The God in the Car: A Novel

CHAPTER III

MRS. DENNISON'S ORDERS

Next door to Mrs. Dennison's large house in Curzon Street there lived, in a small house, a friend of hers, a certain Mrs. Cormack. She was a Frenchwoman, who had been married to an Englishman, and was now his most resigned widow. She did not pretend to herself, or to anybody else, that Mr. Cormack's death had been a pure misfortune, and by virtue of her past trials – perhaps, also, of her nationality – she was keenly awake to the seamy side of matrimony. She would rhapsodise on the joys of an ideal marriage, with a skilful hint of its rarity, and condemn transgressors with a charitable reservation for insupportable miseries. She was, she said, very romantic. Tom Loring, however (whose evidence was tainted by an intense dislike of her), declared that affaires du cœur interested her only when one at least of the parties was lawfully bound to a third person; when both were thus trammelled, the situation was ideal. But the loves of those who were in a position to marry one another, and had no particular reason for not following that legitimate path to happiness, seemed to her (still according to Tom) dull, uninspiring – all, in fact, that there was possible of English and stupid. She hardly (Tom would go on, warming to his subject) believed in them at all, and she was in the habit of regarding wedlock merely as a condition precedent to its own violent dissolution. Whether this unhappy mode of looking at the matter were due to her own peculiarities, or to those of the late Mr. Cormack, or to those of her nation, Tom did not pretend to say; he confined himself to denouncing it freely, and to telling Mrs. Dennison that her next-door neighbour was in all respects a most undesirable acquaintance; at which outbursts Mrs. Dennison would smile.

Mrs. Dennison, coming out on to the balcony to see if her carriage were in sight down the street, found her friend close to her elbow. Their balconies adjoined, and friendship had led to a little gate being substituted for the usual dwarf-wall of division. Tom Loring erected the gate into an allegory of direful portent. Mrs. Cormack passed through it, and laid an affectionate grasp on Maggie Dennison's arm.

"You're starting early," she remarked.

"I'm going a long way – right up to Hampstead. I've promised Harry to call on some people there."

"Ah! Who?"

"Their name's Carlin. He knows Mr. Carlin in business. Mr. Carlin's a friend of Mr. Ruston's."

"Oh, of Ruston's? I like that Ruston. He is interesting – inspiring."

"Is he?" said Mrs. Dennison, buttoning her glove. "You'd better marry him, Berthe."

"Marry him? No, indeed. I think he would beat one."

"Is that being inspiring? I'm glad Harry's not inspiring."

"Oh, you know what I mean. He's a man who – "

Mrs. Cormack threw up her arms as though praying for the inspired word. Mrs. Dennison did not wait for it.

"There's the carriage. Good-bye, dear," she said.

Mrs. Dennison started with a smile on her face. Berthe was so funny; she was like a page out of a French novel. She loved anything not quite respectable, and peopled the world with heroes of loose morals and overpowering wills. She adored a dominating mind and lived in the discovery of affinities. What nonsense it all was – so very remote from the satisfactory humdrum of real life. One kept house, and gave dinners, and made the children happy, and was fond of one's husband, and life passed most – Here Mrs. Dennison suddenly yawned, and fell to hoping that the Carlins would not be oppressively dull. She had been bored all day long; the children had been fretful, and poor Harry was hurt and in low spirits because of a cruel caricature in a comic paper, and Tom Loring had scolded her for laughing at the caricature (it hit Harry off so exactly), and nobody had come to see her, except a wretch who had once been her kitchenmaid, and had come to terrible grief, and wanted to be taken back, and of course couldn't be, and had to be sent away in tears with a sovereign, and the tears were no use and the sovereign not much.

The Carlins fortunately proved tolerably interesting in their own way. Carlin was about fifty-five – an acute man of business, it seemed, and possessed by an unwavering confidence in the abilities of Willie Ruston. Mrs. Carlin was ten or fifteen years younger than her husband – a homely little woman, with a swarm of children. Mrs. Dennison wondered how they all fitted into the small house, but was told that it was larger by two good rooms than their old dwelling in the country town, whence Willie had summoned them to take a hand in his schemes. Willie had not insisted on the coal business being altogether abandoned – as Mrs. Carlin said, with a touch of timidity, it was well to have something to fall back upon – but he required most of Carlin's time now, and the added work made residence in London a necessity. In spite of Mr. Carlin's air of hard-headedness, and his wife's prudent recognition of the business aspect of life, they neither of them seemed to have a will of their own. Willie – as they both called him – was the Providence, and the mixture of reverence and familiarity presented her old acquaintance in a new light to Maggie Dennison. Even the children prattled about "Willie," and their mother's rebukes made "Mr. Ruston" no more than a strange and transitory effort. Mrs. Dennison wondered what there was in the man – consulting her own recollections of him in hope of enlightenment.

"He takes such broad views," said Carlin, and seemed to find this characteristic the sufficient justification for his faith.

"I used to know him very well, you know," remarked Mrs. Dennison, anxious to reach a more friendly footing, and realising that to connect herself with Ruston offered the best chance of it. "I daresay he's spoken of me – of Maggie Sherwood?"

They thought not, though Willie had been in Carlin's employ at the time when he and Mrs. Dennison parted. She was even able, by comparison of dates, to identify the holiday in which that scene had occurred and that sentence been spoken; but he had never mentioned her name. She very much doubted whether he had even thought of her. The fool and the fool's wife had both been dismissed from his mind. She frowned impatiently. Why should it be anything to her if they had?

There was a commotion among the children, starting from one who was perched on the window-sill. Ruston himself was walking up to the door, dressed in a light suit and a straw hat. After the greetings, while all were busy getting him tea, he turned to Mrs. Dennison.

"This is very kind of you," he said in an undertone.

"My husband wished me to come," she replied.

He seemed in good spirits. He laughed, as he answered,

"Well, I didn't suppose you came to please me."

"You spoke as if you did," said she, still trying to resent his tone, which she thought a better guide to the truth than his easy disclaimer.

"Why, you never did anything to please me!"

"Did you ever ask me?" she retorted.

He glanced at her for a moment, as he began to answer,

"Well, now, I don't believe I ever did; but I – "

Mrs. Carlin interposed with a proffered cup of tea, and he broke off.

"Thanks, Mrs. Carlin. I say, Carlin, it's going first-rate. Your husband's help's simply invaluable, Mrs. Dennison."

"Harry?" she said, in a tone that she regretted a moment later, for there was a passing gleam in Ruston's eye before he answered gravely,

"His firm carries great weight. Well, we're all in it here, sink or swim; aren't we, Carlin?"

Carlin nodded emphatically, and his wife gave an anxious little sigh.

"And what's to be the end of it?" asked Mrs. Dennison.

"Ten per cent," said Carlin, with conviction. He could not have spoken with more utter satisfaction of the millennium.

"The end?" echoed Ruston. "Oh, I don't know."

"At least he won't say," said Carlin admiringly.

Mrs. Dennison rose to go, engaging the Carlins to dine with her – an invitation accepted with some nervousness, until the extension of it to Ruston gave them a wing to come under. Ruston, with that directness of his that shamed mere dexterity and superseded tact, bade Carlin stay where he was, and himself escorted the visitor to her carriage. Half-way down the garden walk she looked up at him and remarked,

"I expect you're the end."

His eyes had been wandering, but they came back sharply to hers.

"Then don't tell anybody," said he lightly.

She did not know whether what he said amounted to a confession or were merely a jest. The next moment he was off at a tangent.

"I like your friend Miss Ferrars. She says a lot of sharp things, and now and then something sensible."

"Now and then! Poor Adela!"

"Well, she doesn't often try. Besides, she's handsome."

"Oh, you've found time to notice that?"

"I notice that first," said Mr. Ruston.

They were at the carriage-door.

"I'm not dressed properly, so I mustn't drive with you," he said.

"Supposing that was the only reason," she replied, smiling, "would it stop you?"

"Certainly."

"Why?"

"Because of other fools."

"I'll take you as far as Regent's Park. The other fools are on the other side of that."

"I'll chance so far," and, waving his hand vaguely towards the house, he got in. It did not seem to occur to him that there was any want of ceremony in his farewell to the Carlins.

"I suppose," she said, "you think most of us fools?"

"I've been learning to think it less and to show it less still."

"You're not much changed, though."

"I've had some of my corners chipped off by collision with other hard substances."

"Thank you for that 'other'!" cried Mrs. Dennison, with a little laugh. "They must have been very hard ones."

"I didn't say that they weren't a little bit injured too."

"Poor things! I should think so."

"I have my human side."

"Generally the other side, isn't it?" she asked with a merry glance. The talk had suddenly become very pleasant. He laughed, and stopped the carriage. A sigh escaped from Mrs. Dennison.

"Next time," he said, "we'll talk about you, or Miss Ferrars, or that little Miss Marjory Valentine, not about me. Good-bye," and he was gone before she could say a word to him.

But it was natural that she should think a little about him. She had not, she said to herself with a weary smile, too many interesting things to think about, and she began to find him decidedly interesting; in which fact again she found a certain strangeness and some material for reflection, because she recollected very well that as a girl she had not found him very attractive. Perhaps she demanded then more colouring of romance than he had infused into their intercourse; she had indeed suspected him of suppressed romance, but the suppression had been very thorough, betraying itself only doubtfully here and there, as in his judgment of her accepted suitor. Moreover, let his feelings then have been what they might, he was not, she felt sure, the man to cherish a fruitless love for eight or nine years, or to suffer any resurrection of expired emotions on a renewed encounter with an old flame. He buried his dead too deep for that; if they were in the way, she could fancy him sometimes shovelling the earth over them and stamping it down without looking too curiously whether life were actually extinct or only flickering towards its extinction; if it were not quite gone at the beginning of the gravedigger's work, it would be at the end, and the result was the same. Nor did she suppose that ghosts gibbered or clanked in the orderly trim mansions of his brain. In fact, she was to him a more or less pleasant acquaintance, sandwiched in his mind between Adela Ferrars and Marjory Valentine – with something attractive about her, though she might lack the sparkle of the one and had been robbed of the other's youthful freshness. This was the conclusion which she called upon herself to draw as she drove back from Hampstead – the plain and sensible conclusion. Yet, as she reached Curzon Street, there was a smile on her face; and the conclusion was hardly such as to make her smile – unless indeed she had added to it the reflection that it is ill judging of things till they are finished. Her acquaintance with Willie Ruston was not ended yet.

"Maggie, Maggie!" cried her husband through the open door of his study as she passed up-stairs. "Great news! We're to go ahead. We settled it at the meeting this morning."

Harry Dennison was in exuberant spirits. The great company was on the verge of actual existence. From the chrysalis of its syndicate stage it was to issue a bright butterfly.

"And Ruston was most complimentary to our house. He said he could never have carried it through without us. He's in high feather."

Mrs. Dennison listened to more details, thinking, as her husband talked, that Ruston's cheerful mood was fully explained, but wondering that he had not himself thought it worth while to explain to her the cause of it a little more fully. With that achievement fresh in his hand, he had been content to hold his peace. Did he think her not worth telling?

With a cloud on her brow and her smile eclipsed, she passed on to the drawing-room. The window was open and she saw Tom Loring's back in the balcony. Then she heard her friend Mrs. Cormack's rather shrill voice.

"Not say such things?" the voice cried, and Mrs. Dennison could picture the whirl of expostulatory hands that accompanied the question. "But why not?"

Tom's voice answered in the careful tones of a man who is trying not to lose his temper, or, anyhow, to conceal the loss.

"Well, apart from anything else, suppose Dennison heard you? It wouldn't be over-pleasant for him."

Mrs. Dennison stood still, slowly peeling off her gloves.

"Oh, the poor man! I would not like to hurt him. I will be silent. Oh, he does his very best! But you can't help it."

Mrs. Dennison stepped a yard nearer the window.

"Help what?" asked Tom in the deepest exasperation, no longer to be hidden.

"Why, what must happen? It must be that the true man – "

A smile flickered over Maggie Dennison's face. How like Berthe! But whence came this topic?

"Nonsense, I tell you!" cried Tom with a stamp of his foot.

And at the sound Mrs. Dennison smiled again, and drew yet nearer to the window.

"Oh, it's always nonsense what I say! Well, we shall see, Mr. Loring," and Mrs. Cormack tripped in through her window, and wrote in her diary – she kept a diary full of reflections – that Englishmen were all stupid. She had written that before, but the deep truth bore repetition.

Tom went in too, and found himself face to face with Mrs. Dennison. Bright spots of colour glowed on her cheeks; had she answered the question of the origin of the topic? Tom blushed and looked furtively at her.

"So the great scheme is launched," she remarked, "and Mr. Ruston triumphs!"

Tom's manner betrayed intense relief, but he was still perturbed.

"We're having a precious lot of Ruston," he observed, leaning against the mantelpiece and putting his hands in his pockets.

"I like him," said Maggie Dennison.

"Those are the orders, are they?" asked Tom with a rather wry smile.

"Yes," she answered, smiling at Tom's smile. It amused her when he put her manner into words.

"Then we all like him," said Tom, and, feeling quite secure now, he added, "Mrs. Cormack said we should, which is rather against him."

"Oh, Berthe's a silly woman. Never mind her. Harry likes him too."

"Lucky for Ruston he does. Your husband's a useful friend. I fancy most of Ruston's friends are of the useful variety."

"And why shouldn't we be useful to him?"

"On the contrary, it seems our destiny," grumbled Tom, whose destiny appeared not to please him.

CHAPTER IV

TWO YOUNG GENTLEMEN

Lady Valentine was the widow of a baronet of good family and respectable means; the one was to be continued and the other absorbed by her son, young Sir Walter, now an Oxford undergraduate and just turned twenty-one years of age. Lady Valentine had a jointure, and Marjory a pretty face. The remaining family assets were a country-house of moderate dimensions in the neighbourhood of Maidenhead, and a small flat in Cromwell Road. Lady Valentine deplored the rise of the plutocracy, and had sometimes secretly hoped that a plutocrat would marry her daughter. In other respects she was an honest and unaffected woman.

Young Sir Walter, however, had his own views for his sister, and young Sir Walter, when he surveyed the position which the laws and customs of the realm gave him, was naturally led to suppose that his opinion had some importance. He was hardly responsible for the error, and very probably Mr. Ruston would have been better advised had his bearing towards the young man not indicated so very plainly that the error was an error. But in the course of the visits to Cromwell Road, which Ruston found time to pay in the intervals of floating the Omofaga Company – and he was a man who found time for many things – this impression of his made itself tolerably evident, and, consequently, Sir Walter entertained grave doubts whether Ruston were a gentleman. And, if a fellow is not a gentleman, what, he asked, do brains and all the rest of it go for? Moreover, how did the chap live? To which queries Marjory answered that "Oxford boys" were very silly – a remark which embittered, without in the least elucidating, the question.

Almost everybody has one disciple who looks up to him as master and mentor, and, ill as he was suited to such a post, Evan Haselden filled it for Walter Valentine. Evan had been in his fourth year when Walter was a freshman, and the reverence engendered in those days had been intensified when Evan had become, first, secretary to a minister and then, as he showed diligence and aptitude, a member of Parliament. Evan was a strong Tory, but payment of members had an unholy attraction for him; this indication of his circumstances may suffice. Men thought him a promising youth, women called him a nice boy, and young Sir Walter held him for a statesman and a man of the world.

Seeing that what Sir Walter wanted was an unfavourable opinion of Ruston, he could not have done better than consult his respected friend. Juggernaut – Adela Ferrars was pleased with the nickname, and it began to be repeated – had been crushing Evan in one or two little ways lately, and he did it with an unconsciousness that increased the brutality. Besides displacing him from the position he wished to occupy at more than one social gathering, Ruston, being in the Lobby of the House one day (perhaps on Omofaga business), had likened the pretty (it was his epithet) young member, as he sped with a glass of water to his party leader, to Ganymede in a frock coat – a description, Evan felt, injurious to a serious politician.

"A gentleman?" he said, in reply to young Sir Walter's inquiry. "Well, everybody's a gentleman now, so I suppose Ruston is."

"I call him an unmannerly brute," observed Walter, "and I can't think why mother and Marjory are so civil to him."

Evan shook his head mournfully.

"You meet the fellow everywhere," he sighed.

"Such an ugly mug as he's got too," pursued young Sir Walter. "But Marjory says it's full of character."

"Character! I should think so. Enough to hang him on sight," said Evan bitterly.

"He's been a lot to our place. Marjory seems to like him. I say, Haselden, do you remember what you spoke of after dinner at the Savoy the other day?"

Evan nodded, looking rather embarrassed; indeed he blushed, and little as he liked doing that, it became him very well.

"Did you mean it? Because, you know, I should like it awfully."

"Thanks, Val, old man. Oh, rather, I meant it."

Young Sir Walter lowered his voice and looked cautiously round – they were in the club smoking-room.

"Because I thought, you know, that you were rather – you know – Adela Ferrars?"

"Nothing in that, only pour passer le temps," Evan assured him with that superb man-of-the-worldliness.

It was a pity that Adela could not hear him. But there was more to follow.

"The truth is," resumed Evan – "and, of course, I rely on your discretion, Val – I thought there might be a – an obstacle."

Young Sir Walter looked knowing.

"When you were good enough to suggest what you did – about your sister – I doubted for a moment how such a thing would be received by – well, at a certain house."