Читать книгу Gerald Cranston's Lady - Gilbert Frankau - Страница 31

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Naturally enough, neither Cranston nor his wife, as they dressed separately and hurriedly for dinner, vouchsafed a single thought to Gordon Ibbotsleigh. Busied, the one with the difficulty of replacing Ephraim Bewsher on the Cranston directorate, and the other with more intimate problems, they completely forgot the very existence of that rather melodramatic personage.

All afternoon—ever since, somewhat to her own surprise, she had kissed his mother good-by at Phillimore Gardens—Hermione’s mind, carrying on the thought-train of early morning, had been running on her husband’s dissimilarity from the men of her own set. “He’s a puzzle,” she mused; “a complicated, rather intriguing puzzle”; and when—early arrived at her father’s barrack of a mansion in Great Cumberland Place—they climbed the cold, ill lighted stairs to the vast gloomy night-nursery that she had once shared with Alan, the complications of the puzzle intrigued her yet further.

Arthur—one wax-like hand clenched at his cheek, and his hair, yellow as Tony’s, tousled over his pale forehead—slept quiet-breathing and motionless under the satin eiderdown. A night-light burned, opal-shaded, on the mantelpiece; and by its pale pink radiance she could see how the stern set lines of Gerald’s face softened to tenderness as they bent together over the cot.

“Thank the Lord, we didn’t wake the little beggar,” he whispered as they tiptoed from the room. “It’ll be a good thing when we get him under our own roof in Aldford Street. By the way, how’s the new nurse? Trustworthy?”

“She seems all right.”

They interviewed the new nurse, a pleasant-featured middle-aged woman, with a figure like a motherly bear’s, who rose from her sewing at their entrance into the day-nursery; and, once again, noticing how Gerald’s face hardened as he questioned her about the child’s welfare, Hermione felt herself puzzled. Gerald’s questions were so abrupt, so businesslike, so definitely unsentimental, so concerned with the child’s health and so unconcerned with his happiness, that she wondered fleetingly whether imagination had deceived her about his momentary tenderness.

Nevertheless, leaving nurse and day-nursery, she experienced anew that gratitude she had felt on the terrace at Cosgrave. This new husband of hers; she realized, might have a thousand faults; but one fault, dereliction of duty, was not in him.

They went on in silence down the vast picture-hung staircase toward the vaster drawing-room. To Hermione, this place was home—every nook and corner of it a memory. But to her husband, Rorkton House appeared scarcely more habitable than the derelict mansion of little Arthur’s inheritance.

Compared with that which he was making of 15-A Aldford Street, this house seemed an anachronism, a relic of some dead age. The pictures on its landings might be valuable, but mere value could not compensate for their hideousness. A bath-room door, open, revealed primitive plumbing. The stair-carpets were worn thin, the lamp-globes dusty.

“If it were mine,” he thought, as he followed his wife into the still empty drawing-room which occupied most of the first floor, “I’d turn the place into flats.”

Husband and wife waited a conversationless moment or so by the inadequate coal-fire under the elaborate marble chimneypiece, till the owner of the room appeared, and Gerald Cranston, his imagination momentarily at work, realized that for such a man as the Earl of Rorkton such a house provided one of the few possible settings.

For though the earl, apart from his house, looked, as his house apart from the earl, like an anachronism—seen in conjunction, both had an air. The earl’s clothes, for instance—and especially the black, stock-like Joinville tie which he affected above his soft frilled shirt-front—were as out of date as his gold-fringed curtains; yet his height carried them off in the same way as the height of his drawing-room managed to carry off its window draperies: and as the old aristocrat came slowly across the gigantic, and somewhat dusty, carpet, the young plutocrat knew himself definitely impressed.

“A fine type,” thought the young plutocrat, perpending the high forehead, the steel-gray eyes, the silvering hair, and the clean-cut, clean-shaven lips of his father-in-law. Then, as the earl kissed his daughter, and, proffering a fine ringless hand, began: “How are you, Gerald? How’s the new abode progressing?” another more selfish thought crossed his mind.

The three stood chatting aimlessly for another five minutes; and while they chatted Gerald Cranston’s brain continued active. “Why not try and persuade the earl to take Bewsher’s place?” asked that brain.

The scheme was an appealing one; and, abruptly, he decided to adopt it. At worst, his father-in-law could only refuse; and that, in view of his comparative poverty, seemed unlikely. The earl, moreover, would, at that particular moment, find the director’s fees especially acceptable.

“Alan talks of chucking the service,” he was saying. “I sha’n’t like that much. But I suppose it can’t be helped. Five hundred a year doesn’t go very far in the Household Cavalry.”

“But what’s he going to do if he does resign his commission, Father?” put in Hermione.

“I’m sure I don’t know.” The earl laughed. “He’s got some scheme or other—orange-growing, I think.”

“Orange-growing takes a considerable capital,” interpolated Gerald, just as his youngest brother-in-law—obviously a throw-back to the dead countess, whose portrait hung, red-lipped, pale-haired, and willowy, in the tarnished gilt frame above the elaborate chimneypiece—arrived in the company of the earl’s eldest son, Viscount Doxford, who, despite the modernness of his smoking-jacket and his thirty years juniority to him, appeared—with his graying hair and his already desiccated skin—the very image of his aristocratic progenitor.

Conversation came to a full stop while the two brothers—the elder in the modulated voice of the Foreign Office official, and the younger drawling as he curled his blond mustache between first and forefinger—greeted their father; and had not been renewed by the time that two of Hermione’s aunts, tall, plainly dressed, plain-spoken, horsy-looking women, and the gawky third cousin they were mutually chaperoning, completed the family party: which, thereupon, a gong sounding cavernous from the hall, proceeded informally to dinner.