So she gradually drew herself away, pushing him softly with her small gloved hand.
"I am sure I hate quarrelling," she said. "But there! Oh, George! don"t let"s talk of it any more! And look what you have done to my poor hair.
You dear, naughty boy!"
But though she called him "Dear," she frowned as she took off her gloves that she might mend what he had done.
George thrust his hands into his pockets, walked to the window, and waited. As he descended the great stairs in her wake he wished Castle Luton and its guests at the deuce. What pleasure was to be got out of grimacing and posing at these country-house parties? And now, according to Letty, the Maxwells were here. A great _gene_ for everybody!
CHAPTER XI
"That lady sitting by Sir George? What! Lady Maxwell? No--the other side?
Oh! that"s Lady Leven. Don"t you know her? She"s tremendous fun!"
And the dark-eyed, rosy-cheeked young man who was sitting beside Letty nodded and smiled across the table to Betty Leven, merely by way of reminding her of his existence. They had greeted before dinner--a greeting of comrades.
Then he turned back, with sudden decorum, to this Lady Tressady, whom he had been commissioned to take in to dinner. "Quite pretty, but rather--well, ordinary!" he said to himself, with a critical coolness bred of much familiarity with the best things of Vanity Fair. He had been Ancoats"s friend at Cambridge, and was now disporting himself in the Guards, but still more--as Letty of course a.s.sumed--in the heart of the English well-born world. She knew that he was Lord Naseby, and that some day he would be a marquis. A halo, therefore, shone about him. At the same time, she had a long experience of young men, and, if she flattered him, it was only indirectly, by a sort of teasing aggression that did not allow him to take his attention from her.
"I declare you are better than any peerage!" she said to him presently, when he had given her a short biography, first of Lord Cathedine, who was sitting opposite, then of various other members of the company. "I should like to tie you to my fan when I go out to dinner."
"Would you?" said the young man, drily. "Oh! you will soon know all you want to know."
"How are poor little people from Yorkshire to find their way about in this big world? You are all so dreadfully absorbed in each other. In the first place, you all marry each other."
"Do we?--though I don"t quite understand who "we" means. Well, one must marry somebody, I suppose, and cousins are less trouble than other people."
Involuntarily, the young man"s eyes travelled along the table to a fair girl on the opposite side, dazzlingly dressed in black. She was wielding a large fan of black feathers, which threw both hair and complexion into amazing relief; and she seemed to be amusing herself in a nervous, spasmodic way with Sir Frank Leven. Letty noticed his glance.
"Oh! you have not earned your testimonial yet, not by any manner of means," she said. "That is Lady Madeleine Penley, isn"t it? Is she a relation of Mrs. Allison"s?"
"She is a cousin. That is her mother, Lady Kent, sitting beside poor Ancoats. Such an old character! By the end of dinner she will have got to the bottom of Ancoats, or know the reason why."
"Is Lord Ancoats such a mystery?" said Letty, running an inquisitive eye over the black front, sharp nose, and gorgeously bejewelled neck of a somewhat noisy and forbidding old lady sitting on the right hand of the host.
Young Naseby"s expression in answer rather piqued her. There was a quick flash of something that was instantly suppressed, and the youth said composedly,
"Oh! we are all mysteries for Lady Kent."
But Letty noticed that his eyes strayed back to Lord Ancoats, and then again to Lady Madeleine. He seemed to be observing them, and Letty"s sharpness at once took the hint. No doubt the handsome, large-featured girl was here to be "looked at." Probably a good many maidens would be pa.s.sed in review before this young Sultan made his choice! By the way he must be a good deal older than George had imagined. Clearly he left college some time ago. What a curious face he had--a small, crumpled face, with very prominent blue eyes; curly hair of a reddish colour, piled high, as though for effect, above his white brow; together with a sharp chin and pointed moustache, which gave him the air of an old French portrait. He was short in stature, but at the same time agile and strongly built. He wore one or two fine old rings, which drew attention to the delicacy of his hands; and his manner struck her as at once morose and excitable. Letty regarded him with involuntary respect as the son of Mrs. Allison--much more as the master of Castle Luton and fifty thousand a year. But if he had not been the master of Castle Luton she would have probably thought, and said, that he had a disagreeable Bohemian air.
"Haven"t you really made acquaintance with Lady Kent?" said Lord Naseby, returning to the charge his laziness was somewhat at a loss for conversation. "I should have thought she was the person one could least escape knowing in the three kingdoms."
"I have seen her, of course," said Letty, lightly, though, alas! untruly.
"But I am afraid you can hardly realise that I have only been three short seasons in London--two with an old aunt, who never goes out, in Cavendish Square, poor dull old dear! and another with Mrs. Watton, of Malford."
"Oh! with Mrs. Watton, of Malford," said Lord Naseby, vaguely. Then he became suddenly aware that Lady Leven, on the other side of the table, was beckoning to him. He leant across, and they exchanged a merry war of words about something of which Letty knew nothing.
Letty, rather incensed, thought him a puppy, drew herself up, and looked round at the ex-Governor beside her. She saw a fine head, the worn yellow face and whitened hair of a man who has suffered under a hot climate, and an agreeable, though somewhat courtly, smile. Sir Philip Wentworth was not troubled with the boyish fastidiousness of Lord Naseby. He perceived merely that a pretty young woman wished to make friends with him, and met her wish at once. Moreover, he identified her as the wife of that "promising and well-informed fellow, Tressady," with whom he had first made friends in India, and had now--just before dinner--renewed acquaintance in the most cordial fashion.
He talked graciously to the wife, then, of Tressady"s abilities and Tressady"s career. Letty at first liked it. Then she was seized with a curious sense of discomfort.
Her eyes wandered towards the head of the table, where George was talking--why! actually talking earnestly, and as though he were enjoying himself, to Lady Maxwell, whose n.o.ble head and neck, rising from a silver white dress, challenged a great Genoese Vandyck of a Marehesa Balbi which was hanging just behind her, and challenged it victoriously.
So other people thought and said these things of George? Letty was for a moment sharply conscious that they had not occupied much place in her mind since her marriage, or, for the matter of that, since her engagement. She had taken it for granted that he was "distinguished"--that was part of the bargain. Only, she never seemed as yet to have had either time or thought to give to those parts and elements in his life which led people to talk of him as this old Indian was doing.
Curtains, carpets, gowns, cabinets; additions to Ferth; her own effect in society; how to keep Lady Tressady in her place--of all these things she had thought, and thought much. But George"s honourable ambitions, the esteem in which he was held, the place he was to make for himself in the world of men--in thinking of _these_ her mind was all stiff and unpractised. She was conscious first of a moral p.r.i.c.k, then of a certain irritation with other people.
Yet she could not help watching George wistfully. He looked tired and pale, in spite of the animation of his talk. Well! no doubt she looked pale too. Some of the words and phrases of their quarrel flashed across her. In this beautiful room, with its famous pictures and its historical a.s.sociations, amid this acc.u.mulated art and wealth, the whole thing was peculiarly odious to remember. Under the eyes of Vandyck"s Marchesa one would have liked to think of oneself as always dignified and refined, always elegant and calm.
Then Letty had a revulsion, and laughed at herself.
"As if these people didn"t have tempers, and quarrel about money! Of course they do! And if they don"t--well, we all know how easy it is to be amiable on fifty thousand a year."
After dinner Mrs. Allison led the way to the "Green Drawing-room." This room, hung with Gainsborough portraits, was one of the sights of the house, and tonight Marcella Maxwell especially looked round her on entering it, with enchantment.
"You happy people!" she said to Mrs. Allison. "I never come into this room without anxiously asking myself whether I am fit to make one of the company. I look at my dress, or I am doubtful about my manners, or I wish someone had taught me to dance the minuet!"
"Yes," said Betty Leven, running up to a vast picture, a life-size family group, which covered the greater part of the farther wall of the room.
"What a vulgar, insignificant chit one feels oneself without cap or powder!--without those ruffles, or those tippets, or those quilted petticoats! Mrs. Allison, _may_ my maid come down to-morrow while we are at dinner and take the pattern of those ruffles? No--no! she sha"n"t!
Sacrilege! You pretty thing!" she said, addressing a figure--the figure of a girl in white with thin virginal arms and bust, who seemed to be coming out of the picture, almost to be already out of it and in the room. "Come and talk to me. Don"t think any more of your father and mother there. You have been curtsying to them for a hundred years; and they are rather dull, stupid people, after all. Come and tell us secrets.
Tell us what you have seen in this room--all the foolish people making love, and the sad people saying good-bye."
Betty was kneeling on a carved chair, her pretty arms leaning on the back of it, her eyes fixed half-in laughter, half in sentiment, on the figure in the picture.
Lady Maxwell suddenly moved closer to her, and Letty heard her say in a low voice, as she put her hand on Lady Leven"s arm:
"Don"t, Betty! _don"t!_ It was in this room he proposed to her, and it was in this room he said goodbye. Maxwell has often told me. I believe she never comes in here alone--only for ceremony and when there is a crowd."
A look of consternation crossed Lady Leven"s lively little face. She glanced shyly towards Mrs. Allison. That lady had moved hastily away from the group in front of the picture. She was sitting by herself, looking straight before her, with a certain stiffness, her thin hands crossed on her knee. Betty impetuously went towards her, and was soon sitting on a stool beside her, chattering to her and amusing her.
Meanwhile Marcella invited Lady Tressady to come and sit with her on a sofa beneath the great picture.
Letty followed her, settled her satin skirts in their most graceful folds, put one little foot on a Louis Quinze footstool which seemed to invite it, and then began to inform herself about the house and the family.
At the beginning of their talk it was clear that Lady Maxwell wished to ingratiate herself. A friendly observer would have thought that she was trying to make a stranger feel more at ease in this house and circle, where she herself was a familiar guest. Betty Leven, catching sight of the pair from the other side of the room, said to herself, with inward amus.e.m.e.nt, that Marcella was "realising the wife."
At any rate, for some time Lady Maxwell talked with sympathy, with effusion even, to her companion. In the first place she told her the story of their hostess.
Thirty years before, Mrs. Allison, the daughter and heiress of a Leicestershire squire, had married Henry Allison, old Lord Ancoats"s second son, a young captain in the Guards. They enjoyed three years of life together; then the chances of a soldier"s career, as interpreted by two high-minded people, took Henry Allison out to an obscure African coast, to fight one of the innumerable "little wars" of his country. He fell, struck by a spear, in a single-file march through some nameless swamp; and a few days afterwards the words of a Foreign Office telegram broke a pining woman"s heart.
Old Lord Ancoats"s death, which followed within a month or two, was hastened by the shock of his son"s loss; and before the year was out the eldest son, who was sickly and unmarried, also died, and Mrs. Allison"s boy, a child of two, became the owner of Castle Luton. The mother saw herself called upon to fight down her grief, to relinquish the quasi-religious life she had entered upon, and instead to take her boy to the kingdom he was to rule, and bring him up there.
"And for twenty-two years she has lived a wonderful life here," said Marcella; "she has been practically the queen of a whole countryside, doing whatever she pleased, the mother and friend and saint of everybody.