"How understanding you are!" she exclaimed. "Do you know, although I love our dinners here, I sometimes feel as though this room were a little cage, a little corner of the world across the threshold of which you had drawn a chalk line, so that no one of your world or mine might enter. The coming of Mr. Thain was almost like an earthquake."
With every moment it seemed to him that he understood her a little more, and with every moment the pain of it all increased.
"My dear Marcia," he said, "you have spoken the word. More than once lately I have fancied that I noticed indications of this desire on your part. I am glad, therefore, that you have spoken. Dine with your publisher, by all means, and lunch with Mr. Hyde. Take to yourself that greater measure of liberty which it is only too natural that you should covet. We will look upon it as a brief vacation, which certainly, after all these years, you have earned. When you have made up your mind, write to me. I shall await your letter with interest."
"But you mean that you are not coming down to see me before then?" she asked, a little tremulously.
"I think it would be better not," he decided. "I have kept you to myself very stringently, Marcia. You see, I recognise this, and I set you free for a time."
He paid the bill, and they left the room together.
"You are coming home?" she whispered, as they passed down the vestibule.
He shook his head.
"Not to-night, if you will excuse me, Marcia," he said. "The car is here. I will take a cab myself. There is a meeting of the committee at my club."
They were on the pavement. She gripped his hand.
"Do come," she begged.
He handed her in with a smile.
"You will go down to Battersea, James," he told the chauffeur, "and fetch me afterwards from the club."
A queer feeling caught at her heart as the car glided off and left him standing there, bareheaded. It was the first time—she felt something like the snap of a chain in her heart—the first time in all these years! Yet she never for a moment deceived herself. The tears which stood in her eyes, the pain in her heart, were for him.
CHAPTER XV
The Duchess, a few mornings later, leaned back in her car and watched the perilous progress of her footman, dodging in and out of the traffic in the widest part of Piccadilly. He returned presently in safety, escorting the object of his quest. The Duchess pointed to the seat by her side.
"Can I take you or drop you anywhere?" she asked. "Please don't look as though you had been taken into custody. I saw you in the distance, walking aimlessly along, and I really wanted to talk to you."
David for a moment indulged in the remains of what was almost a boyish resentment.
"I have to go to the Savoy," he explained, "and I was rather intending to walk across St. James's Park."
"You can walk after your lunch," she insisted. "If you walk before, it gives you too much of an appetite,—afterwards, it helps your digestion, so get in with me, and I will drive you to the Savoy."
He took his place by her side with a distinct air of resignation. The Duchess laughed at him.
"You are a very silly person to dislike other people so," she admonished. "If you begin to give way to misanthropy at your time of life, you will be a withered up old stick whom no one will want to be decent to, except to get money out of, before you're fifty. Don't you know that the society of human beings is good for you?"
"There isn't a medicine in the world one can't take too much of," David ventured, smiling in spite of himself.
"To the Savoy, John," his mistress directed. "Tell Miles to drive slowly. To abandon abstruse discussions," she continued, leaning back, "have you regarded my warning?"
"Which one?" he demanded.
"I mean with reference to my brother. I happen to have come across him once or twice, during the last few days. On Wednesday he was in the most buoyant spirits—for him. He had the air of a man who has accomplished some great feat. If you only knew how amusing Reginald is at such times! His manner isn't in the least different, but you know perfectly well that he is thinking himself one of the most brilliant creatures ever born. There is a note of the finest and most delicate condescension in the way he speaks. I am perfectly certain that if he had happened to come across the Chancellor of the Exchequer on Wednesday, he would have discussed finance with him in a patronising fashion, and probably offered him a few hints as to how to reduce the National Debt."
"On Wednesday this was," David murmured.
"And on Friday," the Duchess continued, "he was a different man. He carried himself exactly as usual, but his footsteps were falling like lead. He looked over the eyes of every one, and there was that queer, grey look in his face which helps one to remember that, notwithstanding his figure, he is nearly sixty years old. What have you been doing to him, Mr. Thain?"
"Nothing that would account for his latter state," David assured her.
"When did you see him last?" she asked.
"On Thursday."
"Where?"
David hesitated.
"At Trewly's Restaurant."
"He was lunching or dining with some one?"
"Dining."
The Duchess nodded.
"Of course! With a lady, wasn't it?"
"Is this a fair cross-examination?" David protested.
"My dear Mr. Thain, don't be absurd," his companion admonished. "Every one in London and out of it has known of my brother's friendship with Marcia Hannaway for years. As a matter of fact, we all approve of it immensely. The young woman, although she must be getting on now, is a very clever writer, and I think that the influence she has exercised upon Reginald, throughout his life, has been an excellent one. So that was Thursday night, eh?"
David assented. He was looking out of the window of the car, as though interested in the passing throngs.
"I will tell you something," the Duchess continued. "You have heard, I dare say, of the lawsuits down at Mandeleys, and of that keeper's cottage within a hundred yards from the lawn, and of the old man Vont, who has come back just as bitter as ever? That girl is his daughter."
"The Marquis seems to have displayed the most extraordinary fidelity," David remarked.
"My dear Mr. Thain," was the emphatic reply, "they have been the making of one another's lives. It is the sort of thing one reads more of in French memoirs than meets with in actual life, but I can assure you that Reginald would be absolutely miserable without her, and she—well, see what she has become through his influence and companionship. Yet they tell me that that old man has come back to his ridiculous cottage, and sits there in the front garden, reading the Bible and blasting the very gooseberry bushes with his curses against Reginald. Most uncomfortable it will be, I should think, when you all get down there."
"Nothing that you have said alters the fact," David reminded her, "that Vont's daughter has been all her life, and is to-day, in an invidious situation with regard to your brother."
The Duchess's eyebrows were slightly raised.
"And why not?" she asked, in genuine surprise. "Of course, I don't claim to be so absolutely feudal in my ideas as Reginald, but I still cannot find the slightest disadvantage which has accrued to the young woman from her position."
"I have been brought up myself in a different school," David said quietly, "in the school Richard Vont was brought up in. I see no difference fundamentally between a Marquis and a gamekeeper, and to me the womenkind of the gamekeeper should be as sacred to the Marquis as the womenkind of the Marquis to the gamekeeper."
The Duchess laughed good-humouredly.
"I have always insisted," she declared, "that America is the most backward country in the world. So many of you come to Europe now, though, that one would have thought you would have attained to a more correct perspective of life. But you are certainly much more amusing as you are. No, be quiet, please," she went on. "I didn't call for you to enter into general discussions. I just wanted to know about Reginald. Of course, you have discovered alread
y that I am ridiculously fond of him, and I am trying to find out what is depressing him so much. Do you know what I am most afraid of?"
"I have no idea," David confessed. "The workings of your mind seem to lead you to such unexpected conclusions."
"Don't be peevish," she replied. "What I am really more afraid of than anything is that Marcia Hannaway will leave him."
"Why?"
The Duchess shrugged her shoulders.
"She is twenty years younger than Reginald, and she has made for herself an entirely new place in life. That is the wonderful goal a woman reaches who has brains and is enabled to put them to some practical use. She has a circle of friends and admirers and sympathisers, already made. Now Reginald is a dear, but his outlook upon life is almost whimsical, and I have always wondered whether he would be able to hold a woman like this to the end. The only thing is," she concluded ruminatively, "that the affair has been going on for so long, and is so well known, that it would be positively indecent of her to break it off. Don't you think so, Mr. Thain?"
David looked at the Duchess and shook his head.
"Honestly," he admitted, "I can't give an opinion. I thought I understood something of human nature before I came into touch with you and those few members of your aristocracy whom I have met through you. But frankly, to use a homely metaphor, you take the wind out of my sails. I don't know where I am when you lay down the law. There is something wrong between us fundamentally. I was brought up the same way Vont was brought up. Things were right or wrong, moral or immoral. You people seem to have made laws of your own."
"It's time some one revised the old ones," his companion laughed. "However, I can see that you can be no help to me about Reginald, and here we are at the Savoy. By-the-by, I've never seen you except with men. Have you no women friends? Are none of those charming little musical comedy ladies I see through the windows there expecting you as their host?"
"They look very attractive," David admitted, smiling back at his companion, "but I am, in reality, lunching alone. I came here because I know my stockbroker lunches every day in the grillroom, and I want to see him."
"How pathetic!" she sighed. "I really believe that I have a duty in connection with you."
"At any rate," he promised, as he held out his hand, "there is a man here who will serve us some American lobster which is very nearly the real thing."
"Don't make me feel too gluttonous," she begged, as she stepped out. "I really am not in the habit of inviting myself to luncheon like this, but the fact of it is—"
She hesitated. He passed behind her into the little vestibule.
"Well?"
"Well, I rather like you, Mr. David Thain," she whispered. "You won't be vain about it, will you, but all the financiers I have ever met have been so extraordinarily full of their money and how they made it. You are different, aren't you?"
"I am content if you find me so," he answered, with rare gallantry.
David ordered a thoroughly American luncheon, of which his guest heartily approved.
"If you Americans," she observed, "only knew how to live as well as you know how to eat, what a nation you would be!"
"We fancy that we have some ideas that way, also," he told her. "Wherein do we fail most, from your English point of view?"
"In matters of sex," the Duchess replied coolly. "You know so much more about lobster Newburg than you do about women. I suppose it is all this strenuous money-getting that is responsible for your ignorance. No one over here, you see, tries for anything very much."
"You certainly all live in a more enervating atmosphere," David admitted.
"Tell me about your younger days?" she demanded.
"There is nothing to tell in the least interesting," he assured her. "My people were poor. I was sent to Harvard with great difficulty by a relative who kept a boot store. I became a clerk in a railway office, took a fancy to the work and planned out some schemes—which came off."
"How much money have you, in plain English?" she asked.
"About four millions," he answered.
"And what are you going to do with it?"
"Buy an estate, for one thing," he replied. "Fortunately, I am very fond of shooting and riding, so I suppose I shall amuse myself."
"Are those your only resources?" she enquired, with a faint smile.
"I may marry."
"Come, this gets more interesting! Any lady in your mind yet?"
"None whatever," he assured her, with almost exaggerated firmness.
"You'd better give yourself a few years first and then let me choose for you," she suggested. "I know just the type—unless you change."
"And why should I change?"
"Because," she said, eying him penetratively, "there is at present something bottled up in you. I do not know what it is, and if I asked you wouldn't tell me, but you're not quite your natural self, whatever that may be. Is it, I wonder, the result of that twenty years' struggle of yours? Perhaps you have really lost the capacity for generous life, Mr. Thain."
"You are a very observant person."
"Trust me, then, and tell me your secret sorrow?" she suggested. "I could be a very good friend, Mr. Thain, if friends amuse you."
"I have lived under a shadow," he confessed. "I am sorry, but I cannot tell you much about it. But in a sense you are right. Life for me will begin after the accomplishment of a certain purpose."
"You have a rival to ruin, eh?"
"No, it isn't that," he assured her. "It happens to be something of which I could not give you even the smallest hint."
"Well, I don't see how you are going to get on with it down at Broomleys," she observed. "What a horrid person you are to go there at all! You might as well bury yourself. You have the wealth of a Monte Cristo and you take a furnished villa—for that's all it is! Perhaps you are waiting till the mortgages fall in, to buy Mandeleys? Or did my warning come too late and is Letitia the attraction?"
He was conscious of her close observation, but he gave no sign.
"I have seen nothing of Lady Letitia," he said, "but even if she were content to accept my four millions as a compensation for my other disadvantages, it would make no difference."
"Any entanglements on the other side?" she asked airily.
"None!"
The Duchess finished her lobster and leaned back in her chair. Through her tiny platinum lorgnette she looked around the room for several moments. Then a little abruptly she turned again to him.
"Really," she said, "people are doing such mad things, now-a-days, that I am not at all sure that I am right in putting you off Letitia. It would be frightfully useful to have four millions in the family. And yet, do you know," she went on, "it's queer, isn't it, but I don't want you to marry my niece."
"Why not?"
"How crude!" she sighed. "I really shall have to take a lot of trouble with you, Mr. David Thain. However, if you persist—because Letitia is my niece."
"And you don't like me well enough," he asked, "to accept me as a husband for your niece?"
She laughed at him very quietly.
"Are you very ingenuous," she demanded, "or just a little subtle? Hadn't it occurred to you, for instance, that I might prefer to keep you to myself?"
"You must forgive me if I seem stupid," he begged, "or unresponsive. I don't wish to be either. I can understand that in America I might be a person of some interest. Over here—well, the whole thing is different, isn't it? Apart from my money, I know and realise how ignorant I am of your ways, of the things to do here and how to do them. I feel utterly at a disadvantage with every one, unless they happen to want my money."
"You are too modest, Mr. Thain," she declared, leaning a little towards him and dropping her voice. "I will tell you one reason why you interest me. It is because I am quite certain that there is something in your life, some purpose or some secret, which you have not confided to any living person in this country. I want to know what it is. It isn't exactly vulgar inquisitiveness, believe me.
I am perfectly certain that there is something more of you than you show to people generally."
David was conscious of an odd sense of relief. After all, the woman was only curious—and it was most improbable that her curiosity would lead her in the right direction.
"You are very discerning, Duchess," he said. "Unfortunately, I have no confidence to offer you. The one secret in my life is some one else's and not my own."
"And you never betray a confidence?" she asked, looking at him steadfastly. "You could be trusted?"
"I hope so," he assured her.
Their lunch passed on to its final stages. The Duchess smoked a Russian cigarette with her coffee, and it seemed to him that imperceptibly she had moved a little nearer to him. Her elbows were upon the table and her hands clasped. She seemed for a moment to study one or two quaint rings upon her fingers.
"A few more questions, and I shall feel that we know one another," she said. "Just why have you left America and this wonderful pursuit of wealth?"
"Because there were no more railways in which I was interested," he answered, "nor any particular speculation or enterprise that appealed to me. I have more money than I can ever spend, and I know very well that if I remained in America I should have no peace. I should be a target for years for every man who has land to sell near railways, or shares to sell, or an invention to perfect. As soon as I decided to wind up, I decided also that it was necessary for me to clear right away. Apart from that, England and English life attracts me."
"And this purpose?" she enquired. "This secret—which is somebody else's secret?"
"Such as it is," he replied, "it belongs to this country."
"How old are you?" she asked suddenly.
"I am thirty-seven," he told her.
She sighed. Her slightly tired blue eyes seemed to be looking through the little cloud of cigarette smoke to the confines of the room.
"A magnificent age for a man," she murmured, "but a little ghastly for a woman. I was thirty-nine last birthday. Never mind, one has the present. So here are you, in the prime of life, with an immense fortune and no responsibilities. If Disraeli had been alive, he would have written a novel about you. There is so much which you could do, so much in which you could fail. Will you become just a man about town here, make friends partly in Bohemia and partly amongst some of us, endow a theatre and marry the first chorus girl who is too clever for you? Or—"
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