The Market-Place Part 17

"Oh yes, there were many houses," she interposed. "It wasn't a nice exhibition that society made of itself--one admits that,--but it was only one set that quite lost their heads. There are all kinds of sets, you know. And--I don't think I see your application, in any event. The craze, as you call it, was all on a business basis. People ran after those who could tell them which shares were going up, and they gambled in those shares. That was all, wasn't it?"

Still looking intently at her, he dismissed her query with a little shake of the head. "'On a business basis,'" he repeated, as if talking to himself. "They like to have things 'on a business basis.'"

He halted, with a hand held out over her arm, and she paused as well, in a reluctant, tentative way. "I don't understand you," she remarked, blankly.

"Let me put it in this way," he began, knitting his brows, and marshalling the thoughts and phrases with which his mind had been busy.

"This is the question. You were saying that you weren't asked to join my Board. You explained in that way how I could do things for Plowden, and couldn't do them for you. Oh, I know it was a joke--but it had its meaning--at least to me. Now I want to ask you--if I decide to form another Company, a very small and particular Company--if I should decide to form it, I say--could I come to you and ask you to join THAT Board?

Of course I could ask--but what I mean is--well, I guess you know what I mean."

The metaphor had seemed to him a most ingenious and satisfactory vehicle for his purpose, and it had broken down under him amid evidences of confusion which he could not account for. All at once his sense of physical ascendancy had melted away--disappeared. He looked at Lady Cressage for an instant, and knew there was something shuffling and nerveless in the way his glance then s.h.i.+fted to the dim mountain chain beyond. His heart fluttered surprisingly inside his breast, during the silence which ensued.

"Surely you must have said everything now that you wished to say," she observed at last. She had been studying intently the trodden snow at her feet, and did not even now look up. The constraint of her manner, and a certain pleading hesitation in her words, began at once to restore his self-command. "Do not talk of it any further, I beg of you," she went on. "We--we have been lagging behind unconscionably. If you wish to please me, let us hurry forward now. And please!--no more talk at all!"

"But just a word--you're not angry?"

She shook her head very slightly.

"And you do know that I'm your friend--your solid, twenty-four-carat friend?"

After a moment's pause, she made answer, almost in a whisper--"Yes--be my friend--if it amuses you,"--and led the way with precipitate steps down the winding road.

CHAPTER XIII

TWO days later, Thorpe and his young people took an early morning train for Geneva--homeward bound.

It was entirely easy to accept their uncle's declaration that urgent business summoned him to London, yet Julia and Alfred, when they chanced to exchange glances after the announcement, read in each other's eyes the formless impression that there were other things beside business.

Their uncle, they realized, must be concerned in large and probably venturesome enterprises; but it did not fit with their conception of his character that commercial anxieties should possess the power to upset him. And upset he undeniably was.

They traced his disturbance, in a general way, to the morning following the excursion up to Glion and Caux. He told them then that he had slept very badly, and that they must "count him out" of their plans for the day. He continued to be counted out of what remained of their stay at Territet. He professed not to be ill, but he was restless and preoccupied. He ate little, but smoked continuously, and drank spirits a good deal, which they had not seen him do before. Nothing would induce him to go out either day.

Strangely enough, this disturbance of their uncle's equanimity synchronized with an apparent change in the att.i.tude of their new friends on the floor below. This change was, indeed, more apparent than definable. The ladies were, to the nicest scrutiny, as kindly and affable as ever, but the sense of comrades.h.i.+p had somehow vanished.

Insensibly, the two parties had ceased to have impulses and tastes in common. There were no more trips together--no more fortuitous luncheons or formal dinners as a group.

The young people looked up at the front of the big hotel on this morning of departure, after they had clambered over the drifts into the snow-bedecked train, and opened the window of their compartment. They made sure that they could identify the windows of Miss Madden's suite, and that the curtains were drawn aside--but there was no other token of occupancy discernible. They had said good-bye to the two ladies the previous evening, of course--it lingered in their minds as a rather perfunctory ceremony--but this had not prevented their hoping for another farewell glimpse of their friends. No one came to wave a hand from the balcony, however, and the youngsters looked somewhat dubiously at each other as the train moved. Then intuitively they glanced toward their uncle--and perceived that he had his hat pulled over his eyes, and was staring with a kind of moody scowl at the lake opposite.

"Fortunately, it is a clear day," said Julia. "We shall see Mont Blanc."

Her voice seemed to have a hollow and unnatural sound in her own ears.

Neither her uncle nor her brother answered her.

At breakfast, meanwhile, in the apartment toward which the young people had turned their farewell gaze in vain, Miss Madden sipped her coffee thoughtfully while she read a letter spread upon the table beside her.

"It's as they said," she observed. "You are not allowed to drive in the mountains with your own horses and carriage. That seems rather quaint for a model Republic--doesn't it?"

"I daresay they're quite right," Lady Cressage replied, listlessly.

"It's in the interest of safety. People who do not know the mountains would simply go and get killed in avalanches and hurricanes--and all that. I suppose that is what the Government wishes to prevent."

"And you're on the side of the Government," said the other, with a twinkle in her brown eyes. "Truly now--you hated the whole idea of driving over the Simplon."

Lady Cressage lifted her brows in whimsical a.s.sent as she nodded.

"But do you like this Russian plan any better?" demanded Celia. "I wish for once you would be absolutely candid and open with me--and let me know to the uttermost just what you think." "'For once'?" queried the other. Her tone was placid enough, but she allowed the significance of the quotation to be marked.

"Oh, I never wholly know what you're thinking," Miss Madden declared.

She put on a smile to alleviate the force of her remarks. "It is not you alone--Edith. Don't think that! But it is ingrained in your country-women. You can't help it. It's in your blood to keep things back. I've met numbers of English ladies who, I'm ready to believe, would be incapable of telling an untruth. But I've never met one of whom I could be sure that she would tell me the whole truth. Don't you see this case in point," she pursued, with a little laugh, "I could not drag it out of you that you disliked the Simplon idea, so long as there was a chance of our going. Immediately we find that we can't go, you admit that you hated it."

"But you wanted to go," objected Lady Cressage, quietly. "That was the important thing. What I wanted or did not want had nothing to do with the matter."

Celia's face clouded momentarily. "Those are not the kind of things I like to hear you say," she exclaimed, with a certain vigour. "They put everything in quite a false light. I am every whit as anxious that you should be pleased as that I should. You know that well enough. I've said it a thousand times--and have I ever done anything to disprove it? But I never can find out what you do want--what really will please you! You never will propose anything; you never will be entirely frank about the things I propose. It's only by watching you out of the corner of my eye that I can ever guess whether anything is altogether to your liking or not."

The discussion seemed to be following lines familiar to them both. "That is only another way of saying what you discovered long ago," said Lady Cressage, pa.s.sively--"that I am deficient in the enthusiasms. But originally you were of the opinion that you had enthusiasms enough for two, and that my lack of them would redress the balance, so to speak.

I thought it was a very logical opinion then, and, from my own point of view, I think so now. But if it does not work in practice, at least the responsibility of defending it is not mine."

"Delightful!" cried Celia, smiling gayly as she put down her cup again.

"You are the only woman I've ever known who was worth arguing with.

The mere operation makes me feel as if I were going through Oxford--or pa.s.sing the final Jesuit examinations. Heaven knows, I would get up arguments with you every day, for the pure enjoyment of the thing--if I weren't eternally afraid of saying something that would hurt your feelings, and then you wouldn't tell me, but would nurse the wound in silence in the dark, and I should know that something was wrong, and have to watch you for weeks to make out what it was--and it would all be too unhappy. But it comes back, you see, to what I said before. You don't tell me things!"

Edith smiled in turn, affectionately enough, but with a wistful reserve.

"It is a const.i.tutional defect--even national, according to you. How shall I hope to change, at this late day? But what is it you want me to tell you?--I forget."

"The Russian thing. To go to Vienna, where we get our pa.s.sports, and then to Cracow, and through to Kief, which they say is awfully well worth while--and next Moscow--and so on to St. Petersburg, in time to see the ice break up. It is only in winter that you see the characteristic Russia: that one has always heard. With the furs and the sledges, and the three horses galloping over the snow--it seems to me it must be the best thing in Europe--if you can call Russia Europe.

That's the way it presents itself to me--but then I was brought up in a half-Arctic climate, and I love that sort of thing--in its proper season. It is different with you. In England you don't know what a real winter is. And so I have to make quite sure that you think you would like the Russian experiment."

The other laughed gently. "But if I don't know what a real winter is, how can I tell whether I will like it or not? All I do know is that I am perfectly willing to go and find out. Oh yes--truly--I should like very much to go."

Miss Madden sighed briefly. "All right," she said, but with a notable absence of conviction in her tone.

A s.p.a.ce of silence ensued, as she opened and glanced through another note, the envelope of which had borne no postmark. She pouted her lips over the contents of this missive, and raised her eyebrows in token of surprise, but as she laid it down she looked with a frank smile at her companion.

"It's from our young friend," she explained, genially--"the painter-boy--Mr. D'Aubigny. It is to remind me of a promise he says I made--that when I came to London he should paint my portrait. I don't think I promised anything of the kind--but I suppose that is a detail.

It's all my unfortunate hair. They must have gone by this time--they were to go very early, weren't they?"

Lady Cressage glanced at the clock. "It was 8:40, I think--fully half an hour ago," she answered, with a painstaking effect of indifference.

"Curious conglomeration"--mused the other. "The boy and girl are so civilized, and their uncle is so rudimentary. I'm afraid they are spoiling him just as the missionaries spoil the n.o.ble savage. They ought to go away and leave him alone. As a barbarian he was rather effective--but they will whitewash him and gild him and make a tame monstrosity of him. But I suppose it's inevitable. Having made his fortune, it is the rule that he must set up as a gentleman. We do it more simply in America. One generation makes the fortune, and leaves it to the next generation to put on the frills. My father, for example, never altered in the slightest degree the habits he formed when he was a poor workman. To the day of his death, blessed old man, he remained what he had always been--simple, pious, modest, hard-working, kindly, and thrifty--a model peasant. Nothing ever tempted him a hair's-breadth out of the path he had been bred to walk in. But such n.o.bility of mind and temper with it all! He never dreamed of suggesting that I should walk in the same path. From my earliest childhood I cannot remember his ever putting a limitation upon me that wasn't entirely sensible and generous.

I must have been an extremely trying daughter, but he never said so; he never looked or acted as if he thought so.--But I never stop when I begin talking of my father."

"It's always very sweet to me to hear you talk of him," Lady Cressage put in. "One knows so few people who feel that way about their fathers!"

Celia nodded gravely, as if in benevolent comment upon something that had been left unsaid. The sight of the young artist's note recalled her earlier subject. "Of course there is a certain difference," she went on, carelessly,--"this Mr. Thorpe is not at all a peasant, as the phrase goes. He strikes one, sometimes, as having been educated."

"Oh, he was at a public school, Lord Plowden tells me," said the other, with interest. "And his people were booksellers--somewhere in London--so that he got a good smattering of literature and all that. He certainly has more right to set up as a gentleman than nine out of ten of the nouveaux riches one sees flaunting about nowadays. And he can talk very well indeed--in a direct, practical sort of way. I don't quite follow you about his niece and nephew spoiling him. Of course one can see that they have had a great effect upon him. He sees it himself--and he's very proud of it. He told me so, quite frankly. But why shouldn't it be a nice effect?"