Bertram Mitford - The Red Derelict

For the wanderer’s own sake, the old squire in his heart of hearts could almost have brought himself to hope so. For of Everard Wagram the best description had been “a bad lot” – an all round bad lot, and for years his father and brother had lived in secret dread of any day hearing he had come to a bad end. Now gazing at the portrait, the old man was furtively making comparison between its original and Wagram; wondering, too, for the hundredth time, not that there should be any difference between them, but that their characters should be so entirely and completely divergent. But they were of different mothers, and behind this fact lay a good deal. They had both had the same chances, but different mothers, and the younger man had gone utterly to the bad.

“Did you say the young lady’s bicycle was smashed, Wagram?” said the Squire at last, reverting to the adventure.

“All to smithereens. But I’ve drawn up a wire to Gee and Vincent to send her the latest thing up to date, and that sharp. I’ve also written Warren to let her have one on hire until it comes.”

“Yes, that’s quite right. But I doubt if it’ll end there. Calmour’s quite capable of threatening an action for damages with a view to compromise. He’s a most astonishing cad, and chronically hard up.”

“Poor devil. In the latter line he has my sympathy,” said Wagram. “But it wasn’t he who got damaged, it was the girl.”

“That’s just it, and that’s where he’ll score. If she’s put in the box, from your description of her the conscientious and respectable British jury that won’t give her damages doesn’t exist.”

“I can hardly think she’d be a party to anything of that sort,” rejoined Wagram. “She seemed to me a nice sort of a girl; too nice, in fact, to lend herself to that kind of thing.”

The Squire’s head shot up quickly, and for a moment he looked at his son with grave concern. The two were alone together now.

“Don’t you know lovely woman better than that even by this time, Wagram?” he said.

“Well, I ought to,” was the answer, beneath the tone of which lurked a bitterness of rancour, such as seldom indeed escaped this man, normally so equable and self-possessed with regard to the things, so tolerant and considerate towards the persons, about him.

“I should say so,” assented the Squire; “and I’ll bet you five guineas your acquaintance with this one doesn’t end where it begun.”

“I don’t see how it can. If it hadn’t been for her I should almost certainly have lost my life.”

“If it hadn’t been for her your life would not have been in danger, so the situation is even all round.”

Wagram laughed.

“There’s something in that, father. But you say these are absolutely impossible people?”

“Absolutely and entirely – dangerous as well. Didn’t I tell you just now about one of them and Vance’s eldest idiot? Why, for all we know, it may have been your heroine of to-day.”

“It may, of course. Still I have an instinct that it was probably one of the others. Wouldn’t it be the right thing if I were to call and inquire after the girl, make sure she’s none the worse for her spill. It would be only civil, you know.”

“Civil but risky. If you did that it wouldn’t be long before Calmour and some of them returned it. They’d jump at the opportunity. A Calmour at Hilversea! Phew! It would be about as much in place as a cow in a church.”

“That makes it awkward certainly.”

“Doesn’t it? Besides, I don’t see that what you suggest is in the least necessary. The girl on your own showing, wasn’t hurt. Her bicycle got smashed, and we are sending her a new one, probably ten times as good as the one she had before. Moreover we’ve lost one of our African antelopes. Upon my word I think the house of Calmour is far more indebted to us than we are to it. Just shut that window, Wagram. It’s beginning to get a little chilly.”

The sweet, distilling air of meadow and closing flower greeted Wagram’s nostrils as he lingered while obeying, and from the gloaming woodlands came the weird, musical hooting of owls, and again he felt that intense, ecstatic thrill of possession sweep through his being. And as he turned from the window, he heard the Squire repeat, this time half to himself:

“A Calmour at Hilversea! Pho!”

“Oh, what a perfect beauty! Look, Bob. Free wheel, Bowden brakes, everything.”

The hall of Siege House was littered with wrappings and twine, in the midst of which stood Delia Calmour, in a fervour of delight and admiration, while her brother Bob extracted from its crate a brand new bicycle which had just been delivered by railway van.

“Rather! Gee and Vincent, tip-top maker,” pronounced the said Bob, wheeling her machine clear of the litter and surveying it critically. “You’re in luck’s way this time, Delia. First chop new bike for a beginning, and now what about the damages? I’m only wondering whether five hundred would be starting too low.”

“Damages! What are you talking about?” said Delia shortly.

“Why, you got a toss, didn’t you – a bad one too – and owing to Wagram’s wild beast. There you are. First-rate grounds for action. Damages a dead cert. The only question is how much.”

“Oh Bob, don’t be such a beastly young cad,” retorted Delia, with a heightened colour and a flash in her eyes, plain speaking being the custom at Siege House. “But then I forgot,” she continued, coldly ironical. “It’s your trade to scent out plunder, or will be when you’ve learnt it. Good boy, Bob. Stick to biz, and never miss a chance.”

The point of which remark was that its object was in the employ of a firm of solicitors. Incidentally, he was a loose hung, pale faced youth, who was won’t to turn on an exaggerated raffishness out of office hours, under the impression that it was sporting.

“I should think not,” retorted Bob angrily. “And I don’t see any sense in jumping down my throat because I want to do you a good turn.”

“What are you kicking up such a row about Bob, and how the devil am I going to get through my typing in the middle of all this jaw?”

The above, uttered in a sweet and fluty voice, proceeded from an exceedingly handsome girl who now appeared from an adjoining door. She had straight regular features of the classical order, and a pair of large limpid blue eyes, the soulful innocence of whose expression imparted an air of spirituality to the whole face. Yet never was expression more entirely deceptive.

“Oh, keep your hair on, Clytie. I’m only telling Delia how to get five hundred damages out of Wagram. You’d never have got your cool thou, out of Vance if it hadn’t been for me. It’s her turn now,” sneered Bob.

“You mean I’d never have got what your precious firm chose to pass on to me out of it,” retorted the girl serenely. Her brother grinned.

“Biz is biz and costs are costs. We don’t want work for nothing in the law,” he added.

“We! M’yes. Grandiloquent, very. So that’s the new bike?” going over to examine it. “It is a ripper. D’you think there are any more African wild beasts loose at Hilversea, Delia? I could do with a new bike myself.”

Delia, listening, was simply incapable of reply lest she should reveal the lurid anger which was simmering beneath. Her long absence from home and its incidents had gone far towards refining away the cynical vulgarity of mind and speech which was the prevailing tone in her family circle, from her father downwards. Not this alone, however, was at the back of her present indignation. A week had elapsed since her adventure, and the recollection of the acquaintanceship to which it had led – matter of a few minutes as such had been – glowed fresh in her mind, as indeed it had done ever since; though not for worlds would she have let drop word or hint to those about her that such was the case. She was by no means deficient in assurance and self-esteem, yet that day in the presence of Wagram she had felt inferior. He had seemed to her as a different order of being, this man whose prompt courage and readiness, and the exercise thereof, had glided so naturally into the calm considerate kindness whose first thought had been to make good her loss. The refinement of his aspect and manner, the utter absence of even any passing instinct to improve the situation, so different to those among whom she lived and moved, had completed the spell of magnetism he had all unconsciously cast over her, and in that short space her mind had undergone a complete transformation. Had the case been put before her as that of somebody else, Delia would unhesitatingly have pronounced it as one of falling over head and ears in love. Being her own it took on the aspect of a conversion to a sublime and compelling creed, the deity whereof was Wagram. And this was the man against whom her brother was suggesting a low and vulgar scheme of plunder – legal plunder, it was true, but still plunder.