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Page 28
Then, quite suddenly, he had applied for the Chiltern Hundreds, and
left England. His motives for this unlikely course he explained to no
one. To a few intimate friends he wrote brief letters of farewell. 'I
am off for a journey round the world. I shall be gone an indefinite
time.' The indefinite time ended by defining itself as upwards of
thirty years, for the first twenty of which only his solicitor and his
bankers could have given you his address, and they wouldn't. For the
last ten he was understood to be living in the island of Porto Rico,
and planting sugar. Meanwhile his uncle had died, and his cousin (his
uncle's only son) had succeeded to the peerage. But the other day his
cousin, too, had died, and died childless, so that the estates and
dignities had devolved upon himself. With that, a return to England
became an obligation; there were a score of minor beneficiaries under
his cousin's will, whose legacies could not, without great delay, be
paid unless the new lord was at hand.
II.
Mrs Sandryl-Kempton sat before the fire in her wide, airy, faded
drawing-room, and thought of the Theodore Vellan of old days, and
wondered what the present Lord Vellan would be like. She had got a
note from him that morning, despatched from Southampton the day
before, announcing, 'I shall be in town to-morrow--at Bowden's Hotel,
in Cork Street,' and asking when he might come to her. She had
answered by telegraph, 'Come and dine at eight to-night,' to which he
had wired back an acceptance. Thereupon, she had told her son that he
must dine at his club; and now she was seated before her fire, waiting
for Theodore Vellan to arrive, and thinking of thirty years ago.
She was a bride then, and her husband, her brother Paul, and Theodore
Vellan were bound in a league of ardent young-mannish friendship, a
friendship that dated from the time when they had been undergraduates
together at Oxford. She thought of the three handsome, happy,
highly-endowed young men, and of the brilliant future she had foreseen
for each of them: her husband at the Bar, her brother in the Church,
and Vellan--not in politics, she could never understand his political
aspirations, they seemed quite at odds with the rest of his
character--but in literature, as a poet, for he wrote verse which she
considered very unusual and pleasing. She thought of this, and then
she remembered that her husband was dead, that her brother was dead,
and that Theodore Vellan had been dead to his world, at all events,
for thirty years. Not one of them had in any way distinguished
himself; not one had in any measure fulfilled the promise of his
youth.
Her memories were sweet and bitter; they made her heart glow and ache.
Vellan, as she recalled him, had been, before all things, gentle. He
was witty, he had humour, he had imagination; but he was, before all
things, gentle--with the gentlest voice, the gentlest eyes, the
gentlest manners. His gentleness, she told herself, was the chief
element of his charm--his gentleness, which was really a phase of his
modesty. 'He was very gentle, he was very modest, he was very graceful
and kind,' she said; and she remembered a hundred instances of his
gentleness, his modesty, his kindness. Oh, but he was no milksop. He
had plenty of spirit, plenty of fun; he was boyish, he could romp. And
at that, a scene repeated itself to her mind, a scene that had passed
in this same drawing-room more than thirty years ago. It was
tea-time, and on the tea-table lay a dish of pearl biscuits, and she
and her husband and Vellan were alone. Her husband took a handful of
pearl biscuits, and tossed them one by one into the air, while Vellan
threw back his head, and caught them in his mouth as they came
down--that was one of his accomplishments. She smiled as she
remembered it, but at the same time she put her handkerchief to her
eyes.
'Why did he go away? What could it have been?' she wondered, her old
bewilderment at his conduct, her old longing to comprehend it,
reviving with something of the old force. 'Could it have been...?
Could it have been...?' And an old guess, an old theory, one she had
never spoken to anybody, but had pondered much in silence, again
presented itself interrogatively to her mind.
The door opened; the butler mumbled a name; and she saw a tall,
white-haired, pale old man smiling at her and holding out his hands.
It took her a little while to realise who it was. With an unthinking
disallowance for the action of time, she had been expecting a young
fellow of eight-and-twenty, brown-haired and ruddy.
Perhaps he, on his side, was taken aback a little to meet a
middle-aged lady in a cap.
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