The process for which Sir Paget’s reluctant amusement found a nickname
was a natural one in the circumstances of the case. If the Dundrannan
personality was potent, so was the Dundrannan property. Cragsfoot was
a small affair compared even to Briarmount alone; Waldo was not yet
master even of Cragsfoot, for Sir Paget was not the man to take off
his clothes before bedtime. Besides Briarmount, there was Dundrannan
Castle, with its deer and its fishing; there was the Villa San Carlo at
Mentone; never mind what else there was, even after “public objects”
and Captain Frost had, between them, shorn off so large a part of the
Frost concerns and millions. Moreover, another process set in, and
was highly developed by the time I returned to England in the autumn
of 1918, when my last foreign excursion on Government service ended.
Family solidarity, and an identity of business interests in many
matters, brought Nina, and, by consequence, Waldo, into close and ever
closer association with Godfrey Frost. The young man was not swallowed;
he had too strong a brain and will of his own for that; but he was
attached. The three of them came to form a triumvirate for dealing with
the Frost concerns, settling the policy of the Frost family, defining
the Frost attitude towards the world outside. And everybody else was
outside of that inner circle, even though we of Cragsfoot might be only
just outside. So as Waldo, on his marriage, had shifted his bodily
presence from Cragsfoot to Briarmount, his mind and his predominant
interests also centered there; and presently to his were added, in
great measure, Godfrey Frost’s. Nina presided over this union of hearts
and forces with a sure tact; she did not seek to play the despot, but
she was the bond and the inspiration.
Naturally, then, if the three saw eye to eye in all these great
matters, they also saw eye to eye, and felt heart to heart, on such
a merely sentimental subject as the view to take of Lucinda—of whom,
of course, Godfrey derived any idea that he had mainly from Nina.
Probably the idea thus derived was that she was emphatically a person
of whom the less said the better! Only—the curious fact crops up
again—she was not one of whom Nina was capable of saying absolutely
nothing, of giving no hints. Her husband excepted, anybody really near
to her was sure to hear something of Lucinda. Besides, there was the
information, sketchy indeed, but significant, which he had received
from Aunt Bertha, and perhaps that had made him question his cousin;
then either her answers or even her reluctance to answer would have
been enlightening to a man of his intelligence.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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