Jack Compton's Luck

It would mean that he would have to stay in London longer than he had intended, but never mind that. He had had few opportunities to enjoy himself since he had left the army, and the pull of Miss Lacey Chancellor was so strong and profound that he could not ignore it.

No woman had ever attracted him so powerfully before.

‘Now, Aunt,’ said Lacey once they had reached home again, ‘why was it that you were so cool to Jack Compton? He seemed to me exactly the sort of young man of whom you would most approve.’

Her aunt shook her head and said grimly, ‘But you hadn’t overheard him talking with that flighty cousin of his, Rupert Compton. If you had you wouldn’t be defending him. They were, in the most cold-blooded fashion, talking about having a go at you because you are an heiress worth winning. Particularly since it seems that Jack Compton, as well as Rupert, is on his uppers. Jack actually described you as being “as hard as nails”. They were his exact words, I fear.’

The colour drained from Lacey’s face. ‘Are you sure, Aunt? Couldn’t you have been mistaken?’

‘Indeed I wasn’t. I was in the best possible position to hear every word they said. I can’t remember everything, of course, but it wasn’t very pleasant, mostly about you and your money. I warned you about this before you left the States.’

As hard as nails! So that was what he thought of her! All that charm had been poured over her simply so that he could get at her money. It just went to show that you couldn’t judge a book by its cover—one of Grandfather Hoyt’s favourite sayings.

Fighting Jack, that jolly good fellow as everyone called him, was no better than a fortune hunter. Well, he wouldn’t hunt her fortune any more, that was for sure. What hurt her the most was that she had begun to believe that she might have met that rare thing—an honest man—only to find that he was no better than the rest who hung around her. For once she had been unwary, but never again.

She would go to Lady Lynch’s do and there he would soon find out that she was no easy mark—another saying learned from her Grandfather—and that Lacey Chancellor, could, when it pleased her, be exactly as hard as he had described her.

Numbly she sat beside her aunt, for once fighting back tears—she who never cried, she whom Grandfather had nicknamed the infant stoic because even when she had fallen out of the tree which she had insisted on climbing, she had never shed a tear and had never complained.

Her biggest regret was that she had been so attracted to him that she had forgotten to put on the invisible armour which she always wore in public. One thing was certain, she wouldn’t make that mistake again in a hurry.

Jack was whistling cheerfully while dressing himself in the poky bedroom of his lodgings. Never mind that his evening dress was shabby, he had long ago become resigned to such small drawbacks. Besides, he needed to wear evening dress so rarely that buying a new, more up-to-date version of what was now considered fashionable seemed a waste of money.

What was more important was that he was going to see Lacey Chancellor again. He had spent the morning at Coutts where the Comptons’ bank balance was running along just above the fateful line which, if it were crossed, would land it in the red. One had to be grateful for small mercies. A junior banker had interviewed him, for someone so low down in the scale of things as Jack Compton was never interviewed by the top brass. A fact of life which the suave man behind the desk had taken as read.

Tomorrow he would go home. However often he left it, or for how long, Compton Place would always be his home now. If Will had not been so gravely wounded he would have remained in the Army. Time, the death of so many young officers, and his own talents, meant that he had retired with the rank of Colonel and the lost promise of a bright future. That opportunity, like the Comptons’ wealth, was long gone.

Tonight, however, he would forget all that. He would persuade Lacey that it would be to her advantage to visit Compton Place and examine its attics. He was sure that the Sir Jack, who had inherited in 1820, and who had restored the family fortunes, had almost certainly left behind records and documents which might throw light on the Pandora Compton who had married her ancestor, Ritchie Chancellor, and on other matters, too.

Jack laughed at himself a little for inventing opportunities for seeing Lacey again. After all, Ashdown was only a short distance away from Compton Place by motor, and there was every reason why they should meet often. Examining himself in the shadowy mirror in the elderly wardrobe he thought that he almost looked like Fighting Jack again. It was funny how that nickname followed him around, even though it was not now applicable.

Finally he was ready to leave. The taxi which would take him to the Lynchs’ home on Piccadilly would be arriving any minute and he could not afford to keep it waiting. He would return to his lodgings by the Underground since no one was likely to see him depart, whilst his arrival would almost certainly be noticed by the flunkies who guarded the entrance.

He was right about that. A canopy had been erected before the door and a solid phalanx of guests was walking into the house beneath it. There were the usual watchers gaping at the quality while they amused themselves. It was something of a relief that they would not be able to see how threadbare a gent he actually was. The footman’s knowing stare, however, when he handed him his top hat, cane and gloves told him that he knew only too well that Mr Jack Compton was hanging on to his place in society by his teeth.

Several people acknowledged him on the way to the stairs at the top of which his cousin was waiting to receive him. She seemed genuinely pleased, as did her husband.

‘Oh, Jack, I’m delighted that you decided to come. I rather feared that you might abandon town as quickly as you usually do. I know things are a little dire in Sussex, but surely you could manage rather more of the season than a few days in early May.’

How to explain that with Will unfit to run things and so much to run, he really ought not to have stayed on to visit them at all? Jack didn’t even try. ‘Oh, I’m a country boy at heart, you know, and the land is a harsh mistress,’ he replied. Well, at least the second part of the last sentence wasn’t a lie, was his inward gloss on that!

‘You weren’t a country boy when I first knew you,’ remarked Louis Lynch with a wink.

‘Perhaps not, but time changes us all.’

‘True,’ said his cousin, but fortunately, by then the next visitor was waiting to be received so Jack moved on. Well, he thought, looking around him, the War hadn’t destroyed Sir Louis’s wealth. The Sargent portraits of his parents still hung on the walls. It was perfectly furnished to the last degree of sophistication with new fashion mingling well with antique opulence.

Yes, the house was in splendid nick and the signs of great prosperity were everywhere. Jack wondered exactly where all the money came from to pay for such splendour. He only knew that Sir Louis was something in the City. He wondered how one got there and why it had always been supposed that the younger Compton sons always went into the Army, or the Church or became land agents on someone else’s land.

Not that everyone in the City was wealthy—just look at poor Rupert. On second thoughts, Jack decided that he had rather not. He had come here to find Lacey, to dance the Charleston with her again and to tease her as though the past ten years had never happened.

Dancing had already started. Lady Leominster had not yet arrived, but the Marchioness of Londonderry and her two pretty daughters were already seated in one corner of the ballroom, surrounded by a large crowd of hangers-on. Not that he could aspire to the hands of either girl since the Londonderrys were at the very top of the tree in society.

Lacey had arrived, however, and was sitting beside a potted palm with the old dragon on her right and a bevy of eager young men before her. Neither Rupert nor Darcey were among them and the rest were as anonymous to Jack as the nameless courtiers on stage there to make up the numbers in one of Shakespeare’s plays.

He decided to wait a moment before approaching Lacey. The crowd gradually thinned, which gave him a chance to speak to her. By the sound of it they had been proposing themselves for the dances neatly laid out in Lacey’s programme.

Jack bowed to Lacey and Aunt Sue. He could not help noticing that her aunt stared balefully at him, but, armoured in the knowledge of his previously made arrangement to dance the Charleston with her niece, he took little notice of that.

‘Here I am, ready for another lesson in modern dance,’ he said with a smile. ‘I hope that you’ve left room for me on your programme.’

Lacey’s smile, as well as her answer, was so cool that Jack was a little shocked. She displayed little of the happy rapport which they had shared at the Leominsters’ do. Instead, her answer was a regretful, hardly apologetic one.

‘Oh, yes. The Charleston. I did promise to dance it with you, didn’t I? Oh, dear, it’s very remiss of me, but I quite forgot and my programme is already filled. I’m sorry to have been so stupid. Another time, perhaps?’

This last sentence came out after such a fashion that it gave the impression that another time would be long in coming.

Jack’s smile froze on his face. He scarcely knew what to say. He had delayed leaving London only in order to attend the Lynchs’ dance. He had spent all his spare time dreaming about seeing Lacey again, but she was making it very obvious that the moment he had left her on that happy night at the Leominsters’ she had immediately forgotten about him. For her he was simply a chance-met nobody who had entertained her for a little time before she passed on to the next anonymous man who took her brief fancy.

He mentally shook himself, but not before the disappointment which he felt so keenly was plainly written on his face. He could not stop himself from saying quietly, ‘I thought that we had had an understanding…’

Lacey was surprised to find not only how much it had hurt her to let Jack down so brusquely, but also that she felt ashamed that she had done so—and had told a lie in the doing, albeit only a white one. Bad behaviour was bad behaviour, however many excuses one made to one’s self for indulging in it.

Perhaps, after all, her aunt had not been telling her the whole truth about the conversation she had overheard. Young men often talked extravagantly when on their own and one ought not to hang them for it. Besides, she also knew that Aunt Sue was very keen for her to marry a Duke which would mean that she would go one better than that other great heiress, Cornelia Vanderbilt, who was engaged to the heir to a Barony, that of the Amhersts.

Before Jack could walk away, she said in her best impulsive manner, ‘Please allow me to try to make up to you for being so careless about what was, after all, a promise. It won’t be like dancing the Charleston with you tonight, but Richard is making up a party to visit the Wembley Exhibition tomorrow afternoon. Why not squire me there? I’m told that it’s one of the sights of the century.’

Jack’s face brightened immediately. ‘If that is what you want, then I shall be happy to oblige you. By the by, I’m told that the Ashanti warriors do a war dance there, but I can’t promise to partner you in that.’

‘No, indeed, it might be too much. You may call for me tomorrow at Richard’s place in Park Lane at one thirty and join the party. My cousin George will also be going. Now let me introduce you to George’s sister, Pamela—she’s another splendid performer on the ballroom floor. I can’t have you left without a partner because of my carelessness.’

Jack was so delighted by the prospect of a whole afternoon with Lacey that he promptly agreed, although his first impulse on being let down had been to flee the Lynchs’ ball altogether. He allowed her to lead him through the crowd to where the other Chancellors were sitting and make the promised introduction.

Aunt Sue was very reproving when Lacey returned after seeing Jack settled with them and talking cheerfully to George and his family.

‘I thought that, having virtually cut Mr Jack Compton, you would have had more sense than to revive his hopes by asking him to be your escort to the Wembley Exhibition. I am sure that Lord Wellsbourne would have been happy to accompany you there. He is rich enough not to be marrying you for your money and he has been showing a great deal of interest in you lately.’

‘Dear Aunt,’ said Lacey gently. ‘You would not have me behave shamefully to Jack Compton. I promised to dance with him tonight and it was wrong of me to fill my programme before he came, even though you had told me of what you had overheard. Besides, squiring me to Wembley means that we shall be together, with many others, in a public place. I gather that he is returning to Sussex almost immediately so that our paths won’t be crossing much in future.’

Oh, dear, and now she was telling another whopper! Her aunt was not aware, but she was, that when they went to Ashdown they would be mingling with the county society of which Jack was a part. Not only that, but she was determined to discover more about the connection between the Comptons and the Chancellors.

Aunt Sue heaved a great sigh. ‘If you are not going to take any heed of my advice, then I wonder why you felt the need for my companionship, my dear. Reflect that I know more about the world in which we are now moving than you do. These people have a veneer of polish which we in the States do not possess. One has only to read Henry James and Edith Wharton to know how true this is—and always has been. Sophisticated charm may have its theoretical limits when set against the straightforwardness which is so much a part of American life, but it does flatter to deceive and cheat us when we come to Europe as many young men and women have found to their cost.’

Lacey was sorely tempted to point out that these two novelists had actually shown how often supposedly straightforward American heroes and heroines had taken on the sophisticates of Europe and had beaten them at their own game, but she thought that it would not be tactful to inform her of that!

Fortunately, the band began to play and her first partner arrived to whirl her into the quickstep. From then on Lacey was too busy enjoying herself with a sequence of young men whose names featured prominently in Burke’s Peerage, that large volume beloved of Aunt Sue, to worry about her strictures over Jack Compton.

She saw Jack at intervals. He seemed to be enjoying himself with the Chancellors’ set, and danced the Charleston with young Pamela without showing the same athletic vigour which he had done when dancing it with her at the Leominsters’.

No time for regrets, though, until young Henry Laxton, the Duke of Beddington’s heir, came to claim her for the Charleston when the evening was three parts over. He had been sober when he had booked the dance with her, but was far from being so when he reeled up to her chair.

‘Tally ho!’ he announced unoriginally. ‘Ready for the off, are we?’

Lacey rather thought not, and tried to cool him down by saying, ‘Do you feel up to it, Henry?’

‘Hank,’ he said blearily, winking at her. ‘That’s the nickname for Henry in Yankee-land, I’ve been told. Never felt better. Come on, babe,’ and he grabbed her by the arm and hauled her on to the floor just as the music began.

The whole thing was a disaster. He was constantly falling over her feet and proclaiming that it was all her fault. ‘You know,’ he hissed at her, after they had both nearly landed flat on the floor after one of his more unfortunate manoeuvres, ‘you’re the clumsiest bitch I’ve ever had the misfortune to dance with. Are you any better in bed? Do you—’ and he began to reel off an obscene list of suggestions to her.

What to do? Lacey was aware that people were beginning to look at them. She took the whirling giddiness of the Charleston as an opportunity to wheel him slowly away from the dance floor towards an anteroom. This, young Henry took to be an invitation for seduction.

‘What ho! And tally ho,’ he exclaimed again, or Lacey thought he did, since his speech was now so slurred that it was difficult to tell exactly what he was saying. He lunged at her in a clumsy attempt to begin the apparently promised seduction, but fortunately for Lacey drink, and the gyrations of the dance, had affected him so badly that it was easy for her to trip him up. He landed on the floor, winked at her, closed his eyes and immediately began to snore.

Now, what in the world was she to do? Leave him?

She was saved by, of all people, Jack.

He had been watching the erratic progress of an obviously tipsy Henry Laxton around the floor and had seen them dancing into the anteroom. The sixth sense which had served him well had him following them in to find Henry snoring on the floor and Lacey staring down at him.

‘Dead drunk, is he?’

Lacey let out a startled laugh. ‘I fear so. My first instinct is to ask you to help me—but after the way in which I have treated you, I hardly dare to.’

It was Jack’s turn to laugh.

‘You may ask me anything you like: anything.’

‘That is a kindness which I hardly deserve.’

Jack ignored this.

‘No time to waste,’ he told her severely. ‘Help me to get him on to the sofa.’

‘And after that?’

‘I’ll think of something.’

Together they lugged the snoring Henry up from the floor and arranged him artistically on the sofa. He muttered a couple of words which sounded like ‘Tally ho!’ and promptly went to sleep yet again.

‘What now?’ asked Lacey anxiously.

Jack considered the unconscious Henry with a judicial eye. ‘He looks safe enough there to me,’ he pronounced. ‘Let’s leave him and finish the dance together. You can regard it as a thank you to me for rescuing you from that half-wit. I sometimes think that he was the original of P. G. Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster.’

It was Lacey’s turn to laugh. ‘What a splendid notion. But whatever will people think if I Charleston into an anteroom with one partner and come out with another?’

‘That you are the most original American girl who ever set sail from the tall towers of Manhattan.’

He held out his arms to her and she sank into them as though she were coming home. Both of them, while they whirled and twirled away from the unconscious Henry, could not stop laughing. They were still laughing when they reached the ballroom and began to decorate the Charleston with some original steps of their own.

Jack had not enjoyed himself so much for years. Irresponsibility held him in its thrall as it had done when he had been young and silly before the world went mad. Then, he might have been like Henry, sleeping it off on the sofa. Now, he was the recipient of Henry’s folly, being given the chance to dance with a girl with whom, quite without meaning to, he was beginning to fall in love.

What she was feeling for him, he thought ruefully, might be quite a different matter. For the present, though, he would take what fortune, that fickle goddess, was sending him and What ho! and Tally ho! he would be taking her to Wembley.

Aunt Sue’s thoughts when she saw Lacey emerge from the anteroom with Jack, after entering it with Henry, are perhaps best not recorded.

Jack and Lacey were in a world of their own. The strong attraction between them, which had been sparked off at their very first meeting, was growing more powerful by the minute. The dance ended all too soon for them.

Breathless, they stepped back. Lacey gasped out, ‘What a pity that my programme is full. We go so well together, and at the very least you are still sober—which I am sure will not be the case with all my future partners.’

‘I promise to rescue you again if any of them are as far gone as young Laxton was,’ promised Jack gallantly. ‘You have only to run up the Stars and Stripes and I shall come at the double.’

‘And ruin my reputation completely.’ Lacey laughed. ‘Now you must escort me back to Aunt Sue. I think that it would be better if you didn’t take me into supper. I daren’t imagine what all the old gossips are saying about us.’

‘They say, let them say,’ quoth Jack. ‘From what I have seen of you so far, Miss Lacey Chancellor, what other people say about you doesn’t concern you overmuch.’

Before she could answer they had reached Aunt Sue, who now had another lady of uncertain years for a companion. Jack had seen her before. She was yet one more of his distant relatives, Mrs Anna Harley, who was noted for her plain speaking.

‘Tell me, do,’ she cried, snapping her over-large fan at the pair of them, ‘what you have done with Henry Laxton. I trust that he’s still in the land of the living. He was being very forward with you, Lacey, before you disappeared, I hope that young Jack hasn’t been too severe with him.’

‘On the contrary, Cousin Anna,’ replied Jack quickly before Lacey’s aunt could add a rider to her friend’s comment since he feared that it might be over-critical of the pair of them, ‘I helped him to have a nice lie-down on one of our cousin Lynch’s more comfortable sofas. If you will all excuse me, I shall make it my business to find a footman who will be sure to see that he’s looked after before he ventures home.’

His cousin snapped her fan at him again. ‘Off you go then, young Jack. You were always a resourceful villain, as I well remember. You must tell me where you have been hiding since that wretched war was over. I want to hear all the latest news about poor William, as well.’

Jack, amused, exited bowing, as the old playwrights had it.

Lacey was equally amused. Aunt Sue would not now begin to reproach her while Jack’s cousin remained with them. Surprised to learn that she was his cousin, and that their hostess was another, she said, ‘You are related to Mr Compton, then?’

‘Who? Oh, Jack! Why, yes, I’ve known him since he was a boy. Sterling fellow, Jack. A bit wild when he was young, but aren’t they all? Miss Lacey could do worse than set her sights at Jack,’ she continued, much to Lacey’s secret, and further, amusement. ‘He may be as poor as a church mouse but he’s worth a hundred Henry Laxtons for all that Henry’s a Duke’s heir.’

Aunt Sue, who had privately decided that Henry would be just the thing for Lacey, even if he were a few years younger than she, was somewhat put out by this curt dismissal of him and even more by Anna’s unwanted praise of Jack, but she could not say so.

‘Mind you,’ continued Anna, ‘it’s some time since a Duke, or his heir, married an American heiress. Are you acquainted with Miss Cornelia Vanderbilt? I understand that she is going to marry the heir to the Amherst barony shortly. I hear that a fortune is to be spent on the day of the wedding. Pity they’ve not got better things to do with their dollars—if you’ll forgive me for saying so.’

Aunt Sue didn’t want to forgive her but, knowing that Mrs Harley was a powerful member of high society despite having no title before her name except a mere Honourable, which was a nothing of a thing since it was never used in public, had to grin and bear her freely offered opinions in silence.

Fortunately for her peace of mind and her hopes of her niece making a grand marriage, Lacey’s next partner arrived early in order to claim her for the waltz. He had the good fortune to be none other than Peregrine, Viscount Harcourt, the heir to a Marquess who had managed to hold on to his money and estates despite the depredations of the recent war.

That Lacey, as she later told her aunt, found him a dull stick after Jack, was not to the point. Aunt Sue was determined to press her case and prove that in the marriage stakes Miss Lacey Chancellor, whose mother had been one of New York’s Hoyts, was an even better bet than Cornelia Vanderbilt!

That being so, it was a pity that Mrs Harley continued to support Jack’s claim to be Lacey’s suitor all the time that Peregrine and Lacey were dancing a sedate waltz. The only thing which gave her any relief from her worries was that Jack did not return to trouble them. He had, according to Peregrine—who was also distantly related to him—left early, saying that he had to make a final visit to the solicitors early the next morning and had asked Perry to present his regards to his aunt, Miss Hoyt and to Lacey, and his pleasure that he would be seeing them again so soon.