II.
Some five months earlier in the year Lord Veynes had returned from a voyage round the world.
It was to have completed his education, which included, besides some Greek grammar, the use of a cue, a little Cavendish and the racing calendar. He was five-and-twenty, a gentleman; dressed well, looked well and lived well; on the whole, a nice fellow, deeply attached to his father and devotedly to himself.
The former was becoming an old man, having married late in life; was short, had a stoop, a halo of whitened hair, and a face that was a mask of merriment. His kindliness and humor were bywords, and his stories always made a widening silence in a room, to which fresh listeners drifted. He would laugh at them himself, yet his laughter seemed their best part, their sincerest compliment; it was like humor itself holding its sides.
He had filled every county dignity in turn, but they made no mark on him nor he on them; he bore them dutifully, but he was glad to be rid of them; they added something to his tales, to the fullness of his humor, to the softness of his heart; perhaps to public knowledge of his incompetence. Yet he was liked none the less for his failures; his blunt honesty thrust out of them obtrusively, as an elbow through a ragged sleeve.
Veynes was the one relic of his married life, having cost his mother her life; and he was adored as things may be that are made so ruinously unique. He was a good boy, and stood a great deal of spoiling; but he had argued, naturally, his own adorableness from so much adoration, and would have honored his father’s encomiums to any amount.
His home-coming had all the decoration of triumphal entries—flags, festival arches and singing children; afterward a tenant dinner, tenant humor and considerable drowsiness.
When it was all over, and the two men sat together by the log fire in the hall, which burned red splashes on the armored walls, the earl opened the subject nearest his heart—an heir.
“I want to see him here before I’m gone,” he concluded, with a kind of ruefulness which was a part of his pathos and of his humor; “and, by George, my boy, if you don’t marry soon, I will.”
“Oh, I’ll marry, I’ll marry,” laughed the other, “but you must find me the girl.”
Love, however, did that, though the earl was assiduous, surrounding the young man for the betterment of his choice with half the eligible petticoats in the county; a mistake, seeing that iteration and propinquity in affairs of the heart are of more assistance than variety.
Yet it was, in the end, variety which succeeded, in the person of Miss Rosamond Merlin.
She had come to lend terpsichorean relief to an amateur performance of burlesque in the neighborhood, and her appearance transformed Veynes, in a single night, from a conscientious brigand to a distracted and distracting piece of stage furniture; though it is but fair to add he was not the only one affected; for none of his brother bandits were, when slain—while Miss Rosamond was upon the stage—as stiff as their previous rigidity had led one to expect.
Miss Merlin attended but three rehearsals; yet ere the night of the performance, Veynes had decided, as he put it, that they were made for one another—a phrase which has not, in a man’s mouth, all the reciprocity that it conveys. He offered the idea to Miss Rosamond while applying some powder to her cheek.
She laughed, knocked the puff out of his hand, and ran on to the stage; but she found him awaiting her exit, deaf to cues and stage directions, in a kind of tragic calm.
“I mean it,” he protested.
She widened her eyes.
“Well, mean it a little later,” she said.
He took the hint and waited till, having found her some food, they were sitting in the deserted supper room, in an atmosphere of exhausted hilarity, among the ruins of the waiters.
“Have you thought it over?” he asked, impressively.
“I, no!—do I ever think anything over but a new step? Besides, such a simple little thing!”
“Simple!” he stammered.
“To say no to. Do you think I’d have the cheek to marry you?”
“Wouldn’t you?” dropped the young man, feebly.
He was innocent of having conceived, still less suggested, so tremendous a contingency; indeed, her contemplation of it, even in dismissal, appeared unseemly. For he had been strictly brought up, and had added, “Thou shalt not wed the name of Veynes in vain,” to a decalogue somewhat abridged, and, as his, father put it, “edited by Debrett.”
But neither his decalogue nor his delicacy prevented him from sketching airily the insignificance of wedding symbols in an aristocratic connection when the heart was involved.
“People talk such nonsense, you know,” he said.
She smiled with engaging innocence, and he edged a little nearer to his meaning, hoping she would meet him halfway.
It was like laying a wash of color beside another which might be wet; he was horribly afraid of a smear; he thought she might have assured him, figuratively, that she would not run. But she only helped herself to another meringue.
He made pauses and filled the silence with his eyes; but she met them with a pensive examination through the prongs of her fork; and the smiles he fancied ambiguous seemed, reflected on her mouth, to be merely inane; so he was driven back upon words and impersonal allusiveness. He groaned, in explanation, over the austerity which would tie all love knots to a wedding ring; suggesting that some people were able to conceive of them apart.
“Couldn’t you?” he inquired.
She gleamed with malicious coquetry.
“Couldn’t and wouldn’t,” she said, decisively. “Love and marry and trust to luck, that’s my sentiment; but don’t marry if you can’t love; and don’t love if you can’t marry; and don’t do either——”
“Well?”
“If you think you’re going to do both.”
“Poof!” he pouted.
“Oh, no, it’s not; it’s the very sober fact. Love’s a fever, you know, and no better than most of them—contagious and malagious and infectious and—and——”
“Go on!”
“But that’s the truth; it’s carried in frocks, pretty ones; and it’s caught by touching, and it’s regular poison to breathe! Then it must be in the air, because people take it in clumps, perfect epidemics; and the best way to catch it is to let yourself get low and dumpy. When you’ve got it, the only thing to cure you is marriage—and it does generally—a ring dissolved in syrup night and morning; kind of quinine, you know; takes away the shivering and gives you a headache.”
His face was whitening with disapproval, and she burst, as she caught a glimpse of it, into a gust of laughter.
“Shocking, isn’t it?”
“Well, it’s a matter of taste,” he remarked, with a further twist of his nose, to indicate that its flavor, at least in his mouth, was nasty. It is never the hangman can joke when he is hung.
She looked at him, with her head tilted over her plate, and a slow, broad smile.
“You’ll do!” she said. “But you know even your eight pearls won’t run to quite all that—every time.”
He moved impatiently on his chair as she raised her champagne glass and peered mockingly at him across its yellow brim.
She set it down with a laugh.
“My!” she exclaimed; “what a row they are making upstairs! Come along, I believe they are dancing.”
She went up three steps at a time, but Veynes followed more slowly. He feared he was sickening for the fever.