"You think he has deep feelings?" Mrs. Money asked, turning the full light of her melancholy eyes upon Mary, and with her whole soul already in the question.
"Oh, yes; I know he has. I know that he will persevere, and will try to make Minola marry him still. He is a man I should be afraid of if he were disappointed. I should indeed."
"Mamma, don"t you think we had better have Nola to stay with us for a while?" Lucy asked. "Miss Blanchet could describe him, or get a photograph, and we could give orders that no such man was ever to be admitted if he should call and ask to see her. Some one should always go out with her, or she should only go in the carriage. I dread this man; I do indeed. Miss Blanchet is quite right, and she knows more than she says, I dare say. Such terrible things have happened, you know. I read in a paper the other day of a young man who fell in love with a girl--in the country it was, I think, or in Spain perhaps, or somewhere--and she would not marry him; and he hid himself with a long dagger, and when she was going to church he stabbed her several times."
"I don"t think Mr. Augustus Sheppard would be likely to do anything of that kind," Miss Blanchet said. "He"s a very respectable man, and a steady, grave sort of person."
"You never can tell," Lucy declared. "When those quiet men are in love and disappointed, they are dreadful! I"ve read a great many things just like that in books."
"Well, dear," Mrs. Money said, "we"ll ask your papa. If he knows this gentleman--this person--he can tell us what sort of man he is. It doesn"t seem that he is in London now."
"He may have come to-day," said Lucy.
Miss Theresa looked at her watch.
"Mamma dear, I don"t think Miss Grey is coming in just yet, and it"s growing late, and I have to attend the Ladies" Committee of the Saint Angulphus a.s.sociation, at four."
"You go, mamma, with Theresa," Lucy exclaimed. "I"ll wait; I must see Nola. I begin to be alarmed. It"s very odd her staying out. I think something must really have happened. That man may have been in town, waiting somewhere. You go. When I have seen Nola, and am satisfied that she is safe, I can get home in the omnibus, or the underground, or the steamboat, or somehow. I"ll find my way, you may be sure."
"My dear," her mother said, "you were never in an omnibus in your life."
"Papa goes in omnibuses, and he says he doesn"t care whether other people do or not."
"But a lady, my dear----"
"Oh, I"ve seen them in the streets full of women! They don"t object to ladies at all."
"But my dear young lady," Miss Blanchet pleaded, "there is not the slightest occasion for your staying. Mr. Sheppard isn"t at all that kind of person. Minola is quite safe. She is often out much later than this, although I confess that I did expect her home much earlier to-day."
"I"ll stay till Nola comes," the positive little Lucy declared, "unless Miss Blanchet turns me out; and there"s an end of that. So, mamma dear, you and Tessy do as you please, and never mind me."
"When Minola does come----" Mary Blanchet began to say.
"When she does come?" Lucy interrupted in portentous accents. "Say if she does come, Miss Blanchet."
"When she does come, please don"t say anything of Mr. Sheppard. Of course she would not like to think that we spoke about such a subject."
"Oh, of course, of course!" all the ladies chorused, with looks expressive of immense caution and discretion; and in true feminine fashion all honestly a.s.suming that there could be nothing wrong in talking over anybody"s supposed secrets so long as the person concerned did not know of the talk.
"I see Miss Grey," said the quiet Theresa suddenly. She had been looking out of the window to see if the carriage was near. As a professed saint she had naturally less interest in ordinary human creatures than her mother and sister had.
"Thank heaven!" Lucy exclaimed.
"Dear Lucy!" Theresa interposed in tones of mild remonstrance, as if she would suggest that not everybody had a right to make reference to heaven, and that heaven would probably resent any allusion to it by the unqualified.
"Well, I am thankful that she is coming all the same; but I wish you wouldn"t call her Miss Grey, Tessy. It seems cold and unfriendly. Call her Nola, please."
Mary Blanchet went to the door and exchanged a brief word or two with Minola, in order that she might be prepared for her visitors. Minola came in, looking very handsome, with her color heightened by a quick walk home and the little excitement of her morning.
"How lovely you are looking, Nola, dear!" Lucy exclaimed, after the first greetings were over. "You look as if you had been having an adventure."
"I have had a sort of adventure," Minola answered with a faint blush.
The one thought went through the minds of all her listeners at the same moment, and it shaped itself into a name--"Mr. Augustus Sheppard." All were silent and breathless.
"It was not much," Minola hastened to say. "Only I met Mr. Victor Heron in Regent"s Park, and I have been walking with him."
Most of her listeners seemed relieved.
"I wish I had met him," Lucy blurted out. "He is very handsome, and I should like to have walked with him. Oh, what nonsense I am talking!"
and she grew red, and jumped up and looked out of the window.
Then they all talked about something else, and the visit closed with a promise that Minola and Mary Blanchet would present themselves at one of Mrs. Money"s little weekly receptions, out of season, which was to take place the following evening; and after which Mrs. Money hoped to decoy them into staying for the night. Mary Blanchet went to bed that night in an ecstasy of happiness, only disturbed now and then by a torturing doubt as to whether Mrs. Money would be equally willing to receive her if she had known that she had been the keeper of the court-house at Keeton; and whether she ought not to forewarn Mrs. Money of the fact; and whether she ought not, at least, to call Minola"s attention to the question, and submit to her judgment.
CHAPTER IX.
IN SOCIETY.
Mr. Money was not a very regular visitor at his wife"s little receptions out of the season. In the season, and when they had larger and more formal gatherings, he showed himself as much as was fitting and regular; for many of the guests then were virtually his guests, persons who desired especially to see him, and of whose topics he could talk. A good many foreign visitors were there usually--scientific men, and railway contractors, and engineers, and shipbuilders, from Germany, Italy, and Russia, and of course the United States, who looked upon Mr.
Money as a person of great importance and distinction, and would not have cared anything about most of Mrs. Money"s guests.
The foreigners were curiously right and wrong. Mr. Money was a person of importance and distinction. Every Londoner who knew anything knew his name, and knew that he was clever and distinguished. If a Russian stranger of rank were dining with a Cabinet minister, and were to express a wish to see and know Mr. Money, the minister would think the wish quite natural, and would take his friend down to the lobby of the House of Commons, and make him acquainted with Mr. Money. We have all been foreigners ourselves somewhere, and we know how our longing to see some celebrity, as we suppose, of the land we are visiting, some one whose name was familiar to us in England, has been occasionally checked and chilled by our finding that in the celebrity"s own city no one seems to have heard of him. There are only too many celebrities of this kind which shine, like the moon, for those who are a long way off. But Mr. Money was a man of mark in London, as well as in St. Petersburg and New York. Therein the foreigners found themselves right. Yet Mr.
Money"s position was somewhat peculiar for all that, in a manner no stranger could well appreciate. The Cabinet minister did not ask Mr.
Money to meet his friend at dinner; or, at all events, would never have been able to say to his friend, "Money? Oh, yes! Of course you ought to know him. He is coming to-morrow to dine with us. Won"t you come and meet him?" The most the Cabinet minister would do would be to get up a little dinner party, suitably adjusted for the express purpose of bringing his friend and Mr. Money together. It would be too much to say that Mr. Money was under a cloud. There rather seemed to be a sort of faint idea abroad that he ought to be, or some day would be, under a cloud, no one knew why.
No such considerations as these, however, would have affected the company who gathered round Mrs. Money in the out-of-season evenings, or could have been appreciated by them. They were, for the most part, entirely out of Mr. Money"s line. He came among them irregularly and at intervals; and if he found there any man or woman he knew or was taken with, he talked to him or her a good deal, and perhaps, if it were a man, he carried him and one or two others off to his own study or smoking-room, where they discoursed at their ease. Sometimes Lucelet was sent to her papa, if he was not making his appearance in the drawing-room, to beg him to accomplish some such act of timely intervention. Somebody, perhaps, presented himself among Mrs. Money"s guests who was rather too solid, or grave, or scientific, or political, to care for the general company, and to be of any social benefit to them; or some one, as we have said, in whose eyes Mr. Money would be a celebrity, and Mrs. Money"s guests counted for nothing. Then Lucy went for her father, if he was in the house, and drew him forth. He was wonderfully genial with his womankind. They might disturb him at any moment and in any way they chose. He seemed to have as little idea of grumbling if they disturbed him as a Newfoundland dog would have of snapping at his master"s children if they insisted on rousing him up from his doze in the sun.
Mr. Money talked very frankly of his daughters and their prospects sometimes.
"My girls are going to marry any one they like," he would often say; "the poorer the better, so far as I am concerned, so long as they like the girls and the girls like them." As chance would have it, a rich man fell in love with Theresa, and she, in her quiet, sanctimonious way, loved him, and that was settled.
"Now, Lucelet, look out for yourself," Mr. Money would, say to his blushing daughter. "If you fall in love with some fine young fellow, I don"t care if he hasn"t sixpence. Only be sure, Mrs. Lucelet, that you are in love with him, and that he is in love with you, and not with your expectations."
Lucelet generally smiled and saucily tossed her head, as one who should say that she considered herself a person quite qualified to make an impression without the help of any expectations.
"I sometimes wish the right man would come along, Lucelet," Mr. Money said one day, throwing his arm round his pretty daughter"s shoulder, and drawing her to him.
"Papa! do you want to get rid of me so soon? I wonder at you. I know I don"t want to get rid of you."
"No, no, dear; it isn"t that. Never mind. Where"s your mamma? Just run and ask her"--and Mr. Money started something else, and put an end to the conversation.
Mr. Money"s ideas with regard to the future of his daughters did not fail to become known among his acquaintances in general, and would doubtless have drawn young men in goodly numbers around his home, even if Lucelet were far less pretty than she really was. But in any case Mrs. Money loved to be friendly to young people, and her less formal parties were largely attended, almost always, by the young. Miss Theresa"s future husband did not come there often. He had known the family chiefly through Mr. Money and Parliament; and, coming once to dine with Mr. Money, he fell fairly in love with the dove-like eyes and saintly ways of Theresa. Theresa was therefore what her father would have called "out of the swim." She looked tolerantly upon her mother"s little gatherings of poets _en herbe_, artists who were great to their friends, patriots hunting for const.i.tuencies, orators who had not yet caught the speaker"s eye, and persons who had tried success in all these various paths and failed. She looked on them tolerantly, but her soul was not in them; it floated above them in a purer atmosphere. It was now, indeed, floating among the spires of the church which her lover was to build.
One peculiarity seemed common to the guests whom Mrs. Money gathered around her. On any subject in which they felt the slightest interest they never felt the slightest doubt. The air they breathed was that of conviction; the language they talked was that of dogma. The men and women they knew were the greatest, most gifted, and most beautiful in the world; the men and women they did not know were nothing--were beneath contempt. Every one had what Lowell calls an "I-turn-the-crank-of-the-universe air." In that charmed circle every one was either a genius destined yet to move the world, or a genius too great for the dull, unworthy world to comprehend. It was a happy circle, where success or failure came to just the same.