PAGE 12
The Last Asset
by
Mr. Newell paused as he was turning away. “Not for what?” he enquired.
“The fact that, as it happens, the wedding can’t be put through without your help.”
Mr. Newell’s thin lips formed a noiseless whistle. “They’ve got to have my consent, have they? Well, is he a good young man?”
“The bridegroom?” Garnett echoed in surprise. “I hear the best accounts of him–and Miss Newell is very much in love.”
Her parent met this with an odd smile. “Well, then, I give my consent–it’s all I’ve got left to give,” he added philosophically.
Garnett hesitated. “But if you consent–if you approve–why do you refuse your daughter’s request?”
Mr. Newell looked at him a moment. “Ask Mrs. Newell!” he said. And as Garnett was again silent, he turned away with a slight gesture of leave-taking.
But in an instant the young man was at his side. “I will not ask your reasons, sir,” he said, “but I will give you mine for being here. Miss Newell cannot be married unless you are present at the ceremony. The young man’s parents know that she has a father living, and they give their consent only on condition that he appears at her marriage. I believe it is customary in old French families–.”
“Old French families be damned!” said Mr. Newell with sudden vigour. “She had better marry an American.” And he made a more decided motion to free himself from Garnett’s importunities.
But his resistance only strengthened the young man’s. The more unpleasant the latter’s task became, the more unwilling he grew to see his efforts end in failure. During the three days which had been consumed in his quest it had become clear to him that the bridegroom’s parents, having been surprised into a reluctant consent, were but too ready to withdraw it on the plea of Mr. Newell’s non-appearance. Mrs. Newell, on the last edge of tension, had confided to Garnett that the Morningfields were “being nasty”; and he could picture the whole powerful clan, on both sides of the Channel, arrayed in a common resolve to exclude poor Hermione from their ranks. The very inequality of the contest stirred his blood, and made him vow that in this case at least the sins of the parents should not be visited on the children. In his talk with the young secretary he had obtained some glimpses of Baron Schenkelderff’s past which fortified this resolve. The Baron, at one time a familiar figure in a much-observed London set, had been mixed up in an ugly money-lending business ending in suicide, which had excluded him from the society most accessible to his race. His alliance with Mrs. Newell was doubtless a desperate attempt at rehabilitation, a forlorn hope on both sides, but likely to be an enduring tie because it represented, to both partners, their last chance of escape from social extinction. That Hermione’s marriage was a mere stake in their game did not in the least affect Garnett’s view of its urgency. If on their part it was a sordid speculation, to her it had the freshness of the first wooing. If it made of her a mere pawn in their hands, it would put her, so Garnett hoped, beyond farther risk of such base uses; and to achieve this had become a necessity to him.
The sense that, if he lost sight of Mr. Newell, the latter might not easily be found again, nerved Garnett to hold his ground in spite of the resistance he encountered; and he tried to put the full force of his plea into the tone with which he cried: “Ah, you don’t know your daughter!”
VI
MRS. NEWELL, that afternoon, met him on the threshold of her sitting-room with a “Well?” of pent-up anxiety.
In the room itself, Baron Schenkelderff sat with crossed legs and head thrown back, in an attitude which he did not see fit to alter at the young man’s approach.
Garnett hesitated; but it was not the summariness of the Baron’s greeting which he resented.