Part 4 (1/2)
”Well, it hangs in an honoured place in Stafford's chambers. I conjecture right, do I?”
Her eyes darkened slowly, and a swift-pa.s.sing shadow covered her faintly smiling lips; but she only said, ”You see he was ent.i.tled to it, wasn't he?” To herself, however, she whispered, ”Neither of them--neither ever told me that.”
At that moment the door opened, and a footman came forward to Rudyard Byng. ”If you please, sir, your servant says, will you see him. There is news from South Africa.”
Byng rose, but Jasmine intervened. ”No, tell him to come here,” she said to the footman. ”Mayn't he?” she asked.
Byng nodded, and remained standing. He seemed suddenly lost to her presence, and with head dropped forward looked into s.p.a.ce, engrossed, intense.
Jasmine studied him as an artist would study a picture, and decided that he had elements of the unusual, and was a distinct personality.
Though rugged, he was not uncouth, and there was nothing of the nouveau riche about him. He did not wear a ring or scarf-pin, his watch-chain was simple and inconspicuous enough for a school-boy--and he was worth three million pounds, with a palace building in Park Lane and a feudal castle in Wales leased for a period of years. There was nothing greatly striking in his carriage; indeed, he did not make enough of his height and bulk; but his eye was strong and clear, his head was powerful, and his quick smile was very winning. Yet--yet, he was not the type of man who, to her mind should have made three millions at thirty-three. It did not seem to her that he was really representative of the great fortune-builders--she had her grandfather and others closely in mind.
She had seen many captains of industry and finance in her grandfather's house, men mostly silent, deliberate and taciturn, and showing in their manner and persons the acc.u.mulated habits of patience, force, ceaseless aggression and domination.
Was it only luck which had given Rudyard Byng those three millions? It could not be just that alone. She remembered her grandfather used to say that luck was a powerful ingredient in the successful career of every man, but that the man was on the spot to take the luck, knew when to take it, and how to use it. ”The lucky man is the man that sits up watching for the windfall while other men are sleeping”--that was the way he had put it. So Rudyard Byng, if lucky, had also been of those who had grown haggard with watching, working and waiting; but not a hair of his head had whitened, and if he looked older than he was, still he was young enough to marry the youngest debutante in England and the prettiest and best-born. He certainly had inherent breeding.
His family had a long pedigree, and every man could not be as distinguished-looking as Ian Stafford--as Ian Stafford, who, however, had not three millions of pounds; who had not yet made his name and might never do so.
She flushed with anger at herself that she should be so disloyal to Ian, for whom she had pictured a brilliant future--amba.s.sador at Paris or Berlin, or, if he chose, Foreign Minister in Whitehall--Ian, gracious, diligent, wonderfully trained, waiting, watching for his luck and ready to take it; and to carry success, when it came, like a prince of princelier days. Ian gratified every sense in her, met every demand of an exacting nature, satisfied her unusually critical instinct, and was, in effect, her affianced husband. Yet it was so hard to wait for luck, for place, for power, for the environment where she could do great things, could fill that radiant place which her cynical and melodramatic but powerful and sympathetic grandfather had prefigured for her. She had been the apple of that old man's eye, and he had filled her brain--purposely--with ambitious ideas. He had done it when she was very young, because he had not long to stay; and he had overcoloured the pictures in order that the impression should be vivid and indelible when he was gone. He had meant to bless, for, to his mind, to s.h.i.+ne, to do big things, to achieve notoriety, to attain power, ”to make the band play when you come,” was the true philosophy of life. And as this philosophy, successful in his case, was accompanied by habits of life which would bear the closest inspection by the dean and chapter, it was a difficult one to meet by argument or admonition. He had taught his grandchild as successfully as he had built the structure of his success. He had made material things the basis of life's philosophy and purpose; and if she was not wholly materialistic, it was because she had drunk deep, for one so young, at the fountains of art, poetry, sculpture and history. For the last she had a pa.s.sion which was represented by books of biography without number, and all the standard historians were to be found in her bedroom and her boudoir. Yet, too, when she had opportunity--when Lady Tynemouth brought them to her--she read the newest and most daring productions of a school of French novelists and dramatists who saw the world with eyes morally astigmatic and out of focus. Once she had remarked to Alice Tynemouth:
”You say I dress well, yet it isn't I. It's my dressmaker. I choose the over-coloured thing three times out of five--it used to be more than that. Instinctively I want to blaze. It is the same in everything. I need to be kept down, but, alas! I have my own way in everything. I wish I hadn't, for my own good. Yet I can't brook being ruled.”
To this Alice had replied: ”A really selfish husband--not a difficult thing to find--would soon keep you down sufficiently. Then you'd choose the over-coloured thing not more than two times, perhaps one time, out of five. Your orientalism is only undisciplined self-will. A little cruelty would give you a better sense of proportion in colour--and everything else. You have orientalism, but little or no orientation.”
Here, now, standing before the fire, was that possible husband who, no doubt, was selfish, and had capacities for cruelty which would give her greater proportion--and sense of colour. In Byng's palace, with three millions behind her--she herself had only the tenth of one million--she could settle down into an exquisitely ordered, beautiful, perfect life where the world would come as to a court, and--
Suddenly she shuddered, for these thoughts were sordid, humiliating, and degrading. They were unbidden, but still they came. They came from some dark fountain within herself. She really wanted--her idealistic self wanted--to be all that she knew she looked, a flower in life and thought. But, oh, it was hard, hard for her to be what she wished! Why should it be so hard for her?
She was roused by a voice. ”Cronje!” it said in a deep, slow, ragged note.
Byng's half-caste valet, Krool, sombre of face, small, lean, ominous, was standing in the doorway.
”Cronje! ... Well?” rejoined Byng, quietly, yet with a kind of smother in the tone.
Krool stretched out a long, skinny, open hand, and slowly closed the fingers up tight with a gesture suggestive of a trap closing upon a crushed captive.
”Where?” Byng asked, huskily.
”Doornkop,” was the reply; and Jasmine, watching closely, fascinated by Krool's taciturnity, revolted by his immobile face, thought she saw in his eyes a glint of malicious and furtive joy. A dark premonition suddenly flashed into her mind that this creature would one day, somehow, do her harm; that he was her foe, her primal foe, without present or past cause for which she was responsible; but still a foe--one of those antipathies foreordained, one of those evil influences which exist somewhere in the universe against every individual life.
”Doornkop--what did I say!” Byng exclaimed to Jasmine. ”I knew they'd put the double-and-twist on him at Doornkop, or some such place; and they've done it--Kruger and Joubert. Englishmen aren't slim enough to be conspirators. Dr. Jim was going it blind, trusting to good luck, gambling with the Almighty. It's bury me deep now. It's Paul Kruger licking his chops over the savoury mess. 'Oh, isn't it a pretty dish to set before the king!' What else, Krool?”
”Nothing, Baas.”
”Nothing more in the cables?”
”No, Baas.”
”That will do, Krool. Wait. Go to Mr. Whalen. Say I want him to bring a stenographer and all the Partners--he'll understand--to me at ten to-night.”
”Yes, Baas.”