Then she suddenly began to laugh—an action only to be excused in one in her position, and burdened with her sins, by the fact of her having at the moment a peculiarly vivid vision of Millie Bushell going head first out of a canoe.
CHAPTER VII. — THE INEVITABLE MEETING
The first Viscount Thrapston had been an eminent public character, and the second a respectable private person; the third had been neither. And yet there was some good in the third. He had loved his only son with a fondness rare to find; and for ten whole years, while the young man was between seventeen and twenty-seven, the old lord lived, for his sake, a life open to no reproach. Then the son died, leaving a lately married wife and a baby-girl, and Lord Thrapston, deprived at once of hope and of restraint, returned to his old courses, till age came upon him and drove him from practice into reminiscence. Mrs. Glyn had outlived her husband fifteen years and then followed him, fairly snubbed to death, some said, by her formidable father-in-law. The daughter was of sterner stuff, and early discovered for herself that nothing worse than a scowl or a snarl was to be feared. On her, indeed, descended a relic of that tenderness her father had enjoyed, and Agatha used to the full the advantages it gave her. She knew her own importance. It is not every girl who will be a peeress in her own right, and she amused her grandfather by calmly informing him that it was not on the whole a subject for regret that she had not been a boy. “You see,” said she, “we get rid of the new viscounty, and it’s much better to be Warmley than Thrapston.”
The fact that she was some day to be ‘Warmley’ was the mainspring of that hairbrained jaunt to Lang Marsh in company with Nettie Wallace. Nettie was the daughter of Lord Thrapston’s housekeeper, and the two girls had been intimate in youth, much as Charlie Merceron and Willie Prime had been at the Court; and when Nettie, scorning servitude, set up in life for herself, Agatha gave her her custom and did not withdraw her friendship. In return, she received an allegiance which refused none of her behests, and a regard which abolished all formality between them, except when Nettie got a pen in her hand and set herself to compose a polite letter. The expedition was, of course, to see the Court—the old home of the Warmleys, for which Agatha felt a sentimental attraction. She had told herself that some day, if she were rich (and, Lord Thrapston not being rich, she must have had some other resource in her mind), she would buy back Langbury Court and get rid of the Mercerons altogether. There were only a widow and a boy, she had heard, and they should have their price. So she went to the Court in the business-like mood of a possible purchaser (Calder could afford anything), as well as in the romantic mood of a girl escaped from every-day surroundings and plunging into a past full of interest to her. Had not she also read of Agatha Merceron? And in this mixed mood she remained till one evening at the Pool she had met ‘the boy’, when the mood became more mixed still. She dared not now look back on the struggles she had gone through before her meeting with the boy became first a daily event, and then the daily event. She had indulged herself for once. It was not to last; but for once it was overpoweringly sweet to be gazed at by eyes that did not remind her of a frog’s, and to see swiftly darting towards her a lithe straight figure crowned with a head that (so she said) reminded her of Lord Byron’s. But alas! alas! why had nobody told her that the boy was like that before she went? Why did her grandfather take no care of her? Why did Calder never show any interest in what she did? Why, in fine, was everybody so cruel as to let her do exactly what she liked, and thereby get into a scrape like this?
One thing was certain. If that boy were in London, she must avoid him. They must never meet. It was nonsense for Mr. Sigismund Taylor to talk of making a. clean breast of it—of a dignified apology to Charlie, coupled with a no less dignified intimation that their acquaintance must be regarded as closed. Mr. Taylor knew nothing of the world. He even wanted her to tell Calder! No. She was truly and properly penitent, and she hoped that she received all he said in that line in a right spirit; but when it came to a question of expediency, she would rather have Mrs. Blunt’s advice than that of a thousand Mr. Taylors. So she wrote to Mrs. Blunt and asked herself to lunch, and Mrs. Blunt, being an accomplished painstaking hostess, and having no reason to suppose that her young friend desired a confidential interview, at once cast about for some one whom Agatha would like to meet. She did not ask Calder Wentworth—she was not so commonplace as that—but she invited Victor Sutton, and, delighting in a happy flash of inspiration, she added Mr. Vansittart Merceron. The families were connected in some way, she knew, and Agatha certainly ought to know Mr. Merceron.
Accordingly, when Agatha arrived, she found Victor, and she had not been there five minutes before the butler, throwing open the door, announced “Mr. Merceron.”
Uncle Van had reached that state of body when he took his time over stairs, and between the announcement and his entrance there was time for Agatha to exclaim, quite audibly, “Oh!”
“What’s the matter, dear?” asked Mrs. Blunt; but Uncle Van’s entrance forbade a reply, and left Agatha blushing but relieved.