But in an instant the young man was at his side. “I will not ask your reasons, sir,” he said, “but I will give you mine for being here. Miss Newell cannot be married unless you are present at the ceremony. The young man’s parents know that she has a father living, and they give their consent only on condition that he appears at her marriage. I believe it is customary in old French families—.”
“Old French families be damned!” said Mr. Newell with sudden vigour. “She had better marry an American.” And he made a more decided motion to free himself from Garnett’s importunities.
But his resistance only strengthened the young man’s. The more unpleasant the latter’s task became, the more unwilling he grew to see his efforts end in failure. During the three days which had been consumed in his quest it had become clear to him that the bridegroom’s parents, having been surprised into a reluctant consent, were but too ready to withdraw it on the plea of Mr. Newell’s non-appearance. Mrs. Newell, on the last edge of tension, had confided to Garnett that the Morningfields were “being nasty”; and he could picture the whole powerful clan, on both sides of the Channel, arrayed in a common resolve to exclude poor Hermione from their ranks. The very inequality of the contest stirred his blood, and made him vow that in this case at least the sins of the parents should not be visited on the children. In his talk with the young secretary he had obtained some glimpses of Baron Schenkelderff’s past which fortified this resolve. The Baron, at one time a familiar figure in a much-observed London set, had been mixed up in an ugly money-lending business ending in suicide, which had excluded him from the society most accessible to his race. His alliance with Mrs. Newell was doubtless a desperate attempt at rehabilitation, a forlorn hope on both sides, but likely to be an enduring tie because it represented, to both partners, their last chance of escape from social extinction. That Hermione’s marriage was a mere stake in their game did not in the least affect Garnett’s view of its urgency. If on their part it was a sordid speculation, to her it had the freshness of the first wooing. If it made of her a mere pawn in their hands, it would put her, so Garnett hoped, beyond farther risk of such base uses; and to achieve this had become a necessity to him.
The sense that, if he lost sight of Mr. Newell, the latter might not easily be found again, nerved Garnett to hold his ground in spite of the resistance he encountered; and he tried to put the full force of his plea into the tone with which he cried: “Ah, you don’t know your daughter!”
VI
MRS. NEWELL, that afternoon, met him on the threshold of her sitting-room with a “Well?” of pent-up anxiety.
In the room itself, Baron Schenkelderff sat with crossed legs and head thrown back, in an attitude which he did not see fit to alter at the young man’s approach.
Garnett hesitated; but it was not the summariness of the Baron’s greeting which he resented.
“You’ve found him?” Mrs. Newell exclaimed.
“Yes; but—”
She followed his glance and answered it with a slight shrug. “I can’t take you into my room, because there’s a dressmaker there, and she won’t go because she is waiting to be paid. Schenkelderff,” she exclaimed, “you’re not wanted; please go and look out of the window.”
The Baron rose and, lighting a cigarette, laughingly retired to the embrasure. Mrs. Newell flung herself down and signed to Garnett to take a seat at her side.
“Well—you’ve found him? You’ve talked with him?”
“Yes; I have talked with him—for an hour.”
She made an impatient movement. “That’s too long! Does he refuse?”
“He doesn’t consent.”
“Then you mean—?”
“He wants time to think it over.”
“Time? There
“I told him so; but you must remember that he has plenty. He has taken twenty-four hours.”
Mrs. Newell groaned. “Oh, that’s too much. When he thinks things over he always refuses.”
“Well, he would have refused at once if I had not agreed to the delay.”
She rose nervously from her seat and pressed her hands to her forehead. “It’s too hard, after all I’ve done! The trousseau is ordered—think how disgraceful! You must have managed him badly; I’ll go and see him myself.”
The Baron, at this, turned abruptly from his study of the Place Vendome.
“My dear creature, for heaven’s sake don’t spoil everything!” he exclaimed.
Mrs. Newell coloured furiously. “What’s the meaning of that brilliant speech?”
“I was merely putting myself in the place of a man on whom you have ceased to smile.”
He picked up his hat and stick, nodded knowingly to Garnett, and walked toward the door with an air of creaking jauntiness.
But on the threshold Mrs. Newell waylaid him.
“Don’t go—I must speak to you,” she said, following him into the antechamber; and Garnett remembered the dressmaker who was not to be dislodged from her bedroom.
In a moment Mrs. Newell returned, with a small flat packet which she vainly sought to dissemble in an inaccessible pocket.
“He makes everything too odious!” she exclaimed; but whether she referred to her husband or the Baron it was left to Garnett to decide.
She sat silent, nervously twisting her cigarette-case between her fingers, while her visitor rehearsed the details of his conversation with Mr. Newell. He did not indeed tell her the arguments he had used to shake her husband’s resolve, since in his eloquent sketch of Hermione’s situation there had perforce entered hints unflattering to her mother; but he gave the impression that his hearer had in the end been moved, and for that reason had consented
