Gwendolen Read online

  “Not half so distressing, Frieda," Lyndale interrupted her in a voice which both Gwendolen and Jane later admitted sent a cold chill down their respective spines, "as it will be for you if you repeat anything you have overheard here to any of your friends."

  "Oh, dear! How farouche you do sound!" Miss Courtney said, making a quick moue. "But of course I shall be as silent as the grave!" she said, with such a total lack of sincerity that Lyndale looked grimmer than ever and Gwendolen thought in despair that any hope she might have had to keeping the matter from Lady Otilia was now completely at an end. Of course Miss Courtney, in spite of Lyndale's warning and her own extravagant promise, would spread the whole tale to her friends as fast as she was able to get back to them—and this she immediately proceeded to do, running off with a wave of her hand and a gay word to the effect that she was sure they wished to be alone.

  "Detestable creature!" said Gwendolen indignantly. “You did your best, my lord, but I am quite certain that, even at the risk of displeasing you, she will still go at once and whisper every word she has heard to the Duke!"

  "Yes, I think so," said Lyndale dispassionately. "As far as I know, there is no sure way to stop a woman's tongue, short of strangling her." He turned to Jane, who appeared to be still so stricken with a sense of her own guilt that she was unable to speak. "Well, that settles it," he said. "I shall go back to Brightleaves with you, and we shall see how your parents feel the matter had best be managed. You will have no objection to leaving now, I daresay?"

  Jane said miserably that she wished very much to leave, and with a final heartrending glance at young M. de Combray, which Campaspe was fortunately not present to see, allowed Gwendolen to lead her away. Campaspe was collected, and in a short space of time three very subdued young ladies were being conveyed back to Brightleaves in the ducal barouche, with Lyndale riding beside it on a well-ribbed-up bay.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  GWENDOLEN SPENT THE short period occupied by the drive back to Brightleaves in considerable dread of the scene she envisioned would be played out there when Lady Otilia received the news that all three of her daughters had once again been relegated to the role of unattached spinsters. She thought of the announcement she would be obliged to make as being more or less in the nature of a bomb to be cast into the peaceful, shabby drawing room; but what was her astonishment when, upon stepping across the threshold of that same drawing room, she found that the bomb—or at least a bomb of some sort—had apparently already been exploded there even before she had entered. For Mr. Quarters, with a face like a thundercloud, was striding up and down the long, sunlit apartment like a lion in a cage, uttering pithy expletives from time to time in place of angry roars, while Lady Otilia, seated on the somewhat dilapidated Chippendale sofa, appeared to be wringing her hands in the best tradition of theatrical melodrama.

  "Papa! Mama! What in the world is the matter?" exclaimed Gwendolen, checking so abruptly upon the threshold that Campaspe, who was following directly behind her, almost fell over her.

  Lady Otilia and Mr. Quarters, becoming aware that they were not alone, looked up and began speaking simultaneously, so that the four newcomers were greeted with a confused medley of words, from which only such salient phrases as "damned scoundrels," "ruined forever," and "never bear the disgrace" detached themselves ominously. Gwendolen, from whose head all thoughts of broken engagements had now departed, cast a glance of dismay at her sisters and went quickly across the room to seat herself on the sofa beside her mother.

  "Now, Mama, don't cry," she urged, as Lady Otilia, at sight of her daughters, showed alarming signs of being about to burst into tears. She put her arms about her mother and looked up at Mr. Quarters, who had halted his pacing and now stood before the sofa, grimly surveying her. "Papa, do tell us what has happened to put you both in such a state!" she said. “You look as if the end of the world had come!"

  "Aye, and so it has, my girl, as far as the lot of us are concerned!" Mr. Quarters said roughly, obviously controlling his temper only with the greatest difficulty. "We're being sold up. Those damned rascally cent-percenters are foreclosing."

  "Foreclosing?" Gwendolen stared up at him. She had lived for so long under the threat of a financial disaster that had always, by some minor miracle or other—a winning horse, a small legacy—been staved off at the last minute that she had grown used to believing that it would never really happen, and she could not in a moment adjust her thinking to the idea that it had now actually occurred. "But—but you can't mean we shall have to leave Brightleaves!" she expostulated.

  "Oh, can't I?" retorted Mr. Quarters. "That's just what I do mean, and as soon as may be—and if those two scoundrels, Smith and Brown, think I don't know who is behind all this, they're fair and far off, I can tell you!" He stood looking down at her fiercely. "They have a buyer for the property, they say—a gentleman who wishes to remain anonymous," he said, with heavy scorn. "Well, he may wish to remain anonymous as much as he chooses, but I'm on to his little game! The Duke of Tardiff—that's his name and style, or may I never throw my leg over the back of a horse again!"

  By this time Campaspe, Jane, and Lyndale were all in the room, attending to what was going forward there with varying degrees of interest and consternation. Lyndale, Gwendolen saw as she glanced up at him, looked as coolly detached as ever—as well he might, she thought with some resentment, since he was now free of his engagement to Jane. But Jane herself, whose natural forces were never of the strongest, appeared to be sinking entirely under this new shock to her sensibilities and, uttering a faint cry, seemed about to fall into a swoon except that Lyndale, quickly perceiving the situation, helped her to a chair.

  "Oh, Jane, don't be such a noddy!" said her younger sister, not at all impressed by what she considered a piece of Londonish affectation. "What is there to swoon about, I should like to know? I shall not be in the least sorry to leave Brightleaves. It is a dead bore, living in the country, and we shall have a famous time if we go to Cheltenham, as Mama is forever saying we must do if Papa is ruined—"

  "In lodgings," Lady Otilia interpolated faintly, with a perceptible shudder. "I cannot bear it!"

  "Well, I am sure we can be quite as gay in lodgings as anywhere else," Campaspe said stoutly, occupying herself in chafing Jane's hands and pinching her cheeks so briskly that her sister, in sheer self-defence, was constrained to give over all ideas of fainting and sit up. "There are balls and card-assemblies every evening during the Season, and the theatre, and the Pump Rooms, and hundreds of officers, even if half the people one meets there are the most dreadful old fogeys—"

  Lady Otilia, looking outraged and tragical, said how could she talk in such a fashion when her family had just been reduced to beggary, and then, evidently becoming fully aware for the first time, in her distracted state, of Lyndale's presence in the room, said to him with great dignity, "Lord Lyndale! You will forgive me for having failed to greet you properly. The painful circumstances in which you find us—"

  "Oh, there's not the least need to apologise; I understand perfectly, Lady Otilia," Lyndale said. He turned to Mr. Quarters, who was looking more than ever like an angry and frustrated lion, with his rufous face very much flushed and his sandy hair standing on end. "So Smith and Brown have given you notice they intend to come down on you," he said conversationally. "How bad is it, then?"

  "Damned bad!" Mr. Quarters said with gloomy emphasis. “They can sell me up, lock, stock, and barrel, and, what's more, they intend to do it, the clutchfisted old squeeze-crabs! I told them I might be able to make a recover if they'd give me time—you know as well as I do, Lyndale, that I'm bound to have winners at Cheltenham Races with Conqueror and Dame Miracle—" He fell into a passion once more. "Damme, if it isn't more than a man can bear! My land, and my horses, too, to go to the Duke—"

  "But it may not be the Duke who will buy them, Papa,” Gwendolen interposed, leaving Lady Otilia to go and wind her arm persuasively through her father's. "After all, you don't know
it is he your horrid Smith and Brown have in mind. And perhaps it won't come to anyone's having anything, after all. We have always managed to rub through somehow before, and I am sure we shall be able to do so again. Perhaps my uncle Horace will lend you enough to keep those creatures at bay—"

  "Horace!" Mr. Quarters gave a contemptuous snort; it was well known that he had no opinion at all of Lady Priscilla's husband, who was enormously rich but had a fine attachment to his money that only his wife had ever learned the secret of overcoming. "It's not likely he'll come down with a groat; he told me last year, when he lent me a miserable monkey to stave off those bloodsuckers, that I'd had the last of his blunt, and I'd sooner see us all in the poorhouse than go begging to him for more. But it won't come to that, I daresay," he concluded, gloom once more apparently overcoming wrath in his breast. "Your mother has a bit of money of her own, you know, and they can't touch that."

  Lady Otilia, who in spite of Gwendolen's adjurations had got out her handkerchief and was weeping gently into it, was heard to utter a further despairing reference, in a muffled voice, to lodgings in Cheltenham. Mr. Quarters turned upon her irritably.

  "Aye, in Cheltenham, ma'am!" he said. "I shall go there tomorrow and look out something suitable, for I won't stay here, I can tell you, to see my goods and chattels sold out from under me. And you may think yourself fortunate," he continued grimly, as Lady Otilia seemed about to utter a renewed protest to this scheme, "if it is in Cheltenham that we are able to settle, for it's far more likely we shan't be able to stand the nonsense there, either, and will have to flit to the Continent for economy's sake. They tell me living is very cheap in Boulogne."

  "Boulogne!" Lady Otilia, suddenly abandoning her handkerchief, sat up straight and regarded her husband with an expression of passionate indignation in her prominent dark eyes. "No, that I will not do, Mr. Quarters, and there is an end to it! Go to Boulogne, indeed, and live in nasty damp lodgings, among foreigners! You need not ask it of me, for I will never do it!" She turned to Lyndale with an air of resolution. "Lord Lyndale," she said, "you must help us! I have been given to understand that your circumstances are such as to make it quite possible for you to do so, and surely you will not wish to see the family of the young lady to whom you are betrothed in such straits, when it is in your power to relieve them!"

  Lyndale cast a glance at Jane, who had coloured up vividly and was looking at him imploringly.

  “Unfortunately, ma'am," he said, quite with his usual imperturbable air, "your daughter and I are no longer betrothed."

  "Yes, I know—not formally" said Lady Otilia, who had apparently not taken in the full meaning of his statement, and assumed that he was referring to the fact that Jane had not yet given him her answer in form. "But it is all one—"

  "No, Mama, it is not," said Gwendolen firmly, feeling it was time she took a hand in straightening out this embarrassing situation. "Lord Lyndale and Jane are not betrothed now, nor will they be in the future. Jane has formed another attachment, you see—"

  "Another attachment!"

  Lady Otilia stared incredulously at Jane, who looked for a moment as if she was again considering a swoon as the best way out of her dilemma. But beneath what her sisters tolerantly called her softness she, too, had a good deal of the family spirit, and, calling upon it now, she said to Lady Otilia in a reasonably steady voice, "Yes, Mama, another attachment. It is M. de Combray, and though I am quite aware that he is not at present in a position to ask me to be his wife, I am willing to wait—"

  She was interrupted at this point by exclamations from both her parents, Mr. Quarters's consisting of—"De Combray! The devil you say!"—uttered in accents of decided displeasure, while Lady Otilia pronounced the words, "Merciful heavens!” in the tone of one who feels reason tottering upon its throne.

  "You cannot mean to say," continued Lady Otilia in a quavering voice, "that you have been so wicked, Jane, so ungrateful for all the opportunities that have been given you—"

  Gwendolen interrupted her. "Now, Mama, it will do no good at all to scold Jane," she said, "and, besides, it is not in the least her fault. She was saying good-bye to M. de Combray, just as you would have wished her to do, when Lord Lyndale came upon them and divined the situation—and I am sure it will all be for the best in the end—"

  “The best!" exclaimed Lady Otilia dramatically. "When she has made mice feet of our last opportunity to be saved from ruin!" A sudden inspiration seized her. "But no—not the last!" she went on, in a tone of renewed hope. "There is Belville! He is a. man of substance; he will not wish to see his bride's family driven in disgrace from their home—"

  "I am very sorry. Mama," Gwendolen said, with a sinking heart, for she foresaw the effect this announcement would have upon her mother, "but I am not going to be Captain Belville's bride." Lady Otilia stared at her wildly. "We have agreed that we shall not suit," Gwendolen went on, and then added hastily, to Campaspe, "Cammie, go and fetch Mama's vinaigrette—"

  "Oh, very well," said Campaspe, who had the poorest opinion of people who found it necessary to have recourse to such remedies. "But you had best tell her at once," she recommended as she departed, "that Neil and I are not going to be married either, so she need not be saying next that perhaps the Fairhalls may help us."

  She disappeared into the hall, and Lady Otilia, with a piteous moan, collapsed into Gwendolen's arms.

  "Yes, I know. Mama—it is really very hard on you," said Gwendolen sympathetically, but without great alarm, for she knew that Lady Otilia's constitution was quite robust, and that, in spite of her liking for the dramatic effect, she was capable of sustaining the several unpleasant shocks she had just been obliged to undergo without any great injury to it. "But as Lord Lyndale has been saying to me, it is really better to have all the bad news in one fell swoop, and get it over with." She looked up at Lyndale, who, unlike most men when faced with an emotional scene in an acquaintance's drawing room, was exhibiting no signs of a craven desire to escape, but instead appeared to be taking a great interest in the whole proceeding. "I expect you wouldn't care to come to the rescue with a nice large loan, even though you are not to marry Jane?" she asked him hopefully. "I am quite sure you can afford it—"

  "Oh yes, I can afford it,'* Lyndale agreed. "The question is, can Miss Jane?"

  "Jane?" Gwendolen looked at him uncomprehendingly. "But what has she to do with it?"

  "Well, for one thing, she might feel obliged to marry me," Lyndale pointed out. Gwendolen began to speak, but he cut her off. "Miss Jane," he reminded her, "has, as I have discovered, a very well-developed sense of duty. Now who is to say that, if I come down with a considerable sum to save Brightleaves, she won't feel it her duty to forget young M. de Com-bray all over again and marry me?"

  This, Gwendolen was obliged to admit, was an unanswerable question. Jane, faced with such generosity and, moreover, with the strong opposition of both her parents to her entering into any sort of understanding with Alain de Combray, was only too likely to be led to reverse the decision into which circumstance had forced her today and agree to wed Lyndale, after all. Lady Otilia, however, who obviously took an entirely different view of the situation, here revived sufficiently to say in an accusatory voice to Lyndale that she would have thought that that was exactly what he desired.

  "As for M. de Combray," she said superbly, “I am sure you must know that young girls are always having these kinds of romantic fancies. I myself was desperately in love with my dancing master before I married Mr. Quarters. It signifies—I may tell you—nothing."

  Gwendolen was a good deal taken aback at hearing her mother utter such heresy against the romantic point of view to which she had always been a strong adherent; and it was obvious that Campaspe, re-entering the room at that moment with her mother's vinaigrette, was equally surprised.

  "But, Mama, how can you say such a thing?" she objected. "You have always told us that one should never marry except from inclination—"

  "And so I say still
," said Lady Otilia with some asperity, rejecting the vinaigrette with a wave of her hand, "but what there is about Lord Lyndale to disgust any female I am sure I cannot conceive! It is true that his complexion is very brown, but no doubt residence in England will remedy that in time: and I most certainly have not the least notion why Jane cannot have an inclination for him if she will only put her mind to it— particularly since by doing so she will be able to save her entire family from ruin!"

  Gwendolen, who, though used to her mother's habit of speaking with extreme and often embarrassing frankness when her emotions had been called into play, was not at all certain how Lyndale would take this mixed encomium upon his appearance, gave him a questioning glance, and was relieved to see that he seemed to have accepted it quite calmly. Mr. Quarters, however, who had been holding himself in with bit and bridle, so to speak, while all these revelations of broken engagements and their disagreeable consequences were being debated, here exploded and said with great bitterness that in his opinion a man was a fool to have daughters; and with this Lear-like statement he stamped out of the room and was shortly to be heard calling vehemently for one of his horses to be saddled.

  "You must forgive him, Lord Lyndale," said Lady Otilia, who appeared to have quite got over any idea of swooning away and was now sitting very upright upon the sofa, like a plump but determined hen who has made up her mind to look after her chicks properly even if they have all turned out to be ducklings, and ugly ones at that. "Men do have such a tendency to become angry when it will least serve—not that you are not a man yourself, so you will know exactly what I mean. But I am very happy to see that you are not angry, which I am sure is greatly to your credit, with Jane behaving so very foolishly, so if you will be so kind as to sit down here beside me, I believe we may well be able to sort this matter out—"