Our Friend the Charlatan Part 47

Dymchurch sat bending forward. The dry leaf crackled between his fingers; he was crushing it to powder.

"Who," he asked, "is the lady Miss Bride was speaking of, in connection with the servant's training-school?"

"Mrs. Gallantry. A good, active sort of woman at Hollingford."

"That scheme doesn't interest you much?"

"Not very much, I confess. I quite approve of it. It's just the kind of thing for people like Miss Bride, plodding and practical; no doubt they'll make it very useful. But I have rather lost my keenness for work of that sort. Perhaps I have grown out of it. Of course I wish as much as ever for the good of the lower cla.s.ses, but I feel that my own work will lie in another direction."

"Tell me what you have in mind," said Dymchurch, meeting her look with soft eyes.

"What I really care about now is the spirit of the educated cla.s.s.

There's such a great deal to be done among people of our own kind. Not of course by direct teaching and preaching, but by personal influence, exercised in all sorts of ways. I should like to set the intellectual tone in my own circle. I should like my house to--as it were, to radiate light."

The listener could not but smile. Yet his amus.e.m.e.nt had no tincture of irony. He himself would not have used these phrases, but was not the thought exactly what he had in mind? He, too, felt his inapt.i.tude for the ordinary forms of "social" usefulness; in his desire and his resolve to "do something," he had been imagining just this sort of endeavour, and May's words seemed to make it less vague.

"I quite understand you," he exclaimed, with some fervour. "There's plenty of scope for that sort of influence. You would do your best to oppose the tendencies of vulgar and selfish society. If only in a little circle one could set the fashion of thought, of living for things that are worth while! And I see no impossibility. It has been done before now."

"I'm very glad you like the idea," said May, graciously. Again--without looking at him--she saw his lips shaping words which they could not sound; she saw his troubled, abashed smile, and his uneasy movement which ended in nothing at all.

"We have some fine trees at Rivenoak," fell from her, as her eyes wandered.

"Indeed you have!"

"You like trees, don't you?"

"Very much. When I was a boy, I once saw a great many splendid oaks and beeches cut down, and it made me miserable."

"Where was that?"

"On land that had belonged to my father, and, which, for a year or two, belonged to me."

He spoke with an uneasy smile, again crushing a brown leaf between his fingers. May's silence compelled him to proceed.

"I have no trees now." He tried to laugh. "Only a bit of a farm, which seems to be going out of cultivation."

"But why do you let it do so?"

"It's in the hands of a troublesome tenant. If I had been wise, I should have learnt to farm it myself, years ago. Perhaps I shall still do so."

"That would be interesting," said May. "Tell me about it, will you?

It's in Kent, I think?"

The impoverished peer spoke freely of the matter. He had been seeking this opportunity since the beginning of their talk. Yet, before he had ceased, moral discomfort took hold upon him, and his head drooped in shame. The silence which followed--May was saying to herself that now, now the moment had come did but increase his embarra.s.sment. He wished to speak of his sisters, to hint at their circ.u.mstances, but the thing was impossible. In desperation, he broke into some wholly foreign subject, and for this morning, all hope of the decisive step had pa.s.sed.

The day brought no other opportunity. Towards midnight, Dymchurch sat at the open window of his chamber, glad to be alone, anxious, self-reproachful. To-morrow he must discharge what had become an obvious duty, however difficult it might be.

He had received a long letter from the younger of his sisters. It spoke of the other's ill health, a subject of disquiet for the past month, and went on to discuss a topic which frequently arose in this correspondence the authority of the Church of Rome. A lady who had just been pa.s.sing a fortnight at the house in Somerset was a Catholic, and Dymchurch suspected her of proselytism; from the tone of the present letter it appeared that her arguments had had considerable success.

Though impartial in his judgment of the old faith, Dymchurch felt annoyed and depressed at the thought that one of his sisters, or both, might turn in that direction; he explained their religious unrest by the solitude and monotony of their lives, for which it seemed to him that he himself was largely to blame. Were he to marry May Tomalin, everything would at once, he thought, be changed for the better; his sisters might come forth from their seclusion, mingle with wholesome society, and have done with more or less morbid speculation.

He had gone so far that honour left him no alternative. And he had gone thus far because it pleased him to do a thing which broke utterly with his habits and prejudices, which put him into a position such as he had never foreseen. He was experimenting in life.

May, he told himself, behaved very well. Never for a moment had she worn the air of invitation; a smirk was a thing unknown to her; the fact of his t.i.tular dignity she seemed wholly to disregard. Whatever her faults he saw most of them--she had the great virtue of unaffectedness. a.s.suredly he liked her; he could not feel certain that even a warmer sentiment had not begun to breathe within him. As for May's willingness to marry him, why, at all events, it appeared a probability. They had some intellectual sympathies, which were likely to increase rather than diminish. And, if the marriage would be for him a great material benefit, he hoped that May also might profit by it.

Lady Ogram desired their union, that was clear. That she should have made choice of _him_, was not easy to explain, for surely she might have wedded her niece more advantageously. But then, Lady Ogram was no mere intriguer; he thought her, on the whole, a woman of fine character, with certain defects so obvious that they could never be the means of misleading anyone. She was acting, undoubtedly, in what she deemed the best interests of her young relative--and _he_ could hardly accuse her of having made a mistake.

Pacing the room, he took up a review, opened at a philosophical article, and tried to read.

"Why does man exist? Why does _anything_ exist? Manifestly because the operations of the energies of nature, under the particular group of conditions, compel it, just in the same way that they cause everything else to happen."

He paused, and re-read the pa.s.sage. Was it satire or burlesque? No, he saw that the writer meant it for a serious contribution to human knowledge. In disgust he flung the periodical aside. This was the kind of stuff that people feed upon nowadays, a result of the craze for quasi-scientific phraseology, for sonorous explanations of the inexplicable. Why does man exist, forsooth!--To guard his lips against the utterances of foolishness, and to be of what use in the world he may.

Before mid-day on the morrow, he would offer May Tomalin his heart and hand, offer both with glad sincerity, disregarding all else but the fact that to this point had destiny brought him.

He thought of her humble origin, and rejoiced in it. His own family history was an ill.u.s.tration of how a once genuinely n.o.ble house might fall into decay if not renewed by alliances with more vigorous blood.

May Tomalin had perfect health: she represented generations of hardy, simple folk, their energy of late recruited in the large air of Canada.

Why, had he gone forth deliberately to seek the kind of wife best suited to him, he could not have done better than chance had done for him in his indolent shirking existence. If he had children, they might be robust and comely. In May's immediate connections, there was nothing to cause embarra.s.sment; as to her breeding it would compare more than favourably with that of many high-born young ladies whom Society delights to honour. Of such young ladies he had always thought with a peculiar dread. If ever he allowed himself to dream of love and marriage, his mind turned to regions where fashion held no sway, where ambitions were humble. May Tomalin stood between the two worlds, representing a mean which would perchance prove golden.

So determined and courageous was his mood when he fell asleep that it did not permit him long slumbers. A bright sunrise gleaming on a sky which in the night had shed cool showers tempted him to rise much before his usual time. He turned over a volume or two from the shelves in the bedroom, seeking thus to keep his nerves steady and to tune his mind. Presently he thought he would take a stroll before breakfast. It was nearly eight o'clock; servants would be about and the door open. He left his room.

Pa.s.sing a great window at the end of the corridor, he glanced out upon the garden lying behind the house. Some one was walking there it was no other than May herself. She moved quickly, in the direction of the park; evidently bent on a ramble before her friends were stirring.

Better chance could not have befallen him. He went quickly downstairs.

But, when he had made his way to that part of the grounds where May had appeared, she was no longer discoverable. He strode on in what seemed the probable direction, taking, as a matter of fact, the wrong path; it brought him into the park, but at a point whence he looked in vain for the girl's figure. This was vexatious. Should he linger here for her return, or step out at a venture? He strolled vaguely for some minutes, coming at length into a path which promised pleasant things. Perhaps May had gone to the basky hollow yonder. If he missed her, they were sure of meeting after breakfast.

He walked towards the cl.u.s.tered trees.

CHAPTER XXII

Piqued by the uneventfulness of the preceding day, May Tomalin stole forth this morning in a decidedly adventurous frame of mind. She scorned danger; she desired excitement. Duplicity on her part was no more than Lord Dymchurch merited after that deliberate neglect of opportunity under the great tree. Of course nothing irrevocable must come to pa.s.s; it was the duty of man to commit himself, the privilege of woman to guard an ambiguous freedom. But, within certain limits, she counted on dramatic incidents. A brisk answer to her tap on the door in the park wall made her nerves thrill delightfully. No sooner had she turned the key than the door was impatiently pushed open from without.

"Quick!" sounded Lashmar's voice. "I hear wheels on the road.--Ha! Just in time! It might be someone who would recognise me."

He had grasped May's hand. He was gazing eagerly, amorously into her face. His emotions had matured since the meeting two days ago.

"Tell me all the news," he went on. "Is Dymchurch here?"

"Yes. And the others. You come to lunch to-day, of course? You will see them."

She recovered her hand, though not without a little struggle, which pleased her. For all her academic modernism, May belonged to the cla.s.s which has primitive traditions, unsophisticated instincts.

"And what has happened?" asked Dyce, advancing as she stepped back. He spoke like one who has a right to the fullest information.

"Happened? Nothing particular. What could have happened?"