The Eldest Son Part 17

Virginia held it open. "Couldn't I have just one?" she pleaded.

"No," said d.i.c.k, taking it from her. "You promised you would give it up when you came down here."

"So I have," she said. "I think you are very cruel."

d.i.c.k put the case back into his pocket. "Of course I'm not unprepared for this," he said, "though I hoped it wouldn't come to it. I shall have to give up the service and get some work."

"Oh, d.i.c.k!" she said. "You don't want to give up the service."

"No, I don't want to. I should have got my majority next year, and I wanted to go on till I commanded the regiment, though I never told _him_ so. But it's got to be done, and it's no use grizzling about it."

"And you're doing this for me!" she said softly.

"I am doing a great deal more than that for you," he said. "I'm giving up Kencote, at least for a time."

"Do you think I'm worth it?" she asked drily.

He looked down at her, and then took her hand in his. "You must get used to my little ways," he said, with a kind smile. "I must be able to say to you what is in my mind."

"Oh, I know," she said repentantly. "It was horrid of me. But I do know what you're giving up, and I love you for it. I hope it won't be for long--Kencote, I mean. I suppose if you give up the army you won't be able to go back to it. I hate to think of that because it's your career. And what else can you work at, dear d.i.c.k? Fancy you in an office!"

"The idea of me in an office needn't disturb you," said d.i.c.k. "I don't intend to go into an office. There are two things I know about. One is soldiering, the other is estate management. If I'm to be prevented from managing the estate that's going to be my own some day, then I'll manage somebody else's in the meantime. There are lots of landowners who would be only too glad to give me a job."

"Tell me what it means exactly, d.i.c.k. Have you got to be a sort of steward to some rich person? I don't think I should like that."

He laughed and patted her hand. "You must get rid of some of your American ideas," he said. "The 'rich person' wouldn't want to treat me as a servant. And it isn't necessary that he should be very rich. I might not be able to get a big agency all at once. I don't know that I should want to, as long as there was enough work to do. As far as your money goes, Virginia, I shouldn't have any feeling about using it to help run the show. What I won't do is to live on it and do nothing.

There ought not to be any difficulty in finding a place that would give us a good house, and enough money to run the stables on, and for my personal expenses, which wouldn't be heavy, as we would stick there and do our job. It would be just what I hoped we should be doing at Kencote from the dower-house. With luck, if there happened to be a vacancy anywhere, I could do better than that. But that much, at any rate, it won't be difficult to get, with a month or so to look round in."

"Then all our difficulties are done away with!" she exclaimed. "Oh, d.i.c.k, why didn't you tell me before? I thought, if your father held out, we should have a terrible time, and you would be as obstinate as possible about my money. I'll tell you what I have. I have----"

"I don't want to know what you have--yet," he interrupted her. "I didn't tell you before because I hoped it wouldn't come to that. I didn't want to face the necessity of giving up the service, and still less of having to give up Kencote. But now there's no help for it; well, we must just let all that slide and make the best of things."

She still thought his scruples about using her money to do what he wanted to do, and his absence of scruples about using it to do what he didn't want, needed more explanation. But she gave up that point as being only one more of the inexplicable tortuosities of a man's sense of honour. She was only too glad that the question could be settled as easily as that. But d.i.c.k must have felt also that it needed more explanation, for he said, "When I said that I had no feeling about letting you help run the house--of course, I really hate it like poison. But there is just the difference."

"Oh, of course there is--all the difference in the world," she made haste to reply, terrified lest they should be going to split, after all, on this wretched simulacrum of a rock. Then she had a bright thought. "But, d.i.c.k dear, you told me once how lucky your ancestors had been in marrying heiresses--not that I'm much of an heiress!"

"You're not an heiress at all," he said impatiently. "I suppose everything you've got comes from--from that fellow. Can't you see the difference? I hate touching his beastly money. And I won't, longer than I can help."

"But, d.i.c.k!" she exclaimed wonderingly. "Didn't you know? He never left me a cent. He hadn't a cent to leave."

He stared at her. "Then where _did_ it come from?" he asked.

"Why, from pigs--from Chicago," she said, laughing. "My father was of an old family, my mother wasn't, and one of her brothers made a fortune in a bacon factory. Unfortunately, he did not make it until after she was dead and I was married, or it might have stopped--oh, many things.

But he left it to me--the bacon factory--and I sold it for---- But you won't let me tell you how much."

"Oh, you can tell me if it's yours," he said.

"Well, they told me I had been cheated. But what was I to do with a bacon factory? And I sold it for as much as I wanted to live comfortably on. I sold it for a quarter of a million dollars."

d.i.c.k's stare was still in evidence. "A quarter of a million!

Dollars!" he repeated. "That's--what? Fifty thousand pounds. By the Lord, Virginia, you're an heiress after all."

CHAPTER XII

THE HOUSE PARTY

"My dear Emmeline," said the Judge, "if I hadn't such a profound contempt for Edward's intellect and for everything represented or misrepresented by him, I could feel it in my heart to be very sorry for him."

"My dear Herbert," replied Lady Birkett, "if you weren't as deeply sorry for him as you actually are, you wouldn't be your own kind, sympathetic, would-be-cynical self."

Sir Herbert and Lady Birkett with their two daughters and their son-in-law had arrived at Kencote that afternoon to make part of the company gathered there for the South Meads.h.i.+re Hunt Ball. Other guests had arrived by a later train, but there had been an interval during which the Judge had been closeted with his brother-in-law, the Squire, and heard from him everything that had taken place within the past month, which was the interval that had elapsed since d.i.c.k had abruptly left Kencote. He had now come into his wife's bedroom, where she was in the later stages of dressing for dinner, although dinner was as yet half an hour off.

"I know you want to tell me everything," she said, "and although the lady who is doing my hair does not understand a word of English as yet, you will probably be able to talk more freely if she is not present.

If you will come back in five minutes she will have gone to Angela."

So the Judge went into his dressing-room and, finding his clothes already laid out, dressed and repaired again to his wife, not quite in five minutes, but in little more than ten.

"I suppose you have heard all about it from Nina?" he said, taking up the conversation where he had left it. "Have you seen this Lady George Dubec?"

"Yes," said Lady Birkett. "She is not in the least what Edward pictures her, according to Nina. As far as her looks tell one anything, I should say she was a charming woman."

"Edward paints her as a voluptuous siren of the ballet. I suppose one may put that down as one of his usual excursions of imagination."

"She certainly isn't that, and it was news to me that she had ever been on the stage. Poor Nina is very distressed about it. She says that they have had no word from d.i.c.k since he left the house, that Edward has only heard through Humphrey that he has sent in his papers, but even Humphrey doesn't know where he is or what he is doing."

"I had the same news from Edward, with the additions which might be expected of him. He takes it hard that after all he has done for d.i.c.k he should be treated in that way, and I don't know that I shouldn't take it hard in his place. It makes me increasingly thankful that I haven't any sons."

This was a polite little fiction on the Judge's part which his wife respected. It was the chief regret of his life that he had no son.

"Nina says he is fretting himself into a fever," said Lady Birkett, "lest d.i.c.k should be raising money on his expectations."

"Fretting himself into a fever," replied the Judge, "is not the expression I should use of Edward. But he certainly feels deep annoyance, and expresses it. He had not thought of that when he delivered his ultimatum, and, as he says, it would be the easiest possible thing for d.i.c.k to do. But I was mercifully able to relieve his mind on that point. I did not exactly tell him that d.i.c.k, although he has more brains in his little finger than his father has in his head, is so much like him that he would shrink from taking so sensible a step as much as Edward himself would; but I gave him the gist of it.

My dear Emmeline, to men like Edward and d.i.c.k, land--landed property--is sacrosanct. d.i.c.k would give up _any_ woman rather than embarra.s.s an acre of Kencote. Kencote is his religion, just as much as it is Edward's. Edward gained comfort from my a.s.suring him of the fact. He said that d.i.c.k was behaving so badly that right and wrong seemed to have no distinction for him for the time being, but probably there were crimes that he would not commit, and this might be one of them."

"I am glad you told him that," said Lady Birkett. "I should think it is probably true. But what is he doing, or thinking of doing?"

"He may be thinking of doing a little honest work," said the Judge, who had sat for some time in the House of Commons as a wicked Radical. "I put the suggestion to Edward for what it was worth, but he scouted it.

As he indicated, there is nothing that a man who has been through a public school and university training, and has been for ten or fifteen years in a position of responsibility in His Majesty's army, can do.

He has no money value whatever. I did not contradict him."

"_She_ has money, I suppose," said Lady Birkett.

"She must have some. But there again I felt able to rea.s.sure Edward.

I know the d.i.c.ks of the world pretty well. They are not without their merits, and there are certain things they don't do. Of course, if he were working, and making some sort of an income, with his prospects it would be different."

Lady Birkett let this go by. "Will Edward hold out, do you think?" she asked.