by Molly Thynne
London, he reflected savagely, as he picked out the imperturbable face of Manners and signed to it, would be empty and dreary to a degree, while the thought of a wet Easter in the country filled him with unutterable depression.
“Has it been raining long, Manners?” he asked, as he alighted.
“The best part of a week, sir. Very pessimistic, they are, on the wireless, I regret to say. I hope you have had a satisfactory time abroad, sir?”
Constantine, who was perfectly well aware of the fact that Manners followed his progress assiduously in the chess columns of the daily Press, glowered at him, and then, for very shame, tried to shake off his black mood.
“I came to an inglorious end and I deserved it,” he said with an attempt at cheerfulness. “Everything all right at the flat?”
“Perfectly, sir. I engaged a taxi, thinking you would wish to go.”
Constantine left Manners to deal with the luggage, and, as his cab slithered and splashed its way through the drowned streets gave his mind to the task of circumventing the Easter holiday. He had thrown his hat on the seat beside him, and, as he sat swaying with the motion of the taxi, he not only felt, but looked, his age. The dark eyes beneath the heavy lids were dull and lifeless. Only the magnificent crop of thick white hair that crowned the fine-drawn, olive-skinned face seemed to have retained its magnificent virility.
He had arrived at no conclusion as to his plans when later, fortified by a hot bath and an excellent dinner, he gave his mind to the correspondence that had accumulated during his absence.
“Three telephone messages from the Duchess of Steynes! Did you tell her when I was coming back?”
“Yes, sir.”
Manners placed a last knob of coal on the fire, surveyed the result with the air of a connoisseur, and straightened himself.
“If I may say so, sir,” he vouchsafed, “Her Grace seemed greatly annoyed to hear you were abroad. She desired to be informed immediately on your return.”
Constantine looked up.
“What did she say exactly?” he demanded with interest.
“‘Bother the man,’ were her exact words, sir,” Manners informed him, his manner slightly more pontifical than usual. “She also alluded to your absence as ‘abominably inconvenient’.”
“In fact, ‘“Hell,” said the Duchess’,” murmured Constantine, pulling himself wearily to his feet.
“I beg your pardon, sir?”
“I was quoting an author who might almost have been a personal friend of the Duchess of Steynes,” answered his master as he made his way to the telephone.
The Duchess was dining out. Would she ring him up immediately on her return?
He returned to his letters, his mind straying whimsically at intervals to the Duchess and her desire to see him. In spite of his genuine affection for that lady, and, indeed, for her whole family, he was ruefully aware of her shortcomings. One of these, which was apt to react forcibly on Constantine himself, was her delusion that the Duke—the simplest, sanest and most reasonable of men—was one of those people who had to be managed. Coupled with this otherwise harmless mania was a conviction that the collusion of Constantine, one of her husband’s oldest friends, was indispensable to the process.
The three-cornered comedy that was apt to ensue, the Duchess painstakingly leading her husband to the water which he had had every intention from the beginning of drinking, the Duke, with a mildly satirical eye on his wife’s unwilling confederate, jibbing just enough to lend zest to the leading, was one which, though it exasperated Constantine, never failed to amuse him. Here, at any rate, should be entertainment enough to tide him over Easter.
Tired with his journey, he had begun to undress when the Duchess rang him up. Her opening was characteristic.
“Thank heavens you’re back! I’ve been out of my mind with worry. You’ve heard about Marlowe, of course?”
“I’ve heard nothing. You must remember I’m only just back and haven’t seen an English paper for two days.”
“Oh, it’s not in the papers yet. Not that that makes much difference, considering that people are Talking already.”
Even over the telephone the capital letters were apparent. Constantine realized that the Duchess must have real cause for perturbation.
“I’m so sorry. I hope it’s nothing serious.”
“We may save the situation yet if we get together at once. I rely on you. Utterly. Bertie’s taking the most absurd attitude. You must talk to him. You’re my one hope!”
“But, Duchess, what am I to talk to him about?”
“I can’t tell you now. Goodness knows who may be listening. Luncheon to-morrow. Please! Come at half past twelve and we can make a plan.”
“Of course. Delighted. Anything I can do . . .” murmured Constantine vaguely.
He rang off, feeling distinctly ruffled. That something serious had happened was obvious, for the Duchess did not as a rule deal in superlatives, and it was irritating to feel that he had been jockeyed into blindly taking sides against the most level-headed member of the family before he had even discovered what the argument was about. He felt sorely tempted to sound Manners, whom he knew to be far more au fait than himself with the gossip appertaining to the best society, but he conquered the impulse and went to the bed that night his curiosity still unassuaged.
The Duchess was waiting for him next morning in her own special sanctum, a room Constantine loathed. The door had hardly closed behind the butler when she launched her bombshell.
“Marlowe has involved himself with a girl,” she announced tragically.
Constantine could only stare at her, for once bereft of speech.
Marlowe, the Duke’s only son, and, as regards birth, the best parti in England, who had reached his thirty-fifth year still unscathed, owing, apparently, to a total inability to distinguish one girl from another, had been the despair of half the mothers in the country, not excluding his own. “He must realize that he has got to marry some day,” she had wailed to Constantine not so very long ago.
“You’re not pleased?” he asked fatuously.
“Pleased!” She was a fine woman, though she had just missed being a beautiful one, and was magnificently built for moments like these. “Considering his extraordinary propensity for picking out the plainest and least eligible girl in the room to dance with, do you imagine he has shown any sense in this? Pleased!”
Constantine wilted.
“Who is she?” he asked feebly.
“An actress of sorts. She has been playing very small parts at one of the London theatres. Marlowe met her at one of these clubs that give Sunday performances.”
“Any family?”
“A grandfather, I believe. Nobody has seen him,” answered the Duchess, dismissing him with a magnificent, if careless, gesture.
“How far has it gone?”
“What are Marlowe’s intentions, you mean? My dear Doctor Constantine, being Marlowe, of course, they are strictly honourable. That’s why the whole thing is so serious. Do sit down and we can settle what’s to be done about it.”
Constantine seated himself obediently, still intent on eliciting information.
“He intends to marry her?”
The Duchess groaned.
“He’s only waiting till he has brought her here to announce the engagement.”
“And Bertie?”
It was characteristic of this couple that, whereas the Duke was “Bertie” to all his friends and a large number of acquaintances, very few people outside her immediate relatives called the Duchess by her Christian name.
“Bertie is being simply impossible. Marlowe introduced him to the girl at the Trastevere, and she seems to have got round him entirely. When I try to get him to do something about it, he goes off at a tangent on the subject of effete old families and fresh stock. He might be the father of a racehorse from the way he talks. But you know what Bertie can be!”
Constantine’s eyes twinkled.
“‘I think
nobly of the soul, and no way approve his opinion,’” he quoted softly.
For a moment the Duchess looked suspicious, then: “Oh, Shakespeare, I suppose. I’ve the greatest respect for Bertie’s opinion about some things. It’s when he gets one of these contrary fits that he’s so difficult. However, thank goodness, he can always be managed. That’s where you come in, dear Doctor Constantine.”
“And where, if Bertie hadn’t the patience of an archangel, I should go out,” said Constantine. “After all, Duchess, he’s seen the girl and you haven’t.”
The Duchess turned on him.
“Doctor Constantine, you know better than that. He’s seen a girl who’s probably quite pretty, well dressed and skillfully made up, who has deliberately set herself out to charm him. He wasn’t with her for more than an hour in a crowded restaurant. He hasn’t seen her home or her people; he hasn’t seen her in the morning, slopping about in a soiled dressing-gown, among dirty champagne glasses….”
She stopped, suddenly conscious that the picture was possibly too suggestive of an American film to be convincing. Constantine was openly smiling.
“He probably wouldn’t notice the dressing-gown, and he’d make an effort to wash the glasses,” he said. “In that respect, you know, he and Marlowe are very much alike. Seriously, why not see the girl before you make yourself perhaps unnecessarily unhappy?”
“You’re not going to pretend that it’s a good match, I suppose?”
“From a worldly point of view it’s deplorable, but Marlowe, charming though he is, is not an easy proposition. The War caught him at an age when most men are sowing their wild oats; perhaps that’s why he never seems to have gone through that phase. Certainly it was beginning to look as if he were never going to marry. Isn’t it possible that he has found the woman best calculated to make him happy?”
The Duchess glared at him in silence for the space of several electric sounds. This was rank heresy on the part of one she had grown to consider her staunchest ally. Then a great light broke on her.
“You’ve been talking to Bertie,” she announced decisively.
“I assure you I haven’t. What I said was based entirely on my knowledge of Marlowe. You must admit that he was always known his own mind, and that, having made it up, he very rarely changes it.”
“That’s just what makes it so imperative that we should do something, instead of wasting precious time in arguing. If you knew how I’ve been depending on you!”
“I hope I shall never fail you,” he assured her, “but I can be more useful when I have had time to look round and see how matters stand.”
“If by looking round you mean shutting yourself up with Bertie and being talked over by him, I shall deeply regret having asked your advice,” said the Duchess with a dignity that degenerated suddenly to mere crossness as the luncheon bell pealed through the house.
Constantine rose and faced her. His smile was disarming.
“Do you know, I’ve never really been talked over by either of you yet,” he said gently. “I’ve managed, so far, to preserve my integrity while supporting you to the best of my ability.”
Her face softened.
“And we’ve all used you unmercifully,” she admitted. “Come and eat, and do what you can with my tiresome family.”
The tiresome family was represented on this occasion by the Duke, looking, if anything, taller, leaner, greyer and milder than usual. He greeted Constantine warmly, and kept the conversation drifting through pleasant channels during the meal. He seemed entirely at peace with himself and the world at large. Only once did he mention the topic that had brought Constantine to the house.
“You have heard our news already from Violet, I expect,” he said with a whimsical gleam in his eye.
The Duchess glanced hastily round her. The room, for the moment was empty of servants.
“My dear Bertie,” she protested, “is it necessary to take Portland into your confidence?”
The Duke inclined his head in a gesture that was almost a bow. He treated his family with a kind of absent-minded courtesy that never failed to fascinate Constantine. It was so punctilious and yet so curiously sincere, as opposed to the more florid variety he had just left on the other side of the Channel.
“Portland, if you asked him, would probably give you a far more detailed and circumstantial account of Marlowe’s movements during the last few days than either you or I could provide,” he said quietly. “And, incidentally, the servants’ hall is quite sure to be more bitterly opposed to the whole affair than ourselves.”
The return of Portland and his minions made it impossible for the Duchess to say what was in her mind, and Constantine hastened to bridge an awkward gap in the conversation.
“What news of Trastevere?” he asked. “Still a howling success?”
“Howling is an excellent word for it,” said the Duchess. “Fortunately our bedrooms are on the other side of the house.”
Constantine glanced at her in surprise. The Duchess had sponsored the opening night of the Trastevere Restaurant, and had been largely responsible for its immediate popularity.
The Duke supplied the explanation.
“The Trastevere has got into the hands of the opposition,” he said with a gleam of humour in his eye. “Personally I find it rather amusing, though I have a suspicion that the Bright Young People are more entertaining to others than themselves.”
“I’m afraid that the Trastevere is going to turn out one of our mistakes,” sighed his wife plaintively.
Constantine’s lips twitched. The last appeal from the Duchess, six months ago, which had brought him post-haste to her aid, had been on the subject of the Trastevere Restaurant.
When, in seventeen eighty-three, the eighth Duke had built Steynes House, that huge barrack overlooking the Park, he had followed in the footsteps of his crony, the Prince Regent, and equipped it with stables out of all proportion to its size. Even in the days of horses these had proved to be as unwieldy as they were inconvenient, situated as they were at the far end of the garden that lay behind the house. When the motor-car came into being they became little less than a white elephant, and the present Duke, soon after his marriage, converted part of the equally inconvenient and rambling servants’ quarters of Steynes House into a garage, and left the stables to their fate.
It was the Duchess who, on hearing that the manager of a well-known restaurant in London was looking for a site, conceived the brilliant idea of offering him the stables. The project had hardly taken form in her mind before she was at the telephone invoking Constantine’s aid. Constantine, who had a far clearer perception than herself of the condition of the ducal finances, was privately of the opinion that the Duke would require very little persuasion. The restaurant would be too far from the house to encroach on its privacy, the entrance need not even be in the same street, and the Duke, as Constantine knew, was not nearly so conservative as he looked. But the Duchess, having made up her mind that her husband was going to be “difficult”, laid her plans accordingly and proceeded to put them into execution, dragging the alternately amused and exasperated Constantine in her wake.
The result had been the Trastevere Restaurant, which owing partly to the organizing capacity of Angelo Civita, the proprietor, and the determined patronage of the Duchess, had prospered increasingly from the day it was opened.
Looking back on the events that had attended its birth, it was amusing, to say the least of it, to hear it stigmatized by the Duchess as “one of our mistakes”.
Constantine rashly looked up, met the Duke’s eye, and turned away.
“Do you still use the private door?” he asked hastily.
The Duchess stiffened.
“Bertie and Marlowe use it,” she said frigidly. “The whole tone of the place has changed so much that I never go there. Civita is making a fortune out of it, I understand.”
In accordance with his agreement, Civita, in remodeling the stables, had made the palm court, which ran along the
entire back of the restaurant, windowless, so that the garden of Steynes House was at no point overlooked. The court was furnished with a glass roof and opened directly on to the restaurant, leading down to which was a short, broad flight of steps. But behind a towering bank of palms in the back wall of the palm court was a small door furnished with a Yale lock, and at the culminating point in the opening ceremony at the Trastevere the key to this door had been handed to the Duchess by Civita with an apt, if somewhat florid, little speech. Parties from Steynes House were thereby enabled to reach the restaurant by way of the garden, and, as a result, the Duchess’s dinner-parties, which had erred somewhat on the side of dullness, had suddenly become unwontedly popular with the younger set.
Constantine, who had the restaurant habit in his blood, felt his heart sink at the news that the Trastevere had fallen under her ban. His mind went back to the apparently inordinate length of some of the functions at Steynes House in pre-Trastevere days, and he decided that the Victorian tradition was becoming a little moth-eaten even in her capable hands.
He was as nearly out of patience with her as he had ever been when, over the coffee, she unmasked her batteries.
“Doctor Constantine and I have been discussing this absurd infatuation of Marlowe’s,” she announced, as Constantine, with the pessimism born of long experience, took his first tentative sip of the worst coffee in London.
The Duke crossed one long thin leg over the other and said nothing.
“If you can call it a discussion,” amended Constantine, “seeing that it is a subject about which, up to the present, I know precisely nothing.”
The Duke inclined his head.
“Sheer waste of time,” he agreed. “Far better to see the girl, then you’ll have something definite to go on. She’s a very nice girl, you know, my dear.”
The Duchess’s voice was full of compassion.
“How like you, Bertie dear! Can’t you see that the only way to deal with the situation is to take a firm line from the beginning? It’s just because you consented to meet her that you’re so useless to me now. Now I’ve simply got to act alone!”