Viviette | Page 2

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 Dick, 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 title'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 godsend if you'd marry me, I give you my word."
"Before I have anything to do with you," replied Viviette, who had heard Dick 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 title, 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 massive shoulders and a thick, strong neck, coarse 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 Dick 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 circumstance.
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 Dick, 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