"Grey hair doesn"t bring the thing I mean. I"ve sometimes wished it did.
But our friendship is an uncommonly peaceful one, don"t you think?"
"Yes; I think it is," he said. "All the same, you know there"s a touch of magic in it." But, as though to condone the confession, "You haven"t told me why you were ruffled."
"It"s nothing. I dare say I was a little tired."
They had come out into the park. "I hurried so to catch the train. My sister"s new coachman is stupid about finding short cuts in London, and we got blocked by a procession--a horrible sort of demonstration, you know."
"Oh, the unemployed."
"Yes. And I got so tired of leaning out of the window and shouting directions that I left the maid and the luggage to come later. I got out of the brougham and ran through a slum, or I"d have lost my train. I nearly lost it anyway, because I saw a queer picture that made me stop."
She stopped again at the mere memory of it.
"In a second-hand shop?"
He turned his pointed face to her, and the grey-green eyes wore a gleam of interest that few things could arouse in their cool depths.
"No, not in a shop." She stopped and leaned against a tree. "In the street. It was a middle-aged workman. When I caught sight of his back and saw his worn clothes--the coat went up in the middle, and had that despairing sag on both sides--it crossed my mind, here"s another of those miserable, unemployed wastrels obstructing my way! Then he looked round and I saw--solid content in his face!" She stopped a moment.
"So he _wasn"t_ one of the----"
"Well, I wondered. I couldn"t see at first what it was he had looked round at. Then I noticed he had a rope in his hand, and was dragging something. As the people who had been between us hurried on I saw--I saw a child, two or three years old, in a flapping, pink sun-bonnet. He was sitting astride a toy horse. The horse was clumsily made, and had lost its tail. But it had its head still, and the board it was mounted on had fat, wooden rollers. The horse was only about that long, and so near the ground that, for all his advantage in the matter of rollers, still the little rider"s feet touched the pavement. They even trailed and lurched, as the horse went on, in that funny, spasmodic gait. The child had to half walk, or, rather, make the motions--you know, without actually bearing any of even his own weight. The slack-shouldered man did it all.
I crossed to the other side of the street, and stood and watched them till, as I say, I nearly lost my train. The dingy workman, smoking imperturbably, dragging the grotesque, almost hidden, horse--the delighted child in the flapping sun-bonnet--the crisis when they came to the crossing! The man turned and called out something. The child declined to budge. I wondered what would happen. So did the man. He waited a moment, and puffed smoke and considered. The baby dug his heels in the pavement and shouted. Then I saw the man carefully tilt the toy horse up by the rope. I stood and watched the successful surmounting of the obstacle, and the triumphant progress as before--sun-bonnet flapping, smoke curling. Of course the man was content! He had lost the battle. You saw that in his lined face. What did it matter? _He held the future by a string._"
Lord Borrodaile lifted his eyes and looked at her. Without a word the two walked on.
The first to speak after the silence was the man. He pointed out a curious effect of the light, and reminded her who had painted it best--
"Corot could do these things!"--and he flung a stone in pa.s.sing at the New Impressionists.
At the Lodge Gate they found Lady John with Filey and Hermione.
"We thought if we walked this way we might meet Jean and her bodyguard.
But I mustn"t go any further." Lady John consulted her watch. "The rest of you can take your time, but I have to go and receive my other guest."
Filey and Hermione were still at the gate. The girl had caught sight of Farnborough being driven by the park road to the station.
"Oh, I do believe it"s the new mare they"re trying in the dogcart," said Hermione. "Let"s wait and see her go by."
Borrodaile and his companion kept at Lady John"s side.
"I"m glad," said Vida, "that I shall at last make acquaintance with your Jean."
"Yes; it"s odd your never having met, especially as she knows your cousins at Bishopsmead so well."
"I"ve been so little in England----"
"Yes, I know. A great business it is," Lady John explained to Lord Borrodaile, "each time to get that crusty old Covenanter, Jean"s grandfather, to allow her to stay at Bishopsmead. So it"s the sadder for them to have her visit cut short."
"Why is it cut short?" he asked.
"Because the hostess took to her bed yesterday with a chill, and her temperature was a hundred and one this afternoon."
"Really?" said Miss Levering. "I hadn"t heard----"
"She is rather bad, I"m afraid. We are taking over another of her guests. Of course you know him--Geoffrey Stonor."
"Taking him over?" Miss Levering repeated.
"Yes; he was originally going to Bishopsmead this week-end, but as he"s been promising for ages to come here, it"s been arranged that we should take him off their hands. Of course we"re delighted."
Miss Levering walked on, between her two companions, looking straight in front of her. As Lady John, with a glance at her watch, quickened the pace--
"I"m rather unhappy at what you tell me about my cousin," said Vida.
"She"s a delicate creature." Then, as though acting on a sudden impulse, Vida paused. "You mustn"t mind, Lady John, but I shall have to go to her. Can I have a trap of some sort to take me over?"
She put aside the objections with a gentle but unmistakable decision that made Lady John say--
"I"m sure I"ve alarmed you more than there was the least need for. But the carriage shall wait and bring you back just as soon as you"ve satisfied yourself."
"I can"t tell, of course, till I"ve seen Mary. But may my maid be told not to unpack----"
"Not unpack!"
"In case I have to send for my things."
"My _dear_!" Lady John stopped short for very vexation. "_Don"t_ desert us! I"ve been so congratulating myself on having you, since I knew Geoffrey Stonor was coming." Again she glanced nervously at her watch.
"He is due in ten minutes! John won"t like it if I"m not there."
As she was about to hurry on, the other slackened pace. She seemed to be revolving some further plan.
"Why shouldn"t"--she turned suddenly--"why shouldn"t the dogcart take me on after dropping Mr. Farnborough at the station? Yes, that will be simplest. Mr. Farnborough!" she waved to him as the cart came in sight, "Wait! Good-bye! Forgive my rushing off, won"t you?" she called back over her shoulder, and then with that swift, light step of hers, she covered by a short cut the little distance that lay between her and the lodge gate.
"I wish I"d held my tongue," said Lady John almost angrily as she hastened in the opposite direction. Already some sense seemed to reach her of the hopelessness of expecting Vida"s return.
"I didn"t _dream_ she cared so much for that dull cousin of hers!"
"Do you think she really does?" said Borrodaile, dryly.
CHAPTER VII
About Vida"s little enterprise on a certain Sunday a few weeks later was an air of elaborate mystery. Yet the expedition was no further than to Trafalgar Square. It was there that those women, the so-called "Suffragettes," in the intervals of making worse public disturbances, were rumoured to be holding open-air meetings--a circ.u.mstance distinctly fortunate for any one who wanted to "see what they were like," and who was yet unwilling to commit herself by doing anything so eccentric as publicly to seek admission under any roof known to show hospitality to "such goings on." In those days, only a year ago, and yet already such ancient history that the earlier pages are forgotten and scarce credible if recalled, it took courage to walk past the knots of facetious loafers, and the unblushing Suffragette poster, into the hall where the meetings were held. Deliberately to sit down among odd, misguided persons in rows, to listen to, and by so much to lend public countenance to "women of that sort"--the sort that not only wanted to vote (quaint creatures!), but were not content with merely wanting to--for the average conventional woman to venture upon a step so compromising, to risk seeming for a moment to take these crazy brawlers seriously, was to lay herself open to "the comic laugh"--most dreaded of all the weapons in the social armoury. But it was something wholly different to set out for a Sunday Afternoon Concert, or upon some normal and recognized philanthropic errand, and on the way find one"s self arrested for a few minutes by seeing a crowd gathered in a public square. Yet it had not been easy to screw Mrs. Fox-Moore up to thinking even this non-committal measure a possible one to pursue. "What would anybody think," she had asked Vida, "to see them lending even the casual support of a presence (however ironic) to so reprehensible a spectacle!" Had it not been for very faith in the eccentricity of the proceeding--one wildly unlikely to be adopted, Mrs. Fox-Moore felt, by any one else of "their kind"--she would never have consented to be drawn into Vida"s absurd project.
Of course it was absolutely essential to disguise the object of the outing from Mr. Fox-Moore. Not merely because with the full weight of his authority he would most a.s.suredly have forbidden it, but because of a nervous prefiguring on his wife"s part of the particular things he would say, and the particular way he would look in setting his extinguisher on the enterprise.