IT was not till long afterwards that Baltazar learned the cause of his son’s discomfiture. Marcelle learned it at once. The boy exploded with pent-up indignation. Dorothy had turned him down, callously turned him down. Could Marcelle imagine such heartlessness? He had gone to her after his Board. Seeing that she had undertaken to keep him in the army, it was only civil to report progress. Besides, the house had been open to him since childhood. Well, there she was alone in the drawing-room. Looked bewitching. Jolly as possible. Everything right as rain. Then, he didn’t know how it happened—perhaps because she hadn’t discouraged him at the Carlton—anyhow there it was; he lost his head; told her he loved her, worshipped her and all the rest of it, and asked her to marry him. She broke into peals of laughter and recommended him not to be an idiot. She had the infernal impudence to laugh at him! If she had been a man he would have wrung her neck. “And that isn’t all,” he cried. “What do you think she had the colossal nerve to tell me? That she was engaged to my brother Leopold. Leopold! ‘Why,’ I said, ‘only the other day you informed me you were fed up with Leopold.’ ‘Oh! that,’ she said airily, ‘was before the engagement.’ Apparently the brute’s just home on leave and has stolen a march on me. Easy enough with two feet,” he added bitterly.
Marcelle tried to console. After all, he was very young, not yet one-and-twenty. It would be years before he could marry. He flared up at the suggestion. That was what Dorothy, a month older than he, had the cool cheek to say. What did age matter? He was as old as Hell. He had all his life behind him. In the trenches alone he had spent twenty years. As for marrying, he was perfectly able to support a wife, not being, through God’s grace, one of those unhappy devils of new army officers who were wondering what the deuce they would do to earn their living when the war was over. . . . She had treated him damnably. A decent girl would have been kind and sorry and let him down easily. But she!
“She treated me as though I were a lout of a schoolboy, and she a woman of thirty. Only the woman of thirty would at least have had manners. Well, she’s going to marry Leopold. I wish her joy of him. She’ll have a hell of a time.”
Decidedly it had not been a lucky day for the House of Baltazar. Marcelle was oppressed by a sense of guilt for her share in the family disaster, and felt tragically unable to administer comfort. Yesterday she would have poured healing sympathy over the hurts of the evilly entreated youth, and her wrath would have flamed out upon the heartless minx who had spurned the love of a gallant gentleman. But to-day how could she? Had not some horrible freak of chance put her in the same dock as Dorothy, worthless criminals both?
“I suppose you were very angry with her,” she said timidly.
He flung out a hand. Oh, that inherited gesture! Angry? Who wouldn’t have been angry? He would never see her, speak to her, think of her again. He had told her so. As for receiving favours from General Mackworth, she was not to dare insult him by dreaming of it. Marcelle pictured a very pretty rumpus. Godfrey was not John Baltazar’s son for nothing.
And she, in the modern idiom, had turned down John Baltazar; with less ostensible reason, for, after all, she had not engaged herself to another man. Was he, too, like his son, hurling anathema at the head of a faithless woman? Outwardly he had been very courteous, astonishingly gentle; but he was older and had learned self-restraint. How was he taking it now? She was very glad when they reached Churton Towers and when she stripped from herself the unfamiliar trappings of Marcelle Baring and put on the comforting impersonal uniform of the nurse.
Baltazar, however, carried out none of Marcelle’s forebodings. He neither upbraided her nor smashed furniture, nor made one of his volcanic decisions. He merely lit a pipe and sat down and tried to think out his unqualified rejection. It was a second Zeppelin bomb, annihilating the castle in the air which that morning had appeared utterly solid and assured, as effectively as the first had wiped out Spendale Farm and all that it signified. He couldn’t make head or tail of it. He sat a mystified man. For him the glamour of the old days had not faded. In her ripe woman’s beauty she was more desirable than ever. Flashes had shown the continuance of her old wit and gaiety. Thank God she wasn’t eighteen still. What would he do with a child of eighteen? The association was unthinkable. But the woman into which she had developed was the ideal mate and companion. As for her being dead, that was rubbish. Never was woman more splendidly alive. . . . Now let him try to get her point of view. He clenched his teeth on his pipe. At eighteen she loved him. She made some sort of hero of him. She kept up her idealization until she met him an elderly, unromantic savage of fifty. Then her romance fell tumbling about her ears, and she said to herself, “Oh, my God! I can’t marry this!”
It was the “that” which he had thought himself that the second bomb had sent into eternity. It took a lot of confused and blinking wonder for him to realize Marcelle’s “this.” Having realized, he accepted it grimly.
He had a little passage of arms with her some days afterwards. She had invited it, anxious to know how deeply she had wounded.
“I’m wretched because I feel I’ve again brought you unhappiness,” she confessed.
“That you should be leading the life you wish to lead is my happiness,” he replied, not insincerely.
“I feel so selfish,” she said.
“Which means that if I pestered and blustered and raved and stormed and made your days a nightmare of remorse, you would end by marrying me out of desperation?”
She shrugged her shoulders helplessly. “I suppose I should.”
“Then I’m damned if I do it. You’d be merely a scared sort of slave of duty, suffering all the time from acute inflammation of the conscience. I being a product of human civilization, and not a German or a gorilla, or even a Hottentot, should be soon aware of the fact, and our lives would be the most exquisite misery the mind could conceive.”
“I can’t see why you don’t hate me,” she said.
“I think I’ve arrived at an understanding of the phenomenon,” he replied with a wry smile. “You might just as well try to recreate a vanished rainbow as a lost illusion.” He smiled. “Go in peace,” said he.
To himself he said: “I wonder what will be the next knock-down blow.”
Not being able to take charge of Marcelle and Godfrey, who both seemed bent on going their respective independent ways, and Quong Ho still lingering at Water End, Baltazar applied himself seriously to England. First he must learn, learn more fully the endless ramifications of national and international life that formed the nervous ganglion of that manifestation of activity known as the war. In pursuit of knowledge he not only read books, but eagerly availed himself of every opportunity of social intercourse. His circle of acquaintances grew rapidly. His three friends, loyal sponsors, had started him with the reputation of an authority on Far Eastern problems. He became a little lion and delighted in it like a child.
A great monthly review published an article on China written by a well-known diplomatist. It was so deplorably wrong in its failure to reach any possible Chinese point of view, that Baltazar shut himself up for a couple of days in his inn sitting-room and wrote a scathing refutation of the eminent sciolist’s propositions. This, the ink on the last sheets scarcely dry, he put into an envelope and sent off to the editor. A week later the article was returned with the stereotyped form of rejection. In a fury Baltazar sought Weatherley and consulted him as to the quickest means of wading in that editor’s blood. Here was this monstrous ass, he shouted, who, on the strength of having passed a few months at the Embassy in Pekin, with his owl’s eyes full of the dust politely thrown in them by bland Chinese officials, not knowing a word of any Chinese language written or spoken, without the vaguest idea of the thoughts or aspirations of the educated man in the interior of the kingdom, was granted the authority of a great review to spread abroad in this country the miasma of his pestilential ignorance. That stupendous and pernicious asses of his kidney should be allowed to mould British public opinion was a scandal of scandals. And when he, who knew, wrote to expose the solemn red-tape and sealing-wax dummy’s imbecility, an equally colossal ass of an editor sent back his article as if it were an essay on Longfellow written by a schoolgirl.
“When you’ve finished foaming at the mouth, my dear J. B.,” said Weatherley, “let me look at the manuscript. Ah!” he remarked, turning over the pages, “untyped, difficult to read, owing to saeva indignatio playing the devil with a neat though not very legible handwriting, and signed by a name calamitously unknown to the young and essentially Oxford Pennyfeather.”
“Your serene equanimity does me a lot of good,” growled Baltazar.
“You must advance with the times, my dear J. B.,&rdquo............