The Vision of Desire Part 2

"I've told you how you can manage me--if you want to," he returned swiftly.

"I'd be like wax in your hands if you'd marry me, Ann."

"I shouldn't care for a husband who was like wax in my hands, thank you,"

she retorted promptly. "Besides, I'm not in the least in love with you."

"That's frank, anyway."

"Quite frank. And what's more, you're not really in love with me."

Tony stiffened.

"I should think I'm the best judge of that," he said, haughtily.

"Not a bit. You're too young to know"--coolly.

A look of temper flashed into his face, but it was only momentary. Then he laughed outright. Like most people, he found it difficult to be angry with Ann; she was so transparently honest and sincere.

"I'm three years your senior, I'd have you remember," he observed.

"Which is discounted by the fact that you're only a man. All women are born with at least three years' more common sense in their systems than men."

Tony demurred, and she allowed herself to be led into a friendly wrangle, inwardly congratulating herself upon having successfully side-tracked the topic of matrimony. The subject cropped up intermittently in their intercourse with each other and, from long experience, Ann had brought the habit of steering him away from it almost to a fine art.

He had been more or less in love with her since he was nineteen, but she had always refused to take him seriously, believing it to be only the outcome of conditions which had thrown them together all their lives in a peculiarly intimate fashion rather than anything of deeper root. But now that the boy had merged into the man, she had begun to ask herself, a little apprehensively, whether she were mistaken in her a.s.sumption, and she sometimes wondered if fate had not contrived to enmesh her in a web from which it would be difficult to escape. Tony was a very persistent lover, and unfortunately she was not free to send him away from her as she might have sent away any other man.

Fond as she was of him, she didn't in the least want to marry him. She didn't want to marry any one, in fact. But circ.u.mstances had combined to give her a very definite sense of responsibility concerning Tony Brabazon.

His father had been the younger son of Sir Percy Brabazon of Lorne, and, like many other younger sons, had inherited all the charm and most of the faults, and very little of the money that composed the family dower.

Philip, the heir, and much the elder of the two, pursued a correct and uneventful existence, remained a bachelor, and in due course came into the t.i.tle and estates. Whereas d.i.c.k, lovable and hot-headed, and with the gambling blood of generations of dicing, horse-racing ancestors running fierily in his veins, fell in love with beautiful but penniless Virginia Dale, and married her, spent and wagered his small patrimony right royally while it lasted, and borrowed from all and sundry when it was squandered.

Finally, he ended a varied but diverting existence in a ditch with a broken neck, while the horse that should have retrieved his fortunes galloped first past the winning-post--riderless.

Sir Philip Brabazon let fly a few torrid comments on the subject of his brother's career, and then did the only decent thing--took Virginia and her son, now heir to the t.i.tle, to live with him.

It was then that Ann Lovell, who was a G.o.dchild of Sir Philip's, had learned to know and love Tony's mother. Motherless herself, she had soon discovered that the frailly beautiful, sad-faced woman who had come to live with her somewhat irascible G.o.dparent, filled a gap in her small life of which, hitherto, she had been only dimly conscious. With the pa.s.sing of the years came a clearer understanding of how much Virginia's advent had meant to her, and ultimately no bond between actual mother and daughter could have been stronger than the bond which had subsisted between these two.

It was to Ann that Virginia confided her inmost fears lest Tony should follow in his father's footsteps. From Sir Philip, choleric and tyrannical, she concealed them completely--and many of Tony's youthful escapades as well, paying some precocious card-losses he sustained while still in his early teens out of her own slender dress allowance in preference to rousing his uncle's ire by a knowledge of them. But with Ann, she had been utterly frank.

"Tony's a born gambler," she told her. "But he has a stronger will than his father, and if he's handled properly he may yet make the kind of man I want him to be. Only--Philip doesn't know how to handle him."

The last two years of her life she had spent on a couch, a confirmed invalid, and oppressed by a foreboding as to Tony's ultimate future. And then, one day, shortly before the weak flame of her life flickered out into the darkness, she had sent for Ann, and solemnly, appealingly, confided the boy to her care.

"I hate leaving him, Ann," she had said between the long bouts of coughing which shook her thin frame so that speech was at times impossible. "He's so--alone. Philip represents nothing to him but an autocrat he is bound to obey. And Tony resents it. Any one who loves him can steady him--but no one will ever drive him. When I'm gone, will you do what you can for him--for him and for me?"

And Ann, holding the sick woman's feverish hands in her own cool ones, had promised.

"I will do all that I can," she said steadily.

"And if he _does_ get into difficulties?" persisted Virginia, her eager eyes searching the girl's face.

Ann smiled down at her rea.s.suringly.

"Don't worry," she had answered. "If he does, why, then I'll get him out of them if it's in any way possible."

Two days later, Ann had stood beside the bed where Virginia lay, straight and still in the utter peace and tranquillity conferred by death. Her last words had been of Tony.

"I've 'bequeathed' him to you, Ann," she had whispered. Adding, with a faint, humorous little smile: "I'm afraid I'm leaving you rather a troublesome legacy."

And now, nearly four years later, Ann had thoroughly realised that the task of keeping Tony out of mischief was by no means an easy one. Here, at Montricheux, however, she had felt that she could relax her vigilance somewhat. There was no temptation to back "a certainty" of which some racing friend had apprised him, and, as Tony himself discontentedly declared, the stakes permitted at the Kursaal tables were so small that if he gambled every night of the week he ran no risk of either making or losing a fortune.

The chief danger, she reflected, was that he might become bored and irritable--she could see that he was tending that way--and then trouble would be sure to arise between him and his uncle, with whom he was staying at the Hotel Gloria. She recalled his hesitation when she had asked him if he had been getting into mischief. Was trouble brewing already?

"Tony," she demanded shrewdly. "Have you been quarrelling with Sir Philip again? There's generally some disturbing cause when you feel driven into asking me to marry you."

"Well, why won't you? He'd be satisfied then."

"He? Do you mean your uncle?"--with some astonishment.

Tony nodded.

"Yes. Didn't you know he wanted it more than anything? Just as I do," he added with the quick, whimsical smile which was one of his charms.

Ann shook her head.

"You haven't answered my question," she persisted.

"Well," admitted Tony unwillingly, "he and I did have a bit of a dust-up this morning. I'm sick of doing nothing. I told him I wanted to be an architect."

"Well?"

"It was anything but well! He let me have it good and strong. No Brabazon was going to take up planning houses as a profession if he knew it! I'd got my duty to the old name and estate and the tenants, et cetera, et cetera.

All the usual tosh."

Ann's face clouded. She devoutly wished that Sir Philip _would_ allow his nephew to take up some profession--never mind which, so long as it interested him and gave him definite occupation. To keep him idling about between Lorne and the Brabazon town house in Audley Square was the worst thing in the world for him. Privately she determined to approach her G.o.dfather on the subject at the very next opportunity, though she could make a very good, guess at the reason for his refusal. It was a purely selfish one. He liked to have the boy with him. Bully him and browbeat him as he might, Tony was in reality the apple of the old man's eye--the one thing in the whole world for which he cared.

There would be nothing gained, however, by letting Tony know her thoughts, so she answered him with trenchant disapproval.

"It's not tosh. After all, your first duty is to Lorne and to the tenants.

A good landlord is quite as useful a member of society as a good architect."

"Oh, if I were doing the actual managing, it would be a different thing,"

acknowledged Tony. "But I don't. He decides everything and gives all the orders--without consulting me. I just have to see that what he orders is carried out, and trot about with him, and do the n.o.ble young heir stunt for the benefit of the tenants on my birthday. It's absolutely sickening!"--savagely.

"Well, don't quarrel with your bread-and-b.u.t.ter," advised Ann. "Or with Sir Philip. He's not a bad sort in his way."

"Oh, isn't he?"--grimly. "You try living with him! Thank the powers that be, I shall get a 'day off' to-morrow. He's going over to Evian by the midday boat. The St. Keliers--blessed be their name!--have asked him to dine with them--to meet some exiled Russian princess or other."

"Lady Susan is going, too. She's staying the night there. Is Sir Philip?"

"Yes. There's no getting back the same night. This is topping, Ann." Tony's face had brightened considerably. "Suppose you and I go up to the Dents de Loup for the afternoon, and then have a festive little dinner at the Gloria. Will you? Don't have an attack of common sense and say 'no'!"