“We mustn’t build castles,” she sighed, and the light fringed her eyelids.
“We’ll build ’em as high as the moon!”
She shook a whimsical head. And then the goad of youth drove her to a smile of perilous happiness. All sorts of subtle fears were lurking in that good, shrewd brain of hers. They were on the verge of chaos and Old Night—yet she had not the heart to rebuke him.
The dread hour of one-thirty was now so very near, that it was idle to disguise the fact that one at least of the two people on the Park chairs had grown extremely unhappy. Mary was quite sure that a horrible ordeal was going to prove too much for her. It was hardly less than madness to have yielded in the way she had. But qualms were useless, fears were vain. There was only one thing to do. She must set her teeth and go and face the music.
II
Punctual to the minute they were at the solemn portals of Bridport House. And then as a servant in a grotesque livery piloted them across an expanse of rather pretentious hall into a somber room, full of grandiose decoration and Victorian furniture, a grand fighting spirit suddenly rose in one whose need of it was sore. Mary was quaking in her shoes, yet the joy of battle came upon her in the queerest, most unexpected way. It was as if a magician had waved his wand and all the paltry emotions of the past hour were dispelled. Perhaps it was that deep down in her slept an Amazon. Or a clear conscience may have inspired her; at any rate she had no need to reproach herself just then. She could look the whole world in the face. Her attitude had been sensitively correct; if other people did not appreciate that simple fact, so much the worse for other people!
A long five minutes they waited in that large and dismal room, a slight flush of anxiety upon their faces, their hearts beating a little wildly, no doubt. In all that time not a word passed between them; the tension was almost more than they could bear. If Fate had kept till the last one final scurvy trick it would be too horrible! And then suddenly, in the midst of this grim thought, an old man came hobbling painfully in. Both were struck at once by the look of him. There was something in the bearing, in the manner, in the play of the rather exquisite face which spoke to them intimately. For a reason deeply obscure, which Jack and Mary were very far from comprehending, the welcome he gave her was quite touching. It was full of a simple kindness, spontaneous, unstudied, oddly caressing.
Jack, amazed not a little by the heart-on-the-sleeve attitude of this old barbarian, could only ascribe it to the desire of a finished man of the world to put the best possible face on an impossible matter. Yet, somehow, that cynical view did not seem to cover the facts of the case.
In a way that hardly belonged to a tyrant and an autocrat, the old man took one of the girl’s hands into the keeping of his poor enfeebled ones, and was still holding it when his sister and his eldest daughter came into the room. Both ladies were firm in the belief that this was the most disagreeable moment of their lives. Still it was their nature to meet things heroically, and they now proceeded to do so.
The picture their minds had already formed of this girl was not a pleasing one. But as far as Lady Wargrave was concerned it was shattered almost instantly. The likeness between father and daughter was amazing. She had, in quite a remarkable degree, the look of noblesse the world had always admired in him, with which, however, he had signally failed to endow the daughters of the first marriage. But there was far more than a superficial likeness to shatter preconceived ideas. Another, more virile strain was hers. The mettle of the pasture, the breath of the moorland, had given her a look of purpose and fire, even if the grace of the salon had yielded much of its own peculiar amenity. Whatever else she might be, the youngest daughter of the House of Dinneford was a personality of a rare but vivid kind.