Grenfell had been some days at the Castle, and liked his quarters. There were, it is true, many things he wished changed; some of them, he fancied, could be altered by a little adroit diplomacy with the butler and the housekeeper, and other heads of departments; others, of a more serious kind, he reserved to be dealt with when the time should come that he would be regarded in that house as little less than a master. He had weighed the matter carefully with himself, and determined that it was better to stand by Sir Within, old as he was, than to depend on the friendship of young Ladarelle, whose innate vulgarity would have made all companionship irksome, and whose inveterate obstinacy would have made guidance impossible.
The house had, indeed, great capabilities, and, with Sir Within’s means, might be made all that one could wish for. With the smallest imaginable addition to the household, thirty, ay, forty guests could be easily accommodated, and he, Grenfell, knew of such delightful people—such charming people—who would be in ecstasies to stop at a house where there was no mistress, where no return civilities were wanted, where each guest might be a law to himself as to his mode of life, and where the cellar was immaculate, and the cook better than at the Travellers’.
“If I could only get him out of this stupid isolation—if I could persuade him that all England is not like a Welsh county, and that this demure neighbourhood, with its antiquated prudery, has no resemblance to the charming world of seductive sinners I could bring around him, what a victory it would be!” To this end the first grand requisite was, that the old man should not marry. “If he marry,” argued Grenfell, “he will be so deplorably in love, that what between his passion and his jealousy, he’ll shut up the house, and nothing younger than the old French abbé will ever cross the threshold.”
Now Grenfell had not of late kept up any relations of intercourse with Ladarelle; indeed, in his life in town, he had avoided intimacy with one all whose associates were evidently taken from the lowest ranks of the turf, and the slang set of second-rate theatres. Grenfell could not, consequently, know what plan of campaign this promising young gentleman was following out; but when he learned that it was quite suddenly he had quitted the Castle, and that his servant, Mr. Fisk, had been left behind, he very soon established such a watch on the accomplished valet’s movements as satisfied him that he was there on duty as a spy, and that his daily visits to the post-office signified how industriously he despatched his intelligence. At first, Grenfell was disposed to make advances to Fisk, and win his confidence—a task not difficult to one whose whole life had been a series of such seductions; but he subsequently thought it might be better to hold himself quite aloof from all intercourse with the younger branch, and stand firmly by the head of the dynasty. “If Ladarelle be really gone after, this girl, to marry her, or to run off with her, it matters not which, he is playing my game. All I ask is, that Sir Within be not the bridegroom. If the shock of the disaster should not overwhelm him, there is nothing else to be dreaded.” There, indeed, lay the great peril; nor was Grenfell a man to undervalue it. In his contempt for all emotions, he naturally ascribed their strongest influences to those whose age had weakened their faculties and impaired their judgments. Love was a folly with the young; but with the old, it was the stupidest of all infatuations, and the reckless way in which an old man would resign fortune, station, and the whole world’s opinion on such an issue, was, to his thinking, the strongest possible evidence of second childhood.
“If I could make him feel the ridiculous part of the calamity, he would gain courage to brave the disaster,” thought he. And while he thus thought he smoked on in silence, neither uttering a word.
“Nine o’clock!” said Sir Within, as he counted the strokes of the timepiece. “Nine, and the post not in!”
“How easily one takes the delay of the mail when ‘the House’ is up,” said Grenfell, purposely saying what might possibly suggest some sort of dissent or opinion; but the old diplomatist had been too well schooled to fall into such indiscretion, and simply said, “It is true, we all hibernate when the autumn begins.”
Grenfell saw that his shell had not exploded, and began to talk at random about how much pleasanter it was to have one’s post of a morning—that letters should always come in with the eggs at breakfast—that people exchanged their gossip more genially then than at any other time; and, at last, arrived at what he sought to portray, the tableau of a charming party in a delightful country-house, “The best thing we have in England; and, indeed, the best thing the world has anywhere.”
“I quite agree with you,” said Sir Within, blandly. And he wiped the beautiful miniature of Marie Antoinette that adorned the lid of his snuff-box, and gazed with admiration at the lovely features.
“I fancy they know very little abroad of what we call country-house life?” half asked Grenfell.