CHAPTER II.
You may remember what Jim Courtenaye said in the garden: that he would probably have to support me.
Well, he dared to offer, through Mr. Carstairs, to do that very thing, “for the family's sake.” At least, he proposed to pay off all our debts and allow me an income of four hundred a year, if it turned out that my inheritance from Paolo was nil.
When Mr. Carstairs passed on the offer to me, as he was bound to do, I said what I felt dear grandmother would have wished me to say: “I'll see him dead first!” And I added, “I hope you'll repeat that to the person.”
I think, from later developments, Mr. Carstairs cannot have repeated it verbatim. After the funeral, when I knew the worst about the entail, and that Paolo's brother Carlo was breaking it wholly for his own benefit and not at all for mine, Mr. Carstairs asked sympathetically if I had thought what I should like to do.
“Like to do?” I echoed bitterly. “I should like to go home to the dear old Abbey and restore the place as it ought to be restored, and have plenty of money without lifting a finger to get it. What I must do is a different question.”
“Well, then, my dear, supposing we put it in that brutal way. Have you thought—er”
“I've done nothing except think. But I've been brought up with about as much earning capacity as a mechanical doll. The only thing I have the slightest talent for being is—a detective!”
“Good gracious!” was Mrs. Carstairs' comment on that.
“I've felt ever since that awful spooky night at the Abbey that I had it in me to make a good detective,” I modestly explained.
“'Princess di Miramare, Private Detective,' would be a distinctly original signboard over an office door,” the old lady reflected. “But I believe I've evolved something more practical, considering your name and your age—twenty-one, isn't it?—and your looks. Not that detective talents mayn't come in handy even in the profession I'm going to suggest. Very likely they will, among other things. If you take it up, you'll need to make use of all the talents you can get hold of.”
“Do you, by chance, mean marriage?” I inquired coldly. “I've never been a wife. But I suppose I am a sort of widow.”
“If you weren't 'a sort of widow,' you couldn't cope with the profession I've—er—invented. You wouldn't be independent enough.”
“Invented? Then you don't mean marriage! And not even the stage! I warn you that once I solemnly promised grandmother never to go on the stage.”
“I know, my child. She mentioned that to Henry, my husband, when they were discussing your future, before you both left London. My idea is much more original than marriage or even the stage. It popped into my mind the night Mrs. Courtenaye died, while we were in the taxi between the Palazzo Ardini and this hotel. I said to myself, “Dear Elizabeth shall be a brightener!”
“A brightener?” I repeated, with a vague vision of polishing windows or brasses. “I don't”
“You wouldn't! I told you I'd invented the profession expressly for you. Now I'm going to tell you what it is. I felt that you wouldn't care to be a tame companion, even to the most gilded millionairess, or a social secretary to”
“Horror! No, I couldn't be a tame anything.”
“That's why brightening is your line. A brightener couldn't be a brightener and tame. She must be brilliant, winged, soaring above the plane of those she brightens; expressive, to make herself appreciated; capable of taking the lead in social direction. Why, my dear, people will fight to get you—pay any price to secure you! Now do you understand?”
I didn't. So she explained. After that dazzling preface, the explanation seemed rather an anticlimax. Still, I saw that there might be something in the plan, if it could be worked. And Mrs. Carstairs guaranteed to work it.
My widowhood—save the mark—qualified me to become a chaperon, And my princesshood would make me a gilded one. Chaperonage, at its best, might be amusing. But chaperonage was far from the whole destiny of a brightener. A brightener need not confine herself to female society, as a mere companion must. A young woman, even though a widow and a princess, could not “companion” a person of the opposite sex, even if he were a hundred. But she might, from a discreet distance, be his brightener. That is, she might brighten a lonely man's life without tarnishing her own reputation.
“After all,' Mrs. Carstairs went on, “in spite of what's said against him, man is a fellow being. If a cat may look at a king, man may look at a princess. And unless he's in her set, he can be made to pay for the privilege. Think of a lonely button or bootmaker! What would he give for the honor of invitations to tea, with introductions and social advice, from the popular Princess di Miramare? He might have a wife or daughters, or both, who needed a social boost. They would come extra! He might be a widower; in fact, I've caught the first widower for you already. But, unluckily, you can't use him yet.”
“Ugh!” I shuddered. “Sounds as if he were a fish, wriggling on a hook till I'm ready to tear it out of his gills!”
“He is a fish, a big fish. In fact, I may as well break it to you that he is Roger Fane.”
“Good heavens!” I cried. “It would take more electricity than I'm fitted with to brighten his tragic and mysterious aura!”
“Not at all. In fact, you are the only one who can do it.”
“What are you driving at? He's dead in love with Shelagh Leigh.”
“That's just it. As things are, he has no hope of marrying Shelagh. She likes him, as you probably know, better than I do, for you're her best friend, although she's a year or so younger than you”
“Two years.”
“Well, as I was going to say, in many ways she's a child compared to you. She's as beautiful as one of those cut-off cherubs in the prayer books and as old-fashioned as an early Victorian sampler. These blond visions, with naturally waving golden hair and rosebud mouths and eyes as big as half crowns, have that drawback, as I've discovered since I came to live in England. In America, we don't grow early Victorian buds. You know perfectly well that those detestable snobs, the Pollens, don't think Fane good enough for Shelagh, in spite of his money. Money's the one nice thing they've got themselves which they can pass on to Shelagh. Probably they forced the wretched Miss Pollen, who was the male snob's sister, to marry the old Marquis of Leigh, just as they wish to force Shelagh to marry some other wreck of his sort and die young, as her mother did. The girl's a dear, a perfect lamb; but lambs can't stand up against lions. They generally lie down inside them, But with you at the helm the Pollen lions could be forced”
“Not if they knew it!” I cut in.
“They wouldn't know it. Did you know that you were being forced to marry that poor young prince of yours?”
“I wasn't forced. I was persuaded.”
“We won't argue the point! Anyhow, the subject doesn't press. The scheme I have in my head for you to launch Fane on the social sea—the sea in every sense of the word, as you'll learn by and by—can't come off till you're out of your deepest mourning. I'll find you a quieter line of goods than the Fane-Leigh business to begin on, if you agree to take up brightening. The question is, do you agree?”
“I do,” I said more earnestly than I had said “I will” as I stood at Paolo's side in church. For life hadn't been very earnest then. Now it was.
“Good!” exclaimed Mrs. Carstairs.
“Then the next thing is to furnish you a charming flat in the same house with us. You must have a background.”
“You forget I haven't a farthing!” I fiercely reminded her. “But Mr. Carstairs won't forget! I've made him too much trouble. The best brightening won't run to half a background in Berkeley Square.”
“Wait,” Mrs. Carstairs calmed me. “I haven't finished the whole proposition yet. In America when we run up a skyscraper we don't begin at the bottom in any old, commonplace way. We stick a few steel girders into the earth; then we start at the top and work down. That's what I've been doing with my plan. It's perfect. Only you've got to support it with something.”
“What is it you're trying to break to me?” I demanded.
The dear old lady swallowed heavily. It must be something pretty awful if it frightened her!
“You like Roger Fane?” she began.
“Yes, I admire him. He's handsome and interesting, though, for my taste, a little too mysterious and tragic to live with.”
“He's not mysterious at all,” she defended Fane. “His tragedy—for there was a tragedy—is no secret in America. I often met him before the war, when I ran over to pay visits in New York, though he was far from being at the social top. But at the moment I've no more to say about Roger Fane. I've been using him for a handle to brandish a friend of his in front of your eyes.”
My blood grew hot.
“Not the ex-cowboy?”
“That's no way to speak of Sir James Courtenaye.”
“Then he's what you want to break to me!”
“I want—I mean, I'm requested—to inform you of a way he proposes out of the woods for you—at least, the darkest part of the woods.”
“I told Mr. Carstairs I'd see James Courtenaye dead rather than”
“This is a different affair entirely. You must listen, my dear, unless I'm to wash my hands of you. What I have to describe is the foundation for your career.”
I swallowed some more of grandmother's expressions which occurred to me, and I listened.
Sir James Courtenaye's second proposition was not an offer of charity. He suggested that I let Courtenaye Abbey to him for a term of years, for the sum of one thousand five hundred pounds a year, the first three years to be paid in advance. This clause, Mrs. Carstairs hinted, would enable me to dole out crumbs here and there for the quieting of grandmother's creditors. Sir James' intention was not to use the Abbey as a residence, but to make of it a show place for the public during the term of his lease. In order to do this, the hall must be restored and the once-famous gardens beautified. This expense he would undertake, carrying the work quickly to completion, and would reimburse himself by means of the fees, a shilling a head, charged for viewing the place and its historic treasures,
When I had heard all this, I hesitated as to what to answer, thinking of grandmother and wondering what she would have said had she been in my shoes. But as this thought flitted into my mind it was followed by another. One of grandmother's few old-fashioned fads was her style of shoe—pattern 1875. The shoes I stood in, at that moment, were pattern 1919. In my shoes grandmother would simply scream! And I wouldn't be at my best in hers. This was the parable which common sense put to me; and Mrs. Carstairs cleverly offering no word of advice, I paused no longer than five minutes before I snapped out:
“Yes! The horrid brute can. have the darling place till I get rich.”
“How sweet of you to consent so graciously, darling!” purred Mrs Carstairs. Then we both laughed. After which I fell into her arms and cried.
For fear I might change my mind, Mr. Carstairs got me to sign some dull-looking documents that very day; and the oddness of their being all ready to hand didn't strike me till the ink was dry.
“Henry had them prepared because he knew how sensible you are at heart—I mean at head,” his wife explained. “Indeed, it is a compliment to your intelligence.”
Anyhow, it gave me the wherewithal to throw sops to a whole zooful of Cerberuses, and still keep enough to take that flat in the Carstair's house in Berkeley Square. Of course, to do all this meant leaving Italy for good and going back to England. But there was little to keep me in Rome. My whole inheritance from my husband-of-an-hour could be packed into a suit case! Shelagh and her snobs traveled with us. And as soon as they were demobilized, Roger Fane and James Courtenaye followed, if not us, at least in our direction.
I don't think that Aladdin's lamp builders “had anything on” Sir Jim, as he himself said, judging by the way the restorations simply flew. From what I heard of the sums he spent, it would take the shillings of all England and America as sightseers to reimburse him for his output. But, as Mr. Carstairs pointed out, that was his business!
Mine was, via Lucille's and Red- fern's, to become a brightener. For the clock was ticking regularly now. I was no longer down and out. I was up and in. Elizabeth, Princess di Miramare, was spoiling for her first job.