Capricious Caroline Part 52

"Oh, don't let us talk such nonsense!" she exclaimed, and she moved away, but he followed her.

"It is not nonsense," he spoke irritably. "I have established myself as your guardian, and by my mother's will you are bequeathed to my care, therefore I have a right to put questions to you which might seem impertinent if asked by anybody else."

"I think Mrs. Brenton makes a mistake," said Caroline, still walking on.

"In what way?"

"Sir Samuel is an old friend of the house, he has been in the habit of coming here freely, I understand; why, therefore, should it be supposed that he comes now only because of me?"

"I don't know why, but I hope to G.o.d he does not come for that reason!"

His voice grew harder. "You know what I think of this man; I have spoken to you freely about him, and, better than that, your own instinct, which has carried you to such rare judgments, must tell you that he is no fit a.s.sociate for a girl. I was going to say for any decent woman."

Caroline was silent for a long time. Suddenly she said--

"All women are unreasonable, you know; that is a tradition, and sometimes they see things in a light that is hidden to you men. I don't suppose Sir Samuel is a paragon of perfection, but, at the same time, I don't think he is half so bad as he has been painted. At least he is very harmless, and rather amusing."

Rupert Haverford looked at her, and a great amazement which bordered on pain took possession of him.

"You like him?" he said, going to the point in his peculiarly direct way.

Caroline shrugged her shoulders.

"I really think I do, but I am not sure; at any rate, I don't bother myself about it very much." Her tone was flippant. "How you _do_ love catechising!" she said. It might have been Camilla speaking.

They pa.s.sed up the garden again in silence; beyond the wide expanse of lawn the house stood hospitably open. Lights gleamed everywhere, Mr.

Brenton's tall figure with stooping shoulders was coming slowly towards them.

"Well," Haverford said, in a cold, dry way, "if you regard him in this uncertain way it is easier for me to act."

Caroline looked round sharply. There was indignation in her tone.

"How do you mean ... act?"

"I mean I shall take steps to prevent this acquaintance from becoming an intimate one. However much it may annoy you, the fact remains that I am your guardian, and that until you are twenty-one you are not free to do anything of which I do not approve, and I a.s.suredly do _not_ approve of your friends.h.i.+p with this man."

Caroline paused and caught her breath.

"This surveillance," she said coldly, "is not only very ridiculous, it is very objectionable. You may arrogate to yourself a certain authority where my money is concerned, but in the matter of choosing my friends I demand absolute liberty. Please understand I can recognize no law you may make in this." She stood a few seconds, then she said "Good night"

abruptly, and she walked away from him quickly. Indeed, halfway across the lawn she broke into a run, and had gained the house almost before he realized she was gone.

Mr. Brenton called out something to her as she pa.s.sed him so fleetly, but she made no answer.

"What's wrong with Caroline?" he asked as he reached Rupert Haverford.

The young man sat down, and did not reply for a moment; then he said shortly--

"I have been speaking to her about Broxbourne."

"Oh!" said Mr. Brenton. He stretched himself comfortably in another chair. "That's what my wife has been putting you up to, I suppose?

Aggie has worked herself into a rare state over this business of Sammy.

You know, my dear fellow," d.i.c.k Brenton said, in his pleasant, tranquil voice, "I don't quite go with you both. I know Sammy is a bit wild, his father was before him, but he will settle down. He's got the nicest old mother in the world. Seems to me he is in earnest."

"The thing is preposterous," said Rupert Haverford, in his decisive way. "I am not speaking of his position, his t.i.tle, or his family; it is the man himself I abhor. I should be sorry to see any woman I care about married to him."

"Well, my experience teaches me," said Mr. Brenton, after a little silence, "that these things right themselves. I don't suppose Caroline gives Sammy two thoughts, but, on the other hand, she may. I am rather sorry you spoke."

"I am not," said Haverford shortly. A moment later he said, "I thought she was unusually sensible, and able to take care of herself; but I see now I have made a mistake."

He was extraordinarily disturbed. If he had not questioned her himself he would not have believed this thing. There had been something so fresh and clear to him about Caroline, she had matched himself in straightforwardness; her word had been charged with truth, and over and again she had given evidence of such unusual qualities that he had unconsciously endowed her with wisdom beyond her years, and regarded her mental outlook as peculiarly well balanced. Not even the great overthrow of his life's sweetest task had moved him more sharply than he was moved now. Indeed, then he had been partially prepared. As he had put it himself to Caroline, he had felt that the creature he loved was slipping gradually but surely out of his grasp; he had been conscious that the b.u.t.terfly he had caught and chained was fluttering restlessly (albeit the chain was a glittering one), and he had nerved himself for the p.r.o.nouncement that his love was wearying, his devotion exacting. And when all this had come, he had met it quietly, as something that was inevitable. But he had suffered none the less.

All things he had expected from Camilla except the thing she had done.

And the astounding conviction of her disloyalty had been hardly more startling than this curious phase of her nature which Caroline had revealed this night.

He had, like Agnes Brenton, found it possible to pardon in Camilla many, many things that would have been unforgivable in others, because he took her mental construction into consideration first of all; because he regarded her as a child, a headstrong, foolish, sweet, irresponsible child, with all the innocence that belongs to extreme youth, and because he knew she had been from the beginning surrounded by the most disastrous influences. And Camilla had shown him how mistaken he had been to treat her with such tender thought.

So now with Caroline. He had placed her apart; he realized now that he had thought of her as something fragrant and beautifying, and with her own lips she had confessed herself capable of a sympathy for a man who was brutal, vulgar, coa.r.s.e in heart and mind.

Were all women so framed? Or was it merely his destiny to be denied knowledge of woman in her true personification? The woman of sweetest compa.s.sion and bravest comrades.h.i.+p; that figure of n.o.bility and modesty of whom poets had sung from ages uncounted and for whose purity and honour men had died in centuries gone. His mother had shown him one side of the picture, Camilla the reverse; now Caroline added her touch.

He sat a long time after Mr. Brenton had smoked his cigar and gone indoors. He was both angry and miserable. His feeling, as he had approached Yelverton that evening, had been one nearly akin to pleasure. He was glad to meet Agnes Brenton, glad to see Caroline again; and after the first greeting Mrs. Brenton had swept him into a fresh element for trouble and regret. "The fault is in myself," he mused, "it must be so. I am in my wrong groove; that's what is at the bottom of it all."

He delivered himself up wholly in this moment to that old yearning to shake off the trammels of his present existence, to be stripped of all that made the world envy him.

For a brief while he had sunned himself in the glory of a false paradise, and for that brief while the clamour of his old ambitions had been silenced, the weighty responsibility of his money had been changed into satisfaction. But once that glory had been darkened his spirit had gone back with a rush to the old habits, the old desires.

It was, perhaps, inevitable that he should turn against this environment of wealth and luxury, of soft raiment and cultivated beauty, since he had been taught the hollowness of this social life, since trickery and selfishness, lies and ba.n.a.lities, had swept so destructively across his path. Not that he condemned wholesale; he made distinctions. There was good everywhere. These very people whose guest he was this night were in themselves the surest testimony to that.

Brought in contact now with all sorts and conditions of people, he was quick to recognize that there were hearts as honest and as simple in the ranks of the moneyed cla.s.s as in any other walk of life.

Nevertheless, Haverford's real sympathies were with those who worked; it seemed to him there must always be more possibility for finding gold in the natures of those who toiled and suffered and even died together in their grind to put bread into the mouths of their children, than could be possible to the idlers and the well-cared-for.

Back in the old days he had seen many an evidence of this golden nature packed away in a rough frame, an uncouth personality.

And the women of those old days, was not their history such as to place them apart for honour and admiration? Why, he could bring back memories now of fidelity, and courage, and dogged endurance among those working women that made his eyes wet and his heart thrill as he recalled them.

And he remembered, too, that till this night there had always been something about Caroline Graniger to remind him of those people who had been once so dear to him, to whom his heart still turned, despite their recent churlish treatment of him; who made such a close bond between his boyhood and his present self.

Yes, Caroline had surely possessed something of the simplicity, that quiet, reticent strength of those North Country people. He was conscious now of how much he had relied on her. He got up with a sigh at last, and before he went indoors he made his way to Betty's little garden again. He stooped and touched the rose once more with his lips, but it seemed as if the fragrance had gone from the flower, as if the soft beauty of the garden had lost something. Certain it was that as he slowly moved under the trees he had a sense of loss heavily upon him, as if in the flitting away of that girl's white-robed figure, not merely the little world about him was robbed of a potent charm, but that there had gone with her a sympathy, an influence that all unconsciously had suggested to him consolation.

CHAPTER XVIII

The sea had gone out a long way, and between the tiny digue and the beach there stretched a large expanse of rich wet sand, broken here and there by large smooth pools which reflected as in a mirror the wondrous opalescent colouring of the sky, made inexpressibly glorious by the sinking of the hot, tired sun.

At least Caroline felt that it ought to be tired, it had been s.h.i.+ning so fiercely for so many hours.

She sat in a low canvas chair on the sands, and watched her two small people scampering here and there absolutely regardless of fatigue. They had their dainty clothes pinned up carefully, and their pretty little legs were burnt dark brown. Betty looked quite tall, especially with her sunny hair bunched on her head.