Lang Andrew
The Disentanglers
II. The Affair of the Jesuit
Trains do not stop at the little Rookchester station except when the high and puissant prince the Earl of Embleton or his visitors, or his ministers, servants, solicitors, and agents of all kinds, are bound for that haven. When Logan arrived at the station, a bowery, flowery, amateur-looking depot, like one of the ‘model villages’ that we sometimes see off the stage, he was met by the Earl, his son Lord Scremerston, and Miss Willoughby. Logan’s baggage was spirited away by menials, who doubtless bore it to the house in some ordinary conveyance, and by the vulgar road. But Lord Embleton explained that as the evening was warm, and the woodland path by the river was cool, they had walked down to welcome the coming guest.
The walk was beautiful indeed along the top of the precipitous red sandstone cliffs, with the deep, dark pools of the Coquet sleeping far below. Now and then a heron poised, or a rock pigeon flew by, between the river and the cliff-top. The opposite bank was embowered in deep green wood, and the place was very refreshing after the torrid bricks and distressing odours of the July streets of London.
The path was narrow: there was room for only two abreast. Miss Willoughby and Scremerston led the way, and were soon lost to sight by a turn in the path. As for Lord Embleton, he certainly seemed to have drunk of that fountain of youth about which the old French poet Pontus de Tyard reports to us, and to be going back, not forward, in age. He looked very neat, slim, and cool, but that could not be the only cause of the miracle of rejuvenescence. Closely regarding his host in profile, Logan remarked that he had shaved off his moustache and the little, obsolete, iron-grey chin-tuft which, in moments of perplexity, he had been wont to twiddle. Its loss was certainly a very great improvement to the clean-cut features of this patrician.
‘We are a very small party,’ said Lord Embleton, ‘only the Prince, my daughter, Father Riccoboni, Miss Willoughby, my sister, Scremerston, and you and I. Miss Willoughby came last week. In the mornings she and I are busy with the manuscripts. We have found most interesting things. When their plot failed, your ancestor and mine prepared a ship to start for the Western seas and attack the treasure-ships of Spain. But peace broke out, and they never achieved that adventure. Miss Willoughby is a cousin well worth discovering, so intelligent, and so wonderfully attractive.’
‘So Scremerston seems to think,’ was Logan’s idea, for the further he and the Earl advanced, the less, if possible, they saw of the pair in front of them; indeed, neither was visible again till the party met before dinner.
However, Logan only said that he had a great esteem for Miss Willoughby’s courage and industry through the trying years of poverty since she left St. Ursula’s.
‘The Prince we have not seen very much of,’ said the Earl, ‘as is natural; for you will be glad to know that everything seems most happily arranged, except so far as the religious difficulty goes. As for Father Riccoboni, he is a quiet intelligent man, who passes most of his time in the library, but makes himself very agreeable at meals. And now here we are arrived.’
They had reached the south side of the house – an eighteenth-century building in the red sandstone of the district, giving on a grassy terrace. There the host’s maiden sister, Lady Mary Guevara, was seated by a tea-table, surrounded by dogs – two collies and an Aberdeenshire terrier. Beside her were Father Riccoboni, with a newspaper in his hand, Lady Alice, with whom Logan had already some acquaintance, and the Prince of Scalastro. Logan was presented, and took quiet notes of the assembly, while the usual chatter about the weather and his journey got itself transacted, and the view of the valley of the Coquet had justice done to its charms.
Lady Mary was very like a feminine edition of the Earl, refined, shy, and with silvery hair. Lady Alice was a pretty, quiet type of the English girl who is not up to date, with a particularly happy and winning expression. The Prince was of a Teutonic fairness; for the Royal caste, whatever the nationality, is to a great extent made in Germany, and retains the physical characteristics of that ancient forest people whom the Roman historian (never having met them) so lovingly idealised. The Prince was tall, well-proportioned, and looked ‘every inch a soldier.’ There were a great many inches.
As for Father Riccoboni, the learned have remarked that there are two chief clerical types: the dark, ascetic type, to be found equally among Unitarians, Baptists, Anglicans, Presbyterians, and Catholics, and the burly, well-fed, genial type, which ‘cometh eating and drinking.’ The Father was of this second kind; a lusty man – not that you could call him a sensual-looking man, still less was he a noisy humourist; but he had a considerable jowl, a strong jaw, a wide, firm mouth, and large teeth, very white and square. Logan thought that he, too, had the makings of a soldier, and also felt almost certain that he had seen him before. But where? – for Logan’s acquaintance with the clergy, especially the foreign clergy, was not extensive. The Father spoke English very well, with a slight German accent and a little hoarseness; his voice, too, did not sound unfamiliar to Logan. But he delved in his subconscious memory in vain; there was the Father, a man with whom he certainly had some associations, yet he could not place the man.
A bell jangled somewhere without as they took tea and tattled; and, looking towards the place whence the sound came, Logan saw a little group of Italian musicians walking down the avenue which led through the park to the east side of the house and the main entrance. They entered, with many obeisances, through the old gate of floreated wrought iron, and stopping there, about forty yards away, they piped, while a girl, in the usual contadina dress, clashed her cymbals and danced not ungracefully. The Father, who either did not like music or did not like it of that sort, sighed, rose from his seat, and went into the house by an open French window. The Prince also rose, but he went forward to the group of Italians, and spoke to them for a few minutes. If he did not like that sort of music, he took the more excellent way, for the action of his elbow indicated a movement of his hand towards his waistcoat-pocket. He returned to the party on the terrace, and the itinerant artists, after more obeisances, walked slowly back by the way they had come.
‘They are Genoese,’ said the Prince, ‘tramping north to Scotland for the holiday season.’
‘They will meet strong competition from the pipers,’ said Logan, while the Earl rose, and walked rapidly after the musicians.
‘I do not like the pipes myself,’ Logan went on, ‘but when I hear them in a London street my heart does warm to the skirl and the shabby tartans.’
‘I feel with you,’ said the Prince, ‘when I see the smiling faces of these poor sons of the South among – well, your English faces are not usually joyous – if one may venture to be critical.’
He looked up, and, his eyes meeting those of Lady Alice, he had occasion to learn that every rule has its exceptions. The young people rose and wandered off on the lawn, while the Earl came back and said that he had invited the foreigners to refresh themselves.
‘I saw Father Riccoboni in the hall, and asked him to speak to them a little in their own lingo,’ he added, ‘though he does not appear to be partial to the music of his native land.’
‘He seems to be of the Romansch districts,’ Logan said; ‘his accent is almost German.’
‘I daresay he will make himself understood,’ said the Earl. ‘Do you understand this house, Mr. Logan? It looks very modern, does it not?’
‘Early Georgian, surely?’ said Logan.
‘The shell, at least on this side, is early Georgian – I rather regret it; but the interior, northward, except for the rooms in front here, is of the good old times. We have secret stairs – not that there is any secret about them – and odd cubicles, in the old Border keep, which was re-faced about 1750; and we have a priest’s hole or two, in which Father Riccoboni might have been safe, but would have been very uncomfortable, three hundred years ago. I can show you the places to-morrow; indeed, we have very little in the way of amusement to offer you. Do you fish?’
‘I always take a trout rod about with me, in case of the best,’ said Logan, ‘but this is “soolky July,” you know, and the trout usually seem sound asleep.’
‘Their habits are dissipated here,’ said Lord Embleton. ‘They begin to feed about ten o’clock at night. Did you ever try night fishing with the bustard?’
‘The bustard?’ asked Logan.
‘It is a big fluffy fly, like a draggled mayfly, fished wet, in the dark. I used to be fond of it, but age,’ sighed the Earl, ‘and fear of rheumatism have separated the bustard and me.’
‘I should like to try it very much,’ said Logan. ‘I often fished Tweed and Whitadder, at night, when I was a boy, but we used a small dark fly.’
‘You must be very careful if you fish at night here,’ said Lady Mary. ‘It is so dark in the valley under the woods, and the Coquet is so dangerous. The flat sandstone ledges are like the floor of a room, and then a step may land you in water ten feet deep, flowing in a narrow channel. I am always anxious when anyone fishes here at night. You can swim?’
Logan confessed that he was not destitute of that accomplishment, and that he liked, of all things, to be by a darkling river, where you came across the night side of nature in the way of birds, beasts, and fishes.
‘Mr. Logan can take very good care of himself, I am sure,’ said Lord Embleton, ‘and Fenwick knows every inch of the water, and will go with him. Fenwick is the water-keeper, Mr. Logan, and represents man in the fishing and shooting stage. His one thought is the destruction of animal life. He is a very happy man.’
‘I never knew but one keeper who was not,’ said Logan. ‘That was in Galloway. He hated shooting, he hated fishing. My impression is that he was what we call a “Stickit Minister.”’
‘Nothing of that about Fenwick,’ said the Earl. ‘I daresay you would like to see your room?’
Thither Logan was conducted, through a hall hung with pikes, and guns, and bows, and clubs from the South Seas, and Zulu shields and assegais, while a few empty figures in tilting armour, lance in hand, stood on pedestals. Thence up a broad staircase, along a little gallery, up a few steps of an old ‘turnpike’ staircase, Logan reached his room, which looked down through the trees of the cliff to the Coquet.
Dinner passed in the silver light of the long northern day, that threw strange blue reflections, softer than sapphire, on the ancient plate – the ambassadorial plate of a Jacobean ancestor.
‘It should all have gone to the melting-pot for King Charles’s service,’ said the Earl, with a sigh, ‘but my ancestor of that day stood for the Parliament.’
Logan’s position at dinner was better for observation than for entertainment. He sat on the right hand of Lady Mary, where the Prince ought to have been seated, but Lady Alice sat on her father’s left, and next her, of course, the Prince. ‘Love rules the camp, the court, the grove,’ and Love deranged the accustomed order, for the Prince sat between Lady Alice and Logan. Opposite Logan, and at Lady Mary’s left, was the Jesuit, and next him, Scremerston, beside whom was Miss Willoughby, on the Earl’s right. Inevitably the conversation of the Prince and Lady Alice was mainly directed to each other – so much so that Logan did not once perceive the princely eyes attracted to Miss Willoughby opposite to him, though it was not easy for another to look at anyone else. Logan, in the pauses of his rather conventional entertainment by Lady Mary, did look, and he was amazed no less by the beauty than by the spirits and gaiety of the young lady so recently left forlorn by the recreant Jephson. This flower of the Record Office and of the British Museum was obviously not destined to blush unseen any longer. She manifestly dazzled Scremerston, who seemed to remember Miss Bangs, her charms, and her dollars no more than Miss Willoughby appeared to remember the treacherous Don.
Scremerston was very unlike his father: he was a small, rather fair man, with a slight moustache, a close-clipped beard, and little grey eyes with pink lids. His health was not good: he had been invalided home from the Imperial Yeomanry, after a slight wound and a dangerous attack of enteric fever, and he had secured a pair for the rest of the Session. He was not very clever, but he certainly laughed sufficiently at what Miss Willoughby said, who also managed to entertain the Earl with great dexterity and aplomb. Meanwhile Logan and the Jesuit amused the excellent Lady Mary as best they might, which was not saying much. Lady Mary, though extremely amiable, was far from brilliant, and never having met a Jesuit before, she regarded Father Riccoboni with a certain hereditary horror, as an animal of a rare species, and, of habits perhaps startling and certainly perfidious. However, the lady was philanthropic in a rural way, and Father Riccoboni enlightened her as to the reasons why his enterprising countrymen leave their smiling land, and open small ice-shops in little English towns, or, less ambitious, invest their slender capital in a monkey and a barrel-organ.
‘I don’t so very much mind barrel-organs myself,’ said Logan; ‘I don’t know anything prettier than to see the little girls dancing to the music in a London side street.’
‘But do not the musicians all belong to that dreadful Camorra?’ asked the lady.
‘Not if they come from the North, madam,’ said the Jesuit. ‘And do not all your Irish reapers belong to that dreadful Land League, or whatever it is called?’
‘They are all Pap-’ said Lady Mary, who then stopped, blushed, and said, with some presence of mind, ‘paupers, I fear, but they are quite safe and well-behaved on this side of the Irish Channel.’
‘And so are our poor people,’ said the Jesuit. ‘If they occasionally use the knife a little —naturam expellas furca, Mr. Logan, but the knife is a different thing – it is only in a homely war among themselves that they handle it in the East-end of London.’
‘Cœlum non animum,’ said Logan, determined not to be outdone in classical felicities; and, indeed, he thought his own quotation the more appropriate.
At this moment a great silvery-grey Persian cat, which had sat hitherto in a stereotyped Egyptian attitude on the arm of the Earl’s chair, leaped down and sprang affectionately on the shoulder of the Jesuit. He shuddered strongly and obviously repressed an exclamation with difficulty, as he gently removed the cat.
‘Fie, Meriamoun!’ said the Earl, as the puss resumed her Egyptian pose beside him. ‘Shall I send the animal out of the room? I know some people cannot endure a cat,’ and he mentioned the gallant Field Marshal who is commonly supposed to share this infirmity.
‘By no means, my lord,’ said the Jesuit, who looked strangely pale. ‘Cats have an extraordinary instinct for caressing people who happen to be born with exactly the opposite instinct. I am like the man in Aristotle who was afraid of the cat.’
‘I wish we knew more about that man,’ said Miss Willoughby, who was stroking Meriamoun. ‘Are you afraid of cats, Lord Scremerston? – but you, I suppose, are afraid of nothing.’
‘I am terribly afraid of all manner of flying things that buzz and bite,’ said Scremerston.
‘Except bullets,’ said Miss Willoughby – Beauty rewarding Valour with a smile and a glance so dazzling that the good little Yeoman blushed with pleasure.
‘It is a shame!’ thought Logan. ‘I don’t like it now I see it.’
‘As to horror of cats,’ said the Earl, ‘I suppose evolution can explain it. I wonder how they would work it out in Science Jottings. There is a great deal of electricity in a cat.’
‘Evolution can explain everything,’ said the Jesuit demurely, ‘but who can explain evolution?’
‘As to electricity in the cat,’ said Logan, ‘I daresay there is as much in the dog, only everybody has tried stroking a cat in the dark to see the sparks fly, and who ever tried stroking a dog in the dark, for experimental purposes? – did you, Lady Mary?’
Lady Mary never had tried, but the idea was new to her, and she would make the experiment in winter.
‘Deer skins, stroked, do sparkle,’ said Logan, ‘I read that in a book. I daresay horses do, only nobody tries. I don’t think electricity is the explanation of why some people can’t bear cats.’
‘Electricity is the modern explanation of everything – love, faith, everything,’ remarked the Jesuit; ‘but, as I said, who shall explain electricity?’
Lady Mary, recognising the orthodoxy of these sentiments, felt more friendly towards Father Riccoboni. He might be a Jesuit, but he was bien pensant.
‘What I am afraid of is not a cat, but a mouse,’ said Miss Willoughby, and the two other ladies admitted that their own terrors were of the same kind.
‘What I am afraid of,’ said the Prince, ‘is a banging door, by day or night. I am not, otherwise, of a nervous constitution, but if I hear a door bang, I must go and hunt for it, and stop the noise, either by shutting the door, or leaving it wide open. I am a sound sleeper, but, if a door bangs, it wakens me at once. I try not to notice it. I hope it will leave off. Then it does leave off – that is the artfulness of it – and, just as you are falling asleep, knock it goes! A double knock, sometimes. Then I simply must get up, and hunt for that door, upstairs or downstairs – ’
‘Or in my – ’ interrupted Miss Willoughby, and stopped, thinking better of it, and not finishing the quotation, which passed unheard.
‘That research has taken me into some odd places,’ the Prince ended; and Logan reminded the Society of the Bravest of the Brave. What he was afraid of was a pair of tight boots.
These innocent conversations ended, and, after dinner, the company walked about or sat beneath the stars in the fragrant evening air, the Earl seated by Miss Willoughby, Scremerston smoking with Logan; while the white dress of Lady Alice flitted ghost-like on the lawn, and the tip of the Prince’s cigar burned red in the neighbourhood. In the drawing-room Lady Mary was tentatively conversing with the Jesuit, that mild but probably dangerous animal. She had the curiosity which pious maiden ladies feel about the member of a community which they only know through novels. Certainly this Jesuit was very unlike Aramis.
‘And who is he like?’ Logan happened to be asking Scremerston at that moment. ‘I know the face – I know the voice; hang it! – where have I seen the man?’
‘Now you mention it,’ said Scremerston, ‘I seem to remember him too. But I can’t place him. What do you think of a game of billiards, father?’ he asked, rising and addressing Lord Embleton. ‘Rosamond – Miss Willoughby, I mean – ’
‘Oh, we are cousins, Lord Embleton says, and you may call me Rosamond. I have never had any cousins before,’ interrupted the young lady.
‘Rosamond,’ said Scremerston, with a gulp, ‘is getting on wonderfully well for a beginner.’
‘Then let us proceed with her education: it is growing chilly, too,’ said the Earl; and they all went to billiards, the Jesuit marking with much attention and precision. Later he took a cue, and was easily the master of every man there, though better acquainted, he said, with the foreign game. The late Pope used to play, he said, nearly as well as Mr. Herbert Spencer. Even for a beginner, Miss Willoughby was not a brilliant player; but she did not cut the cloth, and her arms were remarkably beautiful – an excellent but an extremely rare thing in woman. She was rewarded, finally, by a choice between bedroom candles lit and offered by her younger and her elder cousins, and, after a momentary hesitation, accepted that of the Earl.
‘How is this going to end?’ thought Logan, when he was alone. ‘Miss Bangs is out of the running, that is certain: millions of dollars cannot bring her near Miss Willoughby with Scremerston. The old gentleman ought to like that – it relieves him from the bacon and lard, and the dollars, and the associations with a Straddle; and then Miss Willoughby’s family is all right, but the girl is reckless. A demon has entered into her: she used to be so quiet. I’d rather marry Miss Bangs without the dollars. Then it is all very well for Scremerston to yield to Venus Verticordia, and transfer his heart to this new enchantress. But, if I am not mistaken, the Earl himself is much more kind than kin. The heart has no age, and he is a very well-preserved peer. You might take him for little more than forty, though he quite looked his years when I saw him first. Well, I am safe enough, in spite of Merton’s warning: this new Helen has no eyes for me, and the Prince has no eyes for her, I think. But who is the Jesuit?’
Logan fought with his memory till he fell asleep, but he recovered no gleam of recollection about the holy man.
It did not seem to Logan, next day, that he was in for a very lively holiday. His host carried off Miss Willoughby to the muniment-room after breakfast; that was an advantage he had over Scremerston, who was decidedly restless and ill at ease. He took Logan to see the keeper, and they talked about fish and examined local flies, and Logan arranged to go and try the trout with the bustard some night; and then they pottered about, and ate cherries in the garden, and finally the Earl found them half asleep in the smoking-room. He routed the Jesuit out of the library, where he was absorbed in a folio containing the works of the sainted Father Parsons, and then the Earl showed Logan and Father Riccoboni over the house. From a window of the gallery Scremerston could be descried playing croquet with Miss Willoughby, an apparition radiant in white.
The house was chiefly remarkable for queer passages, which, beginning from the roof of the old tower, above the Father’s chamber, radiated about, emerging in unexpected places. The priests’ holes had offered to the persecuted clergy of old times the choice between being grilled erect behind a chimney, or of lying flat in a chamber about the size of a coffin near the roof, where the martyr Jesuits lived on suction, like the snipe, absorbing soup from a long straw passed through a wall into a neighbouring garret.
‘Those were cruel times,’ said Father Riccoboni, who presently, at luncheon, showed that he could thoroughly appreciate the tender mercies of the present or Christian era. Logan watched him, and once when, something that interested him being said, the Father swept the table with his glance without raising his head, a memory for a fraction of a moment seemed to float towards the surface of Logan’s consciousness. Even as when an angler, having hooked a salmon, a monster of the stream, long the fish bores down impetuous, seeking the sunken rocks, disdainful of the steel, and the dark wave conceals him; then anon is beheld a gleam of silver, and again is lost to view, and the heart of the man rejoices – even so fugitive a glimpse had Logan of what he sought in the depths of memory. But it fled, and still he was puzzled.
Logan loafed out after luncheon to a seat on the lawn in the shade of a tree. They were all to be driven over to an Abbey not very far away, for, indeed, in July, there is little for a man to do in the country. Logan sat and mused. Looking up he saw Miss Willoughby approaching, twirling an open parasol on her shoulder. Her face was radiant; of old it had often looked as if it might be stormy, as if there were thunder behind those dark eyebrows. Logan rose, but the lady sat down on the garden seat, and he followed her example.
‘This is better than Bloomsbury, Mr. Logan, and cocoa pour tout potage: singed cocoa usually.’
‘The potage here is certainly all that heart can wish,’ said Logan.
‘The chrysalis,’ said Miss Willoughby, ‘in its wildest moments never dreamed of being a butterfly, as the man said in the sermon; and I feel like a butterfly that remembers being a chrysalis. Look at me now!’
‘I could look for ever,’ said Logan, ‘like the sportsman in Keats’s Grecian Urn: “For ever let me look, and thou be fair!”’
‘I am so sorry for people in town,’ said Miss Willoughby. ‘Don’t you wish dear old Milo was here?’
Milo was the affectionate nickname – a tribute to her charms – borne by Miss Markham at St. Ursula’s.
‘How can I wish that anyone was here but you?’ asked Logan. ‘But, indeed, as to her being here, I should like to know in what capacity she was a guest.’
The Clytemnestra glance came into Miss Willoughby’s grey eyes for a moment, but she was not to be put out of humour.
‘To be here as a kinswoman, and an historian, with a maid – fancy me with a maid! – and everything handsome about me, is sufficiently excellent for me, Mr. Logan; and if it were otherwise, do you disapprove of the proceedings of your own Society? But there is Lord Scremerston calling to us, and a four-in-hand waiting at the door. And I am to sit on the box-seat. Oh, this is better than the dingy old Record Office all day.’
With these words Miss Willoughby tripped over the sod as lightly as the Fairy Queen, and Logan slowly followed. No; he did not approve of the proceedings of his Society as exemplified by Miss Willoughby, and he was nearly guilty of falling asleep during the drive to Winderby Abbey. Scremerston was not much more genial, for his father was driving and conversing very gaily with his fair kinswoman.
‘Talk about a distant cousin!’ thought Logan, who in fact felt ill-treated. However deep in love a man may be, he does not like to see a fair lady conspicuously much more interested in other members of his sex than in himself.
The Abbey was a beautiful ruin, and Father Riccoboni did not conceal from Lady Mary the melancholy emotions with which it inspired him.
‘When shall our prayers be heard?’ he murmured. ‘When shall England return to her Mother’s bosom?’
Lady Mary said nothing, but privately trusted that the winds would disperse the orisons of which the Father spoke. Perhaps nuns had been bricked up in these innocent-looking mossy walls, thought Lady Mary, whose ideas on this matter were derived from a scene in the poem of Marmion. And deep in Lady Mary’s heart was a half-formed wish that, if there was to be any bricking up, Miss Willoughby might be the interesting victim. Unlike her brother the Earl, she was all for the Bangs alliance.
Scremerston took the reins on the homeward way, the Earl being rather fatigued; and, after dinner, two white robes flitted ghost-like on the lawn, and the light which burned red beside one of them was the cigar-tip of Scremerston. The Earl had fallen asleep in the drawing-room, and Logan took a lonely stroll, much regretting that he had come to a house where he felt decidedly ‘out of it.’ He wandered down to the river, and stood watching. He was beside the dark-brown water in the latest twilight, beside a long pool with a boat moored on the near bank. He sat down in the boat pensively, and then – what was that? It was the sound of a heavy trout rising. ‘Plop, plop!’ They were feeding all round him.
‘By Jove! I’ll try the bustard to-morrow night, and then I’ll go back to town next day,’ thought Logan. ‘I am doing no good here, and I don’t like it. I shall tell Merton that I have moral objections to the whole affair. Miserable, mercenary fraud!’ Thus, feeling very moral and discontented, Logan walked back to the house, carefully avoiding the ghostly robes that still glimmered on the lawn, and did not re-enter the house till bedtime.
The following day began as the last had done; Lord Embleton and Miss Willoughby retiring to the muniment-room, the lovers vanishing among the walks. Scremerston later took Logan to consult Fenwick, who visibly brightened at the idea of night-fishing.
‘You must take one of those long landing-nets, Logan,’ said Scremerston. ‘They are about as tall as yourself, and as stout as lance-shafts. They are for steadying you when you wade, and feeling the depth of the water in front of you.’
Scremerston seemed very pensive. The day was hot; they wandered to the smoking-room. Scremerston took up a novel, which he did not read; Logan began a letter to Merton – a gloomy epistle.
‘I say, Logan,’ suddenly said Scremerston, ‘if your letter is not very important, I wish you would listen to me for a moment.’
Logan turned round. ‘Fire away,’ he said; ‘my letter can wait.’
Scremerston was in an attitude of deep dejection. Logan lit a cigarette and waited.
‘Logan, I am the most miserable beggar alive.’
‘What is the matter? You seem rather in-and-out in your moods,’ said Logan.
‘Why, you know, I am in a regular tight place. I don’t know how to put it. You see, I can’t help thinking that – that – I have rather committed myself – it seems a beastly conceited thing to say – that there’s a girl who likes me, I’m afraid.’
‘I don’t want to be inquisitive, but is she in this country?’ asked Logan.
‘No; she’s at Homburg.’
‘Has it gone very far? Have you said anything?’ asked Logan.
‘No; my father did not like it. I hoped to bring him round.’
‘Have you written anything? Do you correspond?’
‘No, but I’m afraid I have looked a lot.’
As the Viscount Scremerston’s eyes were by no means fitted to express with magnetic force the language of the affections, Logan had to command his smile.
‘But why have you changed your mind, if you liked her?’ he asked.
‘Oh, you know very well! Can anybody see her and not love her?’ said Scremerston, with a vagueness in his pronouns, but referring to Miss Willoughby.
Logan was inclined to reply that he could furnish, at first hand, an exception to the rule, but this appeared tactless.
‘No one, I daresay, whose affections were not already engaged, could see her without loving her; but I thought yours had been engaged to a lady now at Homburg?’
‘So did I,’ said the wretched Scremerston, ‘but I was mistaken. Oh, Logan, you don’t know the difference! This is genuine biz,’ remarked the afflicted nobleman with much simplicity. He went on: ‘Then there’s my father – you know him. He was against the other affair, but, if he thinks I have committed myself and then want to back out, why, with his ideas, he’d rather see me dead. But I can’t go on with the other thing now: I simply can not. I’ve a good mind to go out after rabbits, and pot myself crawling through a hedge.’
