Margaret Vincent Part 4

"Couldn't I go with you now--I mean about your business?"

He considered for a moment. It was one of his characteristics that he always thought out his words before answering even trivial questions.

"It would be better not. I want to arrange some family matters."

"But I am family," she pleaded.

"That's true." He hesitated again before he went on. "You know that my brother--he is your uncle Cyril, of course--is ill, and I may possibly go out to him?"

"Yes, father, I know."

"I want to find out how ill he is, if it is possible, from the account he gives of himself. A specialist may know."

"You never told me anything about him. Is he older than you?"

"Of course. That is why he inherited the t.i.tle."

"Oh!" She looked up rather amused. Chidhurst folk had none of the sn.o.bbishness of London, but t.i.tles are picturesque and even romantic to a young imagination. "What t.i.tle?"

"He is Lord Eastleigh," Mr. Vincent answered, reluctantly, "as my father was before him; but a t.i.tle without property to keep it up is not a very praiseworthy possession. It generally suggests that there has been extravagance or bad management, or something of the sort." He stopped again, and then went on quickly: "After his marriage he went to Australia, and we knew nothing of each other for years till he wrote some months ago."

"Mother told me. Are you rich, father--can you afford to go to him?"

"I have two hundred a year and a legacy of five hundred pounds--it came in some time ago, and will pay the expenses of the journey."

"I see." Gradually she was grasping the family position. "It must be dreadful for his wife, to be all that way off alone with him, and he going to die."

He looked up in surprise. It had not occurred to him to feel any sympathy for his brother's wife. He liked Margaret for thinking of her.

"Yes, I suppose it is," he said; "though I believe she wasn't a very desirable person. I don't know whether I'm wise to give you these details. They are not necessary to our life at Chidhurst."

"But I'm growing older," she said, eagerly, and held out her hands to him as if she were groping her way through the world with them. "I want to know things. Don't keep them from me."

He looked at her in dismay. It was the old cry--the cry of his own youth. "I won't," he said, and kissed her forehead.

She was glad to be alone for a little while, to get rid of the first excitement, the first strangeness of the journey, and of being at the hotel. She looked out at the hansoms setting down and driving on, at all the swift traffic along the roadway, at the people on the wide pavement.

She had imagined what London would be like from pictures, and from Guildford and Haslemere, and other places where there were shops and streets. It was what she had expected, and yet it was different. She felt herself so near to the heart of things, as if the people going to and fro were the pulse of the world; she could almost hear the throb of their lives. She wanted to be in the whirl of things, too, to know what it was all like, to understand--oh, no, no! the farm was better, the Dutch garden and the best parlor and the mother who was thinking of her.

She would sit down and write to her this very minute--it was an excellent chance while she was alone. On the writing-table in the corner there were paper and envelopes, with the name of the hotel stamped on them. Her mother would look at it and understand the strangeness of her surroundings. This was the first time they had been separated at all; and writing to her was like a door creaking on its hinges, suggesting that at some unexpected moment it might open wide to let her through.

When the letter was finished she took up one of the newspapers lying on the table. There was a war going on somewhere along the Gold Coast; she read about it, but she could not grasp the details. She looked at the speeches that had been made in the House the night before, and tried to be interested in them; but they were difficult. She read all the little odds and ends of news, even the advertis.e.m.e.nts; and these were oddly fascinating. There was one that set her thinking. It was of a dramatic agency in the Strand. Young ladies could be trained for the stage, it said, and engagements were guaranteed. She wondered what the training was like, and what sort of engagements they would be. Now that she was actually going to a theatre she felt that she ought to take an interest in everything; her outlook was widening every moment; and she would never be quite the same simple country girl again who had set out from Chidhurst that morning.

Mr. Vincent came back at a quarter-past one. He looked worried, and she was able to imagine reasons for it since their talk just now.

"Is the news bad?" she asked.

"It might be worse," he answered, with a shrug. "There is nothing definite to say just yet. We must go down and lunch; an old friend of mine is waiting--he wants to see you." Her father had put on the manner that was his armor--the grave manner of few words that made questions impossible. He opened the door with as much courtesy as a stranger would have done, and walked beside her down the wide staircase. "I have secured a table," he said as they entered the dining-room, forgetting that his remark would convey nothing to her.

The table was in an alcove; beside it a middle-aged man was waiting for them. He was tall and dark, and well set-up. A short, well-cut beard and mustache, grizzled like his hair, covered his mouth; his eyes were brown and alert, though time had made them dim and lines had gathered round them; his face was that of a man who lived generously, but with deliberation; his slow movements suggested tiredness or disappointment; his manner had a curious blending of indulgence and refinement.

"This is Sir George Stringer; we were at Oxford together," Mr. Vincent said to Margaret.

"I am delighted to meet you," Sir George said; "and it's very good of your father to put it in that way, for, as a matter of fact, he was five years my junior. I stayed up after taking my degree." Looking at him now, she saw that he was quite elderly, though in the distance she had taken him to be almost young. "I had not seen him for more than twenty years," he went on after they had settled themselves at the table, "till he walked into my office just now. I didn't even know that he was a married man till the other day, much less that he had a daughter."

"But he knew where to find you?"

"Of course he did," Sir George said. "I am a permanent official--a moss-grown thing that is never kicked aside unless it clamors, till the allotted number of years have pa.s.sed and the younger generation comes knocking at the door."

"What do you think he has done, Margey?" Mr. Vincent asked, noticing with satisfaction that she was quite unembarra.s.sed by her new surroundings. The people at the different tables put a pleasant curiosity into her eyes, or provoked a little smile; now and then she looked up at him when some strange dish or attention of the waiters puzzled her, but she was neither awkward nor over-elated.

"What has he done?" she asked.

"We saw that the house on the hill had been let when we pa.s.sed this morning--"

"It's the most amazing thing that I should have hit upon it," Sir George said.

"You have taken it!" she exclaimed, and clasped her hands with delight.

It would be like a little bit of London going to Chidhurst, she thought, and her mother would like him, she was sure of it, this friend of her father's, who would have been difficult to describe, for, though he was old--to her young eyes--he was so agreeable. And he would be some one else for her father to talk with; they would discuss all manner of things concerning the world that she was discovering to be a wonderful place, though Chidhurst, with its beauty and its silence, held aloof from it--and she would listen to them; it would be like hearing a fairy story told at intervals. If only her father did not have to go to Australia--that threat was beginning to make itself distinct, though she tried to forget it.

"It's very good of you to be pleased at the prospect of a grim old bachelor being near you," Sir George said, and looked at her critically.

Her beauty had been taking him by surprise. How lucky Vincent was to have her, he thought. He remembered his own empty rooms in Mount Street, their luxury and loneliness, the precision with which everything kept to its place, their silence and dulness. Vincent had made a mull of his life, but he had a home, and a wife who, though no doubt she was homely enough--mended his socks and cooked his dinner herself, perhaps--was probably a handsome woman, since she was the mother of this beautiful creature. In spite of his opinions, and the manner in which he had kicked aside his prospects, Vincent had not done so badly for himself after all.

"Did father tell you that we lived at Woodside Farm?" Margaret asked.

"Of course he did. I wish I had known it the other day. By-the-way, Vincent," he went on to her father, "it was young Carringford who told me of the house. You remember his father? He was President of the Union just before your time. He died about a year ago worth a quarter of a million, and left two children--this boy, who is only two or three and twenty now, and a girl who married Lord Arthur Wanstead. They have a hundred thousand pounds each."

"It sounds as if it could never be counted," Margaret said.

"Only three thousand a year if they have the luck to get three per cent.

for it, and income tax off that. Well, Master Tom has some friends living on Hindhead--in red-brick houses that ought to be blown up with gunpowder, especially when they have weather-c.o.c.ks on their gables.

Hindhead, as you probably know, is celebrated for its red-brick houses, philosophers, pretty young ladies, and afternoon parties at which games are played with astonishing energy."

"We are miles and miles from Hindhead," Margaret said, bewildered. But Sir George enjoyed talking, and took it for granted that others liked to listen.

"Of course you are," he answered, genially; "but one fine day he and the Lakemans were staying in the neighborhood. He rode over to Chidhurst, saw this house, and thought it might do for them, so they all went over to look at it--"

"She told me."

"Oh, you have heard from her? Mrs. Lakeman, as you probably know, is a lady who does not care for quite so much unadulterated nature as there is in your neighborhood, so the house didn't suit her. The other day Tom told me of it, and I took it on the spot. When did you see her last?"

"A good many years ago." Mr. Vincent's manner was a shade curt.

Sir George looked up quickly. "Why, of course, I remember--what an idiot I am!"

"Not at all. We are going there this afternoon. Who was Lakeman? I didn't know him."

"No one in particular; but he was good-looking and fairly well off." Sir George smiled to himself, and took a liqueur with his coffee. "She was a fascinating woman," he added; "and has had my scalp among others."

"I think you might go up-stairs, Margey. We'll follow you presently."

Sir George looked after her as she disappeared. "She is going to be a beautiful woman," he said. "Rather a shame to hide her on a farm at Chidhurst, though, for my part, I always think that the devil lives in town and G.o.d in the country."