CHAPTER VI
LORD DREWITT'S PERPLEXITIES
ON the afternoon of the following day Beresford found himself setting out upon a subsidiary quest, the discovery of the friends and acquaintance that hitherto it had been his one object to avoid. Whatever his own state of mind, the day at least was perfect. June had spread her gayest gossamer over Piccadilly. The sun shone as if in a moment of geographical forgetfulness. Pretty women and well-tailored men streamed to and from the Park, whilst the roadway was a desperate congestion of traffic, controlled by patient optimists. Here and there an empty sleeve, or a pair of crutches, acted as a reminder of the war, which otherwise seemed countless centuries away.
It was like a day from a society novel, where it never rains when the heroine wears her best frock. It was an unreal, artificial, fantastical, and hitherto unprecedented day. From Bond Street to Knightsbridge, not an umbrella or a mackintosh was to be seen, nevertheless it was June in London.
Beresford sauntered idly down Piccadilly in the direction of Hyde Park Corner, enjoying the warmth and admiring all that was to be admired. Into the tin pannikin of the old blind man outside Devonshire House he dropped a shilling. It was clearly a day for silver largesse, for light and love and lingering. He smiled at the thought of the absurdity of his own position. Something like one hundred and twenty pounds stood between him and absolute destitution. What would the passers-by think if they knew,—Lady Tanagra Elton, for instance, who had just driven by? What would she say? What would?
"Hullo, Drew!" he broke off his speculations suddenly, as a tall, fair-haired man was about to pass him.
Fixing his monocle in his right eye, Lord Drewitt gazed at his cousin with expressionless face.
"My dear Richard," he drawled, "I invariably cut the family skeleton during the Season. Ghosts I never acknowledge, even in August, when my social standard is at its lowest ebb."
Beresford laughed, linked his arm in that of his cousin and turned him westward.
"Anyhow, you've got to take me into the club and give me a barley-water," he said.
Although different in temperament and character in about as many ways as two men can differ, Beresford and his cousin had always been on the best of terms. Lord Drewitt's pose of frank cynicism, softened by a certain dry humour, was to Beresford always amusing.
"To give a man a title and two thousand a year on which to keep it out of the mud," Lord Drewitt would say, "is a little joke that only the Almighty and the Aunt are capable of appreciating."
In spite of his expensive tastes and insufficient income, Lord Drewitt had repeatedly refused pressing invitations to join the Boards of quite reputable companies. On one occasion, when a very obtuse financier had doubled his original offer of five hundred a year for "the most inconspicuous tax upon your lordship's time," Lord Drewitt had lazily asked him if he had ever played in a 'varsity match at Lord's. The puzzled city man confessed that he had not.
"Well, I have," was the reply, "and you learn a devil of a lot of cricket in the process, more than you can ever forget in the city."
Lord Drewitt had greatly offended his aunt, Lady Drewitt, when on one occasion she had suggested that he might go into the city, by saying, "My dear aunt, it has been said that it takes three generations to make a gentleman. I am the third Baron Drewitt."
For fully a minute the two men walked westward without speaking. It was Drewitt who at length broke the silence.
"I understood, Richard, that you had forsaken the haunts of men in favour of sitting under hedges and haystacks."
"I had to give it up," said Beresford with a self-conscious laugh. "I found the country is for the temperamentally robust."
Drewitt turned and looked at him, but made no comment.
"There's too much incident, too much excitement, too many adventures for a man accustomed to the quiet of town life," continued Beresford. "If you really want to be alone you must be in London."
"I believe that has been said before," remarked Drewitt drily, as they climbed the steps of the Diplomatic Club and passed into the smoking room.
With a sigh Drewitt threw himself into a chair.
"Where are you staying?" he enquired.
"At the Ritz-Carlton."
Drewitt merely raised his eyebrows and, beckoning a waiter, ordered whiskies-and-sodas.
"What's she like?" With great deliberation he proceeded to light a cigarette. Presently he raised his eyes and looked enquiringly at Beresford over the flame.
"You impute everything to a wrong motive" began Beresford.
"A woman is not a motive, my dear Richard," interrupted Drewitt; "she's an imaginative extravagance of Nature, like a mushroom, or the aurora borealis."
"You expect," continued Beresford, ignoring the interruption, "that every man is capable of making an ass of himself about some woman and, naturally, you are never surprised when he does."
"The surprise generally comes when I meet the woman," was the dry retort. "What does the Aunt say?"
"I haven't seen her yet," Beresford confessed.
"There are only two sorts of men in the world, Richard," said Drewitt after a short silence. "Those who make asses of themselves and those"
"How is she," interrupted Beresford.
"Who, the Aunt?"
"Yes."
"At the present moment she is much occupied with a project by which I shall become the legal protector of a lady's freckled and rather shapeless charms and, incidentally, the guardian of her estate, amounting to I forget how many million dollars."
"Noblesse oblige," laughed Beresford.
"Noblesse be damned," murmured Drewitt evenly. "The situation is not without its embarrassments," he added.
"But surely you can decline," said Beresford. "You have your two thousand a year."
"Two thousand a year is just sufficient to embarrass a man who otherwise might have carved out a career for himself, in accordance with the best traditions of the novel. With nothing at all I should have got into the illustrated papers as a romantic figure in London Society; but with two thousand a year" he shrugged his shoulders and, with great deliberation, extinguished his cigarette in the ashtray beside him.
"There is always hope, Drew, 'Unto him who hath shall be given.'"
"Precisely," replied Drewitt, "unto him that hath two thousand a year shall be given Aunt Caroline for all time. She has, however, a peculiarly discriminating nature. She recognises the inadequacy of two thousand a year to keep up the title of the barony of Drewitt."
"Some day she'll give you a little out of her own fifty thousand a year," suggested Beresford.
"My dear Richard," Drewitt drawled, "there is an obvious bourgeois trait in you. The Aunt is a woman of originality and imagination. She does much better than that. She collects and hurls at me all the heiresses for continents round. Such figures, such faces, such limbs, exist nowhere outside the imagination of a German caricaturist. Sometimes they have attached to them mammas, sometimes papas, which merely adds to the horror of the situation. I suppose," he continued resignedly, "it is due to the rise in democracy that the accent and waist-measurement of wealth should be as obvious as the Chiltern Hills."
"But surely there are some heiresses with attractions, Drew," suggested Richard.
Drewitt shook his head in profound dejection.
"None, my dear Richard, none. Even if there were, there would always be the relatives. Why is it," he demanded plaintively, "that we are endowed with relatives?"
"That's where birds and animals have the best of it," said Beresford, watching an impudent-looking sparrow on the window-ledge. "They don't even know their relatives."
"That, too, would have its disadvantages," said Drewitt gloomily; "if we didn't know them, we might adopt them as friends, and only find out our mistake when it was too late."
"But why trouble about marrying?" asked Beresford. "You can rub along fairly well on two thousand a year."
"Rub along," retorted Drewitt in a voice that contained something of feeling, "I can rub along: but I have to marry and produce little Drewitts for the sake of the title. I can't go round with a barrel-piano, I should be bound to catch cold; besides, I have no sense of rhythm."
Beresford laughed at the expression of unutterable gloom upon his cousin's face.
"To throw a man upon the tender mercies of the world as the third peer of a line is a shameful and humiliating act."
Drewitt gazed reflectively at the cigarette he had just selected from his case. Striking a match, he lighted it with great deliberation.
"All titles," he continued, "like the evening papers, should begin at the fourth issue, and then there might be a sort of final night edition, after which the line would become extinct."
"But how" began Beresford.
Drewitt motioned him to silence.
"There would be some virtue in being the seventh Baron Drewitt," he explained. "A seventh baron might have traditions, a family ghost, a picture gallery of acquired ancestors. These are the things which make a Family. No family should be admitted to Burke without a ghost, one that walks in clanking chains, although why ghosts should choose these unmusical accompaniments I've never been able to discover. Then there should be a thoroughly disreputable ancestor, or ancestress, generally called Sir Rupert, or Lady Marjorie, and finally a motto that shall foretell the happening of something when something else takes place."
He sipped his whiskey-and-soda with an air of deep depression.
"The Drewitts have no ghost, nothing more disreputable than myself, and the nearest thing to a family motto that we can lay claim to is the trade mark of the far-famed Drewitt Ales, a ship on a sea of beer above the thrilling legend:
"'I see it foam
Where'er I roam.'
Richard," he said, leaning forward and speaking earnestly, "that is what keeps me back. I've just realised it. It's that damned motto.
"The Aunt's latest scheme," he continued after a pause, "is concerned with one Lola Craven, reputed to have well over a million inherited from an uncle who undermined the constitution of the British Empire by producing New Zealand mutton, which found its way over here in a frozen state. I tasted the stuff once, I actually swallowed the first mouthful," he added.
"What is she like?" asked Beresford.
"Probably like the mutton," answered Drewitt; "they descend upon me with such rapidity that I cannot get the taste of one out of my mouth before another is produced. Ida Hopkins was the last, she of the freckles. Her shapelessness, my dear Richard, was really most indelicate. She bulged wherever she should have receded, and receded everywhere she should have bulged."
"And what did Aunt Caroline say?" enquired Beresford.
"Oh, she said quite a lot about saving the title, and the woman who was content with her place by the fireside. I pointed out some of Ida's physical imperfections, and suggested a photographer's darkroom in preference to the fireside; but the Aunt said that if I wished to be indelicate, I had better go; so I went, and Ida has taken her gross inequalities to another market. It's all very tame and tedious," he added.
"What's Lola Craven like?" asked Beresford.
"I haven't the most remote idea. She has one advantage, however, she's an orphan, with only an aunt attachment."
"Lola Craven is also a much better name than Ida Hopkins."
"When you marry," said Drewitt, "you don't live with a visiting-card, you have to live with a woman. That's what makes marriage so infernally uncomfortable. But tell me about yourself."
Beresford outlined the adventures that had befallen him, making no mention, however, of the Rain-Girl. When he had finished Drewitt regarded him with interest.
"There is one thing I have always liked about you, Richard, you're an ass; but you don't seem to mind other people knowing it. Most of the asses I have met endeavour to camouflage their asinine qualities with lions' skins. Is it indiscreet to enquire what you propose to do?"
"I shall carry on to the extent of my finances," said Beresford with a smile.
"And then?"
"Oh! I may enter for the Ida Hopkins stakes."
"You might, but I'm afraid it's no good. Ida's out for plunder, she will sell her charms only for a title, and you have nothing more attractive than a D.S.O. and the reputation of being mentally a little unequally balanced, at least that is what the Aunt would tell her. In any case I wouldn't recommend Ida."
"Why?"
"Even if you could accommodate your ideas to her figure and its defiance of the law of feminine proportion, you would find her freckles a source of constant worry. They are like a dewildering bed-room wall-paper to an invalid. You have to try and count them, and of course you lose your place and start again. When I first met her they so fascinated me that I could do nothing but stare at her, and she blushed. Heavens! that blush. It was the most awful thing I have ever encountered. I felt that it must inevitably be followed by a violent perspiration. I fled. No, Richard; give up all thought of Ida. Why, even now I live in daily terror lest some man I know may marry her and ask me to be best man. Now I must be going. I'm due at the Bolsovers' at four o'clock, and it's already half-past five."
Both men rose and walked towards the door.
"By the way, is it absolutely necessary that you should stay at the Ritz-Carlton?"
"Absolutely," with decision.
"Ah, well! you're an interesting sort of ass, Richard, I will say that for you. I'll see that you meet Lola. Sometimes these heiresses like a fool without a title just as much as one with, and it would please the Aunt to keep her in the family. Good-bye."
Drewitt hailed a taxi and drove off, Beresford turning westward. He had refused his cousin's invitation to lunch on the morrow, determined to be free of all engagements. He turned gloomily into the Park, crossed the road and sat down upon a vacant chair. In a novel the Rain-Girl would drive by in a car or carriage, bow to him half shyly and with a blush. He would start up and she would order the chauffeur or coachman to stop. He would be introduced to the aunt, invited to lunch and
"Oh, damn!"
Beresford stabbed viciously at the gravel with his stick, and glared savagely at an inoffensive little man with grey mutton-chop whiskers, who looked amazed that any one could be profane on so perfect a day.
"Beg pardon, sir; but 'er Ladyship would like to speak to you."
The voice seemed to come suddenly from nowhere. Beresford turned to find Rogers, Lady Drewitt's first footman, at his elbow. He looked beyond Rogers and saw Lady Drewitt herself seated in her carriage, examining him attentively through her lorgnettes. With her was Mrs. Edward Seymour.
Beresford walked slowly and reluctantly towards the carriage. What cursed luck, he told himself, to run up against Aunt Caroline so early in his adventure.
Caroline, Lady Drewitt, was the widow of the second Baron Drewitt of Tonscombe, who had died at the age of fifty, leaving to his lady an enormous fortune and to his nephew, Philip, the title with two thousand a year. The first Baron had gone "up-stairs" by virtue of the famous Drewitt Ales, and a profound belief in the soundness of Tory principles and legislative inspiration.
Lady Drewitt took it as her mission in life to see that "the family" behaved itself. Whenever a Drewitt or a Challice—Lady Drewitt was a Challice before her marriage—got into difficulties the first thought was, what would Lady Drewitt think? but this was as nothing to the morbid speculation as to what she would probably say. She had a worldly brain and a biting tongue. She never strove to smooth troubled waters; but by making them intolerably rough frequently achieved the same end.
As Beresford approached, Lady Drewitt continued to stare at him with uncompromising intentness through her lorgnettes.
"What is the meaning of this, Richard?" she demanded in level tones as he reached the side of the carriage.
"That's just what has been puzzling me," said Beresford, smiling across at his cousin Cecily. "I think the weather people call it the approach of an anti-cyclone. For June in London it's really"
"Don't be a fool, Richard. Why are you in London?"
"My dear Aunt, it's June and I am a Challice. We Challices all gravitate towards the metropolis in June just as the cuckoo gravitates What is it the cuckoo gravitates towards, Cecily?" he enquired, turning suddenly to Mrs. Edward.
"You said that you were going to sell all your—your"
"Duds," suggested Beresford helpfully, as Lady Drewitt hesitated. "I did." He enjoyed Mrs. Edward's scandalised look.
"Then how is it?" again she hesitated.
"I bought more. My tailor seemed quite pleased," he added as an afterthought.
"But why are you in town, Richard?" burst out Mrs. Edward, unable longer to restrain herself. Her tone seemed to imply that Beresford's being in London was an offence against good taste.
"The bucolic life was too much for me, Cecily. You would be astounded at the bewildering manner in which adventures descend upon the would-be vagabond and recluse."
"Where are you staying?" demanded Lady Drewitt, with the air of one not to be trifled with.
"At the Ritz-Carlton."
"The Ritz-Carlton!" Lady Drewitt's lorgnettes fell from her nerveless hand and her jaw dropped.
"A little bourgeois perhaps," admitted Beresford, "but it's really quite respectable."
"You will come and dine with me to-night, Richard." There was grim determination in Lady Drewitt's tone.
"I'm afraid I cannot, Aunt Caroline, I"
"Then lunch to-morrow."
"As a matter of fact I am engaged for all meals for the next six weeks." Beresford had determined not to risk missing the Rain-Girl by either lunching or dining away from the Ritz-Carlton.
Lady Drewitt continued to stare.
"If I may run in to tea one afternoon," he suggested.
"To-morrow, then, at four." Lady Drewitt's jaws closed with a snap.
With a smile and a bow Beresford lifted his hat and strolled away, feeling that there were compensations in a life that permitted a man to refuse two invitations from a wealthy relative.
Lady Drewitt drove home, and beside her sat Mrs. Edward, who had just remembered with a sigh of misgiving that she and her husband were dining that night with their "dear Aunt Caroline."