Chapter 9

'Talk about a distant cousin!' thought Logan, who in fact felt ill-treated. However deep in love a man may be, he does not like to see a fair lady conspicuously much more interested in other members of his sex than in himself.

The Abbey was a beautiful ruin, and Father Riccoboni did not conceal from Lady Mary the melancholy emotions with which it inspired him.

'When shall our prayers be heard?' he murmured. 'When shall England return to her Mother's bosom?'

Lady Mary said nothing, but privately trusted that the winds would disperse the orisons of which the Father spoke. Perhaps nuns had been bricked up in these innocent-looking mossy walls, thought Lady Mary, whose ideas on this matter were derived from a scene in the poem of _Marmion_. And deep in Lady Mary's heart was a half-formed wish that, if there was to be any bricking up, Miss Willoughby might be the interesting victim. Unlike her brother the Earl, she was all for the Bangs alliance.

Scremerston took the reins on the homeward way, the Earl being rather fatigued; and, after dinner, _two_ white robes flitted ghost-like on the lawn, and the light which burned red beside one of them was the cigar-tip of Scremerston. The Earl had fallen asleep in the drawing-room, and Logan took a lonely stroll, much regretting that he had come to a house where he felt decidedly 'out of it.' He wandered down to the river, and stood watching. He was beside the dark-brown water in the latest twilight, beside a long pool with a boat moored on the near bank. He sat down in the boat pensively, and then--what was that? It was the sound of a heavy trout rising. '_Plop_, _plop_!' They were feeding all round him.

'By Jove! I'll try the bustard to-morrow night, and then I'll go back to town next day,' thought Logan. 'I am doing no good here, and I don't like it. I shall tell Merton that I have moral objections to the whole affair. Miserable, mercenary fraud!' Thus, feeling very moral and discontented, Logan walked back to the house, carefully avoiding the ghostly robes that still glimmered on the lawn, and did not re-enter the house till bedtime.

The following day began as the last had done; Lord Embleton and Miss Willoughby retiring to the muniment-room, the lovers vanishing among the walks. Scremerston later took Logan to consult Fenwick, who visibly brightened at the idea of night-fishing.

'You must take one of those long landing-nets, Logan,' said Scremerston. 'They are about as tall as yourself, and as stout as lance-shafts. They are for steadying you when you wade, and feeling the depth of the water in front of you.'

Scremerston seemed very pensive. The day was hot; they wandered to the smoking-room. Scremerston took up a novel, which he did not read; Logan began a letter to Merton--a gloomy epistle.

'I say, Logan,' suddenly said Scremerston, 'if your letter is not very important, I wish you would listen to me for a moment.'

Logan turned round. 'Fire away,' he said; 'my letter can wait.'

Scremerston was in an attitude of deep dejection. Logan lit a cigarette and waited.

'Logan, I am the most miserable beggar alive.'

'What is the matter? You seem rather in-and-out in your moods,' said Logan.

'Why, you know, I am in a regular tight place. I don't know how to put it. You see, I can't help thinking that--that--I have rather committed myself--it seems a beastly conceited thing to say--that there's a girl who likes me, I'm afraid.'

'I don't want to be inquisitive, but is she in this country?' asked Logan.

'No; she's at Homburg.'

'Has it gone very far? Have you _said_ anything?' asked Logan.

'No; my father did not like it. I hoped to bring him round.'

'Have you _written_ anything? Do you correspond?'

'No, but I'm afraid I have _looked_ a lot.'

As the Viscount Scremerston's eyes were by no means fitted to express with magnetic force the language of the affections, Logan had to command his smile.

'But why have you changed your mind, if you liked her?' he asked.

'Oh, _you_ know very well! Can anybody see her and not love her?' said Scremerston, with a vagueness in his pronouns, but referring to Miss Willoughby.

Logan was inclined to reply that he could furnish, at first hand, an exception to the rule, but this appeared tactless.

'No one, I daresay, whose affections were not already engaged, could see her without loving her; but I thought yours had been engaged to a lady now at Homburg?'

'So did I,' said the wretched Scremerston, 'but I was mistaken. Oh, Logan, you don't know the difference! _This_ is genuine biz,' remarked the afflicted nobleman with much simplicity. He went on: 'Then there's my father--you know him. He was against the other affair, but, if he thinks I have committed myself and then want to back out, why, with his ideas, he'd rather see me dead. But I can't go on with the other thing now: I simply can _not_. I've a good mind to go out after rabbits, and pot myself crawling through a hedge.'

'Oh, nonsense!' said Logan; 'that is stale and superfluous. For all that I can see, there is no harm done. The young lady, depend upon it, won't break her heart. As a matter of fact, they don't--_we_ do. You have only to sit tight. You are no more committed than I am. You would only make both of you wretched if you went and committed yourself now, when you don't want to do it. In your position I would certainly sit tight: don't commit yourself--either here or there, so to speak; or, if you can't sit tight, make a bolt for it. Go to Norway. I am very strongly of opinion that the second plan is the best. But, anyhow, keep up your pecker. You are all right--I give you my word that I think you are all right.'

'Thanks, old cock,' said Scremerston. 'Sorry to have bored you, but I _had_ to speak to somebody.'

* * * * * *

'Best thing you could do,' said Logan. 'You'll feel ever so much better. That kind of worry comes of keeping things to oneself, till molehills look mountains. If you like I'll go with you to Norway myself.'

'Thanks, awfully,' said Scremerston, but he did not seem very keen. Poor little Scremerston!

Logan 'breasted the brae' from the riverside to the house. His wading- boots were heavy, for he had twice got in over the tops thereof; heavy was his basket that Fenwick carried behind him, but light was Logan's heart, for the bustard had slain its dozens of good trout. He and the keeper emerged from the wood on the level of the lawn. All the great mass of the house lay dark before them. Logan was to let himself in by the locked French window; for it was very late--about two in the morning. He had the key of the window-door in his pocket. A light moved through the long gallery: he saw it pass each window and vanish. There was dead silence: not a leaf stirred. Then there rang out a pistol-shot, or was it two pistol-shots? Logan ran for the window, his rod, which he had taken down after fishing, in his hand.

'Hurry to the back door, Fenwick!' he said; and Fenwick, throwing down the creel, but grasping the long landing-net, flew to the back way. Logan opened the drawing-room window, took out his matchbox, with trembling ringers lit a candle, and, with the candle in one hand, the rod in the other, sped through the hall, and along a back passage leading to the gunroom. He had caught a glimpse of the Earl running down the main staircase, and had guessed that the trouble was on the ground floor. As he reached the end of the long dark passage, Fenwick leaped in by the back entrance, of which the door was open. What Logan saw was a writhing group--the Prince of Scalastro struggling in the arms of three men: a long white heap lay crumpled in a corner. Fenwick, at this moment, threw the landing-net over the head of one of the Prince's assailants, and with a twist, held the man half choked and powerless. Fenwick went on twisting, and, with the leverage of the long shaft of the net, dragged the wretch off the Prince, and threw him down. Another of the men turned on Logan with a loud guttural oath, and was raising a pistol. Logan knew the voice at last--knew the Jesuit now. '_Rien ne va plus_!' he cried, and lunged, with all the force and speed of an expert fencer, at the fellow's face with the point of the rod. The metal joints clicked and crashed through the man's mouth, his pistol dropped, and he staggered, cursing through his blood, against the wall. Logan picked up the revolver as the Prince, whose hands were now free, floored the third of his assailants with an upper cut. Logan thrust the revolver into the Prince's hand. 'Keep them quiet with that,' he said, and ran to where the Earl, who had entered unseen in the struggle, was kneeling above the long, white, crumpled heap.

It was Scremerston, dead, in his night dress: poor plucky little Scremerston.

* * * * * *

Afterwards, before the trial, the Prince told Logan how matters had befallen. 'I was wakened,' he said--'you were very late, you know, and we had all gone to bed--I was wakened by a banging door. If you remember, I told you all, on the night of your arrival at Rookchester, how I hated that sound. I tried not to think of it, and was falling asleep when it banged again--a double knock. I was nearly asleep, when it clashed again. There was no wind, my window was open and I looked out: I only heard the river murmuring and the whistle of a passing train. The stillness made the abominable recurrent noise more extraordinary. I dressed in a moment in my smoking-clothes, lit a candle, and went out of my room, listening. I walked along the gallery--'

'It was your candle that I saw as I crossed the lawn,' said Logan.

'When a door opened,' the Prince went on--'the door of one of the rooms on the landing--and a figure, all in white,--it was Scremerston,--emerged and disappeared down the stairs. I followed at the top of my speed. I heard a shot, or rather two pistols that rang out together like one. I ran through the hall into the long back passage at right-angles to it, down the passage to the glimmer of light through the partly glazed door at the end of it. Then my candle was blown out and three men set on me. They had nearly pinioned me when you and Fenwick took them on both flanks. You know the rest. They had the boat unmoored, a light cart ready on the other side, and a steam-yacht lying off Warkworth. The object, of course, was to kidnap me, and coerce or torture me into renewing the lease of the tables at Scalastro. Poor Scremerston, who was a few seconds ahead of me, not carrying a candle, had fired in the dark, and missed. The answering fire, which was simultaneous, killed him. The shots saved me, for they brought you and Fenwick to the rescue. Two of the fellows whom we damaged were--'

'The Genoese pipers, of course,' said Logan.

'And you guessed, from the cry you gave, who my confessor (_he_ banged the door, of course to draw me) turned out to be?'

'Yes, the head croupier at Scalastro years ago; but he wore a beard and blue spectacles in the old time, when he raked in a good deal of my patrimony,' said Logan. 'But how was he planted on _you_?'

'My old friend, Father Costa, had died, and it is too long a tale of forgery and fraud to tell you how this wretch was forced on me. He _had_ been a Jesuit, but was unfrocked and expelled from Society for all sorts of namable and unnamable offences. His community believed that he was dead. So he fell to the profession in which you saw him, and, when the gambling company saw that I was disinclined to let that hell burn any longer on my rock, ingenious treachery did the rest.'

'By Jove!' said Logan.

* * * * *

The Prince of Scalastro, impoverished by his own generous impulse, now holds high rank in the Japanese service. His beautiful wife is much admired in Yokohama.

The Earl was nursed through the long and dangerous illness which followed the shock of that dreadful July night, by the unwearying assiduity of his kinswoman, Miss Willoughby. On his recovery, the bride (for the Earl won her heart and hand) who stood by him at the altar looked fainter and more ghostly than the bridegroom. But her dark hour of levity was passed and over. There is no more affectionate pair than the Earl and Countess of Embleton. Lady Mary, who lives with them, is once more an aunt, and spoils, it is to be feared, the young Viscount Scremerston, a fine but mischievous little boy. On the fate of the ex-Jesuit we do not dwell: enough to say that his punishment was decreed by the laws of our country, not of that which he had disgraced.

The manuscripts of the Earl have been edited by him and the Countess for the Roxburghe Club.

VIII. THE ADVENTURE OF THE LADY PATRONESS

'I cannot bring myself to refuse my assent. It would break the dear child's heart. She has never cared for anyone else, and, oh, she is quite wrapped up in him. I have heard of your wonderful cures, Mr. Merton, I mean successes, in cases which everyone has given up, and though it seems a very strange step to me, I thought that I ought to shrink from no remedy'--

'However unconventional,' said Merton, smiling. He felt rather as if he were being treated like a quack doctor, to whom people (if foolish enough) appeal only as the last desperate resource.

The lady who filled, and amply filled, the client's chair, Mrs. Malory, of Upwold in Yorkshire, was a widow, obviously, a widow indeed. 'In weed' was an unworthy _calembour_ which flashed through Merton's mind, since Mrs. Malory's undying regret for her lord (a most estimable man for a coal owner) was explicitly declared, or rather was blazoned abroad, in her costume. Mrs. Mallory, in fact, was what is derisively styled 'Early Victorian'--'Middle' would have been, historically, more accurate. Her religion was mildly Evangelical; she had been brought up on the Memoirs of the Fairchild Family, by Mrs. Sherwood, tempered by Miss Yonge and the Waverley Novels. On these principles she had trained her family. The result was that her sons had not yet brought the family library, and the family Romneys and Hoppners, to Christie's. Not one of them was a director of any company, and the name of Malory had not yet been distinguished by decorating the annals of the Courts of Bankruptcy or of Divorce. In short, a family more deplorably not 'up to date,' and more 'out of the swim' could scarcely be found in England.

Such, and of such connections, was the lady, fair, faded, with mildly aquiline features, and an aspect at once distinguished and dowdy, who appealed to Merton. She sought him in what she, at least, regarded as the interests of her eldest daughter, an heiress under the will of a maternal uncle. Merton had met the young lady, who looked like a portrait of her mother in youth. He knew that Miss Malory, now 'wrapped up in' her betrothed lover, would, in a few years, be equally absorbed in 'her boys.' She was pretty, blonde, dull, good, and cast by Providence for the part of one of the best of mothers, and the despair of what man soever happened to sit next her at a dinner party. Such women are the safeguards of society--though sneered at by the frivolous as 'British Matrons.'

'I have laid the case before the--where I always take my troubles,' said Mrs. Malory, 'and I have not felt restrained from coming to consult you. When I permitted my daughter's engagement (of course after carefully examining the young man's worldly position) I was not aware of what I know now. Matilda met him at a visit to some neighbours--he really is very attractive, and very attentive--and it was not till we came to London for the season that I heard the stories about him. Some of them have been pointed out to me, in print, in the dreadful French newspapers, others came to me in anonymous letters. As far as a mother may, I tried to warn Matilda, but there are subjects on which one can hardly speak to a girl. The Vidame, in fact,' said Mrs. Malory, blushing, 'is celebrated--I should say infamous--both in France and Italy, Poland too, as what they call _un homme aux bonnes fortunes_. He has caused the break-up of several families. Mr. Merton, he is a rake,' whispered the lady, in some confusion.

'He is still young; he may reform,' said Merton, 'and no doubt a pure affection will be the saving of him.'

'So Matilda believes, but, though a Protestant--his ancestors having left France after the Revocation of the Edict of Nancy--Nantes I mean--I am certain that he is _not_ under conviction.'

'Why does he call himself Vidame, "the Vidame de la Lain"?' asked Merton.

'It is an affectation,' said Mrs. Malory. 'None of his family used the title in England, but he has been much on the Continent, and has lands in France; and, I suppose, has romantic ideas. He is as much French as English, more I am afraid. The wickedness of that country! And I fear it has affected ours. Even now--I am not a scandal-monger, and I hope for the best--but even last winter he was talked about,' Mrs. Malory dropped her voice, 'with a lady whose husband is in America, Mrs. Brown- Smith.'

'A lady for whom I have the very highest esteem,' said Merton, for, indeed, Mrs. Brown-Smith was one of his references or Lady Patronesses; he knew her well, and had a respect for her character, _au fond_, as well as an admiration for her charms.

'You console me indeed,' said Mrs. Malory. 'I had heard--'

'People talk a great deal of ill-natured nonsense,' said Merton warmly. 'Do you know Mrs. Brown-Smith?'

'We have met, but we are not in the same set; we have exchanged visits, but that is all.'

'Ah!' said Merton thoughtfully. He remembered that when his enterprise was founded Mrs. Brown-Smith had kindly offered her practical services, and that he had declined them for the moment. 'Mrs. Malory,' he went on, after thinking awhile, 'may I take your case into my consideration--the marriage is not till October, you say, we are in June--and I may ask for a later interview? Of course you shall be made fully aware of every detail, and nothing shall be done without your approval. In fact all will depend on your own co-operation. I don't deny that there may be distasteful things, but if you are quite sure about this gentleman's--'

'Character?' said Mrs. Malory. 'I am _so_ sure that it has cost me many a wakeful hour. You will earn my warmest gratitude if you can do anything.'

'Almost everything will depend on your own energy, and tolerance of our measures.'

'But we must not do evil that good may come,' said Mrs. Malory nervously.

'No evil is contemplated,' said Merton. But Mrs. Malory, while consenting, so far, did not seem quite certain that her estimate of 'evil' and Merton's would be identical.

She had suffered poignantly, as may be supposed, before she set the training of a lifetime aside, and consulted a professional expert. But the urbanity and patience of Merton, with the high and unblemished reputation of his Association, consoled her. 'We must yield where we innocently may,' she assured herself, 'to the changes of the times. Lest one good order' (and ah, how good the Early Victorian order had been!) 'should corrupt the world.' Mrs. Malory knew that line of poetry. Then she remembered that Mrs. Brown-Smith was on the list of Merton's references, and that reassured her, more or less.

As for Merton, he evolved a plan in his mind, and consulted Bradshaw's invaluable Railway Guide.

On the following night Merton was fortunate or adroit enough to find himself seated beside Mrs. Brown-Smith in a conservatory at a party given by the Montenegrin Ambassador. Other occupants of the fairy-like bower of blossoms, musical with all the singing of the innumerable fountains, could not but know (however preoccupied) that Mrs. Brown-Smith was being amused. Her laughter 'rang merry and loud,' as the poet says, though not a word of her whispered conversation was audible. Conservatories (in novels) are dangerous places for confidences, but the pale and angry face of Miss Malory did _not_ suddenly emerge from behind a grove of gardenias, and startle the conspirators. Indeed, Miss Malory was not present; she and her sister had no great share in the elegant frivolities of the metropolis.

'It all fits in beautifully,' said Mrs. Brown-Smith. 'Just let me look at the page of Bradshaw again.' Merton handed to her a page of closely printed matter. '9.17 P.M., 9.50 P.M.' read Mrs. Brown-Smith aloud; 'it gives plenty of time in case of delays. Oh, this is too delicious! You are sure that these trains won't be altered. It might be awkward.'

'I consulted Anson,' said Merton. Anson was famous for his mastery of time-tables, and his prescience as to railway arrangements.

'Of course it depends on the widow,' said Mrs. Brown-Smith, 'I shall see that Johnnie is up to time. He hopes to undersell the opposition soap' (Mr. Brown-Smith was absent in America, in the interests of that soap of his which is familiar to all), 'and he is in the best of humours. Then their grouse! We have disease on our moors in Perthshire; I was in despair. But the widow needs delicate handling.'

'You won't forget--I know how busy you are--her cards for your party?'

'They shall be posted before I sleep the sleep of conscious innocence.'

'And real benevolence,' said Merton.

'And revenge,' added Mrs. Brown-Smith. 'I have heard of his bragging, the monster. He has talked about _me_. And I remember how he treated Violet Lebas.'

At this moment the Vidame de la Lain, a tall, fair young man, vastly too elegant, appeared, and claimed Mrs. Brown-Smith for a dance. With a look at Merton, and a sound which, from less perfect lips, might have been described as a suppressed giggle, Mrs. Brown-Smith rose, then turning, 'Post the page to me, Mr. Merton,' she said. Merton bowed, and, folding up the page of the time-table, he consigned it to his cigarette case.

* * * * * *

Mrs. Malory received, with a blending of emotions, the invitation to the party of Mrs. Brown-Smith. The social popularity and the wealth of the hostess made such invitations acceptable. But the wealth arose from trade, in soap, not in coal, and coal (like the colza bean) is 'a product of the soil,' the result of creative forces which, in the geological past, have worked together for the good of landed families. Soap, on the other hand, is the result of human artifice, and is certainly advertised with more of emphasis and of ingenuity than of delicacy. But, by her own line of descent, Mrs. Brown-Smith came from a Scottish house of ancient standing, historically renowned for its assassins, traitors, and time- servers. This partly washed out the stain of soap. Again, Mrs. Malory had heard the name of Mrs. Brown-Smith taken in vain, and that in a matter nearly affecting her Matilda's happiness. On the other side, Merton had given the lady a valuable testimonial to character. Moreover, the Vidame would be at her party, and Mrs. Malory told herself that she could study the ground. Above all, the girls were so anxious to go: they seldom had such a chance. Therefore, while the Early Victorian moralist hesitated, the mother accepted.