“We’ll never know,” was Tregarvon’s comment. “But why Hartridge should shield our obstacle-thrower at one time, and try to set us on to him at another, is beyond me.”
Carfax smiled soberly. “Mr. William W. Hartridge appears to be a unique. I had the pleasure of meeting him again, socially, no longer ago than yesterday.”
“You spent the Sunday at Highmount?”
“No; I did better than that. Wilmerding was down from Whitlow, and I found that he knows Judge Birrell familiarly and well. I took my courage in my hand, borrowed your beast of a car, and Wilmerding and I drove to Westwood House in the rain.”
“So you have met Richardia’s father?”
“I have; and a finer old citizen doesn’t exist. That suspicion of yours that he may be inspiring the fight on us is all bosh. He isn’t at all the kind of man to knife an enemy in the dark. He is a poem on the Old South, Vance; a whole heart-breaking epic. His manners would put a Chesterfield to shame; and you can see at once where Richardia gets her keen little mind. The judge was disposed to place me in the Parker class at first—quite naturally; I could see that plainly enough—that, and his prejudice against all things Northern. But I was there as the friend of his friend Wilmerding, and that settled it. A Bedouin chief couldn’t have been more hospitable.”
“You told him you were going to marry Richardia?”
“Oh, dear, no; you mustn’t hurry things that way!” laughed the golden one. “You simply can’t hurry them, you know, with a man like Judge Birrell. But I flatter myself that I made good in the try-out. Hartridge was there, with Miss Farron—though I can’t imagine how they got over from Highmount in the rain—so there was quite a house-party of us. At dinner-time it was raining harder than ever, and the judge wouldn’t hear to our going, though I had the top up on the car, and, of course, offered to take Hartridge and Miss Farron back to the college. So we all stayed to dinner. That dinner would have broken your heart, Vance.”
“Why?”
“Because it showed in a thousand little ways what the family has been, and what it has now come to. The china was Sèvres, but much of it was chipped and broken, and hardly any two pieces were alike. The table-cloth had once been somebody’s pride, but it had been laundered and darned until it was like a piece of old lace. The silver was evidently an heirloom, and it was so worn with much polishing that you could scarcely make out the engraving. We had chicken—I imagine nobody in the South ever gets so poor that he can’t have chicken—but the luxuries were conspicuous by their absence. Do you know what I think, Vance? I believe that the Westwood House cash assets are measured exactly by the size of Richardia’s Highmount salary.”