Marriage a la mode Part 13

"Well, of course I did! What else is one engaged for?"

"I'm certain she wished for a great deal of kissing!" said Daphne, quickly.

Roger was silent. Suddenly there swept through him the memory of the scene in the orchard, and with it an admission--wrung, as it were, from a wholly unwilling self--that it had remained for him a scene unique and unapproached. In that one hour the "muddy vesture" of common feeling and desire that closed in his manhood had taken fire and burnt to a pure flame, fusing, so it seemed, body and soul. He had not thought of it for years, but now that he was made to think of it, the old thrill returned--a memory of something heavenly, ecstatic, far transcending the common hours and the common earth.

The next moment he had thrown the recollection angrily from him.

Stooping to his wife, he kissed her warmly. "Look here, Daphne! I wish you'd let that woman alone! Have I ever looked at anyone but you, old girl, since that day at Mount Vernon?"

Daphne let him hold her close: but all the time, thoughts--ugly thoughts--like "little mice stole in and out." The notion of Roger and that woman, in the past, engaged--always together, in each other's arms, tormented her unendurably.

She did not, however, say a word to Lady Barnes on the subject. The morning following Mrs. Fairmile's visit that lady began a rather awkward explanation of Chloe Fairmile's place in the family history, and of the reasons for Roger's silence and her own. Daphne took it apparently with complete indifference, and managed to cut it short in the middle.

Nevertheless she brooded over the whole business; and her resentment showed itself, first of all, in a more and more drastic treatment of Heston, its pictures, decorations and appointments. Lady Barnes dared not oppose her any more. She understood that if she were thwarted, or even criticized, Daphne would simply decline to live there, and her own link with the place would be once more broken. So she withdrew angrily from the scene, and tried not to know what was going on. Meanwhile a note of invitation had been addressed to Daphne by the d.u.c.h.ess, and had been accepted; Roger had been reminded, at the point of the bayonet, that go he must; and Dr. Lelius had transferred himself from Heston to Upcott, and the companionship of Mrs. Fairmile.

It was the last day of the Frenches' visit. Roger and Herbert French had been trying to get a brace or two of partridges on the long-neglected and much-poached estate; and on the way home French expressed a hope that, now they were to settle at Heston, Roger would take up some of the usual duties of the country gentleman. He spoke in the half-jesting way characteristic of the modern Mentor. The old didactics have long gone out of fashion, and the moralist of to-day, instead of preaching, _ore retundo_, must only "hint a fault and hesitate dislike." But, hide it as he might, there was an ethical and religious pa.s.sion in French that would out, and was soon indeed to drive him from Eton to a town parish.

He had been ordained some two years before this date.

It was this inborn pastoral gift, just as real as the literary or artistic gifts, and containing the same potentialities of genius as they which was leading him to feel a deep anxiety about the Barnes's _menage_. It seemed to him necessary that Daphne should respect her husband; and Roger, in a state of complete idleness, was not altogether respectable.

So, with much quizzing of him as "the Squire," French tried to goad his companion into some of a Squire's duties. "Stand for the County Council, old fellow," he said. "Your father was on it, and it'll give you something to do."

To his surprise Roger at once acquiesced. He was striding along in cap and knickerbockers, his curly hair still thick and golden on his temples, his clear skin flushed with exercise, his general physical aspect even more splendid than it had been in his first youth. Beside him, the slender figure and pleasant irregular face of Herbert French would have been altogether effaced and eclipsed but for the Eton master's two striking points: prematurely white hair, remarkably thick and abundant; and very blue eyes, shy, spiritual and charming.

"I don't mind," Roger was saying, "if you think they'd have me. Beastly bore, of course! But one's got to do something for one's keep."

He looked round with a smile, slightly conscious. The position he had occupied for some three years, of the idle and penniless husband dependent on his wife's dollars, was not, he knew, an exalted one in French's eyes.

"Oh! you'll find it quite tolerable," said French. "Roads and schools do as well as anything else to break one's teeth on. We shall see you a magistrate directly."

Roger laughed. "That would be a good one!--I say, you know, I hope Daphne's going to like Heston."

French hoped so too, guardedly.

"I hear the Archdeacon got on her nerves yesterday?"

He looked at his companion with a slight laugh and a shrug.

"That doesn't matter."

"I don't know. He's rather a spiteful old party. And Daphne's accustomed to be made a lot of, you know. In London there's always a heap of people making up to her--and in Paris, too. She talks uncommon good French--learnt it in the convent. I don't understand a word of what they talk about--but she's a queen--I can tell you! She doesn't want Archdeacons prating at her."

"It'll be all right when she knows the people."

"Of course, mother and I get along here all right. We've got to pick up the threads again; but we do know all the people, and we like the old place for grandfather's sake, and all the rest of it. But there isn't much to amuse Daphne here."

"She'll be doing up the house."

"And offending mother all the time. I say, French, don't you think art's an awful nuisance! When I hear Lelius yarning on about _quattro-cento_ and _cinque-cento_, I could drown myself. No! I suppose you're tarred with the same brush." Roger shrugged his shoulders. "Well, I don't care, so long as Daphne gets what she wants, and the place suits the child."

His ruddy countenance took a shade of anxiety.

French inquired what reason there was to suppose that Beatty would not thrive perfectly at Heston. Roger could only say that the child had seemed to flag a little since their arrival. Appet.i.te not quite so good, temper difficult, and so on. Their smart lady-nurse was not quite satisfied. "And I've been finding out about doctors here," the young father went on, knitting his brows: "blokes, most of them, and such old blokes! I wouldn't trust Beatty to one of them. But I've heard of a new man at Hereford--awfully good, they say--a wunner! And after all a motor would soon run him out!"

He went on talking eagerly about the child, her beauty, her cleverness, the plans Daphne had for her bringing up, and so on. No other child ever had been, ever could be, so fetching, so "cunning," so lovely, such a duck! The Frenches, indeed, possessed a boy of two, reputed handsome.

Roger wished to show himself indulgent to anything that might be pleaded for him. "Dear little fellow!"--of course. But Beatty! Well! it was surprising, indeed, that he should find himself the father of such a little miracle; he didn't know what he'd done to deserve it. Herbert French smiled as he walked.

"Of course, I hope there'll be a boy," said Roger, stopping suddenly to look at Heston Park, half a mile off, emerging from the trees. "Daphne would like a boy--so should I, and particularly now that we've got the old house back again."

He stood and surveyed it. French noticed in the growing manliness of his face and bearing the signs of things and forces ancestral, of those ghostly hands stretching from the past that in a long settled society tend to push a man into his right place and keep him there. The Barnes family was tolerable, though not distinguished. Roger's father's great temporary success in politics and business had given it a pa.s.sing splendour, now quenched in the tides of failure and disaster which had finally overwhelmed his career. Roger evidently did not want to think much about his Barnes heritage. But it was clear also that he was proud of the Trescoes; that he had fallen back upon them, so to speak. Since the fifteenth century there had always been a Trescoe at Heston; and Roger had already taken to browsing in county histories and sorting family letters. French foresaw a double-barrelled surname before long--perhaps, just in time for the advent of the future son and heir who was already a personage in the mind, if not yet positively expected.

"My dear fellow, I hope Mrs. Barnes will give you not one son, but many!" he said, in answer to his companion's outburst. "They're wanted nowadays."

Roger nodded and smiled, and then pa.s.sed on to discussion of county business and county people. He had already, it seemed, informed himself to a rather surprising degree. The shrewd, upright county gentleman was beginning to emerge, oddly, from the Apollo. The merits and absurdities of the type were already there, indeed, _in posse_. How persistent was the type, and the instinct! A man of Roger's antecedents might seem to swerve from the course; but the smallest favourable variation of circ.u.mstances, and there he was again on the track, trotting happily between the shafts.

"If only the wife plays up!" thought French.

The recollection of Daphne, indeed, emerged simultaneously in both minds.

"Daphne, you know, won't be able to stand this all the year round," said Roger. "By George, no! not with a wagon-load of Leliuses!" Then, with a sudden veer and a flush: "I say, French, do you know what sort of state the Fairmile marriage is in by now? I think that lady might have spared her call--don't you?"

French kept his eyes on the path. It was the first time, as far as he was concerned, that Roger had referred to the incident. Yet the tone of the questioner implied a past history. It was to him, indeed, that Roger had come, in the first bitterness of his young grief and anger, after the "jilting." French had tried to help him, only to find that he was no more a match for the lady than the rest of the world.

As to the call and the invitation, he agreed heartily that a person of delicacy would have omitted them. The Fairmile marriage, it was generally rumoured, had broken down hopelessly.

"Faults on both sides, of course. Fairmile is and always was an unscrupulous beggar! He left Eton just as you came, but I remember him well."

Roger began a sentence to the effect that if Fairmile had no scruples of his own, Chloe would scarcely have taught him any; but he checked himself abruptly in the middle, and the two men pa.s.sed to other topics.

French began to talk of East London, and the parish he was to have there. Roger, indifferent at first, did not remain so. He did not profess, indeed, any enthusiasm of humanity; but French found in him new curiosities. That children should starve, and slave, and suffer--_that_ moved him. He was, at any rate, for hanging the parents.

The day of the Upcott visit came, and, in spite of all recalcitrance, Roger was made to mount the motor beside his wife. Lady Barnes had entirely refused to go, and Mr. and Mrs. French had departed that morning for Eton.

As the thing was inevitable, Roger's male philosophy came to his aid.

Better laugh and have done with it. So that, as he and Daphne sped along the autumn lanes, he talked about anything and everything. He expressed, for instance, his friendly admiration for Elsie French.

"She's just the wife for old Herbert--and, by George, she's in love with him!"

"A great deal too much in love with him!" said Daphne, sharply. The day was chilly, with a strong east wind blowing, and Daphne's small figure and face were enveloped in a marvellous wrap, compounded in equal proportions of Russian sables and white cloth. It had not long arrived from Worth, and Roger had allowed himself some jibes as to its probable cost. Daphne's "simplicity," the pose of her girlhood, was in fact breaking down in all directions. The arrogant spending instinct had gained upon the moderating and self-restraining instinct. The results often made Barnes uncomfortable. But he was inarticulate, and easily intimidated--by Daphne. With regard to Mrs. French, however, he took up the cudgels at once. Why shouldn't Elsie adore her man, if it pleased her? Old Herbert was worth it.

Women, said Daphne, should never put themselves wholly in a man's power.

Moreover, wifely adoration was particularly bad for clergymen, who were far too much inclined already to give themselves airs.

"I say! Herbert never gives himself airs!"