"'It was cheap—che-ap. I was wort' more dan vodki.'
"Lord Warcote had lived a fast life in his earlier days. After Nature had allowed him a rare fling for sixty years she was beginning to withdraw her powers, and my grandfather had become as religious as he had been fast. The effect of my mother's presence upon him was to make him suddenly young again, and although he soon assumed his new Puritan gravity he could not keep his eyes off her. On a jury he would have acquitted her of anything, and when she turned around imperiously and told a servant to bring a chair, 'Good Lord!' he said, 'she's a Russian princess!' and he jumped up like an old courtier to get the chair himself. The more he heard of her story the more interested he became, and when he had heard it all, nothing would suffice but an immediate marriage. My father protested on several grounds, but his protests made no difference to the old man. His will, he said, would be law until he died, and even after he died, and, what with my mother's beauty, which made him take what he understood to be a strong religious interest in her behalf, and one thing and another, he got quite fanatical on the point. He forgot himself several times, and swore he would cut father off with nothing if he refused.
"The end of it was that they were married at once, and afterward I was born. My poor mother had no intention of giving father trouble when she came to England, neither did she wish in the slightest degree for a formal marriage, the usefulness of which she did not understand. She simply felt that she could not do without him. And I don't think he ever regretted the step he was driven to. She had some failings, but she was as true and loving to him as a woman could be, besides being, for a short time, considered a miracle of beauty in London.
"I can only remember her dimly as going out riding with father. They say her horsemanship was the most perfect thing ever seen in the hunting field. It was the means of her death at last. The trouble was that she did not know what fear was while on horseback. She thought a horse ought to do anything. Father has told me that when they were out together a freak would seize her suddenly, and away she would go across country for miles—riding furiously, like her forefathers, waving her whip high in the air for him to follow, and taking everything on the full fly. If her horse could not get over anything he had to go through it. At last, one day, an oak fence stopped her horse forever, and she was carried home dead. I was three years old then."
Geoffrey paused.
The others remained silent. His strong magnetic voice, rendered more powerful by the vehement way he interpreted the last part of the story in his actions, impressed them. They were walking in the Queen's Park at this time, and it did not matter that he was more than usually graphic. When he spoke of the wild riding of the Tartars, he sprang forward full of a bodily eloquence. For an instant, while poised upon his toes, his cane waving high aloft, his head and shoulders thrown back in an ecstasy of abandon, and his left hand outstretched as if holding the reins, he seemed to electrify them, and to give them the whole scene as it appeared in his own mind. Rankin shuddered. Involuntarily he gasped out:
"Hampstead! For God's sake, don't do that!"
"Why not?" said Geoffrey, as he resumed his place beside them, while the wild flash died out of his eyes.
"Because no man could do it like that unless—because, in fact, you do it too infernally well."
Rankin felt that Margaret must be suffering. It seemed to him that. Geoffrey had really become a Tartar marauder for a moment. Perhaps he had.