"Oh, you must take me literally if you want to understand," she answered, "and you won"t do that. I tell you plainly that I find my account in unsettled states, and that I am unsettling them. Everywhere.
You will see."
She spoke with her monstrous dispa.s.sionateness, and I felt a shiver pa.s.s down my spine, very distinctly. I was thinking what she might do if ever she became in earnest, and if ever I chanced to stand in her way--as her husband, for example.
"I wish you would talk sense--for one blessed minute," I said; "I want to get things a little settled in my mind."
"Oh, I"ll talk sense," she said, "by the hour, but you won"t listen.
Take your friend, Churchill, now. He"s the man that we"re going to bring down. I mentioned it to you, and so...."
"But this is sheer madness," I answered.
"Oh, no, it"s a bald statement of fact," she went on.
"I don"t see how," I said, involuntarily.
"Your article in the _Hour_ will help. Every trifle will help," she said. "Things that you understand and others that you cannot.... He is identifying himself with the Duc de Mersch. That looks nothing, but it"s fatal. There will be friendships ... and desertions."
"Ah!" I said. I had had an inkling of this, and it made me respect her insight into home politics. She must have been alluding to Gurnard, whom everybody--perhaps from fear--pretended to trust. She looked at me and smiled again. It was still the same smile; she was not radiant to-day and pensive to-morrow. "Do you know I don"t like to hear that?" I began.
"Oh, there"s irony in it, and pathos, and that sort of thing," she said, with the remotest chill of mockery in her intonation. "He goes into it clean-handed enough and he only half likes it. But he sees that it"s his last chance. It"s not that he"s worn out--but he feels that his time has come--unless he does something. And so he"s going to do something. You understand?"
"Not in the least," I said, light-heartedly.
"Oh, it"s the System for the Regeneration of the Arctic Regions--the Greenland affair of my friend de Mersch. Churchill is going to make a grand coup with that--to keep himself from slipping down hill, and, of course, it would add immensely to your national prestige. And he only half sees what de Mersch is or _isn"t_."
"This is all Greek to me," I muttered rebelliously.
"Oh, I know, I know," she said. "But one has to do these things, and I want you to understand. So Churchill doesn"t like the whole business.
But he"s under the shadow. He"s been thinking a good deal lately that his day is over--I"ll prove it to you in a minute--and so--oh, he"s going to make a desperate effort to get in touch with the spirit of the times that he doesn"t like and doesn"t understand. So he lets you get his atmosphere. That"s all."
"Oh, that"s _all_," I said, ironically.
"Of course he"d have liked to go on playing the stand-off to chaps like you and me," she mimicked the tone and words of Fox himself.
"This is witchcraft," I said. "How in the world do you know what Fox said to me?"
"Oh, I know," she said. It seemed to me that she was playing me with all this nonsense--as if she must have known that I had a tenderness for her and were fooling me to the top of her bent. I tried to get my hook in.
"Now look here," I said, "we must get things settled. You ..."
She carried the speech off from under my nose.
"Oh, you won"t denounce me," she said, "not any more than you did before; there are so many reasons. There would be a scene, and you"re afraid of scenes--and our aunt would back _me_ up. She"d have to. My money has been reviving the glories of the Grangers. You can see, they"ve been regilding the gate."
I looked almost involuntarily at the tall iron gates through which she had pa.s.sed into my view. It was true enough--some of the scroll work was radiant with new gold.
"Well," I said, "I will give you credit for not wishing to--to prey upon my aunt. But still ..." I was trying to make the thing out. It struck me that she was an American of the kind that subsidizes households like that of Etchingham Manor. Perhaps my aunt had even forced her to take the family name, to save appearances. The old woman was capable of anything, even of providing an obscure nephew with a brilliant sister.
And I should not be thanked if I interfered. This skeleton of swift reasoning pa.s.sed between word and word ... "You are no sister of mine!"
I was continuing my sentence quite amiably.
Her face brightened to greet someone approaching behind me.
"Did you hear him?" she said. "_Did_ you hear him, Mr. Churchill. He casts off--he disowns me. Isn"t he a stern brother? And the quarrel is about nothing." The impudence--or the presence of mind of it--overwhelmed me.
Churchill smiled pleasantly.
"Oh--one always quarrels about nothing," Churchill answered. He spoke a few words to her; about my aunt; about the way her machine ran--that sort of thing. He behaved toward her as if she were an indulged child, impertinent with licence and welcome enough. He himself looked rather like the short-sighted, but indulgent and very meagre lion that peers at the unicorn across a plum-cake.
"So you are going back to Paris," he said. "Miss Churchill will be sorry. And you are going to continue to--to break up the universe?"
"Oh, yes," she answered, "we are going on with that, my aunt would never give it up. She couldn"t, you know."
"You"ll get into trouble," Churchill said, as if he were talking to a child intent on stealing apples. "And when is our turn coming? You"re going to restore the Stuarts, aren"t you?" It was his idea of badinage, amiable without consequence.
"Oh, not quite that," she answered, "not _quite_ that." It was curious to watch her talking to another man--to a man, not a bagman like Callan.
She put aside the face she always showed me and became at once what Churchill took her for--a spoiled child. At times she suggested a certain kind of American, and had that indefinable air of glib acquaintance with the names, and none of the spirit of tradition. One half expected her to utter rhapsodies about donjon-keeps.
"Oh, you know," she said, with a fine affectation of aloofness, "we shall have to be rather hard upon you; we shall crumple you up like--"
Churchill had been moving his stick absent-mindedly in the dust of the road, he had produced a big "C H U." She had erased it with the point of her foot--"like that," she concluded.
He laid his head back and laughed almost heartily.
"Dear me," he said, "I had no idea that I was so much in the way of--of yourself and Mrs. Granger."
"Oh, it"s not only that," she said, with a little smile and a cast of the eye to me. "But you"ve got to make way for the future."
Churchill"s face changed suddenly. He looked rather old, and grey, and wintry, even a little frail. I understood what she was proving to me, and I rather disliked her for it. It seemed wantonly cruel to remind a man of what he was trying to forget.
"Ah, yes," he said, with the gentle sadness of quite an old man, "I dare say there is more in that than you think. Even you will have to learn."
"But not for a long time," she interrupted audaciously.
"I hope not," he answered, "I hope not." She nodded and glided away.
We resumed the road in silence. Mr. Churchill smiled at his own thoughts once or twice.
"A most amusing ..." he said at last. "She does me a great deal of good, a great deal."
I think he meant that she distracted his thoughts.
"Does she always talk like that?" I asked. He had hardly spoken to me, and I felt as if I were interrupting a reverie--but I wanted to know.
"I should say she did," he answered; "I should _say_ so. But Miss Churchill says that she has a real genius for organization. She used to see a good deal of them, before they went to Paris, you know."
"What are they doing there?" It was as if I were extracting secrets from a sleep-walker.
"Oh, they have a kind of a meeting place, for all kinds of Legitimist pretenders--French and Spanish, and that sort of thing. I believe Mrs.
Granger takes it very seriously." He looked at me suddenly. "But you ought to know more about it than I do," he said.