I
“I hope you are using all your influence to prevent the marriage?” said Clyde, in the impersonal tone that he always adopted when speaking to his wife of her only daughter.
“Why, Charles? They’re madly in love.”
“That is why,” said Sir Charles.
“What do you mean?”
Lady Clyde had not the slightest desire to know what her husband meant, and had already made up her mind that she disagreed with it root and branch, so she said, “What do you mean?” in a tone of indignation, and not one of enquiry, and gave him no time to answer.
“Richard is a gentleman, he’s earning a very good salary, and he adores Rita. The only possible objection is their having to live in the East, but everyone says the Malay States are quite healthy, and she’s very strong, thank heaven. If she’s plucky enough to face it, I don’t see how we can object.”
“My objection has nothing to do with their living in the Malay States. It is simply concerned with the fact that they will have nothing whatever to depend upon except Richard Lambourne’s salary. He is a young man, he has saved nothing, and he has no expectations from anybody.”
“Rita has her own small income.”
“It might keep them from starvation, certainly, but it wouldn’t be enough for a family.”
“No one expects it to be. Richard will save if he has a wife, naturally, and he hopes to become a part owner of the rubber estate, later on. After all, it’s very creditable for a man of his age to have been made general manager already.”
“Very.”
“Then what have you against him?”
“Nothing at all,” said Sir Charles mildly.
“A minute ago you were telling me how you hoped I should use my influence to prevent this marriage. If you have nothing against him, why shouldn’t they marry?”
“Perhaps I have ‘something against’ Rita, as you express it.”
“Rita is only your step-daughter, Charles, and I know very well that your own children——”
“Our own children——”
“That they come first, and always have. But I have an unprejudiced eye,” said Lady Clyde warmly, “and I don’t pretend that Rita isn’t a greater deal cleverer, prettier, and more attractive than all the others put together. And as for talking of having anything against her, it’s the sheerest nonsense, as even you must know.”
Sir Charles looked at his wife with an expression which she had long ago summed up, not inaptly, as “Charles looking as though he couldn’t decide if one were worth explaining the alphabet to or not.” On this occasion, Sir Charles appeared to decide in favour of the modicum of intelligence required.
“My case is simply this, Catherine. If Richard Lambourne and Rita marry now, they are entirely dependent upon Richard’s job. Say he loses it, or loses his health—which amounts to the same thing—or falls off his horse and breaks his neck, Rita may be left with a child, or children, and nothing whatever to live on except a yearly sum which she has hitherto spent upon her clothes, largely supplemented by presents from you.”
“As though Rita wouldn’t always have a welcome from me, and as though I wouldn’t share my last crust with her!”
“On the contrary, I should expect you to divide your last crust into equal parts between Rita and your four other children,” said Sir Charles with coldness. “But apart from last crusts, which is a rhetorical way of speaking, you had better understand once and for all, my dear Catherine, that my sons and daughter are not to be sacrificed to Rita. If she marries this man, he must keep her. This house is her home, and has been so for twenty years or so, but once she is married, it ceases to be her home. I am sorry if I hurt your feelings, but if Rita is to take the risk of marriage with a man who has nothing to depend on but what he can earn for himself, she had better understand exactly what she is doing. Personally, I consider her entirely unfitted to take such a risk.”
“She is more than ready to take any risk. You are perfectly incapable of understanding Rita, Charles, and what a generous, ardent nature she has. And she is very, very much in love, for the first time in her life. You know as well as I do that plenty of people have wanted to marry Rita, and I think it’s wonderful that she should have refused so many offers, to give herself to a man who isn’t rich, simply because she loves him.”
“You look upon it as being decided, then?”
“Of course I do. She is absolutely determined to marry him and go out with him at once. I can’t refuse my consent—and I shan’t—and they’re not dependent upon yours, Charles.”
She looked at him with a rather nervous defiance, but Sir Charles said with great calm:
“Certainly they’re not. I shall therefore consider the subject closed, so far as my objections go.”
He kept his word, as he invariably did.
The wedding of Rita and Richard took place six weeks later.
Rita was little and very pretty, with big dark eyes, a pathetic baby face, and, in rather quaint contrast, a very erect little figure and a decided bearing.
Unlike her stepfather, the majority of her friends and relations fully realised the beautiful recklessness of Rita’s love-match.
“A very gallant little lady!” said an old friend of Lady Clyde’s, and she reversed an opinion which she had hitherto held as to his senility. He used the same phrase, which had evidently caught his ancient fancy, when the bride was making her farewells, and it oddly suited her appearance, in a velvet dress and a three-cornered hat with a long plume, vaguely recalling pictures of cavalier heroines.
“So she’s marrying all for love, and going eight thousand miles away from home!” said Rita’s aged admirer. “None of your mercenary, modern, ideas there. A gallant little lady, I call her.”