Chapter XIII: The Sweets of Life

Not a word has been said by Mr. Trenchard as to his testamentary intentions in reference to his three nieces, but in the mind of Redcastle it is an established fact that Sibyl is to inherit the bulk of her uncle’s property. The other two girls will get something, no doubt, Mrs. Stormont remarks obligingly to Mrs. Groshen, the banker’s wife, as those two ladies take their afternoon tea together, ceremoniously, in the Stormont drawing-room, a spacious apartment with a good deal, of white paneling, gold moulding, and looking-glass, and not much besides in the way of furniture, a barren tract of Brussels carpet, with an islet here and there in the shape of sofa, ottoman, or coffee-table.

‘The other two girls will get something, of course--two hundred a year each, perhaps: and a very nice income too, for young women not likely to marry. But mark my words, Mrs. Groshen, Sibyl is the heiress. Mr. Trenchard positively doats upon her.’

‘Do you think her pretty?’ asked the banker’s wife, languidly. She has been esteemed a beauty in her time, on the strength of an aquiline nose and a large pale blue eye, and she does not particularly approve of these new lights.

‘Well, yes, decidedly pretty--in her peculiar style. Features rather too sharp, perhaps, and a sad want of colour.’ The Miss Stormonts rejoice in vivid complexions. ‘But she has fine eyes.’

‘Yes, fine eyes,’ assents Mrs. Groshen.

‘Though I cannot say I like their expression.’

‘No more do I,’ says Mrs. Groshen, warmly.

‘Perhaps the nicest thing about her is her manner. She has really charming manners.’

‘Ye-es, very agreeable manners,’ drawls Mrs. Groshen.

‘If they were not so painfully artificial.’

‘That’s the very thing that struck me,’ says Mrs. Groshen, brightening.

The banker’s wife rustles home in her silk attire, and tells Mr. Groshen at dinner how the Stormonts are trying their uttermost to catch Mr. Trenchard’s niece for their empty-headed son Frederick.

‘This Mr. Trenchard is very rich, I suppose?’ she says, interrogatively.

‘Enormously. I wish he’d keep an account with us,’ replies the banker.

Sibyl accepts all the homage Redcastle can offer her, with a tranquillity which raises her not a little in the estimation of the _élite_. She takes Mrs. Stormont’s somewhat oppressive kindness as a matter of course, and is unawed by the splendour of the Groshens’ dinner-table, which for plate, china, glass, floral decoration, and hothouse fruit, takes precedence of other tables in Redcastle.

‘I don’t pretend to do things as Mrs. Groshen does,’ the Redcastle matrons inform one another apologetically. ‘We can’t all be bankers.’

Mrs Stormont volunteers her services in escorting Sibyl to concerts, and other local entertainments which a man of Mr. Trenchard’s age may not care to patronize. Stephen Trenchard is quite willing that Sibyl should take advantage of these friendly offers, but, to his surprise, and perhaps gratification, the girl refuses.

‘I am very fond of music, uncle Trenchard,’ she says, ‘but I shall not go out of an evening without you. That would be a pretty way of keeping you company.’

‘But, my dear, there is some difference between seventy and twenty. Crabbed age and youth cannot dwell together; or if they do, youth must have a holiday now and then.’

‘You are not crabbed, and I am very happy with you,’ answers Sibyl.

‘Flatterer,’ exclaims Stephen Trenchard, not the less pleased.

‘Artful hussy,’ thinks Mrs. Stormont, and by-and-bye in the course of that cutting and wounding which passes for conversation in Redcastle, that lady informs Mrs. Groshen that Sibyl Faunthorpe is one of the deepest girls it was ever her fate to encounter.

‘She’ll have that old man’s money, my dear, every sixpence,’ says Mrs. Stormont, emphatically.

‘Then your Fred ought to have her.’

‘Why, you see, my dear, these Faunthorpes are people of no family.’

‘You mean that he has asked her and been refused,’ remarks Mrs. Groshen, astutely.

‘I don’t think a Stormont is likely to find himself rejected by a parish doctor’s niece,’ replies the colonel’s wife, with suppressed indignation. ‘As to Mr. Trenchard’s fortune, it is nothing to boast of after all. It has all come from trade.’

This is a thrust at the banking business.

‘I fancy that is the source of most people’s money now-a-days,’ returns Mrs. Groshen, blandly. ‘Professional men seldom seem to have much.’

Hereupon the two ladies, having indulged in a few friendly passes on their own account, return to the slaughter of the absent, and kiss each other affectionately at parting.

Sibyl’s dissipations are therefore, by her own desire, confined to those festivities to which Mr. Trenchard is bidden, and which take the dignified and substantive form of dinners. No one could think of inviting the master of Lancaster Lodge to ‘come in’ in the evening. Dinners of first quality, A1 at Lloyd’s, are those to which Mr. Trenchard is bidden, and very splendid are the banquets with which at longish intervals he gratifies his friends in return. Wonderful is the regard which Redcastle has for Mr. Trenchard, and its eagerness to win and retain his friendship. It is not to be supposed that the _élite_ have any expectation of profiting in a direct manner by his wealth. They have none. But they like to adorn their table with a rich man. They like to put him forward as one of their best friends, and to know that less privileged people are smitten with envy. They invite him very much for the same reason that they buy costly fruit out of season, and waxen blossoms from the hothouse instead of homely roses ripened in the sun. He reflects honour and glory upon themselves. It is a distinction to be on intimate terms with so much money. Mr. Trenchard’s Redcastle friends brag about his wealth as if it were their own, smack their lips as they tell each other his income, and that he has never less than fifty thousand at call, in case some sudden opportunity for a stroke of business should crop up in Calcutta. Has Stephen Trenchard told his new friends the amount of his income, or the sum he keeps uninvested? Hardly, for he is the most reticent of men as to his own affairs. But Redcastle has a knack of evolving facts about other people’s business out of its inner consciousness.

A year has slipped away, unawares almost it seems to Sibyl, despite lurking pangs of remorse, silent hours given to regret. Life at Lancaster Lodge is such an easy thing. It is so pleasant to have everything one desires, to be praised and petted, and invited here, there, and everywhere, and to refuse the most flattering invitations upon the last fashionable absurdity in note-paper. Pleasant, in a word, to be Miss Faunthorpe of Lancaster Lodge, instead of Miss Faunthorpe of nowhere. There is something of the lotus-eater’s dreamy idlesse assuredly in this reposeful existence at Lancaster Lodge.

Conscience has been lapped to sleep before the year is out, and Sibyl has persuaded herself that Alexis Secretan has carved his way to independence somehow or other, and is getting on very well indeed in some distant quarter of the globe, whence he will doubtless return by some happy conjuncture of events soon after uncle Trenchard’s death, which calamity in the course of nature will come to pass in a few years.

‘And then we shall both be amply rewarded for the sacrifice we have made in this separation,’ muses Sibyl, as if the separation had been a voluntary one on her husband’s side as well as her own.

Mr. Trenchard takes life tolerably easily considering that he has his own way in everything, an indulgence which acts as an irritant upon some dispositions. He is feared and obeyed in his own house, flattered and caressed out of it. His servants work for him as no other man’s servants work, and obey, and tremble at his footstep. He accepts all that Redcastle can give him, dines out a good deal among the _élite_, tells his prosy old Indian stories again and again, to listeners who always laugh in the right places. He enjoys the homage offered to his wealth, and chuckles over the weakness of his flatterers as he drives home with his niece.

‘If my name were in the _Gazette_ next Wednesday morning, before Wednesday night I should be friendless,’ he says; ‘and the people we have dined with this evening would be gloating over my downfall.’

‘Oh, uncle! they would be sorry, surely,’ exclaims Sibyl, more for the sake of conversation than from any belief in the good-heartedness of her friends.

‘Sorry that they had been taken in--that they had mistaken a poor man for a rich one, no doubt; but for me, not a whit. Society in a place like Redcastle is made up on the co-operative system--is a club to which a man is admitted upon certain understood conditions. The first of these is that he should be well off.’

‘Luckily you are never likely to put our friends to the test,’ says Sibyl.

‘Of course not. And in the meanwhile there’s no harm in calling them friends. One name does as well as another when you are talking of unrealities.’

The year has gone, and Marion has not been asked to stay with her uncle Trenchard--a fact which she resents bitterly, and ascribes to double-dealing on the part of Sibyl. She has been at Lancaster Lodge tolerably often, but only as Sibyl’s visitor, and although she accepts all Sibyl’s invitations, it is almost unbearable to be invited and patronized by a sister. Sibyl has established herself as Mr. Trenchard’s adopted daughter. He coolly declares that she suits him better than Marion, and that she is to keep his house till she marries.

‘I suppose I must have made myself very disagreeable to him in the three months I spent here,’ remarks Marion one bright April afternoon, digging her croquet ball into the ground with misused energy. She has come to spend the afternoon with Sibyl.

‘No, dear, I don’t think it was so bad as that,’ replies Sibyl, graciously; ‘but you didn’t succeed in making yourself agreeable to him.’

‘I know I made myself a perfect slave,’ complains the injured Marion; ‘toasting his newspapers, and running for his slippers, and peeling walnuts for him till my fingers were black. I’m sure I don’t know what he wants--the nasty old thing!’

‘Now really, Marion, I can’t consent to hear the best of uncles called names,--on his own croquet lawn, too.’

‘Very much the best of uncles for you, but give me uncle Robert.’

‘Well, my dear, you’ve got him. Haven’t I left you in undisturbed possession of our paternal uncle?’

‘All I can say is that it is positive injustice,’ murmurs Marion, as the game proceeds.

Frederick Stormont strolls in five minutes afterwards and takes a mallet, whereupon the sisters become all smiles and graciousness. He goes in to afternoon tea with them, and they sit on the crimson brocade sofas sipping orange pekoe out of Indian teacups, waited on by the most accomplished of footmen, and discussing the petty gossip of Above and Below Bar. An empty life assuredly. But it is pleasant to sit in a handsome room, almost an indoor garden in its abundance of choicest flowers, a sunlit lawn beyond the open windows; pleasant to be dressed in the last fashion; pleasant to be admired, even though the eyes of the admirer are pale in hue and porcine in shape; pleasant to feel that in life’s eager race one has shot ever so far ahead of one’s younger sister. So, at least, feels Sibyl as she accepts Mr. Stormont’s vapid homage, and allows Marion to be useful as her foil.

Mrs. Groshen is strictly incorrect in her conjecture about this young man’s wooing. Frederick has not been rejected by Mr. Trenchard’s niece. He has not yet ventured to propose to her, and when pushed hard upon the subject by his father, he always asks for time.

‘I think she likes me,’ he says complacently, ‘but, by Jove, you know it doesn’t do for a man to hurry that kind of thing; you’re so impatient, you see, you want a fellow to round the Cape before he’s got across the Bay of Biscay. Miss Faunthorpe has a good deal of reserve about her and that kind of thing, and she’s just the sort of girl to throw over a fellow who proposed to her before she’d quite made up her mind about liking him.’

‘She’s a long time making up her mind about you,’ replies the colonel, pensively. ‘And upon my word, you know, Fred, if you don’t marry a woman with money you’ll have to do something for yourself. Things can’t go on like this much longer. By Jove, you know, you’ll have to emigrate. I don’t see that there’s anything you could do in England. You’re too old for the army, or the navy, or the civil service; you’ll have to try the colonies.’

‘I might do something, kangaroo-shooting in New Zealand,’ says Frederick, meditatively.

‘Hang it, sir! a man can’t get his livin’ kangaroo-shootin’,’ roars the colonel. ‘You’d better marry Trenchard’s niece.’

‘She’s a very jolly girl,’ says Fred, vaguely. He would have called Electra or Antigone, Joan of Arc or Mary Stuart, jolly. He knows no higher praise to bestow on the woman of his choice.