by Grant Allen
‘I’ll tell Cecil when I write that you inquired kindly after him,’ Linda went on, still without the faintest tinge of embarrassment in her voice. Basil only wished to goodness he was one half as much at his ease as she was. ‘I hardly expected to meet you, Mr. Maclaine, when I came to England.’
Basil gazed at her hard. What did those words mean? Some fat lady by the piano began to sing by this time — a great soprano at fifty guineas — and it was a little easier now to converse in a low tone without being listened to. Besides, a skinny old lady with a moustache and an impossible head-dress, understood to be a Dowager of immense pretensions, had buttonholed the Duke, and was whispering aside to him, and tapping him with her fan, so his attention was temporarily withdrawn from his wife and her squire. Basil determined, therefore, under cover of the song, to make a bold stroke for some solution of the mystery. In any case, it looks so well to be seen confidentially conversing in a corner with a Duchess, even if nothing comes of it. He leant forward with some eagerness, and asked, between the lines of that German ditty, in a very low voice:
‘But what does this all mean, Duchess? Do please explain to me. How did you come to be called Miss Amberley?’
Linda gazed back at him with the same frank, fearless glance as ever. She had lived down her disappointment long since, no doubt, and knew him now for just what he was, with all the illusion dispelled and destroyed, so she could look him in the face without one qualm of remorse.
‘Why, I don’t understand you, Mr. Maclaine,’ she answered, for all the world as if they were still in the drawing-rooms at Clandon Street. ‘There’s nothing to explain. I met the Duke in the States, where Cecil and I have been living together ever since we left England, and there I married him — at the little church round the corner. What is there strange in that? So many young Englishmen in our days get married in America.’
‘But after all the past,’ Basil blurted out, still astonished, and incapable of entering into Linda’s simple point of view, ‘I — I hardly thought it likely you would marry him.’
He meant he hardly thought it likely the Clandon Street landlady would get the chance of marrying an English Duke. But Linda, true to her ingrained habit of looking at the realities of life rather than at its mere appearances, naturally misunderstood him. She drew herself up, as cold as ice, and looked him full in the face once more.
‘Why not?’ she answered, with chilling dignity. ‘You could hardly have thought, after that past you venture so curiously to allude to, that I would keep myself free for ever for the sake of a man who never really loved me? That would have been most weak of me. I never wished to see you again, Mr. Maclaine. I never expected to see you. I wouldn’t have come here to-night if I had thought I should meet you. But having met you by accident, I’m not sorry I came. I married whom I chose, and I don’t know what right I ever gave you to comment upon my marriage.’
This vigorous assault took Basil by surprise. Their places were now so completely changed, he hardly knew how to shape his conduct aright.
‘Oh, I didn’t mean that,’ he stammered out apologetically, beginning to be conscious of two unexpected feelings — first, that he was ashamed of himself; and second, that he had always been really in love with Linda. ‘I meant, how did you come to be called Miss Amberley, don’t you know? It was Figgins at Clandon Street. How did your brother spring up all at once into a great electrical swell? How did you happen to be thrown in with Dukes? Well, you needn’t look so surprised,’ he added, with a knowing smile, gaining confidence as he went on, and trying to remember that this magnificent creature in silk and diamonds was, after all, nobody but Linda Figgins. ‘You used not to be thick with — er — many Dukes in Bloomsbury, now, used you?’
Linda handled her fan with a quiet air of self-restraint. ‘All that’s very simple,’ she answered with unruffled dignity, in spite of Basil’s very aggressive air. ‘There’s nothing new in Cecil. My brother was always a great electrical genius. He was a great electrical genius when we were here in London, though very few people in England had the discrimination to appreciate him. He was a great electrical genius when he went to New York, where men are more equally judged and more readily pushed forward into the front rank of things, if they’re fit for it. And there’s nothing new in our name. It was always Amberley. We were Amberleys in London, if you’d ever taken the trouble to inquire. But you called us Figgins. My mother’s maiden name was Figgins, to be sure, and Figgins had always been left upon the door-plate; so when you jumped at the name, Cecil preferred you should call us so while we lived in Clandon Street, partly to keep up the goodwill of the house, and partly because he was proud of the Amberleys, my father’s people, and never gave up his hopes of making himself a better position in future. When we went to New York, to start afresh in life, we went in our own right name as Amberley, by which we were always known to our own friends in London. We preferred it so for many reasons, and among others for dear Mr. Harrison’s sake.’ She paused a moment, while the music sank low; then after a short lull, when it rose once more, as the soprano quivered and shook with emotion, she added quietly: ‘I meant, now I was married, to write to Mr. Harrison, but I never expected to meet you again, either here or elsewhere.’
Basil drew himself up. ‘Since you left London,’ he said, with some just pride, ‘I’ve begun to mix with a great many of the Best People.’
‘So I see,’ Linda answered, unmoved. ‘You meant to push yourself, and you’ve pushed yourself well. Now we’ve settled all that, how about Mr. Harrison?’
She spoke throughout so quietly, so calmly, so simply, so unaffectedly, that Basil felt for the moment it was all quite natural; he saw it was wholly in the ordinary course of events (as in the ‘Arabian Nights’) for a London lodging-house keeper to go to New York in search of fortune, to grow enormously rich, as if by magic, to marry a Duke of old Welsh descent, and to return to England in three short years, or thereabouts, as beautiful as ever, but draped in rich silks and covered with big diamonds. Linda seemed to think it so, and why should he doubt it? She was evidently the self-same Linda still as ever, with that calm, strong smile, that sensible air, that capable manner, that imperturbable way of facing all the problems of existence like a real live woman. He could only stammer out in a negligent fashion, ‘Oh, poor old Harrison’s precisely where you left him — a briefless barrister. He gets no luck, and he makes no business. He’s too quixotic for work, that’s the fact of it. His conscience is always standing in his way whenever he sees some fair chance of a decent opening.’
‘So I thought,’ Linda said, folding her fan pensively. ‘Too good for this world. I never respected anybody as I respected Mr. Harrison.’
The fifty guineas’ worth of song was nearly finished now, and Basil saw his chance of a tête-à-tête was drawing to a close. But there was just one more question he felt impelled to put. ‘Well, I want to ask you a single thing,’ he said, leaning forward confidentially and presuming upon their old friendship, ‘how did you come to be in such a position yourself? Cecil has made money, of course, I suppose — no end of money — vast pots at a time — out of the light and the motor. But you yourself?’ He gazed at her inquiringly, and paused for a second to think how he should frame his question.
Before he could do so, however, Linda had answered at once, with the same straightforward simplicity and directness as ever, ‘Oh, that’s easy enough. I had a few hundred pounds of my own,’ she said quietly, without any attempt at dressing it up in fine words, ‘money that I got for the furniture and goodwill of the house, and had saved while I was keeping it. Cecil wanted capital, so I put my little all into Cecil’s business. The business went well, and to-day I’m a partner. That’s all. It’s quite natural. There’s no mystery in it anywhere. I’m part proprietor of the light, and the motor, and the mines, and the waterworks. I belong to the syndicate. Whatever Cecil has started since he went to the States, I’ve borne an equal share in and drawn an equal dividend. It’s my own propert
y.’
As she spoke the music ceased, and the Duke, released by his Dowager, strolled over to join them. Basil noticed there was a keen, cat-like look in his eyes as he came up to where they were talking.
‘What’s that, Linda?’ he asked sharply, with a suspicious glance at Basil, who had been so close in conference with his wife while the song was being sung. ‘An equal share in what? Who have you and Maclaine been discussing together?’
‘I was telling him of my relation with Cecil’s undertakings,’ Linda answered, unabashed. ‘I was explaining how I came to be connected at first with the light and the motor.’
‘Oh, that’s it, is it?’ the Duke answered, mollified. ‘Well, that’s all very interesting in its way, no doubt, and I’m sorry to disturb your conversation with a former acquaintance’ — he glanced a look of instant dismissal at Basil— ‘but I want to take you over to a very old friend of my family, the Duchess of Munster, who’s anxious to know you — a dear old lady, Linda, so mind you’re about as nice as you know how to her.’
‘Well, good-evening, Mr. Maclaine,’ Linda said, taking her husband’s arm to move across the room, like one to the manner born. ‘If I don’t see you again, remember me to Mr. Harrison.’
But as she went, Basil somehow divined from the movement of the Duke’s lips that he was saying to his wife, a trifle huskily:
‘What on earth did you mean by talking with that man so long? And where or how on earth did you ever come to know him?’
As Basil Maclaine drove home that evening in his hired brougham his feelings were somewhat mixed and of diverse pleasurableness.
On the one hand, he felt it was a distinct point to hobnob with a Duchess. On the other hand, he felt it was a matter for regret that he had refused to marry that Duchess himself when she was a London lodging-house keeper. And yet, to be logical, if he had married her, then she would never have been a Duchess; and in that case he would never have so enlarged his acquaintance with our old nobility. Once more, it was a point to have refused to propose to a girl whom a British Duke thought worthy of his exalted alliance. But, per contra, it made a man feel rather a fool that he should have thought a future Duchess a cut or so too low for him. On the whole, Basil Maclaine emerged from his self-examination proud but ashamed. He was one to the good, to be sure, in dignity; but one to the bad in judgment of women.
A single other fact, however, struck him with immense surprise when he came to reflect upon it. Linda had never bound him to a pledge of secrecy. Now, if he himself had been in Linda’s place, and had met someone whom he knew in his former larval stage, his very first impulse would have been to beg and implore that person not to expose his past — in short, not to tell upon him. But Linda, poor simpleton! had done nothing of the sort. The idea hadn’t even so much as occurred to her. She behaved as if she had always been an American heiress — as if there was nothing to forget, nothing to conceal, nothing to deny, nothing to gloss over. Incredible as it seemed, she wasn’t ashamed of herself. Basil Maclaine, who would have died in her place sooner than have it known he had once been connected with a lodging-house, was thunderstruck at her carelessness. But for that very reason he admired and respected her for it.
Whether it was the diamonds, or whether it was the title, or whether it was that magnificent tone of public tittle-tattle, he couldn’t quite decide in his own mind; but, for the first time in his life, he felt himself thoroughly in love with Linda.
What a fool he had been! What a chance he had thrown away! That queenly woman that everybody in the room so admired and praised! And she might once have been his, but he pooh-poohed the thought of it.
And he would have done so still — if she were still at Clandon Street.
CHAPTER XXIII.
DOUGLAS WONDERS.
Though it was late when Basil returned to his chambers that evening, resplendent, he found both the Harrisons sitting up over the fire in close conference. Douglas, in his loose old velveteen smoking coat, had been out to a bachelor party in the Temple; and Hubert, hot from the office of the Daily Telephone, where he had been dashing off, against time, next morning’s leader on the attitude of the Government towards the Cornish Allotments Bill, had dropped round, after hours, at his brother’s room, to discuss an important crisis in his own fortunes.
Basil burst in upon them big with his news.
‘Well, I’ve been to the Simpsons’!’ he cried. ‘An awfully swell affair — the crush of the season — and I’ve seen the Duchess of Powysland — this new one — the American; and who on earth do you fellows think she is? It quite took my breath away. You’ll never guess, Harrison!’
Douglas looked up with an amused smile. It was nothing new for him to see Basil Maclaine so engrossed by his latest smart acquaintance. He fancied this effervescence based itself entirely on the bare fact of another introduction to another new peeress.
‘According to the journals of our country,’ he answered gravely, ‘upon whose sources of information, in Hubert’s presence, it would ill become me to cast a passing doubt, she’s the sister of Amberley, the New York electrician, and the grand-daughter of Martin van Buren, the President.’
‘Oh yes,’ Basil replied, with the infinite condescension of superior knowledge, caressing his orchid. ‘Of course I know all that. She’s the Amberley motor, right enough, no doubt. That’s common property long ago. But you’d never find out who she really is if you guessed till Doomsday. So I won’t keep you on tenterhooks. Well, the new Duchess is — Linda, my dear fellow — Linda Figgins!’
If a thunderbolt had fallen into their midst, as they sat there smoking over the embers of their fire, Douglas Harrison could not have been more surprised and astonished than at this startling news.
‘Impossible!’ he cried, starting up incredulously. ‘You must be mistaken, Maclaine. Somebody like her, perhaps; but your eyes have deceived you.’
‘Not a bit of it,’ Basil answered, proud to show off the full extent of his acquaintance with our magnates, even the newest made, if only the genuine Mint-mark pattern. ‘I was presented to her in due form — Powysland himself presented me; and I talked to her confidentially for half an hour, and heard all her past history, and what she’s been doing meanwhile over yonder in America. And Amberley himself’s just Cecil Figgins, our old gas-pipe landlord! And Linda was graciousness incarnate, in diamonds and rubies, and she sent her very kind regards to both you Harrisons.’
Douglas gasped for breath, and clutched his chair for support.
‘You really mean it, Maclaine?’ he asked, half inarticulately. ‘You’re not taking me in? You’re not playing tricks upon me?’
‘Honour bright, I assure you,’ Basil answered, delighted at the sensation his news had caused. ‘No ghosts! No doubles! It was Linda herself, not any spurious imitation. They went to New York, and they called themselves Amberley, and then — —’
‘Why, I remember, I remember!’ Douglas interposed, with a burst of sudden recollection. ‘She sometimes signed herself Linda Amberley Figgins. And I fancy she once said something to me implying that Figgins was only her mother’s name, but that it went with the goodwill of the house, so to speak, and therefore they’d stuck to it. So it’s Cecil, then, who’s made all these wonderful discoveries that everybody’s talking about! It’s Cecil who’s invented the light and the motor! Well, I always thought we all of us immensely underrated Cecil.’
‘Oh yes, he’s made enormous sums of money,’ Basil went on with warmth, pursuing the subject from his own point of view, ‘and taken quite a leading position in New York society, and got the run of the very best houses, and married his sister at last at the little church round the corner — which seems, from all I can hear, to be a sort of Transatlantic St. George’s, Hanover Square — to an English Duke in search of millions.’
Douglas Harrison sank back in his chair very pale and white. He saw Basil was quite in earnest now, and that his circumstantial report admitted of no possible doubt.
‘Te
ll me all about her,’ he cried, with quivering lips. ‘She’s really married, then — and married to Powysland?’
Basil threw himself carelessly into his own place on the sofa, silk flaps and all, lighted a cigarette from Harrison’s case, and proceeded to detail the whole story of his meeting with this new glorified and diamond-bedizened avatar of Linda. Douglas Harrison listened in an agony of regret. As Basil spoke, the one hope of his life faded away from him utterly by slow degrees. Impossible as it seemed, he had always cherished that last faint daydream of going to America, hunting up Linda, when she had recovered from the shock of Basil Maclaine’s treatment, and winning her heart in the end, that he might make her happy. And now she was married — inconceivably married — married to a gambler, a rake, and a spendthrift — and his life henceforth was left unto him desolate.
‘What on earth could ever have made her do it?’ he gasped out at last, when Basil ceased talking. ‘I can’t imagine Linda marrying such a man as the Duke.’
Basil stared at him, open-eyed.
‘What on earth could ever have made her do it, my dear boy?’ he cried, astonished. ‘Why, even you, though you don’t know the world, Harrison, must surely know any girl in her position would simply jump at such a catch as Powysland. “What on earth made her do it!” Why, what on earth would induce her to miss such a chance if once she got it? She’s rich, very rich, of course; as rich as Crœsus. She invested her little savings from the beginning in Cecil’s concerns — Arizona, Montana, mines, electricity — and now she’s a half-partner in the light and the motor, and the ranches and the railways, and heaven only knows how many other first-class investments. She has founders’ shares enough to roll in, and she was covered to-night with a perfect blaze of the most lovely diamonds. Well, what has she left to wish for, then, but position, title, rank, a settled place in society? All those an English Duke could best give her. At that precise juncture of affairs, Powysland steers the waterlogged craft of his fortunes across to America in search of an heiress, and heaves in sight of Linda, gilded all over with the Amberley millions. He falls in love with her, of course; what on earth could be more natural? You and I both did the same in our time, without the money. She’s a beautiful woman — more beautiful now than ever, I think, and when her complexion’s well set off by her improved costume — —’
