CHAPTER VIII
IN WHICH HETTY IS WEIGHED
Booth and Leslie returned to the city on Tuesday. The artist leftbehind him a "memory sketch" of Sara Wrandall, done in the solitudeof his room long after the rest of the house was wrapped in slumberon the first night of his stay at Southlook. It was as sketchilydrawn as the one he had made of Hetty, and quite as wonderful inthe matter of faithfulness, but utterly without the subtle somethingthat made the other notable. The craftiness of the artist was there,but the touch of inspiration was lacking.
Sara was delighted. She was flattered, and made no pretence ofdisguising the fact.
The discussion which followed the exhibition of the sketch atluncheon, was very animated. It served to excite Leslie to such adegree that he brought forth from his pocket the treasured sketchof Hetty, for the purpose of comparison.
The girl who had been genuinely enthusiastic over the picture ofSara, and who had not been by way of knowing that the first sketchexisted, was covered with confusion. Embarrassment and a shy senseof gratification were succeeded almost at once by a feeling of keenannoyance. The fact that the sketch was in Leslie's possession--andevidently a thing to be cherished--took away all the pleasure shemay have experienced during the first few moments of interest.
Booth caught the angry flash in her eyes, preceding the flush andunaccountable pallor that followed almost immediately. He feltguilty, and at the same time deeply annoyed with Leslie. Later onhe tried to explain, but the attempt was a lamentable failure. Shelaughed, not unkindly, in his face.
Leslie had refused to allow the sketch to leave his hand. If shecould have gained possession of it, even for an instant, the thingwould have been torn to bits. But it went back into his commodiouspocket-book, and she was too proud to demand it of him.
She became oddly sensitive to Booth's persistent though inoffensivescrutiny as time wore on. More than once she had caught him lookingat her with a fixedness that betrayed perplexity so plainly thatshe could not fail to recognise an underlying motive. He was vainlystriving to refresh his memory: that was clear to her. There is nomistaking that look in a person's eyes. It cannot be disguised.
He was as deeply perplexed as ever when the time came for him todepart with Leslie. He asked her point blank on the last eveningof his stay if they had ever met before, and she frankly confessedto a short memory for faces. It was not unlikely, she said, thathe had seen her in London or in Paris, but she had not the faintestrecollection of having seen him before their meeting in the road.
Urged by Sara, she had reluctantly consented to sit to him for aportrait during the month of June. He put the request in such termsthat it did not sound like a proposition. It was not surprisingthat he should want her for a subject; in fact, he put it in sucha way that she could not but feel that she would be doing hima great and enduring favour. She imposed but one condition: thepicture was never to be exhibited. He met that, with bland magnanimity,by proffering the canvas to Mrs. Wrandall, as the subject's "nextbest friend," to "have and to hold so long as she might live," "freegratis," "with the artist's compliments," and so on and so forth,in airy good humour.
Leslie's aid had been solicited by both Sara and the painter inthe final effort to overcome the girl's objections. He was ratherbored about it, but added his voice to the general clamour. Withhalf an eye one could see that he did not relish the idea of Hettyposing for days to the handsome, agreeable painter. Moreover, itmeant that Booth, who could afford to gratify his own whims, wouldbe obliged to spend a month or more in the neighbourhood, so thathe could devote himself almost entirely to the consummation of thisparticular undertaking. Moreover, it meant that Vivian's portraitwas to be temporarily disregarded.
Sara Wrandall was quick to recognise the first symptoms of jealousyon the part of her brother-in-law. She had known him for years.In that time she had been witness to a dozen of his encounters inthe lists of love, or what he chose to designate as love, and hadseen him emerge from each with an unscarred heart and a smilingvisage. Never before had he shown the slightest sign of jealousy,even when the affair was at its rosiest. The excellent ego whichmastered him would not permit him to forget himself so far as toconsider any one else worthy of a feeling of jealousy. But now hewas flying an alien flag. He was turning against himself and hissmug convictions. He was at least annoyed, if not jealous. Doubtlesshe was surprised at himself; perhaps he wondered what had come overhim.
Sara noted these signs of self-abasement (it could be nothing elsewhere a Wrandall was concerned), and smiled inwardly. The new idolof the Wrandalls was in love, selfishly, insufferably in love asthings went with all the Wrandalls. They hated selfishly, and sothey loved. Her husband had been their king. But their king wasdead, long live the king! Leslie had put on the family crown,--alittle jauntily, perhaps,--cocked over the eye a bit, so to speak--butit was there just the same, annoyingly plain to view.
Sara had tried to like him. He had been her friend, the only one shecould claim among them all. And yet, beneath his genial allegiance,she could detect the air of condescension, the bland attitude of asuperior who defends another's cause for the reason that it gratifiesNero. She experienced a thrill of malicious joy in contemplatingthe fall of Nero. He would bring down his house about his head,and there would be no Rome to pay the fiddler.
In the train that Tuesday morning, Booth elected to chaff hisfriend on the progress of his campaign. They were seated oppositeto each other in the almost empty parlour car.
"Buck up, old chap," he counselled scoffingly. "Don't look sodisconsolate. You're coming out again at the end of the week."
Leslie had been singularly reticent for a matter of ten miles ormore after leaving the little station behind. His attention seemed tobe engaged strictly in the study of objects beyond the car window.
"What's that?" he demanded curtly.
"I say you're lucky enough to be asked again for the end of the--"
"I've got a standing invitation, if that's what you mean. Sara givesme a meal ticket, as it were. Nothing extraordinary in my goingout whenever I like, is there?" His manner was a trifle offish.
Booth laughed. "In spite of your disagreeable remark, I wish yougood luck, old man."
"What the devil are you driving at, Brandy?"
"I only meant to cheer you up a bit, that's all."
"Thanks!"
There was another interval of silence. Leslie furtively studiedthe face of his friend, who had resumed his dreamy contemplationof the roof of the car, his hands clasped behind his head, his legsoutstretched.
"I say, Brandy," he ventured at last, a trace of embarrassment inhis manner, "if you've nothing better to do, come down and dinewith us to-night--en famille. Viv said over the 'phone this morningthat we are dining alone in state. Come along, old chap, and wakeus up. What say?"
A clever mind-reader could have laid bare the motive in this cordial,even eager invitation. He was seeking to play Vivian against Hettyin the game, which seemed to have taken on a new turn.
Booth was not a mind-reader, although in jest he had posed as one."I'm quite sure I've nothing better to do," he said. "I'd suggest,however, that you let the invitation come from some one in authority.Your mother, for instance."
"Nonsense," cried the other blithely. "You know you've got a mealticket at our house, good for a million punches. Still I'll haveVivian call you up this afternoon."
"If she wants me, I'll come," said Booth in the most matter-of-factway.
Leslie settled down with a secret sigh of relief. He regained hisusual loquaciousness. The points of his little moustache resumedtheir uprightness.
"How do you like Sara?" he asked. It was a casual question, withno real meaning behind it as it was uttered. No sooner had it lefthis lips, however, than a new and rather staggering idea enteredhis mind,--a small thing at first but one that grew with amazingswiftness.
"She is splendid," said Booth warmly.
"I thought you'd like her," said Leslie, the idea growing apace:It di
d not occur to him that he might be nurturing disloyalty tothe interests of his own sister. Things of that sort never botheredLeslie. When all was said and done, Vivian had but a slim chanceat best, so why champion a faint hope? "Why don't you do a portraitof her? It would be a wonderful thing, old chap."
He sat up a trifle straighter in his chair.
"She hasn't asked me to, which is the best reason in the world.
"Oh, I can fix that." His lively imagination was full of it now.
"Thanks. Don't bother."
"And there's this to be said for a portrait of Sara," went on Leslie,rather too eagerly: "she wouldn't object to having it exhibited inthe galleries. 'Gad, it would do you a world of good, Brandy."
The other's eyes narrowed. "I suppose I am to infer that Mrs.Wrandall courts publicity."
"Not at all," cried the other impatiently. "What I mean is this:she's taken a fancy to you, and if her portrait could be the meansof helping you--"
"Oh, cut that out, Les,--cut it out," growled Booth coldly.
"Well, in any event, if you want to paint her, I can fix it foryou," announced his companion.
"If you don't mind, old chap, I'll tackle Miss Castleton first,"said Booth, dismissing the matter with a yawn.
"I hate the word tackle," said Leslie.
On a bright, sunny afternoon two weeks later, Mrs. Redmond Wrandallreceived her most intimate friend in her boudoir. They were bothin ample black. Mrs. Rowe-Martin, it seems, had suffered a recentbereavement--with an aspect of permanency,--in the loss of a fourthousand dollar Airdale who had stopped traffic in Fifth Avenue fortwenty minutes while a sympathetic crowd viewed his gory remains,and an unhappy but garrulous taxi-cab driver tried to account forhis crime. He never even thought of the insanity dodge. The Airdalewas given a most impressive funeral and was buried in pomp withall his medals, ribbons, tags, collars and platinum leashes, butminus a few of the uncollected parts of his anatomy. While it hadbeen a complete catastrophe, he was by no means a complete carcass.
Be that as it may, his mistress went into mourning, denying herselfso many diversions that not a few of her friends became alarmedand advised her husband to put her in a sanitarium. He was willing,poor chap, but not she. She couldn't see the sense of confiningher grief to the four walls of a sanitarium while the four windsof heaven were at her disposal.
The most distressing feature of the great Airdale's taking-offlay in the fact that his descendants--he had several sets ofgreat-grandchildren--appeared to be uncommonly ordinary brutes,without a symptom of good breeding in the lot of them. They wereso undeviatingly gauche and middle-class, that already the spitefultongues of envy had begun to question his right to the medals andribbons acquired at the bench shows, where Mrs. Rowe-Martin wasconsidered one of the immortals. She could have got a blue ribbonon a yellow dog any time. Of course, in defence of her exotic Airdale,she unblinkingly fell back on the paraphrase: "It's a wise fatherthat knows his own son"; or the other way round, just as you please.
Mrs. Rowe-Martin professedly was middle-aged--that is to say, justrounding fifty. As a woman is always fifty until she is sixty, justas it is nine o'clock until the stroke of ten, there may be somequestion as to which end of the middle-aged period she was rounding,but as that isn't material to the development of this story, wewill give her the benefit of the doubt and merely say that sensiblyshe dressed in black.
She was Mrs. Wrandall's closest friend and confidante. It was Mrs.Rowe-Martin who rushed over and gave the smelling salts to Mrs.Wrandall when that excellent lady collapsed on hearing that her sonChallis was going to marry the daughter of old Sebastian Gooch. Itwas she who acted as spokeswoman for the distressed mother and toldthe world--that is to say, THEIR world--that Sara was a scheming,designing creature, whose sole aim in life was to get into the smartset by the easiest way. It was she who comforted Mrs. Wrandall, afterthe lamentable deed was done, by proclaiming from the house-topsthat old man Gooch's daughter should never enter society if shecould prevent it, and went so far as to invite Challis to all ofher affairs without asking his wife to accompany him, quite as ifshe didn't know that he had a wife. (In speaking of her to Challis,she invariably alluded to Sara as Miss Gooch, for something overa year after the wedding--and might have gone on for ever had notMrs. Wrandall, senior, upset everything by giving a reception inhonour of her daughter-in-law: a bolt from a clear sky, you maybe sure, that left Mrs. Rowe-Martin stunned and bleeding on thebattlefield of a mistaken cause.) She never quite got over thatbit of treachery on the part of her very best friend, although shemade the best of it by slyly confiding to other stupefied personsthat Challis's father had taken the bit in his mouth,--God knowswhy!--and that Mrs. Wrandall thought best to humour him for thetime being, at least. And it was she who came to Mrs. Wrandall inher greatest trial and performed the gentlest deeds that one womancan do for another when all the world has gone black and hatefulto her. When you put her to the real test, a woman will always riseabove herself, no matter how lofty she may have considered herselfbeforehand.
They were drinking tea, with the lemon left out.
"My dear," said Mrs. Rowe-Martin, "I quite agree with you. Leslieshould be thinking of it."
"It means so much to me, Harriet, his getting the right sort of girl.I feel confident that he is interested--very deeply interested inMiss Castleton."
"I am so glad you like her."
"She is a dear."
"My sister has met her in London, and at one or two of the countryplaces. I was inquiring only yesterday. When I mentioned that sheis related to Lord Murgatroyd, Frances remembered her quite well.She sees a lot of them, you know, during the season," explainedMrs. Rowe-Martin affably.
Mrs. Wrandall concealed her curiosity. In the most casual way sheremarked:
"I must ask Miss Castleton if she remembers Mrs. Roodleigh."
"Oh, I fancy she won't recall her," her friend made haste to say."Young girls are not likely to remember elderly persons whom theymeet--Oh, you might say in passing, for that's what it really is,you know."
"Still, if Frances knows the Murgatroyds so intimately it isn'tlikely--"
"Did I say she knew them intimately?" protested the other, somewhatplaintively. "How like me! So stupid! As a matter of fact, my dear,I don't believe Frances knows them at all--except as one knows peoplein a general sort of way. Drawing-rooms, you know, and all thatsort of thing. Of course, every one knows Lord and Lady Murgatroyd.Just as they might know the Duke of--well any one of the greatdukes, for that matter."
"Or King George," added Mrs. Wrandall softly, without a perceptibletrace of spite.
"She has met them, of course," said Mrs. Rowe-Martin defensively.Somehow, a defence was called for; she couldn't sit there and saynothing.
Mrs. Wrandall changed the subject, or at least divided it. She putthe chaff aside, for that was what Mrs. Rowe-Martin's revelationsamounted to.
"Leslie is such a steady, unimpressionable boy, you see," she said,apropos of nothing.
"And so good looking," added her friend beamingly.
"It wouldn't be like him to make a mistake where his own happinessand welfare are concerned," said the subject's mother, speakingmore truth than she knew, but not more than Mrs. Rowe-Martin knew.That lady knew Leslie like a book.
"And he is really devoted to her?"
"I fear so," said her hostess, with a faint sigh. The other sighedalso.
"My dear, it would be perfectly lovely. Why do you say that?"
"I suppose it's the way all mothers feel. Of course, I want to besure that he is to be very, very happy."
"That is perfectly natural. And he WILL be happy."
If either of them recalled the strenuous efforts Mrs. Wrandallhad made a couple of years before to get her only daughter marriedoff to a degenerate young English duke, the thought was submergedin the present sea of sentimentality. It speaks well for Vivian'scharacter that she flatly refused to be given in marriage, althoughit appeared to be the fashion at the time. It was the year of thec
oronation.
"Miss Castleton is a most uncommon girl," said Mrs. Wrandall, againapropos of nothing that had gone before.
"Most English girls are," agreed her friend, scenting something.
"I mean to say, she is so unlike the girls one sees in society. Myhusband says she's level-headed. Sound as a rivet, he also says.Nothing silly or flip about her, he adds when he is particularlyenthusiastic, and he knows I hate the word 'flip.' Of course hemeans flippant. He is very much taken with her."
Mrs. Rowe-Martin pondered a moment before risking her next remark.
"I can't quite understand her taking up with Sara Gooch in thisfashion. You know what I mean. Sara is the last person in the worldyou'd think a gently bred person would--" Here she pulled herselfup with a jerk. "I mean, of course, a gently bred girl. Naturallyshe would appeal to men--and gently bred men, at that. But thispresent intimacy--well, isn't it rather extraordinary?"
Mrs. Wrandall drained her cup, without taking her eyes from theface of her friend.
"You must remember, my dear Harriet, that Miss Castleton looks uponSara as a Wrandall, not a Gooch. She was the wife of a Wrandall.That covers everything so far as the girl is concerned. I dare sayshe finds Sara amusing, interesting, and we all know she is kindnessitself. It doesn't surprise me that Miss Castleton admires her, orthat she loves her. Sara has improved in the last seven or eightyears." She said this somewhat loftily.
Mrs. Rowe-Martin was most amiable. "She has, indeed, thanks topropinquity."
"And her own splendid intelligence," added Mrs. Wrandall.
"Isn't it wonderful how superior they are when it comes tointelligence?" cried her friend, almost plaintively. "I've noticedit in shop-girls and manicures, over and over again."
"Perhaps you got the effect by contrast," said Mrs. Wrandall,pouring a little more tea into her friend's cup. Mrs. Rowe-Martinwas silent. "Sara deserves a lot of credit. She has made a positionfor herself, a very decided position. We are all quite proud ofher."
Mrs. Rowe-Martin was on very intimate terms with the Wrandall familyskeleton. She could afford to be plain spoken.
"It is hard to reconcile your present attitude, my dear, to theposition you held a few years ago. Heaven knows you weren't proudof her then. She was dirt beneath your feet."
"My dear Harriet," said Mrs. Wrandall, without so much as theflutter of an eyelid, "I am not saying that I would select her asa daughter-in-law, even to-day. Don't misunderstand me."
"I am not underestimating her splendid intelligence," said Mrs.Rowe-Martin sharply, and her hostess was so long in working it outthat it was allowed to pass unresented. "I dare say she will marryagain," went on the speaker blandly.
Sara's mother-in-law was startled.
"It's rather early to suggest such a thing, isn't it?" she askedreproachfully.
"Forgive me," cried Mrs. Rowe-Martin, but she did not attempt tounsay the words. She meant them to sink in when she uttered them.It was commonly predicted in society that Challis Wrandall's wifewould further elevate herself by wedding the most dependable noblemanwho came along, and without any appreciable consideration for thefeelings of her late husband's family.
"It is quite natural--and right--that she should marry," said Mrs.Wrandall, after a moment's deliberation. "She is young and beautifuland we sincerely hope she will find some one--But, my dear, aren'twe drifting? We were speaking of Leslie."
"And Miss Castleton. You are quite satisfied, then? You don't feelthat he would be making a mistake?"
Mrs. Wrandall touched her handkerchief to the corners of her eyes.
"We could not possibly raise any objection to Miss Castleton, ifthat is what you mean, Harriet," she said.
"I am so glad you feel that way about it, my dear," said her friend,touching her handkerchief to her lips. "It would grieve me morethan I can tell you if I thought you would have to go through withanother experience like that of--Forgive me! I won't distress youby recalling those awful days. Poor, susceptible Challis!"
"No," said Mrs. Wrandall firmly; "Leslie is safe. We feel quitesure of him."
The visitor was reflective. "I suppose there is no doubt that MissCastleton will accept him," she mused aloud.
"We are assuming, of course, that Leslie means to ask her," saidLeslie's mother, with infinite patience.
"I only mentioned it because it is barely possible she may haveother fish to fry."
"Fish?"
"A figure of speech, my dear."
And it set Mrs. Wrandall to thinking.
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