The Mummy and Miss Nitocris: A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension, Griffith [read with me .txt] 📗

you that I loved you and wanted you for my wife, and—and the real fact is that it—I mean I know now that it wasn't true—and so I thought I ought to tell you. You know, of course, that the Professor——"

"My dear Lord Leighton," she answered, with an air of quite superior wisdom, "my learned father is a very clever man in his own subjects: but I think I know a great deal more about this particular one than he does. You are quite right. You did not love me. You liked me very much, I have no doubt——"

"Yes, and so I do still, and always shall do, but——"

"But your liking was great enough to make you mistake it for love. Women's instincts are[Pg 154] quicker and keener in these relations than men's are, and I saw that you did not love me as a real woman has to be loved, and, to be quite frank with you, some one else did. I like you very much, Lord Leighton, and I am going to go on liking you; but, you see, I could not give you what I had already given away. Now, you have told me so much that you ought to tell me a little more. How did your sudden enlightenment on that interesting subject come about?"

He was infinitely relieved by the absolutely frank and friendly way in which she had treated the whole subject, and so he had courage to reply with a laugh:

"In short, Miss Marmion, you ask me who the other girl is. Well, you certainly have a right to know, because, curiously enough, I might never have got to know her but for you——"

"Is it Brenda?"

The question was whispered, and he replied in a whisper:

"Yes; do you think I have any chance?"

A cohort of wild cats would not have torn Brenda's secret out of her friend's soul, and so she replied in a tone that was almost judicious in its evenness:

"That, my friend, is a question that you can only get answered by asking another—and you must ask her, not me."

"Oh yes, of course I must," he said rather limply. "But she's so splendid—so beautiful, so[Pg 155] exquisite—and—I do wish she wasn't so very rich. You see, even if I had the great good fortune to—to get her to marry me, I have lots for both; and, you know, the moment an Englishman with a title gets engaged to an American millionairess everybody says that he is simply dollar-hunting."

"That, unfortunately, is usually too well justified by the facts," she replied seriously. "But only the most idiotic and ignorant of gossips could possibly say that of you. Every one who is any one knows that the Kyneston coronet does not want re-gilding."

And then she went on, glancing sideways at him again:

"Still, as you know perfectly well, in matters of this kind, these very delicate diplomatic considerations, I do not care whether it is a question of fifty shillings a week or fifty thousand a year. You once paid me the very great compliment of offering me rank, position, and almost everything that a girl, from the merely material point of view could ask for. I refused, because I felt certain that you and I did not love each other—however much we may have liked and respected each other—as a man and woman ought to do, unless they become guilty of a great sin against each other. To put it in a very hackneyed way, we were not each other's affinities. I had already found mine—and I think, and hope, that you have found yours—and I wish you all the good fortune that you may, and, perhaps, can win."

"If is very, very good of you, Miss Marmion;[Pg 156] but do you think you could—well, help me a little? I know I don't deserve it."

"No, sir, you do not," she laughed softly, because the other two were coming back on to the lawn. "I wonder that you have—I have half a mind to say the impudence—to ask such a thing. You have confessed your fickleness in an almost shameless way; and now you ask me to help you with the other girl! No, my lord: if I know anything of Brenda van Huysman's nature, there is no one who can help you except yourself. Of course she might——"

"Do you really think she might—I mean in that way?"

"Who am I that I should know the secrets of another woman's soul?" she replied, with unhesitating prevarication. "There she is. Go and ask her, and take my best wishes with you. Now I am going to talk to my affinity for a few minutes."

"So it was Merrill, after all!" he said to himself, as they joined the others. "Well, I'm glad. He's a splendid fellow; and she—of course, she's worth the love of the best man on earth—and I'm afraid that's not—anyhow, I'll have Miss Brenda's opinion on the subject before I go home to-night."

It now need hardly be added that the said opinion was not only entirely satisfactory, but also very sweetly expressed.[Pg 157]

CHAPTER XIII OVER THE TEA AND THE TOAST

The next morning there were, at least, three eventful breakfasts "partaken of," as it was once the fashion to say; one at "The Wilderness," one at the Savoy, and one at the Kyneston town house in Prince's Gate.

When Professor Marmion came down he was a little late, for he had done a long night's work, finishing his lecture-notes to his own satisfaction, or, at least, as nearly as he could get there. Like all good workers, he was never quite satisfied with what he did. When the maid had closed the door of the breakfast-room, he looked across the table at his daughter with a twinkle in his eyes, and said:

"Niti, before Lord Leighton left last night he had a talk with me, and you were partly the subject of it."

"And who might have been the other part of the subject, Dad?" she asked, with excellently simulated composure.

"That, Niti," he replied slowly, "I expect you know quite as well as I do. I am inclined to consider myself the victim of something very like a conspiracy."[Pg 158]

"I think you are quite right, Dad," she replied, with perfect calmness. "But the chief conspirators were the Fates themselves. We others only did as we had to do. When you have solved that problem of N to the fourth, I think you will see that we could really have done nothing else, because, if you once crossed the border-line—the horizon which Professor Cayley spoke of, I mean—you ought to be on speaking terms with them."

Before he replied to this somewhat searching remark, the man who had crossed the horizon emptied his coffee cup, and set it down in the saucer with a perceptible rattle. Then he said more slowly than before:

"My dear Niti, there are other mysteries than N to the fourth. I only wish now to confess frankly to you that I have tried to solve one of them, perhaps the greatest of all, and ignominiously failed. I learnt a great deal last night from a young man to whom I thought I could have taught anything, and I got up this morning in a distinctly chastened frame of mind; and so, to make a long story short, if you like to drive into town and bring Commander Merrill back to lunch, I shall be very pleased to have a chat with him afterwards."

The next moment Nitocris was on the other side of the table, with her arm round her father's shoulders. She kissed him, and whispered:

"You dearest of dears! If I could have loved you any more, I would now, but I can't. I won't drive into town, because Brenda's coming out with[Pg 159] Lord Leighton in her new motor to fetch me; at least, she will, if other papas have been as delightful as you have been."

He put his hand up and stroked her cheek with a gesture that was older than she was, and said with a smile which meant more than she could comprehend:

"Ah! so it was a conspiracy, after all! Well, dear, I hope that, for all your sakes, it will turn out a successful one."

About the same time Brenda was saying to her parents:

"Poppa and Mammy, I've got some news to tell you, and I've slept on it, so as to make quite sure about the telling."

"And what might that be, Brenda?" asked her mother, looking up a trifle anxiously. "Nothing very serious, I hope."

"Anything connected with the Marmions?" asked her father, in a voice that sounded as though it had come from somewhere far away. He had the Times propped up against the sugar basin on his left hand, and he had just read the announcement of Franklin Marmion's lecture for the following evening, and this was quite a serious matter for him.

"It's connected with them in this way," said Brenda, leaning her elbows on the table. "You and Uncle have wanted a coronet in the family, and you know that I've refused three, because the men who wore them weren't fit to respect, to say nothing about loving. Well, I've just discovered[Pg 160] that I do love a man who has one coronet now, and will have another some day, unless something unexpected happens to him; but mind, it's the man I love and want to marry, and I'd want to do it just the same if he was still the same man he is, and hadn't either a coronet or a dollar to his name."

"That's like you, Brenda, and it sounds good," said her father, tearing his attention away from the alluring title of Franklin Marmion's lecture. "Now, who is it?"

"If it was only that nice young man, Lord Leighton!" said Mrs van Huysman, in a voice that sounded like an appeal against the final judgment of human fate, "but, of course, he's——"

"No, Mammy, that's just what he's not going to do," exclaimed Brenda, sitting up and clasping her hands behind her neck. "Nitocris Marmion is in love with some one else, and Lord Leighton is in love with me—at least he said so last night at 'The Wilderness,' and I don't suppose he'd have said it if he hadn't meant it—and I told him to go and ask his Papa: and now I'm going to ask my Poppa and Mammy if I may be Lady Leighton soon, and, perhaps, some day Countess of Kyneston. You see, Lord Leighton is just a viscount now——"

"What, just a viscount!" exclaimed Mrs van Huysman, getting up from her chair and putting a plump arm round her neck. "Just a viscount—and heir to one of the oldest peerages in England! Oh, Brenda, is it really true?"[Pg 161]

"I guess Brenda wouldn't say it if it wasn't, and that's about all there is to it," said her father, putting his long arm out over the table. "I congratulate you, my girl. Mammy and I may have been a bit troubled over some of those other refusals of yours, but you seem to have known best, after all: and I reckon your Uncle Ephraim'll think the same. Lord Leighton's a man right through. He wouldn't have done what he has done if he hadn't been. Shake, child, and——"

Brenda "shook," and then, without another word, she got up and hurried out of the room.

"The girl's right!" said Professor van Huysman, as the door closed behind her; "and if I'm not a fool entirely, she's found the right man."

"Hoskins, you can leave that to a well-brought-up girl like Brenda all the time. She is right, and all we've got to hope for now is that the Earl will be right too," said his wife somewhat anxiously.

"He's just got to see our girl and then he will be, unless he's a natural born idiot, which, of course, he couldn't be," replied Brenda's father in a tone of absolute conviction. "Now, I wonder what that man Marmion's going to let loose on us to-morrow night?"

"Good morning, sir," said Lord Leighton, as his father came into the breakfast-room at about the same time that Brenda left the other room in the Savoy.

"Good morning, Lester," replied the Earl of Kyneston, as father and son shook hands in the[Pg 162] old courtly fashion which, within the last half century, has gone out of vogue save among those who have ancestors whose record is a credit to their descendants. "You are looking very well and fit—and there is something else. What is it? Had you a very pleasant evening yesterday at 'The Wilderness'? Has Miss Marmion revoked her decision after all?"

"No, sir," said his son, looking