Chapter V: Part I (5)

Elton's visit roused no curiosity in his complacent breast, for the favorite seldom announced his coming, and it was quite in order that he should run down for congratulations, and delight his affectionate if disapproving relative with personal details of the great fight. He had come with the intention of being the one to break the news of his cousin's death to his grandfather, should it be necessary; but he permitted himself to hope that Zeal would rise above his type. He had driven him to the station himself, dispensing with the groom as well, and pleaded with him to wait at least a month; to consider the matter more coolly and carefully than had hitherto been possible; begged him to return to Capheaton; offered to travel with him if he preferred to leave England. Whatever might threaten in the future there could be no immediate danger of arrest, for if the shot had carried beyond the private rooms of the Club there would have been evidence of the fact at once, and if the undertakers had suspected the truth and delayed giving information, their purpose was blackmail and could be dealt with.

And while he argued and pleaded he wondered, as he had during the hours he watched beside his cousin sleeping, if, in spite of certain principles which he had believed to be immutable, he could have found any other solution himself. Honor has many arbitrary inflections, and Zeal's act, being wholly abominable, there must seem, in his code, to be no place for him among men. To walk among them unscathed, punished only by a conscience that time would inevitably dull, and the loss of a small fortune that his promised wife would more than replace, while some passionate creature without powerful friends or money for blackmail went to the noose, was an outrage abroad in the secret regions of the spirit even if it made no assault upon public standards. He deserved extinction, one way or another, and it would be almost as great an outrage were he to cover his family with his own disgrace. Certain men might, after such a lesson, live on to devote their lives to repentance and beneficent works, but not Zeal; and Gwynne had no great respect for a character made over after some terrifying explosion among its baser parts. And the question would always remain if the highest honor would not have commanded confession.

He made a deliberate effort to put himself in Zeal's place, and after several failures accomplished the feat. He was willing to believe that his first impulse would have been to destroy himself, not so much through fear as through a blind sense of atonement, for when he endeavored to argue that the crime belonged to the law and the public, he swore at himself for a prig. Either way was suicide, and if the more deliberate might damn a man's soul, no doubt he deserved nothing less, and at least he had done his duty by his family and his class. Gwynne had in the base of his character a puritanical stratum by no means mined as yet, but with too many outcroppings to have been overlooked. But the very strength it gave him served to confuse the simplicity of the religious instinct; and duty, like the code of honor, endures many interpretations in complex minds. He was quite sure that ultimately he would have decided with his cold intelligence; and he was equally sure that if he had doggedly determined to conquer life and be conquered by nothing, that the best part of his mental existence would have gone into the grave with his ideals.

Although there was still some confusion in his mind, he kept it out of his words, and as he drove home from the station he was sanguine enough to hope that he had at least dissuaded Zeal from precipitancy; for his cousin, flippant, cynical, appeared to be quite his usual self, and as he nodded from the window of the train bore little resemblance to the demoralized wretch of the night.

Nevertheless, he hastened to his grandfather, for he knew how little the mood of the moment may presage that of an hour hence; although he was reasonably sure that if Zeal lived until the following morning it would be some time before he brought himself to the sticking-point again. He announced to his mother and his guests that it was his duty to spend twenty-four hours with his grandfather, promising to return in time for two hours' shooting on the morrow.

He took for granted that Zeal had gone to London. What then was his foreboding horror when Lord Strathland, as they sat alone at luncheon--the unmarried aunts were visiting--remarked with acerbity:

"Zeal arrived on the train before yours--went straight to his room, giving orders he was not to be called until dinner--has not honored me with so much as an intimation that he was in the house--Where are you going?"

Gwynne had half risen. He sat down hastily.

"I was afraid he might be ill," he replied, coolly. "But doubtless he merely had a bad night and wants sleep."

In a flash he had understood. It was like Zeal's cynicism to die as close to the family vault as possible.

No meal had ever seemed as long as that last luncheon with his grandfather, who promptly dismissed the subject of his detested heir and asked a hundred questions about the campaign. A fierce sense of protecting the two men he loved best enabled Gwynne to answer as collectedly as if he had not been possessed with the sickening idea that the very bones had gone out of him. When luncheon was over he accompanied his grandfather to the library, then after smoking a third of a cigar, left him to his nap, frankly stating that he thought he had better look up Zeal, who had been rather seedy of late; he would risk being unwelcome.

He walked slowly up the stair and along the corridor to his cousin's suite; he was in no hurry to reach it, but neither could he wait for the possible discovery of the servants at the dinner-hour.

He knocked at the door of the sitting-room. There was no answer. He turned the handle. The door was locked. Then he pounded and called. He was about to fling himself against the door when he heard a quick step in the corridor, and before he could retreat Lord Strathland was beside him. There was no defect in the old gentleman's eyesight nor in his perceptions. Zeal's abrupt arrival without servant or luggage, and his more than usual rudeness, had charged him with vague suspicions as well as annoyance. When Gwynne, in spite of his self-control, had turned livid upon hearing that Zeal was in the Abbey, and had risen as if to fly to his rescue, a dark if undefined foreboding had entered his grandfather's mind. But Lord Strathland respected the reserve of his guests, no matter how nearly related, and, dismissing the subject, had forgotten his apprehension until Gwynne revived it by his untimely pilgrimage. Then Lord Strathland thought the time had come to hear the truth.

"Well?" he demanded, sharply. "What is it? What's up? Why doesn't Zeal open? I saw him in Piccadilly on Saturday and he stared at me as if he had never seen me before. I thought at the moment it was some of his damned impertinence, but concluded that he had something on his mind. He looked more dead than alive."

Gwynne's back was to the light, and he controlled his voice, although his heart was thumping. "Well, he has been, poor chap--awfully seedy--I am really worried. He may have anticipated a final hemorrhage, and crawled home to die." He cherished the hope that Zeal had been at pains to procure an untraceable drug.

"Ah! Well--I hope that is it if the poor fellow is dead. He looked as if he had more than ill-health on his mind. I thought he had pulled up, but no doubt he went to pieces over some wretched woman again. Come, let us get in. I don't want the servants to know anything of this at present."

They threw themselves against the door. The old gentleman was heavy and Gwynne sound and wiry in spite of his delicate appearance. The door was stout but its hinges were old, and after several attempts they drove it in. Lord Strathland's face was pale and he was panting, but he led the way rapidly through the sitting-room into the bedroom.

Zeal had undressed, extended himself on the bed, and covered his body with an eider-down quilt. Lord Strathland jerked it off, and both saw what they had expected to see, for a faint odor of burnt powder lingered in the rooms.

Lord Strathland's face was ghastly, almost blue. He had anticipated death, not with the imagination of the young, but dully, through the atrophied faculties of his age, and the shock could hardly have been greater had he found his grandson without warning.

"What does this mean?" he demanded, thickly. "You know and I will know."

Gwynne took him firmly by the arm and turned him about. "Not here," he said. "Come to the library. I will tell you, but I am no more fit to talk just now than you are to listen."

His grandfather submitted, and Gwynne dropped his arm and rearranged the quilt over his cousin's body. At the same moment Lord Strathland's eyes lit on a sealed letter addressed to himself. Before Gwynne could interfere he had broken the seal. It ran:

MY LORD,--I murdered Brathland. In cold blood--saving the fact
that I was drunk. My entire private fortune has gone for purposes
of blackmail. Even that might not have saved me eventually from the
hangman, we have grown so damned democratic. All things considered,
I am sure you will agree that it is quite proper I should make the
exit of a gentleman while there is yet time. Jack will give you
further particulars, should you care to listen to them. ZEAL."

He too had known nothing of the condition of his grandfather's heart, and it had amused him to plan a last shock to the perennial optimism and complacency of the person he disliked most on earth. The smile was still on his frozen lips that expressed the amused anticipation of his brain. Death, to do him justice, he had met with none of the cowardice he had vaunted, and consistently with his arid cynical soul.

"Don't read it! Don't!" Gwynne had exclaimed, in agony, and forgetting the awful figure on the bed in his alarm at the sight of his grandfather's face. "If you must know the truth let me tell it in my own way."

But Lord Strathland read, and fell at his feet like a bundle of old clothes.

XVII

Gwynne wondered if he should ever shake off the pall-like memories of the past week: the testimony before the coroner, in which every word had to be weighed as carefully as if life instead of the honor of the worthless dead were at stake, the reporters from the less dignified of the British newspapers, and the American correspondents, two of whom dodged the vigilance of the servants, entered the Abbey by a window, and took snap shots of the lower rooms and of the coffins in the death-chamber; the painful scenes with the women of the family, who had descended in a body; the wearisome interview with the family solicitor, in the course of which he had learned that he was heir to little more than the entailed properties; which must be let in order to insure an income for his three unmarried aunts, Zeal's five girls, and himself; the hideous reiteration of "your lordship" by the obsequious servants, that reproduced in his mind the slow deep notes of the passing bell, tolled in the village for his grandfather and cousin.

A letter from Julia Kaye had fluttered in like a dove of promise, but he had never been able to recall anything in the six pages of graceful sympathy but her allusions to the dead as "the marquess" and "the earl." He told himself angrily that his brain must have weakened to notice a solecism at such a time, but it is in moments of abnormal mental strain that trifles have their innings; and during the beautiful service in the chapel he caught himself wondering if any woman of his own class could have made such a slip. Always deaf to gossip, he had no suspicion that his Julia had been laughed at more than once for her inability to grasp all the unwritten laws of a world which she had entered too late. With an ear in which a title lingered like a full voluptuous note of music, she was blunt to certain of the democratic canons of modern society. Although it gave her the keenest pleasure to address the highest bulwarks of the peerage off-handedly as "duke" and "duchess," there had been moments of confusion when she had lapsed naturally into "your grace." And it would have seemed like a lost opportunity to have alluded to a titled foreigner without his "von" or "de," even where there was a more positive title to use as often as she pleased. It was the one weak spot in a singularly acute and accomplished mind.

But of all this Gwynne knew nothing, and he was dully wondering if a great love could be affected by trifles, and if his brain and character were of less immutable material than he had believed, his mental vision still straying through the insupportable gloom of the past week, when he heard a light foot-fall beyond the door. He sprang to his feet, cursing his nerves, and was by no means reassured upon seeing the long figure of a woman, dressed entirely in white, a candle in her hand, approaching him down the dark corridor. He had never given a moment's thought in his active life to psychic phenomena, but he was in a state of mind where nothing would have surprised him, and he had turned cold to his finger-tips when a familiar voice reassured him.

"I am not Lady Macbeth," said Isabel, with a tremor in her own voice, as she entered and blew out the candle. "But I felt like her as I braved the terrors of all those dark corridors and that staircase in my wild desire to talk to a living person. I had arrived at that stage where all your ancestors gibbered at the foot of my bed. Flora has been sleeping with me, but your mother wanted her to-night, and I am deserted."

"What a lot of babies you are!" Gwynne was delighted to wreak his self-contempt on some one else, but glad of the interruption, and unexpectedly mellowed by the sight of a pretty woman after the red noses and sable plumage of the past week. It was true that he had seen Isabel at dinner, but like Flora she had worn a black gown out of respect to the family woe, and he hated the sight of black.

Now she wore a gown of soft white wool fastened at the throat and waist with a blue ribbon; and even her profile, whose severity he had disapproved, having a masculine weakness for pugs, was softened by the absence of the coils or braids that commonly framed it: her hair hung in one tremendous plait to the heels of her slippers.

"I see that you have no more sleep in you than I have," he said. "Let us make a night of it."

It had rained all day and he was suddenly alive to a sense of physical discomfort. He rang and ordered a servant to make a fire and bring the tea-service.

"How did you know I was here?" he asked Isabel, when they were alone again.

"I felt that you were, but I went first to your room and tapped. I was quite capable of waking you up. Thank heaven I summoned the courage to come down. This is delightful."

The fire was crackling in the grate, the water boiling in the big silver kettle. Isabel made his tea almost black, but diluted her own, lest she should be left alone before she too was ready for sleep.

"You have had a beastly time these last days," he said, for he was genuinely hospitable. "I am sorry you did not happen to come a month earlier. Have you seen anything of Hexam? He was going on to Arcot."

"He rode over, or walked over, every day. We should have fallen a prey to melancholy without him, although you may believe me when I assure you that we thought more of you than we did of ourselves. I am your own blood-relation, so I have a right to feel dreadfully sympathetic--may I have a cigarette?"

"What a brick you are to smoke! I don't mind being sympathized with for a change. I have had to do so much sympathizing with others in the last week that I have not had time to pity myself. Even my mother went to pieces, for she was fond of Zeal, poor old chap, and her conscience scorched her because she was always rather nasty to my grandfather--she likes and dislikes tremendously, you know; although to most people she is merely indifferent. But when she dislikes--" He blew the ashes from the tip of his cigarette with a slight whistling sound.

Flora Thangue had extracted all the particulars of the death and suicide from Lady Victoria--who knew nothing, however, of the tragic cause of both--and imparted them to Isabel, whose mind, in consequence, was free of morbid curiosity. She had also read the newspapers. The speculations and veiled hints of the sensational sheets had not interested her, but she had pondered deeply over leaders in the more dignified organs, which had abounded in comment upon the changed conditions in the meteoric career of the young man who was no longer Elton Gwynne, but a peer of the realm.

"Do you mind it so awfully much?" she asked, after a short silence during which they had both smoked absently and gazed at the fire.

"What?" Gwynne turned the cold surprise of his eyes upon her. "Losing two of the four people I cared most for on earth?"

"Of course not. Being suddenly made a peer and having to begin all over. You never will be called Elton Gwynne again, and you will have as much trouble educating the public up to your new name as if you were emerging from obscurity for the first time."

The words, brutally direct, rolled away the last clouds of his lethargy. He vividly realized that he had been skulking before the closed shutters of his understanding, accepting the new conditions with but the dulled surface of his brain.

Now his naked soul stared at her out of his white face and tortured eyes, and she looked away. She had not believed that he could be racked with feeling of any sort, and it was as if she heard him cry: "Oh, God! Oh, God!" although his lips were silent.

But she did not change the subject.

"I suppose you haven't seen the newspapers," she said. "I cut out all the editorials and paragraphs I thought would interest you. One of the big dailies, I forget which, said that the interruption of your career was a greater political tragedy than Parnell's or Lord Randolph Churchill's."

"Do they say that?" asked Gwynne, eagerly. "Well, God knows, it is a tragedy for me."

"Don't you like being a peer the least little bit? I am too feminine, possibly too American, not to see a certain picturesqueness in a title, especially in such a pretty one as yours; and there is no doubt that you are a more imposing figure in the eyes of the world to-day than you were a week ago. Are you really indifferent to that side of it?"

"Am I? One does such a lot of self-posing and self-imposition. There are few things in this world that gratify a man's vanity more than being a peer of Great Britain, and, no doubt, had I happened to be born without what you might call a fighting ambition, and certain abilities, I should--barring natural grief--feel that I was one of the favorites of destiny--that is to say if I had a commensurate income. The fact that I must let the Abbey and Capheaton, and after portioning off all the unmarried women of the family, shall have barely enough left to keep up my flat in Charles Street, may have something to do with my absence of enthusiasm. But--yes--I _am_ sure of myself!" he burst out. "I am the most miserable man on earth to-night, and the reason is not that I have lost two good friends, but because my career is ruined, broken off in the middle."

"You could become a militant Liberal peer."

"Paradoxes don't happen to appeal to me. And the only chance for a genuine fighter is the House of Commons. Besides, it is impossible for a man to be a peer and remain a true Liberal. Power, and inherited influence, and exalted social position have a deadly insinuation. I don't believe any man is strong enough to withstand them. There is never an hour that a peer is not reminded of his difference from the mass of humanity; and human nature is too weak to resist complacency in the end--long before the end. And complacency is the premature old age of the brain and character. If this tragedy had not occurred, even if my grandfather had lived on for fifteen years more, as there was every reason to believe he would, I might have gone on that much longer before discovering weak points in my character. Now God knows what I shall develop."

"Have you made any plans?"

"Plans? I hadn't faced the situation until you spoke."

"You have weak spots like other people, of course. You would be a horrid prig if you hadn't. But you surely must know if your Liberalism is sincere, ingrained. There is no question that you are a hopeless aristocrat in essentials. But so have been certain of America's greatest patriots--Washington and Hamilton, for instance. I do not see that it matters. One can hold to what seems to me the first principles of advanced civilization--that hereditary monarchy is an insult to self-respecting and enlightened men--without wishing to associate with those that offend grammar and good taste. Education, intellect, breeding, would create an aristocracy among anarchists on a desert island--supposing any possessed them; and in time it would become as intolerant of liberties as if it harked back to the battle of Hastings. There is no plant that grows so rapidly in the human garden as self-superiority, and it is ridiculous only when watered by nothing more excusable than the arbitrary social conditions that exist in the United States. I don't see that the qualities you have inherited should interfere with your ability to see the justice and rationality of self-government."

"They do not!" She seemed to beat his thoughts into their old coherent and logical forms. "Whatever may have been the various motives that impelled me into the Liberal party in the beginning, there is no question that I have become even more extreme and single-minded than I have let the world know. Perhaps it is my American blood, although I never thought of that before. At all events, had the time been ripe I should have devoted all the gift for leadership I now possess, and all the power I could build up, to overturning monarchy in this country and establishing a republic. There! I never confessed as much to a living soul, but I think you have bewitched me, for I never have been less--or more--myself!"

"With yourself as President?"

"Sooner or later--the sooner the better. But I waste no time in dreams, my fair cousin--although I have something of a tendency that way. It was enough that I had a great and useful career before me and might have gone into history as the prime factor of the great change."

"Well, that is over," said Isabel, conclusively. "There is only one thing left you and that is to come over and be an American."

"What?" He stared, and then laughed. "Ah!"

"You will have all the fighting you want over there. You will have to work twenty times harder than you ever did here, for your accent, your personality, the thirty years you have lived out of the country you were born in, all will be against you. You will have to be naturalized in spite of your birth--I happen to know of a similar case in my father's practice--and that will take five years. In those five years you will encounter all the difficulties that strew the way of the foreigner who would gain the confidence of the shrewd American people--they are most characteristic in the small towns and farming districts. You will win because you were born to win, but you will learn for the first time what it is to stand and fight absolutely alone--for if they learn of your exalted birth they will but distrust you the more; and you will taste the sweets of real success for the first time in your life. In spite of your youth and enthusiasm, there is in you a vein of inevitable cynicism, for you have had far too much experience of the flatterer and the toady. You are too honest not to confess that if you had been born John Smith there would have been no editorial comments of any sort upon the tragic end of your relatives, and the great world would have taken as little notice of your abilities until you had compelled its unwilling attention by many more years of hard work. America will take you for exactly what you are and no more. But you will have to become more American than the Americans; although you may continue to say 'ain't it' and 'it's me' and drop your final gs, because those are all the hall-marks of the half-educated in the United States, and will rather help you than otherwise. Of course you will assume charge of your own ranch, for that will not only give you plenty to do, but it will be the quickest way of becoming one of the people; and after you have been out in all weathers for a year or two, turned a dark brown down to your chest, ridden a loping horse on a Mexican saddle, talked politics on street corners and in saloons, left your muddy or dusty wagon once a week at the Rosewater hitching-rail while you transact business in a linen duster, or yellow oil-skin overalls and rubber boots, you will feel so American--Californian, to be exact--that the mere memory of this formal cut-and-dried Old World will fill you with ennui."

There was a glint of laughter in Gwynne's eyes, but they were widely open and very bright.

"I see! You are determined to make a convert of me. You began the night of your arrival. I suspect you of having come over on a crusade."

"That was the moment of inspiration--that first night. I won't deny that I have thought a great deal about it since--of little else since I read those editorials."

He leaned back and regarded the sole of his shoe as if it were a familiar. "That is a large order," he said, in a moment. "Colossal! There might be worse solutions. And the life of a cow-boy, for a while at least--"

"Don't delude yourself. You would not be the least bit of a cow-boy. You wouldn't even look picturesque--if you did you might be sorry. You would just be a plain northern California rancher. Of course you would have all the riding you wanted, but there are no round-ups worth speaking of on a ranch the size of Lumalitas. And probably you would continue to let sections of it to men that wanted to raise cattle or horses on a small scale. You had better devote yourself to the dairy and to raising hay and grain, and turn about five hundred acres into a chicken-ranch--nothing pays like that."

He threw back his head and laughed as heartily as if death and disaster had never been.

"From the English hustings and the greatest parliamentary body the world has ever known to chickens and butter in California! From Capheaton to Rosewater, oil-skin overalls and a linen 'Duster!' Oh, Lord! Oh, Lord! But give me a comprehensive idea of the place, in your own inimitable unvarnished diction. That will keep the ghosts off, at all events."

XVIII

Julia Kaye was one of those women designed by nature for the role of a Valerie Marneffe, or of that astute Parisian's bourgeoise and more romantic daughter, Emma Bovary; but tossed, in the gamble of the fates, into a setting of respectable opulence, where her instincts for prey were trimmed of their crudities, and the vehemence of her passions subdued by the opportunity to gratify all other whims and desires.

Her father, born in the sooty alley of a manufacturing town in the north of England, had run away to sea in his boyhood, deserted in the port of New York, starved, stolen, peddled, washed dishes in cheap restaurants, shovelled snow, tramped to Chicago, starved and peddled and shovelled again, finally found a position with a firm of wholesale druggists. He attended a night school, proved himself a lad of uncommon sharpness, and in less than a year was first packing and then dispensing drugs. Five years later he was drawing a large salary, and at the age of thirty he had opened a retail drug store of his own.

It was during his earlier period of comparative leisure and peace of mind that he began to test the inventive faculty that had pricked him in small but significant ways during his boyhood. His first inventions were of a minor importance, although they increased his income and were permanently remunerative; but when he turned the torch of his genius upon the fatal antipathies of vermin, his success was so deservedly rewarded that he was a millionaire in less than three years. He returned to England, and, avoiding the alley of inglorious memory, courted and won the daughter of a manufacturer, his ambition driving him to compel social recognition in his native city. It soared no higher, but his wife, now no longer one of a large family, but with the income of a generous millionaire at her disposal, was open to higher promptings; and he to conversion. They moved to London and laid their plans with some skill.

But although London can stand a good deal in the cause of resupply and novelty, the violence of Mrs. Tippett's accent, and the terrible solecisms of a gentleman whose education had begun in a Lancashire alley and finished in the business purlieus of Chicago, who had acquired the American vice of brag in its acutest form, and who, when in his cups, shouted and spat and swore, were more than the most enterprising among them had been called upon to endure. The social ambitions of the Tippetts were so definitely quenched that the indignant millionaire threatened to return to Chicago. But Mrs. Tippett moved him firmly to Brighton, where, in the course of time, she toned him down. They made their way slowly into society of a sort, and attracted the attention of the public. There was no law to prevent them from dining at the fashionable hotels, where Paris gowns could not pass unobserved; and their turnouts were irreproachable.

Mrs. Tippet, an astute woman, by this time had realized that hers was not the destiny of the social star, and she concentrated her hopes and ambitions upon her one child, an uncommonly clever little girl. This child grew up in a luxury that would have stifled even her precocious mind had it not been for the rigid laws of the school-room. Her governesses and tutors were selected with a sharp eye to the number of titles in their reference-books, but dismissed promptly if they were unworthy of their hire. Later, the little Julia was sent to a distinguished school near Paris, where, with an eye to her future well-being, remarkable in one so young, she divided her affectionate affluence among the few whose exalted station made them worth the while of a maiden with an indefinite future.

These friends did not prove as useful as she had hoped. At home there were her parents to terrify theirs, and although she visited at several chateaux, and more than one title was laid at her gilded feet, she made up her mind to read her name in Burke.

She took her parents for a tour round the world with a view to polishing off their lingering idiosyncrasies, and her chance came in India, where she buried them both. They succumbed to cholera, and the kindly wife of the viceroy, to whom she had had the forethought to secure a letter, sent for her to come to Simla and remain as her guest until she found courage and a chaperon for the return to England. Here she met Captain, the Honorable Augustus Kaye, heir to an ancient barony, chivalrous, impressionable, and hard-up. They were married with the blessings of old friends and new, and, to do her full justice, she made him a good wife according to her lights. She was quite insanely in love with him at first, for he looked like one of Ouida's guardsmen, and his pedigree was so long, and so varied with romantic historic episode, that she was fully a week committing it to memory.

When he left the army and they had returned to England--via Paris--she had the wardrobe and establishment of a princess, the right to dine at the Queen's table, and not a relative in London. She was immoderately happy, and during the five years of her wedded life she exhausted the first strength of her affections, buried her feminine caprice, and whatever of impulse youth may have clung to as its right. When Gussy Kaye died, the predominant feeling in her bosom was rage at his inconsiderateness in leaving the world before his father, and nothing behind him but a courtesy prefix which she could not even use on her cards.

She opened her soul to searching, and decided that five years of love were quite enough for any woman, and that her attentions hereafter should be directed towards the highest worldly success obtainable with brains, talents, and wealth. To be merely a rich woman in the right set did not come within measurable distance of her ambition's apex, and she determined to gratify her passionate self-love by becoming a personality.

She had long since simulated the repose of the high-born Englishwoman, until, like all imitators, she far surpassed her models, and her manners were marked not so much by the caste of Vere de Vere as by an almost negative stolidity. This at least provided her with an unruffled front for trying occasions--others besides the Arcots were insensible of her offerings--which in the United States of America would have been admiringly characterized as "nerve." This manner became solidified after her popular husband's death, and if it was generally referred to as "aplomb" or "poise," allowances must be made for the poverty of the average vocabulary.

It is not difficult for a clever, handsome, correct, and wealthy woman to reach and hold a distinctive position even in London, that world's headquarters of individualities. In addition to a judiciously lavish hospitality, it is only necessary to personalize intelligently, and this Mrs. Kaye did with an industry that would have carried her to greatness had she been granted a spark of the divine fire. She cultivated the great and the fashionable in art, letters, and the drama, mixed them tactfully with her titles, attended the banquets of the ruling class in Bohemia attired flatteringly in her best, and founded a society for the study of Leonardo da Vinci. She became intimate with several royal ladies, who were charmed with her endless power to amuse them and her magnificent patronage of their charities; and she formed close relations with other dames but a degree less exalted, and generally more discriminating. She cultivated a witty habit of speech, the society of cabinet ministers, and her _chef_ was a celebrity. Her gowns would have been notable in New York, and she was wise enough to avoid eccentricity and openly to regard all forms of sensationalism with a haughty disdain.

Her attitude to men was equally well-advised. Detrimentals and ineligibles never so much as came up for inspection; she had a far-reaching sense of selection and a proper notion of the value of time. Therefore, the many that had the run of her luxurious mansion contributed personally to her prestige, and she flattered herself that her particular band was little less distinguished than the Royal Household. And they invariably found her witty, entertaining, or, like Madame Recamier, ready to listen "avec seduction." Her knowledge of politics was practically unbounded.

In such moments as she happened to be alone with any of her swains, she became distractingly personal, inviting, gently repelling, afforded dazzling glimpses of possibilities awaiting time and the man: so accomplishing the double purpose of agreeably titillating her own depths and wearing the halo of a well-behaved Circe. Altogether her success was what it always must be when brains and ambition, money and a cold heart are allied; but it was small wonder if the head of the daughter of the House of Tippett was a trifle turned and certain of her perceptions were blunted.

Although ofttimes large with complacency, she by no means lost sight of her original purpose to wed a coronet, and if she endured four years of widowhood it was merely because she knew that she could afford to wait for transcendence. This she had finally run to earth in Lord Brathland, imminent heir to a dukedom, and personally more agreeable to her than any man in London. That he was notoriously inconstant but added zest to the chase, and it was, perhaps, the illusion she at times achieved of a certain resemblance to the ladies of his preference that finally overcame his intense aversion from respectability. He had offered himself to her on the day of his undoing.

This was the woman with whom Elton Gwynne was infatuated at the most critical moment of his career. Of her profound aybsses he suspected nothing. She reigned in his imagination as the unique woman in whom intellect and passion, tenderness and all the social graces united in an exquisite harmony. There had been a time when, dazzled by the brilliancy of his ascending star, and Brathland being but a name to her, she had considered marriage with a man who assuredly would be the next leader of a Liberal House, and was no less certain of being prime-minister. She was under no delusion that she could one day induce him to accept a peerage, but she was reasonably sure that Zeal would not marry again, and there were times when the heir looked so ill that she tightened her bonds about the heir-presumptive, while assuring him that she was too much in love with liberty to think of marriage. Even when Zeal came back from Norway or Sorrento looking almost well, she never permitted Gwynne to escape, to see so much as a corner of her ego that might disturb the image of herself she had created in his mind; and when she met Brathland and her senses swam with the subtle scent of strawberry leaves, she saw no reason for losing the stimulating society and flattering attentions of the brightest star in the political firmament. Therefore, when he was ready to hand, in the crushing hour of her riven ambitions, and his own of serenest effulgence, she promptly reflected that the distance between a marquisate and a dukedom was quickly traversed by a powerful statesman. Meanwhile, although Elton Gwynne would no doubt be a hideous trial as a husband, his wife's position, supported by a million in the funds and another in Chicago, would be one of the most brilliant in England. And she too had seen Lord Zeal in Piccadilly on Saturday.

XIX

The sudden elevation of her Jack to a marquisate, beside whose roots, gripping the foundations of Britain's aristocracy, and ramifying the length and breadth of its society, the lost dukedom was a mere mushroom, created for a favorite of the last George, and notorious for its _mesalliances_, did not cost Mrs. Kaye a moment's loss of poise. She merely wondered that she had ever questioned her star. People that disliked her found a subtle suggestion of arrogance in her manner, and the slight significant smile on her large firm lips was a trifle more stereotyped. Those that she favored with the abundance of her offerings remembered afterwards that she had never been so brilliant as during the month that followed the announcement of her bethrothal, and attributed the fact to the electrified springs of affection.

Gwynne and she had been invited to the same houses for the rest of the autumn, but he cancelled his engagements while begging her to fulfil hers, as he should be too busy to entertain her were she so sweet as to insist upon coming to Capheaton. This she had not the least intention of doing, for she not only yearned for the additional tribute due to her, but she always avoided long sojourns in Lady Victoria's vicinity, knowing her as a woman of caprice, who often dropped people as abruptly as she took them up. Susceptible to the charm of novelty, so far Mrs. Kaye had wholly pleased her; but the clever Julia gauged the depths of her future mother-in-law's credulity and kept her distance. With all her reason for self-gratulation, in the depths of her cynical soul she was quite aware of her natural inferiority to the women she emulated in all but their license. That prerogative, with the wisdom that had marked her upward course, she had flagrantly avoided, knowing that the world is complacent only to those that fire its snobbishness, never to those that fan the flame; and while she bitterly envied these women, she never forgot the market value of her own unimpeachable virtue. She could not in any case have been the slave of her passions, but her serenity was sometimes ruffled as she reflected that, in spite of eminence achieved, her caution in this and in other respects branded her in her secret soul as second rate.

But if she tactfully did not insist upon flying to Capheaton, she wrote such charming letters, happily free of solecisms, that Gwynne wondered at his failure to sound the depths of her charm. But he refrained from meeting her, and the reason was that he was slowly working towards a momentous decision, and wished to arm himself at all points before braving her possible disapproval. When he was his cool normal collected self again, he gave way to his impatience to see the woman he had every reason to believe was deeply in love with him. He telegraphed her a peremptory appeal to go up to her house in London, and she was too wise to refuse. It was now October and London quite bearable. She telegraphed to her servants to strip her house of its summer shroud, and returned early on the day of his choice.

It is hardly necessary to state that Mrs. Kaye lived in Park Lane. She had cultivated half-tones with a notable success, but to symbolize her new estate was a temptation it had not occurred to her to resist. Shortly after her return from India she had bought a large house in the facade of London, and furnished it with a luxury that satisfied one of the deepest cravings of her being, while her admirable sense of balance saved her from the peculiar extravagances of the cocotte.

She had seen Lady Victoria's expressive boudoir at Capheaton, and its mate in Curzon Street, and relieved the envy they inspired in a caustic epigram that happily did not reach the insolent beauty's ear. "These old coquettes," she had lisped, with an amused uplift of one eyebrow. "They surround themselves with the atmosphere of the demi-monde and forget that a wrinkle is as fatal as a chaperon."

The pictures in her own house were as correct as they were costly, and she had no boudoir. She invariably received her guests in the drawing-room, an immense and unique apartment, with a frieze of dusky copies of old masters, all of a size, and all framed in gilt as dim with time. From them depended a tapestry of crimson silk brocade of uncheckered surface. By a cunning arrangement of furniture the great room was broken up into a semblance of smaller ones, each with its group of comfortable chairs, its tea-table, or book case, or cabinet of bibelots, or open hearth. And all exhaled the inviting atmosphere of occupation.

Mrs. Kaye, rested, and more self-possessed than if the hastening lover had been the late Lord Brathland, but agreeably stirred nevertheless, awaited the new peer in a charming corner before a screen of dull gold, the last reviews on a table beside her, the afternoon sun shining in on her healthy unworn face. When he entered and advanced impetuously across the room she decided that he certainly was a dear, even if he lacked the fascination of Brathland and his kind. And his halo was almost visible. She therefore yielded enchantingly when he enveloped her, smothered her, stormed her lips, and even pulled her hair. She finally got him over to the little sofa--she had advanced to meet him--but remained in his arm, the very picture of tender voluptuous young womanhood. Indeed, she was well pleased, and found her Jack, with that light blazing in his eyes, quite handsome, and fascinating in his own boyish imperious self-confident way.

It was half an hour before she rang for tea, and then she looked so pretty and domestic on the other side of the little table, with its delicate and costly service, that Gwynne was obliged to pause and summon all his resolution before proceeding to another subject that possessed him as fully as herself; but he succeeded, for not even passion could turn him from his course; and she gave him his opening.

"Poor Lord Strathland!" she exclaimed, with a tear in her throat. "He was always so jolly and amusing, quite the most cheerful person I ever met. And before your cousin became--lost his health--we were great friends. Indeed he never quite forgot me. But it was for you I was so horribly cut up. I cried for two nights."

"Did you? But I was positive you did not make those tears in your first letter with your hair-brush." He laughed like a happy school-boy, while she protested with a roughish expression that made her look like a very young girl.

"It need not prevent our immediate marriage," he said. "What do you say to the last of this month?"

"I could get ready. Only girls, who never have any clothes, poor things, get trousseaux in these days. I had set my heart upon spending the honeymoon at the Abbey, but it would be rather indecent yet awhile; don't you think so?"

He had not an atom of tact and rushed upon his doom. "We shall have to cut the Abbey," he said, firmly. "I start for California three weeks from to-day."

"Indeed?" she said, stiffly. "I should have thought you would have consulted me. Not but that I shall be enchanted to visit California, but--well, you _are_ rather lordly, you know."

"My dear girl, I have been too harassed to consider the amenities. And when a man is rearranging his whole life he must isolate himself or run the risk of clouds in his judgment."

He paused. She disguised her mortification and answered, kindly: "I can understand that in this sudden demand for readjustment you have had many bad moments. It was far too soon for you to go up to the Peers'. But with your marvellous energies, your genius--there is no other word for it--you can soon astonish the world anew with a patent for defossilization. At all events the Peers' will enter upon a new life as a sort of mastodon cave swept out and illuminated by the most energetic and aspiring of knights-errant."

Gwynne laughed dryly. "The role does not appeal to me; nor any other in the same setting. I have done a month of the hardest thinking of my life. Everything that went before looks like child's play. I have arrived at the definite conclusion that my career in England has come to a full stop, and I have made up my mind to create another--out of whole cloth--in the United States."

She stared at him, her face not yet unset, but her eyes expanding with incredulous apprehension. "You mean to desert England?" she asked, quietly.

"Forever. Absolutely. It is all or nothing. I cannot become an American citizen until five years after entering the country, and I do not wish to lose any valuable time. Having made up my mind, I have ceased to wonder if I shall like it. That is now beside the question. I shall drop my title as a matter of course, and hope that I shall pass undiscovered as John Gwynne. In short, I shall begin life all over again--as if I were a criminal in disguise instead of the sport of circumstances. I have ceased to regret the inevitable and begun to be stimulated by the thought of a struggle to which all that I have had here was a mere game, and I am sure that you, with your brains and energy, will enjoy the fight as much as I. I am not going into the wilderness. We shall be only two hours from San Francisco, which I am told is the only city in America that in the least suggests Europe; it should be very attractive. On the ranch you shall have every comfort and luxury. You must be sick of London, anyhow. You have conquered everything here."

He paused and regarded her in some trepidation. In spite of his self-confidence he had had his moments of doubt. And although he had anticipated tears and remonstrance, he was unprepared for the more subtle weapon of amusement, flickering through absolute calm. He suddenly wished that she were younger. He had never given a thought to her age before, but he remembered that she had lived for two years longer than himself, and it made him feel even less than thirty.

"My dear boy," she said, wonderingly, "I never heard anything so romantic and impossible. Of course it is the American cousin with whom you have been shut up all these weeks that has been putting such preposterous ideas into your head. I always said that nature just missed making you a poet. But if you wish to work out your manifest destiny--to be immortalized in history--you will remind yourself that England is the one place on earth where an Anglo-Saxon can cut a really great figure. Not only because he has the proper background of traditions, but because he has an audience trained to recognize a man's greatness during his lifetime. If you go in for those unspeakable American politics you will never be given credit for anything higher than your medium; in other words, should you develop into a statesman on American lines you would never be recognized for anything but a successful politician. Even if you survived in their hurly-burly of history, you would be judged by contemporary standards--infused with a certain contempt because you were not American-born."

"I have thought it all out. The obstacles to greatness, even more than to success, have whetted my appetite for the struggle. I must fight! fight! fight! I must exercise my powers of usefulness to some good end, and now, now, when I am young and ardent. I should go mad sitting round doing nothing. I have no temper for attacking the passive resistance of inertia. I want to fight out in the open. If I fail I will take my beating like a man. But I have not the least intention of failing. I am acutely aware of the powers within me, and I can use them anywhere."

"Then why not in the Upper House?" she asked, quickly.

"For the reasons I have given you, and because I should fear the results on my character. You know what it means to be a peer of Great Britain. Flattery without accomplishment is demoralizing--would be to me, at all events. It is wine to me when I am achieving, but it would drug me in idleness. Are you so wedded to London?"

"London is the _raison d'etre_ of life. Has it occurred to you," she asked, gently, "that I might refuse to go to America?"

"I was afraid the idea would be something of a shock, but I was sure you would see the matter in my light."