I  
The Earl of Beaumaris, a worthy and imposing personage, flushed from the nape of his neck to the high summit of his cranium—premature baldness figured amongst the family heredities—paced, in creaking patent-leather boots, up and down the castle library—a noble apartment of Tudor design, lined with rare and antique volumes into which none ever looked. There were other persons present beside the Dowager Countess, and, to judge by the strainedly polite expression of their faces, the squeaking leather must have been playing havoc with their nerves.
“Gustavus,” said the Dowager at length, “you’re an English Peer in your own castle, and not a pointsman on a Broadway block, unless I’m considerably mistaken. Sit down!”
“Mother, I will not be defied!” said Lord Beaumaris. “I will not be bearded by my own child—a mere chit of a girl! Had Susanna been a boy I should have known how to deal with this spirit of insubordination. Being a girl—and moreover, motherless—I abandon her to you. She has many things to learn, but let the first lesson you inculcate be this—that I positively refuse to be defied!”
“The child has, I gather, gone out to take the air when she ought to have stayed in and taken a scolding,” said Lady Beaumaris. “Does anybody know of her whereabouts?”
242Alaric Osmond-Omer, a languid, drab-complexioned, light-haired man of aristocratic appearance, never seen without the smoked eyeglass that concealed a diabolic squint, spoke:
“I saw her in a crimson golfing-jacket and a white Tam-o’-shanter crossing the upper terrace. She carried an alpenstock, and was followed by quite a pack of dogs—incorporated in the body of one extraordinary mongrel which I have occasionally observed about the stable-yards. I gathered that she was going for a climb upon the cliffs. That was about half an hour ago!”
“Alaric, you have attended every Family Council that I recollect since I became a member of this family, and have never before opened your lips,” said Lady Beaumaris, fixing the unfortunate Alaric with her eye, which was still black and snappingly bright. “Make this occasion memorable by offering a suggestion. You really owe us one!”
Everybody present looked at Alaric, who smiled helplessly and dropped his eyeglass, revealing the physical peculiarity it concealed. The effect of the diabolic squint, in combination with his mild features and somewhat foolish expression, conveyed a general impression of reserve force. He spoke, fumbling for the missing article, which had plunged rapturously into his bosom, with long, trim fingers, encrusted with mourning rings.
“The question at issue is—unless I have failed in my mental digest of the situation—how to bring Susanna Viscountess Lymston—pardon me if I indulge a little my weakness for prolixity——”
The door creaked, and Alaric broke off.
“My dear man,” said the Dowager, “I never before heard you utter a sentence of more than two words’ length!”
“—To bring Susanna, who is just seventeen and fiercely virginal in her expressed aversion to, and avoidance 243of, ordinary, everyday Man—into compliance with your paternal wishes”—Alaric bowed to Lord Beaumaris—“where the encouragement of a suitor is concerned!”
“I have appealed to her filial feelings—which do not appear to exist,” said Lord Beaumaris; “I have appealed to her reason—I doubt gravely whether the girl possesses any: ‘There is too much landed property, there are too many houses and too many heirlooms, and there is not enough ready money to keep things going,’ I said. Her reply was: ‘Sell some of the land and some of the houses and all of the pictures, and then there will be enough to keep up the rest.’ ‘My dear child, is it possible,’ I said, ‘that at your age, and occupying the position you occupy, you have no idea of what is meant by an Entail?’ Then I made her sit down here, in this library, opposite me, and laid plainly before her why it is necessary for her, as my daughter, to marry, and to marry Wealth, Position, and Title. Before I had ended she rose with a flaming face and burst into an hysterical tirade, which lasted ten minutes. I gather that she was willing to marry Sir Prosper Le Gai or the Knight of the Swan if either of these gentlemen proposed for her hand. Neither being available, she intends, I gather, to write great poems, or paint great pictures, or go upon the stage.... Go upon the stage! My blood curdled at the bare idea. It is still in that unpleasant condition.” Lord Beaumaris shuddered violently, and pressed his handkerchief to his nose. “If you have any advice to give, Alaric,” he said bluntly, “oblige us by giving it. We are at a positive crux!”
The drab-complexioned, light-haired Alaric responded:
“In my poor opinion—which may be crassly wrong—too much stress has been laid upon the necessity of Susanna’s marrying.” At this point the contrast between the amiable vacuity of Alaric’s face and the Mephistophelian 244intelligence of his monocled eye was so extraordinary as to hold his listeners spellbound in their chairs. “I think we may take it that the principal feature of the child’s character is—call it determination amounting to obstinacy——”
“Crass obstinacy!” burst from the Earl.
“Pig-headedness!” interjected the Dowager.
“I think I remember hearing that in her nursery days the sure way to make her take a dose of harmless necessary medicine,” pursued Alaric, his left eye fixed upon the door, “was to prepare the potion, pill, or what-not, sweeten, and then carefully conceal it from her. Were she my daughter—which Heaven for—which Heaven has not granted!—I should make her take a husband in the same way.”
“An utterance possibly inspired, but as obscure as the generality. I fear, my dear Alaric——” Lord Beaumaris began. The Dowager cut him short.
“Say, Gus, can’t you let him finish? That’s what I call real mean—to switch a man off just when he’s beginning to grip the track.”
“Mother, I bow to you,” Lord Beaumaris said, purpling with indignation. “Pray continue, Alaric!”
“Hum along, Alaric,” encouraged the Dowager.
Alaric, his countenance as the countenance of a little child, his right eye beaming with mildness, and his left eye as the eye of an intelligent fiend, went on:
“Susanna has never yet seen the Duke of Halcyon—her cousin, and the husband for whom you destine her. When she does see him—I think I may be pardoned for saying——”
“She’ll raise Cain,” agreed Lady Beaumaris. “Girls think such heaps of good looks; I was like that myself, before I married your father, Gus.”
“My dear mother, granted that Halcyon’s gifts, both physical and mental, are not”—the Earl coughed—“not 245of the kind best calculated to impress and win upon a romantic, willful girl!... He is, to speak plainly——”
“A hideous little Troglodyte,” nodded the Dowager, over her interminable Shetland-wool knitting.
“Odd, considering that his mother, when Lady Flora MacCodrum, was, with the sole exception of myself, the handsomest young woman presented in the Spring of 1845.”
“Mother,” said Lord Beaumaris, “delightful as your reminiscences invariably are, Alaric is waiting to resume.”
“I had merely intended to suggest,” said Alaric, twirling his eyeglass by its black ribbon and turning his demure drab-colored countenance and balefully glittering left eye upon the Earl and the Dowager in turn, “that the Duke of Halcyon, like the rhubarb of Susanna’s infancy, should be rendered tolerable, agreeable, and even desirable to our dear girl’s palate, by being forbidden and withheld. Ask him here in September for the partridge shooting—as I understand you think of doing—but let him appear, not in his own character as a young English Peer of immense wealth and irreproachable reputation, but as one of those literary and artistic Ineligibles, who are encouraged by Society to take every liberty with it—short of marrying its cousins, sisters, or daughters. Let him encourage his hair to grow—wear a velvet coat, a flamboyant necktie, and silk stockings in combination with tweed knickerbockers. Let him pay attention to Susanna—as marked as he chooses. And do you, for your part”—he fixed Lord Beaumaris with his gleaming left eye—“discourage those attentions, and lose no opportunity of impressing upon your daughter that she is to discourage them too. Given this tempting opportunity of manifesting her independent spirit, you will find—or I know 246nothing of Susanna—that it will be pull baker, pull devil. And I know which will pull the hardest!”
Lord Beaumaris rose to his feet in superb indignation. He struck the attitude in which he had posed for his portrait, by Millais, which hung at the upper end of the library, representing him in the act of delivering his maiden speech in Parliament—an address advocating the introduction of footwarmers into the Upper House, and opened upon Alaric:
“Your proposal—I do not hesitate to say it—is audacious. You deliberately expect that I—I, Gustavus Templebar Bloundle-Abbott Bloundle, ninth Earl of Beaumaris, and head of this ancient family—should stoop to carry out a deception—and upon my only child. That I should take advantage of her willful youth, her undisciplined temper, to——”
“To bring about a match that will set every mother’s mouth watering, and secure your daughter’s son a dukedom, and a hundred and thirty thousand a year.... That’s so, and I guess,” said Lady Beaumaris, “you’ll do it, Gus! You’re a representative English peer, it’s true, but on my side you’ve Yankee blood in you, and the grandson of Elijah K. Van Powler isn’t going to back out of a little bluff that’s going to pay. No, sir!” The Dowager ran her knitting-needles through her wool ball, and rolled up her work briskly. “He’ll do it, Alaric,” she said with conviction.
“Mother,” exclaimed the Earl in desperation. “You were my father’s choice, and Heaven forbid that I should fail in respect towards a lady whom he honored with his hand. But when you suggest that to bring about this most desirable union, I should wallow, metaphorically, in dirt——”
“It’s pay dirt, Gus,” said the Dowager. “A hundred and thirty thousand a year, my boy!”
“Mother!” cried Lord Beaumaris. “If I brought myself 247to grovel to such infamy, do you suppose for one moment Halcyon——”
“That Halcyon would tumble to the plot? There are no flies on Halcyon,” said the Dowager, “and you bet he’ll worry through—velvet coat, orange necktie, forehead, curls, and all!”
“Then do I understand,” said Lord Beaumaris helplessly, “that I am to ask him to accept my hospitality in a character that is not his own, and appear at my table in a disguise! The idea is inexpressibly loathsome, and I cannot imagine in what character he could possibly appear.”
“As a painter—of the fashionable fresco brand—engaged if you like to decorate your new ballroom!” put in Alaric in his level expressionless tones.
“But he can’t paint!” said the Dowager. “That’s where we’re going to buckle up and collapse. He can’t paint worth a cent! That takes brain, and Halcyon isn’t overstocked with ’em, I must allow.”
“Get a man who has the brain and the ability to do the work,” said the imperturbable Alaric.
“Deception on deception!” groaned Lord Beaumaris.
“I have the very fellow in my eye,” pursued Alaric: “Remarkable clever A.R.A., and a kinsman of your own. Perhaps you have forgotten him,” he continued, as Lord Beaumaris stiffened with polite inquiry, and the Dowager elevated her handsome and still jetty eyebrows into interrogative arches; “perhaps—it’s equally likely—you never heard of him, but at least you remember his mother, Janetta Bloundle?”
“She married a person professionally interested in the restoration of Perpendicular churches,” said Lord Beaumaris, “and though I cannot now recall his name, I remember hearing of his death, and forwarding a brief, condolatory postcard to his widow.”
“Who joined him, wherever he is, six months ago.”
248“Dear me!” said Lord Beaumaris, “that is quite too regrettable. However, it is too late in the day to send another postcard addressed to the surviving members of the family.”
“There is only a son,” said Alaric, “and he is the rising artist to whom I suggest that you should offer a commission. He is strong in fresco, and has just executed a series of wall cartoons for the new Naval and Military Idiot Asylum, which will carry his name down to the remotest posterity.”
“Might—I—ah!—ask his name?” said Lord Beaumaris.
“Wopse,” responded Alaric.
Lord Beaumaris shuddered.
“And the Christian prefix?” He closed his eyes in readiness for the coming shock.
“Halcyon.”
Lord Beaumaris opened his eyes, and the Dowager uttered a slight snort of astonishment.
“A relationship existing upon the mother’s side between young Wopse and the ducal house of Halcyon,” said Alaric, twirling his eyeglass faster: “it is not surprising that the poor lady should have improved upon the homespun Anglo-Saxonism of Wopse by the best means in her power. At any rate the young fellow is well-looking and well-bred enough to carry both names in a creditable fashion.”
“You’ve taken considerable of a time about making it,” said Lady Beaumaris, “but I’m bound to say your suggestion ain’t worth shucks. Given the real artistic and Bohemian article to nibble at, is a girl like Susanna likely to swallow the imitation article? I guess not!”
“I concur entirely with my mother, Alaric,” said Lord Beaumaris. “You propose, in the person of this young man, to introduce an element of danger into our limited September house-party.”
249“You could let this Mr. Wopse live in the garden chalet, and commission the keeper’s wife to attend to him,” said the Dowager, “but even then, how are you to make sure that——”
“That Susanna does not associate with him? There is a simple method of divesting the young man of all attraction for a young creature of our dear girl’s temperament,” said Alaric, “but for several reasons I shrink from recommending its selection.”
“Pray mention it,” said Lord Beaumaris, with an uneasy laugh.
“Let’s hear it!” said Lady Beaumaris.
“You have only,” said Alaric, with great distinctness, “to call this young fellow by his Christian name; to let him take Lady Beaumaris in to dinner; to put him up in your best room—the Indian chintz suite—and generally to foster the idea——”
“That he is the Duke of Halcyon!” cried the Dowager. “My stars! what a Palais Royal farce to be played under this respectable old roof.”
“You suggest a double—a doubly-infamous and objectionable deception! Not a word more.... I will not hear it!” Lord Beaumaris rapped decidedly on the table, rose in agitation, and strode on creaking patent leathers to the door. “The question is closed forever,” said he, turning upon the threshold. “Let no one refer to it again in my——”
The door, which had occasionally creaked throughout this discussion, smartly opened from without, and acting upon the Earl’s offended person as a battering-ram, caused him to run forwards smartly, tripping over the edge of the worn, but still splendid Turkey carpet. Lord Beaumaris saved himself by clinging to the high back of an ancestral chair, upon the seat of which he subsided, as the tall young figure of his daughter appeared on the threshold, her Tam-o’-shanter cap, her long yellow 250locks, and her red golfing jacket shining with moisture, her fresh cheeks red with the cold kisses of the March winds.
“It began to snow like Happy Jack,” said Susanna, pulling off her rough beaver gauntlet gloves, “so I came home. Well, have you all done plotting? You look like conspirators—all—with the exception of Alaric.”
This was true, for while the Earl, his mother, and three other members of the family council, whom we have not found it necessary to describe, wore an air of somewhat guilty perturbation, the drab-colored, mild countenance of Alaric, its diabolical left eye now blandly shuttered with its tinted eyeglass, alone appeared guiltless and unmoved.
“We’ve been discussing the September house-party,” explained this Catesby, as Susanna sat upon the elbow of his chair and affectionately rumpled his sparse, light-colored locks.
“And husbands for me!” said Susanna, half throttling Alaric with her strong young arm.
“Susanna!” cried her father. “I am surprised! I say no more than that I am surprised!”
“And I say,” retorted Susanna, in clear, defiant, ringing accents, as she swayed herself to and fro upon her narrow perch, “that it is beastly to be expected to marry just because money has got to be brought into the family. Of course I shall marry one day—I don’t want to study law, or be a hospital nurse like that idiotic Laura Penglebury. But I don’t want to be a married woman until I’m tired of being a girl. I want to have lots of fun and do lots of things, and see lots of people, and make my mind up for my own self. And——”
Lord Beaumaris, who had long been fermenting, frothed over. “When you form an alliance, my child, you will form it with my sanction and my approval, and the husband you honor with your hand will be a 251person selected and approved of by me. By me! I will choose for you——”
“And suppose I choose for myself afterwards!” cried Susanna, blue fire flashing from her defiant eyes.
“Every woman is at heart—ahem!” muttered Alaric, as Lord Beaumaris strove with incipient apoplexy. Susanna continued, with a whimper in her voice:
“The young men you and grandmother point out to me as nice and eligible, and all that, are simply awful. They have no chins, or too much, and no teeth, or too many, and they don’t talk at all, or they gabble all the time, about nothing. They never read, they don’t care for Art or Poetry—they aren’t interested in anything but Bridge and racing; and if you told them that Beethoven composed the ‘Honeysuckle and the Bee,’ or that Chopin wrote ‘When I Marry Amelia,’ they’d believe you. They like married women better than girls, and people who dance at theaters better than the married women——”
“Pet, you’d better go to Mademoiselle.... Ask her, with my love, to fix you up some French history to translate,” Lady Beaumaris suggested.
“I should prefer a Gallic verb,” Lord Beaumaris amended. “I marry in accordance with my parents’ wishes. Thou marriest in accordance with thy parents’ wishes. He marries—and so on! And make a solid schoolroom tea while you are about it, my child,” he continued, as Susanna bestowed a parting strangle upon Alaric, kicked over a footstool, and rose to leave the room. “For I fear we are to be deprived of your society at dinner this evening.”
Susanna’s lovely red underlip pouted; her blue eyes clouded with tears. She flashed a resentful look at her sire, and went out.
“She is not manageable by any ordinary methods,” said Lord Beaumaris, running his forefinger round the 252inside of his collar, and shaking his head. “In such a case Contumacy must be combated with Craft, and Defiance met with Diplomacy. Alaric, regrettable as is the course you have counseled us to pursue, I feel inclined to adopt it.... I shall write to-night to make an appointment on Wednesday with the Duke of Halcyon at the Peers’ Club, and—I shall be obliged if you will, at your early convenience—favor me with the address of the young man Wopse.”
II
 
The garden chalet was damp; it had been raining, a............