V
The string of episodes which discovered before the autumn was over the heart of Mr. Cyrus Worthington at her feet hardly deserves record in her history but for the fillip which it gave to her spirits. Tribute is tribute, and Mr. Worthington was a warrantable gentleman. The tarnish she had discerned upon her armour, the foxmarks upon her fair page, dispersed under his ardent breath; she realised herself desirable and loveworthy; she arose from the thicket in which she cowered with the light of triumph prophetic in her eyes, the flush of victory after victory prophetic in her cheeks. Therefore Mr. Worthington's career in the Charles Street lists shall be chronicled.
He was a portly widower, a banker, a father, who made his bow to Lady Maria some three times a year when he dined in Charles Street. In return, he received her ladyship once during a summer at his mansion of Fallowlea, Walton-on-Thames. On such occasions the Misses Worthington and their cousins, the Pascoe girls, who lived at Esher, would enact a pastoral play in the shrubberies with various entangled curates, with young Sam Worthington from Oxford and friends of his. Mr. Worthington himself, master of the difficult art of declining verse as if it were bad prose, rehearsed the Prologue and Epilogue in a master's gown and mortarboard, which he would retain for the rest of the afternoon. It was in that guise that, his caution deserting him, he allowed himself to dwell upon Sanchia's beauty.
Lady Maria had taken her down to Walton in mid-July; she had chanced to meet Melusine there, and the two had embraced as sisters should. It is to be owned that her adoption by Charles Street had restored her credit with her family more certainly than any white sheet and taper which she could have supported would have done. Her mother was highly gratified, though she affected a shrug when good Mr. Percival, in the simplicity of his heart, overflowed with the joy of it. “Sancie in Berkeley Square—where Lord Rosebery lives: think of that, my dear!” And Mrs. Percival, who knew where Lord Rosebery lived as well as anybody, would reply, “These things will be balanced hereafter. Neither you nor I, Welbore, are assessing angels, I believe. I pray to God that she has made her peace with our Church.”
“Chapel Royal,” said Mr. Percival, “will be her ladyship's ticket—or St. James's, Piccadilly. They tell me that the great world go there now in the evenings, dressed for dinner.” Privately he vowed that, should his Sancie be one of those immaculate worshippers, she should not fail in toilet. And he had not missed the point so far as you might think. Philippa Tompsett-King, who had been present when these things were discussing, had lifted an inflamed face over the dinner-table. “I only know,” she had said, “that I would rather live in Bloomsbury than have her conscience. Cynicism has always seemed to me the sin against the Holy Ghost.” But Melusine Scales, the gentle creature, had written meekly of her joy; and Vicky Sinclair said to her husband, the captain—“Sancie always tumbles on her feet. She always did—like a sweet cat.” Shrewd and affectionate at once, she alone had discerned the god's prerogative immanent in the youngest daughter of Thomas Welbore Percival.
But the picture of Sanchia and Melusine, two fair girls, standing together embraced under the cedarn shade had smitten deep into the well-cased heart of Cyrus Worthington. He had come upon them at a pretty moment, when Melusine, the willowy and tall, having opened her arms to the dear truant, one arm still about her, with her free hand touched her cheek that lips might meet lips. “Darling, I'm so glad—so very glad,” she was whispering, and Sanchia, with the same light laughing in her eyes, “Dear old Melot—how sweet you are to me.” Mr. Worthington pushed back his mortarboard and revealed the crimson chevron which it had bitten into his bald brow. “A charming scene—two charming young ladies! Mrs. Gerald Scales and her sister, I think. Lady Maria's adoption—charming, charming!” A right instinct sent him tiptoe over his lawn, another made him doff his mortarboard.
“Mrs. Scales, we begin. The hunt is up. Poesy calls, 'Follow, follow, follow!' Your sister, I think?”
Sanchia played the rogue. “Oh, Mr. Worthington, have you forgotten already? Lady Maria explained me half-an-hour-ago. Must Melusine introduce me again?”
“Not for the world, Miss Percival, not for the world!” the banker protested. “I was in a sense explaining myself. Pray, do not suppose that I forget either you or my manners so completely. No, no. But I am a little near-sighted, I fear; there is a little difficulty of focussing; nothing organic, no loss of function.” He cleared his throat, and to give himself assurance, jingled half-crowns with his plunged hand. “No loss of function whatever.” He took the thing a little more seriously than he need, was in danger of labouring it. Melusine turned the talk. He invited them to the play, as “master of the revels,” and walked between them, looking a very decent figure of a don on a college lawn, substantial, serene, and with an air of displaying his possessions: “Parva sed apta mihi; Deus nobis haec otia fecit!” He still possessed the rags of his Latin. “This little bay-tree will interest you, Miss Percival. It was planted many years ago by the late Lord Meeke—the uncle of the present peer. We had had some business relations; they were happily cemented into something more intimate by this little fellow.” He touched it tenderly. “A sturdy growth! Like my affection for my noble but departed friend. Dear me! Labuntur anni, indeed!” His fig tree, which some one else had planted, his laburnum—a slip from one at Rickmansworth, the seat of the late Lord Mayor Burgess—a catalpa seedling from Panshanger, which the late Lady Cowper did him the honour to present with her own hands: as Sanchia said afterwards to Melot, his garden was rather like a cemetery of dead friendships....
Then they sat to witness the revels. Sanchia's fancy, uplifted by her contentment, played with the play, and suggested flights undreamed of for many a year. She sat by Melusine and her husband, and Mr. Worthington watched her in the long intervals of his duty. Charming indeed, and most high-bred: now where did old Welbore Percival, whom he met daily in Throgmorton Street, fetch up such a strain of blood? His wife, too, Kitty Blount, as she had been—what had Kitty Blount been but a high-coloured, bouncing romp of a girl when they had all been paddling together at Broadstairs? Extraordinary! And now here was one of his girls sister-in-law of a county baronet—none of your city knights, mind you—and the other, with the lift of a princess and the clear sight which is hers by title. Extraordinary!