Part 23 (2/2)
His thoughts went back to the white face of the private enquiry agent.
”Absolutely nothing, Sir.” What had the fellow thought of hinting?
Nothing of that kind in V.V.'s composition, never fear. Yet it was a curious anomaly that while one had a thousand ways of defending one's daughter and one's property against that daughter's husband, there was no power on earth by which a father could stretch his dead hand between that daughter and the undue influence of a lover. Unless you tied her up for good and all, lover or none....
One was left at the mercy of V.V.'s character....
”I ought to see more of her,” he thought. ”She gets away from me. Just as her mother did.” A man need not suspect his womenkind but he should know what they are doing. It is duty, his protective duty to them. These companions, these Seyffert women and so forth, were all very well in their way; there wasn't much they kept from you if you got them cornered and asked them intently. But a father's eye is better. He must go about with the girl for a time, watch her with other men, give her chances to talk business with him and see if she took them. ”V.V., I'm going to make a man of you,” the phrase ran through his brain. The deep instinctive jealousy of the primordial father was still strong in old Grammont's blood. It would be pleasant to go about with her on his right hand in Paris, HIS girl, straight and lovely, desirable and unapproachable,--above that sort of nonsense, above all other masculine subjugation.
”V.V., I'm going to make a man of you....”
His mind grew calmer. Whatever she wanted in Paris should be hers. He'd just let her rip. They'd be like sweethearts together, he and his girl.
Old Grammont dozed off into dreamland.
Section 5
The imaginations of Mr. Gunter Lake, two days behind Mr. Grammont upon the Atlantic, were of a gentler, more romantic character. In them V.V.
was no longer a daughter in the fierce focus of a father's jealousy, but the G.o.ddess enshrined in a good man's heart. Indeed the figure that the limelight of the reverie fell upon was not V.V. at all but Mr. Gunter Lake himself, in his favourite role of the perfect lover.
An interminable speech unfolded itself. ”I ask for nothing in return.
I've never worried you about that Caston business and I never will.
Married to me you shall be as free as if you were unmarried. Don't I know, my dear girl, that you don't love me yet. Let that be as you wish.
I want nothing you are not willing to give me, nothing at all. All I ask is the privilege of making life happy--and it shall be happy--for you.... All I ask. All I ask. Protect, guard, cherish....”
For to Mr. Gunter Lake it seemed there could be no lovelier thing in life than a wife ”in name only” slowly warmed into a glow of pa.s.sion by the steadfast devotion and the strength and wisdom of a mate at first despised. Until at last a day would come....
”My darling!” Mr. Gunter Lake whispered to the darkness. ”My little guurl. IT HAS BEEN WORTH THE WAITING....”
Section 6
Miss Grammont met Sir Richmond in the bureau of the Old George with a telegram in her hand. ”My father reported his lat.i.tude and longitude by wireless last night. The London people think he will be off Falmouth in four days' time. He wants me to join his liner there and go on to Cherbourg and Paris. He's arranged that. He is the sort of man who can arrange things like that. There'll be someone at Falmouth to look after us and put us aboard the liner. I must wire them where I can pick up a telegram to-morrow.”
”Wells in Somerset,” said Sir Richmond.
His plans were already quite clear. He explained that he wanted her first to see Shaftesbury, a little old Wess.e.x town that was three or four hundred years older than Salisbury, perched on a hill, a Saxon town, where Alfred had gathered his forces against the Danes and where Canute, who had ruled over all Scandinavia and Iceland and Greenland, and had come near ruling a patch of America, had died. It was a little sleepy place now, looking out dreamily over beautiful views. They would lunch in Shaftesbury and walk round it. Then they would go in the afternoon through the pleasant west country where the Celts had prevailed against the old folk of the Stonehenge temple and the Romans against the Celts and the Saxons against the Romanized Britons and the Danes against the Saxons, a war-scarred landscape, abounding in d.y.k.es and entrenchments and castles, sunken now into the deepest peace, to Glas...o...b..ry to see what there was to see of a marsh village the Celts had made for themselves three or four hundred years before the Romans came. And at Glas...o...b..ry also there were the ruins of a great Benedictine church and abbey that had once rivalled Salisbury. Thence they would go on to Wells to see yet another great cathedral and to dine and sleep. Glas...o...b..ry Abbey and Wells Cathedral brought the story of Europe right up to Reformation times.
”That will be a good day for us,” said Sir Richmond. ”It will be like turning over the pages of the history of our family, to and fro. There will be nothing nearly so old as Avebury in it, but there will be something from almost every chapter that comes after Stonehenge. Rome will be poorly represented, but that may come the day after at Bath. And the next day too I want to show you something of our old River Severn.
We will come right up to the present if we go through Bristol. There we shall have a whiff of America, our new find, from which the tobacco comes, and we shall be reminded of how we set sail thither--was it yesterday or the day before? You will understand at Bristol how it is that the energy has gone out of this dreaming land--to Africa and America and the whole wide world. It was the good men of Bristol, by the bye, with their trade from Africa to America, who gave you your colour problem. Bristol we may go through to-morrow and Gloucester, mother of I don't know how many American Gloucesters. Bath we'll get in somehow.
And then as an Anglo-American showman I shall be tempted to run you northward a little way past Tewkesbury, just to go into a church here and there and show you monuments bearing little s.h.i.+elds with the stars and stripes upon them, a few stars and a few stripes, the Was.h.i.+ngton family monuments.”
”It was not only from England that America came,” said Miss Grammont.
”But England takes an American memory back most easily and most fully--to Avebury and the Baltic Northmen, past the emperors and the Corinthian columns that smothered Latin Europe.... For you and me anyhow this is our past, this was our childhood, and this is our land.” He interrupted laughing as she was about to reply. ”Well, anyhow,” he said, ”it is a beautiful day and a pretty country before us with the ripest history in every grain of its soil. So we'll send a wire to your London people and tell them to send their instructions to Wells.”
”I'll tell Belinda,” she said, ”to be quick with her packing.”
Section 7
As Miss Grammont and Sir Richmond Hardy fulfilled the details of his excellent programme and revised their impressions of the past and their ideas about the future in the springtime sunlight of Wilts.h.i.+re and Somerset, with Miss Seyffert acting the part of an almost ostentatiously discreet chorus, it was inevitable that their conversation should become, by imperceptible gradations, more personal and intimate. They kept up the pose, which was supposed to represent Dr. Martineau's philosophy, of being Man and Woman on their Planet considering its Future, but insensibly they developed the idiosyncrasies of their position. They might profess to be Man and Woman in the most general terms, but the facts that she was the daughter not of Everyman but old Grammont and that Sir Richmond was the angry leader of a minority upon the Fuel Commission became more and more important. ”What shall we do with this planet of ours?” gave way by the easiest transitions to ”What are you and I doing and what have we got to do? How do you feel about it all? What do you desire and what do you dare?”
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