by Grant Allen
Paul shifted a little uncomfortably in his pea-jacket. This cynic had clearly devoted all his energies to the study and comprehension of his fellow-creatures, and he read them, it seemed, a trifle too easily In such a man’s hands, who was safe for a moment? Paul was afraid what the fellow might screw and worm out of him.
“The funniest thing of all.” Armitage went on, after a short pause, “is that she speaks all languages well, but none exactly like a born native. Her English’s splendid; but her rs and ths are a trifle German. Her French is good; but her us and her eus are a trifle English. Her German’s prodigious; but her chs and her final gs are scarcely Hanoverian. And she can’t talk in any one of those languages for five minutes at a stretch without helping herself out now and again quite naturally by a word from another.”
“Perhaps,” Paul said, “she lived as a child in all three countries.”
“Perhaps so,” Annitage repeated. “But there’s no evidence. However, I mean in my case to clear up her history. I was writing last night to a friend of mine, a parson, who knows Mr. Blair — he’s the vicar of Hipsley near Hillborough, in Surrey—” he eyed his man close to see the effect upon him—” and I’ve asked him to find out all he can about her.”
“Indeed!” Paul said, never showing surprise by a muscle of his face. “I wonder you care to take so much pains about so unimportant a piece of intelligence.”
“Oh, for the girl’s sake, don’t you know,” Armitage added hastily. “Of course, she’s hardly a proper person to have charge of a young lady alone on the Continent. Besides, one naturally likes to know what sort of company one’s committing oneself to, doesn’t one?”
“I don’t think it much matters, as long as they’re decent people,” Paul answered evasively.
“Ah, but that’s just the question at issue,” Armitage went on, trying another tack. “My manat Hillborough will hunt it all up. He’s a capital hand at tracking people down. He ought to have been a detective. By the way, I fancy I heard Miss Blair say you came yourself from somewhere near Hillborough.”
“I came from Hillborough town,” Paul answered shortly. “Then you know Rimington, of course.”
“No, I’ve never met him.”
“Dear me, how odd! He’s a vicar at Hipsley. And he’s so very much répandu, as the French say. Spread about at every tea-fight and lunch and garden-party for twenty miles everywhere around Hillborough.”
“Yes.”
“Yes, really. You must have seen him. Though perhaps, you took him for a layman or a trainer’s assistant. A bulldoggy-looking parson — a regular slogger, with a taste for loud tweeds and a most unclerical necktie.”
“Oh, I know him well by sight,” Paul answered in haste. “I only meant I’d never spoken to him.”
Armitage altered the venue once more. “I’ve been down in that part of the world myself,” he went on reflectively, “and I don’t remember to have met any Gascoynes there.”
“Most likely not,” Paul answered with energy.
“You spell your name like the Pembrokeshire people,” his persecutor went on. “It’s a very rare way. Do you happen to be related to them?”
Thus brought to bay, Paul answered “Yes,” with a very great effort, and then relapsed into silence.
But Armitage was not going to let him off so cheap. “You don’t mean to say so!” he exclaimed, with real interest, for the scent was growing very warm now. “Then what relation are you to the present baronet?”
There was no escape from it any longer. Paul gasped for breath. “Mr. Armitage,” he said, turning suddenly upon him, like a hunted creature at bay, “you’ve no right to question a stranger like this. My private affairs are my private affairs. I refuse to answer. I decline to say what relation I am to the present Sir Emery.”
He slipped out the words without weighing them well. Armitage leapt upon them with the true joy of the chase. “The present Sir Emery!” he exclaimed with much irony. “Why, that’s a queer thing to say. You must be very ill-informed as to the history of your own family, it seems, Gascoyne. I should be sorry to pit my information against yours; but I was under the impression, shared I believe by society at large, that the late Sir Emery was the last of the name, and that the property in Pembrokeshire had gone to a distant cousin, who’s not a baronet at all, Mrs. Newton tells me.”
No man can stand having his veracity impugned by such an obvious innuendo of falsehood as that. Paul Gascoyne drew a deep breath once more and answered warmly, “There you have been misinformed. It’s not my business to set you right. You can correct your mistake by looking in a peerage. But if you must know, the present baronet is my father, Sir Emery Gascoyne, and he lives at Hillborough.”
Armitage gazed at the flushed young face and angry eyes in blank astonishment. Apparently, the fellow believed what he said; but how absurd, how incredible! This scallywag the heir to the Gascoyne baronetcy and the Pembrokeshire estates! What blunder could he have made? What error of identity? What mistake of fact? What confusion of persons?
However, being a very politic young man, and having now obtained all the information he wanted or was likely to get, he hastened to answer, in his most soothing tones, “Dear me! I must have been misinformed. I fancied I’d heard so. A very great family, the Gascoynes of Pembrokeshire. I stopped once down at — at your uncle’s place,” and he glanced inquiringly at Paul, who fronted him angrily; “what a magnificent house and so well kept, too, with such lovely gardens!”
“Old Sir Emery was not my uncle,” Paul answered curtly. “I never saw him. But the subject’s one I don’t care to talk about.”
At the top of the hill they changed partners. Armitage, all agog with his news, took Isabel Boyton ahead quickly. “Well, I’ve found out who he is,” he cried, with triumph in his face; “or, at least, what he calls himself. Now’s your chance for that English title, after all, Miss Boyton. He tells me his father’s a real live baronet.”
“He’s quite nice,” Isabel answered, gravely digesting the news, “and I don’t know that he mightn’t fit the place. I hook on to him, Mr. Armitage.”
The Englishman smiled at her credulous simplicity. A baronet’s son! That threadbare scallywag!
They returned by the inland road in varying moods. Paul, hot with the thought that that horrid secret would now get abroad all over Mentone and make him the laughing-stock of the Promenade du Midi, went home alone to the Hôtel Continental. Armitage burst radiant into the Jardin Public, big with his latest item of gossip.
He found Mme. Ceriolo equally excited with her own discovery.
“Just fancy,” she said, as he sat down by her side; “figurezvous, mon ami, you saw that woman Mr. Gascoyne bowed to the moment he left us? Well, who in the world do you suppose she is? A lady’s maid — a lady’s maid at the Iles Britanniques! And he raised his hat to her exactly like an equal!”
“And who do you think he is himself?” Armitage cried, all eagerness. “You’ll never guess. It’s too absurd. He says his father’s a British baronet.”
“Oh, no,” Nea Blair exclaimed, flushing hot with a burst of sympathetic shame. “He never said that! He told me quite the contrary. It can’t be possible.”
“He did, honor bright, I give you my word for it,” Armitage answered, exploding. “He’s the heir to the finest estate in all South Wales, and he’s the last descendant of an ancient and noble family that came over, like the Slys, with Richard the Conqueror.”
“I don’t believe it,” Nea exclaimed stoutly; meaning, not that she disbelieved Paul, but disbelieved the report of his ever having said so.
“No more do I, Miss Blair, if you ask my honest opinion,” Armitage answered, laughing. “I expect his uncle’s the same sort of baronet as the unfortunate nobleman who lately languished so long in Portland Prison.”
“There’s a good deal of doubt about baronetcies, I believe,” Mme. Ceriolo mused to herself aloud. “They’re not so regularly looked into as peerages. And I’m given to underst
and there are a great many baronets knocking about loose on the world at present, who have no more claim to be called Sir Somebody So-and-so, than I have to be called — well, the Queen of England.”
Very dangerous ground for you, Mme. Ceriolo!
CHAPTER VII.
SIR EMERY AND LADY GASCOYNE AT HOME.
SIR EMERY GASCOYNE, Baronet, sat in his own easy-chair in front of his own fireplace at Hillborough, Surrey. It was evening, and Sir Emery rested after his day’s labors. He had been out driving from two in the afternoon, and it was cold winter weather for holding the reins, for Sir Emery always drove himself. He had ample reason. His fingers were numbed and cramped with driving. He found it difficult, indeed, to enter in a book a few notes he was endeavoring to make of his afternoon’s engagements. “’Ere, Faith, girl,” the British baronet called to his daughter in the adjoining room, “I can’t ‘old pen. Come along and enter them drives to-day, will you? I’m most clemmed with cold, it’s that keen and bitter up o’ Kent’s ‘ill this weather.”
“Just wait a minute, father, dear,” Faith answered cheerily, from the kitchen behind. “I’m coming directly. We’re hotting up some soup for your supper, here, mother and I. It’s lovely soup, darling, and it’ll thaw you out just beautifully as soon as you drink it.”
The voice was a voice like her brother’s own — soft and sweet, with a delicate intonation that made each syllable clear and distinct as the notes of a bell. Sir Emery listened to it with a fatherly smile, for he loved her well. “God bless that girl!” he said to himself, laying down the pen he could scarcely wield. “It’s a comfort to ‘ear ‘er. She do make a man glad with that pretty, small voice of ‘ers.”
Sir Emery’s room was neither large nor handsomely furnished. It was entered direct from the street by a buff-colored door, and it led by a second similar one into the kitchen behind it. The center of the apartment was occupied by a square table, with flaps at the side, covered with that peculiar sort of deep-brown oil cloth which is known to the initiated as American leather. A sideboard stood against the further wall, decorated with a couple of large spiky shells and a spotted dog in dark red-and-white china. The spotted dog Faith had attempted, more than once, surreptitiously to abolish, but Sir Emery always brought it back again to its place in triumph: it had been his mother’s, he said, and he was sort of attached to it. A couple of cane-bottomed chairs, a small horse-hair couch, and the seat which Sir Emery himself occupied, completed the furniture of the Baronet’s reception-room.
And yet there were not wanting, even in that humble home, some signs of feminine taste and æsthetic culture. The spotted dog was an eyesore that Faith could never quite get rid of; but the cheap porcelain vases, with the red and blue bouquets painted crudely on their sides, and the pink paper flowers stuck into their yawning mouths, she had sternly and successfully repressed some months ago. In their place two simple little monochromatic jars of Linthorpe pottery were installed on the mantelpiece, and some sprigs of green and late-lingering chrysanthemums usurped the former throne of the pink-paper monstrosities. The curtains were plain, but of a pretty cretonne; the covering of Sir. Emery’s chair itself was neat and cheerful; and the antimacassar on the couch, worked in simple crewels, had at least the negative merit of unobtrusiveness and harmony. Altogether one could easily see at a glance it was a working man’s cottage of the superior sort, kept neat and sweet by loving and tasteful hands, which did all in their power to relieve and diversify its necessary monotony.
For the British baronet was not known as Sir Emery at all to his friends and neighbors, but simply and solely as Gascoyne the Flyman. Most of them had heard, indeed, in a vague and general way, that if everybody had his rights, as poor folk ought to have, Martha Gascoyne would have been My Lady and the flyman himself would have ridden in a carriage through the handsomest park in the county of Pembroke. But, as to calling him anything but plain Gascoyne — him the driver they had known so well from his childhood, when he played in the street with them all as children — why, it should have no more occurred to those simple souls than it occurs to any of us to address the ordinary familiar descendant of Welsh or Irish princes as “Your Highness” or “Your Majesty.”
Sir Emery knocked the ashes out of his black clay pipe, and waited patiently for the advent of his soup. As soon as it arrived he ate it heartily, at the same time dictating to Faith the various items of his day’s engagements (for at Hillborough long credit businesses were the order of the day): “Cab from the station, Mrs. Morton, one-and-six; put it two shillin’; she’ll never pay till Christmas twelvemonth! To Kent’s ‘ill an’ back, Cap’en Lloyd, ‘arf a suverin’; no, ‘arf a suverin’s not a penny too much, missus; and then to the Birches, Mrs. Boyd-Galloway; that lot’s worth ‘alf-a-crown, Faith. If ever we see the color of ‘er money, ‘arf-a-crown’s not a farden too ‘igh for it.”
Faith entered the items dutifully as she was bid, and laid down the ledger with a sigh as soon as they were finished. “I can’t bear to think, father,” she said, “you have to go out driving cold nights like these, and at your age, too, when you ought to be sitting home here comfortably by the fire.”
“I can’t abear to think it myself, neither,” Mrs. Gascoyne echoed — for why keep up, now we’re in the bosom of the family, the useless farce of describing her as my lady? It was only in the respected works of Debrett and Burke that she figured under that unfamiliar and noble designation. To all the neighbors in Plowden’s Court she was nothing more than plain Mrs. Gascoyne, who, if everybody had their rights, would no doubt have been a real live lady.
The baronet stirred the fire with meditative pokes.
“It’s a wonderful pity,” he murmured philosophically, “that nothing couldn’t never be done in the way of makin’ money out of that there baronite-cy. It’s a wonderful pity that after all them years we should be livin’ on ’ere, missus, the same as usual, a-drivin’ a cab day an’ night for a livelihood, when we’re acshally an’ in point of law an’ fac’ baronites of the United Kingdom. It beats me ‘ow it is we can’t make money out of it.”
“I always think,” Mrs. Gascoyne responded, taking out her knitting, “that you don’t understan’ ‘ow to do it, Emery.”
“Mother, dear!” Faith said low, in a warning voice, for she knew only too well whither this prelude inevitably tended.
The baronet of the United Kingdom slowly filled his pipe once more, as he finished the soup and poured himself out a glassful of beer from the jug at his elbow. “It can’t be done,” he answered confidently. “There aint no doubt about that, it can’t be done. It stands to reason it can’t. If it could be done, Mr. Solomons ‘ud ‘a done it, you warrant you, long ago.”
“This aint ‘ow you’d ought to be livin’ at your age, though, Emery,” Mrs. Gascoyne went on, sticking to her point. “If we only knowed ‘ow, we’d ought to be making money out of it some ‘ow.”
“Mr. Solomons is a rare clever man,” the baronet replied, puffing vigorously away at the freshly lighted pipe. “Wot I say is this, missus, if it could ‘a been done, Mr. Solomons ‘ud ‘a done it.”
Faith made a bid for a gentle diversion.
“I met Mr. Solomons this evening,” she said, “as I was coming home from school, and he told me to tell you he’d look in on business to-morrow morning, before you went down to meet the 10.40.”
“You’re tired, Faith,” her father said, eying her kindly.
Faith smoothed back the hair from her high white forehead — so like her brother’s.
“Only a little bit, father,” she answered with rather a wearied smile. “It’s the Infants that are so tiring. They wear one out. They don’t mean to be worries, poor little souls, of course; but they do distract one a bit sometimes.”
“I wish you was well quit of them Infants,” Mrs. Gascoyne remarked, “and cord’d ‘and them over to the pupil-teachers. The big girls don’t give no trouble at all, in the manner of speaking, by the side of the little ones. It’s when
you’ve took the Infants, I always take notice, you comes ‘ome most worn and tired-like.”
“Oh, it’s nothing,” Faith answered, taking her mother’s hand in hers and soothing it gently. “It’ll be over soon for this term — the holidays begin on Wednesday. And when I think of father, driving out in the cold on Kent’s Hill this weather, I’m ashamed of myself to think I ever complain a word about the Infants.”
“They’re rarely trying, them Infants, I’ll be bound,” her father continued, philosophically slow. “I mind what it was myself, when you was all little ones, you an’ Paul an’ the rest, afore we buried ‘Ope and Charity, playin’ around among the ‘osses’ feet, an’ kickin’ up that row that a man couldn’t ‘ardly ‘ear to take a order. Charity was a rare one to make a noise, she was; she was the biggest o’ the three, when you was all born; for ‘the greatest o’ these,’ says the parson, ’is Charity.’ And wot it must be to ‘ave twenty or thirty of ’em, all to once, a-cryin’ and a-chatterin’, why, it beats everything.”
