Lord Loveland Discovers America. C. N. Williamson
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and I can't think of something to clear the weather, I shall have to chuck the army. And even if I do, the bills will still keep on snowing."
"What horrible creatures tradesmen must be," said Lady Loveland, whose opinions had come down to her crusted and spider-webbed from the cellars of the Stone Age. "To think that we'd have had power of life and death over them if we'd lived a few hundred years ago. I wish those times could come back."
"The world at large doesn't agree with you."
"It oughtn't to be at large," replied Lady Loveland, without the smallest idea of a joke. "It's reached a pretty pass when Worms who make boots and uniforms and——"
"And sell wine——"
"Oh, if you like——"
"And jewellery——"
"Very well. Admit the jewellery——"
"And motors. I've wasted a good deal of substance in riotous motor-cars, Mater."
"Oh, I suppose men of your position have some right to enjoy their lives? As I was saying, it's come to a pretty pass when Worms who make or sell what every gentleman must have—things that ought simply to come, like the air you breathe—can turn and rend an officer of the Guards, a peer of the realm, without fear of being crushed."
"If I'd chosen to be a kind of secret advertising agent for tradespeople, I might have been dressed and wined for nothing, motor-carred too, perhaps," said Loveland. "I know some fellows who do go in for that sort of thing. But I'm hanged if I could. I'd rather blow out my brains decently."
"Oh, my darling, don't speak so wildly," implored his mother. "There must be resources we can call upon—if we could only think of them."
"I have called on several people's resources, without any good coming of it." Loveland grinned faintly, though he was in the depths of depression, and had suffered from insomnia for at least a week, between eight and ten in the morning, when so popular a young man should (in his own opinion) have been dreaming of last night's pleasures, instead of worrying how to pay for them.
"There is surely a last resort," went on Lady Loveland.
"Miss Mecklenburg was mine—and she's failed me—thank Heaven!"
"There must be something else."
"Something still worse?"
"Don't be flippant, dearest. I can't concentrate my thoughts when you are. Ah, if we could have let Loveland Castle as well as we did twelve years ago!"
"It's crumbled a lot since. And we're too poor to repair ourselves, let alone our castles."
"You at least don't need repairing," said his mother, gazing at her son with admiration. "You're the handsomest young man in the Kingdom."
Loveland laughed, though he believed her. As a child he had been kissed by all his mother's prettiest friends, because he was so absurdly beautiful, and so precocious. If he had been a plain or stupid boy he might have grown up to be an estimable young man, as Marquises go. "Why don't you say, 'in the world'?" he asked.
"I'm not a woman to exaggerate, dearest. All the Lovelands have been good-looking. One has only to go into the picture gallery at the Castle to see that——"
"Yes. As we can't sell their portraits."
"If we could, your father would have done it when he sold the Town house. But you will be so confusing, Val. My argument is, that as you're the best looking and the cleverest——"
"I don't know a blessed thing, my dear ladyship. Never had any education. You ought to have sent me to Eton, instead of coddling me up with tutors and——"
"You didn't think so then. I remember well when it was proposed, you flung yourself on the floor and howled."
"So of course that settled it."
"Why, yes. You generally settled things like that. You had such a determined way, dear. But you were born knowing more than many studious, uninteresting young men have forgotten. Then, your South African career! It was like a romance. You, who had been crammed, oh, ever so little, for Sandhurst, and then left there to go to the war when you were a mere child, hardly nineteen—so brave! And then, the Thing you did on the battlefield! Of course you ought to have had the Victoria Cross, but as it was, the newspapers rang with your praises, and I was besieged for your photographs to publish. That deed alone would have made you a personage of consideration, even without your rank."
"I've told you lots of times, Mater, the whole thing was a sort of accident. I couldn't bear the chap. If I'd stopped to think, I don't believe I'd have run back a step to drag him out from under fire. But I was there, hauling him away, before I knew what I was doing."
"Yes, you have told me—and other people. But no one believes you. How could they? They see it's your modesty." (Lord Loveland's mother was perhaps the one person on earth who would have attributed to him this quality.) "And as for disliking the young man whose life you saved at the risk of your own, of course that proves you all the more noble. Everybody must see that."
"Oh, well, it's a jolly good thing for me if they do," said Val, mechanically passing his hand over the scar on his forehead, which became him like a hall mark or a halo. It, together with the South African brown that never quite faded, had made him still more ornamental in the eyes of the pretty young married women with whom he was popular. Also in the eyes of girls, who liked to dance and flirt with Lord Loveland, even though they preferred to marry Dukes and Princes. "But what are you working up to so elaborately, Mater?"
"To your Prospects. There's no young man so liked and wanted everywhere."
"Oh, I'm fair at polo: I can ride straight, and shoot a bit," said Loveland with a pretence at self-depreciation he was far from feeling. "I get asked to all the amusing house parties. But you know as well as I do, that stopping at such places is a lot more expensive than swaggering about at the most expensive hotels in Europe."
"I know, dearest," sighed the devoted lady who by industrious spoiling had made him what he was. "I was only going on to say that you are a personage of importance; never think you're not. As for the two or three wretched girls who have hurled themselves at the heads of princes, when they might have had you—why, our English heiresses are growing disgustingly conceited and ambitious, quite unmaidenly, and let them regret their mistakes—you needn't. Val, you want my advice. Well, I've had an inspiration, I do believe, a real inspiration. Why don't you go to America?"
"To try ranching?"
"Good Heavens, no, my son! To try marrying. In America you'll succeed brilliantly. Why not run over and see what there is?"
She spoke as if to see meant to have, notwithstanding certain failures nearer home. But Loveland's sense of humour, which had a real existence, did not always bestir itself when his own affairs were in question. When things come too close to the eye, one is apt to lose the point of view. And Loveland did not laugh at his mother's suggestion.
"Oh, girls!" he said, distastefully. "Why go there for them? Plenty come over here to collect us."
"Ye—es. But think of the competition. There are still unmarried Dukes. It's so annoying, there always seem to be Dukes, and foreign semi-Royalties who might better stop in their own countries than prowl about ours, seeking what they may devour."
"That's what you propose my doing in the States."
"Oh, that's different. The Americans would be the foreigners, not you."
"They don't look on themselves in that light."
"Let them look at you—the girls I mean—in any light, there, on their native heath, where practically no competition can exist. For who ever heard of an American heiress marrying an American man?"
"I suppose it must happen sometimes," said Val.
"It's never in the newspapers. No, dearest, I believe that is why, according to statistics,