by Molly Thynne
Constantine seated himself obediently, still intent on eliciting information.
“He intends to marry her?”
The Duchess groaned.
“He’s only waiting till he has brought her here to announce the engagement.”
“And Bertie?”
It was characteristic of this couple that, whereas the Duke was “Bertie” to all his friends and a large number of acquaintances, very few people outside her immediate relatives called the Duchess by her Christian name.
“Bertie is being simply impossible. Marlowe introduced him to the girl at the Trastevere, and she seems to have got round him entirely. When I try to get him to do something about it, he goes off at a tangent on the subject of effete old families and fresh stock. He might be the father of a racehorse from the way he talks. But you know what Bertie can be!”
Constantine’s eyes twinkled.
“‘I think nobly of the soul, and no way approve his opinion,’” he quoted softly.
For a moment the Duchess looked suspicious, then: “Oh, Shakespeare, I suppose. I’ve the greatest respect for Bertie’s opinion about some things. It’s when he gets one of these contrary fits that he’s so difficult. However, thank goodness, he can always be managed. That’s where you come in, dear Doctor Constantine.”
“And where, if Bertie hadn’t the patience of an archangel, I should go out,” said Constantine. “After all, Duchess, he’s seen the girl and you haven’t.”
The Duchess turned on him.
“Doctor Constantine, you know better than that. He’s seen a girl who’s probably quite pretty, well dressed and skillfully made up, who has deliberately set herself out to charm him. He wasn’t with her for more than an hour in a crowded restaurant. He hasn’t seen her home or her people; he hasn’t seen her in the morning, slopping about in a soiled dressing-gown, among dirty champagne glasses….”
She stopped, suddenly conscious that the picture was possibly too suggestive of an American film to be convincing. Constantine was openly smiling.
“He probably wouldn’t notice the dressing-gown, and he’d make an effort to wash the glasses,” he said. “In that respect, you know, he and Marlowe are very much alike. Seriously, why not see the girl before you make yourself perhaps unnecessarily unhappy?”
“You’re not going to pretend that it’s a good match, I suppose?”
“From a worldly point of view it’s deplorable, but Marlowe, charming though he is, is not an easy proposition. The War caught him at an age when most men are sowing their wild oats; perhaps that’s why he never seems to have gone through that phase. Certainly it was beginning to look as if he were never going to marry. Isn’t it possible that he has found the woman best calculated to make him happy?”
The Duchess glared at him in silence for the space of several electric sounds. This was rank heresy on the part of one she had grown to consider her staunchest ally. Then a great light broke on her.
“You’ve been talking to Bertie,” she announced decisively.
“I assure you I haven’t. What I said was based entirely on my knowledge of Marlowe. You must admit that he was always known his own mind, and that, having made it up, he very rarely changes it.”
“That’s just what makes it so imperative that we should do something, instead of wasting precious time in arguing. If you knew how I’ve been depending on you!”
“I hope I shall never fail you,” he assured her, “but I can be more useful when I have had time to look round and see how matters stand.”
“If by looking round you mean shutting yourself up with Bertie and being talked over by him, I shall deeply regret having asked your advice,” said the Duchess with a dignity that degenerated suddenly to mere crossness as the luncheon bell pealed through the house.
Constantine rose and faced her. His smile was disarming.
“Do you know, I’ve never really been talked over by either of you yet,” he said gently. “I’ve managed, so far, to preserve my integrity while supporting you to the best of my ability.”
Her face softened.
“And we’ve all used you unmercifully,” she admitted. “Come and eat, and do what you can with my tiresome family.”
The tiresome family was represented on this occasion by the Duke, looking, if anything, taller, leaner, greyer and milder than usual. He greeted Constantine warmly, and kept the conversation drifting through pleasant channels during the meal. He seemed entirely at peace with himself and the world at large. Only once did he mention the topic that had brought Constantine to the house.
“You have heard our news already from Violet, I expect,” he said with a whimsical gleam in his eye.
The Duchess glanced hastily round her. The room, for the moment was empty of servants.
“My dear Bertie,” she protested, “is it necessary to take Portland into your confidence?”
The Duke inclined his head in a gesture that was almost a bow. He treated his family with a kind of absent-minded courtesy that never failed to fascinate Constantine. It was so punctilious and yet so curiously sincere, as opposed to the more florid variety he had just left on the other side of the Channel.
“Portland, if you asked him, would probably give you a far more detailed and circumstantial account of Marlowe’s movements during the last few days than either you or I could provide,” he said quietly. “And, incidentally, the servants’ hall is quite sure to be more bitterly opposed to the whole affair than ourselves.”
The return of Portland and his minions made it impossible for the Duchess to say what was in her mind, and Constantine hastened to bridge an awkward gap in the conversation.
“What news of Trastevere?” he asked. “Still a howling success?”
“Howling is an excellent word for it,” said the Duchess. “Fortunately our bedrooms are on the other side of the house.”
Constantine glanced at her in surprise. The Duchess had sponsored the opening night of the Trastevere Restaurant, and had been largely responsible for its immediate popularity.
The Duke supplied the explanation.
“The Trastevere has got into the hands of the opposition,” he said with a gleam of humour in his eye. “Personally I find it rather amusing, though I have a suspicion that the Bright Young People are more entertaining to others than themselves.”
“I’m afraid that the Trastevere is going to turn out one of our mistakes,” sighed his wife plaintively.
Constantine’s lips twitched. The last appeal from the Duchess, six months ago, which had brought him post-haste to her aid, had been on the subject of the Trastevere Restaurant.
When, in seventeen eighty-three, the eighth Duke had built Steynes House, that huge barrack overlooking the Park, he had followed in the footsteps of his crony, the Prince Regent, and equipped it with stables out of all proportion to its size. Even in the days of horses these had proved to be as unwieldy as they were inconvenient, situated as they were at the far end of the garden that lay behind the house. When the motor-car came into being they became little less than a white elephant, and the present Duke, soon after his marriage, converted part of the equally inconvenient and rambling servants’ quarters of Steynes House into a garage, and left the stables to their fate.
It was the Duchess who, on hearing that the manager of a well-known restaurant in London was looking for a site, conceived the brilliant idea of offering him the stables. The project had hardly taken form in her mind before she was at the telephone invoking Constantine’s aid. Constantine, who had a far clearer perception than herself of the condition of the ducal finances, was privately of the opinion that the Duke would require very little persuasion. The restaurant would be too far from the house to encroach on its privacy, the entrance need not even be in the same street, and the Duke, as Constantine knew, was not nearly so conservative as he looked. But the Duchess, having made up her mind that her husband was going to be “difficult”, laid her plans accordingly and proceeded to put them into execution, dragging
the alternately amused and exasperated Constantine in her wake.
The result had been the Trastevere Restaurant, which owing partly to the organizing capacity of Angelo Civita, the proprietor, and the determined patronage of the Duchess, had prospered increasingly from the day it was opened.
Looking back on the events that had attended its birth, it was amusing, to say the least of it, to hear it stigmatized by the Duchess as “one of our mistakes”.
Constantine rashly looked up, met the Duke’s eye, and turned away.
“Do you still use the private door?” he asked hastily.
The Duchess stiffened.
“Bertie and Marlowe use it,” she said frigidly. “The whole tone of the place has changed so much that I never go there. Civita is making a fortune out of it, I understand.”
In accordance with his agreement, Civita, in remodeling the stables, had made the palm court, which ran along the entire back of the restaurant, windowless, so that the garden of Steynes House was at no point overlooked. The court was furnished with a glass roof and opened directly on to the restaurant, leading down to which was a short, broad flight of steps. But behind a towering bank of palms in the back wall of the palm court was a small door furnished with a Yale lock, and at the culminating point in the opening ceremony at the Trastevere the key to this door had been handed to the Duchess by Civita with an apt, if somewhat florid, little speech. Parties from Steynes House were thereby enabled to reach the restaurant by way of the garden, and, as a result, the Duchess’s dinner-parties, which had erred somewhat on the side of dullness, had suddenly become unwontedly popular with the younger set.
Constantine, who had the restaurant habit in his blood, felt his heart sink at the news that the Trastevere had fallen under her ban. His mind went back to the apparently inordinate length of some of the functions at Steynes House in pre-Trastevere days, and he decided that the Victorian tradition was becoming a little moth-eaten even in her capable hands.
He was as nearly out of patience with her as he had ever been when, over the coffee, she unmasked her batteries.
“Doctor Constantine and I have been discussing this absurd infatuation of Marlowe’s,” she announced, as Constantine, with the pessimism born of long experience, took his first tentative sip of the worst coffee in London.
The Duke crossed one long thin leg over the other and said nothing.
“If you can call it a discussion,” amended Constantine, “seeing that it is a subject about which, up to the present, I know precisely nothing.”
The Duke inclined his head.
“Sheer waste of time,” he agreed. “Far better to see the girl, then you’ll have something definite to go on. She’s a very nice girl, you know, my dear.”
The Duchess’s voice was full of compassion.
“How like you, Bertie dear! Can’t you see that the only way to deal with the situation is to take a firm line from the beginning? It’s just because you consented to meet her that you’re so useless to me now. Now I’ve simply got to act alone!”
“Marlowe’s of age, you know,” the Duke reminded her mildly.
“Marlowe will get over this foolish infatuation if only he’s given time,” she retorted with magnificent finality.
The Duke rose to his feet.
“Constantine,” he said, “have you ever met a more obstinate beggar than my son?”
Constantine’s laughter was so unexpected and infectious that the veiled amusement in the Duke’s eyes deepened and the Duchess stared at him in pained surprise.
“I’m sorry,” he said, as soon as he could speak, “but your father asked me that very question in practically the same words not so many years ago. The answer is in the affirmative.”
For the first time since the beginning of their interview, the Duchess permitted herself a somewhat wry smile.
“Marlowe takes after his father,” she said, “and I couldn’t tell you, Doctor Constantine, what they can both be like when they deliberately set out to be annoying. If I hadn’t thought Bertie was lunching at his stupid club I should never have asked you to come to-day.”
The Duke, who realized that, truly earnest herself, she had never really succeeded in understanding flippancy, looked genuinely apologetic.
“Spiked your guns, my dear,” he said. “I’m sorry. But Constantine’s got to hear my side of the argument some time, and it may as well be now as later. Coming, Constantine?”
And, evading his wife’s wrathful eye, he snatched her guest from under her very nose and bore him off to the library.
Once there, he proceeded to deal with the whole business with his customary clearness and brevity.
“Marlowe’s old enough to know his own mind. He wants to marry the girl and, though I cannot make my wife see it, there’s no reason why he shouldn’t marry her. She’s been brought up as carefully, in fact more so, than some of the girls my wife looks upon as suitable. According to Marlowe, there’s an old martinet of a grandfather in the background who has looked after her since she was a baby, and whose hair would stand on end at the sight of some of the diversions of our bright young people. She’s a charming girl and perfectly presentable. I believe her to be genuinely fond of the boy and I like her, and I’m not going to stand in their way.”
He bent over the fire and kicked a log into position with the toe of his shoe, then, with a glance, half whimsical, half shy, over his shoulder at Constantine:
“The truth is, I want to see my grandchildren before I die, and it was beginning to look as if there was deuced little chance of my wish ever being gratified. If you can talk my wife round, Constantine, I shall be grateful”.
Constantine nodded. He understood.
“I’ll do my best,” he said. “It would be easier if I knew the lady’s name. Neither of you have seen fit to enlighten me so far!”
The Duke laughed.
“Ridiculous situation, really,” he agreed. “Betty Anthony is the name, and her grandfather plays the fiddle or something in the Parthenon orchestra. Now you know the worst, and it is the worst, I assure you.”
Before he left Steynes House Constantine had definitely made up his mind that this time, at least, he would not be coerced by the Duchess into any line of conduct but his own, and, by token of his independence, had arranged to meet the young couple at dinner at the Trastevere on the following night.
The Duchess rang him up twice next morning, but drew a blank each time. The respectful Manners who shared with the staff at Steynes House a comprehensive grasp of the whole situation, could only assure her that his master was out and that he could not say when he would be back. She gave instructions which be dutifully imparted to Constantine on his return soon after lunch.
“Her Grace requested that you would ring her up immediately on your return, sir,” he said, as he helped his master off with his coat.
“In that case I think we will assume, for the time being, that I have not yet come back,” replied Constantine firmly.
Half an hour later Manners entered the study, discreetly closing the door behind him
“I understood you to say that you were not at home, sir,” he began, in a somewhat hushed voice.
Constantine’s mind flew to the Duchess of Steynes. She must indeed be hard pressed if she had gone so far as to come to the flat.
“Who wishes to see me?” he asked.
“Lord Marlowe is in the drawing-room. I said that I would ascertain whether you had returned, sir.”
Constantine threw the book he had been reading on the table.
“Of course I’m in!” he exclaimed.
There was a conspiratorial flavour about Manners’s stately withdrawal which suggested that, Duchess or no Duchess, interruptions would not mar the coming interview.
“This is a pleasant surprise . . .” began Constantine as his visitor entered the room, then broke off at the sight of his face. “My dear boy, is anything the matter?”
Lord Marlowe, a more sturdy, loose-knit, bronzed edit
ion of his father, obviously had no time for preliminaries.
“Doctor Constantine,” he said, “is it true that you’ve got a pull with the fellows at Scotland Yard?”
“I know one or two fairly influential people there,” admitted Constantine.
A smile flickered for an instant on Marlowe’s lips.
“You’ve heard my news from my mother, I know,” he went on, “and I’m afraid her description of Betty may have been a bit biased. It’s on her account that I’m here. She’s worrying herself sick, and we can’t get the local police to move. They seem to think the matter isn’t serious. Personally, I’m inclined to believe that it is. You see, I know old Anthony.”
“Is that Miss Anthony’s grandfather? Surely he hasn’t got on the wrong side of the law?”
“Good heavens, no! But he went out last night to play quartettes with some friends as usual, and he hasn’t been seen since.”
“You mean that he’s actually disappeared?”
Marlowe nodded.
“Utterly and entirely. He’s simply vanished,” he said.
CHAPTER II
CONSTANTINE admitted afterwards that his first thought was of the Duchess. She had been in his mind when Lord Marlowe was announced, and, as the full meaning of the news he had brought dawned on him, he realized that, from her son’s point of view, a more unfortunate thing could hardly have happened. Whatever might be the cause of this old man’s disappearance, were it an accident or a stroke or only loss of memory, it would find its way into the Press, and Marlowe was in no mood to keep his own connection with the affair from the reporters. The premature announcement of the engagement, and the inevitable publicity attendant on the whole business, would prejudice his mother even more hopelessly against the girl and her belongings.
“You say you’ve been to the police?” he asked.
“Betty went to the local police-station early this morning. They were decent to her, but when they found that Mr. Anthony had only been missing since last night they seemed to think there was no real need for anxiety.”
