Lady Connie Part 33

She did her best, seeing already the anxious face of the nurse in the window behind. And as she got up to go, she said, "I shall come again very soon. And when you go to Yorks.h.i.+re, I shall see you perhaps every day."

He looked up in astonishment and delight, and she explained that at Scarfedale Manor, her aunts' old house, she would be only two or three miles from the high moorland vicarage whither he was soon to be moved.

"That will do more for me than doctors!" said Radowitz with decision.

Yet almost before she had reached the window opening on the balcony, his pain, mental and physical, had clutched him again. He did not look up as she waved farewell; and Sorell hurried her away.

Thenceforward she saw him almost every day, to Lady Langmoor's astonishment. Sorell too, and his relation to Connie, puzzled her greatly. Connie a.s.sured her with smiles that she was not in love with the handsome young don, and never thought of flirting with him. "He was mother's friend, Aunt Sophia," she would say, as though that settled the matter entirely. But Lady Langmoor could not see that it settled it at all. Mr. Sorell could not be much over thirty--the best time of all for falling in love. And here was Connie going to pictures with him, and the British Museum, and to visit the poor fellow in the nursing home. It was true that the aunt could never detect the smallest sign of love-making between them. And Connie was always putting forward that Mr. Sorell taught her Greek. As if that kind of thing wasn't one of the best and oldest gambits in the great game of matrimony! Lady Langmoor would have felt it her solemn duty to snub the young man had it been at all possible. But it was really not possible to snub any one possessed of such a courteous self-forgetting dignity. And he came of a good Anglo-Irish family too. Lady Langmoor had soon discovered that she knew some of his relations, and placed him socially to a T. But, of course, any notion of his marrying Connie, with her money, her rank, and her good looks, would be simply ridiculous, so ridiculous that Lady Langmoor soon ceased to think about it, accepted his visits, and began to like him on her own account.

One evening towards the end of the first week in July, a hansom drew up before a house in Portman Square. Douglas Falloden emerged from it, as the door was opened by a maidservant.

The house, which had been occupied at the beginning of the season by the family, was given over now to a charwoman and a couple of housemaids, the senior of whom looked a little scared at the prospect of having to wait on the magnificent gentleman who had just entered the house. In general, when Mr. Douglas came up to town in the absence of his family, he put up at his own very expensive club, and the servants in Portman Square were not troubled with him. But they, like every one else, knew that something was going wrong with the Fallodens.

Falloden walked into the deserted and dust-sheeted house, while the cabman brought in his portmanteau. "Is Mr. Gregory here?" he enquired of the maid.

"Yes, sir, he is in the library. Please, sir, Mrs. O'Connor wants to know if you'll want dinner."

Falloden impatiently said "No," and walked on down a long pa.s.sage to the library, which had been built out at the back of the house. Here the blinds had been drawn up, only to reveal the dusty desolation of an unused room, in which a few chairs had been uncovered, and a table cleared. A man rose from a chair beside the table, and he and Falloden shook hands. He was a round-faced and broad-shouldered person, with one of the unreadable faces developed by the life of a prominent solicitor, in contact with all sorts of clients and many varieties of business; and Falloden's sensitive pride had soon detected in his manner certain shades of expression to which the heir of Flood Castle was not accustomed.

"I am sorry to hear Sir Arthur is not well." Mr. Gregory spoke politely, but perhaps without that accent of grave and even tragic concern which six months earlier he would have given to the same words. "There is a great deal of heavy, and, I am afraid, disagreeable business to be done."

"My father is not fit for it," said Falloden abruptly. "I must do the best I can."

Mr. Gregory gave a sign of a.s.sent. He drew a packet of doc.u.ments from his pocket, and spreading out a letter from Sir Arthur Falloden on the table, proceeded to deal with the points in it seriatim. Falloden sat beside him, looking carefully through the various doc.u.ments handed to him, asking questions occasionally, and making notes of his own. In the dusty northern light of the room, his face had a curiously purple and congested look; and his eyes were dead tired. But he showed so much shrewdness in his various remarks that the solicitor secretly admitted his capacity, reflecting indeed once or twice that, young as he was, it would have been a good thing if his father had taken him into counsel earlier. After the discussion had lasted half an hour, Falloden pushed the papers away.

"I think I see. The broad facts are that my father can raise no more money, either on his securities, or on the land; his two banks are pressing him; and the Scotch mortgages must be paid. The estates, of course, will have to be sold. I am quite willing."

"So I understand. But it will take time and the bank overdrafts are urgent. Mason's Bank declare that if their debt is not paid--or freshly secured--within a month from now, they will certainly take proceedings.

I must remind you they have been exceedingly forbearing."

"And the amount?" Falloden consulted his papers.

"Forty thousand. The securities on which Sir Arthur obtained it are now not worth more than eight."

The lawyer paused a moment, looked at his companion, and at last said--

"There are, of course, your own expectations from Lord Dagnall. I do not know whether you and your father have considered them. But I imagine it would be possible to raise money on them."

Falloden laughed. The sound was a mixture of irritation and contempt.

"Uncommonly little! The fact is my uncle--at seventy-two--is philandering with a lady-housekeeper he set up a year ago. She seems to be bent on netting him, and my father thinks she'll do it. If she does, my uncle will probably find himself with an heir of his own. Anyway the value of my prospects is enormously less than it was. All the neighbours are perfectly aware of what is going on. Oh, I suppose he'll leave me something--enough to keep me out of the workhouse. But there's nothing to be got out of it now."

There was another silence. Falloden pondered the figures before him.

"There are always the pictures," he said at last, looking up.

The lawyer's face lightened.

"If you and Sir Arthur will sell! But as you know they are heirlooms, and you could stop it."

"On the contrary, I am ready to agree to it," said Falloden briefly.

"But there will be a lot of legal business, won't there?"

"Certainly. But it can all be put through in time. And directly it was known that you would sell, the whole situation would be changed."

"We might save something out of the wreck?" said Falloden, looking up.

The lawyer nodded gravely.

"Something--certainly."

"What are they worth?" said Falloden, taking a note-book from his pocket, and looking at a list scribbled on its first page.

Mr. Gregory laughed.

"There is no market in the ordinary sense for such pictures as yours.

There are only half a dozen millionaires in the world who could buy them--and one or two museums." He paused a moment, looking thoughtfully at the young man before him. "There happens, however,"--he spoke slowly--"to be a buyer at this moment in London, whom it would be difficult to beat--in the matter of millions."

He mentioned the name.

"Not an American? Well, send him along." Falloden raised his eyebrows.

"If my father doesn't feel able to see him, I can tackle him. He can choose his own day and hour. All our best pictures are at Flood."

"And they include--"

"Four Rembrandts," said Falloden, looking at his list, "two t.i.tians, two Terburgs, a Vermeer of Delft, heaps of other Dutchmen--four full-length Gainsboroughs, and three half-lengths--two full-length Reynoldses, three smaller--three Lawrences, a splendid Romney, three Hoppners, two Constables, etc. The foreign pictures were bought by my grandfather from one of the Orleans collections about 1830. The English pictures--the portraits--have all been at Flood since they were painted, and very few of them have ever been exhibited. I scribbled these few facts down before I left home. There is, of course, an elaborate catalogue."

For the first time the lawyer's countenance as he listened showed a flash of active sympathy. He was himself a modest collector, and his house at Richmond contained a number of pretty things.

"Sir Arthur will mind parting with them very much, I fear," he said with real concern. "I wish with all my heart it had been possible to find some other way out. But we have really done our best."

Falloden nodded. He sat looking straight before him, one hand drumming on the table. The whole att.i.tude was haughtily irresponsive. The slight note of compa.s.sion in Mr. Gregory's tone was almost intolerable to him, and the lawyer guessed it.

"Insolent cub!" he thought to himself; and thenceforward allowed himself no departure from a purely business tone. It was settled that the buyer--with legal caution, Mr. Gregory for the moment threw no further light upon him--was, if possible, to be got hold of at once, and an appointment was to be made for Flood Castle, where Falloden, or his father, would receive him.

Then the solicitor departed, and Falloden was left to pace up and down the dismal room, his hands in his pockets--deep in thought.

He looked back upon a fortnight of unbroken worry and distress. The news with which his father had received him on his return from Oxford had seemed to him at first incredible. But the facts on which it was based were only too substantial, and his father, broken in health and nerve, now that silence was once thrown aside, poured out upon his son a flood of revelation and confession that soon made what had happened tragically clear. It was the familiar story of wealth grasping at yet more wealth, of the man whose judgment and common sense begin to play him false, when once the intoxication of money has gone beyond a certain point. Dazzled by some first speculative successes, Sir Arthur had become before long a gambler over half the world, in Canada, the States, Egypt, Argentina.

One doubtful venture supported another, and the City, no less than the gambler himself, was for a time taken in. But the downfall of a great Egyptian company, which was to have extracted untold wealth from a strip of Libyan desert, had gradually but surely brought down everything else in its train. Blow after blow fell, sometimes rapidly, sometimes tardily. Sir Arthur tried every expedient known to the financier _in extremis_, descending ever lower in the scale of credit and reputation; and in vain. One tragic day in June, after a long morning with the Gregory partners, Sir Arthur came home to the splendid house in Yorks.h.i.+re, knowing that nothing now remained but to sell the estates, and tell Douglas that his father had ruined him. Lady Laura's settlement was safe; and on that they must live.

The days of slow realisation, after Douglas's return, had tried both father and son severely. Sir Arthur was worn out and demoralised by long months of colossal but useless effort to retrieve what he had done.

Falloden, with his own remorse, and his own catastrophe to think over, was called on to put it aside, to think for and help his father. He had no moral equipment--no trained character--equal to the task. But mercifully for them both, his pride came into play; his shrewd intelligence also, and his affection for his father--the most penetrable spot so far in his hard and splendid youth. He had done his best--a haughty, ungracious best--but still he had done it, and in the course of a few days, now that the tension of concealment was over, Sir Arthur had become almost childishly dependent upon him.

A church clock struck somewhere in the distance. Falloden looked at his watch. Time to go to some restaurant and dine. With Gregory's figures running in his head, he shrank from his Club where he would be sure to meet a host of Harrow and Oxford acquaintance, up for the Varsity match, and the latter end of the season. After dinner he would look into a music-hall, and about eleven make his way to the Tamworth House ball.

He must come back, however, to Portman Square sometime to dress. Lady Tamworth had let it be known privately that the Prince and Princess were coming to her ball, and that the men were expected to appear in knee-breeches and silk stockings. He had told his valet at Flood to pack them; and he supposed that fool of a housemaid would be equal to unpacking for him, and putting out his things.