Gallantry Part 19

The impa.s.sive-faced young man who sat opposite placed a despatch-box between them. "These were sent down from London only last night, sir.

Mr. Morfit [Footnote: Perhaps the most adroit of all the many spies in Ormskirk's employment. It was this same Morfit who in 1756 accompanied Damiens into France as far as Calais; and see page 16.] has been somewhat dilatory."

"Eh, it scarcely matters. I looked them over in bed this morning and found them quite correct, Mr. Langton, quite--Why, heyday!" the Duke demanded, "what's this? You have brought me the despatch-box from my dresser--not, as I distinctly told you, from the table by my bed. Nay, I have had quite enough of mistakes concerning despatch-boxes, Mr. Langton."

Mr. Langton stammered that the error was natural. Two despatch-boxes were in appearances so similar--

"Never make excuses, Mr. Langton. '_Qui s'excuse--_' You can complete the proverb, I suppose. Bring me Morfit's report this afternoon, then. Yes, that appears to be all. You may go now, Mr. Langton. No, you may leave that box, I think, since it is here. O man, man, a mistake isn't high treason!

Go away, Mr. Langton! you annoy me."

Left alone, the Duke of Ormskirk sat for a while, tapping his fingers irresolutely against the open despatch-box. He frowned a little, for, with fair reason to believe Tom Langton his son, he found the boy too stolid, too unimaginative, to go far. It seemed to Ormskirk that none of his illegitimate children displayed any particular promise, and he sighed. Then he took a paper from the despatch-box, and began to read.

He sat, as one had said, upon the east terrace of Halvergate House. Behind him a tall yew-hedge shut off the sunlight from the table where he and Tom Langton had earlier completed divers businesses; in front of him a bal.u.s.trade, ivy-covered, and set with flower-pots of stone, empty as yet, half screened the terraced gardens that sank to the artificial lake below.

The Duke could see only a vast expanse of sky and a stray bit of Halvergate printing the horizon with turrets, all sober gray save where the two big copper cupolas of the south facade burned in the April sun; but by bending forward you glimpsed close-shaven lawns dotted with clipped trees and statues,--as though, he reflected, Glumdalc.l.i.tch had left her toys scattered haphazard about a green blanket--and the white of the broad marble stairway descending to the sunlit lake, and, at times, the flash of a swan's deliberate pa.s.sage across the lake's surface. All white and green and blue the vista was, and of a monastic tranquillity, save for the plas.h.i.+ng of a fountain behind the yew-hedge and the grumblings of an occasional bee that lurched complainingly on some by-errand of the hive.

Presently his Grace of Ormskirk replaced the papers in the despatch-box, and, leaning forward, sighed. "_Non_ _sum qualis eram sub bonae regno Cynarae_," said his Grace of Ormskirk. He had a statesman-like partiality for the f.a.g-end of an alcaic.

Then he lifted his head at the sound of a girl's voice. Somewhere rearward to the hedge the girl idly sang--an old song of Thomas Heywood's,--in a serene contralto, low-pitched and effortless, but very sweet. Smilingly the Duke beat time.

Sang the girl:

"Pack clouds away, and welcome, day!

With night we banish sorrow: Sweet air, blow soft; mount, lark, aloft, To give my love good-morrow.

Wings from the wind to please her mind, Notes from the lark I'll borrow: Bird, prune thy wing; nightingale, sing, To give my love good-morrow."

And here the Duke chimed in with a sufficiently pleasing baritone:

"To give my love good-morrow, Notes from them all I'll borrow."

"O heavens!" spoke the possessor of the contralto, "I would have thought you were far too busy sending people to gaol and arranging their execution, and so on, to have any time for music. I am going for a walk in the forest, Jack." Considering for a moment, she added, "You may come, too, if you like."

But the concession was made so half-heartedly that in the instant the Duke of Ormskirk raised a dissenting hand. "I would not annoy you for an emperor's ransom. Go in peace, my child."

Lady Marian Heleigh stood at an opening in the yew-hedge and regarded him for a lengthy interval in silence. Slender, men called her, and women "a bean pole." There was about her a great deal of the child and something of the wood-nymph. She had abundant hair, the color of a dead oak-leaf, and her skin was clear, with a brown tinge. Her eyes puzzled you by being neither brown nor green consistently; no sooner had you convicted them of verdancy than they s.h.i.+fted to the hue of polished maple, and vice versa; but they were too large for her face, which narrowed rather abruptly beneath a broad, low forehead, and they flavored her aspect with the shrewd innocence of a kitten. She was by ordinary grave; but, animated, her countenance quickened with somewhat the glow of a brown diamond; then her generous eyes flashed and filmed like waters moving under starlight, then you knew she was beautiful. All in all, you saw in Marian a woman designed to be petted, a Columbine rather than a Cleopatra; her lures would never shake the stability of a kingdom, but would inevitably gut its toy-shops; and her departure left you meditative less of high enterprises than of buying something for her.

Now Marian considered her betrothed, and seemed to come at last to a conclusion that skirted plat.i.tude. "Jack, two people can be fond of each other without wanting to be together all the time. And I really am fond of you, Jack."

"I would be a fool if I questioned the first statement," rejoined the Duke; "and if I questioned the second, very miserable. Nevertheless, you go in pursuit of strange G.o.ds, and I decline to follow."

Her eyebrows interrogated him.

"You are going," the Duke continued, "in pursuit of G.o.ds beside whom I esteem Zidonian Ashtoreth, and Chemosh, and Milcom, the abomination of the Ammonites, to be commendable objects of wors.h.i.+p. You will pardon my pedantic display of learning, for my feelings are strong. You are going to sit in the woods. You will probably sit under a youngish tree, and its branches will sway almost to the ground and make a green, sun-steeped tent about you, as though you sat at the heart of an emerald. You will hear the kindly wood-G.o.ds go steathily about the forest, and you will know that they are watching you, but you will never see them. From behind every tree-bole they will watch you; you feel it, but you never, never quite see them.

Presently the sweet, warm odors of the place and its perpetual whispering and the illimitably idiotic boasting of the birds,--that any living creature should be proud of having constructed one of their nasty little nests is a reflection to baffle understanding,--this hodge-podge of sensations, I say, will intoxicate you. Yes, it will thoroughly intoxicate you, Marian, and you sit there quite still, in a sort of stupor, drugged into the inebriate's magnanimity, firmly believing that the remainder of your life will be throughout of finer texture,--earth-spurning, free from all pettiness, and at worst vexed only by the n.o.blest sorrows. Bah!" cried the Duke; "I have no patience with such nonsense! You will believe it to the tiniest syllable, that wonderful lying message which April whispers to every living creature that is young,--then you will return to me, a slim, star-eyed Maenad, and will see that I am wrinkled. But do you go your ways, none the less, for April is waiting for you yonder,--beautiful, mendacious, splendid April. And I? Faith, April has no message for me, my dear."

He laughed, but with a touch of wistfulness; and the girl came to him, laying her hand upon his arm, surprised into a sort of hesitant affection.

"How did you know, Jack? How did you, know that--things, invisible, gracious things, went about the spring woods? I never thought that you knew of them. You always seemed so sensible. I have reasoned it out, though,"

Marian went on, sagaciously wrinkled as to the brow. "They are probably the heathen fauns and satyrs and such,--one feels somehow that they are all men. Don't you, Jack? Well, when the elder G.o.ds were sent packing from Olympus there was naturally no employment left for these sylvan folk. So April took them into her service. Each year she sends them about every forest on her errands: she sends them to make up daffodil-cups, for instance, which I suppose is difficult, for evidently they make them out of suns.h.i.+ne; or to pencil the eyelids of the narcissi--narcissi are brazen creatures, Jack, and use a deal of kohl; or to marshal the fleecy young clouds about the sky; or to whistle the birds up from the south. Oh, she keeps them busy, does April! And 'tis true that if you be quite still you can hear them tripping among the dead leaves; and they watch you--with very bright, twinkling little eyes, I think,--but you never see them.

And always, always there is that enormous whispering,--half-friendly, half-menacing,--as if the woods were trying to tell you something. 'Tis not only the foliage rustling.... No, I have often thought it sounded like some gigantic foreigner--some t.i.tan probably,--trying in his own queer and outlandish language to tell you something very important, something that means a deal to you, and to you in particular. Has not anybody ever understood him?"

He smiled. "And I, too, have dwelt in Arcadia," said his Grace of Ormskirk.

"Yes, I once heard April's message, Marian, for all my crow's-feet. But that was a long while ago, and perhaps I have forgotten it. I cannot tell, my dear. It is only from April in her own person that one hears this immemorial message. And as for me? Eh, I go into the April woods, and I find trees there of various sizes that pay no attention to me, and shrill, dingy little birds that deafen me, and it may be a gaudy flower or two, and, in any event, I find a vast quant.i.ty of sodden, decaying leaves to warn me the place is no fitting haunt for a gentleman afflicted with rheumatism. So I come away, my dear."

Marian looked him over for a moment. "You are not really old," she said, with rather conscious politeness. "And you are wonderfully well-preserved.

Why, Jack, do you mind--not being foolish?" she demanded, on a sudden.

He debated the matter. Then, "Yes," the Duke of Ormskirk conceded, "I suppose I do, at the bottom of my heart, regret that lost folly. A part of me died, you understand, when it vanished, and it is not exhilarating to think of one's self as even partially dead. Once--I hardly know"--he sought the phrase,--"once this was a s.p.a.cious and inexplicable world, with a mystery up every lane and an adventure around each street-corner; a world inhabited by most marvelous men and women,--some amiable, and some detestable, but every one of them very interesting. And now I miss the wonder of it all. You will presently discover, my dear, that youth is only an ingenious prologue to whet one's appet.i.te for a rather dull play. Eh, I am no pessimist,--one may still find satisfaction in the exercise of mind and body, in the pleasures of thought and taste and in other t.i.tillations of one's faculties. Dinner is good and sleep, too, is excellent. But we men and women tend, upon too close inspection, to appear rather paltry flies that buzz and bustle aimlessly about, and breed perhaps, and eventually die, and rot, and are swept away from this fragile window-pane of time that opens on eternity."

"If you are, indeed, the sort of person you describe," said Marian, reflectively, "I do not at all blame April for having no communication with anyone possessed of such extremely unpleasant opinions. But for my own part, I shall never cease to wonder what it is that the woods whisper about."

Appraising her, he hazarded a cryptic question, "Vase of delights, and have you never--cared?"

"Why, yes, I think so," she answered, readily enough. "At least, I used to be very fond of Humphrey Degge,--that is the Marquis of Venour's place yonder, you know, just past the spur of the forest,--but he was only a younger son, so of course Father wouldn't hear of it. That was rather fortunate, as Humphrey by and by went mad about Dorothy's blue eyes and fine shape,--I think her money had a deal to do with it, too, and in any event, she will be fat as a pig at thirty,--and so we quarrelled. And I minded it--at first. And now--well, I scarcely know." Marian hesitated. "He was a handsome man, but that ridiculous cavalry moustache of his was so bristly--"

"I beg your pardon?" said the Duke.

"--that it disfigured him dreadfully," said she, with firmness. She had colored.

His Grace of Ormskirk was moved to mirth. "Child, child, you are so deliciously young it appears a monstrous crime to marry you to an old fellow like me!" He took her firm, soft hand in his. "Are you quite sure you can endure me, Marian?"

"Why, but of course I want to marry you," she said, naively surprised. "How else could I be d.u.c.h.ess of Ormskirk?"

Again he chuckled. "You are a worldly little wretch," he stated; "but if you want my t.i.tle for a new toy, it is at your service. And now be off with you,--you and your foolish woods, indeed!"

Marian went a slight distance and then turned about, troubled. "I am really very fond of you, Jack," she said, conscientiously.

"Be off with you!" the Duke scolded. "You should be ashamed of yourself to practice such flatteries and blandishments on a defenceless old gentleman.

You had best hurry, too, for if you don't I shall probably kiss you," he threatened. "I, also," he added, with point.

She blew him a kiss from her finger-tips and went away singing.

Sang Marian:

"Blackbird and thrush, in every bush, Stare, linnet, and c.o.c.k-sparrow, You pretty elves, amongst yourselves, Sing my fair love good-morrow.

To give my love good-morrow, Sing birds, in every furrow."

II

Left to his own resources, the Duke of Ormskirk sat down beside the table and fell to making irrelevant marks upon a bit of paper. He hummed the air of Marian's song. There was a vague contention in his face. Once he put out his hand toward the open despatch-box, but immediately he sighed and pushed, it farther from him. Presently he propped his chin upon both hands and stayed in the att.i.tude for a long while, staring past the bal.u.s.trade at the clear, pale sky of April.

Thus Marian's father, the Earl of Brudenel, found Ormskirk. The Earl was lean and gray, though only three years older than his prospective son-in-law, and had been Ormskirk's intimate since boyhood. Ormskirk had for Lord Brudenel's society the liking that a successful person usually preserves for posturing in the gaze of his outrivalled school-fellows: Brudenel was an embodied and flattering commentary as to what a less able man might make of chances far more auspicious than Ormskirk ever enjoyed.

All failure the Earl's life had been; in London they had long ago forgotten handsome Harry Heleigh and the composure with which he nightly shoved his dwindling patrimony across the gaming-table; about Halvergate men called him "the muddled Earl," and said of him that his heart died, with his young wife some eighteen years back. Now he vegetated in the home of his fathers, contentedly, a veteran of life, retaining still a mild pride in his past vagaries; [Footnote: It was then well said of him by Claridge, "It is Lord Henry Heleigh's vanity to show that he is a man of pleasure as well as of business; and thus, in settlement, the expedition he displays toward a fellow-gambler is equitably balanced by his tardiness toward a too-credulous shoemaker."] and kindly time had armed him with the benumbing, impenetrable indifference of the confessed failure. He was abstractedly courteous to servants, and he would not, you felt, have given even to an emperor his undivided attention. For the rest, the former wastrel had turned miser, and went noticeably shabby as a rule, but this morning he was trimly clothed, for he was returning homeward from the quarter-sessions at Winstead.

"Dreamer!" said the Earl. "I do not wonder that you grow fat."

The Duke smiled up at him. "Confound you, Harry!" said he, "I had just overreached myself into believing I had made what the world calls a mess of my career and was supremely happy. There are disturbing influences abroad to-day." He waved his hand toward the green-and-white gardens. "Old friend, you permit disreputable trespa.s.sers about Halvergate. 'See you not Goldy-locks there, in her yellow gown and green sleeves? the profane pipes, the tinkling timbrels?' Spring is at her wiles yonder,--Spring, the liar, the queen-cheat, Spring that tricks all men into happiness."