Works of Grant Allen

by Grant Allen

  Sabine gazed at her fixedly, and answered in a very chilly voice, ‘It must be so, I suppose. You seem to be really capable of loving him — that way?’

  The poor small thing raised her head once more with a pleading gesture. ‘And I can never be happy,’ she said, with her eyes dim with tears, ‘till you’ve called me Woodbine again, and thrown your dear arms around me, and kissed me on my lips, and told me you’ve forgiven me. Oh, Sabine, I’ll try never to stand in your way at all. But you must just kiss me and tell me you forgive me.’

  Sabine looked down at those wistful eyes and that pale small face, and her resolution melted. ‘You don’t know how hard a trial you’ve put me to, my dear,’ she answered slowly, ‘but — there — I forgive you, Woodbine.’ And bending down with an effort, she gave way and kissed her.

  Woodbine flung herself upon her friend’s neck, and burst into floods of passionate tears. ‘Oh, thank you, dear!’ she cried. ‘Ten thousand times thank you. I shall be happy now!’ And she sobbed as if her poor little heart would break for many minutes.

  CHAPTER XII.

  THE DUKE PLUNGES.

  Before the fortnight was over — the fortnight Mr. Venables had allowed in his own mind for Sabine to settle herself in — the new-made Duke found his way once more down to Hurst Croft. He had his reasons for coming. Poor Powysland’s affairs had now been ‘cleared up,’ as the lawyers phrase it — the dry light of legal day had at last been let in upon that endless complication of bills, and notes of hand, and mortgages, and gambling debts; but the result of the clearing was one which showed the balance of the estate so very much on the wrong side of the ledger that the new Duke made up his mind at once nothing was left for him now but to marry immediately.

  To marry was, indeed, an imperative necessity. His lawyers were talking about ‘equity of redemption.’ Llanfyllin Castle itself was at stake this time; while Powysland House, in London, the last remnant of the old ducal splendour, had fallen into such a state of comparative decay that the Duke was really ashamed to meet the reproachful gaze of the family portraits. Nevertheless, as far as his own inclinations were concerned, the sacrifice was a painful one. Adalbert Montgomery was one of those butterfly bachelors who, in their own hateful and anti-social phrase, ‘prefer their liberty.’ He wanted to be free to do as he liked, for good or for evil — and especially for evil. Not that he was what people generally call a bad man; he was merely the average product of a bad system; he held that the world existed, so far as he was concerned, mainly for the purpose of giving him pleasure; and provided he got it, by hook or by crook, flitting from flower to flower, he cared very little what expense or trouble it entailed upon those mere outsiders, the insignificant class of other people. If he could have consulted his own feelings alone, therefore, and had possessed the necessary balance in the Venables’ books in the City to enable him so to follow them, he would have remained single all the days of his life, and allowed the title and estates (if any) to descend after his day to his remote second cousin, Owen Llanfyllin Montgomery, of the Inland Revenue.

  But there were two cogent reasons which drove the Duke now, while the sod was still fresh on his brother’s grave, to run down to Hurst Croft on a strictly business-like errand. In the first place, his credit demanded that he should supply himself at once with ready money, or its equivalent in expectations of a negotiable character. In the second place, his mother, the Dowager, had strongly impressed upon him the absolute necessity of saving what remained of the family property by a judicious matrimonial sacrifice, and of raising up a direct heir of the senior branch to the Dukedom of Powysland.

  ‘Let me see,’ the Duchess had said, wiping her red eyes with a dainty cambric, and playing calmly meanwhile with her tortoise-shell quizzing glasses. ‘Who is there you could fix upon? There’s the daughter of that man who was Lord Mayor last year, of course. She has lots of money, they say, and she’s perfectly presentable. She isn’t as young as she was, to be sure, but she lights up well, and has good shoulders. She’d cut a very decent figure at a drawing-room still, any day.’

  ‘I dislike her,’ the son answered with the undisguised frankness of private life. ‘I distinctly object to her. I don’t want to pretend to high sentiment and all that sort of thing; but I’d rather not marry a woman who lights up well, and whom I distinctly object to.... Unless, of course, it was a matter of absolute necessity.’

  The Duchess twirled her glasses slowly round once more in deliberative fingers. ‘Then there’s that brewer girl, Miss Massy-Smith,’ she went on reflectively. ‘Old Massy-Smith would pay down handsomely, I haven’t the least doubt, to make his daughter a Duchess.’

  ‘What! That red-haired creature!’ the Duke ejaculated, with some obvious annoyance. ‘Why, I wouldn’t take her at any price, mother. I should be ashamed to be seen at Monte Carlo, or anywhere smart, with a woman like that. Besides, she’s so fat; they’d say she represented the family stout, and was sent about the country as a sort of living advertisement, don’t you know: Before using — and After.’

  The Duchess drew herself up, and reflected once more. Her own hair had been generously described as bright auburn in youth, and the seventh Duke had married her from a family not remotely connected with the beer-producing interest; so that her son’s remark almost verged on the personal — especially as her own maturer charms distinctly took the direction of a certain chastened massiveness.

  ‘Well, how about that Venables girl?’ she asked again. ‘She’s a fine-built creature, handsome and well made, and clever into the bargain; and Venables père must have nothing on earth to do with his money, dear, stupid old man, except just simply to roll in it!’

  The Duke hesitated. ‘Well, I like her,’ he said. ‘I’ve thought about her more than once. In fact, in a way, she decidedly attracts me. She’s a devilish fine girl — there’s no denying that. And I admit she amuses me. But do you know, mumsie,’ and he hesitated for a second — a Montgomery could hardly make such an avowal without some tinge of hesitation— ‘I’m not quite sure whether she’d have me if I asked her.’

  His mother’s face broke into a scornful smile. ‘Nonsense, Bertie,’ she answered. ‘What an absurd idea! The girl would just jump at you. Take my word for that.’ For it was her grace’s habit to measure all other women by her own individual standard of reference; and she remembered well how hard she and all her family had angled in their day to catch Leopold Augustus, seventh Duke of Powysland.

  ‘Well, but, mother, I’ve been going there a great deal all through the summer, and half a dozen times over I’ve been on the very point of proposing to her — —’

  ‘Not proposing, my dear boy. A man in your position never proposes. Offering her your hand — which, of course, she’d snap at.’

  ‘And I’ve been so discouraged each time by her queer behaviour that I’ve put it off over and over again; for there’s one thing on earth I could never endure, and that would be that a woman should be in the position to say I’d asked her and she’d refused me.’

  ‘No woman alive dare say it!’ his mother answered with warmth. ‘Besides, no woman’s likely to be such a precious fool either.’

  ‘Well, you never know,’ the Duke proceeded thoughtfully. ‘This is such a queer, proud girl. She behaves so oddly to one. She often seems intentionally to make a man feel she thinks no more of him than of the merest broomstick of a country curate. Why, she’s almost positively rude to me sometimes.’

  The Duchess smiled. ‘That’s her way of drawing you on, my dear,’ she answered. ‘I know the type. And I know the tactics. Not bad tactics, either, for a certain sort of girl, with a certain sort of man. They hold you off with one hand, while they draw you on with the other. But they always mean in the end to take you.’

  ‘She doesn’t seem to mean it,’ Bertie mused to himself, in a serious mood.

  ‘You were only Lord Adalbert Montgomery then,’ his mother answered, with a conventional sigh and a faint upward tendency of her dainty pock
et-handkerchief, symbolical of maternal desire to check ere it came the rising tear. ‘Poor Algernon’s death has made a great difference, of course. Not that I think she’d ever have refused you even as Lord Adalbert, and heir-presumptive to the title. But, still, nobody could have expected poor Algernon’s life would be cut short like that’ — and here the tears actually coursed down the Duchess’s cheek unchecked— ‘so that of course an heir might have been born at any time; and that would have put you in quite a different position. As things stand now, all that’s so changed. Take my word for it, Bertie; I know the world I live in, and I know a girl like Sabine Venables — her name’s Sabine, isn’t it? — would never be such a fool as to throw away for ever one chance in life of making herself a Duchess.’

  Bertie hesitated still. ‘The fact is,’ he said apologetically, ‘I believe she’s got a fancy for a man called Harrison, a sort of a penny-a-lining fellow, who writes in the papers. She doesn’t talk much to him in public — which is all the more dangerous — but Mrs. Bouverie-Barton says she’s awfully gone upon him.’

  ‘Mashed?’ the Duchess suggested, with a condescending smile. ‘Well, my dear boy, you must surely know that doesn’t matter twopence. She may be in love with the penny-a-lining fellow who writes for the papers — I dare say she is very much in love indeed with him; but love’s not everything. If you were to ask her, I’d lay a hundred to one in ponies, as soon as look at it, against the penny-a-lining fellow who writes for the papers, and I don’t think I’d get any sensible person in England to take me either.’ For the Duchess had lived all her life in sporting circles, and this fractional method of calculating chances on a debated event came as naturally to her lips as moral platitudes to Old Affability’s.

  So, fortified by the Dowager’s maternal encouragements, the ninth Duke of Powysland went down to Hurst Croft only ten days after his brother’s death and his own accession to the title, to lay his heart, his hand, and his newly-acquired strawberry-leaves at Sabine Venables’ feet, with very little doubt indeed in his own mind that Sabine would gladly accept the lot at owner’s valuation.

  The typical English Philistine was at home that afternoon; but he wisely proposed a stroll and tea on the lawn as the best means of leaving the young people alone together. Nature was so beautiful, he observed, and the skylarks were singing. So as they walked through the grounds, Mr. Venables and the companion discreetly in front, intent upon the skylarks, the Duke and Sabine loitering accidentally behind beneath the alley of rose-bushes, the young man found an opportunity in some clumsily sporting way to suggest his errand to the not wholly unprepared ears of the lady of his selection.

  Sabine listened to him, as he floundered through his awkward proposal, without moving a muscle of that haughty face of hers. Once or twice, indeed, when the Duke paused and appealed to her mutely to take the rest of a sentence for granted as an assistance to his rhetoric, she smiled internally as she contrasted his clumsiness to herself with Hubert Harrison’s ready command of phrase and compliment; but externally, not a curl of the lip, not a flash of the eye, betrayed for one moment her hidden meaning. Cruel in her coquetry, as was her wont by nature, she made the unfortunate young man formulate his ideas in full to the uttermost syllable, without one glance to cut short a hard declaration or to interpret an unfinished and halting sentence. The Duke gazed at her pleadingly, but her face was as enigmatical as a sphinx’s and as unmoved as a statue’s. Once or twice he paused for breath, and halted nervously. But Sabine just waited till he was ready to go on again, and answered nothing. She would hear it all out in the plainest terms from his own lips, that he offered unreservedly to make her a Duchess.

  There should be no mistake or doubt about the absoluteness of the offer. In so many words, he should ask her definitely to marry him. He should have no loophole of retreat left whereby he might pretend he had only put out a casual feeler. It should be a fair and square proposal to make her his wife outright, in sound English phrase, without doubt or condition.

  At last, the unhappy young man, his patience exhausted with looking out for some reply, some word of encouragement, some glance of recognition, burst out with a visible effort, ‘In short, Miss Venables, I’ve come down this afternoon to ask you if you’ll marry me.’

  ‘Of course,’ Sabine answered with a very quiet, matter-of-fact air.

  The Duke started. He was prepared for acquiescence; he expected her, in fact, to jump at him, as his mother had said; but, still, he had hardly looked forward in his wildest moments to such unconventional frankness of acceptance as this. It fairly took his breath away.

  ‘Then you mean to say you answer Yes?’ he put in, quite tremulously. She was a splendid girl after all, and even Dukes (though the fact is not generally known in England) are really human.

  Sabine drew herself up with an astonished air. ‘I mean nothing of the sort,’ she answered curtly. ‘You quite misunderstand me. I said, of course you’d come down this afternoon on purpose to ask me. Anybody could see that the moment you arrived. It was quite evident at once. I was waiting for you to speak and to finish what you had to say before I thought what answer I should give your question. It’s always better to hear what the question is, don’t you know, before trying to answer it.’

  The Duke looked at her with a curious glance, compounded of frank admiration and frank suspicion. ‘You’re so awfully hard to understand, Miss Venables!’ he cried, with a tremor in his throat. ‘Perhaps that’s one of the things that makes me like you so much. You give one such lots to think about. But you needn’t keep a fellow in suspense like this. Remember, your answer means a great deal to me.’

  ‘Not quite so much as you think, perhaps,’ Sabine replied with quiet emphasis. ‘Before I answer you, Lord Adalbert — I beg your pardon; it’s so hard to remember you’re a Duke now — but before I answer you, anyhow, I want to tell you something that may perhaps make a considerable difference to you. I mention it in confidence, as it was mentioned to me.... My father’s going to marry again before long. He’s going to marry Woodbine Weatherley.’

  ‘The dickens he is!’ the Duke murmured to himself. ‘That certainly alters things.’ But he was enough of a gentleman to answer aloud in his chivalrous manner, in spite of this thunderbolt, ‘I don’t see what difference that can possibly make in my attitude towards you, Sabine.’

  He called her Sabine with a little thrill in his voice, and with the pleasant consciousness of performing a very generous action. Contiguity to a beautiful woman counts for much. His heart beat high. At that moment he loved her. He loved her so well, and he thought it so honourable of her to tell him the whole truth before giving him her answer — so as to let him withdraw his offer in time if he were so disposed under these altered circumstances — that he made up his mind at once to a desperate course of quixotic fanaticism. Yes, in spite of everything, he would plunge, and be hanged to it. He determined then and there, as he tried to catch Sabine’s hand in his, under cover of the rose-bushes, that, fortune or no fortune, he’d marry that splendid creature, and make a Duchess of her. Besides, who could tell whether Old Affability would ever have a son and heir, after all, or not; and if not, then the young man felt he would have turned out a brick and acted nobly, at no ultimate pecuniary loss to himself in any way.

  One must have been brought up in an atmosphere of entail and settlements, and equity of redemption, where to sell one’s virility for money seems both natural and praiseworthy, in order to enter fully into the feelings of a man who thinks it rather a magnanimous thing than otherwise to neglect a chance of getting the highest market price for his manhood. So the Duke stood there in all sober seriousness, patting himself on the back mentally for his chivalrous determination not to let a beautiful girl see that the disappearance or eclipse of her prospective fortune had the slightest effect upon his appreciation of her womanly charms; and repeating meanwhile in a very sentimental voice, ‘I don’t really see what difference that can possibly make in my attitude towards you.’
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  ‘But I see what difference it can make in mine,’ Sabine answered quietly, her fingers eluding his grasp as she spoke. ‘I think in saying that you’re acting like a gentleman. You don’t want me to feel it was my money you proposed for, not myself. And I dare say you proposed to some extent for myself into the bargain. But I won’t let you spoil your prospects like that. I know how you people who move in the big world look at these things; and I won’t let any man marry me out of a pure momentary access of courtesy. You’d regret it to-morrow, you know. You’d be sorry you spoke to me. Besides,’ she added after a pause, with an unexpected outburst of most unflattering frankness, ‘to tell you the truth, even before this happened, I’d made up my mind irrevocably to refuse you.’

  ‘To refuse me!’ the Duke blurted out, gazing at her and gasping.