Mary Gray Part 12

She would go on till the company had departed, and Lady Agatha would come to her side, laughing, and ask her what horrible feudal theories she had been propounding. The two differed on every point but one, and that was in the mere matter of loving each other. Lady Agatha delighted in her cousin's conservatism; and always said she would not have it otherwise if she could. It was a _sauce piquante_ to the dish of their daily lives.

"You shan't lead Mary astray," she would say with pretended indignation.

"If she knew the things Sir Michael has been saying about her!"

"My dear Agatha, don't _you_ go leading her astray. Politics are no _metier_ for a woman, or they should be subservient to something else.

Go marry, Agatha, and bring children into the world, and when you have reared them you can set up a political salon and theorise about the regeneration of humanity. Let Miss Gray do likewise. You play with these things when you are young--later on you will find them dry bones."

"Dear me!" Lady Agatha said, with admiration. "What a pity she isn't with us, Mary! What a pity she is only a destructive critic! Don't listen to her, child!"

That first evening of their meeting Sir Robin Drummond had come to Mary's side and turned the page of her music while she sang. She had a fresh and sweet voice, although of no great range or compa.s.s, and she could sing, without music, song after song of the old English masters, of Arne and Purcell and Bishop, and their delightful school.

"She brings strawberries and cream to town," said someone who was not particularly imaginative.

Mary was conscious of the young man's scrutiny as he turned her pages, and it embarra.s.sed her, but she made no sign.

Afterwards she met Sir Robin many times. He was at this time the adopted candidate for an East-End const.i.tuency, and was becoming well known as an advanced politician. He went further than his party, indeed, and somewhat offended even his particular _clientele_ by the breadth of his views. He and Lady Agatha were at this time engaged in the work of organising labour, especially amongst the girls and women of the worst-paid and most dangerous trades. It brought them often together amid forlorn habitations and hopeless humanity. One of the difficulties was the question of whether the alien women should be brought in. "They will join the Union and they will go on underselling all the same," said someone. But Sir Robin was of those who held that the alien should have equal rights with her English sister, and that it was possible to teach her to stand on her feet like one of the free-born. He was not chary of his denunciations of certain methods among the Trade Unions and the Trade Unionists, and therefore a crowd sometimes howled him down. But there was always a minority at least to stand by him, and the minority included the industrious and sober, the honest and thinking, among those he desired to help.

By-and-by he fell into a quiet friendliness with Mary Gray. He used to take charge of the ladies when they went into the East End. Lady Agatha used to say that he was a drag on the wheel, because he would not let her do imprudent things, because he would veto it when a question of their going into dangerous streets or houses or rooms, because he insisted on their leaving by a side door a meeting which was becoming turbulent, because he was always forbidding some extravagance or other of her Ladys.h.i.+p's.

"There is one thing about that young man," said Mrs. Morres, who was chary of praise of her Ladys.h.i.+p's party: "he has excellent common-sense, and I thank Heaven for it."

"Ah, yes; he has excellent common-sense," Lady Agatha echoed, with a ruefulness which made Mary laugh suddenly.

"You ought to marry him, my dear," Mrs. Morres went on, looping another st.i.tch of the endless crochet.

"Marry Bob Drummond!" Lady Agatha repeated. "Marry Bob Drummond! Why, it is the last thing in the world I should dream of doing."

One evening, just at the end of the season, someone brought the latest lion to a small reception at Lady Agatha Chenevix's. He was a very modest and retiring lion, a quiet, very bronzed young man, who wore his arm in a sling. He had had his shoulder torn in an encounter with an African leopard. He had fought almost hand to hand with the beast over the body of a Kaffir servant, and had rescued the man at the cost of his own life, it seemed at first, later on of his right arm. It was doubtful whether the strength and vitality of it would ever be restored.

He was not merely a brave man, however, this Mr. Jardine. He had gone to the Gold Coast, and from there into Central Africa, inspired, in the first place, by the desire of knowledge and love of adventure. But, amid the thrilling adventures and hairbreadth escapes, there had grown up in his heart the liveliest interest in and sympathy with the people he found himself amongst. He discovered that they had an ancient civilisation of their own. To be sure, what remained of it hung in shreds and patches on some of them; but there were others, civilised after a fas.h.i.+on, which was not the Western one. He discovered traditions, folk-lore, ancient poetry, laws, a wealth of customs.

Understanding the people, he came to love them. They interested him profoundly. He was going back to them as soon as he could.

He stayed after the other guests, and was yet talking eagerly to his hostess when the dressing-bell rang.

"We dine alone," Lady Agatha said to the old friend who had brought Mr.

Jardine. "And I go nowhere afterwards: I am f.a.gged out. How glad I am that next week sees us at Hazels! If you and Mr. Jardine could dine, Colonel Brind?"

The old friend answered her wistful look.

"Our lodgings are not far off; we have only to jump into a hansom; we should be back before the dinner-bell rings. Only--this fellow has a host of engagements."

"Ah!"

Lady Agatha had hardly sighed when Jardine woke up as if from a dream.

"Have I engagements?" he asked. "I do not remember any. Anyhow, I am a convalescent, and the privileges of convalescence are mine. I vote for that hansom, Brind."

After dinner they sat around the fire and talked. Although it was June, it had been a sunless day of arid east wind, and Lady Agatha, who always s.n.a.t.c.hed at the least excuse for a fire because it was so beautiful, had ordered one to be lit. The three long windows were open beyond the red leather screen that made a cosy corner of the fireplace, and the scent of flowers came in from the balcony.

Paul Jardine talked as much as they desired him to talk. He started on his hobby about those West African peoples, and rode it with spirit and energy. His friend laughed at him.

"Why, Jardine," he said, "I can never again call you the lion that will not roar."

"Am I horribly loquacious?" The hero smiled, but was not more silent. He had great things to tell, and he told them well and modestly. Lady Agatha sat with her cheek shaded by a peac.o.c.k-feather fan. There was a deep glow in her eyes. Glancing across at her from the opposite corner, Mary thought it must be the reflection of the firelight.

She came to Mary's room after the guests had departed, when Mary was preparing for bed, and sat down in the chair by the open window.

"What do you think of him, Mary?" she asked.

"Of whom?" Mary said sleepily. They had met a good many people during the day, so the question was a pardonable one.

"Of whom! Why, of Mr. Jardine! Who else could it be?"

She lifted her arms about her head, and the loose white sleeves of her gown fell away from their roundness and softness.

"What a man!" she said, with a long sigh. "What a man! That is life, if you like. How tame the others seem beside him!"

"He roared very gently," said Mary, "but it was very exciting."

"Yes, wasn't it? That sail in the canoe down the river, with the jungle on each side of them alive with wild beasts and venomous reptiles, to say nothing of cannibals, and deadly sicknesses worse than any of those.

He said so little about the danger. One got an impression of the extraordinary languorous beauty of the tropical vegetation; one smelt it, that African night, with its enormous moon beyond the mists. There was death on every side of him, in every breath he drew. He found what he went for, the antidote to the bite of the death's-head spider.

Henceforth life in those lat.i.tudes will be robbed of one of its terrors.

What a man!"

"It is a pity that we could not have heard him at the Royal Society,"

Mary said, with a little yawn--they had been keeping late hours. "If it had been a day or two earlier!"

"But I am going," said Lady Agatha. "Why, Mary, it is only to alter our arrangements by a day. Hazels--the dear place--will keep for a day longer."

CHAPTER XII

HER LADYs.h.i.+P

At Hazels Mary found her duties more onerous than they had been in town.

It was delightful to see Lady Agatha among her own people. She had made life easier for them. Mary marvelled at the prettiness of the red-brick farmhouses, with roses and honeysuckle to their eaves. She could never get over the feeling that it was only a picture. They would walk or drive to them, and the farmer's wife would come out and beg her Ladys.h.i.+p to come in for a gla.s.s of cowslip wine; and she and Mary would go in to a rather dark parlour--to be sure, the windows were smothered in jessamine and roses and honeysuckle--and sit down in chairs covered in flowery chintz, and sip the fragrant wine and eat the home-made cake, while the topics of interest between landlord and tenant were discussed.

Then the farmer would come in himself, hat in hand, and his eyes would light up at the sight of the visitor, and there would be more pleasant homely talk of cattle and crops, and the harvest and the plans for the autumn sowing, and the state of fairs and markets.

There was Nuthatch Village, which seemed to have stepped out of Morland's pictures. It was all so pretty and peaceful, with its red gabled cottages sending up their blue spirals of smoke into the overhanging boughs of great trees. Mary cried out in delight at the quaint dormers, with their diamond panes, at the wooden fronts, at the gardens chockfull of the gayest and most old-fas.h.i.+oned flowers.

"As for prettiness," said Lady Agatha, "it isn't a patch on Highercombe, a mile away, and, what is more, I've done more than anyone else to spoil its prettiness. I've filled in the pond and driven the swan and the water-hen to other haunts. I've given them a new water-supply and done away with the most picturesque pump, which was sunk in 1770 by Dame Elizabeth Chenevix. I've put new grates and new floors into the houses, and I've seen to it that all windows open and shut. The pity of it is that I can't compel them to make use of their privilege of opening.

Also, I've introduced cowls on the chimneys. My friend, Lionel Armytage, the painter, lifted his hands in horror at my doings. I'd have liked to get at the chimneys, but I'd have had to pull down every cottage in the place to rectify them. Oh, I've spoilt Nuthatch, there's not a doubt of it. You must see Highercombe."

"The children seem healthy," Mary said thoughtfully, "and the old people walk straighter than one sees them often."