The Return of the Prodigal Part 50

"I've done nothing to her, I a.s.sure you."

"Ah, you mean you've not been making love to her."

"I don't mean anything of the sort."

Durant was angry. It was borne in upon him that Mrs. Fazakerly was vulgar, after all. She looked at him, and her _pince-nez_ balanced itself on the bridge of her nose, then leapt its suicidal leap. She was amused with the ambiguity of his reply.

"_That's_ all right. Heaven help the man who does make love to her, if he means it. That girl's a riddle to me. I used to think she cared a little for her father; but it's my belief that Frida Tancred cares for n.o.body, not even herself. She simply doesn't know what love is, and she doesn't want to know. Why am I saying these alarming things to you? I'm saying them because I'm old enough to be your mother, and because I like you. You're clever, and you've got a sense of humor, too, though I can't say it's been much use to you since you came here. But, with all your cleverness, you'll never understand Frida Tancred. She's not like other women, the sort you've flirted with so much. Don't tell me you haven't; for you have. She can't help it. Her mother was a queer fantastic creature, and Frida's just like her, only stronger, much stronger, and deeper, which makes it worse. I'm sorry for her, because you see I'm very fond of her, and I think there's nothing--positively nothing--I wouldn't do to help her."

"It's an intolerable existence for her."

"Intolerable? Ah, my dear Mr. Durant, you're delightfully young; so is Frida, though you mightn't think it; and you young people are all so tragic. Frida's absurd about her father; she's always been going about with that face of hers, playing at being Antigone, and as the poor, dear Colonel is as blind as What's-his-name? he naturally doesn't see it. She's brought it all on herself. She looks on her father as her fate, and treats him accordingly--in the grand style--and it doesn't suit him. What a subject like the Colonel wants is a light touch. With me, for instance, he's a dear."

"Is he? I thought he rather bored you," said Durant maliciously.

"When did you think that? Oh, that first night when we all laughed so much, except poor Frida. I wasn't bored--not a bit; on the contrary, I was amused at the expression of your face, and at your atrocious manners and still more atrocious puns. Nothing ever bores me. It's only you young people who let yourselves be bored. Tragedy again. Too much tragedy for my taste."

Mrs. Fazakerly paused to let her communications sink in and take root. There was a deep hush on the landscape, as if in deference to her awful confidences. A deer stood knee-deep in the gra.s.s and gazed at them inquiringly. And as Mrs. Fazakerly stared unabashed into the face of Nature, Durant thought of Frida's remark, and wondered if she found it "soothing."

"Mind you, I don't mean to say that she's cold. On the contrary, I believe she's capable of a tremendous pa.s.sion for something--I don't quite know what. It might be a person,"--she rose--"but let me tell you it's much more likely to be a thing."

They were talking quite innocently about art and literature when they appeared at the house.

Durant vainly tried to unravel the possible motives for her confidence. They were so many and so mixed. It was possible that she honestly suspected him of a dawning pa.s.sion for Frida and that she meant to warn him of the hopelessness of such an attachment; apparently she understood her friend. Or the conversation may have been designed as an apology for her own future conduct. Durant knew that she would not refuse to marry Colonel Tancred if he made the offer; he knew, or thought he knew, her inmost opinion of that ridiculous person. She must be aware that her own dignity was considerably compromised by the situation; perhaps she hoped by rehabilitating the Colonel's behavior to justify her own. But why that insistence on the enigma of Frida Tancred's? Why this superfluous and elaborate cover for her own very simple meaning?

Unless, indeed, she was not quite so simple as she seemed. In courtship the Colonel had shown himself vacillating, to say the least of it. If Mrs. Fazakerly wanted to bring him to the point it was obviously her interest to get Miss Tancred out of her way. In other words, to throw her in Durant's way. His delicacy shrank from the baseness of this conjecture, but his reason, as well as his experience, suggested that the thing was not impossible. Mrs.

Fazakerly had been studying him, and she was shrewd enough to see that the surest way to interest him in Miss Tancred was to set his intellect to work on her. She had doubtless observed his _fin de siecle_ contempt for the obvious, his pa.s.sion for the thing beyond his grasp, his worship of the far-fetched, the intangible, the obscure. Thus she thought to inflame his curiosity by hinting that Frida Tancred was incomprehensible, while she touched the very soul of desire by representing her as unattainable. All this was no doubt very clever of Mrs. Fazakerly; but it was not quite what he had expected of her.

His suspicions were confirmed by Frida's behavior. Ever since their last interview she had relapsed into something like her former reticence. To-night, as if she had an inkling of the atrocious plot, she avoided him with a sort of terror.

IX

Durant's time was up, but the Colonel had pressed him to stay another week. He was affectionate; he was firm; he would take no refusal. He dwelt on the advantages of a prolonged visit. "A little change," said he, "does us all good. You young fellows are apt to get into a groove. But you seem brighter since you came. I think we've shaken you up a bit."

Indeed, at no time had there been room for any doubt as to the sincerity of his welcome. Though he was so determined to shake Durant up, to get him out of his groove, and give him fresh ideas, he betrayed a pitiable dependence on the young fellow. He endeavored to meet youth on its own ground; he made piteous experiments in the frivolous. More than once Durant had suspected that the poor gentleman had asked him down as a protection from the terrors of his own society. His intellectual resources were evidently giving out.

The barometer was stationary; a fortnight's almost persistent sunshine had dried up the source of ideas. Having gutted the _Nineteenth Century_, his mind seemed to be impotently raging for fresh matter to destroy. He repeated himself eternally; the same phrases were always in his mouth. "A fad, a theory, a name for ignorance." "Don't tell me; it's an insult to my intelligence!"

Durant could have been sorry for him if he had not been so infinitely sorry for himself.

On Monday morning Frida Tancred was herself again; not her old self, but the new one that Durant had learned to know and tolerate. She sought him out after breakfast and seconded the Colonel's invitation.

"If you could possibly stop, Mr. Durant, I wish you would. I'm asking a favor. My cousin, Georgie Chatterton, is coming down on Wednesday to stay. I don't know how long. I've never seen her before, and she's a young girl."

Frida's voice expressed a certain horror.

"Well, what of that?"

"If there's one thing on earth that I'm afraid of, it's a young girl. If you could only stay on just to amuse her a little, to help her through her first week! You see, it'll be so desperately dull for her if you don't."

He laughed; there was no other way of responding to the _navete_ of the request.

"It doesn't really seem fair to ask her when she hasn't an idea--I can't think why father did it. Perhaps he didn't. It's odd, but I've noticed that, when anything like this happens, Mrs. Fazakerly is always at the bottom of it."

Another lurid light on Mrs. Fazakerly!

"Was Mrs. Fazakerly at the bottom of his asking me?"

She smiled. "To tell you the honest truth, she was. Not but what he is delighted to have you here. I don't know when I've seen him so happy, so interested in anyone. But, you see, he's fearfully conservative; he can't bear to take the first step in anything."

He saw. The Colonel might be as conservative as he pleased; but the old order was changing; Coton Manor was on the eve of a revolution.

He saw it all clearly, that deep-laid plot of Mrs. Fazakerly's. He had been asked down at her suggestion to keep Frida Tancred out of the way for the moment, or, better still, forever. He had not risen to the occasion; his time was up, so Miss Chatterton was to be invited to take his place. Yet, when he came to think of it, so simple a scheme, the mere subst.i.tution of one cat's paw for another, hardly did justice to Mrs. Fazakerly's imagination. Was she still convinced of his dawning pa.s.sion for Miss Tancred? Had she doubts as to Miss Tancred's willingness or power to return it? and had she suggested that he should be pressed to prolong his stay in the hope that the rival presence of the young girl would act as the spark that fires the mine, kindling Miss Tancred's emotions and revealing her to herself?

Meanwhile Miss Tancred's one idea was to make use of him, to hand over the young girl to him and be rid of her. Her former offer of the black mare on the condition that he stayed another week appeared now as a grim jest, a cynical wager. This time she was in earnest.

Whereas, if she had been in love with him----

Weighing these matters in his sensitive brain, Durant conceived a violent hatred of Mrs. Fazakerly and her plot, together with a corresponding determination to stay on, if only to prove to that ingenious lady that she was hopelessly mistaken. Any hasty movement on his part would but confirm her in her absurd suspicions, while his actual flight would be the most flattering testimony to the profundity of her insight. He was not going to behave like the victim to a desperate infatuation for Miss Tancred. He would stay on, and Mrs. Fazakerly would see that nothing came of her psychological intrigue.

How far the Colonel was her accomplice he had no idea. The old fellow was a gentleman when all was said and done, and it was more than likely that he contented himself with a gentlemanly acquiescence. His dignity might possibly not refuse to draw a profit either way from the transaction. Durant could reckon on Miss Tancred, having returned to his original opinion of her. There was not enough womanhood in her for ordinary elemental jealousy; as for pa.s.sion, he had decided that she was as innocent of understanding as she was incapable of inspiring it. A sentimental c.o.xcomb might beat a precipitate retreat because he thought or fancied that his hostess was in love with him, and he would probably call his ridiculous conduct chivalry; it was more becoming in a gentleman to ignore the painful circ.u.mstance. For all these reasons he determined to stay.

His acceptance of their renewed invitation gave evident pleasure to the Colonel and Miss Tancred and very little annoyance to himself.

He had grown used to Coton Manor as a prisoner grows used to his cell. He had, as he had feared, tied himself to the place by beginning serious work in it. He was too well pleased with his landscape studies of the neighborhood to leave them unfinished; and, as it happened, he had plenty of time to give to them, for the Colonel was pretty constantly engaged with Mrs. Fazakerly. (Here again he traced the delicate hand of that lady. She had seen that, if any guest was to remain at Coton Manor, a limit must be put to the Colonel's opportunities for tormenting him.) Durant had ceased to long for distraction; he was sufficiently entertained by the situation itself.

X

If he had been on the lookout for distraction, he would have found it in Georgie Chatterton. At Miss Tancred's request he went with her to the station to meet the expected guest. It was evidently thought that his presence would break the shock of her arrival.

It proved an unnecessary precaution. The young girl presented a smiling face at the carriage window--the Tancred face, somewhat obscured by a ma.s.s of irrelevant detail, sandy hair, freckles, a sanguine complexion, and so on. She jumped out on to the platform with a joyous cry of "Fridah!" She embraced "Fridah" impetuously, and then kept her a moment at arm's length, examining her dubiously.

"You don't seem a bit glad to see me," was her verdict. She smiled gaily at Durant, and held out a friendly hand. All the way up from the station she conversed with them in a light-hearted manner.

Thus:--

"What do you people do down here?"

"Ask Mr. Durant; he'll tell you that we vegetate all day and play whist all night."

"Oh, do you? Well, you know, I shan't. My goodness, Frida! is that your house? Whatever is it like? A Unitarian chapel, or the Carlton Club, or, stop a bit--you don't bury people in it, do you?" Then, as it occurred to her that she might have hurt her cousin's feelings by her last suggestion, she added, "It's rather a jolly old mausoleum, though. I wonder what it's like inside."

If Miss Chatterton had any premonition of her own approaching death by boredom, and had seen in Coton Manor more than a mere pa.s.sing resemblance to a tomb, she was neither awestruck nor downcast at the prospect of dissolution. She flung herself into the vault as she had flung herself onto the platform, all glowing with pleasurable antic.i.p.ation. To Durant there was something infinitely sad in the spectacle of this young creature precipitating herself into the unknown with such reckless and pa.s.sionate curiosity. The whole long evening through he could discover no diminution of her mood, her gleeful determination to enjoy herself among the shades. She behaved to Colonel Tancred as if he had been a celebrity whose acquaintance she had long desired to make, a character replete with interest and romantic charm. She greeted Mrs. Fazakerly with a joyous lifting of the eyebrows, as much as to say, "What! another delightful person?"

And she was observant in her way, too. When Miss Tancred put a hand on her shoulder and said, "It will be horribly dull for you, Georgie; you'll have nothing to do but talk to Mr. Durant," she replied, "H'm! Mr. Durant looks as if he had been talked to all his life. I shall talk to you, Frida."

All through dinner she managed to preserve her spirits, her air of being among the most curious and interesting people. Durant wondered how on earth she kept it up. She seemed one of those fortunate beings whose vivacity is so overpowering that it can subdue even dulness to itself. She made the Colonel look strangely old; beside her Mrs. Fazakerly seemed suddenly to become dull and second-rate, to sink into the position of an attendant, a fatuous chorus, a giddy satellite. Her laughter swallowed up Mrs. Fazakerly's as a river in flood devours its tributaries; her spirits quenched Mrs. Fazakerly's as a blaze licks up a spasmodic flicker. It pleased Durant to look at her, the abandonment of her manners was in such flagrant contradiction with the Roman regularity of her Tancred face. Owing, perhaps, to some dash of the Tancred blood in her, she was neither pretty nor witty; yet she contrived to get her own way with everybody. Durant accounted for it by her sheer youth, the obstinacy of her will to live.

In twenty-four hours she had put a stop to Frida's disappearances, to Durant's sketching, and to the Colonel's intellectual conversation; and this she did by behaving so as to make these things impossible. In short, she had taken possession of her cousin and her black mare, of the Colonel and his cigarettes, of Mrs.

Fazakerly and her books, of everybody and everything except Durant.

She was friendly with him, but somehow her friendliness was infinitely more unflattering than Miss Tancred's former apathy. It implied that he was all very well in his way, but that she had seen too many of his sort to be greatly excited about him; while in Frida Tancred, now, she had found something absolutely and uniquely new.

She was not going to be put off with Durant; she fastened herself upon Frida, and refused to let her go; she did the thing she had said she would do--without absolutely ignoring her fellow-guest, she talked to Frida or at Frida or for Frida alone. And yet, strangely enough, by dint of much observation she had detected a subtle resemblance between them, and she proclaimed her discovery with her natural frankness.