The Missioner. E. Phillips Oppenheim
motioned him to sit down by her side.
“I’ll explain,” she said. “You know we’re all expected to know something about everything nowadays, and it’s such a bore reading up things. I’m going to compile a little volume of definitions. I shall sell it at a guinea a copy, pay all my debts, and become quite respectable again.”
Deyes shook his head. His attitude was scarcely sympathetic.
“My dear Lady Peggy, what nonsense!” he declared. “Respectable, indeed! I call it positively pandering to the middle classes!”
Lady Peggy looked doubtful.
“It is a horrid word, isn’t it?” she admitted, “but it would be lovely to make some money. Of course, I haven’t absolutely decided how to spend it yet. It does seem rather a waste, doesn’t it, to pay one’s debts, but think of the luxury of feeling one could do it if one wanted to!”
“There’s something in that,” Deyes admitted. “But an encyclopædia! My dear Lady Peggy, you don’t know what you’re talking about. I’ve got one somewhere, I know. It came in a van, and it took two of the men to unload it.”
Lady Peggy laughed softly.
“Oh! I don’t mean that sort, of course,” she declared. “I mean just a little gilt-edged text book, bound in morocco, you know, with just those things in it we’re likely to run up against. Radium, for instance. Now every one’s talking about radium. Do you know what radium is?”
Deyes swung his eyeglass carefully by its black riband.
“Well,” he admitted, “I’ve a sort of idea, but I’m not very good at definitions.”
“Of course not,” Lady Peggy declared triumphantly. “When it comes to the point, you see what a good idea mine is. You turn to my textbook,” she added, turning the pages over rapidly, “and there you are. Radium! ‘A hard, rare substance, invented by Mr. Gillette to give tone to his bachelor parties.’ What do you think of that?”
“Wonderful!” Deyes declared solemnly. “Where do you get your information from?”
“Oh! I poke about in dictionaries and things, and ask every one questions,” Lady Peggy declared airily. “Would you like to hear some more?”
“Our hostess is beckoning to me,” Deyes answered, rising. “I expect she wants some bridge.”
“I’m on,” Lady Peggy declared cheerfully. “Whom shall we get for a fourth?”
“Wilhelmina has found him already,” Deyes declared. “It’s the new young man, I think.”
Lady Peggy shrugged her shoulders.
“The agent’s son?” she remarked. “I shouldn’t have thought that he would have cared about our points.”
“He can afford it for once in a way, I should imagine,” Deyes answered. “I can’t understand, though——”
He stopped short. She looked at him curiously.
“Is it possible,” she murmured, “that there exists anything which Gilbert Deyes does not understand?”
“Many things,” he answered; “amongst them, why does Wilhelmina patronize this young man? He is well enough, of course, but——” he shrugged his shoulders expressively; “the thing needs an explanation, doesn’t it?”
“If Wilhelmina—were not Wilhelmina, it certainly would,” Lady Peggy answered. “I call her craving for new things and new people positively morbid. All the time she beats her wings against the bars. There are no new things. There are no new experiences. The sooner one makes up one’s mind to it the better.”
Gilbert Deyes laughed softly.
“If my memory serves me,” he said, “you are repeating a cry many thousand years old. Wasn’t there a prophet——”
“There was,” she interrupted, “but they are beckoning us. I hope I don’t cut with the young man. I don’t believe he has a bridge face.”
CHAPTER V
EVICTED
Victor Macheson smoked his after-breakfast pipe with the lazy enjoyment of one who is thoroughly at peace with himself and his surroundings. The tiny strip of lawn on to which he had dragged his chair was surrounded with straggling bushes of cottage flowers, and flanked by a hedge thick with honeysuckle. Straight to heaven, as the flight of a bird, the thin line of blue smoke curled upwards to the summer sky; the very air seemed full of sweet scents and soothing sounds. A few yards away, a procession of lazy cows moved leisurely along the grass-bordered lane; from the other side of the hedge came the cheerful sound of a reaping-machine, driven slowly through the field of golden corn.
The man, through half closed eyes, looked out upon these things, and every line in his face spelt contentment. In repose, the artistic temperament with which he was deeply imbued, asserted itself more clearly—the almost fanatical light in his eyes was softened; one saw there was something of the wistfulness of those who seek to raise but a corner of the veil that hangs before the world of hidden things—something, too, of the subdued joy which even the effort brings. The lines of his forceful mouth were less firm, more sensitive—a greater sense of humanity seemed somehow to have descended upon him as he lounged there in the warmth of the sun, with the full joy of his beautiful environment creeping through his blood.
“If you please, Mr. Macheson,” some one said in his ear.
He turned his head at once. A tall, fair girl had stepped out of the room where he had been breakfasting, and was standing by his elbow. She was neatly dressed, pretty in a somewhat insipid fashion, and her hands and hair showed signs of a refinement superior to her station. Just now she was apparently nervous. Macheson smiled at her encouragingly.
“Well, Letty,” he said, “what is it?”
“I wanted—can I say something to you, Mr. Macheson?” she began.
“Why not?” he answered kindly. “Is it anything very serious? Out with it!”
“I was thinking, Mr. Macheson,” she said, “that I should like to leave home—if I could—if there was anything which I could do. I wanted to ask your advice.”
He laid down his pipe and looked at her seriously.
“Why, Letty,” he said, “how long have you been thinking of this?”
“Oh! ever so long, sir,” she exclaimed, speaking with more confidence. “You see there’s nothing for me to do here except when there’s any one staying, like you, sir, and that’s not often. Mother won’t let me help with the rough work, and Ruth’s growing up now, she’s ever such a strong girl. And I should like to go away if I could, and learn to be a little more—more ladylike,” she added, with reddening cheeks.
Macheson was puzzled. The girl was not looking him in the face. He felt there was something at the back of it all.
“My dear girl,” he said, “you can’t learn to be ladylike. That’s one of the things that’s born with you or it isn’t. You can be just as much a lady helping your mother here as practising grimaces in a London drawing-room.”
“But I want to improve myself,” she persisted.
“Go for a long walk every day, and look about you,” he said. “Read. I’ll lend you some books—the right