The Making of a Prig Part 5

"We're both the same in reality, Miss Kitty. Only, you are focussing it from one end, and I from another. I mean, you are too abominably young and I am too abominably old, for conversation. We shall have to keep to the favourite poets, after all."

Katharine had come round to the side of the bed, and was regarding him critically, with a very serious look on her face.

"What is the matter?" she asked abruptly. "I hate people to say they are old--when they are nice people. It makes me feel horrid; I don't like it. I never let daddy talk about growing old; it gives me a sort of cold feel, don't you know? I wish you wouldn't. Besides, I am not young, either; I am nearly nineteen. I know I look much younger, because I won't put my hair up; but my skirts are nearly to the ground. What makes you say I am too young to be talked to?"

"I said you were too young for conversation. It is not quite the same thing, is it?"

"Isn't it?" said Katharine, and she looked away out of the window for a full minute. What she saw there she could not have told, but it was something that had never been there before. When she brought her eyes round again to his face, the serious look had gone out of them, and they were twinkling with fun. "I know!" she laughed. "Let's talk without any conversation."

"She's the same woman, after all," was Paul's reflection.

They did not mention the favourite poets again; but they had no difficulty for the rest of the afternoon in finding something to talk about. It was getting late when the garden gate gave its usual warning, and Katharine got up with a sigh.

"When shall I see you again?" he asked. They had not gone through the formality of shaking hands, this time.

"When Aunt Esther has _not_ gone to see a poor woman who has lost her baby," said Katharine, laughing.

"Nonsense! we will keep the letters and the newspaper for that kind of visit. Won't some one else die, don't you think, so that we can have another talk?"

"I'll see," said Katharine, which could not strictly be called an answer to his question. But it fully satisfied Paul.

CHAPTER IV

The weeks crept on; and Paul Wilton, from being merely an object of interest and pity, gradually became the greatest mystery in the neighbourhood. Such a reputation was entirely unsought on his part, although, had he been aware of it, the probability is that it would not have been wholly unpleasing to him. For it had been his pose through life to mystify people,--not by deliberately a.s.suming to be what he was not, but by strenuously avoiding any appearance of what he was; and his indifference, which was what people first noticed in him, was entirely feigned for the purpose of concealing that his real att.i.tude towards life was a critical one. It was not unreasonable that a man of this calibre, suddenly placed in a quiet country parish, should end in making some sort of a sensation there. Miss Esther from the beginning had suffered much, and silently; but a man who had a father in Crockford and a mother in Debrett, was to be forgiven a good deal, and she felt compelled to overlook even the ash of his cigarettes, and his French novels, when she found them both on the chaste counterpane of the best spare-room bed. But there were others in Ivingdon who, not having much of a pedigree themselves, were inclined to undervalue the importance of one; and some of these, the doctor, for instance, and Peter Bunce the churchwarden, came to the Rector for enlightenment.

"Eh, but he doan't give hisself away much, do he, now?" said the churchwarden, jerking his thumb in the direction of the lame man, who had just swung himself past the window on his crutches. "He be proper close, I reckon, eh?"

"He is a very intelligent young man," said the Rector vaguely. "He has quite an appreciation of Oriental china."

It was Sunday afternoon, and the Rector was dispensing whiskey and cigars to his guests, with a prodigality that might have been attributed to Miss Esther's absence at the Sunday school. There was an ease, too, about their manners and their conversation, which was to be traced to the same cause.

"I suppose he's beastly clever, and all that, isn't he?" asked Ted morosely. He was sitting on the window ledge, a convenient position which allowed him to shout occasional answers to the questions that came from Katharine on the other side of the lawn. Just then, however, she was joined by Paul; and Ted knew instinctively that he would have no more questions to answer after that.

"It is difficult to say what he is," observed the doctor. "You can't get him to talk; at least, not much. Generally, when I've done all the professional business, he relapses into total silence, and I just have to go; but sometimes he is inclined to be chatty, and then he makes a delightful companion. But the odd thing is, that I know no more about the man himself at the end of a conversation than I did at the beginning. A barrister, did you say he was? That accounts for the judicial manner, then; but the question is, what is there behind it all?"

No one seemed to have an answer ready to the doctor's question; but Peter Bunce took a long pull at the whiskey, and brushed the cigar ash from his capacious waistcoat, and attacked the subject with fresh vigour.

"There ain't no finding out anything about no one, without you take a bit o' trouble," he remarked wisely. "Mayhap Mr. Austen, yonder, might know a something more than us folk. Hasn't he got never a father, now? There's a won'erful lot to be gathered from knowing of a man's father, there is. Like enough he's one o' they London folk, as daren't speak aloud for fear of its getting into the newspapers.

London folk is mighty well watched, so I've heard; there's never a moment's peace or safety in London, some say. Mayhap Mr. Wilton's father is a London gen'leman, now!"

"His father?" said the Rector, with sudden enthusiasm. "His father was something short of a genius, sir! He is the best authority we have on the numismatics of his neighbourhood. Have you never heard of Wilton's 'Copper Tokens'?"

"Guess we have, sir, pretty often," laughed Ted.

The Rector looked pathetic, and handed him another cigar, with an apprehension that arose from the distant clang of the garden gate.

"They all laugh at me," he said in a cheery tone that evoked no one's pity. "I'm an old fool; oh, yes, we know all about that. But if you had read Wilton's 'Copper Tokens,' you wouldn't want to know who this man's father was. Let me see,--what did I do with my Crockford?"

"I expect you thought it was a hymn-book and carted it up to church this morning," said Ted, in a tone of forced merriment. He still had one eye on the lawn, and what he saw there did not raise his spirits.

"Died at the age of fifty-eight, when his son was a lad of eighteen, he tells me," continued the Rector. "That was the same date that the fifth edition of the 'Copper Tokens' was issued, some ten or fifteen years ago now. Bless me, how time flies when we're not growing any younger!"

For the s.p.a.ce of a moment or two, everybody present was occupied with a mental calculation. The churchwarden was the first to give up the attempt, and he returned doggedly to the original topic.

"Age ain't got nothing to do with it," he began, heaving a sigh of relief as he subst.i.tuted his pipe for the unusual cigar. "'Cause why?

Some folk's old when they're young, and other folk's young when they're old; that's where it lays, you see."

n.o.body did see; but Ted threw in a vicious comment.

"The Lord only knows how old he is, but he's as played out as they make them," he said.

The churchwarden smiled, without understanding, and Cyril Austen was too deep in his Crockford to hear what was pa.s.sing; but the doctor had been young himself, not so long ago, and he understood.

"Does he talk about leaving?" he asked in a casual manner, directing his remark to the boy on the window ledge. "There's nothing to keep him here now, as far as I can see."

"Don't know anything about him," said Ted, with a studied indifference. "I should have thought, from the way Kitty speaks of him, that London couldn't do without him for another moment. What they all see in him, I don't know. I suppose it's because I'm such a rotten a.s.s, but he seems just like anybody else to me as far as brains are concerned. And he can't talk for nuts. But Miss Esther says his family is all square; and that's enough for the women, I suppose."

The doctor nodded sympathetically, and Ted laughed as if he were a little ashamed of taking himself so seriously.

"He's going to make himself scarce on Wednesday," he continued, rather more cordially. "He's got a pal of his coming down on business to-morrow, and they're going off together. Good thing, too, eh? Don't know anything about the pal--he's not any great shakes, I expect; but Wilton swears he knows a lot about coins, and of course that will fetch the Rector. Fact is, this place is getting too clever for me.

There's Kitty, who rots about poetry and things till it makes you sick. She never used to; and it's no good her trying to spoof you that she isn't altered, because she is,--and all for the sake of a chap like Wilton, who hardly ever opens his mouth! It's so poor, isn't it?"

But here the arrival of Miss Esther postponed any further discussion of the Rectory guest. The doctor suddenly remembered that he had a patient to visit, and took an abrupt departure; and the churchwarden refused a curt invitation to tea, and went hastily after him. Ted lingered a moment or two, without being noticed at all; and Miss Esther, having successfully routed her brother's guests, went into the garden to disturb the conversation on the other side of the lawn.

Some two days later, Paul Wilton and his friend from London were pacing up and down the narrow strip of gravel path that skirted the house on the south side. In the absence of Katharine, who had induced him to prolong the period of helplessness, as he would have wished to prolong any other pleasurable sensation, Paul had no reason to play the invalid; and, except for an occasional limp, there was nothing in his walk to indicate lameness. There was the usual inexplicable smile on his face, however, as he listened to the bantering conversation of the man at his side, and occasionally interrupted it with one of his dry, terse remarks. His companion was a little elderly man, with small features and a fresh complexion, whose geniality was the result of temperament rather than of principle, and whose conversation was toned with a personal refrain that made it navely amusing.

"That's a pretty child, by the way," he was saying, with the air of a connoisseur. Katharine had just left them, and they could hear her laughing with her father indoors. Paul murmured an a.s.sent, and went on smoking. His companion glanced at him sideways, and smiled gently.

"Very pretty," he repeated, "but ridiculously young. And who is the charming boy who is so gone on her? She doesn't see it a bit, and he hasn't the pluck to tell her. I'm quite sorry for that boy; I've been in his shoes many a time, and I know what it feels like. He's got a lot to teach her, that's certain, eh? Doesn't interest you, I suppose!

If it had been me, now, chained here with a broken leg and nothing to do, with an idyllic love story going on under my eyes--ah, well! you are not made that way, and I am too old, I suppose. Besides, in spite of her charm, she isn't exactly my style."

"No," said Paul; "she is not your style."

"All the same, she's remarkably pretty, and I'm not too old to admire a pretty woman," chuckled his companion. "'Pon my word, I'm quite inclined to envy that boy. Just imagine a veritable woman, still thinking herself a child, with a delightful boy for her only companion, and no one to stand between them! I'd have given worlds for such a chance when I was his age."

"But, you see, you are not his age; so it is no use trying to cut him out. Besides, you ought to know better, Heaton, at your time of life,"

said Paul, in a jesting manner that was a little strained. Heaton took his remark rather as a compliment than otherwise.

"You won't alter me, my boy; you'll find me the same to the end of the chapter,--so make up your mind to that. I'm not ashamed of it either, not I! Seriously, though, I'm quite interested in our little love story yonder. I should like to help that boy. Silly a.s.s! why doesn't he make a plunge for it? He isn't likely to have a rival."

"Perhaps that is why he doesn't," observed Paul. "But I don't see why we should trouble ourselves about it."

"That's where you're so cynical," complained Heaton. "These little affairs always interest me intensely; they bring back my youth to me, and remind me of my lost happiness. Oh, life! what you once held for me! And now it is all gone, buried with my two sweet wives, and I am left alone with no one to care what becomes of me."

His eyes were moist as he finished speaking, and Paul walked along at his side without offering any consolation. He would have found it difficult to explain why he had chosen Laurence Heaton for a friend.