had married my best girl, while she spoke most beautifully and sensibly about love, and the way the old families were dying out because they had set greater store on their lands than on their hearts, and altogether with what she said and what I said, and what was understood, we pa.s.sed from acquaintance to friendship, and from friendship to the verge of something even nearer. Even the Uncle Tom hound fell under the spell of our new-found intimacy and condescended to lick my hand of his own volition, which Verna said he had never done before except to the butcher, and winked a bloodshot eye when I remarked he was too big for the island and ought to go back with me to a country nearer his size.
By the time we had reached the cliffs and began to perceive the high grey walls of the castle in the distance, Verna and I were faster friends than ever, and anyone seeing us together would have thought we had known each other all our lives. I felt more and more happy to think I had met her first in this unconventional way, for as the castle loomed up closer and we pa.s.sed gardeners and keepers and jockeys with a string of race-horses out for exercise, I felt that my pretty companion was constrained by the sight of these obsequious faces and changing by gradations into what she really was, the daughter of the castle and by right of blood one of the great ladies of the countryside.
The castle itself was a tremendous old pile, built on a rocky peninsula and surrounded on three sides by the waters of Appledore Harbour, It lay so as to face the entrance, which Verna told me was commanded--or rather had been in years past--by the guns of a half-moon battery that stood planted on a sort of third-story terrace. It was all towers and donjons and ramparts, and might, in its mediaeval perfection, have been taken bodily out of one of Sir Walter Scott"s novels. Verna and I had lunch together in a perfectly gorgeous old hall, with beams and carved panelling and antlers, and a fireplace you could have roasted an ox in, and rows of glistening suits of armour which the original ffrenches had worn when they had first started the family in life--and all this, if you please, tete-a-tete with a woman who seemed to get more beautiful every minute I gazed at her, and who smiled back at me and called me Fyles, to the stupefaction of three noiseless six- footers in silk stockings. Disapproving six-footers, too, whose gimlet eyes seemed to pierce my back as they sized up my clothes, which, as I said before, had suffered not a little by my trip, and my collar, which I"ll admit straight out wasn"t up to a castle standard, and the undeniable stain of machine-oil on my cuffs which I had got that morning in putting the machine to rights. You ought to have seen the man that took my hat, which he did with the air of a person receiving pearls and diamonds on a golden platter, and smudged his lordly fingers with the grime of my Fourth of July. And that darling of a girl, who never noticed my discomfiture, but whose eyes sparkled at times with a hidden merriment--shall I ever forget her as she sat there and helped me to mutton-chops from simply priceless old Charles the First plate!
We had black coffee together in a window-seat overlooking the harbour and the ships, and she asked me a lot of questions about the war with Spain and my service in the Dixie. She never moved a muscle when it came out I had been a quartermaster, though I could feel she was astounded at my being but a shade above a common seaman, and not, as she had taken it for granted, a commissioned officer. I was too proud to explain over-much, or to tell her I had gone in, as so many of my friends had done, from a strong sense of duty and patriotism at the time of my country"s need, and consequently allowed her to get a very wrong idea, I suppose, about my state in life and position in the world. Indeed, I was just childish enough to get a trifle wounded, and let her add misconception to misconception out of a silly obstinacy.
"But what do you do," she asked, "now that the war is over and you"ve taken away everything from the poor Spaniards and left the Navy?"