Читать книгу Gerald Cranston's Lady - Gilbert Frankau - Страница 23

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Gerald Cranston’s return to town—a return duly chronicled in the “Morning Post”—did not alter his early morning routine; so that Hermione, even as she awoke lonely in her luxurious apartment to find the hands of her bedside clock pointing eight and the hands of Syrett proffering her chocolate-cup, heard from the near-by sitting-room his terse “Come” to the knocking waiter, followed by the muffled rattle of the dishes on his punctual breakfast-tray. “He’s not a man,” she thought, propping the pillows behind her shapely back; “he’s a mechanism.”

Then, her chocolate finished, she began to think about Cosgrave. The Cosgrave episode six weeks since had been typical of Gerald. While she had been sentimentalizing about love, scenery, the decay of a proud house, and other romanticisms, her “coal-merchant” had been busying, and successfully busying, his brain with the problem of converting scenery into pounds, shillings, and pence. While she, one hand on his arm, had been attitudinizing her dutiful gratitude, he—as she suddenly realized—had been deciding to rid her of Fordham.

No sentimentalizing, no attitudinizing there! Her “coal-merchant” had paid off Fordham, in nominal charge of the estates for the last twenty years, and taken her affairs out of the hands of Poole, Cartwright & Poole, family solicitors to the Cosgraves for the last half-century, with as little compunction as though he had been sacking an unfaithful clerk or a lazy butler. Already, moreover—she knew though she had not seen—timbermen were marking Cosgrave larches for the ax; already the last of the Cosgrave deer were gone from the park; and already Simmons, that astute ferret of an ex-officer whom Gerald had picked for her new agent, was in treaty with the neighboring farmers for the letting out of her pastures.

“Sheer mechanism!” thought the Lady Hermione, propping smooth cheek on smoother hand. “A calculating-machine——”

Syrett, tapping discreetly on the curtained door, disturbed her mistress’s musing. “Begging your ladyship’s pardon,” requested the perturbed Syrett, “but could your ladyship see Mr. Cranston for a moment!”

“Tell Mr. Cranston he can come in in five minutes.”

The unusualness of the request startled Hermione even more than it had startled her maid. Before admitting her husband, she demanded her tortoise-shell-backed hand-mirror, a powder-puff, a comb, a peacock-blue bed-jacket, the smoothing of sheets and eiderdown. “I’m not looking so bad this morning,” she thought; and then, amazingly, eying her face in the round of the mirror, she saw the faintest of faint blushes suffuse each freshly powdered cheek.

By the time, however, that Syrett admitted her husband, both Hermione’s blush, and the thought which prompted it, had subsided. “Gerald,” she said lightly, “your early rising puts me to shame. I feel a perfect criminal not to be up.”

“I shouldn’t hurry if I were you. It’s a beast of a morning.” He laughed; and, coming slowly round the brass bedstead, went on: “I’m sorry to worry you at this hour; but I’ve got a busy day ahead. It’s about that dining-room table. Do you think we ought to buy it?”

“It’s genuine Chippendale.” Hermione spoke slowly. “But the price is awful.”

“Never mind the price. These dealers always ask more than they’ll take. Is the thing precisely what you’ve been looking for?”

“Precisely.”

“Good. Then that’s settled. Now, about the curtains for the drawing-room——”

Cranston, one eye on the clock, continued to ask questions for three purposeful minutes; and Hermione, as purposefully answering him, marveled at the clear rapidity of his mind. “Finance or furniture or forestry,” she thought whimsically, “the machine deals faithfully with them all.”

All the same when, at half-past eight to the second, he left her room for Tillotson’s, the picture of him which remained with her was not a picture of his mental processes. “He dresses well,” mused the Lady Hermione, “and in his rather stern way, he’s quite handsome.”

Whereupon, realizing herself for the first time since Tony’s death still capable of being interested in a man’s appearance, she curbed further speculation about the “coal-merchant,” and rang hastily for Syrett.