The Brightener Part 2

"'Princess di Miramare, Private Detective,' would be a distinctly original sign-board over an office door," the old lady reflected. "But I believe _I've_ evolved something more practical, considering your name--and your age--(twenty-one, isn't it?)--and your _looks_. Not that detective talent mayn't come in handy even in the profession I'm going to suggest. Very likely it will--among other things. It's a profession that'll call for all the talents you can get hold of."

"Do you by chance mean marriage?" I inquired, coldly. "I've never been a wife. But I suppose I _am_ a sort of widow."

"If you weren't a sort of widow you couldn't cope with the profession I've--er--invented. You wouldn't be independent enough."

"Invented? Then you _don't_ mean marriage! And not even the stage. I warn you that I solemnly promised Grandmother never to go on the stage."

"I know, my child. She mentioned that to Henry--my husband--when they were discussing your future, before you both left London. My idea is _much_ more original than marriage, or even the stage. It popped into my mind the night Mrs. Courtenaye died, while we were in a taxi between the Palazzo Ardini and this hotel. I said to myself, 'Dear Elizabeth shall be a Brightener!'"

"A Brightener?" I repeated, with a vague vision of polis.h.i.+ng windows or bra.s.ses. "I don't----"

"You wouldn't! I told you I'd invented the profession expressly for you.

Now I'm going to tell you what it is. I felt that you'd not care to be a tame companion, even to the most gilded millionairess, or a social secretary to a----"

"Horror!--no, I couldn't be a tame anything."

"That's why brightening is your line. A Brightener couldn't _be_ a Brightener and tame. She must be brilliant--winged--soaring above the plane of those she brightens; expensive, to make herself appreciated; capable of taking the lead in social direction. Why, my dear, people will fight to get you--pay any price to secure you! _Now_ do you understand?"

I didn't. So she explained. After that dazzling preface, the explanation seemed rather an anti-climax. Still, I saw that there might be something in the plan--if it could be worked. And Mrs. Carstairs guaranteed to work it.

My widowhood (save the mark!) qualified me to become a chaperon. And my Princesshood would make me a gilded one. Chaperonage, at its best, might be amusing. But chaperonage was far from the whole destiny of a Brightener. A Brightener need not confine herself to female society, as a mere Companion must. A young woman, even though a widow and a Princess, could not "companion" a person of the opposite s.e.x, even if he were a _hundred_. But she might, from a discreet distance, be his Brightener. That is, she might brighten a lonely man's life without tarnis.h.i.+ng her own reputation.

"After all," Mrs. Carstairs went on, "in spite of what's said against him, Man _is_ a Fellow Being. If a cat may look at a King, Man may look at a Princess. And unless he's in her set, he can be made to pay for the privilege. Think of a lonely b.u.t.ton or boot-maker! What would he give for the honour of invitations to tea, with introductions and social advice, from the popular Princess di Miramare? He might have a wife or daughters, or both, who needed a leg up. _They_ would come extra! He might be a widower--in fact, I've caught the first widower for you already. But unluckily you can't use him yet."

"Ugh!" I shuddered. "Sounds as if he were a fish--wriggling on a hook till I'm ready to tear it out of his gills!"

"He is a fish--a big fish. In fact, I may as well break it to you that he is Roger Fane."

"Good heavens!" I cried. "It would take more electricity than I'm fitted with to brighten his tragic and mysterious gloom!"

"Not at all. In fact, you are the only one who can brighten it."

"What are you driving at? He's dead in love with Shelagh Leigh."

"That's just _it_. As things are, he has no hope of marrying Shelagh.

She likes him, as you probably know better than I do, for you're her best pal, although she's a year or so younger than you----"

"Two years."

"Well, as I was going to say, in many ways she's a child compared to you. She's as beautiful as one of those cut-off cherubs in the prayer-books, and as old-fas.h.i.+oned as an early Victorian sampler. These blonde Dreams with naturally waving golden hair and rosebud mouths, and eyes big as half-crowns, _have_ that drawback, as I've discovered since I came to live in England. In _my_ country we don't grow early Victorian buds. You know perfectly well that those detestable sn.o.bs, the Pollens, don't think Fane good enough for Shelagh in spite of his money. Money's the _one_ nice thing they've got themselves, which they can pa.s.s on to Shelagh. Probably they forced the wretched Miss Pollen, who was the male sn.o.b's sister, to marry the old Marquis of Leigh just as they wish to _compel_ Shelagh to marry some other wreck of his sort--and die young, as her mother did. The girl's a dear--a perfect _lamb_!--but lambs can't stand up against lions. They generally lie down inside them. But with _you_ at the helm, the Pollen lions could be forced----"

"Not if they knew it!" I cut in.

"They wouldn't know it. Did _you_ know that you were being forced to marry that poor young prince of yours?"

"I wasn't forced. I was persuaded."

"We won't argue the point! Anyhow, the subject doesn't press. The scheme I have in my head for you to launch Fane on the social sea (the _sea_ in every sense of the word, as you'll learn by and by) can't come off till you're out of your deepest mourning. I'll find you a quieter line of goods to begin on than the Fane-Leigh business if you agree to take up Brightening. The question is, _do_ you agree?"

"I do," I said more earnestly than I had said "I will" as I stood at Paolo's side in church. For life hadn't been very earnest then. Now it was.

"Good!" exclaimed Mrs. Carstairs. "Then that's _that_! The next thing is to furnish you a charming flat in the same house with us. You must have a background of your own."

"You forget--I haven't a farthing!" I fiercely reminded her. "But Mr.

Carstairs won't forget! I've made him too much trouble. The best Brightening won't run to _half_ a Background in Berkeley Square."

"Wait," Mrs. Carstairs calmed me. "I haven't finished the whole proposition yet. In America, when we run up a sky-sc.r.a.per, we don't begin at the bottom, in any old, commonplace way. We stick a few steel girders into the earth; then we start at the top and work down. That's what I've been doing with my plan. It's perfect. Only you've got to support it with something."

"What is it you're trying to break to me?" I demanded.

The dear old lady swallowed heavily. (It must be something pretty awful if it daunted _her_!)

"You like Roger Fane," she began.

"Yes, I admire him. He's handsome and interesting, though a little too mysterious and tragic to live with for my taste."

"He's not mysterious at all!" she defended Fane. "His tragedy--for there _was_ a tragedy!--is no secret in America. I often met him before the war, when I ran over to pay visits in New York, though he was far from being in the Four Hundred. But at the moment I've no more to say about Roger Fane. I've been using him for a handle to brandish a friend of his in front of your eyes."

My blood grew hot. "_Not_ the ex-cowboy?"

"That's no way to speak of Sir James Courtenaye."

"Then _he's_ what you want to break to me?"

"I want--I mean, I'm _requested_!--to inform you of a way he proposes out of the woods for you--at least, the darkest part of the woods."

"I told Mr. Carstairs I'd see James Courtenaye d--d rather than----"

"_This_ is a different affair entirely. You must listen, my dear, unless I'm to wash my hands of you! What I have to describe is the foundation for the Brightening."

I swallowed some more of Grandmother's expressions which occurred to me, and listened.

Sir James Courtenaye's second proposition was not an offer of charity.

He suggested that I let Courtenaye Abbey to him for a term of years, for the sum of one thousand five hundred pounds per annum, the first three years to be paid in advance. (This clause, Mrs. Carstairs hinted, would enable me to dole out crumbs here and there for the quieting of Grandmother's creditors.) Sir James's intention was, not to use the Abbey as a residence, but to make of it a show place for the public during the term of his lease. In order to do this, the hall must be restored and the once-famous gardens beautified. This expense he would undertake, carrying the work quickly to completion, and would reimburse himself by means of the fees--a s.h.i.+lling a head--charged for viewing the house and its historic treasures.

When I had heard all this, I hesitated what to answer, thinking of Grandmother, and wondering what she would have said had she been in my shoes. But as this thought flitted into my mind, it was followed by another. One of Grandmother's few old-fas.h.i.+oned fads was her style of shoe: pattern 1875. The shoes I stood in, at this moment, were pattern 1918. In _my_ shoes Grandmother would simply scream! And I wouldn't be at my best in hers. This was the parable which commonsense put to me, and Mrs. Carstairs cleverly offering no word of advice, I paused no longer than five minutes before I snapped out, "Yes! The horrid brute can have the darling place till I get rich."

"How sweet of you to consent so _graciously_, darling!" purred Mrs.

Carstairs. Then we both laughed. After which I fell into her arms, and cried.

For fear I might change my mind, Mr. Carstairs got me to sign some dull-looking doc.u.ments that very day, and the oddness of their being all ready to hand didn't strike me till the ink was dry.

"Henry had them prepared because he knew how _sensible_ you are at heart--I mean _at head_," his wife explained. "Indeed, it is a compliment to your intelligence."

Anyhow, it gave me a wherewithal to throw sops to a whole Zooful of Cerberuses, and still keep enough to take that flat in the Carstairs'

house in Berkeley Square. Of course to do all this meant leaving Italy for good and going back to England. But there was little to hold me in Rome. My inheritance from my husband-of-an-hour could be packed in a suitcase! Shelagh and her sn.o.bs travelled with us. And as soon as they were demobilized, Roger Fane and James Courtenaye followed, if not us, at least in our direction.

I don't think that Aladdin's Lamp builders "had anything on" Sir Jim's (as he himself said), judging by the way the restorations simply flew.

From what I heard of the sums he spent, it would take the s.h.i.+llings of all England and America as sightseers to put him in pocket. But as Mr.