Despite his forty-eight years his sister Caroline still had the power at times to make him feel like a small boy. She had been a great martinet in the days of their mutual nursery.
“The Family History is more important than grubbing about in the dirt. I cannot understand why you do not leave this sort of thing to MacPherson. Why you should pay him liberal wages and then do his work for him, I cannot see. You know the publishers are waiting for the History. Go and attend to these notes at once.”
“You promised you would attend to them this morning, Lord Marshmoreton,” said Alice invitingly.
Lord Marshmoreton clung to his can of whale-oil solution with the clutch of a drowning man. None knew better than he that these interviews, especially when Caroline was present to lend the weight of her dominating personality, always ended in the same way.
“Yes, yes, yes!” he said. “Tonight, perhaps. After dinner, eh? Yes, after dinner. That will be capital.”
“I think you ought to attend to them this morning,” said Alice, gently persistent. It really perturbed this girl to feel that she was not doing work enough to merit her generous salary. And on the subject of the history of the Marshmoreton family she was an enthusiast. It had a glamour for her.
Lord Marshmoreton’s fingers relaxed their hold. Throughout the rose-garden hundreds of spared thrips went on with their morning meal, unwitting of doom averted.
“Oh, all right, all right, all right! Come into the library.”
“Very well, Lord Marshmoreton.” Miss Faraday turned to Lady Caroline. “I have been looking up the trains, Lady Caroline. The best is the twelve-fifteen. It has a dining-car, and stops at Belpher if signalled.”
“Are you going away, Caroline?” inquired Lord Marshmoreton hopefully.
“I am giving a short talk to the Social Progress League at Lewisham. I shall return tomorrow.”
“Oh!” said Marshmoreton, hope fading from his voice.
“Thank you, Miss Faraday,” said Lady Caroline. “The twelve-fifteen.”
“The motor will be round at a quarter to twelve.”
“Thank you. Oh, by the way, Miss Faraday, will you call to Reggie as you pass, and tell him I wish to speak to him.”
Maud had left Reggie by the time Alice Faraday reached him, and that ardent youth was sitting on a stone seat, smoking a cigarette and entertaining himself with meditations in which thoughts of Alice competed for precedence with graver reflections connected with the subject of the correct stance for his approach-shots. Reggie’s was a troubled spirit these days. He was in love, and he had developed a bad slice with his mid-iron. He was practically a soul in torment.
“Lady Caroline asked me to tell you that she wishes to speak to you, Mr. Byng.”
Reggie leaped from his seat.
“Hullo-ullo-ullo! There you are! I mean to say, what?”
He was conscious, as was his custom in her presence, of a warm, prickly sensation in the small of the back. Some kind of elephantiasis seemed to have attacked his hands and feet, swelling them to enormous proportions. He wished profoundly that he could get rid of his habit of yelping with nervous laughter whenever he encountered the girl of his dreams. It was calculated to give her a wrong impression of a chap–make her think him a fearful chump and what not!
“Lady Caroline is leaving by the twelve-fifteen.”
“That’s good! What I mean to say is–oh, she is, is she? I see what you mean.” The absolute necessity of saying something at least moderately coherent gripped him. He rallied his forces. “You wouldn’t care to come for a stroll, after I’ve seen the mater, or a row on the lake, or any rot like that, would you?”
“Thank you very much, but I must go in and help Lord Marshmoreton with his book.”
“What a rotten–I mean, what a dam’ shame!”
The pity of it tore at Reggie’s heart strings. He burned with generous wrath against Lord Marshmoreton, that modern Simon Legree, who used his capitalistic power to make a slave of this girl and keep her toiling indoors when all the world was sunshine.
“Shall I go and ask him if you can’t put it off till after dinner?”