The time spirit: A romantic tale

by J. C. Snaith

After eighteen months of the new life came the news of his father’s death. The brothers and sisters it seemed were rather better provided for than there had been reason to expect. At any rate, Mabel and Iris would have a roof over their heads, Bill had passed into Sandhurst, and Frank was at Cambridge. Therefore Jack, little guessing what Fate had in store, decided to stay as he was, in the hope that in a few years he would have made his pile. He had a taste for hard work, and the new land offered opportunities denied by the old.

Some months later he received an urgent summons to return home. He had suddenly and unexpectedly become next of kin to the Duke of Bridport. The news was little to the young man’s taste. He was very loth to give up a growing business for a life of parasitic idleness under the ægis of the titular great. But the circumstances seemed to make it imperative. The powers that were had not the slightest doubt that it was his bounden duty to go into training at once. He must fit himself for the dizzy eminence to which it had pleased Providence to call him.

Sadly enough the tiro sold out, returned to England, and in due course reported himself at Bridport House. It was the first time he had been there. He was such a distant kinsman that he had never taken the ducal connection seriously.

The family’s reception of the Tenderfoot—his own humorous name for himself—amused him considerably, yet at the same time it filled him with a subtle annoyance. Five fruitful years out West had made him an iconoclast. He saw with awakened eyes the arid and sterile pomposities which were doing their best to put the old land out of the race. Bridport House was going to spell boredom and worse for Jack Dinneford.

Still the Duke, as became a man of the world, soon got to the root of the trouble, and having the welfare of a time-honored institution at heart, was at pains to deal with the novice tactfully. All the same, he was far from being pleased by the tricks of Providence. But he made the young man an allowance of two thousand a year, and exhorted him not to get into mischief; and the Dinneford ladies, who were prepared to be kind to the Tenderfoot and to be more amused by his “originality” than they confessed to each other, chose some rooms for him in Arlington Street, looked after his general welfare, and began to make plans for the future of Bridport House. Aunt Charlotte took him at once under an ungracious wing, and found him a bear-leader in the person of her nephew Wrexham, a subaltern of the Pinks, a picturesque young man, reputed a paragon of all the Christian virtues, and a martyr to a sense of duty.

From this model of discretion the tiro soon received a hint. Cousin Sarah owned to thirty-eight in the glare of Debrett, Cousin Muriel had other views apparently, but there remained Cousin Blanche and Cousin Marjorie—the heir could take his choice, but the ukase had gone forth that one of them it must be.

The Tenderfoot did not feel in a marrying mood just then, but he had chivalry enough not to say so to his mentor, who as the messenger of Eros began to disclose quite a pretty turn of humor. It was not seemly to offer advice in such a delicate matter, but Blanche was a nailer to hounds, although she never kept awake after dinner, while Marjorie’s sphere was church decoration in times of festival, in the course of which she generally had an affaire with a curate.

Face to face with a problem which in one way or another was kept ever before his eyes, the poor Tenderfoot seemed to feel that if wive he must in the charmèd circle, and the relentless Wrexham assured him that it was a solemn duty, perhaps there was most to be said for Cousin Marjorie. She was not supremely attractive it was true. The Dinneford girls, one and all, were famous up and down the island for a resolute absence of charm. And the Dinneford frontispiece, imposing enough in the male, when rendered in terms of the female somehow seemed to lack poetry. Still Cousin Marjorie was not yet thirty and her general health was excellent.

The heir had now been settled in Arlington Street six months. And with nothing in the world to do but learn to live a life which threatened to bore him exceedingly, time began to hang upon his hands. Moreover, the prospect of having presently to lead Cousin Marjorie to the altar merely increased a sense of malaise. Here was an arbitrary deepening of the tones of a picture which heaven knew was dark enough already. For a modern and virile young man, life at Bridport House would only be tolerable under very happy conditions. To be yoked, willy-nilly, to one of its native denizens for the rest of one’s days, seemed a hardship almost too great to be borne.

While the Tenderfoot was in this frame of mind, which inclined him to temporize, he decided to put off the dark hour as long as he could. And then suddenly, while still besieged by doubt, the hypnotic Princess Bedalia swam into his ken.