“What strikes one most is a sort of commercial brilliance in her,” taking up his thread again after a smilingly reflective pause. “It quite exhilarates one by its novelty. There’s spice in it. We English have not a look-in when we are dealing with Americans, and yet France calls us a nation of shopkeepers. My impression is that their women take little inventories of every house they enter, of every man they meet. I heard her once speaking to my wife about this place, as if she had lived in it. She spoke of the closed windows and the state of the gardens—of broken fountains and fallen arches. She evidently deplored the deterioration of things which represented capital. She has inventoried Dunholm, no doubt. That will give Westholt a chance. But she will do nothing until after her next year’s season in London—that I’d swear. I look forward to next year. It will be worth watching. She has been training my wife. A sister who has married an Englishman and has at least spent some years of her life in England has a certain established air. When she is presented one knows she will be a sensation. After that–-” he hesitated a moment, smiling not too pleasantly.
“After that,” said Mount Dunstan, “the Deluge.”
“Exactly. The Deluge which usually sweeps girls off their feet—but it will not sweep her off hers. She will stand quite firm in the flood and lose sight of nothing of importance which floats past.”
Mount Dunstan took him up. He was sick of hearing the fellow’s voice.
“There will be a good many things,” he said; “there will be great personages and small ones, pomps and vanities, glittering things and heavy ones.”
“When she sees what she wants,” said Anstruthers, “she will hold out her hand, knowing it will come to her. The things which drown will not disturb her. I once made the blunder of suggesting that she might need protection against the importunate—as if she had been an English girl. It was an idiotic thing to do.”
“Because?” Mount Dunstan for the moment had lost his head. Anstruthers had maddeningly paused.
“She answered that if it became necessary she might perhaps be able to protect herself. She was as cool and frank as a boy. No air pince about it—merely consciousness of being able to put things in their right places. Made a mere male relative feel like a fool.”
“When ARE things in their right places?” To his credit be it spoken, Mount Dunstan managed to say it as if in the mere putting together of idle words. What man likes to be reminded of his right place! No man wants to be put in his right place. There is always another place which seems more desirable.
“She knows—if we others do not. I suppose my right place is at Stornham, conducting myself as the brother-in-law of a fair American should. I suppose yours is here—shut up among your closed corridors and locked doors. There must be a lot of them in a house like this. Don’t you sometimes feel it too large for you?”
“Always,” answered Mount Dunstan.
The fact that he added nothing else and met a rapid side glance with unmoving red-brown eyes gazing out from under rugged brows, perhaps irritated Anstruthers. He had been rather enjoying himself, but he had not enjoyed himself enough. There was no denying that his plaything had not openly flinched. Plainly he was not good at flinching. Anstruthers wondered how far a man might go. He tried again.
“She likes the place, though she has a natural disdain for its condition. That is practical American. Things which are going to pieces because money is not spent upon them—mere money, of which all the people who count for anything have so much—are inevitably rather disdained. They are `out of it.’ But she likes the estate.” As he watched Mount Dunstan he felt sure he had got it at last—the right thing. “If you were a duke with fifty thousand a year,” with a distinctly nasty, amicably humorous, faint laugh, “she would—by the Lord, I believe, she would take it over—and you with it.”
Mount Dunstan got up. In his rough walking tweeds he looked over-big—and heavy—and perilous. For two seconds Nigel Anstruthers would not have been surprised if he had without warning slapped his face, or knocked him over, or whirled him out of his chair and kicked him. He would not have liked it, but—for two seconds—it would have been no surprise. In fact, he instinctively braced his not too firm muscles. But nothing of the sort occurred. During the two seconds—perhaps three—Mount Dunstan stood still and looked down at him. The brief space at an end, he walked over to the hearth and stood with his back to the big fireplace.
“You don’t like her,” he said, and his manner was that of a man dealing with a matter of fact. “Why do you talk about her?”
He had got away again—quite away.
An ugly flush shot over Anstruthers’ face. There was one more thing to say—whether it was idiotic to say it or not. Things can always be denied afterwards, should denial appear necessary—and for the moment his special devil possessed him.
“I do not like her!” And his mouth twisted. “Do I not? I am not an old woman. I am a man—like others. I chance to like her—too much.”
There was a short silence. Mount Dunstan broke it.
“Then,” he remarked, “you had better emigrate to some country with a climate which suits you. I should say that England—for the present—does not.”
“I shall stay where I am,” answered Anstruthers, with a slight hoarseness of voice, which made it necessary for him to clear his throat. “I shall stay where she is. I will have that satisfaction, at least. She does not mind. I am only a racketty, middle-aged brother-in-law, and she can take care of herself. As I told you, she has the spirit of the huntress.”
“Look here,” said Mount Dunstan, quite without haste, and with an iron civility. “I am going to take the liberty of suggesting something. If this thing is true, it would be as well not to talk about it.”
“As well for me—or for her?” and there was a serene significance in the query.
Mount Dunstan thought a few seconds.
“I confess,” he said slowly, and he planted his fine blow between the eyes well and with directness. “I confess that it would not have occurred to me to ask you to do anything or refrain from doing it for her sake.”
“Thank you. Perhaps you are right. One learns that one must protect one’s self. I shall not talk—neither will you. I know that. I was a fool to let it out. The storm is over. I must ride home.” He rose from his seat and stood smiling. “It would smash up things nicely if the new beauty’s appearance in the great world were preceded by chatter of the unseemly affection of some adorer of ill repute. Unfairly enough it is always the woman who is hurt.”
“Unless,” said Mount Dunstan civilly, “there should arise the poor, primeval brute, in his neolithic wrath, to seize on the man to blame, and break every bone and sinew in his damned body.”
“The newspapers would enjoy that more than she would,” answered Sir Nigel. “She does not like the newspapers. They are too ready to disparage the multimillionaire, and cackle about members of his family.”
The unhidden hatred which still professed to hide itself in the depths of their pupils, as they regarded each other, had its birth in a passion as elemental as the quakings of the earth, or the rage of two lions in a desert, lashing their flanks in the blazing sun. It was well that at this moment they should part ways.
Sir Nigel’s horse being brought, he went on the way which was his.
“It was a mistake to say what I did,” he said before going. “I ought to have held my tongue. But I am under the same roof with her. At any rate, that is a privilege no other man shares with me.”