"Then what do you mean?"
"Only that it"s--so odd----"
But suddenly Louie gave her towel a twitch and turned away. She spoke with her chin over her shoulder.
"I don"t love my mother," she said, "but for all that she is Lord Moone"s sister--Augustus Evelyn Francis Scarisbrick, Lord Moone. And the other"s my father. I wouldn"t study too hard about it if I were you. You have your medal to get."
She walked abruptly to the bathroom.
That night, as usual, she sat at supper between Burnett Minor and Richenda Earle. The ordinarily irrepressible child on her left was silent; but others, two or three places removed from Louie, leaned back or forward from time to time to speak to her. She fancied Burnett Minor had been crying; she was sure of this when, giving the child"s hand a pat under the table, she felt her own hand impulsively caught and squeezed. Then, in proportion as Burnett Minor cheered up (which she usually did very quickly), the others ceased to talk across to Louie. It was as if, whoever did it, some normal level of chatter must be maintained. Soon supper was as desultorily talkative as it always was. Louie, glancing at the top table, saw that Mrs. Lovenant-Smith knew nothing of what had happened at tea-time. She was, however, quite ready for her the moment she should find out something.
V
One afternoon about three weeks later Louie Causton had occasion to go into the carpenter"s shed. This shed lay between the dairies and the boiler-house that was the centre of the hot-water-pipe system, and Priddy had a frame making there. Half this frame, protected by a board with "Wet Paint" chalked upon it, leaned against the outside wall, and, with his back to the sunlit doorway, a young man, whom at first Louie took to be Priddy, was doing something at a bench. Hearing her, he turned. It was not Priddy. Louie did not know him.
There is in the British Museum a small helmeted head very like the young man Louie saw. It is on the upper floor, among the Tanagras, in a case on the left as you walk from the stairs. This young man, of course, was not helmeted. His face was handsome and slightly vacuous; his eyes in particular had something of the blankness of the little terra-cotta head; and his mouth was full and cla.s.sically curved, and had the slightest of smudges of dark moustache along the deeply indented upper lip. A pair of rolling muscular shoulders showed through his white sweater; his old trousers were tucked into a pair of wooden-looking boots; and he was filing something. Louie wondered what business he had there.
He told her. He spoke in a slow voice, as if he had got his explanation by rote. He was there by Mrs. Lovenant-Smith"s permission, he said.
"We had a smash with the centre-board, you see," he explained.
"Crash--just at tea-time. Izzard wanted to send it to Mazzicombe, but I told him they"d charge nearly as much as we gave for the beastly boat. So I"m doing it myself."
Then, as if his presence within the precincts of a horticultural college for young women was quite explained, he bent over his filing again. Louie, who had come for a couple of boards that had been put aside for her, took them and went out. She was twenty yards away when she heard the young man call slowly after her: "I say--I ought to carry those for you, you know----"
The boards were for her bed. This she had removed from the orchard.
The new place lay quite beyond the orchard, at the foot of the hill between Chesson"s and the sea. There, for the first time on the previous night, she had had the best of what breeze there was.
It had been the att.i.tude of her fellow-students during the past month--or, more fairly, what she had conceived to be their att.i.tude--that had caused her thus to remove herself.
It might be too much to say that she was still not as popular as ever.
These things are not demonstrable. Popular she had been; now--well, it depended a little more than it had done. Burnett Minor, of course, would have eaten from the same plate with her by day and shared her bed at night had she been permitted--also had she not left for her vacation a fortnight before; but Burnett Major--Louie was not so sure about Burnett Major. Her att.i.tude had been more than correct; it had been so correct that Louie had been put altogether in the wrong. The words, of course, had never been said, but Louie had imagined Burnett Major"s private opinion to be as follows:--
"But why didn"t she tell us sooner? What earthly difference does she suppose it would have made? Who cares about things like that? I dare say her father"s just as good as anybody else"s father; for that matter, mother"s grandfather was only a farmer--mother told us so herself; but n.o.body likes being treated as if they were sn.o.bs. It showed a lack of confidence, that"s what it showed; and I don"t know--now--I mean no girl, unless she _wasn"t_ quite a lady, would----" Louie could supply that part too.
"I don"t care--I _love_ Causton!" she had also imagined B. Minor as having sobbed, bold and unconvinced. "He didn"t sky the wiper when his beezer was bleeding, anyway!"
Yes: for Burnett Major, presentation and all the rest of it lay ahead.
Matters would probably have stopped at that had Louie herself allowed them to do so; but that would not have been like Louie. Allow them to stop there? Good gracious, no! Her cynicism had become bright indeed.
_She_ was not the girl to contaminate the innocent Burnett Minor; neither--for she was a Scarisbrick when all was said and done--was she going to be driven w.i.l.l.y-nilly into the society of Richenda Earle as company good enough for her. She could look after herself, thank you.
Coventry is no unpleasant place provided you have the putting of yourself there, and at any rate her Coventry at the foot of the hill was cooler at night than the other one. It meant carrying her mattress and bedding a little farther, but she had a prizefighter"s physique to carry them with, which was more than her nearest neighbour, Elwell, the daughter of the Treasury mandarin, could say.
It is true that she did sometimes wonder (with Burnett Major, perhaps) whether she had not inherited also from the prizefighter something less desirable than his physique--a discontented and ill-conditioned nature. But that did not mend matters. It merely made her, if it did anything at all, distrustful of herself. And as this is the story of Louie, virtues and vices and all, her moods must go down with the rest.
At any rate, rolled in her blanket at the foot of the hill, she could feel the night wind on her face, and see the stars, and in her fancy deride or boast of her parentage to her heart"s content.
On the afternoon following that on which she had fetched the boards from the carpenter"s shed she went to the shed again, this time for a couple of tent-pegs and a piece of cord for the better securing of her blankets. The vacant young Tanagra was still there. But this time he was not quite so vacant. He had had leisure to think of quite a number of words.
"I say," he said, lifting slow and bashful eyes of the colour of blue porcelain to Louie, "I"ve been thinking. Haven"t I seen you before?"
"Yes. Yesterday," said Louie shortly. He had had the bad luck to catch her at her brooding. But he did not seem to notice her curtness.
"No, but I mean--before----"
"When?"
"Isn"t--isn"t your name Chaffinger?" He almost blushed.
"No."
"Oh!"
Then she relented a little.
"I was called Chaffinger for a time. My name"s Causton. I suppose yours is Chesson, or you"d hardly be here?"
"Chesson? Why Chesson? No. Mine"s Lovenant-Smith--Roy Lovenant-Smith."
"Oh!" said Louie. "Then you"re right. We have met before, at Mallard Bois."
Roy Lovenant-Smith appeared to be so relieved at being rid of a perplexity that he didn"t much care if they never met again.
"I thought we had," he said mildly. "You were Louie Chaffinger then. I knew you were."
"But what," Louie asked, "are you doing here?"
He radiated simplicity.
"That centre-board, didn"t I tell you? Izzard would make me go halves in the rotten old thing; just look at her; hardly a shroud on the port side, and the centre-board was. .h.i.tched up with a piece of old rope instead of a chain and down it came the other tea-time. It"s the cabin table as well as the centre-board, you see, and the whole thing shut up-just like that----"
He set the inner edges of his hands together and then closed his palms with a slap.
"All the tea--jam and all the lot," he said.
He amused Louie. "That was a pity," she said demurely.
"Wasn"t it? But I say, I shall be catching it. I might use the shed, aunt said, but she told me it was a fixed Rule about men, unless you"re a gardener, of course----"
("An obedient nephew," Louie thought.) "Then I must go at once," she added.
"Well, I shouldn"t like to get you into a row too," said Roy Lovenant-Smith ingenuously.
"No," Louie agreed, more demurely still. "They have to be strict, you know."
"Rather!" said Roy Lovenant-Smith heartily.
And Louie left him.