God's Good Man, Marie Corelli [me reader .txt] 📗

Morton Pippitt opened conversation by feigning to recall having met her some two or three years back. He was not altogether in the best of humours, the sight of his recently dismissed butler, Primmins, having upset his nerves. He knew how servants ‘talked.’ Who could tell what Primmins might not say in his new situation at Abbot’s Manor, of his former experiences at Badsworth Hall? And so it was with a somewhat heated countenance that Sir Morton endeavoured to allude to a former acquaintance with his hostess at a Foreign Office function.

“Oh no, I don’t think so,” said Maryllia, lazily dropping lumps of sugar into the tea-cups—“Do you take sugar? I ought to ask, I know,—such a number of men have the gout nowadays, and they take saccharine. I haven’t any saccharine,—so sorry! You do like sugar, Mr. Adderley? How nice of you!” And she smiled. “None for you, Mr. Longford? I thought not. You, Miss Pippitt? No! Everybody else, yes? That’s all right! The Foreign Office? I think not, Sir Morton,—I gave up going there long ago when I was quite young. My aunt, Mrs. Fred Vancourt, always went—you must have met her and taken her for me, I always hated a Foreign Office ‘crush.’ Such big receptions bore one terribly—you never see anybody you really want to know, and the Prime Minister always looks tired to death. His face is a study in several agonies. Two or three years ago? Oh no,—I don’t think I was in London at that time. And you were there, were you? Really!”

She handed a cup of tea with a bewitching smile and a ‘Will you kindly pass it?’ to Julian Adderley, who so impetuously accepted the task she imposed upon him of acting as general waiter to the company, that in hastening towards her he caught his foot in the trailing laces of her gown and nearly fell over the tea-tray.

“A thousand pardons!” he murmured, righting himself with an effort— “So clumsy of me!”

“Don’t mention it!” said Maryllia, placidly—“Will you hand bread- and-butter to Miss Pippitt, Do you take hot cake, Sir Morton?”

Sir Morton’s face had become considerably redder during this interval, and, as he spread his handkerchief out on one knee to receive the possible dribblings of tea from the cup he had begun to sip at somewhat noisily, he looked as he certainly felt, rather at a loss what next to say. He was not long in this state of indecision, however, for a bright idea occurred to him, causing a smile to spread among his loose cheek-wrinkles.

“I’m sorry my friend the Duke of Lumpton has left me,” he said with unctuous pomp. “He would have been delighted—er—delighted to call with me to-day—”

“Who is he?” enquired Maryllia, languidly.

Again Sir Morton reddened, but managed to conceal his discomfiture in a fat laugh.

“Well, my dear lady, he is Lumpton!—that is enough for him, and for most people—”

“Really?—Oh—well—of course!—I suppose so!” interrupted Maryllia, with an expressive smile, which caused Miss Tabitha’s angular form, perched as it was on the high music-stool, to quiver with spite, and moved Miss Tabitha’s neatly gloved fingers to clench like a cat’s claws in their kid sheaths with an insane desire to scratch the fair face on which that smile was reflected.

“He is a charming fellow, the Duke-charming-charming!” went on Sir Morton, unconscious of the complex workings of thought in his elderly daughter’s acidulated brain! “And his great ‘chum,’ Lord Mawdenham, has also been staying with us—but they left Badsworth yesterday, I’m sorry to say. They travelled up to London with Lady Elizabeth Messing, who paid us a visit of two or three days—”

“Lady Elizabeth Messing!” echoed Maryllia, with a sudden ripple of laughter—“Dear me! Did you have her staying with you? How very nice of you! She is such a terror!”

Mr. Marius Longford stroked one of his pussy-cat whiskers thoughtfully, and put in his word.

“Lady Elizabeth spoke of you, Miss Vancourt, several times,” he said. “In fact”—and he smiled—“she had a good deal to say! She remembers meeting you in Paris, and—if I mistake not—also at Homburg on one occasion. She was surprised to hear you were coming to live in this dull country place—she said it would never suit you at all—you were altogether too brilliant—er—” he bowed—” and er- -charming!” This complimentary phrase was spoken with the air of a beneficent paterfamilias giving a child a bon-bon.

Maryllia’s glance swept over him carelessly.

“Much obliged to her, I’m sure!” she said—“I can quite imagine the anxiety she felt concerning me! So good of her! Is she a great friend of yours?”

Mr. Longford looked slightly disconcerted.

“Well, no,” he replied—“I have only during these last few days— through Sir Morton—had the pleasure of her acquaintance—”

“Mr. Longford is not a ‘society’ man!” said Sir Morton, with a chuckle—“He lives on the heights of Parnassus—and looks down with scorn on the browsing sheep in the valleys below! He is a great author!”

“Indeed!” and Maryllia raised her delicately arched eyebrows with a faint movement of polite surprise—“But all authors are great nowadays, aren’t they? There are no little ones left.”

“Oh, yes, indeed, and alas, there are!” exclaimed Julian Adderley, flourishing his emptied tea-cup in the air before setting it back in its saucer and depositing the whole on a table before him; “I am one of them, Miss Vancourt! Pray be merciful to me!”

The absurd attitude of appeal he assumed moved Maryllia to a laugh.

“Well, when you look like that I guess I will!” she said playfully, not without a sense of liking for the quaint human creature who so willingly made himself ridiculous without being conscious of it— “What is your line in the small way?”

“Verse!” he replied, with tragic emphasis—“Verse which nobody reads—verse which nobody wants—verse which whenever it struggles into publication, my erudite friend here, Mr. Longford, batters into pulp with a sledge-hammer review of half-a-dozen lines in the heavier magazines. Verse, my dear Miss Vancourt!—verse written to please myself, though its results do not feed myself. But what matter! I am happy! This village of St. Rest, for example, has exercised a spell of enchantment over me. It has soothed my soul! So much so, that I have taken a cottage in a wood—how melodious that sounds!—at the modest rent of a pound a week. That much I can afford,—that much I will risk—and on the air, the water, the nuts, the berries, the fruits, the flowers, I will live like a primaeval man, and let the baser world go by!” He ran his fingers through his long hair. “It will be an experience! So new—so fresh!”

Miss Tabitha sniffed sarcastically, and gave a short, hard laugh.

“I hope you’ll enjoy yourself!” she said tartly—“But you’ll soon tire. I told you at once when you said you had decided to spend the summer in this neighbourhood that you’d regret it. You’ll find it very dull.”

“Oh, I don’t think he will!” murmured Maryllia graciously; “He will be writing poetry all the time, you see! Besides, with you and Sir Morton as neighbours, how CAN he feel dull? Won’t you have some more tea?”

“No, thank you!” and Miss Pippitt rose,—“Father, we must be going. You have not yet explained to Miss Vancourt the object of our visit.”

“True, true!” and Sir Morton got out of his chair with some difficulty—“Time flies fast in such fascinating company!” and he smiled beamingly—“We came, my dear lady, to ask you to dine with us on Thursday next at Badsworth Hall.” No words could convey the pomposity which Sir Morton managed to infuse into this simple sentence. To dine at Badsworth was, or ought to be, according to his idea, the utmost height of human bliss and ambition. “We will invite some of our most distinguished neighbours to meet you,—there are a few of the old stock left—” this as if he were of the ‘old stock’ himself;—“I knew your father—poor fellow!—and of course I remember seeing you as a child, though you don’t remember me—ha- ha!—but I shall be delighted to welcome you under my roof—”

“Thanks so much!” said Maryllia, demurely—“But please let it be for another time, will you? I haven’t a single evening disengaged between this and the end of June! So sorry! I’ll come over to tea some day, with pleasure! I know Badsworth. Dear old place!—quite famous too, once in the bygone days—almost as famous as Abbot’s Manor itself. Let me see!” and she looked up at the ceiling musingly—“There was a Badsworth who fought against the Commonwealth,—and there was another who was Prime Minister or something of that kind,—then there was a Sir Thomas Badsworth who wrote books—and another who did some wonderful service for King James the First—yes, and there were some lovely women in the family, too—I suppose their portraits are all there? Yes—I thought so!”—this as Sir Morton nodded a blandly possessive affirmative— “How things change, don’t they? Poor old Badsworth! So funny to think you live there! Oh, yes! I’ll come over—certainly I’ll come over,—some day!”

Thus murmuring polite platitudes, Maryllia bade her visitors adieu. Sir Morton conquered an inclination to gasp for breath and say ‘Damn!’ at the young lady’s careless refusal of his invitation to dinner,—Miss Tabitha secretly rejoiced.

“I’m sure I don’t want her at Badsworth,” she said within herself, viciously—“Nasty little insolent conceited thing! I believe her hair is dyed, and her complexion put on! A regular play-actress!”

Unconscious of the spinster’s amiable thoughts, Maryllia was holding out a hand to her.

“Good-bye!” she said—“So kind of you to come and see me! I’m sure you think I must be lonely here. But I’m not, really! I don’t think I ever shall be,—because as soon as I have got the house quite in order, I am going to ask a great many friends to stay with me in turn. They will enjoy seeing the old place, and country air is such a boon to London people! Good-bye!”—and here she turned to Marius Longford—“I’m afraid I haven’t read any of your books!—anyway I expect they would be too deep for me. Wouldn’t they?”

“Lord Roxmouth has been good enough to express his liking for my poor efforts,” he replied, with a slight covert smile—“I believe you know him?”

“Oh, quite well—quite too well!” said Maryllia, without any discomposure—“But what he likes, I always detest. Unfortunate, isn’t it! So I mustn’t even try to read your works! You, Mr. Adderley”—and she laughingly looked up at that gentleman, who, hat in hand, was pensively drooping in a farewell attitude before her,— “you are going to stop here all summer, aren’t you? And in a cottage! How delightful! Anywhere near the Manor?”

“I am not so happy as to have found a domicile on this side Eden!” murmured Adderley, with a languishing look—“My humble hut is set some distance apart,—about a mile beyond the rectory.”

“Then your best neighbour will be the parson,” said Maryllia, gaily- -“So improving to your morals!”

“Possibly—possibly! “assented Adderley—” Mr. Walden is not exactly like other parsons,—there is something wonderfully attractive about him—”

“Something wonderfully conceited and unbearable, you mean!” snapped out Sir Morton—“Come, come!—we must be off! The horses are at the door,—can’t keep them standing! Miss Vancourt doesn’t want to hear anything about the parson. She’ll find him out soon enough for herself. He’s an upstart, my dear lady—take my word for it!—a pretentious University prig and upstart! You’ll never meet HIM at Badsworth Never! Sorry you can’t dine on Thursday! Never mind, never mind! Another time! Good-bye!”

“Good-bye!” and with a slight further exchange of salutations Maryllia found herself relieved of her visitors. Of all the four, Adderley alone