Chapter 14

SIR LIONEL PENDRAGON TO COLONEL PATRICK O'HAGAN

Knoll Park Hotel, Sidmouth, Devon, August 2nd. Evening

My Dear Pat: I am a fool. By this time you will soon be receiving my first letter, and saying to yourself, "He is on the way to being a fool." Well, I am already that fool. I didn't see where I was drifting, but I see now that it had begun then; and of course you, a spectator, won't be dense as I was at first. You will know.

I didn't suppose this thing could happen to me again. I thought I was safe. But at forty, it's worse with me than when I was twenty-one.

I don't need to explain. Yet I will say in self-defence that, fool as I am, I am not going to let anyone but you know that I'm a fool. Especially the girl. She would be thunderstruck. Not that girls of nineteen haven't married men of forty, and perhaps cared for them. But this girl has been brought up since her babyhood to think of me as her guardian, and an elderly person beyond the pale where love or even flirtation is concerned. Imagine a daughter and namesake of Ellaline de Nesville being in the society of a man, and not trying to flirt with him! It's almost inconceivable. But Ellaline the second shows not the slightest inclination to flirt with me. She is gentle, sweet, charming, even obedient; perhaps I might say daughterly, if I were willing to hurt my own feelings. Therefore, even without Mr. Dick Burden's oppressive respect for me, I must suppose that I am regarded as a generation behind.

By the way, that young beast made me a present of a cane the other day. Not an ordinary stick, but an old gentleman's cane, with a gold head on it. He said he saw it in a shop at Weymouth, where we stopped for lunch, and thought it so handsome, he begged that I would accept it. His aunt laughed, called him a ridiculous little boy, and advised me to have "Thou shalt not steal" engraved on a gold band, with my name and address. This was to soothe my amour propre; but, while I wonder whether the thing really is a gift suitable to my years, I long to lay it across the giver's back. He gave it to me before Ellaline, too. What an idiot I am to care! I can laugh, for my sense of humour hasn't yet jilted me, if my good sense has. But the laugh is on the wrong side of my mouth.

I feel somewhat better, having confessed my foolishness—which you would have divined without the confession. The girl doesn't suspect. I enact the "heavy father" even more ostentatiously than if I weren't ass enough to prefer a role for which time and our relationship have unfitted me. But it's rather curious, isn't it, what power one little woman can wield over a man's life, even the life of a man who is as far as possible from being a "woman's man"? Ellaline de Nesville pretty well spoiled my early youth, or would if I hadn't freed myself to take up other interests. She burdens the remainder of my young years by making me, willy nilly, the guardian of her child. And, not content with that, she (indirectly) destroys what might have been the comfortable contentment of my middle age.

Women are the devil. All but this one—and she isn't a woman yet.

The dangerous part is that I am not as grimly unhappy as I ought to be. There are moments, hours, when I forget that there's any obstacle dividing Ellaline's future from mine. I think of her as belonging to me. I feel that she is to be a part of my life always, as she is now. And until I have again drummed it into my rebellious head that she is not for me, that my business with her is to see that she gets a rich, well-born, and well-looking young husband, not more than two-thirds of my age, I enjoy myself hugely in her nearness.

But, why not, after all? Just for the length of this tour in the motor-car, which throws us so constantly together? As long as I don't betray myself, why not? Why not revel in borrowed sunshine? At Graylees, I can turn over a new leaf; I need see very little of her there. She and Emily will have plenty to do, with their social duties, and I shall have my own. Let me be a fool in peace till Graylees, then. If I can be a fool in peace!

Talking of borrowed sunshine, England seems to have borrowed an inexhaustible supply from some more "favoured clime" this summer. I dare say we shall have to pay for it later. I shall have to pay for my private supply, too—but no matter.

Next to my native Cornwall, I think I prefer Devonshire; and Devonshire is being particularly kind and hospitable, offering us her choicest gifts.

It's said that the Earth is a host who murders all his guests. But he certainly gives some of us, for some of the time, glorious innings during our visit to him. I don't complain, though my stay so far has been accompanied by a good deal of stormy weather.

I remember your once remarking that Weymouth would be a good place to hide in, if you wanted to grow a beard or anything lingering and unbecoming; but you wouldn't make that remark now: there are too many pretty women in the nice, tranquil old town. Just at this season it's far from dull, and walking along the Esplanade, while young Nick mended a tire, I understood something of George the Third's fondness for the place. Certainly vanity wouldn't permit you to show your nose on parade or beach, in these times, during the beard-growing process, for there's apparently no hour of the day when a lively scene isn't being enacted on both: the sands thickly dotted with tents; charming girls bathing, chubby children playing, pretty women reading novels under red parasols, fishermen selling silver-scaled fish, boatmen soliciting custom; the parade crowded with "trippers," soldiers and sailors; the wide road noisy with motor-cars and motor-'buses; even the sea gay with boats of all descriptions, and at least one big war vessel hovering in the distance. Besides, there is the clock-tower. I don't know why I like it so much, but I do. I have a feeling that Weymouth would be worth a visit for the sake of that clock alone; and then there's the extraordinary historical and geological interest, which no other watering-place has.

Burden was anxious to go over to Portland, lured there, no doubt, by the incipient detective talent of which he boasts; but the ladies voted it too sad a place to see, on an excursion of pleasure, and perhaps they were right. The sort of woman who would like to go and spend a happy afternoon staring at a lot of unfortunate wretches dressed in a pattern of broad arrows, would go "slumming" out of idle curiosity; and I have always thought I could not love a woman who amused herself by slumming, any more than I could love one who eagerly patronized bull-fights.

Thomas Hardy's work is too near Nature's heart to appeal to Mrs. Senter, and too clever for my good sister Emily, who will read no author, willingly, unless he calls a spade a pearl-headed hatpin. But Ellaline, strange to say, has been allowed to read him. Evidently French schools are not what they once were; and she and I particularly wanted to go through Dorchester (his Casterbridge) even though we could see nothing of Hardy's place, Max Gate, except its tree-tops. A pity more English towns haven't made boulevards of their earthworks (since there are plenty that have earthworks), planting them with chestnuts and sycamores, as Dorchester has cleverly done. It was an idea worthy of a "Mayor of Casterbridge." We lingered a bit, in the car, picking out "landmarks" of resemblance to the book, and there were plenty. You know, there's a magnificent Roman amphitheatre near by; but did we stay to look at it? My friend, we are motorists! And it happened to be a grand day with the car, which, though still very new, has "found" itself. "Apollo" seemed a steed of "pure air and fire; and the dull elements of earth and water never appear in him." He chafed against stopping, and I humoured him gladly.

"Strange," said Ellaline, yesterday, "how a person will pay lots of money to buy a motor-car, and go tearing about the world at great expense, to gratify two little black or blue holes in his face; and then, instead of letting the holes thoroughly absorb his money's worth, he will rush past some of the best things on earth rather than 'spoil a run.'" But she doesn't take the intoxication of ozone into consideration in this indictment.

Our road was of the best, and always interesting, with some fine distant views, and here and there an avenue of trees like a vast Gothic aisle in a cathedral. "We could see things so nicely if it weren't for the mists!" sighed Emily, who, if her wish had been a broom, would have ruthlessly swept away those lacy cobwebs clinging to the hill-sides. "Why," replied Ellaline, "you could see a bride's face more clearly if you took away her veil, but it's the prettiest thing about her." That put my feelings in a nutshell. England would be no bride for me if she threw away her veil; and nowhere did it become her more than in Dorset, Somerset, and Devon, where it is threaded with gold and embroidered with jewels toward the edge of sunset.

Of course, there's only the most fanciful dividing line between Somerset and Devon, yet I imagine the two counties different in their attributes, as well as in their graces. Surely in Somerset the Downs are on a grander scale. Between two of them you are in a valley, and think that you see mountains. In Devonshire you have wider horizons, save for the lanes and hedges, which do their best to keep straying eyes fastened on their own beauty.

I suppose men who never have left England take such beauty for granted, but to me, after the flaunting luxuriance of the East, it is enchanting. I notice everything. I want someone, who cares for it as I do, to admire it with me. If it weren't for Dick Burden this England would be making me twenty-one again.

You should see, to understand me, all the lovely things fighting sportively for supremacy in these Devonshire hedges; the convolvulus pretending to throttle the honeysuckle; the honeysuckle shaking creamy fists in the faces of roses that push out, blushing in the starlight of wild clematis, white and purple. Such gentle souls, these Devonshire roses! Kind and innocent, like the sweet, sentimental "Evelinas" of old-fashioned stories, yet full of health, and tingling with buds, as a young girl with fancies.

Devonshire seems to express herself in flowers, as sterner counties do in trees and rocks. Even the children one meets playing in the road are flowers. They are to the pretty cottages what the sweetbriar is to the hedges; and no background could be daintier for the little human blossoms than those same thatched cottages with open, welcoming doors.

Ellaline, fascinated by glimpses through open doors—(old oak dressers set with blue and white china; ancient clocks with peering moon-faces; high-backed chairs; bright flowers in gilt vases on gate-legged tables, all obscurely seen through rich brown shadows)—says she would like to live in such a cottage with somebody she loved. Who will that somebody be? I constantly wonder. I should think less of her if it could be Dick Burden, or one of his type, yet Mrs. Senter hints that the girl likes his society. Can she?

We had a picnic luncheon on our way to Sidmouth, lingering rather long (once you have stopped your motor, nothing matters. If you're happy, you are as reluctant to go on as you are to stop when going). Then, as they all wished to travel by moonlight, I suggested that dinner also should be a picnic. We bought food and drink at Honiton, and the country being exquisite between there and Sidmouth, we soon found a moss-carpeted, tree-roofed dining-room, fit for an emperor. Nearby glimmered a sheet of blue-bells, like a blue underground lake that had broken through and flooded the meadow. Ellaline said she would like to wash her face in it, as if in a fairy cosmetic, to make her "beautiful forever." I really don't believe she knows that would be superfluous trouble! And a fairy godmother has given her the gift of song. I wish you could hear her sing, Pat. I have heard her only once; but if I hadn't been a fool already, I'd have become one then, beyond recall.

So we sat there, on the still, blue brink of twilight, till the moon rose red as a molten helmet, and cooled to a silver bowl as she sailed higher, dripping light. But tell me this: Would I think of such similes if I weren't like a man who has eaten hasheesh and filled his brain with a fantastic tumult—a magical vision of romance, such as his heart never knew in its youth, never can know except in visions, now that youth has passed? There's joy as well as pain in the vision, though, I can tell you, as there must be in any mirage. And it was in a mirage of moonlight and mystery that we took up our journey again, after that second picnic, swooping bird-like, from hill to valley, on our way to the Knoll Park Hotel.

It's an historic place, by the way, with an interesting past—once it was a country house belonging to an eccentric gentleman—and at present it is extremely ornamental among its lawns and Lebanon cedars.

As for Sidmouth the town, you have but to enter it to feel that you are walking in a quaint old coloured lithograph—one of the eighteenth-century sort, you know, that the artist invariably dedicated, with extravagant humility, to a marquis, if he didn't know a duke!

There's no architecture whatever. As far as that is concerned, children might have built the original village of Sidmouth as they sat playing on the beach; but the queer cottages, with their low brows of mouse-coloured thatch, protruding amid absurd battlements, have a fantastic charm. They are most engaging, with their rustic-framed bow-windows, like surprised-looking eyes in spectacles; their green veranda-eyebrows, and their smiling, yellow-stucco faces, with low foreheads. The house where Queen Victoria stopped as a little girl is a great show place, of course, and is like a toy flung down against a cushiony hillside, a battlemented doll's house, forgotten by the child who let it fall, while big trees grew up and tried to hide it.

Two cliffs has Sidmouth, and an innocent esplanade, and—that is about all, except the toy town itself. But it's a place to stay in. A happy man would never tire of it, I think. An unhappy one might prefer Brighton—or Monte Carlo. I am neither one nor the other. So I prefer a motor-car. We are on the wing again to-morrow.

I must now go to our sitting-room, which looks over the sea, and play a rubber of bridge with Mrs. Senter, Emily, and Burden. Ellaline doesn't play.

Hope I haven't bored you with my Burden, and other complaints.

Yours ever,

Pen.

Later, August 2nd, Night

I have opened my letter again, to tell you what came of that rubber of bridge.

I've lost—all the glamour. The reaction after the hasheesh has set in.

We didn't play long. Just that one rubber, and before we finished Ellaline had taken her copy of "Lorna Doone" upstairs to her own room, without interrupting our game for a good-night. She didn't think we saw her go; but there were two of us who did. Burden was one of the two. I don't need to tell you who the other fool was.

Mrs. Senter and I were partners, as we generally are, if there's any bridge going in the evening. She's devoted to the game, and it's always she who proposes it. I would generally prefer to fag up our route for next day with guide-books and road-maps. But hosts, like beggars, can't be "choosers."

Well, to-night Emily and Burden had all the cards, and Burden wanted a second rubber, but his aunt doesn't like losing her money to her nephew, even though we play for childishly low stakes. She said she "knew that Mrs. Norton was tired," and Emily didn't deny the soft impeachment, as she plays bridge in the same way she would do district visiting during an epidemic of measles—because it is her duty.

Dick had the latest French imitation of Sherlock Holmes to read, and a box of Egyptian cigarettes to smoke (mine), which he evidently thinks too young for me. Emily had some embroidery, which I seem to remember that she began when I was a boy, and kept religiously to do in hotels. (But what is there that my good sister does, which she does not do religiously?) Mrs. Senter had nothing to amuse or occupy her—except your humble servant—consequently she suggested a stroll in the garden before bedtime.

She was almost beautiful in the moonlight, quite ethereal-looking, and her hair a nimbus for that small white face of hers; just as small, just as white, and just as smooth as when those big eyes used to look up into our eyes under an Indian moon. And she is always agreeable, always witty, or at least "smart." Still, I must confess that I was ungallantly absent-minded until something she said waked me up from a brown study.

"He really is a nice boy," she was saying, "and after all, it's a tribute to your distinguished qualities that he should be afraid to speak to you."

I guessed at once that she must have been talking of her nephew.

"What is he afraid to say to me?" I enquired.

"Afraid to ask you for Miss Lethbridge," she explained.

I think just about that time an ugly black eyelid shut down over the moon. Anyhow, the world darkened for me.

"Isn't it rather old-fashioned, in these rapid days, for a young man to ask a guardian's permission to make love to his ward?" said I, savage as a chained dog.

She laughed. "Oh, he hasn't waited for that to make love, I'm afraid," she returned. "But he's afraid she won't accept him without your consent."

"He seems to be afraid of several things," I growled. "Afraid to speak to me—afraid to speak to her."

"He is young, and love has made him modest," Mrs. Senter excused her favourite. "He knows he isn't a grand parti. But if they care for each other?"

"I have seen no reason to believe that she cares for him," said I, thinking myself (more or less) safe in the recollection of Ellaline's words at Winchester. I told you about them, I think.

"Ah, well," said Mrs. Senter, "she cares enough, anyhow, to have entered into a pact of some sort with the poor boy—a kind of understanding that, if you approve, she may at least think of being engaged to him in the future."

"You are sure she has done that?" I asked, staggered by this statement, which I was far from expecting.

"Quite sure, unless love (in the form of Dick) is deaf as well as blind. He certainly flatters himself that they are on these terms."

"Since when?" I persisted. (By the by, I wonder if the inquisitors ever hit on the ingenious plan of making prisoners torture themselves? Nothing hurts worse than self-torture.)

"Only since Lulworth Cove, or you would have heard of it before. You know when we came back from our walk, and saw them sitting on the beach together, I said what a pretty picture they made?"

Naturally, I remembered extremely well.

"That was when they had their great scene. Dick begged me, as an old friend of yours, to say a word when I found the chance. And I confess, I've made the chance to-night. I do hope you won't think me impertinent and interfering? I'm fond of Dick. He's about all I have to be fond of in the world. And besides—just because I've never been happy myself, I want others to be, while they're young, not to waste time."

I muttered something, I hardly know what, and she went on to talk to me of her past, for the first time. Said she had married when little more than a child, and had made the mistake of marrying a man she thought she could manage to live happily with, instead of one she couldn't manage to live happily without. That was all; but it had made all the difference—and if Miss Lethbridge had given her first love to Dick—

I nearly said, "Hang first love!" but I held my tongue, fortunately, for of course she meant well, and was only doing her best for her nephew. But how anyone could love that fellow passes my understanding! Why, it seems to me the creature's parents could hardly have loved him, unless he had had something of the monstrous hypnotism, as well as the selfishness, of a young cuckoo in its stolen nest. Yet the same hypnotism may influence birds outside the nest, I suppose. That's the only way to account for an infatuation on the part of Ellaline.

"If you are angry, Dick and I must go away," Mrs. Senter went on. "But he couldn't help falling in love, and to me they seem made for each other."

I had to answer that of course I wasn't angry, but I thought any talk of love premature, to say the least.

"You won't actually refuse your consent, then?" asked she.

"Much good my refusing would do, if the girl really cares!" said I. "I shan't disinherit her, whatever she does."

Mrs. Senter laughed at that. "Why, even if you did," said she, "it wouldn't matter greatly to them, because Dick has something of his own, and she is an heiress, isn't she?"

Then—I don't know whether I was wrong or not—but I swear I made the answer I did without any mean or selfish motives—if I can read my own soul. If Burden were a fortune-hunter, I wanted to save her from him, that's all. I told Mrs. Senter that Ellaline had very little money of her own. "I shall look after her, of course," I said. "But the amount of the dot I may give will be determined by circumstances."

I don't know that I mayn't have put this in a tactless way. Anyhow, Mrs. Senter looked rather odd—hurt, or distressed, or something queer—I couldn't make quite out. She said, nevertheless, that Dick did not care for Miss Lethbridge's money. He had fallen in love with her the first time they met. Nothing else mattered, as they would have enough to live on. But she had supposed the girl almost too rich for Dick. Wasn't Ellaline a relation of the millionaire family of Lethbridges? She had heard so.

I answered that the relationship was distant. That Ellaline's father had once been a friend of mine, and that her mother had been my cousin, though a French girl.

"Oh!" said Mrs. Senter, as if suddenly enlightened. "Is she—by any chance—the daughter of a Frederic Lethbridge?"

What she recalled about Fred Lethbridge, I can't guess. She isn't old enough to have known him, unless as a child or a very young girl. But she certainly had some thought in connection with him which made her silent and reflective. I hope I have done Ellaline no harm—in case the girl really does care for Burden. I never had the intention of keeping her parentage secret, though at the same time it would pain me to have any gossip reach her. However, to do Mrs. Senter justice, I don't think she is a gossip. She likes to say "smart" things, but so far as I have heard, she is never smart at other people's expense. And since her confidences to me concerning her past, I am sorry for the poor little woman.

Not much more passed between us on the subject of Ellaline and Dick, except that I refused to recommend the young man to the girl's good graces. I had to tell Mrs. Senter that, not even for the pleasure of pleasing her, could I consent to do what she asked. But I did finally promise to let Ellaline know that personally I had no objection to the alleged "understanding," if it were for her happiness. Nevertheless, I would advise her that she must do nothing rash. Mrs. Senter not only permitted, but actually suggested, this extra clause; and our seance ended.

Some things are too strange not to be true; and I suppose this infatuation of Ellaline's, if it exists, is one of them. And it must exist. There can be no doubt of it, since Mrs. Senter has it from the boy—who apparently has it from the girl.

What to make of it, however, that she told me only about ten days ago, she didn't like him? Yet I am forgetting. We have it on good authority that "'tis best to begin with a little aversion."

I ought to have known that a daughter of Ellaline de Nesville and Frederic Lethbridge couldn't develop into the star-high being this girl has seemed to me; and I must make the best of it that she's something less in soul than, in my first burst of astonished admiration, I was inclined to appraise her. After all, why feel bitter against people because they have disappointing shortcomings, if not defects, instead of the dazzling virtues that glittered in your imagination? Cream always rises to the top, yet we don't think less of it because there's nothing but milk underneath.

Yes, if I find out that she likes this hypnotic cuckoo I mustn't despise her for it. But I must find out as soon as I can. Suspense is the one unbearable pain. And you are at liberty to laugh at me as I hope I shall soon be laughing at myself.

L. P.