“That I’m sorry.”
She moved quickly to the door, which he opened, and he followed her downstairs. In the vestibule they met Godfrey. Gloom overspread the young man’s candid face and dejection marked his behaviour, neither of which could be accounted for by the fact of the Medical Board having given him, as he announced, a further two months. Baltazar’s proposal to run over soon to Churton Towers for a talk, he welcomed with polite lack of enthusiasm. He took leave with the solemnity of a medical man departing from a house with a corpse in it.
“It doesn’t seem to be one of the House of Baltazar’s lucky days,” said Baltazar to himself, as he went up to his room.
CHAPTER XVI
IT was not till long afterwards that Baltazar learned the cause of his son’s discomfiture. Marcelle learned it at once. The boy exploded with pent-up indignation. Dorothy had turned him down, callously turned him down. Could Marcelle imagine such heartlessness? He had gone to her after his Board. Seeing that she had undertaken to keep him in the army, it was only civil to report progress. Besides, the house had been open to him since childhood. Well, there she was alone in the drawing-room. Looked bewitching. Jolly as possible. Everything right as rain. Then, he didn’t know how it happened—perhaps because she hadn’t discouraged him at the Carlton—anyhow there it was; he lost his head; told her he loved her, worshipped her and all the rest of it, and asked her to marry him. She broke into peals of laughter and recommended him not to be an idiot. She had the infernal impudence to laugh at him! If she had been a man he would have wrung her neck.
“And that isn’t all,” he cried. “What do you think she had the colossal nerve to tell me? That she was engaged to my brother Leopold. Leopold! ‘Why,’ I said, ‘only the other day you informed me you were fed up with Leopold.’ ‘Oh! that,’ she said airily, ‘was before the engagement.’ Apparently the brute’s just home on leave and has stolen a march on me. Easy enough with two feet,” he added bitterly.
Marcelle tried to console. After all, he was very young, not yet one-and-twenty. It would be years before he could marry. He flared up at the suggestion. That was what Dorothy, a month older than he, had the cool cheek to say. What did age matter? He was as old as Hell. He had all his life behind him. In the trenches alone he had spent twenty years. As for marrying, he was perfectly able to support a wife, not being, through God’s grace, one of those unhappy devils of new army officers who were wondering what the deuce they would do to earn their living when the war was over. . . . She had treated him damnably. A decent girl would have been kind and sorry and let him down easily. But she!
“She treated me as though I were a lout of a schoolboy, and she a woman of thirty. Only the woman of thirty would at least have had manners. Well, she’s going to marry Leopold. I wish her joy of him. She’ll have a hell of a time.”
Decidedly it had not been a lucky day for the House of Baltazar. Marcelle was oppressed by a sense of guilt for her share in the family disaster, and felt tragically unable to administer comfort. Yesterday she would have poured healing sympathy over the hurts of the evilly entreated youth, and her wrath would have flamed out upon the heartless minx who had spurned the love of a gallant gentleman. But to-day how could she? Had not some horrible freak of chance put her in the same dock as Dorothy, worthless criminals both?
“I suppose you were very angry with her,” she said timidly.