Part 69

Mina flushed. The conspiracy was put before her--not by one of the conspirators but by her who was the object of it. She remembered Lady Evenswood's question and Southend's. She had answered that it might not much matter whether Harry liked his cousin or not. He had not loved Janie Iver. Where was the difference?

"He won't want anything if he can't have Blent. Mina, did they say anything about me to Mr Disney?"

"No," cried Mina eagerly.

"But they will, they mean to?" Cecily was leaning forward eagerly now.

Mina had no denial ready. She seemed rather to hang on Cecily's words than to feel any need of speaking herself. She was trying to follow Cecily's thoughts and to trace the cause of the apprehension, the terror almost, that had come on the girl's face.

"He'll see it--just as I see it!" Cecily went on. "And, Mina----"

She paused again. Still Mina had no words, and no comfort for her. This sight of the other side of the question was too sudden. It was Harry then, and Harry only, who had really been in her thoughts; and Cecily, her friend, was to be used as a tool. There might be little ground for blaming Southend who had never seen her, or Lady Evenswood who had been brought in purely in Harry's interest. But how stood Mina, who was Cecily's friend? Yet at last a thought flashed into her mind and gave her a weapon.

"Well, what did you come to London for?" she cried defiantly. "Why did you come, unless you meant that too?"

Cecily started a little and lay back in her chair.

"Oh, I don't know," she murmured despondently. "He hates me, but if he's offered Blent and me he'll--he'll take us both, Mina, you know he will." An indignant rush of color came on her cheeks. "Oh, it's very easy for you!"

In a difficulty of that sort it did not seem that even Mr Disney could be of much avail.

"Oh, you Tristrams!" cried Mina in despair.

XIX

IN THE MATTER OF BLINKHAMPTON

Pity for the commander who, while engaging the enemy on his front with valor and success, breaking his line and driving him from his position, finds himself assailed in the rear by an unexpected or despised foe and the prize of victory suddenly wrenched from him! His fate is more bitter than if he had failed in his main encounter, his self-reproaches more keen.

Major Duplay was awakening to the fact that this was his situation. Triumph was not his although Harry Tristram had fled from the battle. Iver's carefully guarded friendliness and the touch of motherly compassion in his wife's manner, Mrs Trumbler's tacit request (conveyed by a meek and Christian sympathy) that he should bow to the will of Providence, Miss S.'s malicious questions as to where he meant to spend the winter after leaving Merrion, told him the opinion of the world. Janie Iver had begun to think flirtation wrong; and there was an altogether new and remarkable self-assertion about Bob Broadley. The last thing annoyed Duplay most. It is indeed absurd that a young man, formerly of a commendable humility, should think a change of demeanor justified merely because one young woman, herself insignificant, chooses for reasons good or bad to favor him. Duplay assumed to despise Bob; it is often better policy to despise people than to enter into competition with them, and it is always rash to do both. These and other truths--as, for example, that for some purposes it is better not to be forty-four--the Major was learning. Was there any grain of comfort? It lay in the fact that he was forty-four. A hypothetical, now impossible, yet subtly soothing Major of thirty routed Bob Broadley and carried all before him. In other words Duplay was driven back to the Last Ditch of Consolation. What we could have done is the latest-tried plaster for the wound of what we cannot do; it would be wise to try it sometimes a little earlier.

From the orthodox sentimentalist he could claim no compassion. He had lost not his heart's love but a very comfortable settlement; he was wounded more in his vanity than in his affections; he had wasted not his life, only one of his few remaining effective summers. But the more lax, who base their views on what men generally are, may spare him one of those less bitter tears which they appropriate to the misfortunes of others. If the tear as it falls meets a smile,--why not? Such encounters are hardly unexpected and may well prove agreeable.

There was another disconsolate person in the valley of the Blent--little Mr Gainsborough, left alone in the big house with a note from his daughter commanding him to stay there and to say nothing to anybody. He was lonely, and nervous with the servants; the curios gave him small pleasure since he had not bought them, and, if he had, they would not have been cheap. For reasons before indicated, Blentmouth and the curiosity-shop there had become too dangerous. Besides, he had no money; Cecily had forgotten that detail in her hurried flight. A man cannot spend more than a portion of his waking hours in a library or over pedigrees. Gainsborough found himself regretting London and the little house. If we divide humanity into those who do things and those who have to get out of the way while they are being done (just as reasonable a division as many adopted by statisticians) Gainsborough belonged to the latter class; like most of us perhaps, but in a particularly unmistakable degree. And he knew he did--not perhaps like most of us in that. He never thought even of appealing to posterity.

Meanwhile Janie Iver was behaving as a pattern daughter, cherishing her mother and father and making home sweet, exercising, in fact, that prudent economy of wilfulness which preserves it for one great decisive struggle, and scorns to fritter it away on the details of daily life. Girls have adopted these tactics from the earliest days (so it is recorded or may be presumed), and wary are the parents who are not hoodwinked by them or, even if they perceive, are altogether unsoftened. Janie was very saintly at Fairholme; the only sins which she could have found to confess (not that Mr Trumbler favored confession--quite the contrary) were certain suppressions of truth touching the direction in which she drove her dog-cart--and even these were calculated to avoid the giving of pain. As for the Tristrams--where were they? They seemed to have dropped out of Janie's story.

Iver needed comfort. There is no disguising it, however much the admission may damage him in the eyes of that same orthodox sentimentalist. He had once expounded his views to Mr Jenkinson Neeld (or rather one of his expositions of them has been recorded, there having been more than one)--and the present situation did not satisfy them. Among other rehabilitations and whitewashings, that of the cruel father might well be undertaken by an ingenious writer; if Nero had had a grown-up daughter there would have been the chance! Anyhow the attempt would have met with some sympathy from Iver. Of course a man desires his daughter's happiness (the remark is a platitude), but he may be allowed to feel annoyance at the precise form in which it realizes--or thinks it will realize--itself, a shape that may disappoint the aim of his career. If he is provided with a son, he has the chance of a more unselfish benevolence; but Iver was not. Let all be said that could be said--Bob Broadley was a disappointment. Iver would, if put to it, have preferred Duplay. There was at least a cosmopolitan polish about the Major; drawing-rooms would not appal him nor the thought of going to Court throw him into a perspiration. Iver had been keen to find out the truth about Harry Tristram, as keen as Major Duplay. At this moment both of them were wishing that the truth had never been discovered by them nor flung in the face of the world by Harry himself.

"But darling Janie will be happy," Mrs Iver used to say. She had surrendered very easily.

He was not really an unnatural parent because he growled once or twice, "Darling Janie be hanged!" It was rather his wife's attitude of mind that he meant to condemn.

Bob himself was hopeless from a parent's point of view. He was actually a little touched by Mrs Trumbler's way of looking at the world; he did think--and confessed it to Janie--that there was something very remarkable in the way Harry Tristram had been cleared from his path. He was in no sense an advanced thinker, and people in love are apt to believe in what are called interpositions. Further, he was primitive in his ideas; he had won the lady, and that seemed to him enough. It was enough, if he could keep her; and in these days that really depends on herself. Moreover he had no doubt of keeping her; his primitiveness appears again; with the first kiss he seemed to pass from slave to master. Many girls would have taught him better. Janie was not one. She seemed rather to acquiesce, being, it must be presumed, also of a somewhat primitive cast of mind. It was terribly clear to Iver that the pair would stand to one another and settle down in inglorious contentment together for their lives. Yes, it was worse than Duplay; something might have been made of him. As for Harry--Iver used to end by thinking how sensible a man old Mr Neeld was; for Mr Neeld had determined to hold his tongue.

There was another vexation, of a different kind indeed, but also a check in his success. Blinkhampton was not going quite right. Blinkhampton was a predestined seaside resort on the South Coast, and Iver, with certain associates, meant to develop it. They had bought it up, and laid it out for building, and arranged for a big hotel with Birch & Company, the famous furnishers. But all along in front of it--between where the street now was and the esplanade was soon to be--ran a long narrow strip, forming the estate of an elderly gentleman named Masters. Of course Masters had to be bought out, the whole scheme hanging on that. Iver, keen at a bargain, hard in business hours (had not Mina Zabriska discovered that?), confident that nobody would care to incur his enmity--he was powerful--by forestalling him, had refused Masters his price; the old gentleman would have to come down. But some young men stepped in, with the rashness of their youth, and acquired an option of purchase from Masters. Iver smiled in a vexed fashion, but was not dismayed. He let it be known that anybody who advanced money to the young men--Sloyd, Sloyd, and Gurney was the firm--would be his enemies; then he waited for the young men to approach him. They did not come. At last, pride protesting, prudence insisting, he wrote and suggested that they might probably be glad to make an arrangement with him. Mr Sloyd--our Mr Sloyd--wrote back that they had found a capitalist--no less than that--and proposed to develop their estate themselves, to put up their own hotel, also a row of boarding-houses, a club, a winter garden, and possibly an aquarium. Youth and a sense of elation caused Sloyd to add that they would always be glad to cooperate with other gentlemen interested in Blinkhampton.

Iver had many irons in the fire; he could no more devote himself exclusively and personally to Blinkhampton than Napoleon could spend all his time in the Peninsula. The transaction was important, yet hardly vital; besides Iver himself could keep his ear to the telephone. It was an opportunity for Bob to win his spurs; Iver proposed to him to go to town and act as his representative.

"I'm afraid you'll lose the game if I play it for you, Mr Iver," responded Bob, with a shake of his head and a good-humored smile. "I'm not accustomed to that sort of job, you know."

"It would be a good chance for you to begin to learn something of business."

"Well, you see, farming's my business. And I don't think I'm a fool at that. But building speculations and so on----" Bob shook his head again.