CHAPTER XIX
THE SETTLEMENT
Nancy’s pitiful little story was soon told. During the last year she had often met the Honorable Philip Lindsay, second son of an impoverished Scottish peer, and now a lieutenant in a line regiment stationed at Aldershot. They discovered each other, in the first instance, at a hunt ball in Leicestershire, and a simple confusion of names led the man to believe that the pretty girl with the blue eyes was the hired companion of the daughters of the family with whom she was staying. Her friends—like herself, just emancipated from the schoolroom—fostered the deception, which she and they found amusing; but Lindsay’s Celtic blood was fired by the knowledge that he had found the one woman in the world he wanted to marry, be she poor as Cinderella. Before the girl realized that the handsome young soldier was not of the carpet-knight type, he was telling her he loved her, and asking her to wait for him till he got his captaincy or secured an adjutant’s berth in a territorial battalion, and they would wed.
Of course, there were explanations, and tears, and a good deal of the white-lipped tragedy of youth. Lindsay, like a gallant gentleman, refused to be dubbed a fortune-hunter, and went back to his regiment, where he threw himself into the dissipation of musketry instruction with a cold fury that surprised and gratified his colonel. Then Nancy found that her heart had gone with him, and wrote a tearful request that they might never meet again; whereupon the sprite who controls these affairs brought Marten and his daughter to a grand review at Windsor—and who should be on some notable general’s staff but Lieutenant the Honorable Philip Lindsay? After that the veriest tyro in the methods of romance must see that the general would invite the American millionaire to dine with him that evening, and that Lindsay should be allotted to Nancy as her dinner partner.
There were thrills, and flashing glances; but Caledonia remained both stern and wild, with the certain result that he and the girl grew more desperately enamoured of each other than ever.
But this is not the love-story of a new Derry and another Nancy; so it may be taken for granted that twenty-four and nineteen were suffering the approved pangs, and were given every opportunity to develop the recognized symptoms. Our real concern lies with a man of middle age, around whom these minor happenings revolved like comets around the sun—itself ever fleeting into stellar depths. Not that Power felt any resemblance to a star of magnitude at that time. Though he never doubted that he was again at the mercy of irresistible forces, dragging him he knew not whither, the simile that presented itself to his mind was that of a log being swept over a cataract. Despite his brave promise to the weeping girl, he had no plan, no hope of successful intervention. He caught at one straw as the swirling current gripped him. This Italian prince might be a very excellent fellow, and the soldier a bit of knave; then it would be his bounden duty to exhort Nancy to filial obedience, that time-honored principle productive of so much good and so great evils.
“What is Mr. Lindsay’s address?” he inquired.
She told him.
“And is there any real need for present anxiety? You are far too young to think of marriage.”
“Father says my mother was wed at twenty. He got rather angry when I retorted that she died at twenty-four. But the real trouble is that that horrid Giovanni Montecastello is pressing for an engagement. Father spoke of it this morning. No wonder I am in such a rebellious mood!”