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CHAPTER IX
LIKE TO LIKE

IT was in May, 1916, that Waldo got a severe wound in the right shoulder, which put him out of action for the rest of the war and sent him, after two or three months in a hospital, back to Cragsfoot. He had done very well, indeed distinguished himself rather notably; had fortune been kinder, he might have expected to rise to high rank. The letters which I received – I was far away, and was not at the time able to get leave, even had I felt justified in asking for it – reflected the mingled disappointment, anxiety, and relief, which the end of his military career, the severity of his wound, and his return home – alive, at all events! – naturally produced at Cragsfoot.

Sir Paget wrote seldom and briefly, but with a quiet humor and an incisive touch. Aunt Bertha’s letters – especially now that she had only me to write to, and no longer spent the larger part of her epistolary energy on Waldo – were frequent, full, vivid, and chatty. But she was also very discursive; she would sandwich in the Kaiser between the cook and the cabbages, Waldo’s wound between Bethmann-Hollweg and Mr. Winston Churchill. It was, however, possible to gather from her, aided by Sir Paget, a pretty complete picture of what was going on both at Cragsfoot and at Briarmount.

For at Briarmount too anxiety reigned, and the times were critical. As might be expected of him, Mr. Jonathan Frost had wrought marvels during the war. The whole of his vast establishments had been placed at the disposal of the Ministry of Munitions; he had effected wonders of rapid adaptation and transformation, wonders of organization and output; he “speeded up” a dozen Boards and infused his own restless energy into somnolent offices. But two years of these exertions, on the top of a life of gigantic labor, proved too much even for him. He won a peerage, but he gave his life. In the September of that same year he came back to Briarmount, the victim of a stroke, a dying man. His mind was still clear and active, but he had considerable difficulty in speaking, and was unable to move without assistance. His daughter, who had sedulously nursed him through his labors, was now nursing him through the last stage of his earthly course.

But there was also a newcomer at Briarmount, a frequent visitor there during the last months of its master’s life, one in whom both Aunt Bertha and Sir Paget took considerable interest. This was Captain Godfrey Frost. Lord Dundrannan (he took his title from a place he had in Scotland) was old-fashioned enough not to approve of confiding to women the exclusive command of great interests; they lacked the broad view and the balance of mind, however penetrating their intuitions might on occasion be! And too much power was not good for them; he even seemed to have hinted to Sir Paget that they were quite masterful enough already! That he meant to leave his daughter handsomely, indeed splendidly, endowed, was certain; but he was minded to provide himself with an heir male in the person of this young man. It would have been natural, perhaps, to suspect him of planning a match between the cousins, but this did not seem to be in his head – perhaps because such personal matters as marriages held a small place in his mind; perhaps because he suspected that his daughter’s ideas on that subject were already settled; perhaps because his nephew was somewhat too young and – from a social point of view – unformed to be a good mate for his accomplished daughter.

Captain Frost was, in fact, inexperienced and backward, shy and rather silent, in society; but unquestionably he had a full share of the family business ability – so much so that, when Lord Dundrannan “cracked up,” he was brought back from the front (against his protests, it is only fair to add), and put in charge, actual if not always nominal, of a great part of the important activities on which his uncle had been engaged. His disposition appeared to be simple, amiable, and unassuming. He was pleasantly deferential to Sir Paget, rather afraid of Aunt Bertha’s acute eyes, cordial and attentive to Waldo. Towards Nina he was content to accept the position of pupil and protégé; he let her put him through his social paces; he regarded her with evident respect and admiration, and thought her worthy to be her father’s daughter – more than that he could not do! There was no trace of any sentiment beyond this, or different in kind from it. There was, in fact, to be detected in Aunt Bertha’s letters an underlying note of satisfaction; it might be described in the words, “He’s quite nice, but there’s nothing to fear!”

But if such a note as that were really to be heard in Aunt Bertha’s letters, it could mean only one thing; and it marked a great change in her attitude towards Nina. It meant that she was looking forward with contentment, apparently with actual pleasure, to a match between Nina and Waldo. Other signs pointed in the same direction – her mention of Nina’s frequent calls at Cragsfoot, of her kindness to Waldo, of her devotion to her father, of her praiseworthy calm and level-headedness during this trying time. The change had perhaps started from a reaction against Lucinda; after the first impulse of sympathy with the distracted fugitive (a very real one at the time) had died down, Lucinda’s waywardness, her “unaccountability,” presented themselves in a less excusable light. But the main cause lay, no doubt, in Waldo himself. Aunt Bertha was – passing impulses apart – for Waldo and on his side. Any shifting of her views and feelings in a matter like this would be certain to reflect a similar alteration in his attitude.

In November a letter from Sir Paget told me of Lord Dundrannan’s death, at which, by chance, he was himself present; evidently moved by the scene, he recounted it with more detail than he was wont to indulge in. Hearing that his neighbor was worse, he went to inquire; as he stood at the door, Nina drove up in her car – she had been out for an airing – and took him into the library where her father was, sitting in a chair by the fire. It was very rarely that he would consent to keep his bed, and he had insisted on getting up that day. “Godfrey Frost was there” (my uncle wrote) “and Dr. Napier, standing and whispering together in the window. By the sick man sat an old white-haired Wesleyan minister, whom he had sent for all the way from Bradford, where he himself was born: he had ‘sat under’ this old gentleman as a boy, and a few days before had expressed a great longing to see him. The minister was reading the Bible to him now. It looked as though he had foreseen that the end was coming. He had had a sort of valedictory talk with Nina and young Frost a week before – about the money and the businesses, what they were to do, what rules they were to be guided by, and so on. That done, he appeared to dismiss worldly affairs, this world itself, from his thoughts, and ‘took up’ the next. I am not mocking; yet I can hardly help smiling. He seemed to have ‘taken it up’ in the same way that he would have inquired into a new, important and interesting speculation; and he got his expert – the old minister from Bradford – to advise him. He was not afraid, or agitated, or remorseful; his feelings seemed, so far as his impaired speech enabled him to describe them to his family, those of a curious and earnest interest in his prospects of survival – he eagerly desired to survive – and in what awaited him if he did survive. The fact that he had neglected religion for a great many years back did not trouble him; nor did ‘How hardly shall a rich man – ’ He seemed confident that, if immortality were a fact, some place and some work would be found for Jonathan Frost. Whether it was a fact was what he wanted to know; he hated the idea of nothingness, of inactivity, of stopping!

“The old minister shut his book when I came in. Nina led me up to her father. He recognized me and smiled. I said a few words, but I doubt if he listened. He pointed towards the book on the minister’s knee – he could move his left hand – and tried to say something: I think that he was trying to pursue the subject that engrossed him, perhaps to get my opinion on it. But the next moment he gave a smothered sort of cry – not loud at all – and moved his hand towards his heart. Napier darted across the room to him; Nina put her arm round his neck and kissed him. He gave a sigh, and his head fell back on her arm. He was gone – all in a minute – gone to get the answer to his question. Then there was a ringing of bells, of course, and they came in and took him way. Nina put her hands in mine for a second before she followed them out of the room: ‘My dear father!’ she said. Then she put her arm in young Frost’s, and he led her out of the room, very gently, in a very gentleman-like way, I must say. I was left alone with the old minister. ‘The end of a remarkable life!’ I said, or something of that sort. ‘I’m glad it came so easily at the end.’ He bowed his white head. ‘He did great things for his country,’ he answered. ‘God’s ways are not our ways, Sir Paget.’ I said good-by, and left him with his book.”

A month after Lord Dundrannan’s death I got Christmas leave, came to England, and went down to Cragsfoot on the Friday before Christmas Day; it fell on a Monday that year. It was jolly to be there again, and to find old Waldo out of danger and getting on really famously.

But how he was changed! I will not go into the physical changes – they proved, thank God, in the main temporary, though it was a long time before he got back nearly all his old vigor – but I can’t help speculating on how much they, and the suffering they brought, had to do with the change in the nature of the man. Perhaps nothing; it is, I suppose, rather an obscure subject, a medical question; but I cannot help thinking that they worked together with his other experiences. At least, they must have made him in a way older in body, just as the other experiences made him older in mind. I never realized till then – though I ought to have – how very little I had really been through, in what had seemed two tolerably exciting and exhausting years, compared to him who had “stuck it through” all the time at the front. I said something of this sort to him as we gossiped together, and it set him talking.

“Well, old chap,” he said, laughing, “I don’t know how you found it – you were, of course, a grown man, a man of the world, before it all began – but I just had to change. It’s no credit to me – I had to! I was a cub, a puppy – I had to become a trained animal. As it was, that infernal temper of mine nearly cost me my commission in the first three months. It would have, by Jove, if Tom Winter – my Company Commander – hadn’t been the best fellow in the world; he was killed six months later, poor chap, but he’d got a muzzle on me before that. You will find me a bit better there; I haven’t had a real old break-out ever since.”

“Oh, I daresay you will, when you get fit!” said I consolingly.

“Thank you,” he laughed again. “But I don’t want to, you know. They were a bit upsetting to everybody concerned.” He smiled as though in a gentle amusement at his old self. “Only father could manage me – and he couldn’t always. Lord, I was impossible! I might have committed a murder one fine day!”

I recollected a certain fine day on which murder, or something very like it, was certainly his purpose. Oh, with a good deal of excuse, no doubt!

Perhaps his thoughts had moved in the same direction; seeing me again might well have that effect on him.

“I don’t want to exaggerate things. I daresay I’ve a bit of the devil left in me. And I don’t know whether men in general have been affected much by the business. Some have, some haven’t, I expect. Perhaps I’m a special case. The war came at what was for me a very critical moment. For me personally it was a lucky thing, in spite of this old shoulder; and it was lucky that my father was so clear about its coming. I was saved from myself, by Jove, I was!”

The “self” of whom he spoke came back to my memory as strangely different and apart from the languid, tranquil man who was talking to me on the long invalid’s chair. He reclined there, smiling thoughtfully.

“I bear no malice against the girl,” he went on. “It was my mistake. She went to her own in the end; it was inevitable that she should; and better before marriage – even just before! – than after. Like to like – she and Monkey Valdez!”

Though I had my own views as to that, I held my tongue. If once I let out that I had seen Lucinda, one question – if not from Waldo, at any rate from Aunt Bertha – would lead to another, and I should be in danger of betraying the needlewoman’s secret. I had made up my mind to lie if need be, but if I kept silence, it was a hundred to one that it would not occur to any one at Cragsfoot to ask whether I had seen Lucinda. Why should I have seen her? It never did occur to any of the three of them; I was asked no questions.

“The best thing to be hoped is that we never run up against one another again. I might still be tempted to give the Monkey a thrashing! Oh, I forgot – I don’t suppose I shall ever be able to give anybody a thrashing! Sad thought, Julius! Well, there it is – let’s forget ‘em!” A gesture of his sound arm waved Lucinda and her Monkey into oblivion.

So be it. I changed the subject. “Very sad about poor old Frost. Dundrannan, I mean.”

“Yes, poor old boy! For a week or two it was about even betting between him and me – which of us would win out, I mean. Well, I have; and he’s gone. We didn’t half do him justice in the old days. Really a grand man, don’t you think?”

I agreed. Lord Dundrannan – Jonathan Frost – had always filled me with the sort of admiration that a non-stop express inspires; and Sir Paget’s letter had added a pathetic touch to the recollection of him – made him more of a human being, brought him into relation with Something that he did not create; that, in fact, I suppose, created him. Really quite a new aspect of Lord Dundrannan!

“She’s come through it splendidly,” said Waldo.

“What, Miss Nina?”

Waldo laughed. “Look here, old chap, you don’t seem to be up to date. Been in Paraguay or Patagonia, or somewhere, have you? She’s not ‘Miss Nina’ – she’s my Lady Dundrannan.”

“Nobody told me that there was a special remainder to her!”

“Well, he’d done wonders. He was old and ill. No son! They could hardly refuse it him, could they? The peerage would have been an empty gift without it.”

“Lady Dundrannan! Lady Dundrannan!”

“You’ve got it right now, Julius. Of Dundrannan in the county of Perth, and of Briarmount in the county of Devon – to give it its full dignity.”

“I expect she’s pleased with it?”

“We’re all human. I think she is. Besides, she was very fond and proud of her father, and likes to have her share in carrying on his fame.”

“And she has wherewithal to gild the title!”

“Gilt and to spare! But only about a third of what he had. A third to her, a third to public objects, a third to Godfrey Frost. That’s about it – roughly. But business control to Godfrey, I understand.”

“Does she like that?” I asked.

He laughed again – just a little reluctantly, I thought. “Not altogether, perhaps. But she accepts it gracefully, and takes it out of the young man by ordering him about! He’s a surprisingly decent young chap; she’ll lick him into shape in no time.”

“From what Aunt Bertha said, you and she have made great friends?”

“Yes, we have now.” He paused a moment. “She was a bit difficult at first. You see, there were things in the past – Oh, well, never mind that – it’s all over.”

There were things in the past; there were: that group of three on the top of the cliffs; the girl sobbing wildly, furiously, shamefully; the man holding the other girl’s arm in his as in a vise of iron. Meeting Nina again may well have been a bit difficult at first! It was also a bit difficult to adjust one’s vision to Baroness Dundrannan and Madame Chose’s needlewoman, to re-focus them. How would they feel about one another now? Lucinda had found some pity for the sobbing girl; would Lady Dundrannan find the like for the needlewoman?

Or would Waldo himself? In spite of the new gentleness that there was in his manner, taken as a whole, there had been an acidity, a certain sharpness of contempt, in his reference to Lucinda. “That girl” – “like to like” – “she and Monkey Valdez.” It was natural, perhaps, but – the question would not be suppressed – was it quite the tone of that “great gentleman” whom Lucinda herself still held in her memory?

I was content to drop the subject. “Your father’s looking splendid,” I remarked, “but Aunt Bertha seems to me rather fagged.”

“Aunt Bertha’s been fretting a dashed sight too much over me – that’s the fact.” He smiled as he went on. “Well, I’m out of it for good and all, they tell me – if I need telling – and I suppose I ought to be sorry for it. But really I’m so deuced tired, that – ! Well, I just want to lie here and be looked after.”

“Oh, you’ll get that!” I assured him confidently. There was Aunt Bertha to do it; Aunt Bertha, at all events. Possibly there was somebody else who would do it even more efficiently.

CHAPTER X
HER LADYSHIP

“YES,” said my uncle, as he warmed himself before the library fire, “a young man of very considerable ability, I think. One might trust old Jonathan Frost to make no mistake about that. He might be led by family feeling – but not led astray! Hard-headed, and ambitious – for himself, I mean, apart from his business, the boy is. He’s different from the old man in that; the old man thought of nothing but his undertakings, he was just the most important part of their machinery. This boy’s got his eye on politics, he tells me. I’ve no doubt he’ll get on in them. Then, with a suitable wife – ”

“Lady Arabella – or something of that sort?”

“Precisely. You catch my train of thought, Julius.” Sir Paget smiled his shrewdly reflective smile, as he continued:

“We may regard the Frost family, then, as made – in both its branches. Because my lady, with her possessions and her looks, is undoubtedly made already – indeed, ready-made.

We must move with the times – or at any rate after them. You’ve done it; you’re a commercial man yourself, and doing very well at it, aren’t you?”

“I hope to – after the war. I believe Sir Ezekiel means to keep me at home and put me in charge in London – if London’s still standing, I mean, of course. But I don’t feel it in my bones to rival the kin of Jonathan Frost.”

“Yes – a remarkable family. What do you make of the girl herself?”

“You’ve seen a lot more of her than I have. What do you?”

“Brain above the average, but nothing wonderful. Will very strong – she’s as tenacious as a limpet.”

“I should think so. But she’s got her feelings too, hasn’t she?”

“That’s the point on which I have some doubt. Well, study her for yourself. I think she’s worth it.” He was frowning a little as he spoke, as though his doubt troubled him, although he could give no very good reason for it. “However, she has lots of good qualities – lots,” he ended. He gave the impression of a man trying to reconcile himself to something, and finding his task difficult. He praised the Frost family in handsomely general terms, with hardly a reservation; yet with just the hint of one. It was as though Nina – and her cousin too, for that matter – just failed to give him complete satisfaction, just lacked something that his nature or his taste needed. I did not think that it was anything very serious – not anything that could be called moral, a matter of lack of virtue or presence of vice. It was rather a dourness, too much solidity, too little gayety, humor, responsiveness. The Frosts were perhaps not “out of working harness” enough. Did his mind insist on drawing a contrast? He had loved the girl of whom we did not speak.

Aunt Bertha’s attitude was different, as her letters had suggested. Her acute and eminently practical mind wasted no time in pining for ideals, or in indulging delicate dissatisfactions. It preferred to concentrate on the pleasant aspects of the attainable. One can’t expect everything in this world! And it may even be doubted whether the softer charms, the insidious fascinations, are desirable attributes in women (men, of course, never possess them, so that the question doesn’t arise there); don’t they bring more trouble than good to their possessors, or anyhow to other people? (To her dear Waldo?)

Perhaps they do. At any rate, it was by hints of this order that Aunt Bertha, having seen reason herself, sought to overcome the lingering sentimentalities, and perhaps memories, of Sir Paget.

“The kindness of the girl!” said Aunt Bertha. “All through her own trouble – and you know how she loved her father! – she never forgot us and our anxiety. She used to manage to see me almost every day; came with grapes – you know the Briarmount grapes? – or something, for Waldo, and cheered me up with a little talk. She may not gush, she may not splash about, but Nina has a heart of gold, Julius.”

“Then she’s gold all through, inside and out,” I said, rather flippantly.

“Men are often fools,” Aunt Bertha remarked – and I hope that the observation may be considered irrelevant. “They undervalue the real things that matter in a woman.”

“What’s the application of that? I’m sure that Waldo likes Lady Dundrannan very much.”

“Of course he does. And whatever my remark meant, it didn’t mean that Waldo is a fool. Waldo has grown a great deal wiser than he was. And for that very reason you’re turning up your nose at him, Julius!”

There her acumen came in. She defined in a single homely sentence the mental attitude against which I was struggling. It was true. I collapsed before Aunt Bertha’s attack.

“I’ll do my best to fall in love with her myself,” I promised.

“It won’t make any difference what you try,” was the best I got out of her in return for my concession.

All the same, her emotional volte-face continued to surprise me. She might, perhaps, well forget that she had loved and pitied Lucinda. Was it – well, decent – so entirely to forget that she had once heartily disliked Nina, and to call me a fool on the score that my feelings were the same as hers had been not much more than two years before? Besides, I did not dislike Nina. I merely failed (as Sir Paget failed) to find in her certain characteristics which in my judgment lend charm and grace to a woman. I tried to explain this to Aunt Bertha; she sniffed and went on knitting.

The young man, Captain Frost, anyhow, I did like; I took to him at once, and he, I think, to me. He was spending a brief Christmas holiday at Briarmount, with a certain Mrs. Haynes, a friend of Nina’s, for company or chaperon to the cousins. He was a tall, straight fellow, with a bright blue eye and fair curly hair. There was an engaging candor about him; he was candid about things as to which men are often not candid with one another – about his stupendous good luck and how he meant to take advantage of it; his ambitions and how he could best go about to realize them; his extremely resolute purpose to let nothing interfere with his realizing them. He was even candid about his affairs of the heart; and this was supreme candor, because it lay in confessing to me – an elder man to whom he would wish to appear mature at least, if not rusé– that he had never had any; a thing, as every man of the world knows (God forgive them!) much harder for any young man to own to than it would be to plead guilty to – or to boast of – half a dozen.

“But why haven’t you?” I couldn’t help asking. He was himself attractive, and he was not, I fancied, insusceptible to beauty; for example, he admired his cousin – at the respectful distance which her Ladyship set between them.

“Well, up to now I couldn’t have afforded to marry,” was his reply, given in all seriousness, as though it were perfectly explanatory, perfectly adequate. But it was so highly revealing that comment on it is needless.

“Well, now you can,” I said – I am afraid a little tartly.

“Yes; but it’s a matter needing careful consideration, isn’t it? An awful thing if a man makes a mistake!” His eyes, bright and blue, fixed themselves on mine in a glance which I felt to be “meaning.” “Your cousin, for instance, Major Rillington, was very nearly let in, wasn’t he?”

“Oh, you know about that, do you? Was it Lady Dundrannan who told you?”

He laughed. “Oh, no! It was Miss Fleming. And she didn’t tell me anything about who it was – only just that he’d had a lucky escape from a girl quite unworthy of him. She said I must remember the affair – it was all over London just before the war. But as I was in the works at Dundee at the time, and never read anything in the papers except racing and football, I somehow missed it; and when I asked Nina about it, she shut me up – told me not to talk scandal.”

“But I thought that she was fitting you for polite society!”

“That’s good – jolly good, Captain Rillington!” he was kind enough to say. “I shall tell Nina that; it’ll amuse her.”

He seemed disposed to take me for a Mentor – to think that I might supplement the social education which his cousin proposed to give him; that I might do the male, the club side, while she looked after the drawing-room department – or deportment. On the other hand, he instructed me rather freely on business, until he happened to gather – from Sir Paget – that in the piping times of peace I held a fairly good position in Ezekiel Coldston & Co., Ltd.; after which he treated me, if not with a greater, yet with a more comprehensive, respect. “That’s a big concern,” he remarked thoughtfully. “Of course you and we don’t come into competition at all – quite separate fields, aren’t they?”

“Oh, quite,” said I, tacitly thanking heaven for the fact.

As I have said, an engaging young man, and interesting. I wondered what he and life would make of one another, when they became better acquainted. Meanwhile our intimacy increased apace.

Human nature is, and apparently always has been, prone to poke fun at newly acquired greatness; I suppose that it hangs on the person stiffly, like a frock coat fresh from the tailor’s. If Lady Dundrannan wore her dignity and power rather consciously, she also wore them well. She made an imposing figure in her mourning; but her stateliness was pleasantly and variously tempered to suit the company in which she found herself. For Aunt Bertha and Sir Paget there was an infusion of the daughterly; for Captain Godfrey of the elder-sisterly. I myself still found in her that piquant directness of approach which, in an earlier moment of temerity, I have ventured to call her impudence; it seasoned and animated her grandeur. She was, behind her dignity, mockingly confidential; she shared a half-hidden joke with me. She was naturally impelled to share it, if there were anybody with whom she could; it was to her the spice of the situation. Not the situation itself, of course; that was to her entirely serious and all important; she was attached to Waldo with all her limpet tenacity, with all her solidity of purpose, with all the tenderness, moreover, of which her heart was capable; finally, with an intensity of straight downright passion, of which I know by hearsay, but should hardly have divined from her own demeanor. But the joke, though not the situation itself, was a lively element in it. She could not share it with Waldo, or Aunt Bertha, or Sir Paget; nor would she share it with young Godfrey Frost, since it hardly became the status of an elder sister. But she could and did share it with me. The joke, of course, was Lucinda.

It would have been a still better joke, had she known all that I knew about Madame Valdez, or Donna Lucinda Valdez, or Madame Chose’s needlewoman; she might not have been so ready to share it with me, had she known that I knew about the girl on the cliffs, passionately, shamefully sobbing in wounded love, pride, and spite. As matters stood to her knowledge, the joke was good enough, and yet fit to share. For here was she – the uninvited skeleton at the abortive feast – triumphant, in possession of the field, awaiting in secure serenity the fruition of her hopes. And so placed, moreover, that the attainment of her object involved no stooping; a queen bowing acquiescence from her throne is not said to stoop. Yes, here she was; here she was, with a vengeance; and – where was Lucinda?

Well, that was just what she wanted to know. Not in any uneasiness or apprehension, but in good, straight, honest, human, feminine curiosity and malice. Moreover, that was what, before we had been much together, she came to have a suspicion, an inkling, that I could tell her – if I would. This was no marvel of feminine intuition. It was my fault, or my mischief. It was my side of the joke, without which the joke would have been to me rather a grim one. I could not help playing with her curiosity, inciting and balking her malice.

She used to come to see Waldo almost every day, sitting with him an hour or more. Being a young woman of active habits, she generally came on foot, and, since he could not escort her home, that duty fell to my lot; we had several walks back from Cragsfoot to Briarmount, just as twilight began to fall on those winter evenings, her clear-cut, handsome features still showing up boldly above her rich dark furs. She really looked very much My Lady!

But it is one walk that stands out conspicuous in memory. It was the afternoon on which Waldo had asked her to be his wife – though I did not know it.

Up to now, when I had occasion to pronounce her name, I had called her Lady Dundrannan, and she had not protested, although she continued to use my Christian name, as she always had since Waldo, Arsenio, and Lucinda set the example. But on this day, when her title happened to fall from my lips, she turned to me with an amused smile:

“Don’t you think you might call me Nina? You used to. And, really, mayn’t I almost be considered one of the family now?”