Lane decided that she must be a New Englander. Then he recalled his glimpse of the underhung, impatient Englishman and remembered that Frances Naylor of Boston had married Lord John Carstairs six months earlier. The match had caused nearly a week’s excitement, for Carstairs was brother and heir-presumptive to the imbecile Duke of Ross, while Frances Naylor was a future heiress and a present beauty.
“Oh, I’ve no objection to him personally,” said Carstairs. “But I don’t suppose we’re very popular with him as a family. There was a blighted romance between him and my cousin, Barbara Neave.” He laughed, and Eric Lane felt his cheeks warming. “I’m afraid you’ll find Barbara—and her relicts and reputation—rather a mouthful.”
Not for the first time Frances Carstairs wished that the English had fewer relations. She had been bewilderingly initiated into the complex family tangle of the Neaves and Lorings, the Carstairs and Knightriders; John had drawn her ingenious plans to shew who had married whom, but every new name impaled her on a new genealogical tree, so that she openly dreaded her arrival in England and the threatened tour of inspection among her husband’s manifold connections.
“But I thought you told me your cousin had married recently,” she said.
“Yes, she married George Oakleigh. He was a son of Miles Oakleigh, the head of the family; and his cousin, Violet Hunter-Oakleigh, who’s of the Catholic branch in the county Dublin, married my cousin, Jim Loring, who was killed in ’15. I know it’s confusing at first——”
“It’s maddening! What has all this to do with Mr. Lane? If your cousin—our cousin——”
“Oh, that’s all over, but he may feel she made rather a fool of him. However, he’s in good company: when she was seventeen, I was supposed to be engaged to her, and Crawleigh had to contradict it in the press; and, to my knowledge, she’s been married off to six people in as many years, beginning with one of the young princes and ending with some barrister. She’s all right if you don’t take her seriously, but I’m told that Lane did, rather. She tried to drive him in double harness with the barrister until they both bolted in opposite directions; then Lane came out here, and the other man, Waring, quietly retired to the country; then she married George Oakleigh. And that’s the end of Barbara.”
Lady John felt that a criticism was expected of her, but could not decide how far it was safe to disapprove of her celebrated new cousin without incurring a charge of provincialism.
“Well, she had her fair share of romance,” she ventured after a pause. “I should think you’re all rather relieved.”
“The Crawleighs were a bit disappointed,” answered Carstairs; “but it might have been worse. Relieved? I don’t know. When I said that was the end of Barbara... There’s a curious little group that my cousin Jim Loring used to call “the Sensationalists”; they were always playing a part and pulling up their psychology by the roots to see how it was growing. Anything for a new emotion! Barbara always had more personality than the rest of them put together and she led them till she really made London too hot to hold her. Then the war came. The men were killed off and the women married; but the old Adam’s still alive in some of them. I’m wondering what Barbara’s next outbreak will be; she had one emotion by marrying a tame-cat Irish squireen, but how long she’ll stick to him... I’m sure we’ve not finished with her yet. You’ll find London a curious place... Look here, if we’re going to be in time, I must go up; I haven’t unpacked yet.”