“No, I’m for three days at Chanter with my mother; whom, as she kindly lent me her car, I should have rather liked to bring.”
Lady Sandgate left the unsaid, in this connection, languish no longer than was decent. “But whom you doubtless had to leave, by her preference, just settling down to bridge.”
“Oh, to sit down would imply that my mother at some moment of the day gets up——!”
“Which the Duchess never does?”—Lady Sand-gate only asked to be allowed to show how she saw it. “She fights to the last, invincible; gathering in the spoils and only routing her friends?” She abounded genially in her privileged vision. “Ah yes—we know something of that!”
Lord John, who was a young man of a rambling but not of an idle eye, fixed her an instant with a surprise that was yet not steeped in compassion. “You too then?”
She wouldn’t, however, too meanly narrow it down. “Well, in this house generally; where I’m so often made welcome, you see, and where——”
“Where,” he broke in at once, “your jolly good footing quite sticks out of you, perhaps you’ll let me say!”
She clearly didn’t mind his seeing her ask herself how she should deal with so much rather juvenile intelligence; and indeed she could only decide to deal quite simply. “You can’t say more than I feel—and am proud to feel!—at being of comfort when they’re worried.”
This but fed the light flame of his easy perception—which lighted for him, if she would, all the facts equally. “And they’re worried now, you imply, because my terrible mother is capable of heavy gains and of making a great noise if she isn’t paid? I ought to mind speaking of that truth,” he went on as with a practised glance in the direction of delicacy; “but I think I should like you to know that I myself am not a bit ignorant of why it has made such an impression here.”
Lady Sandgate forestalled his knowledge. “Because poor Kitty Imber—who should either never touch a card or else learn to suffer in silence, as I’ve had to, goodness knows!—has thrown herself, with her impossible big debt, upon her father? whom she thinks herself entitled to ‘look to’ even more as a lovely young widow with a good jointure than she formerly did as the mere most beautiful daughter at home.”
She had put the picture a shade interrogatively, but this was as nothing to the note of free inquiry in Lord John’s reply. “You mean that our lovely young widows—to say nothing of lovely young wives—ought by this time to have made out, in predicaments, how to turn round?”
His temporary hostess, even with his eyes on her, appeared to decide after a moment not wholly to disown his thought. But she smiled for it. “Well, in that set——!”
“My mother’s set?” However, if she could smile he could laugh. “I’m much obliged!”
“Oh,” she qualified, “I don’t criticise her Grace; but the ways and traditions and tone of this house——”
“Make it”—he took her sense straight from her—“the house in England where one feels most the false note of a dishevelled and bankrupt elder daughter breaking in with a list of her gaming debts—to say nothing of others!—and wishing to have at least those wiped out in the interest of her reputation? Exactly so,” he went on before she could meet it with a diplomatic ambiguity; “and just that, I assure you, is a large part of the reason I like to come here—since I personally don’t come with any such associations.”
“Not the association of bankruptcy—no; as you represent the payee!”
The young man appeared to regard this imputation for a moment almost as a liberty taken. “How do you know so well, Lady Sandgate, what I represent?”
She bethought herself—but briefly and bravely. “Well, don’t you represent, by your own admission, certain fond aspirations? Don’t you represent the belief—very natural, I grant—that more than one perverse and extravagant flower will be unlikely on such a fine healthy old stem; and, consistently with that, the hope of arranging with our admirable host here that he shall lend a helpful hand to your commending yourself to dear Grace?”
Lord John might, in the light of these words, have felt any latent infirmity in such a pretension exposed; but as he stood there facing his chances he would have struck a spectator as resting firmly enough on some felt residuum of advantage: whether this were cleverness or luck, the strength of his backing or that of his sincerity. Even with the young woman to whom our friends’ reference thus broadened still a vague quantity for us, you would have taken his sincerity as quite possible—and this despite an odd element in him that you might have described as a certain delicacy of brutality. This younger son of a noble matron recognised even by himself as terrible enjoyed in no immediate or aggressive manner any imputable private heritage or privilege of arrogance. He would on the contrary have irradiated fineness if his lustre hadn’t been a little prematurely dimmed. Active yet insubstantial, he was slight and short and a trifle too punctually, though not yet quite lamentably, bald. Delicacy was in the arch of his eyebrow, the finish of his facial line, the economy of “treatment” by which his negative nose had been enabled to look important and his meagre mouth to smile its spareness away.
He had pleasant but hard little eyes—they glittered, handsomely, without promise—and a neatness, a coolness and an ease, a clear instinct for making point take, on his behalf, the place of weight and immunity that of capacity, which represented somehow the art of living at a high pitch and yet at a low cost. There was that in his satisfied air which still suggested sharp wants—and this was withal the ambiguity; for the temper of these appetites or views was certainly, you would have concluded, not such as always to sacrifice to form. If he really, for instance, wanted Lady Grace, the passion or the sense of his interest in it would scarce have been considerately irritable.
“May I ask what you mean,” he inquired of Lady Sandgate, “by the question of my ‘arranging’?”
“I mean that you’re the very clever son of a very clever mother.”
“Oh, I’m less clever than you think,” he replied—“if you really think it of me at all; and mamma’s a good sight cleverer!”
“Than I think?” Lady Sandgate echoed. “Why, she’s the person in all our world I would gladly most resemble—for her general ability to put what she wants through.” But she at once added: “That is if—!” pausing on it with a smile.
“If what then?”
“Well, if I could be absolutely certain to have all in her kinds of cleverness without exception—and to have them,” said Lady Sandgate, “to the very end.”
He definitely, he almost contemptuously declined to follow her. “The very end of what?”
She took her choice as amid all the wonderful directions there might be, and then seemed both to risk and to reserve something. “Say of her so wonderfully successful general career.”
It doubtless, however, warranted him in appearing to cut insinuations short. “When you’re as clever as she you’ll be as good.” To which he subjoined: “You don’t begin to have the opportunity of knowing how good she is.” This pronouncement, to whatever comparative obscurity it might appear to relegate her, his interlocutress had to take—he was so prompt with a more explicit challenge. “What is it exactly that you suppose yourself to know?”
Lady Sandgate had after a moment, in her supreme good humour, decided to take everything. “I always proceed on the assumption that I know everything, because that makes people tell me.”
“It wouldn’t make we,” he quite rang out, “if I didn’t want to! But as it happens,” he allowed, “there’s a