CHAPTER X.
THE GATES OPEN.
MERCERON sat in the seventh heaven and sipped his tea.
"So you 've found me out!" the Countess had just observed.
"It was my turn," he answered with a laugh, recalling his own confessions of the night before.
"But so soon!"
"Did you doubt my success?"
"I was not so modest," she answered, smiling; "besides, you had threatened."
"'This afternoon!'" he quoted.
"Are you always so sure?"
"The gods fought on my side;" and he told her how he had soliloquised in the Park, of Carter-Page, and the crafty extraction of "Stoke House" and "Lady Grasmere." Like most men who have lived much alone, Harvey recounted each incident with the personal zest and elaborations of a professed story-teller.
"And that is all you know?" she asked, as he concluded.
"That—and you!"
"No more?"
"I am content," he replied, unmistakably sincere.
"Don't you want to?"
"Not specially. Do you?"
"You have never studied Burke?"
"I once looked at Debrett."
"For whom?"
"Lady A.," said Merceron, helping himself to a cucumber sandwich. "Lady A. is the only member of the aristocracy who ever aroused my interest; and she was fraudulent."
The Countess looked at him wonderingly.
He hastened to her relief.
"Lady A.," he explained, "is the only titled person I ever pondered over and delighted in; and she was—I regret to say it—an impostor."
"Explain!" said the Countess.
Merceron smiled over this show of alarm, and continued with the same zest as had marked his account of the Carter-Page incident:
"I was staying at a small seaside town one summer, and so was Lady A. A child in the house, a niece of my landlady and a native of Camberwell, first drew my attention to Lady A. Her ladyship used to speak to this child; they had met on the beach, and the child was proud of the acquaintanceship. It babbled unceasingly of Lady A. I had never seen this personage, but her name, her name alone, delighted me. There was something romantic and mysterious in that reticent initial. It recalled fashionable fiction of the thirties, of that inflated period when Lady A. and Lord B. and Lady N. strutted through inflated story books. For a whole fortnight I built castles around Lady A.; for a whole fortnight Lady A. shed a glamour over my existence, inflated it, so to speak. This Camberwell child prated of her without cease, and I was delighted to live within a stone's throw of such mystery. At last—dire disillusion—my eyes were opened! The child was with me at the time, this child from Camberwell."
"Go on," said the Countess.
"I encountered Lady A.," continued Merceron. "Her ladyship was a middle-aged woman with a wide leather rim to her skirt, and a big dog. This child and I were advancing together; we were quite close to the heroine of my romances, my one distraction amid so much that was ordinary. 'That is Lady A.,' whispered the child, awestruck and tremulous. 'Hay, child, Hay!' exclaimed her ladyship. She had heard the whisper. Then turning to me, 'This little girl will persist in dropping her aitches,' she said. But I had already turned my back on Lady Hay. The spell was broken; romance and mystery had vanished. She was no Lady A. at all, but a mere Hay! You may find them in any Peerage," concluded Merceron.
The Countess was laughing.
"I'm afraid I'm a fact equally substantial," she said.
"But you do not masquerade under an initial."
"You wear even less."
The comic situation came home to Harvey. Laughing, he produced a card.
She read it curiously.
"I like the name," she said; "only, I 'll have to learn it by heart—and Harvey is nice."
"Suggests a good circulation," he remarked.
"You must tell me some more, though?"
"I was born three years earlier than yourself," he answered, risking the accuracy of the statement.
"How do you know?"
"I'm nearly twenty-six."
"But," and she was about to express her surprise at his correct divination. She caught the merriment in his eye, instead.
"That was very clever—a perfect trap," she said.
"You have never even heard of the Mercerons?" asked Harvey.
She shook her head.
"We are a remarkable family."
"I am not surprised."
"Of course not."
"Came over with the Conqueror, I suppose—Merceron sounds like it?"
"Came over viâ Dieppe and Newhaven, I believe; but the Mercerons are famous, nevertheless. You don't happen to play the barrel-organ?" he asked.
"No—how silly!"
He disregarded the epithet.
"The Mercerons are the only monopolists in this country," said he.
"Is it a patent something?"
"No; but a monopoly all the same. My great-grandfather, you must know, was an organist—quite a musician in his way. His son too was musical, but preferred building organs to playing on them. There was more money in it. It was he who made the first barrel-organs in this country. They had always come from abroad, from Italy, before. Of course he could sell them cheaper, making them on the spot. And when my father succeeded him—evolution had already displaced the barrel-organ by the piano-organ—the Mercerons practically had the monopoly of the street-organ trade. Now I'm sole proprietor. I go down to the works once or twice a year and look at the books. It pays, but it's a sad eminence all the same."
"Why?" asked the Countess, greatly interested.
"Well, you see; every piano-organ in this country comes out of the Merceron works. My own position is therefore most awkward. For, not only do I connive at and profit by the misery of thousands of my fellow-creatures, but, whenever I myself am victimised, whenever some miserable Italian halts outside my rooms and tortures me with my—with his infernal machine—what am I to do! The position is most delicate. I can't send him away, for didn't I sell him the instrument?"
The Countess laughed.
But Harvey continued:
"What can I do to such a man? Nothing. And I really cannot afford to wind up the firm over a simple matter of etiquette!"
"You are musical yourself?" asked the Countess.
Harvey hesitated.
"No—no, certainly not; only the cause of music in others."
He had deflected the shaft.
Here a servant interrupted them, announcing "Captain Mills." Was Lady Grasmere at home?
She looked across at Harvey.
"Yes," she said.
As yet she had only known her companion tête-à-tête. She was curious to see how he would figure in a more complex arena.