"How would you like a motor-car trip?" Sir Lionel asked abruptly.
The relief from suspense was almost too great, and I nearly jumped down his throat, so, after all, it would have been my own fault if the Dragon had eaten me. "I should _adore_ it!" I said.
"My dear!" protested Mrs. Norton, indulgently. "One adores Heavenly Beings."
"I"m not sure a motor-car isn"t a heavenly being," said I, "though perhaps without capitals."
The Dragon smiled, but she looked awfully shocked, and no doubt blamed Madame de Maluet.
"I"ve a forty-horse Mercedes promised to be ready on my arrival," said Sir Lionel, still reflective. "You know, Emily, the little twelve-horse-power car I had sent out to East Bengal was a Mercedes. If I could drive her, I can drive a bigger car. Everybody says it"s easier.
And young Nick has learned to be a first-rate mechanic."
I suppose young Nick must be the Dragon"s pet name for the bronze image.
What fun that he should be a chauffeur! Fancy an Indian Idol squatted on the front seat of an up-to-date automobile. But when you come to think of it, there have been other G.o.ds in cars. I only hope, if I"m to be behind him, this one won"t behave like Juggernaut. He wears almost too many clothes, for he is the type that would look over-dressed in a bangle.
"We might have an eight or ten weeks" run about England," the Dragon went on, "while things are being made straight at Graylees. It would be good to see something of the blessed old island again before settling down."
"One would think you were quite pleased at the fire, Lionel," remarked his sister, who evidently believes it wrong to look on the bright side of things, and right to expect the worst--like an undertaker calling for a client before he"s dead.
"What is, is," returned he. "We may as well make the best of it. You wouldn"t mind a motor tour, would you, Emily?"
"I would go if it were my duty, and you desired it," she said, looking as if she ought to be on stained gla.s.s, with half a halo, "only I am hardly young enough to consider motoring as a pleasure."
"There aren"t many years between us," replied her brother, too polite to say whether he were in front or behind, "but I confess I do regard it as a pleasure."
"A man is different," she admitted.
Thank goodness, he is!
Then they talked more about the fire, which, it seems, happened through something being wrong with a flue, in a room where Mrs. N. had told a servant to build a fire on account of dampness. It must be a wonderful old place from what they both let drop. (I told you in another letter how Sir Lionel had inherited it, about the same time as his t.i.tle, or a little later. The estate, though, comes from the mother"s side, and her people were from Warwickshire.) His cool British way of saying and taking things is a good deal on the surface, I think. He would have hated us to see it, but I"m sure he worked himself up to quite a pitch of joyful excitement over the idea of the motor trip, as it developed in his mind. And it is splendid, isn"t it, darling?
You know how sorry you were we hadn"t been more economical, and made our money last long enough to travel in England, instead of having to stop short after a splash in London. Now I"m going to see bits in spite of all, until I"m "called away," and I"ll try my best, in letters, to make you see what I do. Ellaline wouldn"t have enjoyed such a tour, for she hates the country, or any place where it isn"t suitable to wear high heels and picture hats. But I--oh, I! Twenty dragons on the same seat of the car with me couldn"t prevent my revelling in it--though it may be cut short for me at any minute. As for Mrs. Norton----
But the stewardess has just said we shall be in, in five minutes. I had to come down to the ladies" cabin with Mrs. N. Now I haven"t time to tell you any more, except that they both (Sir L. and his sister, I mean) wanted to get to England as soon as possible. I know _she_ was disappointed not to fling her brother"s ward back to Madame de Maluet, and probably wouldn"t have come over to Paris if she hadn"t hoped to bring it off; but she resigns herself to things easily when a man says they"re best. It was Sir Lionel who wanted particularly to cross to-night, though he didn"t urge it; but she said, "Very well, dear. I think you"re right."
So here we are. A large bell is ringing, and so is my heart. I mean it"s beating. Good-bye, dearest. I"ll write again to-morrow--or rather to-day, for it"s a lovely sunrise, like a good omen--when we get settled somewhere. I believe we"re going to a London hotel. Yes, stewardess. Oh, I ought to have said that to her, instead of writing it to you. She interrupted.
Love--love.
_Your_ Audrie,
_Their_ Ellaline.
V
AUDRIE BRENDON TO HER MOTHER
_Ritz Hotel, London_, _July 8th_
Angel: May your wings never moult! I hope you didn"t think me extravagant wiring yesterday, instead of writing. I was too busy baking the yeasty dough of my impressions to write a letter worth reading; and when one has practically _no_ money, what"s the good of being economical? You know the sole point of sympathy I ever touched with "Sissy" Williams was his famous speech: "If I can"t earn five hundred a year, it"s not worth while worrying to earn anything"; which excused his settling down as a "remittance man," in the top flat, at forty francs a month.
Dearest, the Dragon hasn"t drag-ged once, yet! And, by the way, till he does so, I think I won"t call him Dragon again. It"s rather gratuitous, as I"m eating his bread--or rather, his perfectly gorgeous _a la cartes_, and am literally smeared with luxury, from my rising up until my lying down, at his expense.
I know, and you know, because I repeated it word for word, that Ellaline said she thought he must have been well paid for undertaking to "guardian" her, as his hard, selfish type does nothing for nothing; and she has always seemed so very rich (quite _the_ heiress of the school, envied for her dresses and privileges) that there might be temptations for an unscrupulous man to pick up a few plums here and there.
But--well, of course Ellaline ought to know, after being his ward ever since she was four, and hearing things on the best authority about the horrid way he treated her mother, as well as suffering from his cruel heartlessness all these years. Never a letter written to herself; never the least little present; never a wish to hear from her, or see her photograph; all business carried on between himself and Madame de Maluet, who is too discreet to prejudice a ward against a guardian. And I--I saw him only day before yesterday for the first time. What _can_ I know about him? I"ve no experience in reading characters of men. The dear old Abbe and a few masters in the school are the only ones I have a bowing acquaintance with--except "Sissy" Williams, who doesn"t count.
It"s dangerous to trust to one"s instincts, no doubt, for it"s so difficult to be sure a wish isn"t disguising itself as instinct, in rouge and a golden wig.
But then, there"s the man"s profile, which is of the knight-of-old, Crusader pattern, a regular hook to hang respect upon, though I"d be doing it injustice if I let you imagine it"s _shaped_ like a hook. It isn"t; it"s quite beautiful; and you find yourself furtively, semi-consciously sketching it in air with your forefinger as you look at it. It suggests race, and _n.o.blesse oblige_, and a long line of soldier ancestors, and that sort of thing, such as you used to say survived visibly among the English aristocracy and English peasantry (not in the mixed-up middle cla.s.ses) more markedly than anywhere else. That must mean some correspondence in character, mustn"t it? Or can it be a mask, handed down by n.o.ble ancestry to cover up moral defects in a degenerate descendant?
Am I gabbling school-girl gush, or am I groping toward light? You know what I want to say, anyhow. The impression Sir Lionel Pendragon makes on me would be different if he hadn"t been described by Ellaline. I should have supposed him quite easy to read, if he"d happened upon me, unheralded--as a big ship looms over a little bark, on the high sea. I"d have thought him a simple enough, straightforward character in that case. I should have put him in the cla.s.s with his own Tudor castle--not that I"ve ever yet seen a Tudor castle, except in photographs or on postcards. But I"d have said to myself: If he"d been born a house instead of a man, he"d have been built centuries and centuries ago, by strong barons who knew exactly what they wanted, and grabbed it. He"d have been a castle, an _early_ Tudor castle, battlemented and surrounded by a moat, fortified, of course, and impregnable to the enemy, unless they treacherously blew him up. He would have had several secret rooms, but they would contain chests of treasure, not nasty skeletons.
Now you understand exactly what I"d be thinking of the alleged Dragon, if it weren"t for Ellaline. But as it is, I don"t know what to think of him. That"s why I describe him as elaborate and complicated, because, I suppose, he must be totally different inside from what he seems outside.
Anyhow, I don"t care--it"s lovely being at the Ritz. And we"re in the newspapers this morning, Emily and I shining by reflected light; mine doubly reflected, like the earth"s light shining on to the moon, and from that being pa.s.sed on to something else--some poor little chipped meteorite strayed out of the Milky Way.
It was Mrs. Norton who discovered the article about Sir Lionel--half a column--in the _Morning Post_ and she sent out for lots of other papers without saying anything to her brother, for--according to her--he "hates that sort of thing."
I didn"t have time to tell you in my last that she was sick crossing the Channel (though it was as smooth as if it had been ironed, and only a few wrinkles left in), but apparently she considers it good form for a female to be slightly ill in a ladylike way on boats; so, of course, she is. And as I was decent to her, she decided to like me better than she thought she would at first. For some reason they _both_ seemed prejudiced against me (I mean against Ellaline) to begin with. I can"t think why; and slowly, with unconcealable surprise, they are changing their minds. Changing one"s mind keeps one"s soul nice and clean and fresh; so theirs will be well aired, owing to me.
Emily has become quite resigned to my existence, and doles me out small confidences. She has not a rich nature, to begin with, and it has never been fertilized much, so it"s rather sterile; but no noxious weeds, anyhow, as there _may_ be in Sir Lionel"s more generous and cultivated soil. I think I shall get on with her pretty well after all, especially motoring, when I can take her with plenty of ozone. She is a little afraid of her brother, though he"s five years younger than she (I"ve now learned), but extremely proud of him; and it was quite pathetic, her cutting out the stuff about him in the papers, this morning, and showing every bit to me, before pasting all in a book she has been keeping for years, entirely concerned with Sir Lionel. She says she will show that to me, too, some day, but I mustn"t tell him. As if I would!
But about the newspapers. She didn"t order any Radical ones, because she said they were always down on the aristocracy, and unjust as well as stupid; but she got one by mistake, and you"ve no idea how delighted the poor little woman was when it praised her brother up to the skies. Then she said there were _some_ decent Radicals, after all.
Of course, one knows the difference between "Mirabeau judged by his friends and Mirabeau judged by the people," and can make allowances (if one"s digestion"s good) for points of view. But there"s one thing certain, whether he"s angel or devil, or something hybrid between the two, Sir Lionel Pendragon is a man of importance in the Public Eye. I wonder if Ellaline realizes his importance in that way? I can"t think she does, or she would have mentioned it, as it needn"t have interfered with her opinion of his private character.
It"s a little through Emily, but mostly from the newspaper cuttings, that I"ve got my knowledge of what he"s done, and been, and is expected to be.
He"s forty. I know that, because the _Morning Post_ gave the date of his birth, and he"s rather a swell, although only a baronet, and not even that till a short time ago. It appears that the family on both sides goes back into the mists of antiquity, in the days when legend, handed down by word of mouth (_can_ you hand things out of your mouth? Sounds rude), was the forerunner of history. His father"s ancestors are supposed to be descended from King Arthur; hence the "Pendragon"; though, I suppose, if it"s true, King Arthur must really have been married several times, as say the vulgar records of which Tennyson very properly takes no notice. There have been dukes and earls in the family, but they have somehow disappeared, perhaps because in those benighted days there were no American heiresses to keep them up.
It seems that Sir Lionel was a soldier to begin with, and was dreadfully wounded in some frontier fight in India when he was very young. He nearly lost the use of his left arm, and gave up the army; but he got the Victoria Cross. Ellaline didn"t say a word about that. Maybe she doesn"t know. After I"d read his "dossier" in the paper, I couldn"t resist asking him at lunch what he had done to deserve the V. C.
"Nothing to deserve it," he answered, looking surprised.
"To get it, then?" I twisted my question round.
"Oh, I don"t know--almost forget. Pulled some silly a.s.s out of a hole, I believe," said he.
That"s what you get for asking this sort of Englishman questions about his past. I thought it was only widows with auburn hair you mustn"t talk to about their pasts.
"A grateful Government" (according to the _Morning Post_) "sent young Pendragon, at the age of twenty-five, to East Bengal, as private secretary to Sir John Hurley, who was lieutenant-governor at that time"; and it"s an ill Governor, so to speak, who blows no one any good. Sir John"s liver was so tired of Bengal, that he had to take it away, and Lieutenant Pendragon (as he was then) looked after things till another man could arrive. He looked after them so brilliantly, that when the next lieutenant-governor did something silly, and was asked to resign, our incipient Sir Lionel was invited to take on the job. He was only thirty, and so he has been lieutenant-governor for ten years. Now he"s going to see whether he likes being a baronet better, and having castles and motor-cars. All the papers I saw praised him tremendously, and said that in a crisis which might have been disastrous he had averted a catastrophe by his remarkable strength of character and presence of mind. I suppose that was the time when the other papers accused him of abominable cruelties. I wonder which was right? Perhaps I shall be able to judge, sooner or later, if I watch at the loopholes of his character like a cat watching for a mouse to come out for a walk.
As for money, if one can believe newspapers, he has plenty without shaking pennies from the slot of Ellaline Lethbridge"s bank, and was fairly well off even before he came in for his t.i.tle or his castle.
However, as a very young man, he may have been poor--about the time he went into guardianship.