Was it any wonder that, scarce out of her teens, she was already a femme du monde, with a wide knowledge of the hypocrisies of society, the tortuous ways of political intrigue, and the foetid moral atmosphere of those gilded salons and perfumed boudoirs?
“I wonder if you’ll forgive me if I don’t play any more, Mr Macbean?” she asked of the dark-haired young man in grey who stood, racquet in hand, awaiting her return. “I am very tired. I played in the tournament at your uncle’s yesterday, you know, and we from the South are exotic plants, after all.”
“Forgive you! Of course!” cried the young man gallantly. “The sun is still too warm to be comfortable. Perhaps you will show me the gardens instead?”
“Willingly,” she answered. “But there’s not much to see here, I fear,” and they strolled together between the high box-hedges, into the well-kept flower-garden with its grey old sundial and beds edged with curbs of lichen-covered stone. Beyond lay another lawn, which rose gently until it gave entrance into a small shady wood of high old oaks and elms wherein the rooks were cawing.
The pair were comparatively strangers. A fortnight before, he had called with his uncle, the rector of Thornby, whom he was visiting, and on several occasions since they had met at tennis or at tea in the drawing-rooms of various houses in the neighbourhood.
They chatted while strolling around the great sloping lawn, and he was expressing admiration at the excellent game she had played. She inwardly reflected that he seemed a very pleasant companion – so different from those over-dressed young Roman nobles, all elegance, swagger, and pose.
To George Macbean Nature had been kind and Chance had been cruel.
He was tall, slender, and athletic, with pale, refined features and a look of thoughtful and reticent calm. People looked at him far oftener than they did at handsomer men. It was one of those faces which suggest the romance of fate, and his eyes, under their straight brows and their drooping lids, could gaze at women with an honest, open look. And yet women seldom saw him for the first time without thinking of him when he had passed from sight. He aroused at a first glance a vague speculative interest – he was a man whom women loved, and yet he was utterly unconscious of it all.
He was son of a younger son of the Macbeans of Castle Douglas; the blood of the ancient Galloway lairds ran in his veins; yet it was all that remained to him of the vanished greatness of a race that had fought so valiantly on the Border. He had, on his father’s death, been compelled to come down from Cambridge only to find himself launched upon the world practically penniless, when, by good fortune, an influential friend of his father’s in the City had contrived to obtain for him a situation as private secretary to Mr Morgan-Mason, a wholesale provision merchant, who, having made a fortune in business, sought to enter society by the parliamentary back door. He sat for South-West Norfolk, and was mainly distinguished in the House by his loudness of dress and his vulgar ostentation.
The post of secretary to such an impossible person was by no means a congenial occupation for a gentleman. The white-waistcoated vulgarian smiled at the poverty of the peerage, and treated his secretary as he would one of his shopmen in the Goswell Road; yet George Macbean could only “grin and bear it,” for upon this aspiring merchant of cheese and bacon his very living depended. He could not afford to lose the one hundred and eighty pounds a year which the bacon merchant paid him.
It being the recess, and Mr Morgan-Mason having followed in the wake of a needy earl and his wife to Vichy, Macbean was spending a month with the Reverend Basil Sinclair, his bachelor uncle, when he had become acquainted with that bright, vivacious girl who was walking beside him.
She was speaking of Italy, and life there in winter, without, of course, mentioning the official position of her father, when he said —
“Ah! I too love Italy. I have been to Rome and Florence several times. Both cities are delightful – even to the mere visitor like myself.”
“Perhaps you speak Italian?” she hazarded in that language.
“I am fairly well acquainted with it,” he responded in the purest Tuscan, laughing the while. “Before I went to Cambridge I lived five years with my mother’s brother, who was a priest in Pisa.”
“Why, you speak like a born Italian!” she laughed. “It is so difficult for us English to roll our r’s – to give the exact accent, for instance, to cane and to carne. Over those two words we make ourselves ridiculous.” They had entered the wood, where the damp smell of decaying leaves, so essentially English, met their nostrils, and were strolling up one of the mossy paths in the cool shadow. Yes, she was certainly lovely, he reflected. Report had not lied about her. She was more beautiful than any woman he had ever before beheld, more graceful, more cosmopolitan.
Morini? Morini? Yes, he had heard the name before. It was not at all uncommon in Tuscany. She was Anglo-Italian, and the girl born of Anglo-Italian parents is perhaps the most charming and cosmopolitan of any in Europe.
Chatting gaily, they lingered in the wood, strolled through the long range of hothouses, and then back again to the lawn, where they found the guests bidding farewell to their hostess and departing.
The Reverend Basil Sinclair was bending over Madame Morini’s hand, an example which his nephew, though loth to leave the side of the girl who had so entirely charmed him, was bound to follow, and five minutes later the two men mounted into the rector’s pony-cart, raised their hats, and drove away.
Later that evening, as General Borselli, ready dressed for dinner, stood, a well-set-up figure in the long, low, old-fashioned drawing-room, with its perfume of pot-pourri, awaiting the appearance of the ladies, the door suddenly opened, and there entered a dark, good-looking, brown-bearded man of about thirty, who was a guest at Orton, but having been up to London for the day, had only just returned in time to slip into his dinner-jacket.
The two men faced each other.
The new-comer, also a foreigner, started back, halting on the threshold as he recognised the sallow, sinister countenance of the other in the dim half-light. Angelo Borselli was the very last man he expected to meet beneath the Minister’s roof in England, and the encounter was, to him, somewhat disconcerting.
“You!” cried the general in surprise, speaking in French. “So you actually have the audacity to pose as a friend of His Excellency, after those very plain words I spoke in the Florence Club! You accept my friend’s invitation and dare pay court to mademoiselle! Is this not a dangerous game you are playing, my friend?”
“I conceive no danger in it – as far as I am concerned,” replied the young Frenchman, Jules Dubard, coolly. “Besides, my private affairs are surely no concern of yours! If His Excellency does me the great honour to invite me to his English home, I shall certainly accept, even at risk of incurring your displeasure,” he added, with a supercilious smile.
“You recollect what I told you?”
“Perfectly,” replied the well-dressed young count, with an air of extreme politeness, as he rearranged his cravat in the mirror. “But you appear to overlook one rather important fact.”
“And what is that, pray?” inquired the Sicilian, with an evil flash in his dark eyes.
“Exposure to His Excellency is synonymous with exposure of yourself in quite another quarter, my dear general,” replied the guest, in a meaning tone. “You cannot afford to risk that, you know. We both of us may threaten, but it is, after all, what these English call a fool’s game. Neither of us dare give each other away. So we may just as well be friends as enemies – eh?”
Chapter Three
In which Mary Reveals Certain Suspicions
Dinner, served with that same stiff stateliness that characterised everything in the Morini household, was over, and the