"Oh, Joan, Joan," cried Harold Jupp, shaking his head reproachfully.
"There"s the poet kicked right across the room."
"Where?" asked Harry Luttrell, looking round for the book.
"Oh, it doesn"t matter," said Joan impatiently. "It"s only an old volume of Browning."
Cries of "Shame" broke indignantly from the race-goers, and Joan received them with imperturbable indifference. Harry Luttrell, however, went on his knees and discovering the book beneath a distant sofa, carefully dusted it.
"Did you ever read "How they Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix"?"
he asked.
The audience in the gallery waited in dead silence for Joan Whitworth"s answer. It came unhesitatingly clear and in a voice of high enthusiasm.
"Isn"t it the most wonderful poem he ever wrote?"
The gallery broke into screams, catcalls, hisses and protests against Joan"s shameless recantation.
"It"s Browning, of course, but it"s not Browning at all, if you understand me," Dennis Brown exclaimed with every show of indignation; and the whole party trooped away again to their tennis and their croquet.
Harry Luttrell placed the book upon a table and turned to Joan.
"Now what would you like to do?" he asked.
Joan shrugged her shoulders.
"We might cut into the next tennis set," she said doubtfully.
"You could hardly play in those shoes," said Harry Luttrell.
Joan contemplated a heel of formidable height. Oh, where were the sandals of the higher Life?
"No, I suppose not. Of course, there"s a--but it wouldn"t probably interest you."
"Wouldn"t it?" cried Harry Luttrell.
"Well, it"s a maze. Millie Splay is rather proud of it. The hedges are centuries old." She turned innocent eyes on Harry Luttrell. "I don"t know whether you are interested in old hedges."
It is to be feared that "minx" was the only right word for Joan Whitworth on this afternoon. Harry Luttrell expressed an intense enthusiasm for great box hedges.
"But they aren"t box, they are yew," said Joan, stopping at once.
Harry Luttrell"s enthusiasm for yew hedges, however, was even greater and more engrossing than his enthusiasm for box ones. A paG.o.da perched upon a bank overlooked the maze and a narrow steep path led down into it between the hedges. Joan left it to her soldier to find the way. There was a stone pedestal with a small lead figure perched upon the top of it in the small clear s.p.a.ce in the middle. But Harry Luttrell took a deal of time in reaching it. If, however, their progress was slow, with many false turnings and sudden stops against solid walls of hedge, it was not so with their acquaintanceship; each turn in the path brought them on by a new stage. They wandered in the dawn of the world.
"Suppose that I had never come to Rackham Park!" said Harry Luttrell, suddenly turning at the end of a blind alley. "I almost didn"t come. I might have altogether missed knowing you."
The terrible thought smote them both. What risks people ran to be sure.
They might never have met. They might have never known what it was to meet. They might have lived benighted, not knowing what lovely spirit had pa.s.sed them by. They looked at one another with despairing eyes.
Then a happy thought occurred to Joan.
"But, after all, you did come," she exclaimed.
Harry Luttrell drew a breath. He was relieved of a great oppression.
"Why, yes," he answered in wonderment. "So I did!"
They retraced their steps. As the sun drew towards its late setting, by an innocent suggestion from Joan here, a little question there, Harry Luttrell was manoeuvred towards the centre of the maze. Suddenly he stopped with a finger on the lips. A voice reached to them from the innermost recess--a voice which intoned, a voice which was oracular.
"What"s that?" he asked in a whisper.
Joan shook her head.
"I haven"t an idea."
As yet they could hear no words. Words were flung from wall to wall of the centre s.p.a.ce and kept imprisoned there. It seemed that the presiding genius of the maze was uttering his invocation as the sun went down.
Joan and Harry Luttrell crept stealthily nearer, Harry now openly guided by a light touch upon his arm as the paths twisted. Words--amazing words--became distinctly audible; and a familiar voice. They came to the last screen of hedge and peered through at a spot where the twigs were thin. In the very middle of the clear s.p.a.ce stood Sir Chichester Splay, one hand leaning upon the pedestal, the other hidden in his bosom, in the very att.i.tude of the orator; and to the silent s.p.a.ces of the maze thus he made his address:
"Ladies and gentlemen! When I entered the tent this afternoon and took my seat upon the platform, nothing was further from my thoughts than that I should hear myself proposing a vote of thanks to our indefatigable chairman!"
Sir Chichester was getting ready for the Chichester Flower Show, at which, certainly, he was not going to make a speech. Oh dear, no! He knew better than that.
"In this marvellous collection of flowers, ladies and gentlemen, we can read, if so we will, a singular instance of co-ordination and organisation--the Empire"s great needs to-day----"
Harry Luttrell and Joan stifled their laughter and stole away out of hearing.
"We won"t breathe a word of it," said Joan.
"No," said Harry.
They had a little secret now between them--that wonderful link--a little secret; and to be sure they made the most of it. They could look across the dinner-table at one another with a smile in which no one else could have a share. If Sir Chichester spoke, it would be just to kindle that swift glance in lovers" eyes from which the heart takes fire.
Love-making went at a gallop in nineteen hundred and sixteen; it jumped the barriers; it danced to a lively and violent tune. Maidens, as Sir Charles Hardiman had p.r.o.nounced, had become more primeval. Insecurity had dropped them down upon the bed-rock elemental truths. Men were for women, women for men, especially for those men who went out with a cheery song in their mouths to save them from the hideous destiny of women in ravaged lands. The soldier was here to-day on leave, and G.o.d alone knew where he would be to-morrow, and whether alive, or perhaps a crippled thing like a child!
Joan Whitworth and Harry Luttrell had been touched by the swift magic of those days; he, when he had first seen her in the shining armour of her youth upon the steps of the stairs; she, when Harry had first entered the hall and spoken his few commonplace words of greeting. This was the hour for them, the hour at the well with the desert behind them and the desert in front, the hour within the measure of which was to be forced the essence of many days. When they returned to the hall they found most of the small party gathered there before going up to dress for dinner; and there was that in the faces of the pair which betrayed them.
Hillyard looked quickly round the hall, as a qualm of pity for Stella Croyle seized him. But he could not see her. "Thank Heaven she has already gone up to dress," he said to himself. A marriage between Joan Whitworth and the Harry Luttrell of to-day, the man freed now from the great obsession of his life and trained now to the traditional paths, was a fitting thing, a thing to be welcomed. Hillyard readily acknowledged it. But he had more insight into the troubled soul of Stella Croyle than any one else in that company.
"No one"s bothering about her," he reflected. "She came here to set up her last fight to win back Harry. She is now putting on her armour for it. And she hasn"t a chance--no, not one!"
For Harry"s sake he was glad. But he was a creator of plays; and his training led him to seek to understand, and to understand with the sympathy of his emotions, the points of view of others who might stand in a contrast or a relation. He walked up the stairs with a heart full of pity when Millicent Splay caught him up.
"What did I tell you?" she said, brimful with delight. "Just look at Joan! Is there a girl anywhere who can match her?"
Martin looked down over the bal.u.s.trade at Joan in the hall below.
"No," he said slowly. "Not one whom I have ever seen."
The little note of melancholy in his voice moved Millie Splay. She was all kindness in that moment of her triumph. She turned to Martin Hillyard in commiseration. "Oh, don"t tell me that you are in love with her too! I should be so sorry."
"No, I am not," Martin Hillyard hastened to rea.s.sure her, "not one bit."
The commiseration died on the instant in Millicent Splay.