CHAPTER XI
THE MARVELS OF PHADRIG
The time, about an hour or so before tea, was occupied by the guests according to their varying tastes—in tennis, croquet, more or less good-natured gossip, and flirtations which may or may not have been serious.
Nitocris saw with growing cause for self-gratulation that Lord Leighton and Brenda were decidedly attracted towards each other. He, in spite of having received his gracious, but, as he well knew, final congé from Nitocris, still felt that he was not quite playing the game with himself; but for all that it was impossible for him not to see that the emotion, which was even now stirring in his heart, awakened by the first touch of Brenda's hand, and the first meeting of their eyes, was something very different from the tenderly respectful admiration, the real friendship, inevitably exalted by the magic of sex, which, as he saw now, he had innocently mistaken for love.
He managed quite adroitly to separate Brenda from the circle, and to lure her into a stroll about the outside grounds, during which he told her the history and traditions of "The Wilderness" not, of course, omitting the sad little tragedy of the Lady Alicia, all of which Miss Brenda listened to with an interest which was not, perhaps, wholly derived from the story itself. She had never yet met any one who was quite like this learned, much-travelled, quiet-spoken young aristocrat. On her father's side she was descended from one of the oldest Knickerbocker families in the State of New York and her aristocracy responded instinctively to his, and formed a first bond between them.
It need hardly be said that her beauty and her prospective wealth, to say nothing of the bright, mental, and intellectual atmosphere in which she seemed to live and move, had attracted to her many men whom she had inspired with a very genuine desire to link their lives with hers. She was only twenty-two, but she had already refused more than one coronet of respectable dignity, and so far her heart had remained as virgin as it was when she had admired herself in her first long skirt. But now, for the first time in her life, she began to feel a strange disquietude in the presence of a man, and a man, too, whom she had not known for an hour. Nitocris had, happily, told her nothing of what had passed between Lord Leighton and herself, and so the pleasant element in her disquietude was entirely unalloyed.
Her father was already too deeply engrossed in learned converse with his brother professors to take any notice of the great fact which was beginning to get itself accomplished; but her mother's instinct instantly noticed the subtle change that had come over her daughter, and she saw it with anything but displeasure. All sensible mothers of beautiful daughters are discreetly sanguine. She was far too wise in her generation not to have agreed with Brenda's decision in certain former cases. The idea of her daughter's beauty and her father's millions being bartered for mere rank and social power, however splendid, was utterly repugnant to her. She had married for love, and she wanted Brenda to do the same, whoever the chosen man might be, provided always that he was a man—and in this regard there could be no doubt about Lord Lester Leighton; so as they walked away she said to Nitocris with a confidence which was almost girlish:
"His Lordship is just delightful—now, isn't he, Miss Marmion? Just the sort that you seem to raise over here, and nowhere else. Tells you that you have to take him for a gentleman and nothing else in the first three words he says to you—and Brenda seems to like him. I never saw her go off with a man like that on such short notice, for Brenda's pretty proud and cold with men, for all her nice ways and high spirits."
"You would have to search a long time, Mrs van Huysman," replied Nitocris very demurely, "before you found a better type of the real English gentleman than Lord Leighton. His family is one of the oldest in the country, and, unlike too many of our noble families, the Kynestons have no bar-sinister on their escutcheon."