Jaffery Part 31

"Just those few coa.r.s.e touches you admit are yours."

"Adrian wanted to get an atmosphere of rye-whisky and bad tobacco--not tea and strawberries." The eminent novelist's encomium had aroused the artist's pride in his first-born. An altered word would spoil the book.

"My dear girl," said he, stretching out his great hand, from beneath which she wriggled an impatient shoulder, "my dear Doria," said he, very gently, "the possessor of the Order of Merit is both a critic and a man of common sense. Anyway, he knows more about novels than either of us do. If it weren't for him I would give you the proofs to blue pencil as much as you liked. But I'm sure you would make a thundering mess of it."

Doria made a little gesture--a bit of a shrug--a bit of a resigned flicker of her hands.

"Of course, do as you please, dear Jaffery. I'm quite alone, a woman with n.o.body to turn to"--she smiled with her lips, but there was no coordination of her eyes--"as I said before, I pa.s.s the proofs."

She went quickly through the drawing-room door into the house, leaving Jaffery still scratching a red whisker.

"Oh, Lord!" said he, ruefully, "I've gone and done it now!"

He turned to follow her, but Barbara interposed her small body on the threshold.

"Don't be a silly fool, Jaff. You've pandered quite enough to her morbid vanity. It's your book, isn't it? You have given it birth. You know better than anybody what is vital to it. Just you send those proofs straight back to the publisher. If you let her persuade you to change one word, as true as I'm standing here, I'll tell her the whole thing, and d.a.m.n the consequences!"

My exquisite Barbara's rare "d.a.m.ns" were oaths in the strictest sense.

They connoted the most irrefragable of obligations. She would no more think of breaking a "d.a.m.n" than her marriage vows or a baby's neck.

"Of course, I'm not going to let her touch the thing," said Jaffery.

"But I don't want her to look on me as a bullying brute."

"It would be better, both for you and her, if she did," snapped Barbara.

"The ordinary woman's like the dog and the walnut tree. It's only the exceptional woman that can take command."

I, who had been sitting calm, on the low parapet beneath the tenderly sprouting wistaria arbour, broke my philosophic silence.

"Observe the exceptional woman," said I.

For a day or so Doria stood upon her dignity, treating Jaffery with cold politeness. In the mornings she allowed him to wrap her up in her garden chair and attend to her comforts, and then, settled down, she would open a volume of Tolstoi and courteously signify his dismissal. Jaffery with a hang-dog expression went with me to the golf-course, where he drove with prodigious muscular skill, and putted execrably. Had it not been a question of good taste, to say nothing of human sentiment, I would have reminded him that the thing he was. .h.i.tting so violently was only a little white ball and not poor Adrian's skull. If ever a man was loyal to a dead friend Jaffery Chayne was loyal to Adrian Boldero. But poor old Jaffery was being checked in every vital avenue, not by the memory of the man whom he had known and loved, but by his cynical and masquerading ghost. It is not given to me, thank G.o.d! to know from direct speech what Jaffery thought of Adrian--for Jaffery is too splendid a fellow to have ever said a word in depreciation of his once living friend and afterward dead rival; but both I, who do not aspire to these Quixotic heights and only, with masculine power of generalisation, deduce results from a quiet eye's harvest of mundane phenomena, and Barbara, whose rapier intuition penetrates the core of spiritual things, could, with little difficulty, divine the pa.s.sionate struggle between love and hatred, between loyalty and tenderness, between desire and duty that took place in the soul of this chivalrous yet primitive and vastly appet.i.ted gentleman.

You may think I am trying to present Jaffery as a hero of romance. I am not. I am merely trying to put before you, in my imperfect way, a barbarian at war with civilised instincts; a l.u.s.ty son of Pantagruel forced into the incongruous role of Sir Galahad... . During the term of his punishment he behaved in a bearish and most unheroic manner. At last, however, Doria forgave him, and, smiling on him once more, permitted him to read Tolstoi aloud to her. Whereupon he mended his manners.

The day following this reconciliation was a Sunday. We had invited Liosha (as we constantly did) to lunch and dine. She usually arrived by an early train in the forenoon and returned by the late train at night.

But on Sat.u.r.day evening, she asked Barbara, over the telephone, for permission to bring a friend, a gentleman staying in the boarding house, the happy possessor of a car, who would motor her down. His name was Fendihook. Barbara replied that she would be delighted to see Liosha's friend, and of course came back to us and speculated as to who and what this Mr. Fendihook might be.

"Why didn't you ask her?" said I.

"It would scarcely have been polite."

We consulted Jaffery. "Never heard of him," he growled. "And I don't like to hear of him now. That young woman's running loose a vast deal too much."

"What an old dog in the manger you are!" cried Barbara; and thus started an old argument.

On Sunday morning we saw Mr. Fendihook for ourselves. I met the car, a two-seater, which he drove himself, at the front door, and perceived between a motoring cap worn peak behind and a tightly b.u.t.toned Burberry coat a pink, fleshy, clean shaven face, from the middle of which projected an enormous cigar. I helped Liosha out.

"This is Mr. Fendihook."

"Commonly called Ras Fendihook, at your service," said he.

I smiled and shook hands and gave the car into the charge of my chauffeur, who appeared from the stable-yard. In the hall, aided by Franklin, Mr. Ras Fendihook divested himself of his outer wrappings and revealed a thickset man of medium height, rather flas.h.i.+ly attired. I know it is narrow-minded, but I have a prejudice against a black and white check suit, and a red necktie threaded through a gold ring.

"Against the rules?" he asked, holding up his cigar, a very good one, on which he had retained the band.

"By no means," said I, "we smoke all over the house."

"Tiptop!" He looked around the hall. "You seem to have a bit of all right here."

"I told you you would like it. Everybody does," said Liosha. "Ah, Barbara, dear!" She ran up the stairs to meet her. We followed. Mr.

Fendihook was presented. I noticed, with a little shock, that he had kept on his gloves.

"Very kind of you to let me come down, madam. I thought a bit of a blow would do our fair friend good."

Barbara took off Liosha, looking very handsome and fresh beneath the motor-veil, to her room, leaving me with Mr. Fendihook. As he preceded me into the drawing-room I saw a bald patch like a tonsure in the middle of a crop of coa.r.s.e brown hair. Again he looked round appreciatively and again he said "Tiptop!" He advanced to the open French window.

"Garden's all right. Must take a lot of doing. Who are our friends? The long and the short of it, aren't they?"

He alluded to Jaffery and Doria, who were strolling on the lawn. I told him their names.

"Jaffery Chayne. Why, that's the chap Mrs. Prescott's always talking about, her guardian or something."

"Her trustee," said I, "and an intimate friend of her late husband."

"Ah!" said he, with a twinkle in his eyes which, I will swear, signified "Then there was a Prescott after all!" He waved his cigar. "Introduce me." And as I accompanied him across the lawn--"There's nothing like knowing everybody--getting it over at once. Then one feels at home."

"I hope you felt at home as soon as you entered the house," said I.

"Of course I did, old pal," he replied heartily. "Of course I did." And the amazing creature patted me on the back.

I performed the introductions. Mr. Fendihook declared himself delighted to make the acquaintance of my friends. Then as conversation did not start spontaneously, he once more looked around, nodded at the landscape approvingly, and once more said "Tiptop!"

"That's what I want to have," he continued, "when I can afford to retire and settle down. None of your gimcrack modern villas in a desirable residential neighbourhood, but an English gentleman's country house."

"It's your ambition to be an English gentleman, Mr. Fendihook?" queried Doria.

He laughed good-humouredly. "Now you're pulling my leg."

I saw that he was not lacking in shrewdness.

Susan, never far from Jaffery during her off-time, came running up.

"Hallo, is that your young 'un?" Mr. Fendihook asked. "Come and say how d'ye do, Gwendoline."

Susan advanced shyly. He shook hands with her, chucked her under the chin and paid her the ill compliment of saying that she was the image of her father. Jaffery stood with folded arms holding the bowl of his pipe in one hand and looked down on Mr. Fendihook as on some puzzling insect.

"Do you mind if I take off my gloves?" our strange visitor asked.