by Grant Allen
‘He’s very thoughtful, I know,’ Hubert responded with a sigh.
‘And it isn’t as if she was pretty or attractive, either,’ Sabine went on, musing. ‘A poor, feeble little atomy of a girl like that! It’s just pure goodness of heart. He’s always been kind to Woodbine ever since she and I were at school together. She was a pale, frail little creature then, with no looks to boast of; and she’ll be a frail, pale little creature as long as she lives, till they work her to death at some high school somewhere. She reads Herbert Spencer, and talks like a book about survival of the fittest; but she isn’t fit to battle with the world herself; that’s the long and short of it. Natural selection would select her outright to go to the wall. I wish to goodness some nice rich man would take a fancy to her instead, and marry her offhand. But that’s not likely.’
‘Offer her to the Duke,’ Hubert suggested, with a sudden happy thought.
But Sabine shook her head. ‘The Duke wants money,’ she answered, with the precocious wisdom of the rather ripe girl brought up in the thick of society. ‘He’ll sell his title dear — dearer than ever now. He must have thousands and thousands to pay off old scores, and keep him going on the turf and at the Die and Hazard. And he’ll get them, too, after this — get them as soon as he chooses to ask for them.’
‘Where?’ Hubert Harrison interposed pointedly.
Sabine Venables stared him back in the face with a stony stare. ‘How should I know!’ she answered in her most provoking style. ‘I’m sure I can’t say. Wherever he likes, I should think, Mr. Harrison.’
‘Sabine! You mean it?’
His face turned deadly white. His heart stood still. Had the budding strawberry-leaves produced such an effect upon her already?
Sabine Venables started too, the change in his colour was so marked and so instantaneous. It pained her to see him. She was ashamed of her own coquettish caprice. ‘Hubert,’ she said faintly, in a very low voice, ‘how can you ever ask me? You might know ... I love you.’
‘You admit it?’ he cried, overjoyed. ‘Oh, Sabine, you admit it?’
‘Take care, silly boy!’ Sabine answered, repenting once more her unwonted relentment. ‘Papa’s just behind. If you stare at me like that, he’ll guess what we’re talking about.’
‘But you can’t unsay it,’ Hubert exclaimed, all tremulous with delight. ‘You can never unsay it. With your own lips you’ve told me plainly you love me. When a woman once tells you that, she tells you all. As long as I live, I shall have it always to remember.’
‘Well, don’t put it in the Boomerang, anyhow,’ Sabine retorted provokingly. ‘That’s the worst of telling anything to one of you writing people, you know: one’s sure to see it staring one in the face in print before one knows it almost.’
‘But, Sabine, I shall put something some day in the Boomerang, now you’ve told me you love me,’ the young man said, exulting. ‘I shall put it before very long, too, if I have my own way. “We understand that a marriage has been arranged between — —”’
Sabine cut him short with an imperious gesture. ‘What do you mean?’ she cried proudly, her eyes blazing fire at his bare suggestion. ‘I never gave you any ground to suppose that, did I? I said I loved you. That was a foolish confession — just to keep you quiet. But I never said I’d marry you. Do you think because a woman loves a man she’s bound to chuck away all her chances, offhand, of becoming a Duchess?’
‘Sabine,’ the young man put in, glancing back at her with admiration, ‘you do yourself an injustice. In your heart I know you never seriously thought such a thought as that. You say it only just to tease me and make me uncomfortable.’
Sabine’s proud lips relented once more. She was a strange compound. ‘Hubert,’ she answered, looking up at him in return with a certain confiding womanly pride, ‘you’re the only man on earth who ever understands me. I believe that’s the reason I — er — like you so much. You can read what I mean. The other men never know one little bit what I’m driving at.’
‘Then you mean to consent to — —’
Sabine shook her head decisively. ‘I mean nothing of the sort,’ she replied with quiet reserve. ‘I only mean I’m in a sort of a kind of a way rather fond of you. I’m not going to make up my mind just yet. I shall play with my mouse a bit longer, I can tell you, before I decide whether or not I shall kill it or let it go.’ And she looked up at him once more with a teasing smile, like an Egyptian Pasht, in her wayward spoilt fashion. ‘Or, rather,’ she added, after a telling pause, ‘with both my mice — one of them a Duke, and the other a commoner.’
And that was all Hubert Harrison, for all his cleverness, could manage to get out of her.
At dinner, the conversation not unnaturally turned for the most part upon the new Duke and his unexpected elevation to the honours and glories of the British peerage.
‘He’ll marry before long, I should think,’ Old Affability remarked, in the course of dessert, turning a beaming countenance successively round on all the members of the company. ‘A man in his position is pretty sure to marry. And quite right, too. He ought to, I say. Keep up the family line — pity to see a good old name die out. His brother, the late Duke, was married also — but without issue, of course, as I see from Debrett. Without issue.’
‘Who did he marry?’ Sabine asked languidly. She was much too unaffected to say primly ‘whom,’ as some purists would have wished her to do.
‘An heiress, of course,’ Hubert put in with a meaning smile. ‘A Miss Foster, of Dublin, last of a long line of wealthy whisky-distillers.’
Sabine shuddered with her pretty bare shoulders in her evening dress. ‘What people these peers will get in with!’ she cried with a little pout. ‘Anything on earth for money! I declare it disgusts one.’
‘My dear!’ her father exclaimed, with a faintly disapproving frown. ‘Distilling’s an exceedingly gentlemanly business. Almost as much so, in fact, as banking or brewing.’ Being a banker himself, the typical British Philistine had a nice appreciation of the relative social values of mercantile enterprise.
‘And the distiller’s daughter had no children?’ Sabine asked, to turn the thread of the talk, which she felt showed symptoms of almost growing personal.
‘No children!’ Hubert echoed with an affirmative nod. ‘Else Lord Adalbert wouldn’t this moment be Duke of Powysland.’
‘Heiresses very seldom do have children,’ Woodbine Weatherley ventured to interpose innocently, in a frightened way. ‘People should never marry them. Mr. Galton says in his book on heredity it’s because they’re the last surviving members of a decadent stock which has exhausted its energies in the constant effort of money-making. I suppose he’s right. He has a lot of cases in his book to prove it, I remember.’
Sabine laughed outright at the malapropos remark. And certainly, as Hubert Harrison glanced from one girl to the other, he felt there was nothing that looked very ostentatiously decadent about Sabine Venables. But Old Affability, to his immense surprise, didn’t resent the unintentional imputation upon the money-making type. Hubert took it as one more proof of the unobtrusive goodness about which Sabine had spoken. Indeed, the typical British Philistine showed surprising tact in rescuing his little guest from her unhappy position. ‘For my part,’ he said genially, ‘if I were a young man looking out for a wife, peer or no peer, what would take me most would be neither face nor figure, but the Intellectual Graces. That’s what seems to me most important in a woman — the Intellectual Graces. Beauty fades, and prettiness palls on one, and youth passes away like — er — like the flower on the grass; but the Intellectual Graces continue for ever. They never wear out. They improve with age. What I should go in for decidedly is the Intellectual Graces.’ And after this unwonted flight into the Higher Regions of Thought, Old Affability raised his glass of claret between his finger and thumb, and looked through it fixedly for some seconds at the electric light that glowed and flickered above the orchid-decked dinner-table.
‘Fiddlesticks
!’ Sabine responded, crushing him at once, though Woodbine Weatherley gazed at her in hushed amazement. ‘Dukes don’t want intellectual graces, I’m sure. What they want is money — money, money, money, money — and plenty of it.’
Her father’s glance came down at a rush to earth from heaven. ‘I — I wasn’t thinking of Dukes, my dear,’ he replied shortly, gazing across at her with fatherly affection and pride. ‘A Duke, I suppose, if in straightened circumstances for one of his rank, should ally himself to a person who can enable him properly to keep up his position in the country. I’ve not a word to say against that. I — er — I concur in it, and approve of it. I was thinking rather of men in the middle ranks of life. I believe a person, in such a case, even if conscious of not being particularly brilliant or particularly intellectual himself, often admires brilliancy and intellect in others. And where that is so, he should marry where he finds it. If the possessor will overlook his shortcomings and take him, he should marry where he finds it.’
‘Woodbine dear,’ Sabine remarked coldly, catching her friend’s eye, ‘shall we leave papa and Mr. Harrison to discuss this very interesting and instructive question together?’ And with a curl of her lip and a faint glance at Hubert she swept out of the room, her train a yard behind, driving poor meek little Woodbine like a lamb before her.
That evening, when all the rest had gone, the typical English Philistine stood nervously for a moment with his hand on the drawing-room mantelpiece, and stared hard at Sabine, in a curiously preoccupied and hesitating manner, as was often his wont when Argentines were declining.
‘Well?’ Sabine asked at last, seeing he had apparently something unpleasant to communicate. ‘What is it, papa? Great fall in Turks? Crédit Foncier going down? What do you stand staring at me like that for, I wonder?’
Her father started, and glanced around him uneasily. ‘Oh, nothing!’ he answered, in an apologetic voice. ‘Nothing at all. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Market’s firm as a rock. But, Sabine, I just wanted to ask you — I have a particular reason — did Lord Adalbert — the Duke, I mean — did he — er — say anything particular to you this afternoon when the play was ended?’
‘He said he thought everything had gone off better than he expected,’ Sabine answered with a smile. ‘He didn’t expect it to go off as well as he expected, which may have been his notion of saying something funny; yet there’s a deal of truth in it, too, if you have the trick to understand it.’
‘Well, but besides that?’ her father urged, eyeing her hard. ‘You know what I mean, Sabine. Did he say anything of a sort that might lead you to suppose — —’
Sabine shook her head decisively. ‘He never said a word of a sort to lead me to suppose anything on earth — good, bad, or indifferent,’ she replied in a hasty voice. ‘I know what you mean, of course, however you blink it, and I don’t mind answering you point blank, if it comes to that. He didn’t propose to me.’
‘Sabine, my dear child!’ the typical British Philistine ejaculated in pained surprise, almost shocked at such unmaidenly plainness of speech and directness of purpose. ‘How can you talk so?’
‘Nary propose!’ Sabine went on maliciously, the wicked pleasure of shocking her father taking possession of her, body and soul, as that particular devil will take possession of us all under similar conditions. ‘And what’s more, I don’t believe he ever means to. Buyers are shy, as you say on the Stock Exchange. He won’t come up to the scratch, that’s what’s the matter with him. He dawdles and nibbles around, and looks at the bait from every side, but he can’t be induced to take a good solid bite at it, so that one could hook him and land him outright if one really wanted to.’
Mr. Venables was too profoundly distressed in soul at such recklessness to answer for a moment. Then he said slowly, ‘This is very unfortunate. I thought he’d be sure to speak to you to-day. He would have spoken, too, if it hadn’t been for that most ill-timed interruption of the telegram about his brother. I — I wish, Sabine, he hadn’t heard of it — his accession to the title, I mean — till after he’d had a chance of speaking to you alone on the subject. Now that he’s a Duke, you see, perhaps he’ll think — —’
‘Sir!’
Mr. Venables retreated into his shell at once, like a snail whose horns have been touched with a sharp prickle. Sabine stood glaring at him across the mantelpiece in angry pride. Did he mean to insinuate — did he dare to insinuate — that a Duke or any other living creature on earth could for a moment consider himself too highly placed a match for Sabine Venables? If so, she could never permit such a slight to her pride, even from her own father.
There was a moment’s pause. Then Mr. Venables intervened once more with tentative hesitation. ‘I had a special reason for wishing him to ... er ... to make any propositions on the subject he might have to suggest ... before taking a certain step myself to which I attach a certain amount of importance in this respect. To tell you the truth, Sabine, I’ve been delaying the step in question too long, very much against my will, in order to give him time to come to the point; and I’ve done so at a considerable cost of personal inconvenience. But matters now have taken a different turn.’ Mr. Venables drew himself up very stiff, glanced sharply at his daughter, and then regarded his own clean-shaven face and spotless white choker in the mirror-panel of the overmantel. ‘They took a different turn this afternoon,’ he went on with obvious embarrassment. ‘And therefore, now the young man’s a Duke, I shall give him just another fortnight to make up his mind in — after which time, if he hasn’t — er — placed things upon a satisfactory basis for all parties concerned, I shall — well, I shall proceed at once to take my own course in the matter without waiting any longer for him to declare himself.’
Sabine gazed back at her father in speechless amazement. A vague, blank terror seized upon her mind. What on earth could he mean by this enigmatical pronouncement? ‘I don’t understand you,’ she gasped out feebly, sinking back into a chair. ‘You don’t mean to say you’ll — you’ll actually offer me as a present to any man!’
It was Mr. Venables’ turn to look surprised now. ‘God bless the child!’ he exclaimed with a bewildered stare, ‘what on earth is she talking about? Goodness gracious me! I wasn’t speaking about you at all, Sabine. I was speaking about myself. Under all the circumstances, unless the Duke proposes within a fortnight, I won’t any longer delay the public announcement of my own intentions.’
‘What intentions?’ Sabine gasped out once more, growing faint with the horror of that unknown presentiment.
‘My intentions as to my future,’ Mr. Venables went on, still gazing abstractedly into the glass, and pulling up his shirt collar with an approving air. ‘I was anxious to put off announcing them to the world as long as possible, in order not to interfere with your prospects of settlement in life; but after what has taken place to-day, I really don’t see how I can put it off any longer.’
Sabine arose once more and staggered towards him wildly. The words stuck in her throat. She could hardly get them out. ‘Oh, father! father!’ she cried, holding both hands to her head as if to keep it from splitting, ‘you don’t mean that! You can’t mean that! You can never mean to tell me you’re going to get married!’
She said it in a fierce outburst of utter despair. She couldn’t believe it was possible. It was too, too terrible. It rose up before her only as a mad, incredible nightmare. He could never, never, never mean that. Whatever his strange, problematical words might portend, it could never be anything quite so horrible, so crushing, so annihilating!
Mr. Venables gazed in the glass once more, and stroked his smooth chin, as who should say, ‘Why not, indeed? Am I not as young and good-looking as any man of sixty can reasonably expect to be?’ Then he answered slowly, and with some deliberation as to the choice of his words, ‘Well, I certainly have of late contemplated that course; and this afternoon I took a step which renders it now partially inevitable. I was betrayed by my feelings of admiration into saying, quite impromptu
— on the spur of the moment — a few words I had meant, if possible, to postpone till later.’
‘To whom?’ Sabine cried faintly, clutching at a chair. ‘Not Mrs. Bouverie-Barton?’
Mr. Venables glanced back at her in profound astonishment. ‘I’m surprised you should ask me such a question,’ he answered, raising his eyebrows by slow degrees as he took in the full implications of his daughter’s ignorance. ‘And you a girl, too, with all their talk about woman’s intuitions! Why, who on earth could it be of our acquaintance, except one peerless person? Who on earth else has those Intellectual Graces which one looks for so incontestably in the woman one loves? Who on earth could you think of naming in the same day with her, I wonder? Surely I need hardly tell you it’s — Woodbine Weatherley.’
CHAPTER XI.
TWO SIDES TO A QUESTION.
Sabine Venables never closed her eyes that whole night long. She lay awake in her bed, hour after hour, in silent misery, thinking over all that this terrible avowal enclosed of humiliation and shame for her. She was a proud-natured girl, and her father’s announcement had burst upon her with such a sudden blinding force of dismay and horror that she hardly knew as yet how she could ever outlive it.
And, indeed, she had reason, for she could scarcely realize at the first blush herself what a total change it meant in her position and prospects.
In the first place, there was the mere primary fact of the stepmother. Sabine Venables shared that common feminine prejudice. It’s very unreasonable, to be sure, that girls should object to their fathers doing the very thing they themselves spend their entire time in endeavouring to compass; but such is nevertheless the usual instinct of female humanity; a girl feels it almost a personal slight and insult to herself that her father should dream of taking a new head for his household. And Woodbine, too, of all girls in the world! That poor shrinking little atomy she had so pitied and patronized; to think that Woodbine, enthroned in state, in her stead, was to pose henceforth as mistress of Hurst Croft, and that she herself, Sabine Venables, the admired, the petted, would have to play second fiddle in future to a pallid, hollow-cheeked, consumptive-looking little nursery governess — to walk after her in to dinner, to stand at her beck and call in the paternal drawing-room, to sit on the front seat, with her back to the horses, when they drove out together with her father in the park, to nestle under her protecting wing as the obedient stepdaughter at dances and parties! it was too, too degrading.
