Chapter X

"Charles, darling," pleaded Vingie, "how did you ever come to be possessed of a nephew like Rupert?"

Sir Charles beamed on her with courteous attention.

"My sister Ann married Arthur Frack, and they were blessed with a son," he explained. "I always suspected Arthur--Heaven rest his soul--of some obscure failing. His merits were considerable, and yet he fell just short of distinction. Successively Governor of the Leeward Islands and the Windward Islands, beyond a K.C.B. and a pension he achieved little. Now Rupert will go far. He combines his father's reverence for tradition and his mother's extreme perseverance."

Vingie, toying with after-dinner coffee and cigarette in the small Park Street drawing-room, presenting quite consciously a very distracting figure, turned pensive eyes on the trim figure of her guardian now lost in a reverie of his spacious bachelor past.

At last, with the lithe motion of a siren she rose, and composed her slight loveliness gently upon his knee.

"Nice thing!" she crooned. "I adore unworthy men. They're so broad-minded and adequate and sympathetic. Rupert's abominably worthy. Charles, I'm going to confess to you, and instead of the whipping I deserve you shall give me the most delicious advice. I'm very hard up again, dreadfully in debt, a wee piece bored, and I know a delightful man who might help me to a very pleasant and profitable adventure. You don't feel it would be wrong of me, do you, Charles?'

"My dear Virginia," replied Sir Charles feebly, "there is only one course for a girl to pursue when in doubt. She should say to herself: 'What would the late Queen Victoria have done in my place?' It is an infallible recipe."

Vingie took his face between her hands, kissed him lightly on the brow, rose, sketched one or two steps of a fox-trot, and came to rest.

"I mean Mr. Berriman," she explained, "the news editor of the _Daily Tale_. If I go and see him in a perfectly tailored brown suit, with brown shoes and beige silk stockings, I _think_ he'll give me a job on his paper. By the way, who exactly was Queen Victoria? I seem to have heard the name."

The door opened quietly to admit Rupert, radiantly attired in the height of fashion. His eyes mooned over Vingie in forlorn admiration.

"You promised," he explained, "that I might take you to the Plinlimmons' dance. Rogers has the car at the door."

Vingie gazed at him fixedly.

"You are quite sure it _is_ a dance, and not a funeral? Your clothes are the clothes of a roisterer, but your manner is that of a respectable undertaker," she said patiently. "Nevertheless, I will get my cloak."

When she had gone Rupert looked at Sir Charles, and Sir Charles looked at Rupert. A dreadful sigh tore the younger man's bosom. Sir Charles shook his head gravely.

"The poet sang of woman: 'When pain and anguish wring the brow, a veritable angel thou,'" he observed. "Either woman has altered, or the statement was inaccurate, for you exhibit as much pain and anguish as any two ordinary hospitals, and it avails you nothing with Virginia. My dear Rupert, you have just time for a whisky-and-soda if you act quickly. It is the best advice I can offer on the spur of the moment."

Newspaper men being hardened to shocks, the possessors of steel nerves, and totally unsentimental, Mr. Berriman merely raised his eyebrows when they announced the arrival of the Honorable Virginia Lauriston. He instructed them to show her up and went on balancing the scales of justice between a disturbance in the Sandjak of Novibazar and a thrilling divorce in aristocratic circles. He rose courteously when there appeared in his doorway a slim vision in a brown suit, her slender ankles veiled in beige silk, her feet encased in bench-made mahogany shoes, her hat raked celestially over her fair hair.

"Perfectly charming of you to see me," declared Vingie in clear tones. "I suspect you're frightfully busy."

She gave him a little gloved paw, sat down on a quite unworthy chair, and waited. Mr. Berriman reflected absently how those shirts of thick pajama silk set off an adorable throat if skilfully cut with a V shaped opening.

"Not at all," he replied, "you're always considerate. What's the news--another of your amazing ideas?"

Vingie gazed at him with blinding directness.

"I doubt if you'll call it a brain-wave when I tell you. I want a job on your paper, Mr. Berriman, please."

(Curious how attractive a name sounds if spoken with a faint slurring of the r's by an extremely pretty girl.)

"What sort of a job?" queried Mr. Berriman with a faint sigh for his wasted life, a wife and three children in Brixton, the unsophisticated cut of his tweed suit, and a few hundred other things.

"Any job that brings me a little money and excitement, I'm broke and I'm bored. Wouldn't I be rather a novelty on your staff?"

"Can you write?" temporized Mr. Berriman like a drowning man clutching at straws.

"Men have told me I write awfully good letters. I'm quite decently educated, and I can ride and drive a car, and I'm not scared of things. And of course, I know everybody."

Mr. Berriman stared out of the window for safety.

"I'll give you a chance at five pounds a week," he said at last, as harshly as possible. "Report at ten-thirty to-morrow morning and ask for Mr. Jennings."

Vingie surveyed him sadly.

"My dear, it would cost me more than that for lunches and taxis and things," she explained. "Besides I should need a lot of new clothes. Mine aren't suitable for a working girl. Do you know the price of a suit like this--a perfectly plain little suit, with just a silk lining to the coat and a few buttons and button-holes?"

"Well, let's say ten pounds, and a month on trial," amended Mr. Berriman, feeling like a man caught putting a foreign coin in a church collection.

"Is that _absolutely_ all my exclusive information would be worth?" implored his visitor piteously. "I should have thought for the society column alone--besides, I've got the Foreign Office at my fingertips. I _did_ want so much to be on your paper, Mr. Berriman, because we're friends, and you've been nice to me. But honestly I couldn't afford it. I shall have to try the _Morning Globe_. Thank you awfully for wasting so much time on me."

She stood up to take farewell. Her brown suit fell in the straightest of straight lines. Mr. Berriman positively could not resist wondering what that gently curving mouth would be like to kiss, though it was none of his business. Besides, the mention of the _Morning Globe_ irritated him. It did very well to wrap up fish in, but as a newspaper he despised it.

"Then, subject to confirmation by my proprietor, fifteen pounds a week," he said at last. "Remember, ten-thirty to-morrow and ask for Mr. Jennings. Good morning, Miss Lauriston. I hope--er--we shall find mutual pleasure in--er--our professional relationship."

He smiled mechanically, and took again her offered hand. Somebody someday would marry this divine slip of a thing. He remembered that his bank balance totaled fifty pounds, and that his life insurance premium fell due in a fortnight. Probably the new recruit owed hundreds of pounds without a second thought. Somehow life seemed hardly fair--not that he grudged her one grain of powder for her enchanting face.

Vingie tap-tapped gracefully along endless corridors to the lift. At least six men turned their heads automatically to gaze after her retreating form. She passed the driven carcass of Miss Allin, a plain forty-three who wrote paragraphs beginning:

"'Straordinary how we girls thrive on the rush from lunch to dinner and from dinner to dance, and go tearing in our latest frocklets from Ascot to Cowes and from Cowes north after the wee brown grouse. As Lady Fitz-Battleaxe said to me last night at Claridges----"

She issued from the lift on the ground floor and the chief commissionaire, even an ex-Regimental-Sergeant-Major, tucked her with pride into her little ten horsepower Wonderful car, winking in pale gray and silver. Over luncheon she told Sir Charles, with simple pride, the history of the morning's conquest. He shook his head gravely, motioning away a second helping of the _entrée_.

"No good will come of it, my dear Virginia. The eagle can not mate with the sparrow, and one does not place the thoroughbred in the shafts of a cab. I suppose some people must necessarily provide untruths flavored to suit the taste of the vulgar, but for you it seems a deplorable occupation. However, we all have to eat a peck of dirt before we die, and if you prefer to take yours at one meal I suppose you know best."

"Be quiet, Charles!" she said reprovingly. "First there was William Caxton, then Shakespeare, and now little Vingie. I wonder if Mr. Jennings is youngish and rather good-looking? Even I couldn't do much with some one fifty years old who has a beard."

Mr. Albert Bagford, sitting in his immense room furnished after the Jacobean style, set his square jaw, poised his five feet seven of sinewy dynamite as if he could leap from his chair, and hewed Mr. Berriman in metaphorical pieces.

"Nobody would think I owned this paper!" he stormed. "Nobody would think I rose from nothing to the position of a millionaire in order to give the public news as news has never been given to the public before. Anybody would think you owned it, and could slop out miserable pap in your own knock-kneed style till the cows come home. I s'pose this girl has put it across you--as if sentiment and newspaper work had anything in common. Otherwise how could this sort of tripe get set up and proved?"

He picked up a proof of an article from Vingie's pen, cleared his throat, and read:

"Lady Avis Shillinghoe is engaged to Major Cordigan, M.C., 19th Hussars. This represents the crowning achievement of a long struggle. She was always a wretched little funk as a girl, and a perfect laughing-stock in the hunting field. We can only suppose the major worships the helpless type of female. I saw her dining at the Ritz the other day in one of those insipid gowns that freeze the blood of any woman with blood to freeze. She has written a number of mawkish poems that lack both style and manner. Our congratulations to the happy pair."

"Well," retorted Mr. Berriman, "perhaps you'd like to see her yourself. I can't do anything. She has an extraordinary way with her. Jennings is a pretty tough nut, but he feeds out of her hand. The worst of it is that social stuff of hers brings in hundreds and hundreds of letters. It's so popular I should be prepared to chance a libel action or two."

"Nobody asked for your opinion, Berriman. Send this woman to me, and notice the difference when I've finished with her. That's all."

Mr. Berriman went out wrapping what remained of philosophy about his soul. He sought Vingie in the reporters' room. She sat writing industriously and half a dozen young men watched her covertly as if no girl had ever written before, poised ready to dash forward in her service.

"The chief wants you, Miss Lauriston," said Mr. Berriman sorrowfully; Vingie looked up with distaste.

"What a perfect nuisance!" she retorted. "I'm just in the middle of the Fitzroy-Davenport wedding. However, p'r'aps I'd better see him."

She got up, settled the coat of her brown suit and sauntered out. The half dozen young men held their breath, raised their eyebrows, and stared speechlessly at Mr. Berriman. Mr. Berriman stared back.

"Evidently a public holiday," he observed acidly, and went away, leaving the door open.

Vingie entered the room of Mr. Bagford without knocking. Its vastness left her unmoved, for she was accustomed to vast rooms. She saw a middle-aged man seated at an enormous writing table. He never raised his bent head. He went on writing. A grandfather clock ticked solemnly; not another sound broke the silence. In this fashion Mr. Bagford had subdued scores of men, turning their bowels to water. Vingie merely thought him a trifle ill-bred. She had never known fear in her life.

She wandered across to the vast writing table, and in the absence of a chair seated herself lightly on the table itself, four or five feet from the absorbed proprietor. She felt in the side pocket of her coat, produced a thin gold cigarette-case, chose a cigarette, lighted it, smoked reflectively, removed the cigarette, and said with a great effort of politeness:

"Well, Mr. Bagford, what's the news?"

Mr. Bagford sat up as if some one had struck him. He saw a slim brown figure seated on his table smoking a cigarette. The figure belonged to a girl, thus robbing him of certain expressions adequate to the occasion. Moreover the girl showed no sign of fear, and being accustomed to be feared the fact unnerved him. He picked up the offending proof, glared at her in baffled fury and barked:

"Did you write this?"

Vingie removed the cigarette from between her lips.

"Mm!" she said.

"Are you aware," inquired Mr. Bagford dreadfully, "that it is probably libelous and certainly in bad taste?"

Vingie smiled at him very sweetly.

"My dear," she explained, "you don't know Avis Shillinghoe as well as I do. She'd sell her soul for a paragraph of any sort. As a matter of fact I always trust the sub-editors to save me from libel. It's a pity to cramp one's style. By the time they've done with it there'll be precious little style left. If I started by suppressing myself there wouldn't be anything at all."

"Good God!" exclaimed Mr. Bagford, smitten to the heart.

"Well," objected his lovely employee, "what do we have sub-editors for?"

"I wonder," said Mr. Bagford, "exactly how you persuaded Berriman to engage you." Vingie slid gracefully from the table and stood looking at him.

"I have never," she responded slowly, "found it difficult to persuade any man who had ordinary decent instincts to do anything I wanted. He was perfectly right to get an expert for the society column. Before I did it the thing was ridiculous to any one who knew what society's like. You, of course, are the rudest person I ever met. Besides, you're quite wrong."

If she had been a man Mr. Bagford would have dismissed him; if she had been his wife or his daughter, supposing he had had a wife or daughter, he would have stormed at her. As things were he smiled tolerantly and said with a spacious air:

"Better lunch with me and we'll come to some understanding."

The brown boy-girl figure stiffened.

"Thank you. I am engaged for lunch."

"Well, then, to-morrow," amended Mr. Bagford.

"To-morrow also I'm engaged."

"Well, when aren't you engaged?'

"Never, as far as you're concerned," explained Vingie. "I particularly dislike invitations from men I don't know."

No one rises from nothing to the possession of a million without understanding human nature. Mr. Bagford's fighting face softened. He called back in her the lovely April of his prime when he would walk out of a well-paid job into the gutter rather than go back on his principles. He rose and held out a square hand.

"I beg your pardon. You're right and I'm wrong over the lunch, and I'm right and you're wrong over the paragraph," he said. "Won't you forgive me and change your mind?"

A little enigmatic smile curled the lips of Vingie.

"In that case I'm delighted. Perhaps at one o'clock. Thanks ever so much."

It was the other people at the Carlton who shook Mr. Bagford's confidence. When Vingie arrived in his vast room at twelve fifty-nine, the deference of his secretaries bolstered that feeling of greatness absolutely essential if a man is ever to do great things. The disciplined respect of the commissionaire and chauffeur, the opulent calm of his car all ministered to the idea that he was giving a pretty, mildly-gifted, yet otherwise unremarkable girl, a treat.

Now at the Carlton they were polite to Mr. Bagford, but they worshiped Vingie. The entire staff treated her as one beloved hopelessly yet unswervingly. This fashion communicated itself to the other guests. In particular, Lord Fordingbridge abandoned altogether Miss Letitia Borrodaile of the Omnibus Theater to whom he was purveying luncheon, and bent reverently over Vingie's hand.

"My dear, you look perfect--perfect!" he rumbled. "Charles tells me you're a prop and mainstay of some terrible newspaper. I never read them myself, and it seems impossible to connect you with anything so depraved, but if any one can lift them out of the mire, you will achieve that miracle."

Presently Mr. Bagford sat facing all that loveliness which was Vingie, across her favorite table. He deferred gracefully to her choice of food, acquiesced when she refused wine, and proceeded to mold her to his purpose as he had molded everything as long as he could remember.

"How," he inquired politely, "does the _Daily Tale_ strike you?"

Vingie propped her chin on her hands and gazed into his eyes.

"Lifeless--uninspired--commonplace," she answered sadly. "Hardly any of it interests a woman. All we want is emotional adventure, and all you give us is politics and wars. It's the way you handle everything. You make even a great love-story seem dreary and hackneyed. I s'pose men are a dull lot. They cease to be thrilled after they've married and women go on being thrilled till they die."

"I'm not married," said Mr. Bagford hastily.

"Mentally you must have been born married," retorted Vingie. "The Isaacs-Ferguson divorce case made Antony and Cleopatra look like a village Darby and Joan, but when I tried to read it in the _Daily Tale_ I nearly fell asleep. It's lack of soul, my dear Mr. Bagford. You don't feel; you simply grind out all the old sentiments we're supposed to possess and don't."

"This is very serious," declared her host, his fighting jaw set doggedly. "I never realized it before. Something must be done."

"I loathe anything second-rate," went on Vingie with an adorable sneer. "I'd rather die than be mixed up with a failure. I doubt if I can stand your paper very long. You may have a circulation, but it isn't because you've any merit. It's just that other people are a shade worse--if possible."

"What would you suggest?" asked Mr. Bagford, who felt himself sagging everywhere. Vingie shrugged her shoulders.

"Are you asking me to help, or are you ordering me about?" she demanded.

"I'm asking you to help, if you'll be charitable enough," said Mr. Bagford humbly.

With an inscrutable light in her eyes she offered him one of her very own cigarettes. "We'll put this paper right together," she murmured dreamily. "I'll work my fingers to the bone if you really _want_ me to help."

Mr. Berriman, entering the vast room of Mr. Bagford, his lord, closed the door quietly, paused and stood lost in contemplation. At the Jacobean writing table sat two figures, a girl in a tan suit, molded to her lissom figure, and a square-set man with a fighting jaw. The fair head and the iron-gray bent very close together.

"Well," came in Vingie's clear tones, "I think we've got the woman's side pretty well arranged for to-morrow's issue. There's _My Case against Divorce_, by the Bishop of Banff, and that _Husbands for All_ correspondence, and an article entitled _Down with Men_, by Bathsheba Stoat, the feminist creature. She ought to be boiled in oil, but we must try to please every one."

Mr. Bagford frowned.

"It seems to me rather one-sided. How about dropping the bishop, and having something about, say, _The Art of Fascination_, by a popular actress?"

Mr. Berriman coughed. Mr. Bagford glanced up in annoyance. Vingie, also glancing, flicked one eyelid very faintly.

"Excuse my interrupting," began Mr. Berriman, "but this has just come in over the telephone. The Foreign Minister is taking a firm stand on the Jugo-Czechian question. He is prepared to support the Slogo-Moravians' claim to the province of Tiszch. The First Division has received orders to mobilize, and the Mediterranean Fleet is in readiness to sail at a moment's notice. There is a panic in Jugo-Czechian financial circles, and the lo has fallen to ten thousand to the pound sterling. That, of course, equals forty to a penny, or two thousand to the dollar."

"Well, don't bother me about it," snapped Mr. Bagford. "You know you've got standing orders to oppose the Foreign Minister whatever he does. If he had supported the Jugo-Czechians against the Slogo-Moravians I should oppose him just the same. After all, somebody has to oppose the government. Get Brice to do a leader about wasting the taxpayers' money on wildcat foreign adventures, and go away."

Mr. Berriman sighed, and departed. As the door clicked Mr. Bagford put down his pencil, leaned back in his chair and said:

"Virginia, I love you, will you marry me?"

"My dear Mr. Bagford," responded Vingie, who had often faced this situation, "it's exceedingly kind of you to ask me, but why should I marry you or any one else for that matter? I'm twenty-one and perfectly independent. How would you have liked to be married at my age?"

"That's altogether different. You're a girl and I'm a man," explained Mr. Bagford rather unnecessarily. "You need some one to love and protect you, to provide you with a home--children--all that life means to a woman. You weren't made for the drudgery and hustle of a newspaper. You were intended to reign, a queen, in the house of the man you love."

"I love Charles better than any man on earth, and I've reigned a queen in his house ever since I was twelve. It's perfectly respectable; I'm talking about Sir Charles Gillespie, my guardian. I'm afraid I don't love you at all, and apart from love, you've nothing to offer me that darling Charles hasn't provided over and over again."

"I'd do anything in the world for you, Virginia," said Mr. Bagford rather helplessly for a man in his position.

"Well, then, suppose you stop persecuting Lord Fordingbridge, the Foreign Minister? He's my greatest pal, next to Charles--an absolute angel. Besides, he can't be wrong, because he never does anything without consulting Charles, and Charles knows everything."

"Will you consent to our engagement if I do?" came like a flash from her lover.

Vingie leaned back in her chair, hands clasped behind her head. "That depends how tight a corner Lord Fordingbridge is in. Still it sounds quite bad enough. Would you really care to be engaged to me simply so that I can save an old friend some embarrassment. Do you call that fair, Mr. Bagford?"

The proprietor of the _Daily Tale_ summed up briefly the perfect lines of her bent-back figure.

"All's fair in love and war," he answered grimly.

"Well, as long as there's no kissing and that sort of thing till I give you permission, I agree," said Vingie, so quietly that he started in his chair. "Will you please countermand Mr. Berriman's instructions at once?"

"Of course I will," exclaimed Mr. Bagford, with a somewhat uncalled-for chuckle, and pressed firmly an electric bell....

Through that beautiful friendship which existed between Vingie and Sir Charles it was her custom to confess her triumphs and peccadilloes even as a child confesses at its mother's knee. Therefore, after dinner, since it chanced they were alone, she sat inscrutably among sofa cushions and said in her most innocent manner:

"Charles, would you be surprised if I were to tell you I'm engaged?"

"Normally," replied Sir Charles, "I should not. Nevertheless, since an engagement implies marriage and your views on marriage are unsympathetic, I should consider you a little inconsistent. But then, my dear Virginia, what woman is ever anything else?"

"He is Mr. Bagford, the proprietor of the _Daily Tale_. He's about fifty, and he's worth at least a million," went on Vingie.

"Good God!" exclaimed Sir Charles with emotion. "I must apologize for the expression, but the idea of your being linked with some nameless journalist is really intolerable. Our world has fallen on evil days, yet while there is still a Fortinbras, a Giffard, a Plinlimmon, or a Rupert Frack, what have I done that you should become Mrs. Bagford, _Mrs. Bagford_! Did you ever hear such a word! The sound of it is positively ear-tearing."

"Well," replied Vingie with pious humility, "you always told me to marry some one who would put me ahead of all the other girls in my set--a coming man. Rupert may get a peerage, but Mr. Bagford will have one. Besides I did it to help George Fordingbridge. Mr. Bagford consented not to oppose George's foreign policy if I'd be engaged."

A rigid expression overwhelmed Sir Charles' aristocratic face. He passed a hand across his brow to hide an agony of mind.

"_Quis tantum de te licuit!_" he murmured, for he came of a generation familiar with the classics. "Who has had his will of you so far, my poor Virginia! So beautiful a sacrifice in so ironic a cause! I beg your pardon. My mind is a little astray. Of course, if you are happy, I congratulate you. But Bagford--Bagford! It will be written on my heart, like Calais on the heart of the late Queen Mary."

"Don't you think," asked Vingie with a little sigh, "that we really ought to ask him down to Wynwood for the week-end? Of course, the engagement isn't actually announced, but I'd like you to meet him. He's rather like a lion, Charles, dear. When he roars every one trembles from the editor down to the office boy."

"I will write to him this evening," agreed Sir Charles heavily. "Fordingbridge and Rupert are to be there as well. It will prove a sad holiday for Rupert--a faithful heart if ever there was one!"