“I wonder.”
As he handed her out of the carriage in the courtyard they were surrounded by lackeys, and her anxious maid awaited her. But he said, as they shook hands:
“Thank you so much—again and again. And I shall call to-morrow.”
VI
CERTAIN INEVITABLE PHASES
Somewhat to his surprise, but vastly to his gratification, Ordham, on the following afternoon, was handed a card inscribed “Hiobe Lutz,” accompanied by a line of introduction on one of Gräfin von Tann’s. He had just risen from luncheon in the Legation, and received the rather formidable looking female in the anteroom. She addressed him in such German as he had seldom heard in Bavaria, announced that she should never utter a word of English during his lessons, that he must dismiss his other teachers and study with her every morning, Sundays excepted, from ten until twelve. The last was a harrowing prospect, for he hated early rising; but he had the wit to perceive that here was the force to control his indolence and furnish his brain, that he would never fascinate this grenadier with his wiles and be permitted to entertain her in English. Moreover, he realized that she had received instructions from Margarethe Styr, and this flattered him deeply. The arrangement was quickly made and Fräulein Lutz departed, announcing that upon his second failure to appear promptly at ten o’clock she should consider herself dismissed. She would not waste her time,—she was assisting a historian upon a great work,—no, not for anybody.
Several hours later Ordham left a card on Countess Tann, and with it a note of thanks. But he did not ask for admittance. It cost him an unaccustomed effort of self-denial to turn from her door when there was a bare possibility of crossing its threshold, but he had reflected that he had no right to take advantage of his chance intimacy with a recluse, nor even of her very marked kindness; moreover, that, having done his duty, it was her privilege to ask him to come another day and drink a cup of tea.
But the days passed and it waxed evident that she had no intention of embracing her opportunity. In ordinary conditions he might have been piqued, for he was more spoilt than he knew; certainly disappointed. But even he had his worries, and two descended upon him the day after his return from Neuschwanstein.
One arrived in the morning mail. It was a request from his tailor to pay a bill of four years’ standing, a letter whose inexorable business flavour—which seemed to him sheer insolence—left him aghast. It is true that he had received several reminders from this necessary but ignominious person during the past six months, and tossed them, half read, into his waste-basket. It annoyed him to receive a bill at all, but that the demands of a mere machine might increase in firmness, much less hint of “summons,” had never crossed his mind. Until his father’s death four years since, he had rarely read a bill, or even, extravagant as he was, suffered remonstrance from a parent, who, regretting that his favourite son should not have been his first, made a point of ignoring the fact when he could. Every acre of the large estate was entailed, Lord Bridgminster’s personal property was small, and there were five sons more to educate and provide for. The oldest son and his father had not met for years, but while there was antipathy, there was no rancour; and Lord Bridgminster, never being called upon to meet debts for a man who lived the year round in his hunting box, contrived to forget him. Disappointed in his second wife, after the glamour of her peculiar personality had vanished, he devoted himself to politics and the son whom he fain would believe must inherit the solid honours as well as the brains of his house. Whenever the boy came home from Eton, and later, from Oxford,—where it rarely occurred to him to open a book,—he was received at Ordham Castle with all the honours and attentions due to the heir, and, had his father lived a year longer, the celebration of his twenty-first birthday would have dimmed the memory of the perfunctory festivities with which the majority of Lord Ordham had been announced to the county. And as it grew to be an accepted fact that the Timon would never marry, the oldest of the second family was so generally recognized as the heir, that, from the servants up, he was visited with no reminders of the long interval which might elapse before he could spend the income that went with the titles. Even after his father’s death it was some time before he began to appreciate the difference in his fortunes, for he spent the following summer yachting with a friend, and, a few months later, left Christ Church abruptly and went for a tour round the world. He finished in Paris, where, through the influence of his mother, a place had been found for him, unofficially, in the British Embassy. Moreover, Lord Bridgminster had managed to leave him two thousand pounds, and, although this ran away quickly, it served to postpone the day when he must reckon with a younger son’s portion.
And he had been brought up in that criminal ignorance of the value of money which has compassed the ruin of so many of the younger members of the British aristocracy. American fathers may live up to the last dollar of the large income they make by the constant turning over of their discrepant capital, die bankrupt, or leave nothing but a life insurance to their women; but the sons, no matter how indulged, grow up in the electric atmosphere of a business country; the subject of money and its infinite meanings is never long absent from the conversation about them nor from their minds; they witness the rise and fall of fortunes, the fluctuation of incomes, the accidents to which the most cautious are liable; and they live through those periodical rabies of the money market known as panics, which focus the attention of the most careless. Leisure they know to be merely an incident; they realize that, however wise it may be to enjoy life while conditions are favourable, it is equally wise to keep one’s energies polished and alert. And these energies are born in the blood, which perhaps is the whole point.
There is, save for war and sport, little latent energy in the blood of the young British aristocrat whose ancestors have too long been men of leisure. He has no acquaintance with business, and as little premonition of the serious responsibilities of life as of its ugly contacts. Surrounded, sheltered, reared in an atmosphere of plenty, with expensive habits, and self-denial no part of his creed (and the sons of peers comparatively poor are no exceptions), he has during his father’s lifetime all the advantages and refinements of the concentrated income of the estates that go to the head of the house. Then comes the inevitable moment when he is turned adrift, and confronted with the problem of maintaining his legitimate position in the world upon a younger son’s pittance. Readjustment taking place in few characters except at the conclusion of a series of shocks, and as often not then, he goes on spending mechanically, expecting that a new deus ex machinâ will as inevitably appear as the regular if sometimes invisible stars.