Still, what he did at all, he did more or less cleverly. There was cleverness in every line of his smooth dark face; there was uncommon shrewdness in his clear gray eyes. His father had the same face and the same eyes – with this difference added to the differences naturally due to age: there were wisdom, and dignity, and humanity in the face and glance of the Judge; but the nobility of expression thus given was not inherited by the Judge’s younger son.
The Judge spoke again, breaking a silence of some minutes: —
‘As you say, Mildred, it seems to have been all very wild and sudden; but when we have said this, we have probably said the worst there is to say. At least, let us hope so. Of my own knowledge many men have gone to Australia, as Alfred went, and come back with the best of wives. I seem to have heard, Granville, that that is what Merivale did; and I have met few more admirable women than Mrs Merivale.’
‘It certainly is the case, sir,’ said Granville, who had been patronised to some extent by Merivale, Q.C. ‘But Mrs Merivale was scarcely “born and bred in the Bush”; and if she had what poor Alfred, perhaps euphemistically, calls “mannerisms” – I have detected no traces of any myself – when Merivale married her, at least she had money.’
‘Your sister-in-law may have “money,” too,’ said Sir James, with somewhat scornful emphasis. ‘That is of no consequence at all. Your brother has enough for both, and more than enough for a bachelor.’
There was no need to remind the young man of that; it had been a sore point, and even a raw one, with Granville since his boyhood; for it was when the brothers were at school together – the younger in the Sixth Form, the elder in the Lower Fifth – and it was already plain which one would benefit the most by ‘private means,’ that a relative of Sir James had died, leaving all her money to Alfred.
Granville coloured slightly – very slightly – but observed: —
‘It is a good thing he has.’
‘What do you mean?’ the Judge asked, with some asperity.
‘That he needs it,’ said Granville, significantly.
Sir James let the matter drop, and presently, getting up, went out by the open French window, and on to the lawn. It was not his habit to snub his son; he left that to the other judges, in court. But Lady Bligh remonstrated in her own quiet way – a way that had some effect even upon Granville.
‘To sneer at your brother’s inferior wits, my son, is not in quite nice taste,’ she said; ‘and I may tell you, now, that I did not at all care for your comments upon his letter.’
Granville leant back in his chair and laughed pleasantly.
‘How seriously you take one this morning! But it is small wonder that you should, for the occasion is a sufficiently serious one, in all conscience; and indeed, dear mother, I am as much put out as you are. Nay,’ Granville added, smiling blandly, ‘don’t say that you’re not put out, for I can see that you are. And we have reason to be put out’ – he became righteously indignant – ‘all of us. I wouldn’t have thought it of Alfred, I wouldn’t indeed! No matter whom he wanted to marry, he ought at least to have written first, instead of being in such a violent hurry to bring her over. It is treating you, dear mother, to say the best of it, badly; and as for the Judge, it is plain that he is quite upset by the unfortunate affair.’
‘We have no right to assume that it is unfortunate, Gran.’
‘Well, I hope it is not, that’s all,’ said Gran, with great emphasis. ‘I hope it is not, for poor Alfred’s sake. Yet, as you know, mother, he’s the very kind of old chap to get taken in and imposed upon; and – I tell you frankly – I tremble for him. If he is the victim of a designing woman, I am sorry for him, from my soul I am! If he has married in haste – and he has – to repent at leisure – as he may – though this is trite and detestable language, I pity him, from my soul I do! You have already rebuked me – I don’t say unjustly – for making what, I admit, had the appearance of an odious and egotistical comparison; I will guard against conveying a second impression of that kind; yet I think I may safely say, without bragging, that I know the world rather better than old Alfred does. Well, I have, I will not say my fears, but my dreads; and I cannot help having them. If they are realised, no one will sympathise with poor dear Alfred more deeply than I shall.’
Lady Bligh looked keenly at her eloquent son; a half-smile played about her lips: she understood him, to some extent.
‘But what if your fears are not realised?’ she said, quietly.
‘Why, then,’ said Gran, less fluently, ‘then I – oh, of course, I shall be delighted beyond words; no one will be more delighted than I.’
‘Then you shall see,’ said Lady Bligh, rising, with a sweet and hopeful smile, ‘that is how it is going to turn out; I have a presentiment that it will all turn out for the best. So there is only one thing to be done – we must prepare to welcome her to our hearts!’
Granville shrugged his shoulders, but his mother did not see him; she had gone quietly from the room and was already climbing (slowly, for she was stout) the stairs that led up to her own snuggery on the first floor. This little room was less of a boudoir than a study, and more like an office than either, for it was really a rather bare little room. Its most substantial piece of furniture was a large unlovely office-table, and its one picture was framed in the window-sashes – a changeful picture of sky and trees, and lawn and river, painted this morning in the most radiant tints of early summer. At the office-table, which was littered with letters and pamphlets, Lady Bligh spent diligent hours every day. She was a person of both mental and manual activity, with public sympathies and interests that entailed an immense correspondence. She was, indeed, one of the most charitable and benevolent of women, and was to some extent a public woman. But we have nothing to do with her public life, and, on this Sunday morning, no more had she.
There were no pictures on the walls, but there were photographs upon the chimney-piece. Lady Bligh stood looking at them for an unusually long time – in fact, until the sound of the old church bells, coming in through the open window, called her away.
One of the photographs was of the Judge – an excellent one, in which the dear old gentleman looked his very best, dignified but kindly. Another was a far too flattering portrait of Granville. A third portrait was that of an honest, well-meaning, and rather handsome face, with calm dark eyes, exactly like Lady Bligh’s; and this was the erratic Alfred. But the photograph that Lady Bligh looked at longest, and most fondly, was a faded one of Alfred and Granville as mere schoolboys. She loved her two sons so dearly! One of them was much changed, and becoming somewhat spoilt, to phrase it mildly; yet that son was rather clever, and his mother saw his talents through a strong binocular, and his faults with her eyes at the wrong end of it; and she loved him in spite of the change in him, and listened – at least with tolerance – to the airings of a wit that was always less good natured, and generally less keen, than she imagined it. But the other son had never changed at all; even his present fatal letter showed that. He was still a boy at heart – a wild, stupid, affectionate schoolboy. There was no denying it: in his mother’s heart the elder son was the best beloved of the two.
And it was this one who had married with so much haste and mystery – the favourite son, the son with money, the son who might have married any one he pleased. It was hard to choke down prejudice when this son was bringing home a wife from the Bush, of all places!
What would she be like? What could she be like?
CHAPTER II
HOME IN STYLE
‘He must be mad!’ said Granville, flourishing a telegram in his hand.
‘He must be very fond of her,’ Lady Bligh replied, simply.
Granville held the telegram at arm’s length, and slowly focussed it with his eyeglass. He had already declaimed it twice, once with horror in his voice, once with a running accompaniment of agreeable raillery. His third reading was purely compassionate, in accordance with his latest theory regarding the mental condition of the sender.
‘“Arrived