His Grace of Ormskirk was moved to mirth. 'Child, child, you are so deliciously young it appears a monstrous crime to marry you to an old fellow like me!' He took her firm, soft hand in his. 'Are you quite sure you can endure me, Marian?'
'Why, but of course I want to marry you,' she said, naively surprised. 'How else could I be Duchess of Ormskirk?'
Again he chuckled. 'You are a worldly little wretch,' he stated; 'but if you want my title for a new toy, it is at your service. And now be off with you,—you and your foolish woods, indeed!'
Marian went a slight distance and then turned about, troubled. 'I am really very fond of you, Jack,' she said, conscientiously.
'Be off with you!' the Duke scolded. 'You should be ashamed of yourself to practice such flatteries and blandishments on a defenceless old gentleman. You had best hurry, too, for if you don't I shall probably kiss you,' he threatened. 'I, also,' he added, with point.
She blew him a kiss from her finger-tips and went away singing.
Sang Marian:
II
Left to his own resources, the Duke of Ormskirk sat down beside the table and fell to making irrelevant marks upon a bit of paper. He hummed the air of Marian's song. There was a vague contention in his face. Once he put out his hand toward the open despatch-box, but immediately he sighed and pushed, it farther from him. Presently he propped his chin upon both hands and stayed in the attitude for a long while, staring past the balustrade at the clear, pale sky of April.
Thus Marian's father, the Earl of Brudenel, found Ormskirk. The Earl was lean and gray, though only three years older than his prospective son-in-law, and had been Ormskirk's intimate since boyhood. Ormskirk had for Lord Brudenel's society the liking that a successful person usually preserves for posturing in the gaze of his outrivalled school-fellows: Brudenel was an embodied and flattering commentary as to what a less able man might make of chances far more auspicious than Ormskirk ever enjoyed. All failure the Earl's life had been; in London they had long ago forgotten handsome Harry Heleigh and the composure with which he nightly shoved his dwindling patrimony across the gaming-table; about Halvergate men called him 'the muddled Earl,' and said of him that his heart died, with his young wife some eighteen years back. Now he vegetated in the home of his fathers, contentedly, a veteran of life, retaining still a mild pride in his past vagaries; [Footnote: It was then well said of him by Claridge, 'It is Lord Henry Heleigh's vanity to show that he is a man of pleasure as well as of business; and thus, in settlement, the expedition he displays toward a fellow-gambler is equitably balanced by his tardiness toward a too-credulous shoemaker.'] and kindly time had armed him with the benumbing, impenetrable indifference of the confessed failure. He was abstractedly courteous to servants, and he would not, you felt, have given even to an emperor his undivided attention. For the rest, the former wastrel had turned miser, and went noticeably shabby as a rule, but this morning he was trimly clothed, for he was returning homeward from the quarter-sessions at Winstead.
'Dreamer!' said the Earl. 'I do not wonder that you grow fat.'
The Duke smiled up at him. 'Confound you, Harry!' said he, 'I had just overreached myself into believing I had made what the world calls a mess of my career and was supremely happy. There are disturbing influences abroad to-day.' He waved his hand toward the green-and-white gardens. 'Old friend, you permit disreputable trespassers about Halvergate. 'See you not Goldy-locks there, in her yellow gown and green sleeves? the profane pipes, the tinkling timbrels?' Spring is at her wiles yonder,—Spring, the liar, the queen-cheat, Spring that tricks all men into happiness.'
''Fore Gad,' the Earl capped his quotation, 'if the heathen man could stop his ears with wax against the singing woman of the sea, then do you the like with your fingers against the trollop of the forest.'
'Faith, time seals them firmlier than wax. You and I may sit snug now with never a quicker heart-beat for all her lures. Yet I seem to remember,—once a long while ago when we old fellows were somewhat sprier,—I, too, seem to remember this Spring-magic.'
'Indeed,' observed the Earl, seating himself ponderously, 'if you refer to a certain inclination at that period of the year toward the likeliest wench in the neighborhood, so do I. 'Tis an obvious provision of nature, I take it, to secure the perpetuation of the species. Spring comes, and she sets us all a-mating—humanity, partridges, poultry, pigs, every blessed one of us she sets a-mating. Propagation, Jack—propagation is necessary, d'ye see; because,' the Earl conclusively demanded, 'what on earth would become of us if we didn't propagate?'
'The argument is unanswerable,' the Duke conceded. 'Yet I miss it,—this Spring magic that no longer sets the blood of us staid fellows a-fret.'
'And I,' said Lord Brudenel, 'do not. It got me into the deuce of a scrape more than once.'
'Yours is the sensible view, no doubt….Yet I miss it. Ah, it is not only the wenches and the red lips of old years,—it is not only that at this season lasses' hearts grow tender. There are some verses—' The Duke quoted, with a half-guilty air:
