Partners Part 11

"I acknowledge, Mr. Sandow, that your tone and your whole manner of treating Frida are quite incomprehensible to me. You treat her completely as a child that must obey implicitly your higher will, and seem quite to forget that she must take a place at your side some day."

"She must first be educated for it," said Gustave condescendingly. "At present she is scarcely sixteen, and I am thirty, therefore the child must look on me with respect."

"So it seems! I should expect something more from my future husband, than that he should set himself up as an object of my respect."

"Yes, Miss Clifford, that is quite different. No one would permit himself such a tone towards you."

"I suppose my fortune gives me a claim to more consideration. With the poor dependent orphan, whom one elevates to one's own position, any manner is permitted."

The remark sounded so bitter that Gustave noticed it, and cast a questioning glance at the young lady.

"Do you think that Frida belongs to those natures which allow themselves to be thus elevated?"

"No; I think her very proud, and far more courageous than is usual at her age. Just on that account is this unquestioning docility incomprehensible."

"Yes. I am rather successful in training," acknowledged Gustave. "But as to your proposition, to tell the whole to my brother immediately, that is impossible. You don't know my brother; his obstinacy is by no means conquered, and would return doubly strong if he discovered our plot. The moment that he learnt that I had brought Frida here with a decided purpose, his anger would burst forth, and he would send us both back across the ocean."

"That would indeed be a misfortune, for then the advantage of the whole intrigue would be lost."

Jessie must indeed have been irritated before she allowed the hateful word "intrigue" to pa.s.s her lips, but it slipped out, and Gustave quite accepted it.

"Quite right; that is what I fear, and it would never do to jeopardise it thus, now my heart is set on remaining here."

There was a peculiar light in his eyes at the last words. Jessie did not see it; she had bent again over her drawing, and worked away with renewed zeal, but the pencil trembled in her hand, and the strokes became hasty and uncertain. Gustave watched her for a while; at last he rose again.

"No, Miss Clifford, it really will not do to treat the perspective like that. Permit me one moment."

And without further ceremony, he took the pencil from her hand, and began to alter the drawing. Jessie was about to make a violent protest, but she quickly saw that the pencil was in a very practised hand, and that a few powerful strokes entirely corrected the error.

"You declared you could not draw," said she, wavering between anger and surprise.

"Oh! It is only a little _dilletante_ performance, which I do not venture to call talent. Only enough to enable me to criticise. Here, Miss Clifford."

He returned the leaf to her. Jessie looked silently at it and then at him.

"I really admire your versatility, of which you have just given me a proof. You are everything imaginable, Mr. Sandow! Politician, journalist, artist.--"

"And merchant," said Gustave, completing the sentence. "Yes, I am a sort of universal genius, but share alas, the fate of all geniuses; I am not recognised by my contemporaries."

His half-ironical inclination showed that for the moment he looked upon her as representing his contemporaries. Jessie made no reply, but began to collect her drawing materials.

"It is quite chilly. I ought to go in. Pray do not disturb yourself; I will send the servant to fetch my things," and declining with a motion of her hand any a.s.sistance from him, she took the drawing from the table, and left the summer-house.

Gustave shook his head as he looked after her.

"I seem really to have fallen into disgrace; the last few weeks she has been quite changed. I would rather hear the most violent attack on my selfishness and want of thought than this cool and measured bitterness.

I fear it is high time for me to tell all the truth, and yet I dare not risk Frida's future by so doing. A premature catastrophe would spoil all."

At that moment a carriage drove past the villa. It was Sandow returning from business. He came direct to the garden.

"Here already!" was the short greeting he bestowed on his brother.

"Where are the ladies?"

"Miss Clifford has just left me."

"And Miss Palm?"

"I suppose she is on the beach. I have not seen her since my return."

Sandow's eyes impatiently sought the farther part of the garden. He seemed disappointed that Frida had not come to meet him as usual.

"I have not seen you since this morning," he remarked with temper. "You certainly asked leave on account of pressing business, still I expected to see you in the office later. What kind of business can you have which occupies a whole day?"

"Well, first I was with Henderson, the banker."

"Ah! About the new loan which is being raised in M----. I am glad that you have seen him yourself."

"Naturally about the loan," said Gustave, who did not scruple to leave his brother in error about his business proceedings, though in his wanderings through the picture gallery there had been no mention of the projected loan. "And then there was some talk about private affairs.

When Mrs. Henderson was last here she saw our young country woman, and is quite charmed with her. It is remarkable what an effect this still, timid child produces on every one. From their first meeting, Miss Clifford, too, became one of her warmest friends."

"The child is not so quiet and shy as you imagine," said Sandow, whose eyes continued to look towards the sh.o.r.e. "Beneath that reserve is a deeply emotional, a quite uncommon nature. I never suspected it till accident revealed it to me."

"And since then, you, too, belong to the conquered. Really, Frank, I scarcely know you again. You treat this young girl, this almost total stranger, with a consideration, one might almost say a tenderness, of which your only and highly deserving brother has never been able to boast."

Sandow had seated himself, and thoughtfully supported his head on his hand.

"There is something so fresh, so untouched, in such a young creature.

Against one's will it recalls one's own youthful days. She still clings so fast to her enthusiastic ideas, to her dreams of happiness to come, and cannot understand that the outer world should look on things under such a different aspect. Foolish, childish ideas, which will fall away of themselves in the rough school of the world, but while one listens to them all one's lost beliefs by degrees revive again."

Again his voice had that peculiar softened tone, which those even who best knew the merchant had never heard from his lips, and which seemed like an echo from some older, happier time. Frida must indeed have understood how to touch the right chord as no one before had done, for the very qualities, which in Jessie were regarded as sentimentality and exaggeration, had here found their way to the stern, cold heart of the man. Gustave felt this contradiction, and said, with a touch of satire--

"But all that should not be new to you. You have lived all these years in Clifford's family, and Jessie has grown up under your eyes."

"Jessie was always her parents' idolized darling," replied Sandow, coldly. "Love and happiness were literally showered upon her, and whoever did not treat her with flattery and tenderness, as myself for example, was feared and avoided by her. I have always been a stranger to this fair-haired, soft and petted child, and since she has been grown up, we have become still more distant. But this Frida with her wilful reserve, which we must overcome before reaching the real nature, has nothing weak and wavering about her. When once the somewhat forbidding crust has been broken through, strength and life are found beneath. I like such natures, perhaps because I feel something kindred in them, and sometimes I am surprised, almost startled, to hear from the lips of that girl, remarks and ideas almost identical with what were mine at the same age."

Gustave made no reply, but he closely examined his brother's countenance. The latter felt this, and, as if ashamed of the warmer feeling he had allowed himself to display, immediately stopped, and resumed his usual cold business tone and manner.

"You might at least have come to the office for a few hours. There are things of importance going on, and another letter from Jenkins has arrived. He presses for the fulfilment of your promise with regard to the _K--che Zeitung_, and it is certainly high time. You must have written your article long since."

"I had not supposed there was any hurry," said Gustave. "For some weeks you have not even mentioned the subject."

"There were so many preparations to make. I have kept up an active correspondence with New York on the subject."

"Which you have not allowed me to see as you did the former letters."

"Then it was necessary for you to learn all particulars. This time it concerned very unpleasant difficulties which I alone must arrange."

"I know; you have tried to release yourself from the whole thing!"