CHAPTER V
They had not often seen Ivy so sweetly happy—not for several years. She was quietly gay all through dinner, and afterwards in the drawing-room, on the veranda and at billiards, the soft tinkle of her gentle laughter reminded Sir Charles Snow of another Ivy’s delicious giggle that he’d told her, in Washington, was like a Chinese girl’s and reminded him of the mirth-music a Chinese girl had made for him in her father’s garden in far off Pechilli many, many years ago. Was Lotus still living? He wondered. Even Rupert Blake, the least observant of them there, noticed a new ease, a prettier, more natural brightness and an added sweetness in Ivy Sên when she slipped into the drawing-room looking like an exquisite deep-tinted rose-and-amber tea rose nodding above the leaf-green of her delicate evening draperies. Mrs. Sên’s face glowed softly as she watched her girl; Ruben hovered about his sister like a proud and happy lover and whispered to her as she went through the door he held open when she followed her mother and cousins out from dinner, “You’re It to-night, Ivy!”
“Ivy’s bad time has passed; her cloud has lifted,” Sir Charles commented to his wife a day or two later. “Happy over her palace affair and all the junketings to follow—bless her!—I suppose. And a good job too.”
Lady Snow smiled at her husband indulgently and gave no sign of disagreeing. But she did not believe for a moment that Buckingham Palace or the function gaieties to follow had anything to do with Ivy’s new and very welcome change of mood. Ivy was up to something. Lady Snow was sure of that. But of what it was she could not even make a hazy guess. She hoped it might last—the pleasant new mood—that was all! But Lady Snow did not expect that it would. Ivy was always happiest here, but Dorset, the Priory, Blanche and Rupert and the adorable twins did not account for this transformation. Emma Snow wondered what did account for it. “I’d think she was in love,” Lady Snow reflected to herself, “if there were any one on earth here for her to be in love with, and had forgotten everything else in it; it takes that way sometimes. But there isn’t any one here for her to have fallen in love with. And the change came here—on Tuesday. She was in one of her black moods when she went off by herself after tea; she had reached the danger-point then, almost a crisis. When she came down to dinner she was happy and companionable and docile. What happened to Ivy between tea and dinner?” Lady Snow very rarely, if ever, had seen Ivy docile.
A far wiser, shrewder woman than she ever seemed, very plump, very pretty, her hair still naturally golden at what is erroneously called “the wrong side” of fifty, Emma Snow had danced through life. But thirty odd years of marriage with a diplomat, most of them spent in the diplomatic circles of important capitals in both hemispheres, had made no mean or shallow diplomatist of the accomplished matron who affected to think all things of international moment “silly old stuff.” Ivy Sên and her sudden reformation might deceive the rest of the house party, but it was many years since any one had pulled the wool over the blue, girl-bright eyes of the woman who at fifty-three looked a radiant thirty-five, felt a vivacious twenty and looked forward happily and gaily to sixty, confident and unabashed to eighty.
On Thursday Lord Whitmore tried his luck again.
Left to his own devices, probably he would not have done so just then; not until Ruben had gone back to ’varsity, Mrs. Sên and Ivy back to their house in Kensington, and until the fuss of Ivy’s presentation was well over; but Ivy had spurred him to immediate action.
A burning hot day had kept every one else in the house or garden, even Ruben, who was a young salamander. But Ivy had demanded an early ride and Whitmore, always ready for a canter and always glad to oblige the girl, had promptly ordered her horse and his saddled and the two had ridden off together companionably after an earlier breakfast than any but dawn-liking Ruben had cared to share.
It was nearly noon and getting hotter, when they let their horses walk and turned back towards the Priory.
Naturally the girl and her companion chatted as they rode side by side slowly through the welcome shade of the wych-elms that almost interlaced across the narrow, grassy lane. They chatted at first of nothings and more in comradeship than in any quick interest in what she spoke of; then Ivy began to talk about the lovely county. She never tired of talking of Dorset. The county of infinite varieties and more beautiful than varied, was Ivy Sên’s Mecca. It delighted the man to realize how much she knew about it—its flowers and trees, its story, its coasts and streams, its wishing-wells, the slate roofs and narrow lanes of Fortune’s Well o’ertopped by the bastions of Verne, its martellos and its manors, its estuaries and its castles, its bridges, its people and their folk lore, the minster, all the tiny pictured churches, tiny cottages, the “big” houses, old families, high roads and byways, hills and woodlands. She knew the names of half the old inns, he found, and their bits of history. The Dorset man’s heart warmed at her happy, loving chatter of his county. Something Whitmore said about a tiny village school snuggled on a hillside they saw through a sudden woodland vista led to something about Cambridge—it had been his ’varsity for a few terms before he went to Woolwich; Cambridge led to Ruben.
“Do you like Ruben?” Ivy demanded.
“Thoroughly,” the man told her truthfully.
“You are not as fond of Rue as you are of me, though?”
“Not half as fond,” Lord Whitmore told her with a laugh. “There are not many people I care as much for as I do for you, Miss Persistence, and only just one I care more for. But I am very fond of Ruben, for all that; I think him a splendid fellow.”
“He’s a funny fellow in some ways,” the boy’s sister said insistently. “Ruben—the real Ruben—isn’t much on the surface. I’m all on the surface, I’m afraid, but I don’t believe that any one knows Ruben really well—not even Mother.”
The girl scarcely could have said anything that would have surprised the man more. To him Ruben Sên seemed as legible as a clearly printed, tersely written page, with no hint in his straightforward personality of the complex that Ivy presented. But he held his silence.
“I wonder what Rue will be—what he’ll do. What do you think?”
“Well—you know—he’ll have a great deal to look after. Your place in Surrey isn’t a big one, but any property is a business of itself in England now; and the Sên fortune would keep any three men busy who looked after it properly; it was huge when your father left it to the three of you; and your mother and Snow have nursed it splendidly ever since. Even the bad, foolish years of the so-called Labor Government did not stop its growth, as they did of most such fortunes, and very nearly to the tune of the genuine laboring man’s starvation. It is one of the colossal fortunes now, and intricately ramified; and I don’t see Ruben neglecting anything that he ought not to neglect.”
“Almost all of it is Mother’s and all of it is in her control.”
Whitmore nodded. “Yes, I know. But I hope,” he said significantly, “to persuade your mother to make the bulk of it over to you and Ruben some day, and not too far off. Why shouldn’t she, if I can prevail upon her to do what I so much wish? In any case it’s up to Ruben to look after his mother’s affairs and his sister’s, as well as his own.”
“I don’t see Rue as a landed proprietor or interested in any sort of business affairs ever. Do you know what I think he’ll do? I think that Ruben will roam.”
“Good gracious, Ivy; I hope not; it would grieve his mother, I am sure.”
“I think so too, and Ruben is devoted to Mother. I don’t believe he’ll ever care for any one else half so much as he does for her. Ruben’s wife, if he ever has one—which I hope he won’t—will have to take second place to Mother, and second place a long way off. But I think that very soon Ruben will roam—almost as soon as he comes down from Cambridge, I suspect; and that he will rove about all his life. I think he will have to.”
“I hope not,” Whitmore repeated. “Why do you say you hope Ruben will never marry? You indicated the other day that you intend to.”
“Yes—and chiefly, as I told you, to get rid of my name. I want Ruben not to marry because I want the name of Sên to die out.”
Lord Whitmore made no reply; he thought it would be wiser not to attempt to thrash all that out again; at least not now; his attempt on Tuesday had not been successful, or even encouraging. And they rode on in silence for several moments, he flicking the young leaves of the old oak trees idly, Ivy Sên looking off to the narrowed distance broodingly, as if it were the enigmatical future.
It was she who broke their silence presently. “Did you know my father at Cambridge?” she asked impulsively.
The question surprised Whitmore; that she asked it startled him even. In all the years he had known her—more than a dozen years—he never before had heard Ivy Sên voluntarily mention her father, and certainly had never heard her speak of him as “father.” What was Ivy leading up to? Something, he was sure.
“Oh, no,” he told her, “we must have been there about the same time, I fancy. But I went off to cram for the Army. And he was at Trinity Hall and I at King’s. No; I never met Mr. Sên.”
“I wonder if you’d still wish to marry our mother if you had.”
So—that was it! “Of course, I should,” he said. But—he wondered; Ivy had sown a seed—a seed that might grow a doubt. “Men often marry the widows of men they have known,” he told her, smiling at her as he said it.
“Not often—Englishmen—the widow of a Chinaman they have known—have seen.”
The Englishman riding beside her studied his mare’s ears. He had no answer for Ivy.
“I suspect that that is why you are willing to marry his widow. Are you never jealous of his memory?”
“Not a mite.” Whitmore looked the girl full in the face and smiled again as he spoke.
“You could be very jealous—even of a memory, I believe.” Suddenly the man believed it too; he’d never given such a thing a thought before. He flicked meditatively at the oak leaves again. “Do you know why you are not jealous of my father’s memory? I do. Her marriage was so fantastic that you do not even think of it as having been. You know it was so, but you can’t realize it. Probably you would, if you’d ever seen him—Mother’s Chinese husband—and you would certainly realize it if you ever had seen them together after she was his wife. To you it never was, because it was impossible; not the hideous reality it actually was, but a girl’s meaningless escapade; a sort of private theatrical masquerade. That’s why it does not sting you more. It stings me!”
John Whitmore flushed. He wasn’t going to admit it, but he knew that little Ivy had told him a truth, a hard, disconcerting truth, which he had not before suspected. The girl was making him damned uncomfortable. This subject must be changed.
“What shall I give you to wear at the Drawing-Room, Ivy? Flowers to carry—whatever flowers you like, or a very special fan, or some pearls—or all three?”
“What I want,” the girl retorted bitterly, “is a decent English name to wear at the Drawing-Room.” Her face dimpled suddenly, and she laughed softly at him with their yellow lids lifted higher from her not-straight-set black eyes than they often were, and he saw that her eyes were dancing with wicked, impish mischief. “I wish you’d marry me instead of Mother. Will you, if she won’t have you after all? Do! Let’s elope!”
“Now?”
“Yes; now. I think you might. Will you?”
“No,” he laughed back at her, and flicked at her lightly with the soft loop of his crop. “I most certainly will not marry you, Miss Impudence.”
“Why not?” Ivy pouted.
“For—one—two—three—four,” counting them out on his pommel with the riding crop, “most excellent reasons. First and last, because I wish to marry your mother; second, because in the sanity of fifty-three I object to marrying a sixteen-year-old firebrand; third, because I should very much object to robbing you and Mr. Right; fourth—and perhaps not least—because my heart is very particularly set on having you for my daughter. You would make me an adorable daughter, Ivy; but, between you and me, I have not the slightest doubt that you would make me, or any other old chap of fifty-three ass enough to try it, an utterly abominable wife. And I could give you any number of other excellent reasons.”
“Oh—don’t trouble to think them up; the four you have furnished will do to go on with.”
The girl set a quicker pace then; and they went side by side fairly fast for a mile or two.
There was no one in sight when they reached the Priory door.
Whitmore lifted Ivy down, and she clung to him a moment, and said, “If only you would make her marry you before the Drawing-Room, I’d try to forgive you for jilting me.”
The man laughed at her gently, patting her shoulder lingeringly as he said, “That would be quick work, Ivy.”
As he went off towards the stables, a bridle in each hand, the girl called after him, “I wish you would try though!”
Whitmore looked over his shoulder back at her as she still stood where he had set her down. A lonely looking little figure she seemed to him, standing there framed in the mullioned old green arch of the doorway, framed in the wealth of climbing ivy that grew as it had for centuries on the old Priory’s walls.
He always had known that Ivy Sên was odd; a handful always, sometimes a tempest. Every one knew that who knew the girl. But it never had occurred to him before that her pampered young life was lonely.
No one had thought of her so, except the girl herself and her mother. The mother had known it, and grieved that it was so, for years.
He thought it was a pathetic little figure standing there in the dim wide doorway. And the dark mutinous face was very wistful.
“I’ll do my best,” Whitmore called back, “if I see a ghost of a chance.”