Chapter II
In old days the Mercerons had been great folk. They had held the earldom of Langbury and the barony of Warmley. A failure of direct descent in the male line extinguished the earldom; the Lady Agatha was the daughter of the last earl, and would have been Baroness Warmley had she lived. On her death that title passed to her cousin, and continued in that branch till the early days of the present century. Then came another break. The Lord Warmley of that day, a Regency dandy, had a son, but not one who could inherit his honors, and away went the barony to a yet younger branch, where, falling a few years later into female hands, it was merged in a brand-new viscounty, and was now waiting till chance again should restore it to an independent existence. From the Mercerons of the Court it was gone for ever, and the blot on their escutcheon which lost it them was a sore point, from which it behooved visitors and friends to refrain their tongues. The Regent had, indeed, with his well-known good nature, offered a baronetcy to hide the stain; but pride forbade, and the Mercerons now held no titles, save the modest dignity which Charlie’s father, made a K.C.B. for services in the North-West Provinces, had left behind him to his widow. But the old house was theirs, and a comfortable remnant of the lands, and the pictures of the extinct earls and barons, down to him whose sins had robbed the line of its surviving rank and left it in a position, from an heraldic point of view, of doubtful respectability. Lady Merceron felt so acutely on the subject that she banished this last nobleman to the smoking-room. There was, considering everything, an appropriateness in that position, and he no longer vexed her eyes as she sat at meat in the dining room. She had purposed a like banishment for Lady Agatha; but here Charlie had interceded, and the unhappy beauty hung still behind his mother’s chair and opposite his own. It was just to remember that but for poor Agatha’s fault and fate the present branch might never have enjoyed the honors at all; so Charlie urged to Lady Merceron, catching at any excuse for keeping Lady Agatha. Lady Merceron’s way of judging pictures may seem peculiar, but the fact is that she lacked what is called the sense of historical perspective: she did not see why our ancestors should be treated so tenderly and allowed, with a charitable reference to the change in manners, forgiveness for what no one to-day could hope to win a pardon. Mr. Vansittart Merceron smiled at his sister-in-law and shrugged his shoulders; but in vain. To the smoking-room went the wicked Lord Warmley, and Lady Agatha was remarkably lucky in that she did not follow him.
Mr. Vansittart, half-brother to the late Sir Victor, and twenty years younger than he, was a short thick-set man, with a smooth round white face, and a way of speaking so deliberate and weighty that it imparted momentousness to nothings and infallibility to nonsense. When he really had something sensible to say, and that was very fairly often, the effect was enormous. He was now forty-four, a widower, well off by his marriage, and a Member of Parliament. Naturally, Lady Merceron relied much on his advice, especially in what concerned her son; she was hazy about the characters and needs of young men, not knowing how they should be treated or what appealed to them. Amid her haziness, one fact only stood out clear. To deal with a young man, you wanted a man of the world. In this capacity Mr. Vansittart had now been sent for to the Court, the object of his visit being nothing less than the arrangement and satisfactory settlement of Charlie’s future.
Mr. Vansittart approached the future through the present and the past. “You wasted your time at school, you wasted your time at Oxford, you’re wasting your time now,” he remarked, when Charlie and he were left alone after dinner.
Charlie was looking at Lady Agatha’s picture. “With a sigh he turned to his uncle.
“That’s all very well,” he said tolerantly, “but what is there for me to do?”
“If you took more interest in country pursuits it might be different. But you don’t hunt, you shoot very seldom”
“And very badly.”
“And not at all well, as you admit. You say you won’t become a magistrate, you show no interest in politics or—er—social questions. You simply moon about.”
Charlie was vividly reminded of a learned judge whom he had once heard pronouncing sentence of death. His uncle’s denunciation seemed to lack its appropriate conclusion—that he should be hanged by the neck till he was dead. He was roused to defend himself.
“You’re quite wrong, uncle,” he said. “I’m working hard. I’m writing a history of the family.”
“A history of the family!” groaned Mr. Vansittart. “Who wants one? Who’ll read one?”
“From an antiquarian point of view” began Charlie stoutly.
“Of all ways of wasting time, antiquarianism is perhaps the most futile;” and Mr. Vansittart wiped his mouth with an air of finality.
“Now the Agatha Merceron story,” continued Charlie, “is in itself”
“Perhaps we’d better finish our talk tomorrow. The ladies will, expect us in the garden.”
“All right,” said Charlie, with much content. He enjoyed himself more in the garden, for, while Lady Merceron and her brother-in-law took counsel, he strolled through the moonlit shrubberies with Mrs. Marland, and Mrs. Marland was very sympathetically interested in him and his pursuits. She was a little eager woman, the very antithesis in body and mind to Millie Bushell; she had plenty of brains but very little sense, a good deal of charm but no beauty, and, without any counterbalancing defect at all, a hearty liking for handsome young men. She had also a husband in the City.
“Ghost-hunting again to-night, Mr. Merceron?” she asked, glancing up at Charlie, who was puffing happily at a cigar.
“Yes,” he answered, “I’m very regular.”
“And did you see anyone?”
“I saw Millie Bushell.”
“Miss Bushell’s hardly ghost-like, is she?”
“Well,” said Charlie meditatively, “I suppose if one was fat oneself one’s ghost would be fat, wouldn’t it?”
Mrs. Marland, letting the problem alone, laughed softly.
“Poor Miss Bushell! If she heard you say that! Or if Lady Merceron heard you!”
“It would hardly surprise my mother to hear that I thought Millie Bushell plump. She is plump, you know;” and Charlie’s eyes expressed a candid homage to truth.
“Oh, I know what’s being arranged for you.”
“So do I.”
“And you’ll do it. Oh, you think you won’t, but you will. Men always end by doing what they’re told.”
“Does Mr. Marland?”
“He begins by it,” laughed his wife.
“Is that why he’s not coming till Saturday week?”
“Mr. Merceron! But what was Miss Bushell doing at the Pool? Did she come to find you?”
“Oh, no; just for a walk.”
“Poor girl!”
“Why?—it’s good for her.”
“I didn’t mean the walk.”
“I’d blush if there was light enough to make it any use, Mrs. Marland.”
“Oh, but I know there’s something. You don’t go there every evening to look for a dead lady, Mr. Merceron.”
Charlie stopped short, and took his cigar from his mouth.
“What?” he asked, a little abruptly.
“Well, I shall follow you some day, and I shouldn’t be surprised if I met—not Agatha—but”
“Well?” asked Charlie, with an uncertain smile.
“Why, poor Miss Bushell!”
Charlie laughed and replaced his cigar.
“What are we standing still for?” he said.
“I don’t know. You stopped. She’d be such an ideal match for you.”
“Then I should never have done for you, Mrs. Marland.”
“My dear boy, I was married when you were still in Eton collars.”
They had completed the circuit of the garden, and now approached where Lady Merceron sat, enveloped in a shawl.
“Charlie!” she called. “Here’s a letter from Victor Sutton. He’s coming to-morrow.”
“I didn’t know you’d asked him,” said Charlie, with no sign of pleasure at the news. Victor had been at school and college with Charlie, and often, in his holidays, at the Court, for he was Sir Victor’s godson. Yet Charlie did not love him. For the rest, he was very rich, and was understood to cut something of a figure in London society.
“Mr. Sutton? Oh, I know him,” exclaimed Mrs. Marland. “He’s charming!”
“Then you shall entertain him,” said Charlie. “I resign him.”
“I can’t think why you’re not more pleased to have him here, Charlie,” remarked Lady Merceron. “He’s very popular in London, isn’t he, Vansittart?”
“I’ve met him at some very good houses,” answered Mr. Vansittart. And that, he seemed to imply, is better than mere popularity.
“The Bushells were delighted with him last time he was here,” continued Lady Merceron.
“There! A rival for you!” Mrs. Marland whispered.
Charlie laughed cheerfully. Sutton would be no rival of his, he thought; and if he and Millie liked one another, by all means let them take one another. A month before he would hardly have dismissed the question in so summary a fashion, for the habit of regarding Millie as a possibility and her readiness as a fact had grown strong by the custom of years, and, far as he was from a passion, he might not have enjoyed seeing her allegiance transferred to Victor Sutton. Certainly he would have suffered defeat from that hand with very bad grace. Now, however, everything was changed.
“Vansittart,” said Lady Merceron, “Charlie and I want to consult you (she often coupled Charlie’s hypothetical desire for advice with her own actual one in appeals to Mr. Vansittart) about Mr. Prime’s rent.”
“Oh, at the old farm?”
“Yes. He wants another reduction.”
“He’ll want to be paid for staying there next.”
“Well, poor man, he’s had to take lodgers this summer—a thing he’s never done before. Charlie, did you know that?”
“Yes,” said Charlie, interrupting an animated conversation which he had started with Mrs. Marland.
“Do you know who they are?” pursued his mother, wandering from Mr. Prime’s rent to the more interesting subject of his lodgers.
“Ladies from London,” answered Charlie.
“Rather vague,” commented Mr. Vansittart. “Young ladies or old ladies, Charlie?”
“Why does he want to know?” asked Mrs. Marland; but chaff had about as much effect on Mr. Vansittart as it would have on an ironclad. He seemed not to hear, and awaited an answer with a bland smile. In truth, he thought Mrs. Marland a silly woman.
“Young, I believe,” answered Charlie, in a careless tone.
“It’s curious I’ve not seen them about,” said Lady Merceron. “I pass the farm almost every day. Who are they, Charlie?”
“One’s a Miss Wallace. She’s engaged to Willie Prime.”
“To Willie? Fancy!”
“H’m! I think,” remarked Mr. Vansittart, “that, from the point of view of a reduction of rent, these lodgers are a delusion. Of course she stays with Prime if she’s going to many his son.”
“Fancy Willie!” reiterated Lady Merceron. “Surely he can’t afford to marry? He’s in a bank, you know, Vansittart, and he only gets a hundred and twenty pounds a year.”
“One blessing of the country is that everybody knows his neighbor’s income,” observed Mr. Vansittart.
“Perhaps the lady has money,” suggested Mrs. Marland. “But, Mr. Merceron, who’s the other lady?”
“A friend of Miss Wallace’s, I believe. I don’t know her name.”
“Oh, they’re merely friends of Prime’s?” Mr. Vansittart concluded. “If that’s all he bases his claim for a reduction on”
“Hang it! He might as well have it,” interrupted Charlie. “He talks to me about it for half an hour every time we meet.”
“But, my dear Charlie, you have more time than money to waste—at least, so it seems.”
His uncle’s sarcasm never affected Charlie’s temper.
“I’ll turn him on to you, uncle,” he replied, “and you can see how you like it.”
“I’ll go and call on him to-morrow. You’d better come too, Charlie.”
“And then you can see the ladies from London,” added Mrs. Marland. “Perhaps the one who isn’t young Mr. Prime’s will be interesting.”
“Or,” said Charlie, “as mostly happens in this woeful world, the one who is.”
“I think the less we see of that sort of person at all, the better,” observed Lady Merceron, with gentle decision. “They can hardly be quite what we’re accustomed to.”
“That sort of person!”
Charlie went to bed with the phrase ringing in his horror-struck ears. If to be the most beautiful, the most charming, and the most refined, the daintiest, the wittiest and prettiest, the kindest and the sweetest, the merriest and most provoking creature in the whole world—if to be all this were yet not to weigh against being ‘that sort of person’—if it were not, indeed, to outweigh, banish, and obliterate everything else why, the world was not fit to live in, and he no true Merceron! For the Merceron men had always pleased themselves.