Fordham's Feud Part 24

"I can't say I am."

The old man halted, turned round upon Fordham, and looked him full in the face as though he could hardly believe in his own sense of hearing.

"I--ar--beg your pardon, Mr--ar--Fordham. Did I--ar--understand you to say you were not aware of it?"

"Certainly, Mr Glover. I intended you to understand precisely that."

Old Glover was nonplussed. He began to feel small and at a decided disadvantage, a most unwonted feeling with him. He stared wonderingly, inquiringly, distrustfully, into the dark, saturnine visage confronting him, but could read nothing there.

"It is an odd thing that Phil should not have informed me of the fact,"

went on Fordham. "He is usually openness itself--indeed, too much so, as I said just now. Wears his heart on his sleeve, I always tell him.

However, I shall have to congratulate him the next time I see him. By the way, I suppose his father is delighted? Philip is an only son, you know."

Nothing could be more innocent than Fordham's tone, nothing more unsuspecting than the look of half-amused wonder with which he received the intelligence. But his keen perception noted the disconcerted wave which pa.s.sed over his interlocutor's face at this allusion to Sir Francis Orlebar.

"Fathers have different ways of taking news of that kind," he continued, innocently. "Now, partly as a student of character, partly by reason of some slight acquaintance with Sir Francis himself, I am curious to know how he took the news of his son's engagement. How did he?"

The question was put with blunt and cruel directness. No slippery commercial instincts could avail here. It must be answered. Poor old Glover felt unprecedentedly small in the hands of his wily opponent.

Those piercing dark eyes penetrated his poor coating of pomposity as a lance-head might penetrate the rind of a pumpkin.

"I am not aware how Sir Francis took the news," he answered, stiffly.

"He was informed, of course?" pursued Fordham, remorselessly. "Really-- ar--Mr Fordham. Your tone is--ar--very strange. I am at a loss to-- ar--"

"Oh, a thousand pardons. I merely asked the question because I thought I understood you to say that Philip was engaged to your daughter. If I was mistaken--But I quite understand. Of course the affair is no business of mine. At the same time allow me to remind you, Mr Glover, that the topic was broached by yourself, and, moreover, that you requested me to accompany you for a stroll with that object. It is naturally of far greater interest to you than to me, but if it is distasteful to you, we will drop it at once. So let us talk of something more congenial."

His manner was the perfection of ingenuous indifference. Thorough cynic as he was, Fordham was enjoying the embarra.s.sment of this inflated old schemer, who he well knew had not brought him thus far in order to "drop the subject" at any such early stage of the conversation. And the next words proved it.

"You were not mistaken, sir. He is engaged to my daughter. And--ar-- when you come to look at the matter in its right light, Mr Fordham, you will, I am sure, agree with me that he has acted with very great want of straightforwardness."

"Perhaps. But you know, Mr Glover, Philip is an only son. It does, I confess, appear strange to me that no reference should have been made to his father at the time he asked for your consent to the engagement. He did ask for it, I suppose?"

"Hang it, sir!" blared forth the other, goaded to fury by his own helpless flounderings, which only served to entangle him deeper and deeper within the net. "Hang it, sir! You know as well as I do that in these days young people don't trouble their heads about their fathers in matters of this kind. They take it all into their own hands--arrange it between themselves."

The expression of astonished disapproval upon Fordham's face as he received this announcement would have delighted the heart of the most confirmed stickler for the old-fashioned proprieties.

"Do they? I was not aware of it," he said, "Pardon my ignorance, but I still can't help thinking that, whatever may be the general rule, for the only son of a man of Sir Francis Orlebar's position to be allowed to drift into a tacit engagement without consulting either the young lady's father or his own, is--pardon me again--somewhat of an odd proceeding."

"What is a beggarly baronet?" cried old Glover, the coa.r.s.e huckstering blood showing through the veneer of a would-be stately pomposity in his blind rage at finding himself outwitted at every point. "Pooh! I could buy up a dozen of them."

"True. I was not thinking so much, though, about what was due to a 'beggarly baronet' as to a gentleman and the son of a gentleman.

However," he resumed, after a pause just perceptible enough to carry that last shaft home, "let us now be frank with each other--talk as men of the world, in fact. I presume you had some object in seeking this interview with me, Mr Glover?"

Their stroll had brought them to a large rock which at some period more or less remote had fallen from above and embedded itself in the meadow.

In the shade formed by this Fordham proposed that they should sit down.

A beetling cliff sheered up behind to a great height, but in front and around the approaches to the place were open.

"You are right in your surmise, Mr--ar--Fordham. As an intimate friend of young Orlebar, a man, I believe, considerably older than himself, it occurred to me that you would be--ar--likely to have some influence over him--and--ar--might exert that influence towards inducing him to do what is right."

"You may command any influence I may possess in that direction, Mr Glover," said Fordham, suavely, though inwardly chuckling over the cool impudence of the proposal and the opacity of the mind which could propound it.

"I was sure of it--sure of it," reiterated the other, much mollified at the prospect of so welcome an alliance. "As I said before, he is not behaving straightforwardly, and you will--ar--agree with me. Well, now, some months ago it was that he came first to my place. I've got a little crib down at Henley, you know, Mr Fordham--shall be happy to see you there if you are returning to England--very happy. Well, we had plenty of fun going on--parties and picnics and rowing and all that.

I'm a man that likes to see young folks enjoying themselves. I don't stint them--not I. Let them enjoy themselves when they are young, say I. Don't you agree with me?"

"Undoubtedly," murmured Fordham.

"Well, among other young fellows who came sparking around was this young Orlebar," went on old Glover, forgetting his stilted pomposity in the thread of his narrative. "I was always glad to see him--ask him if I wasn't. Soon it seemed to me that he was taking a fancy to my Edie.

She's my eldest, you know, as good a girl as ever was. She's a pretty girl, too, and looks at home anywhere--in the Park, or wherever she may be. Now doesn't she?"

"I quite agree with you on the subject of Miss Glover's attractions,"

said Fordham, gravely. "She would, as you say, look thoroughly at home in the Park--with a perambulator and a soldier," he added to himself.

"All day and every day he made some excuse or other to run down. He'd take her out on the river by the hour, sit about the garden with her, be sending her flowers and things and all that. If that don't mean intentions, I'd like to know what does. Well, I didn't feel called upon to step in. I don't believe in interfering with young folks'

inclinations. I liked the young fellow--we all did--and it seemed he was old enough to know his own mind. This went on for some time--some months. Then suddenly we heard he'd gone abroad, and from that day on heard no more about him by word or line. My poor Edie felt it dreadfully. She didn't say anything at first, nor for a long time, and at last I got it all out of her. Now, that isn't the way a girl should be treated, is it, Mr Fordham? If you had daughters of your own you would not like to see them treated like that, would you?"

"Certainly not. But pray go on--I am interested."

He was--but in reading _between the lines_ of this very ingenuous and pathetic tale of base and black hearted treachery. To the narrator his sympathetic tone and att.i.tude conveyed the liveliest satisfaction, but that h.o.a.ry plutocrat little guessed at what a dismally primitive hour it was requisite to rise in order to get the blind side of saturnine Richard Fordham.

"I'd taken the girls to the seaside for their summer outing," continued the narrator--"a thing they generally go wild with delight over. But poor Edie this time said she hated the sea. She wanted to go abroad.

Would I take her abroad? At first I wouldn't, till she grew quite thin and pale. Then I knew why she wanted to go, and she told me. If she could find him out herself--make up a pleasant little surprise, she said--it would all come right. It would all be as before, and they would be as jolly as grigs. I hadn't the heart to refuse her, and so we came. We found out where young Orlebar was, and dropped down on him with the pleasant little surprise we'd planned. But--it didn't seem a pleasant surprise at all."

"No, by Jove, it didn't!" said the listener to himself, putting up his hand to hide a sardonic grin.

"You saw that it didn't. You saw how he behaved. Didn't seem at all glad to see us, hardly spoke to us. And that girl had been breaking her heart about him--yes, breaking her heart--and he's never been near her since the moment she arrived. But I see how it is--he's got another string to his bow. That high and mighty young woman that was sitting near you--Miss--what's her name?--Miss Wyatt, isn't it? Well--"

"Excuse me if I remind you, Mr Glover, that among ourselves it is not usual to drag ladies' names into other people's differences in that free-and-easy sort of fashion," said Fordham, stiffly, though inwardly convulsed with mirth at the idea of finding himself, of all people, taking up the cudgels on behalf of one of the detested s.e.x.

"Eh--what? Why, they told me he was engaged to her."

"Who told you he was?"

"Why, let me see--some of the people last night. I don't quite recollect which of them. But perhaps you can tell me for certain. Is he?"

"Not that I am aware of."

"Not--eh?" with a very distrustful look into Fordham's face, and in no wise convinced; for to this representative of British commerce a man was bound to be lying, provided any adequate motive existed for mendacity, and here such motive undoubtedly did exist. "Well, they told me the pair of them were never apart, out together all day, sitting together all the evening--never apart, except at bedtime."

"Pooh! that means nothing. Here you see, and in places like this, society is a pretty happy-go-lucky a.s.sortment, and the harmonious elements gravitate towards each other. And while we are on this subject, Mr Glover, I may as well remind you that Philip is young, a great favourite with women, and consequently a devil of a fellow to flirt. He's always over head and ears in some flirtation or other-- always has been ever since I've known him. But he means nothing by it, and it always comes to nothing."

"Upon my word, Mr--ar--Fordham," replied the other, again bristling up with pomposity, "you seem to treat this matter with strange--ar--levity.

Whatever--ar--_you_ may see fit to call it, _I_ look upon this--ar-- outrageous trifling with my daughter's feelings as the act of an unprincipled scoundrel. Yes, sir, an unprincipled scoundrel," he added, rolling the words, in his delight at having hit upon a good, sounding, double-barrelled epithet. "But what do you want him to do?"

"Well, really--ar--Mr Fordham, that is a strange question to come from a man of your--ar--knowledge of the world. What is the usual--ar-- outcome of a young man's winning a girl's affection?"

"I am bound in candour to reply that its nature varies. Further it might be as well to approach this matter with caution and common sense.

You are doubtless aware that Sir Francis Orlebar is not a rich man--for a man in his position a decidedly poor one, and Philip has not a shilling in the world beyond what his father allows him? Now if his father should disapprove of this--er--engagement--as not having been consulted it is extremely likely he will--he may cut off that allowance summarily."