"I was hostess, you see; and I must say that the more people talk the more I am obliged to them. I suppose that you asked Mr. Urquhart so that he might be amusing...."
James"s head lifted again. You could see it over the _Morning Post_.
"I asked Urquhart for quite other reasons, you remember."
"I don"t know what they were," said Lucy. "My own reason was that he should make things go. "A party in a parlour..."" She bit her lip. The _Morning Post_ quivered but recovered itself.
"What was the party in a parlour, Mamma? Do tell me." That was Lancelot, with a _flair_ for mischief.
"It was "all silent and all d.a.m.ned,"" said Lucy.
"Jolly party," said Lancelot. "Not like yours, though." The _Morning Post_ clacked like a bellying sail, then bore forward over an even keel. Lucy, beckoning Lancelot, left the breakfast-room.
She was ruffled, and so much so that Lancelot noticed it, and, being the very soul of tact where she was concerned, spoke neither of his father nor of Urquhart all the morning. In the afternoon the weather seemed more settled, and he allowed himself more play. He would like to see Mr. Urquhart on horseback, in a battle, he thought. He expected he"d be like Henry of Navarre. Lucy thought that he might be. Would he wear a white plume though? Much head-shaking over this. "Bareheaded, I bet you. He"s just that sort. Dashing about! Absolutely reckless!--frightfully dangerous!--a smoking sword!--going like one o"clock! Oh, I bet you what you like." Then with startling conviction, "Father doesn"t like him. Feels scored off, I expect. He wasn"t though, but he might be, all the same ... I think Father always expects he"s going to be scored off, don"t you? At any minute." Lucy set herself to combat this hazard, which was very amusing and by no means a bad shot. Poor James! What a pity it was that he couldn"t let himself like anybody. It was true--it was quite true--he was afraid of being scored off. She husbanded a sigh. "Poor James!"
To pity James was a new experience. She felt all the better for it, and was able to afford a lighter hand when they met at dinner. It may even be that James himself had thought the time come for a little relaxation of _askesis_, or he may have had something to forestall: he seldom spoke of his affairs without design. At any rate, he told her that Francis Lingen had been with him, and that Urquhart was likely to be of use. "I"ve written to him, anyhow. He will do as he thinks well.
Urquhart is a sharp man of business."
Lucy said, "He struck me so. I thought that he could never have any doubt of his own mind."
James wriggled his eyegla.s.s, to wedge it more firmly. "Ah, you noticed that? Very acute of you, Lucy. We may have a meeting before long--to arrange the whole thing.... It"s a lot of money ... ten thousand pounds.... Your Francis is an expensive young man ... or let"s say _ci-devant jeune homme_."
"Why do you call him "my" Francis?" she asked--rather mischievous than artless.
The eyegla.s.s dropped with a click and had to be sought. "Well, I can hardly call him _mine_, could I?"
"I don"t see why he should be anybody"s," said Lucy, "except his own."
"My dear girl," said Macartney, "_himself_ is the last person he belongs to. Francis Lingen will always belong to somebody. I must say that he has chosen very wisely. You do him a great deal of good."
"That"s very nice of you," she said. "I own that I like Francis Lingen. He"s very gentle, not too foolish, and good to look at. You must own that he"s extremely elegant."
"Oh," said James, tossing up his foot, "elegant! He is what his good Horace would have called "a very pretty fellow"--and what I call "a nice girl.""
"I"m sure he isn"t worth so much savagery," Lucy said. "You are like Ugolino--and poor Francis is your _fiero pasto_."
James instantly corrected himself. "My besetting sin, Lucy. But I must observe--" He applied his glazed eye to her feet--"the colour of your stockings, my friend. Ha! a tinge of blue, upon my oath!" So it pa.s.sed off, and that night when, after his half-hour with the evening paper in the drawing-room, he prepared to leave her, she held out her hand to him, and said good night. He took it, waved it; and then stooped to her offered cheek and pecked it delicately. The good girl felt quite elate. She did so like people to be kind to her.
Half an hour later yet, in her evening post was a letter from Urquhart. He proposed for herself and Lancelot to go to the play with him. The play, _Raffles_, "which ought to meet the case," he said. He added, "I don"t include Macartney in this jaunt, partly because he won"t want to come, but mainly because there won"t be room for him. I am taking a nephew, one Bob Nugent, an Osborne boy, but very gracious to poor civilians like Lancelot and me." He signed himself, "Yours to command."
Lucy was pleased, and accepted promptly; and Lancelot was pleased when he heard of it. His hackles were up at the graciousness of the Osborne kid. He honked over it like a heron. "Ho! I expect you"ll tell him that I"m R. E., or going to be," he said, which meant that he himself certainly would. The event, with subsequent modifications on the telephone, proved to be the kind of evening that Lancelot"s philosophy had never dreamed of. They dined at the Cafe Royal, where Urquhart pointed out famous Anarchists and their wives to his young guests; they went on to the theatre in what he called a "bus, but Lancelot saw to be a mighty motor which rumbled like a volcano at rest, and proceeded by a series of violent rushes, accompanied by explosions of a very dangerous kind. The whole desperate pa.s.sage, short as it was, had the right feeling of law-breaking about it.
Policemen looked reproachfully at them as they fled on. Lancelot, as guest of honour, sat in front, and wagged his hand like a semaph.o.r.e at all times and in all faces; he felt part policeman and part malefactor, which was just right. Then they thrilled at the smooth and accomplished villainy of Mr. Du Maurier, lost not one line of his faultless clothes, nor one syllable of his easy utterance, "like treacle off a spoon," said Urquhart; and then they tore back through the starry night to Onslow Square, leaving in their wake the wrecks and salvage of a hundred frail taxis; finally, from the doorstep waved the Destroyer, as the boys agreed she should be called, upon her ruthless course, listened to the short and fierce bursts of her wrath until she was lost in the great sea of sound; and then--replete to speechlessness--Lancelot looked up to his mother and squeezed her hand. She saw that his eyes were full. "Well, darling?" she said. "You liked all that?" Lancelot had recovered himself. He let go her hand.
His reply was majestic. "Not bad," he said. Lucy immediately hugged him.
Now that was exactly what James would have said, _mutatis mutandis_.
Yet she would not have hugged James for it, nor have loved him because of it. "These are our crosses, Mr. Wesley!" Reflecting on the jaunt, she warmed to the thought of Urquhart, who had, she felt, the knack of making you at ease. What had he done, or how done it? Well, he seemed to be interested in what you said. He looked at you, and waited for it; then he answered, still looking at you. Now, so many men looked at their toes when they answered you. James always did. Yet Mr. Urquhart did not look too much: there were men who did that. No, not too much.
CHAPTER V
EROS STEPS IN
When she was told that Francis Lingen and Urquhart were coming on the nineteenth, not to dine, Lucy said, "Oh, what a bore!" and seeing the mild shock inflicted on the eyegla.s.s by her remark, explained that it was Lancelot"s day for going to school, and that she was always depressed at such times. The eyegla.s.s dropped, and its master stretched out his fine long legs, with a great display of black speckled sock. "My dear, absurd as it may seem, they are coming to see Me. I know your little way. You shan"t be disturbed, if I may be indulged so far as to contrive that the house hold us both. I had thought that it would be only civil to bring them in to you for a minute or two, when they"ve done. But that is for you to decide."
She was immediately penitent. "Oh, do, of course. I daresay they will be useful. I"m very foolish to miss him so much." The eyegla.s.s ruefully stared at the fire.
"Urquhart consents," said James, "and Lingen will have his money.
More snuff-boxes, you"ll find. But he"s had to work for it. Insured his life--and a letter from Sir Giles, which must have cost him something." Sir Giles Lingen was the uncle of Francis, a childless veteran. He turned his disk upon her for a moment. "You like Urquhart?"
"Yes," Lucy said, "I do. I like him--because he likes Lancelot."
"Ah," said James, who thought her weak where the boy was concerned. He added, "Urquhart gets on with children. He"s a child himself."
"Why do you call him that?" she asked, with a tinge of offence in her voice. James could raise the fine hairs at the back of her neck by a mere inflection.
He accepted battle. "Because he only thinks of one thing at a time.
Because to get what he wants he"ll sacrifice every mortal thing--very often the thing itself which he"s after."
But Lucy had heard all that before, and wasn"t impressed. "All men are like that," she said. "I could give you a much better reason."
James and his eyegla.s.s both smiled. "Your exquisite reason?"
"He is like a child," said Lucy, "because he doesn"t know that anybody is looking at him, and wouldn"t care if anybody was."
James clasped his shin. "Not bad," he said, "not at all bad. But the test of that is the length to which you can carry it. Would he wear a pot hat with a frock-coat?--that"s the crux."
It really was, to James, as she knew very well. She perused the glowing fire with its blue salt flames. Perhaps to most men. Probably also to Mr. Urquhart. But she felt that she would be lowering a generous ideal if she probed any further: so James was left to his triumph.
The fatal week wore on apace; one of the few remaining days was wholly occupied with preparations for the last. A final jaunt together was charged with a poignancy of unavailing regrets which made it a harder trial than the supreme moment. Never, never, had she thought this bright and intense living thing which she had made, so beautiful and so dear. Nor did it make a straw"s worth of difference to the pa.s.sion with which she was burdened that she felt precisely the same thing every time he left her. As for Lancelot, he took her obvious trouble like the gentleman he was. He regretted it, made no attempt to conceal that, but was full of little comfortable suggestions which made her want to cry. "You"ll have no more sapping upstairs directly after dinner, I suppose!" was one of them; another was, "No more draughty adventures by the Round Pond." Lucy thought that she would have stood like Jane Sh.o.r.e by the Round Pond, in a blizzard, for another week of him. But she adored him for his intention, and was also braced by it. Her sister Mabel, who had three boys, did not conceal her satisfaction at the approaching release--but Mabel spent Christmas at Peltry; and the hunting was a serious matter.
The worst of her troubles was over when they were at Victoria.
Lancelot immediately became one of a herd. And so did she: one of a herd of hens at the pond"s edge. Business was business. Lancelot remained kind to her, but he was inflexible. This was no place for tears. He even deprecated the last hug, the lingering of the last kiss. He leaned nonchalantly at the window, he kept his eye on her; she dared not have a tear. The train moved; he lifted one hand. "So long," he said, and turned to his high affairs. She was almost aghast to realise how very small, how very pale, how atomy he looked--to confront a howling world! And so to listen to the comfortable words of Mrs. Furnivall-Briggs. "My dear, they"ve no use for us. The utmost we can do is to see that they have good food. And warm socks. I am untiring about warm socks. That is what I am always girding my committee about. I tell the Vicar, "My dear sir, I will give you their souls, if you leave me their soles." Do you see? He is so much amused.
But he is a very human person. Except at the altar. _There_ he"s every inch the priest. Well, good-bye. I thought Lancelot looked delightful.
He"s taller than my Geoff. But I must fly. I have a meeting of workers at four-fifteen. Bless me, I had no idea it was four o"clock. The parish-room, Alphonse." A Spartan mother.
Lucy paid two calls, on people who were out, and indulged herself with shopping in Sloane Street. Lancelot had recently remarked on her gloves. "You have jolly thin hands," he had said. "It"s having good gloves, I expect." The memory of such delightful sayings encouraged her to be extravagant. She thought that perhaps he would find her ankles worth a moment--if she took pains with them. Anyhow, he was worth dressing for. James never noticed anything--or if he did, his ambiguity was two-edged. "Extraordinary hat," he might say, and drop his eyegla.s.s, which always gave an air of finality to comments of the sort. But her shopping done, for Lancelot"s sake, life stretched before her a grey waste. She went back to tea, to a novel, to a weekly paper full of photographs of other people"s houses, dogs, children and motor-cars. It was dark, she was bored as well as child-sick, dissatisfied with herself as well as heart-hungry. She must get herself something to do, she said. Who was the Vicar of Onslow Square?
She didn"t know. Somehow, religion, to her, had always seemed such a very private affair. Not a soul must be near her when she said her prayers--except Lancelot, of course. When he was at home she always said them while he said his. Last night--ah, she had not been able to say anything last night. All her faculties had been bent to watching him at it. Was it bravery in him--or insensibility? She remembered Mr.
Urquhart had talked about it. "All boys are born stoics," he said, "and all girls Epicureans. That"s the instinct. They change places when they grow up." Was James an Epicurean?
It was six o"clock. They would be at their meeting in James"s room.
Surely they wouldn"t want tea? Apparently Crewdson thought that they might, otherwise--well, she would leave it to Crewdson. James never seemed to care for anything done by anybody except Crewdson. Sometimes he seemed to resent it. "Have we no servants then?" the eyegla.s.s seemed to inquire. She wondered if James knew for how much his eyegla.s.s was answerable. How could one like to be kissed, with that glaring disk coming nearer and nearer? And if it dropped just at the moment--well, it seemed simply to change all one"s feelings. Oh, to have her arms round Lancelot"s salient young body, and hear him murmur, "Oh, I say!" as she kissed his neck!...
At this moment, being very near to tears, the light was switched off.
She seemed to be drowning in dark. That was a favourite trick of Lancelot"s, who had no business, as a matter of fact, in his father"s room. It gave her a moment of tender joy, and for another she played with the thought of him, tiptoeing towards her. Suddenly, all in the dark, she felt a man"s arms about her, and a man"s lips upon hers. To wild alarm succeeded warm grat.i.tude. Lucy sobbed ever so lightly; her head fell back before the ardent advance; her eyes closed. With parted lips she drank deep of a new consolation: her heart drummed a tune to which, as it seemed, her wings throbbed the answer. The kiss was a long one--perhaps a full thirty seconds--but she was released all too soon. He left her as he had come, on silent feet. The light was turned up; everything looked as it had been, but everything was not. She was not. She found herself an Ariadne, in a drawing-room, still lax from Theseus" arms. Yes, but Theseus was next door, and would come back to her.