Viviette.

by William J. Locke.

CHAPTER I

THE BROTHERS

"d.i.c.k," said Viviette, "ought to go about in skins like a primitive man."

Katherine Holroyd looked up from her needlework. She was a gentle, fair-haired woman of thirty, with demure blue eyes, which regarded the girl with a mingling of pity, protection, and amus.e.m.e.nt.

"My dear," she said, "whenever I see a pretty girl fooling about with a primitive man I always think of a sweet little monkey I once knew, who used to have great sport with a lyddite sh.e.l.l. Her master kept it on his table as a paper-weight, and no one knew it was loaded. One day she hit the sh.e.l.l in the wrong place--and they're still looking for the monkey.

Don't think d.i.c.k is the empty sh.e.l.l."

Whereupon she resumed her work, and for a few moments the click of thimble and needle alone broke the summer stillness. Viviette lay idly on a long garden chair admiring the fit of a pair of dainty tan shoes, which she twiddled with graceful twists of the ankles some five feet from her nose. At Mrs. Holroyd's remark she laughed after the manner of one quite contented with herself--a low, musical laugh, in harmony with the blue June sky and the flowering chestnuts and the song of the thrushes.

"My intentions with regard to d.i.c.k are strictly honourable," she remarked. "We've been engaged for the last eleven years, and I still have his engagement ring. It cost three-and-sixpence."

"I only want to warn you, dear," said Mrs. Holroyd. "Anyone can see that d.i.c.k is in love with you, and if you don't take care you'll have Austin falling in love with you too."

Viviette laughed again. "But he has already fallen! I don't think he knows it yet; but he has. It's great fun being a woman, isn't it, dear?"

"I don't know that I've ever found it so," Katherine replied with a sigh. She was a widow, and had loved her husband, and her sky was still tinged with grey.

Viviette, quick to catch the sadness in the voice, made no reply, but renewed the contemplation of her shoe-tips.

"I'm afraid you're an arrant little coquette," said Katherine indulgently.

"Lord Banstead says I'm a little devil," she laughed.

If she was in some measure a coquette she may be forgiven. What woman can have suddenly revealed to her the thrilling sense of her s.e.x's mastery over men without s.n.a.t.c.hing now and then the fearful joy of using her power? She was one-and-twenty, her heart still unawakened, and she had returned to her childhood's home to find men who had danced her on their knees bending low before her, and proclaiming themselves her humble va.s.sals. It was intoxicating. She had always looked up to Austin with awe, as one too remote and holy for girlish irreverence. And now!

No wonder her s.e.x laughed within her.

Until she had gone abroad to finish her education, she had lived in that old, grey manor-house, that dreamed in the sunshine of the terrace below which she was sitting, ever since they had brought her thither, an orphaned child of three. Mrs. Ware, her guardian, was her adopted mother; the sons, d.i.c.k and Austin Ware, her brothers--the engagement, when she was ten and d.i.c.k one-and-twenty, had hardly fluttered the fraternal relationship. She had left them a merry, kittenish child. She had returned a woman, slender, full-bosomed, graceful, alluring, with a maturity of fascination beyond her years. Enemies said she had gipsy blood in her veins. If so, the infusion must have taken place long, long ago, for her folks were as proud of their name as the Wares of Ware House. But, for all that, there was a suggestion of the exotic in the olive and cream complexion, and the oval face, pointing at the dimpled chin; something of the woodland in her lithe figure and free gestures; in her swimming, dark eyes one could imagine something fierce and untamable lying beneath her laughing idleness. Katherine Holroyd called her a coquette, Austin whatever the whim of a cultured fancy suggested, and Lord Banstead a little devil. As for d.i.c.k, he called her nothing.

His love was too great; his vocabulary too small.

Lord Banstead was a neighbour who, in the course of three months, had proposed several times to Viviette.

"I'm not very much to look at," he remarked on the first of these occasions--he was a weedy, pallid youth of six-and-twenty--"and the t.i.tle's not very old, I must admit. Governor only a scientific Johnnie, Margetson, the celebrated chemist, you know, who discovered some beastly gas or other and got made a peer--but I can sit with the other old rotters in the House of Lords, you know, if I want. And I've got enough to run the show, if you'll keep me from chucking it away as I'm doing.

It'd be a G.o.dsend if you'd marry me, I give you my word."

"Before I have anything to do with you," replied Viviette, who had heard d.i.c.k express his opinion of Lord Banstead in forcible terms, "you'll have to forswear sack, and--and a very big AND--"

Lord Banstead, not being learned in literary allusions, looked bewildered. Viviette laughed.

"I'll translate if you like. You'll have to give up unlimited champagne and whiskey and lead an ostensibly respectable life."

Whereupon Lord Banstead called her a little devil and went off in dudgeon to London and took golden-haired ladies out to supper. When he returned to the country he again offered her his t.i.tle, and being rejected a second time, again called her a little devil, and went back to the fashionable supper-room. A third and a fourth time he executed this complicated manoeuvre; and now news had reached Viviette that he was in residence at Farfield, where he was boring himself exceedingly in his father's scientific library.

"I suppose he'll be coming over to-day," said Viviette.

"Why do you encourage him?" asked Katherine.

"I don't," Viviette retorted. "I snub him unmercifully. If I am a coquette it's with real men, not with the by-product of a chemical experiment."

Katherine dropped her work and her underlip, and turned reproachful blue eyes on the girl.

"Viviette!"

"Oh, she's shocked! Saint Nitouche is shocked!" Then, with a change of manner, she rose and, bending over Katherine's chair, kissed her. "I'm sorry, dear," she said, in pretty penitence. "I know it was an abominable and unladylike thing to say, but my tongue sometimes runs away with my thoughts. Forgive me."

At that moment a man dressed in rough tweeds and leggings, who had emerged from the stable side of the manor-house, crossed the terrace, and, descending the steps, walked over the lawn towards the two ladies.

He had ma.s.sive shoulders and a thick, strong neck, coa.r.s.e reddish hair, and a moustache of a lighter shade. Blue eyes looked with a curious childish pathos out of a face tanned by sun and weather. He slouched slightly in his gait, like the heavy man accustomed to the saddle. This was d.i.c.k Ware, the elder of the brothers and heir to fallen fortunes, mortgaged house and lands, and he gave the impression of failure, of a man who, in spite of thews and sinews, had been unable to grapple with circ.u.mstance.

Viviette left Katherine to her needlework, and advanced to meet him. At her spontaneous act of welcome a light came into his eyes. He removed from his lips the short corn-cob pipe he was smoking.

"I've just been looking at the new mare. She's a beauty. I know I oughtn't to have got her, but she was going dirt cheap--and what can a man do when he's offered a horse at a quarter its value?"

"Nothing, my dear d.i.c.k, save pay four times as much as he can afford."

"But we had to get a new beast," he argued seriously. "We can't go about the country in a donkey-cart. If I hadn't bought one, Austin would, for the sake of the family dignity--and I do like to feel independent of Austin now and then."

"I wish you were entirely independent of Austin," said Viviette, walking with him up the lawn.

"I can't, so long as I stay here doing nothing. But if I went out to Canada or New Zealand, as I want to do, who would look after my mother?

I'm tied by the leg."

"I'd look after mother," said Viviette. "And you'd write me nice long letters, saying how you were getting on, and I would send you nice little bulletins, and we should all be very happy."

"Do you want to get rid of me, Viviette?"

"I want you to have your heart's desire."

"You know what my heart's desire is," he said unsteadily.

"Why, to raise sheep or drive cattle, or chop down trees in the backwoods," she replied, lifting demure eyebrows. "Oh, d.i.c.k, don't be foolish. See--there's mother just come out."

With a light laugh she escaped and ran up the steps to meet an old lady, rather infirm, who, with the aid of a stick, was beginning to take her morning walk up and down the terrace. d.i.c.k followed her moodily.

"Good morning, mother," said he, bending down to kiss her.

Mrs. Ware put up her cheek, and received the salute with no great show of pleasure.

"Oh, how you smell of tobacco smoke, d.i.c.k. Where's Austin? Please go and find him. I want to hear what he has to say about the stables."

"What can he say, mother?"