The lovely and high-born relict of a decrepit and enormously wealthy commoner, she had sustained her husband’s loss with a becoming display of sorrow, and passed with exquisite grace and discretion through the successive phases of the toilet indicative of connubial woe. From a lovely chrysalis swathed in crape she had changed to a dove-colored moth; the moth had become a heliotrope butterfly, on the point of changing its wings for a brighter pair, when the post brought her a letter from one of her dearest friends. It bore the Zurich postmark, and ran as follows: “Hotel Schwert,
“Appenbad,
“June 18th.”
“I wonder, dear, whether you would mind being troubled with Val for a day? He is coming up from Seaton next Thursday on dentist’s leave, and one does not care that a boy of sixteen—one can consider Val a boy without stretching the imagination overmuch—should be drifting anchorless in town. You will find him grown and developed.... You see, I take it for granted, in my own rude way, that you have already said ‘Yes’ to my request.... The views here are divine—such miles of eye-flight over the Lake of Constance and the Rhine Valley! To quote poor Dynham, who suffered much from the whey-cure, ‘every prospect pleases, and only man is bile.’ Kiss Val for me. My dear, the thought of his future is a continual anxiety. 69The title to keep up, and an income of barely eight thousand pounds.... ‘Marry him,’ you will say; but to whom? American heiresses are beginning to have an exorbitant idea of their own value, and then Val’s is an open, simple nature—unworldly to a degree! Not that I, his mother, could wish him otherwise, but—you will understand and sympathize, I know! And boys are so easily molded by a woman who has charm! If you could drop a word here and there, calculated to bring him to a sense of the responsibility that rests upon his young shoulders, the duty of restoring the diminished fortunes of his house by a really sensible marriage.... I have dinned and dinned, but I fear without much result.
“Ever yours,
“G. D. E. V. T.
“Please address Val, ‘Care of Rev. H. Buntham, Seaton College, near Grindsor.’—G.
“Buntham is the house-master. V. says he ‘understands the fellows thoroughly.’ Such a tribute, I think, to a tutor from a boy.—G.”
So a dainty monogrammed and coroneted note, on heliotrope paper, with a thin but decided bordering of black, was sent off to the Marquis of Valcourt, and Valcourt’s hostess in prospective consulted a male relative over the luncheon-table as to the most approved methods of entertaining a schoolboy.
“Heaps of indigestible things to eat—sweet for choice—and a box at the Gaiety if there’s a matinée; if not, the Hippodrome. But who’s the boy?” asked the male relative.
“Lord Valcourt, Geraldine’s eldest.”
The male relative pursed up his lips into the shape of a whistle, and helped himself to a cutlet in expressive silence.
70“Geraldine is devoted to him. He seems to have a delightful nature, to be quite an ideal son!”
“That young—that young fellow!”
“You have met him, haven’t you?”
“I have had that privilege. I was one of the house-party at Traye last September.”
“Geraldine asked me, but of course it was out of the question....”
“Of course, poor Mussard’s death—quite too recent,” murmured the male relative, taking green peas.
Poor Mussard’s charming relict drooped her long-lashed, brown eyes pensively, and the transparent lace, that covered the hiding-place of the heart that had been wrung with presumable anguish eighteen months before, billowed under the impulse of a little dutiful sigh.
“What a prize for some lucky beggar with a big title and empty pockets!” reflected the male relative, who happened to be a brother, and could therefore contemplate dispassionately. “Thirty—and looks three-and-twenty en plein jour, without a pink-lined sunshade.” Aloud he said: “So you are to entertain Valcourt—Tuesday, I think you said?”
“Thursday. It would be dear of you to come and help me,” murmured Mrs. Mussard plaintively.
“It would afford me delight to do so,” returned the male relative unblushingly, “had I not unfortunately an engagement to see a man about a fishing-tour in Norway.”
“Tiresome! I know so little about modern schoolboys!” murmured Mrs. Mussard.
“The less you know about ’em, my dear Vivienne, the better.”
“Having been a boy yourself,” the speaker’s sister responded, with gentle acerbity, “you are naturally prejudiced. But, going by Geraldine’s account, Valcourt is not the ordinary kind of boy at all. Indeed, I have 71promised her to take him in hand, and impart a few viva voce lessons in savoir faire and worldly wisdom.”
“Have you? By Jove, Vivie, you’ve taken something upon yourself! ‘Angels rush in where demons fear to tread....’ I’m mulling the quotation, but in its perfect state it isn’t complimentary. May Valcourt profit by your instructions on Thursday!”
Thursday came, and with it Valcourt. He was pleasing to view; a clean-limbed, broad-shouldered, straight-featured, pink-and-white specimen of the well-bred English youth of sixteen, with fair hair brushed into a silky sweep above a wide, ingenuous brow; sleepy gray-green eyes, with yellow and blue reflections in them, reminding the beholder of tourmaline; well-kept hands, pleasing manners, and a wide, innocent grin of the cherubic-angelic kind, never more in evidence than when Valcourt was engaged in some pursuit neither angelic nor cherubic. Mrs. Mussard, at first sight, was conscious of a brief maternal inclination to kiss him. Geraldine’s boy was, she said to herself, “a perfect duck!” She subdued the osculatory impulse, shook hands with the boy cordially, and hoped the dentist had not hurt him.
“No, thanks awfully,” said Valcourt, with his cherubic grin. The teeth revealed were exceedingly white and regular.
“But you had gas, of course?” proceeded his hostess.
“When I have teeth out I generally do,” said Valcourt carefully. “They always give you half a guinea extra allowance for gas, so most of the fellows ask to have it.” He touched his waistcoat pocket meditatively as he spoke, and smiled, or rather grinned, again so seraphically that Mrs. Mussard longed to tip him a ten-pound note. She gave her young guest a sumptuous luncheon, and, not without serious misgivings, commanded the butler to produce the exhilarating beverage of champagne.
72“A little sweet, isn’t it?” said Valcourt critically.
“I thought that you—that is——” Mrs. Mussard crumpled her delicate eyebrows in embarrassment, and the butler permitted himself the shadow of a smile.
“Ladies like sweet wine,” remarked Valcourt. He refused liqueur with coffee, but considered Mrs. Mussard’s cigarettes “rather mild.”
“I—I don’t usually smoke that brand,” his hostess explained. “I—I ordered them on purpose for——” She broke off, in sheer admiration of Valcourt’s beautiful grin.
The matinée for which she had secured a stage-box did not commence until three. “Time for a little chat in the drawing-room,” she thought, and ran over in her mind a list of the things dear Geraldine would have wished her to say. She bade the boy sit in the opposite angle of her pet sofa, upholstered in shimmering lily-leaf green, billowed with huge puffy pillows of apricot-yellow, covered with cambric and Valenciennes. She thought the harmony well completed by Valcourt’s sleek fair head and inscrutable tourmaline eyes, and wished for the first time that poor dear Mussard had left an heir. Vague as the yearning was, it imparted a misty softness to her brown eyes, and caused the corners of her delicate lips to quiver. She drew a little nearer to Valcourt, and laid her white jeweled hand softly upon the muscular young arm, firm and hard beneath an uncommonly well-cut sleeve.
“My dear Valcourt,” she began.
“Your eyes are brown, aren’t they?” asked Valcourt.
“I believe they are,” murmured Mrs. Mussard. “My dear boy, I trust that——”
Valcourt shut his own sleepy tourmaline eyes and sniffed, a long rapturous sniff. “Mother uses attar of violets. It’s her pet scent. Jolly, but not so nice as yours. What is it?” He sniffed again. “I can’t guess. 73’Mph! I give it up. I know!” The sleepy tourmaline eyes opened, large and round and bright, the cherubic-angelic smile suffused his features. “Why, it comes from your hair!”
“People have said that before. Oh! never mind my hair!” Mrs. Mussard was not displeased, nevertheless. “Tell me how you progress at School. You know your mother is my dearest friend. I should so much like you to remember that and confide in me, almost as you confide in her!”
A solemn, innocent expression came over Valcourt’s face.
“All right,” he said, after a pause, during which he seemed to be listening to choirs of angels chanting to the accompaniment of celestial harps. “I’ll tell you things just exactly as I tell ’em to mother!”
“You dear!” exclaimed the impulsive young widow, and kissed him. The smooth elastic skin, brownish-pink as a new-laid egg, and dotted with sunny little freckles, grew pinker under the velvet violence of the lady’s lips. Valcourt turned the other cheek, with his cherub’s smile, and less warmly, because more consciously, his mother’s dearest friend saluted that also.
“Now,” he said, in his boyish voice, “what did you want me to tell you about School? I’m not a sap at books, and I don’t spend all my time in getting up my muscles. I’m just an ordinary kind of fellow.... I say, how pretty your nails are!”
He took up one of Mrs. Mussard’s exquisitely manicured hands, and, holding it to the tempered sunlight that stole through the lace blinds, noted with appreciative, if infantile, interest the pearly hues and rosy inward radiances, the nicks and dimples of the wrist and the delicate articulations of the fingers. Then, with a droll, half-mischievous twinkle of the tourmaline eye that was next the fair widow, he bent his sleek, fair head 74and rubbed his cheek against the pretty hand caressingly.
“Silly boy!” breathed Mrs. Mussard.
“I believe I am an awful ass sometimes,” agreed Valcourt composedly.
“Who says so?”
“My tutor and heaps of other fellows, and the Head—not that he says so, but he looks as if he thought it!” said Valcourt.
“Does the Head see a great deal of you?” asked Mrs. Mussard, drawing away her hand and grasping at a chance of improving the languishing conversation. Then as Valcourt, with a grave air of reserve, nodded in reply, “I am so glad!” breathed Mrs. Mussard gushingly; “because, at your age, impressions received must sink in deeply. And to be brought in contact with a personality so marked must be impressive, mustn’t it?” she concluded, rather lamely.
“I suppose so,” agreed Valcourt, examining the pattern of the carpet. He looked a little sulky and a little bored, and for sheer womanly desire of seeing the illuminations rekindled Mrs. Mussard gave him her hand again.
“You are going into the Guards, aren’t you, by-and-by?” she queried.
“If I can get through,” said Valcourt, playing with her rings and smiling. “I’m in the Army Class, mathematics and swot generally. But I think our family’s too old or something to produce brainy fellows. Cads are cleverer, really, than we are.”
His tone took a reflection of the purple, his finely-cut profile looked for an instant hard as diamond and exquisite as a cameo.
Mrs. Mussard, sympathizing, said to herself: “After all, why should he be clever?”
“Still, when one hasn’t much money,” she began, reminiscent of the Duchess’s entreaty.
75“We’re beastly poor, of course,” admitted Valcourt. “But as to clothes and horses and shootin’, tradespeople will tick a fellow till the cows come home, and the millionaire manufacturers who buy or rent fellows’ forests and moors and rivers and things are always glad to get the fellow himself to show with ’em; and the keepers and gillies and chaps take care that he gets the best that’s going generally. And so he does himself pretty well all round.”
“That sort of thing is too—undignified!” said Mrs. Mussard, “and too uncertain. A man of rank and title must have a solid backing, a definite entourage. You must marry, and marry well.”
“Mother always talks like that!” said Valcourt. “I think,” he added, “she has somebody in her eye for me!”
“Who is she?” asked Mrs. Mussard sharply.
“I’m not quite sure,” said Valcourt, his tourmaline eyes narrowing as he smiled his angelic smile. “Dutch Jewess, perhaps,” he added simply, “with barrels of bullion and a family all nose.”
“Horrible!” cried Mrs. Mussard, shuddering.
“Her brother’s in the Fifth,” let out Valcourt. “We call him ‘Hooky Holland.’ Their father was secretary to the Klaproths and made heaps of cash—‘cath’ Hooky calls it. He never talks about anything but ‘cath,’ and fellows punch him for it.” Valcourt doubled his right hand scientifically, thumb well down, and glanced at it with modest appreciation ere he resumed: “He has lots of it, too, Hooky, and lends at interest—pretty thick interest—to fellows who get broke at Bridge or baccarat!”
“Oh-h! You don’t play baccarat at school, surely! Such an awfully gambling game!” expostulated Valcourt’s hostess.
“We go to school to be educated, you see,” said Valcourt, in a slightly argumentative tone, “for what Buntham 76calls ‘the business of life,’ and cards are part of a fellow’s life, aren’t they? So they ought, instead of being forbidden, to form part of what Old Cads calls the curriculum. We call Buntham ‘Cads’ because he calls us cads when we do anything that upsets him. He’s a nervous beggar, and gets a good deal of upsetting. My dame says he weighs himself at the end of every term, and makes a note of the pounds he’s lost since the beginning. When I go to Sandhurst she thinks he’ll pick up a bit,” explained Valcourt with his angelic grin.
“I hope your dame is a nice, motherly old person!” breathed Mrs. Mussard.
“She’s nice—quite,” said Valcourt, “and awfully obliging. I don’t know about being old—unless you’d call thirty-three old.” Mrs. Mussard started slightly. “When I have a cold she makes me jellies and things. Awfully good things! And I give her concert tickets, and sometimes we go on the river and have strawberries and cream. Lots of our fellows tell her their love affairs.”
“Do you?”
“And some of ’em are in love with her,” went on Valcourt.
Mrs. Mussard breathed quickly. Never before had she realized what perils environ the young of the opposite sex, even with the chaste environment of school bounds. In her agitation she laid her hand on Valcourt’s shoulder. “I hope—you do not fancy yourself in love with her,” she uttered anxiously.
“Not much catch!” said Valcourt, with the composure of forty. “I got over that in my second year.”
“Silly boy!” Mrs. Mussard very gently smoothed down a lock at the back of his head, which erected itself in silky defiance above its fellows. “When love comes to you, Valcourt,” she went on, with a vivid recollection of the utterances of the inspired authoress of The Bride’s 77Babble Book, “you will find out what it really means. It is a great mystery, my dear boy, a sacred and solemn unveiling of the heart——”
She stopped, for Valcourt had turned his face up toward hers, gently smiling, and revealing two neat rows of milky white teeth. His tourmaline eyes had an odd expression.
“Did you speak, dear?” his fair Gamaliel asked. For the impression upon her was that he had uttered two words, and that they were, “Hooky’s sister!”
But Valcourt shook his head. “I was only thinking. A fellow like me ... has got to take what comes ... the best he can get ... and the better it is, so much the better for him, don’t you see? If he don’t like what he gets, he doesn’t go about grousing. He generally pretends he’s suited; and she pretends; and they get into a groove—or they get into the newspapers,” said Geraldine’s unworldly babe. “Beastly bad form to get into the newspapers. I never mean to.”
Mrs. Mussard listened breathlessly.
“I shall have a rattling time,” said Valcourt, in his soft, cooing voice, “till Hooky’s sister grows up, and mother presents her, and then I shall marry her, I suppose.”
“Dearest boy, I hope not!” exclaimed Mrs. Mussard. “Someone more suitable must be found,” she continued, rapidly putting all the moneyed girls of her acquaintance through a mental review. “Why should you not marry beauty and birth as well as a banking account? The three things are sometimes associated.”
“German princes pick up girls of that kind,” said Valcourt, his elbows upon his knees, and his round young chin cupped in his hands, “and Austrian archdukes. But why need it be a girl?” he went on, pressing up the smooth young skin at his temples with his finger-tips, so as to produce the effect of premature crows’-feet. 78“I don’t like girls—all red wrists and flat waists. Why shouldn’t it be a woman, say a dozen years older—an awfully pretty woman, rich, and in the best set, who’d show me the ropes? I’m a jolly ass in some things. I shall come no end of croppers when I go into society, unless there’s somebody to give me the needful tip.”
Mrs. Mussard sat very upright. She looked at Valcourt; the hand with which she had smoothed his hair remained suspended in mid-air until she recollected it and laid it over its companion in her lap.
“Most young fellows beginning life go to other men’s wives for advice,” said Valcourt. “Why shouldn’t I go to my own?”
Mrs. Mussard’s chiseled scarlet lips moved as though she had echoed, “Why not?”
“They—the chaps I’m talking of—are wild about ’em—the other men’s wives. Yet nearly all of the women are old enough to be their mothers.”
“Their grandmothers, sometimes,” said Mrs. Mussard unkindly.
“Then why shouldn’t I marry a woman who’s only old enough to be my aunt—a young aunt! I’d make a Marchioness of her, don’t you know! and she’d make—she could make anything she liked of me!” said Valcourt, turning his cherub smile and tourmaline eyes suddenly on Mrs. Mussard. “You could!” The lovely widow started violently, and flushed from the string of pearls encircling her pretty throat to the little gold hair-waves that crisped at her blue-veined temples. “You know you could!” murmured Valcourt. The strong young arm in the well-cut sleeve intercepted the retreating movement that would have placed the lovely widow in the uttermost corner of the sofa. The remonstrance upon Vivienne’s lips was stifled by a kiss, given with eloquence and decision, though the lips that administered it were soft, and unshaded by even the rudiments 79of a mustache. “I’m seventeen the end of this term, and five feet nine in my socks,” said Valcourt, a little breathlessly, for the kiss had not been one-sided; “and—and you’re simply awfully pretty. Marry me—I shall be of age before you know it—and——”
“You dreadfully presuming boy!” There were tears in the lovely eyes of the late Mr. Mussard’s lovely widow; an unwonted throbbing in the region of her bodice imparted a tremor to her voice that added to its charm. “I shall write to your mother!”
“Do!” said Valcourt, with his angelic smile. “She’ll be awfully pleased! I wonder the idea didn’t occur to her instead of to me, for she’s awfully clever, and I’m rather an ass.... Five o’clock!” he exclaimed, as the delicate chime of a Pompadour clock upon the mantelshelf announced the hour.
“And you have missed the matinée!” said Mrs. Mussard.
“I preferred this!” said Valcourt, getting up. She had no idea of his being taller than herself until she found the tourmaline eyes looking down into hers. “Good-bye, and thank you, Mrs. Mussard,” said the boyish, ringing voice. “I’ve had an awfully pleasant day.”
Their hands met and lingered.
“Don’t call me Mrs. Mussard any more; my—my name is Vivienne,” she said in a half-whisper.
“Jolly! Hooky’s sister’s is Bethsaba,” said Valcourt. He made a quaint grimace, as though the word tasted nasty, and Vivienne gave a little, musical, contented laugh. “And I may come again, mayn’t I?”
“This week,” nodded Mrs. Mussard.
“I’ll say it’s my tooth,” explained Geraldine’s guileless offspring.
He reached the door, the handle turned, when Mrs. Mussard beckoned, and Valcourt came back.
“I should like to ask you,” she began hesitatingly—“not 80that it matters to me; but still, in your own interests—— And you know your mother is my dearest friend!” ... Valcourt stood with the beautiful grin upon his face, and Mrs. Mussard found the thing more difficult to say than she had imagined. “Where did you—who taught you to make love like—like that?—at your—at your age.... I—it is——” Valcourt made no reply in words, but the expression upon his face became more celestial than before. “I hope kissing is not a feature of the curriculum. But, understand clearly,” said Mrs. Mussard, with that unusual tremor in her charming voice, “that you are not for the future to kiss anybody but me!” And as the door closed on Valcourt’s heavenly grin and tourmaline eyes, she sat down to write a letter to Geraldine.