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<pre>
The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Unbearable Bassington, by Saki
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
Title: The Unbearable Bassington
Author: Saki
Release Date: February 4, 2013 [eBook #555]
[Updated edition of: etext96/nbrbl10h.htm]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE UNBEARABLE BASSINGTON***
</pre>
<p>Transcribed from the 1913 John Lane edition by David Price,
email ccx074@pglaf.org</p>
<h1>THE UNBEARABLE<br />
BASSINGTON</h1>
<p style="text-align: center">:: BY H. H. MUNRO
(“SAKI”) ::</p>
<div class="gapspace"> </div>
<p style="text-align: center">
<a href="images/p0b.jpg">
<img alt=
"Decorative graphic"
title=
"Decorative graphic"
src="images/p0s.jpg" />
</a></p>
<div class="gapspace"> </div>
<p style="text-align: center">LONDON: JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY
HEAD</p>
<p style="text-align: center">NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY</p>
<p style="text-align: center">TORONTO: BELL & COCKBURN.
MCMXIII</p>
<div class="gapspace"> </div>
<div class="gapmediumdoubleline"> </div>
<p style="text-align: center"><i>SIXTH EDITION</i></p>
<div class="gapmediumdoubleline"> </div>
<div class="gapspace"> </div>
<p style="text-align: center"><span class="GutSmall">PRINTED BY
JAS. TRUSCOTT & SON, LTD. LONDON</span></p>
<div class="gapspace"> </div>
<h2><span class="smcap">Author’s Note</span></h2>
<p>This story has no moral.</p>
<p>If it points out an evil at any rate it suggests no
remedy.</p>
<h2>CHAPTER I</h2>
<p><span class="smcap">Francesca Bassington</span> sat in the
drawing-room of her house in Blue Street, W., regaling herself
and her estimable brother Henry with China tea and small cress
sandwiches. The meal was of that elegant proportion which,
while ministering sympathetically to the desires of the moment,
is happily reminiscent of a satisfactory luncheon and blessedly
expectant of an elaborate dinner to come.</p>
<p>In her younger days Francesca had been known as the beautiful
Miss Greech; at forty, although much of the original beauty
remained, she was just dear Francesca Bassington. No one
would have dreamed of calling her sweet, but a good many people
who scarcely knew her were punctilious about putting in the
“dear.”</p>
<p>Her enemies, in their honester moments, would have admitted
that she was svelte and knew how to dress, but they would have
agreed with her friends in asserting that she had no soul.
When one’s friends and enemies agree on any particular
point they are usually wrong. Francesca herself, if pressed
in an unguarded moment to describe her soul, would probably have
described her drawing-room. Not that she would have
considered that the one had stamped the impress of its character
on the other, so that close scrutiny might reveal its outstanding
features, and even suggest its hidden places, but because she
might have dimly recognised that her drawing-room was her
soul.</p>
<p>Francesca was one of those women towards whom Fate appears to
have the best intentions and never to carry them into
practice. With the advantages put at her disposal she might
have been expected to command a more than average share of
feminine happiness. So many of the things that make for
fretfulness, disappointment and discouragement in a woman’s
life were removed from her path that she might well have been
considered the fortunate Miss Greech, or later, lucky Francesca
Bassington. And she was not of the perverse band of those
who make a rock-garden of their souls by dragging into them all
the stoney griefs and unclaimed troubles they can find lying
around them. Francesca loved the smooth ways and pleasant
places of life; she liked not merely to look on the bright side
of things but to live there and stay there. And the fact
that things had, at one time and another, gone badly with her and
cheated her of some of her early illusions made her cling the
closer to such good fortune as remained to her now that she
seemed to have reached a calmer period of her life. To
undiscriminating friends she appeared in the guise of a rather
selfish woman, but it was merely the selfishness of one who had
seen the happy and unhappy sides of life and wished to enjoy to
the utmost what was left to her of the former. The
vicissitudes of fortune had not soured her, but they had perhaps
narrowed her in the sense of making her concentrate much of her
sympathies on things that immediately pleased and amused her, or
that recalled and perpetuated the pleasing and successful
incidents of other days. And it was her drawing-room in
particular that enshrined the memorials or tokens of past and
present happiness.</p>
<p>Into that comfortable quaint-shaped room of angles and bays
and alcoves had sailed, as into a harbour, those precious
personal possessions and trophies that had survived the
buffetings and storms of a not very tranquil married life.
Wherever her eyes might turn she saw the embodied results of her
successes, economies, good luck, good management or good
taste. The battle had more than once gone against her, but
she had somehow always contrived to save her baggage train, and
her complacent gaze could roam over object after object that
represented the spoils of victory or the salvage of honourable
defeat. The delicious bronze Fremiet on the mantelpiece had
been the outcome of a Grand Prix sweepstake of many years ago; a
group of Dresden figures of some considerable value had been
bequeathed to her by a discreet admirer, who had added death to
his other kindnesses; another group had been a self-bestowed
present, purchased in blessed and unfading memory of a wonderful
nine-days’ bridge winnings at a country-house party.
There were old Persian and Bokharan rugs and Worcester
tea-services of glowing colour, and little treasures of antique
silver that each enshrined a history or a memory in addition to
its own intrinsic value. It amused her at times to think of
the bygone craftsmen and artificers who had hammered and wrought
and woven in far distant countries and ages, to produce the
wonderful and beautiful things that had come, one way and
another, into her possession. Workers in the studios of
medieval Italian towns and of later Paris, in the bazaars of
Baghdad and of Central Asia, in old-time English workshops and
German factories, in all manner of queer hidden corners where
craft secrets were jealously guarded, nameless unremembered men
and men whose names were world-renowned and deathless.</p>
<p>And above all her other treasures, dominating in her
estimation every other object that the room contained, was the
great Van der Meulen that had come from her father’s home
as part of her wedding dowry. It fitted exactly into the
central wall panel above the narrow buhl cabinet, and filled
exactly its right space in the composition and balance of the
room. From wherever you sat it seemed to confront you as
the dominating feature of its surroundings. There was a
pleasing serenity about the great pompous battle scene with its
solemn courtly warriors bestriding their heavily prancing steeds,
grey or skewbald or dun, all gravely in earnest, and yet somehow
conveying the impression that their campaigns were but vast
serious picnics arranged in the grand manner. Francesca
could not imagine the drawing-room without the crowning
complement of the stately well-hung picture, just as she could
not imagine herself in any other setting than this house in Blue
Street with its crowded Pantheon of cherished household gods.</p>
<p>And herein sprouted one of the thorns that obtruded through
the rose-leaf damask of what might otherwise have been
Francesca’s peace of mind. One’s happiness
always lies in the future rather than in the past. With due
deference to an esteemed lyrical authority one may safely say
that a sorrow’s crown of sorrow is anticipating unhappier
things. The house in Blue Street had been left to her by
her old friend Sophie Chetrof, but only until such time as her
niece Emmeline Chetrof should marry, when it was to pass to her
as a wedding present. Emmeline was now seventeen and
passably good-looking, and four or five years were all that could
be safely allotted to the span of her continued
spinsterhood. Beyond that period lay chaos, the wrenching
asunder of Francesca from the sheltering habitation that had
grown to be her soul. It is true that in imagination she
had built herself a bridge across the chasm, a bridge of a single
span. The bridge in question was her schoolboy son Comus,
now being educated somewhere in the southern counties, or rather
one should say the bridge consisted of the possibility of his
eventual marriage with Emmeline, in which case Francesca saw
herself still reigning, a trifle squeezed and incommoded perhaps,
but still reigning in the house in Blue Street. The Van der
Meulen would still catch its requisite afternoon light in its
place of honour, the Fremiet and the Dresden and Old Worcester
would continue undisturbed in their accustomed niches.
Emmeline could have the Japanese snuggery, where Francesca
sometimes drank her after-dinner coffee, as a separate
drawing-room, where she could put her own things. The
details of the bridge structure had all been carefully thought
out. Only—it was an unfortunate circumstance that
Comus should have been the span on which everything balanced.</p>
<p>Francesca’s husband had insisted on giving the boy that
strange Pagan name, and had not lived long enough to judge as to
the appropriateness, or otherwise, of its significance. In
seventeen years and some odd months Francesca had had ample
opportunity for forming an opinion concerning her son’s
characteristics. The spirit of mirthfulness which one
associates with the name certainly ran riot in the boy, but it
was a twisted wayward sort of mirth of which Francesca herself
could seldom see the humorous side. In her brother Henry,
who sat eating small cress sandwiches as solemnly as though they
had been ordained in some immemorial Book of Observances, fate
had been undisguisedly kind to her. He might so easily have
married some pretty helpless little woman, and lived at Notting
Hill Gate, and been the father of a long string of pale, clever
useless children, who would have had birthdays and the sort of
illnesses that one is expected to send grapes to, and who would
have painted fatuous objects in a South Kensington manner as
Christmas offerings to an aunt whose cubic space for lumber was
limited. Instead of committing these unbrotherly actions,
which are so frequent in family life that they might almost be
called brotherly, Henry had married a woman who had both money
and a sense of repose, and their one child had the brilliant
virtue of never saying anything which even its parents could
consider worth repeating. Then he had gone into Parliament,
possibly with the idea of making his home life seem less dull; at
any rate it redeemed his career from insignificance, for no man
whose death can produce the item “another
by-election” on the news posters can be wholly a
nonentity. Henry, in short, who might have been an
embarrassment and a handicap, had chosen rather to be a friend
and counsellor, at times even an emergency bank balance;
Francesca on her part, with the partiality which a clever and
lazily-inclined woman often feels for a reliable fool, not only
sought his counsel but frequently followed it. When
convenient, moreover, she repaid his loans.</p>
<p>Against this good service on the part of Fate in providing her
with Henry for a brother, Francesca could well set the plaguy
malice of the destiny that had given her Comus for a son.
The boy was one of those untameable young lords of misrule that
frolic and chafe themselves through nursery and preparatory and
public-school days with the utmost allowance of storm and dust
and dislocation and the least possible amount of collar-work, and
come somehow with a laugh through a series of catastrophes that
has reduced everyone else concerned to tears or Cassandra-like
forebodings. Sometimes they sober down in after-life and
become uninteresting, forgetting that they were ever lords of
anything; sometimes Fate plays royally into their hands, and they
do great things in a spacious manner, and are thanked by
Parliaments and the Press and acclaimed by gala-day crowds.
But in most cases their tragedy begins when they leave school and
turn themselves loose in a world that has grown too civilised and
too crowded and too empty to have any place for them. And
they are very many.</p>
<p>Henry Greech had made an end of biting small sandwiches, and
settled down like a dust-storm refreshed, to discuss one of the
fashionably prevalent topics of the moment, the prevention of
destitution.</p>
<p>“It is a question that is only being nibbled at, smelt
at, one might say, at the present moment,” he observed,
“but it is one that will have to engage our serious
attention and consideration before long. The first thing
that we shall have to do is to get out of the dilettante and
academic way of approaching it. We must collect and
assimilate hard facts. It is a subject that ought to appeal
to all thinking minds, and yet, you know, I find it surprisingly
difficult to interest people in it.”</p>
<p>Francesca made some monosyllabic response, a sort of
sympathetic grunt which was meant to indicate that she was, to a
certain extent, listening and appreciating. In reality she
was reflecting that Henry possibly found it difficult to interest
people in any topic that he enlarged on. His talents lay so
thoroughly in the direction of being uninteresting, that even as
an eye-witness of the massacre of St. Bartholomew he would
probably have infused a flavour of boredom into his descriptions
of the event.</p>
<p>“I was speaking down in Leicestershire the other day on
this subject,” continued Henry, “and I pointed out at
some length a thing that few people ever stop to
consider—”</p>
<p>Francesca went over immediately but decorously to the majority
that will not stop to consider.</p>
<p>“Did you come across any of the Barnets when you were
down there?” she interrupted; “Eliza Barnet is rather
taken up with all those subjects.”</p>
<p>In the propagandist movements of Sociology, as in other arenas
of life and struggle, the fiercest competition and rivalry is
frequently to be found between closely allied types and
species. Eliza Barnet shared many of Henry Greech’s
political and social views, but she also shared his fondness for
pointing things out at some length; there had been occasions when
she had extensively occupied the strictly limited span allotted
to the platform oratory of a group of speakers of whom Henry
Greech had been an impatient unit. He might see eye to eye
with her on the leading questions of the day, but he persistently
wore mental blinkers as far as her estimable qualities were
concerned, and the mention of her name was a skilful lure drawn
across the trail of his discourse; if Francesca had to listen to
his eloquence on any subject she much preferred that it should be
a disparagement of Eliza Barnet rather than the prevention of
destitution.</p>
<p>“I’ve no doubt she means well,” said Henry,
“but it would be a good thing if she could be induced to
keep her own personality a little more in the background, and not
to imagine that she is the necessary mouthpiece of all the
progressive thought in the countryside. I fancy Canon
Besomley must have had her in his mind when he said that some
people came into the world to shake empires and others to move
amendments.”</p>
<p>Francesca laughed with genuine amusement.</p>
<p>“I suppose she is really wonderfully well up in all the
subjects she talks about,” was her provocative comment.</p>
<p>Henry grew possibly conscious of the fact that he was being
drawn out on the subject of Eliza Barnet, and he presently turned
on to a more personal topic.</p>
<p>“From the general air of tranquillity about the house I
presume Comus has gone back to Thaleby,” he observed.</p>
<p>“Yes,” said Francesca, “he went back
yesterday. Of course, I’m very fond of him, but I
bear the separation well. When he’s here it’s
rather like having a live volcano in the house, a volcano that in
its quietest moments asks incessant questions and uses strong
scent.”</p>
<p>“It is only a temporary respite,” said Henry;
“in a year or two he will be leaving school, and then
what?”</p>
<p>Francesca closed her eyes with the air of one who seeks to
shut out a distressing vision. She was not fond of looking
intimately at the future in the presence of another person,
especially when the future was draped in doubtfully auspicious
colours.</p>
<p>“And then what?” persisted Henry.</p>
<p>“Then I suppose he will be upon my hands.”</p>
<p>“Exactly.”</p>
<p>“Don’t sit there looking judicial. I’m
quite ready to listen to suggestions if you’ve any to
make.”</p>
<p>“In the case of any ordinary boy,” said Henry,
“I might make lots of suggestions as to the finding of
suitable employment. From what we know of Comus it would be
rather a waste of time for either of us to look for jobs which he
wouldn’t look at when we’d got them for
him.”</p>
<p>“He must do something,” said Francesca.</p>
<p>“I know he must; but he never will. At least,
he’ll never stick to anything. The most hopeful thing
to do with him will be to marry him to an heiress. That
would solve the financial side of his problem. If he had
unlimited money at his disposal, he might go into the wilds
somewhere and shoot big game. I never know what the big
game have done to deserve it, but they do help to deflect the
destructive energies of some of our social misfits.”</p>
<p>Henry, who never killed anything larger or fiercer than a
trout, was scornfully superior on the subject of big game
shooting.</p>
<p>Francesca brightened at the matrimonial suggestion.
“I don’t know about an heiress,” she said
reflectively. “There’s Emmeline Chetrof of
course. One could hardly call her an heiress, but
she’s got a comfortable little income of her own and I
suppose something more will come to her from her
grandmother. Then, of course, you know this house goes to
her when she marries.”</p>
<p>“That would be very convenient,” said Henry,
probably following a line of thought that his sister had trodden
many hundreds of times before him. “Do she and Comus
hit it off at all well together?”</p>
<p>“Oh, well enough in boy and girl fashion,” said
Francesca. “I must arrange for them to see more of
each other in future. By the way, that little brother of
hers that she dotes on, Lancelot, goes to Thaleby this
term. I’ll write and tell Comus to be specially kind
to him; that will be a sure way to Emmeline’s heart.
Comus has been made a prefect, you know. Heaven knows
why.”</p>
<p>“It can only be for prominence in games,” sniffed
Henry; “I think we may safely leave work and conduct out of
the question.”</p>
<p>Comus was not a favourite with his uncle.</p>
<p>Francesca had turned to her writing cabinet and was hastily
scribbling a letter to her son in which the delicate health,
timid disposition and other inevitable attributes of the new boy
were brought to his notice, and commanded to his care. When
she had sealed and stamped the envelope Henry uttered a belated
caution.</p>
<p>“Perhaps on the whole it would be wiser to say nothing
about the boy to Comus. He doesn’t always respond to
directions you know.”</p>
<p>Francesca did know, and already was more than half of her
brother’s opinion; but the woman who can sacrifice a clean
unspoiled penny stamp is probably yet unborn.</p>
<h2>CHAPTER II</h2>
<p><span class="smcap">Lancelot Chetrof</span> stood at the end
of a long bare passage, restlessly consulting his watch and
fervently wishing himself half an hour older with a certain
painful experience already registered in the past; unfortunately
it still belonged to the future, and what was still more
horrible, to the immediate future. Like many boys new to a
school he had cultivated an unhealthy passion for obeying rules
and requirements, and his zeal in this direction had proved his
undoing. In his hurry to be doing two or three estimable
things at once he had omitted to study the notice-board in more
than a perfunctory fashion and had thereby missed a football
practice specially ordained for newly-joined boys. His
fellow juniors of a term’s longer standing had graphically
enlightened him as to the inevitable consequences of his lapse;
the dread which attaches to the unknown was, at any rate, deleted
from his approaching doom, though at the moment he felt scarcely
grateful for the knowledge placed at his disposal with such
lavish solicitude.</p>
<p>“You’ll get six of the very best, over the back of
a chair,” said one.</p>
<p>“They’ll draw a chalk line across you, of course
you know,” said another.</p>
<p>“A chalk line?”</p>
<p>“Rather. So that every cut can be aimed exactly at
the same spot. It hurts much more that way.”</p>
<p>Lancelot tried to nourish a wan hope that there might be an
element of exaggeration in this uncomfortably realistic
description.</p>
<p>Meanwhile in the prefects’ room at the other end of the
passage, Comus Bassington and a fellow prefect sat also waiting
on time, but in a mood of far more pleasurable expectancy.
Comus was one of the most junior of the prefect caste, but by no
means the least well-known, and outside the masters’
common-room he enjoyed a certain fitful popularity, or at any
rate admiration. At football he was too erratic to be a
really brilliant player, but he tackled as if the act of bringing
his man headlong to the ground was in itself a sensuous pleasure,
and his weird swear-words whenever he got hurt were eagerly
treasured by those who were fortunate enough to hear them.
At athletics in general he was a showy performer, and although
new to the functions of a prefect he had already established a
reputation as an effective and artistic caner. In
appearance he exactly fitted his fanciful Pagan name. His
large green-grey eyes seemed for ever asparkle with goblin
mischief and the joy of revelry, and the curved lips might have
been those of some wickedly-laughing faun; one almost expected to
see embryo horns fretting the smoothness of his sleek dark
hair. The chin was firm, but one looked in vain for a
redeeming touch of ill-temper in the handsome, half-mocking,
half-petulant face. With a strain of sourness in him Comus
might have been leavened into something creative and masterful;
fate had fashioned him with a certain whimsical charm, and left
him all unequipped for the greater purposes of life.
Perhaps no one would have called him a lovable character, but in
many respects he was adorable; in all respects he was certainly
damned.</p>
<p>Rutley, his companion of the moment, sat watching him and
wondering, from the depths of a very ordinary brain, whether he
liked or hated him; it was easy to do either.</p>
<p>“It’s not really your turn to cane,” he
said.</p>
<p>“I know it’s not,” said Comus, fingering a
very serviceable-looking cane as lovingly as a pious violinist
might handle his Strad. “I gave Greyson some
mint-chocolate to let me toss whether I caned or him, and I
won. He was rather decent over it and let me have half the
chocolate back.”</p>
<p>The droll lightheartedness which won Comus Bassington such
measure of popularity as he enjoyed among his fellows did not
materially help to endear him to the succession of masters with
whom he came in contact during the course of his
schooldays. He amused and interested such of them as had
the saving grace of humour at their disposal, but if they sighed
when he passed from their immediate responsibility it was a sigh
of relief rather than of regret. The more enlightened and
experienced of them realised that he was something outside the
scope of the things that they were called upon to deal
with. A man who has been trained to cope with storms, to
foresee their coming, and to minimise their consequences, may be
pardoned if he feels a certain reluctance to measure himself
against a tornado.</p>
<p>Men of more limited outlook and with a correspondingly larger
belief in their own powers were ready to tackle the tornado had
time permitted.</p>
<p>“I think I could tame young Bassington if I had your
opportunities,” a form-master once remarked to a colleague
whose House had the embarrassing distinction of numbering Comus
among its inmates.</p>
<p>“Heaven forbid that I should try,” replied the
housemaster.</p>
<p>“But why?” asked the reformer.</p>
<p>“Because Nature hates any interference with her own
arrangements, and if you start in to tame the obviously
untameable you are taking a fearful responsibility on
yourself.”</p>
<p>“Nonsense; boys are Nature’s raw
material.”</p>
<p>“Millions of boys are. There are just a few, and
Bassington is one of them, who are Nature’s highly finished
product when they are in the schoolboy stage, and we, who are
supposed to be moulding raw material, are quite helpless when we
come in contact with them.”</p>
<p>“But what happens to them when they grow up?”</p>
<p>“They never do grow up,” said the housemaster;
“that is their tragedy. Bassington will certainly
never grow out of his present stage.”</p>
<p>“Now you are talking in the language of Peter
Pan,” said the form-master.</p>
<p>“I am not thinking in the manner of Peter Pan,”
said the other. “With all reverence for the author of
that masterpiece I should say he had a wonderful and tender
insight into the child mind and knew nothing whatever about
boys. To make only one criticism on that particular work,
can you imagine a lot of British boys, or boys of any country
that one knows of, who would stay contentedly playing
children’s games in an underground cave when there were
wolves and pirates and Red Indians to be had for the asking on
the other side of the trap door?”</p>
<p>The form-master laughed. “You evidently think that
the ‘Boy who would not grow up’ must have been
written by a ‘grown-up who could never have been a
boy.’ Perhaps that is the meaning of the
‘Never-never Land.’ I daresay you’re
right in your criticism, but I don’t agree with you about
Bassington. He’s a handful to deal with, as anyone
knows who has come in contact with him, but if one’s hands
weren’t full with a thousand and one other things I hold to
my opinion that he could be tamed.”</p>
<p>And he went his way, having maintained a form-master’s
inalienable privilege of being in the right.</p>
<p style="text-align: center">* * * * *</p>
<p>In the prefects’ room, Comus busied himself with the
exact position of a chair planted out in the middle of the
floor.</p>
<p>“I think everything’s ready,” he said.</p>
<p>Rutley glanced at the clock with the air of a Roman elegant in
the Circus, languidly awaiting the introduction of an expected
Christian to an expectant tiger.</p>
<p>“The kid is due in two minutes,” he said.</p>
<p>“He’d jolly well better not be late,” said
Comus.</p>
<p>Comus had gone through the mill of many scorching castigations
in his earlier school days, and was able to appreciate to the
last ounce the panic that must be now possessing his foredoomed
victim, probably at this moment hovering miserably outside the
door. After all, that was part of the fun of the thing, and
most things have their amusing side if one knows where to look
for it.</p>
<p>There was a knock at the door, and Lancelot entered in
response to a hearty friendly summons to “come
in.”</p>
<p>“I’ve come to be caned,” he said
breathlessly; adding by way of identification, “my
name’s Chetrof.”</p>
<p>“That’s quite bad enough in itself,” said
Comus, “but there is probably worse to follow. You
are evidently keeping something back from us.”</p>
<p>“I missed a footer practice,” said Lancelot</p>
<p>“Six,” said Comus briefly, picking up his
cane.</p>
<p>“I didn’t see the notice on the board,”
hazarded Lancelot as a forlorn hope.</p>
<p>“We are always pleased to listen to excuses, and our
charge is two extra cuts. That will be eight. Get
over.”</p>
<p>And Comus indicated the chair that stood in sinister isolation
in the middle of the room. Never had an article of
furniture seemed more hateful in Lancelot’s eyes.
Comus could well remember the time when a chair stuck in the
middle of a room had seemed to him the most horrible of
manufactured things.</p>
<p>“Lend me a piece of chalk,” he said to his brother
prefect.</p>
<p>Lancelot ruefully recognised the truth of the chalk-line
story.</p>
<p>Comus drew the desired line with an anxious exactitude which
he would have scorned to apply to a diagram of Euclid or a map of
the Russo-Persian frontier.</p>
<p>“Bend a little more forward,” he said to the
victim, “and much tighter. Don’t trouble to
look pleasant, because I can’t see your face anyway.
It may sound unorthodox to say so, but this is going to hurt you
much more than it will hurt me.”</p>
<p>There was a carefully measured pause, and then Lancelot was
made vividly aware of what a good cane can be made to do in
really efficient hands. At the second cut he projected
himself hurriedly off the chair.</p>
<p>“Now I’ve lost count,” said Comus; “we
shall have to begin all over again. Kindly get back into
the same position. If you get down again before I’ve
finished Rutley will hold you over and you’ll get a
dozen.”</p>
<p>Lancelot got back on to the chair, and was re-arranged to the
taste of his executioner. He stayed there somehow or other
while Comus made eight accurate and agonisingly effective shots
at the chalk line.</p>
<p>“By the way,” he said to his gasping and gulping
victim when the infliction was over, “you said Chetrof,
didn’t you? I believe I’ve been asked to be
kind to you. As a beginning you can clean out my study this
afternoon. Be awfully careful how you dust the old
china. If you break any don’t come and tell me but
just go and drown yourself somewhere; it will save you from a
worse fate.”</p>
<p>“I don’t know where your study is,” said
Lancelot between his chokes.</p>
<p>“You’d better find it or I shall have to beat you,
really hard this time. Here, you’d better keep this
chalk in your pocket, it’s sure to come in handy later
on. Don’t stop to thank me for all I’ve done,
it only embarrasses me.”</p>
<p>As Comus hadn’t got a study Lancelot spent a feverish
half-hour in looking for it, incidentally missing another footer
practice.</p>
<p>“Everything is very jolly here,” wrote Lancelot to
his sister Emmeline. “The prefects can give you an
awful hot time if they like, but most of them are rather
decent. Some are Beasts. Bassington is a prefect
though only a junior one. He is the Limit as Beasts
go. At least I think so.”</p>
<p>Schoolboy reticence went no further, but Emmeline filled in
the gaps for herself with the lavish splendour of feminine
imagination. Francesca’s bridge went crashing into
the abyss.</p>
<h2>CHAPTER III</h2>
<p><span class="smcap">On</span> the evening of a certain
November day, two years after the events heretofore chronicled,
Francesca Bassington steered her way through the crowd that
filled the rooms of her friend Serena Golackly, bestowing nods of
vague recognition as she went, but with eyes that were obviously
intent on focussing one particular figure. Parliament had
pulled its energies together for an Autumn Session, and both
political Parties were fairly well represented in the
throng. Serena had a harmless way of inviting a number of
more or less public men and women to her house, and hoping that
if you left them together long enough they would constitute a
<i>salon</i>. In pursuance of the same instinct she planted
the flower borders at her week-end cottage retreat in Surrey with
a large mixture of bulbs, and called the result a Dutch
garden. Unfortunately, though you may bring brilliant
talkers into your home, you cannot always make them talk
brilliantly, or even talk at all; what is worse you cannot
restrict the output of those starling-voiced dullards who seem to
have, on all subjects, so much to say that was well worth leaving
unsaid. One group that Francesca passed was discussing a
Spanish painter, who was forty-three, and had painted thousands
of square yards of canvas in his time, but of whom no one in
London had heard till a few months ago; now the starling-voices
seemed determined that one should hear of very little else.
Three women knew how his name was pronounced, another always felt
that she must go into a forest and pray whenever she saw his
pictures, another had noticed that there were always pomegranates
in his later compositions, and a man with an indefensible collar
knew what the pomegranates “meant.” “What
I think so splendid about him,” said a stout lady in a loud
challenging voice, “is the way he defies all the
conventions of art while retaining all that the conventions stand
for.” “Ah, but have you noticed—”
put in the man with the atrocious collar, and Francesca pushed
desperately on, wondering dimly as she went, what people found so
unsupportable in the affliction of deafness. Her progress
was impeded for a moment by a couple engaged in earnest and
voluble discussion of some smouldering question of the day; a
thin spectacled young man with the receding forehead that so
often denotes advanced opinions, was talking to a spectacled
young woman with a similar type of forehead, and exceedingly
untidy hair. It was her ambition in life to be taken for a
Russian girl-student, and she had spent weeks of patient research
in trying to find out exactly where you put the tea-leaves in a
samovar. She had once been introduced to a young Jewess
from Odessa, who had died of pneumonia the following week; the
experience, slight as it was, constituted the spectacled young
lady an authority on all things Russian in the eyes of her
immediate set.</p>
<p>“Talk is helpful, talk is needful,” the young man
was saying, “but what we have got to do is to lift the
subject out of the furrow of indisciplined talk and place it on
the threshing-floor of practical discussion.”</p>
<p>The young woman took advantage of the rhetorical full-stop to
dash in with the remark which was already marshalled on the tip
of her tongue.</p>
<p>“In emancipating the serfs of poverty we must be careful
to avoid the mistakes which Russian bureaucracy stumbled into
when liberating the serfs of the soil.”</p>
<p>She paused in her turn for the sake of declamatory effect, but
recovered her breath quickly enough to start afresh on level
terms with the young man, who had jumped into the stride of his
next sentence.</p>
<p>“They got off to a good start that time,” said
Francesca to herself; “I suppose it’s the Prevention
of Destitution they’re hammering at. What on earth
would become of these dear good people if anyone started a
crusade for the prevention of mediocrity?”</p>
<p>Midway through one of the smaller rooms, still questing for an
elusive presence, she caught sight of someone that she knew, and
the shadow of a frown passed across her face. The object of
her faintly signalled displeasure was Courtenay Youghal, a
political spur-winner who seemed absurdly youthful to a
generation that had never heard of Pitt. It was
Youghal’s ambition—or perhaps his hobby—to
infuse into the greyness of modern political life some of the
colour of Disraelian dandyism, tempered with the correctness of
Anglo-Saxon taste, and supplemented by the flashes of wit that
were inherent from the Celtic strain in him. His success
was only a half-measure. The public missed in him that
touch of blatancy which it looks for in its rising public men;
the decorative smoothness of his chestnut-golden hair, and the
lively sparkle of his epigrams were counted to him for good, but
the restrained sumptuousness of his waistcoats and cravats were
as wasted efforts. If he had habitually smoked cigarettes
in a pink coral mouthpiece, or worn spats of Mackenzie tartan,
the great heart of the voting-man, and the gush of the
paragraph-makers might have been unreservedly his. The art
of public life consists to a great extent of knowing exactly
where to stop and going a bit further.</p>
<p>It was not Youghal’s lack of political sagacity that had
brought the momentary look of disapproval into Francesca’s
face. The fact was that Comus, who had left off being a
schoolboy and was now a social problem, had lately enrolled
himself among the young politician’s associates and
admirers, and as the boy knew and cared nothing about politics,
and merely copied Youghal’s waistcoats, and, less
successfully, his conversation, Francesca felt herself justified
in deploring the intimacy. To a woman who dressed well on
comparatively nothing a year it was an anxious experience to have
a son who dressed sumptuously on absolutely nothing.</p>
<p>The cloud that had passed over her face when she caught sight
of the offending Youghal was presently succeeded by a smile of
gratified achievement, as she encountered a bow of recognition
and welcome from a portly middle-aged gentleman, who seemed
genuinely anxious to include her in the rather meagre group that
he had gathered about him.</p>
<p>“We were just talking about my new charge,” he
observed genially, including in the “we” his somewhat
depressed-looking listeners, who in all human probability had
done none of the talking. “I was just telling them,
and you may be interested to hear this—”</p>
<p>Francesca, with Spartan stoicism, continued to wear an
ingratiating smile, though the character of the deaf adder that
stoppeth her ear and will not hearken, seemed to her at that
moment a beautiful one.</p>
<p>Sir Julian Jull had been a member of a House of Commons
distinguished for its high standard of well-informed mediocrity,
and had harmonised so thoroughly with his surroundings that the
most attentive observer of Parliamentary proceedings could
scarcely have told even on which side of the House he sat.
A baronetcy bestowed on him by the Party in power had at least
removed that doubt; some weeks later he had been made Governor of
some West Indian dependency, whether as a reward for having
accepted the baronetcy, or as an application of a theory that
West Indian islands get the Governors they deserve, it would have
been hard to say. To Sir Julian the appointment was,
doubtless, one of some importance; during the span of his
Governorship the island might possibly be visited by a member of
the Royal Family, or at the least by an earthquake, and in either
case his name would get into the papers. To the public the
matter was one of absolute indifference; “who is he and
where is it?” would have correctly epitomised the sum total
of general information on the personal and geographical aspects
of the case.</p>
<p>Francesca, however, from the moment she had heard of the
likelihood of the appointment, had taken a deep and lively
interest in Sir Julian. As a Member of Parliament he had
not filled any very pressing social want in her life, and on the
rare occasions when she took tea on the Terrace of the House she
was wont to lapse into rapt contemplation of St. Thomas’s
Hospital whenever she saw him within bowing distance. But
as Governor of an island he would, of course, want a private
secretary, and as a friend and colleague of Henry Greech, to whom
he was indebted for many little acts of political support (they
had once jointly drafted an amendment which had been ruled out of
order), what was more natural and proper than that he should let
his choice fall on Henry’s nephew Comus? While
privately doubting whether the boy would make the sort of
secretary that any public man would esteem as a treasure, Henry
was thoroughly in agreement with Francesca as to the excellence
and desirability of an arrangement which would transplant that
troublesome’ young animal from the too restricted and
conspicuous area that centres in the parish of St. James’s
to some misty corner of the British dominion overseas.
Brother and sister had conspired to give an elaborate and at the
same time cosy little luncheon to Sir Julian on the very day that
his appointment was officially announced, and the question of the
secretaryship had been mooted and sedulously fostered as occasion
permitted, until all that was now needed to clinch the matter was
a formal interview between His Excellency and Comus. The
boy had from the first shewn very little gratification at the
prospect of his deportation. To live on a remote shark-girt
island, as he expressed it, with the Jull family as his chief
social mainstay, and Sir Julian’s conversation as a daily
item of his existence, did not inspire him with the same degree
of enthusiasm as was displayed by his mother and uncle, who,
after all, were not making the experiment. Even the
necessity for an entirely new outfit did not appeal to his
imagination with the force that might have been expected.
But, however lukewarm his adhesion to the project might be,
Francesca and her brother were clearly determined that no lack of
deft persistence on their part should endanger its success.
It was for the purpose of reminding Sir Julian of his promise to
meet Comus at lunch on the following day, and definitely settle
the matter of the secretaryship that Francesca was now enduring
the ordeal of a long harangue on the value of the West Indian
group as an Imperial asset. Other listeners dexterously
detached themselves one by one, but Francesca’s patience
outlasted even Sir Julian’s flow of commonplaces, and her
devotion was duly rewarded by a renewed acknowledgment of the
lunch engagement and its purpose. She pushed her way back
through the throng of starling-voiced chatterers fortified by a
sense of well-earned victory. Dear Serena’s absurd
<i>salons</i> served some good purpose after all.</p>
<p>Francesca was not an early riser and her breakfast was only
just beginning to mobilise on the breakfast-table next morning
when a copy of <i>The Times</i>, sent by special messenger from
her brother’s house, was brought up to her room. A
heavy margin of blue pencilling drew her attention to a
prominently-printed letter which bore the ironical heading:
“Julian Jull, Proconsul.” The matter of the
letter was a cruel dis-interment of some fatuous and forgotten
speeches made by Sir Julian to his constituents not many years
ago, in which the value of some of our Colonial possessions,
particularly certain West Indian islands, was decried in a medley
of pomposity, ignorance and amazingly cheap humour. The
extracts given sounded weak and foolish enough, taken by
themselves, but the writer of the letter had interlarded them
with comments of his own, which sparkled with an ironical
brilliance that was Cervantes-like in its polished cruelty.
Remembering her ordeal of the previous evening Francesca
permitted herself a certain feeling of amusement as she read the
merciless stabs inflicted on the newly-appointed Governor; then
she came to the signature at the foot of the letter, and the
laughter died out of her eyes. “Comus
Bassington” stared at her from above a thick layer of blue
pencil lines marked by Henry Greech’s shaking hand.</p>
<p>Comus could no more have devised such a letter than he could
have written an Episcopal charge to the clergy of any given
diocese. It was obviously the work of Courtenay Youghal,
and Comus, for a palpable purpose of his own, had wheedled him
into foregoing for once the pride of authorship in a clever piece
of political raillery, and letting his young friend stand sponsor
instead. It was a daring stroke, and there could be no
question as to its success; the secretaryship and the distant
shark-girt island faded away into the horizon of impossible
things. Francesca, forgetting the golden rule of strategy
which enjoins a careful choosing of ground and opportunity before
entering on hostilities, made straight for the bathroom door,
behind which a lively din of splashing betokened that Comus had
at least begun his toilet.</p>
<p>“You wicked boy, what have you done?” she cried,
reproachfully.</p>
<p>“Me washee,” came a cheerful shout; “me
washee from the neck all the way down to the merrythought, and
now washee down from the merrythought to—”</p>
<p>“You have ruined your future. <i>The Times</i> has
printed that miserable letter with your signature.”</p>
<p>A loud squeal of joy came from the bath. “Oh,
Mummy! Let me see!”</p>
<p>There were sounds as of a sprawling dripping body clambering
hastily out of the bath. Francesca fled. One cannot
effectively scold a moist nineteen-year old boy clad only in a
bath-towel and a cloud of steam.</p>
<p>Another messenger arrived before Francesca’s breakfast
was over. This one brought a letter from Sir Julian Jull,
excusing himself from fulfilment of the luncheon engagement.</p>
<h2>CHAPTER IV</h2>
<p><span class="smcap">Francesca</span> prided herself on being
able to see things from other people’s points of view,
which meant, as it usually does, that she could see her own point
of view from various aspects. As regards Comus, whose
doings and non-doings bulked largely in her thoughts at the
present moment, she had mapped out in her mind so clearly what
his outlook in life ought to be, that she was peculiarly unfitted
to understand the drift of his feelings or the impulses that
governed them. Fate had endowed her with a son; in limiting
the endowment to a solitary offspring Fate had certainly shown a
moderation which Francesca was perfectly willing to acknowledge
and be thankful for; but then, as she pointed out to a certain
complacent friend of hers who cheerfully sustained an endowment
of half-a-dozen male offsprings and a girl or two, her one child
was Comus. Moderation in numbers was more than
counterbalanced in his case by extravagance in
characteristics.</p>
<p>Francesca mentally compared her son with hundreds of other
young men whom she saw around her, steadily, and no doubt
happily, engaged in the process of transforming themselves from
nice boys into useful citizens. Most of them had
occupations, or were industriously engaged in qualifying for
such; in their leisure moments they smoked reasonably-priced
cigarettes, went to the cheaper seats at music-halls, watched an
occasional cricket match at Lord’s with apparent interest,
saw most of the world’s spectacular events through the
medium of the cinematograph, and were wont to exchange at parting
seemingly superfluous injunctions to “be good.”
The whole of Bond Street and many of the tributary thoroughfares
of Piccadilly might have been swept off the face of modern London
without in any way interfering with the supply of their daily
wants. They were doubtless dull as acquaintances, but as
sons they would have been eminently restful. With a growing
sense of irritation Francesca compared these deserving young men
with her own intractable offspring, and wondered why Fate should
have singled her out to be the parent of such a vexatious variant
from a comfortable and desirable type. As far as
remunerative achievement was concerned, Comus copied the
insouciance of the field lily with a dangerous fidelity.
Like his mother he looked round with wistful irritation at the
example afforded by contemporary youth, but he concentrated his
attention exclusively on the richer circles of his acquaintance,
young men who bought cars and polo ponies as unconcernedly as he
might purchase a carnation for his buttonhole, and went for trips
to Cairo or the Tigris valley with less difficulty and
finance-stretching than he encountered in contriving a week-end
at Brighton.</p>
<p>Gaiety and good-looks had carried Comus successfully and, on
the whole, pleasantly, through schooldays and a recurring
succession of holidays; the same desirable assets were still at
his service to advance him along his road, but it was a
disconcerting experience to find that they could not be relied on
to go all distances at all times. In an animal world, and a
fiercely competitive animal world at that, something more was
needed than the decorative <i>abandon</i> of the field lily, and
it was just that something more which Comus seemed unable or
unwilling to provide on his own account; it was just the lack of
that something more which left him sulking with Fate over the
numerous breakdowns and stumbling-blocks that held him up on what
he expected to be a triumphal or, at any rate, unimpeded
progress.</p>
<p>Francesca was, in her own way, fonder of Comus than of anyone
else in the world, and if he had been browning his skin somewhere
east of Suez she would probably have kissed his photograph with
genuine fervour every night before going to bed; the appearance
of a cholera scare or rumour of native rising in the columns of
her daily news-sheet would have caused her a flutter of anxiety,
and she would have mentally likened herself to a Spartan mother
sacrificing her best-beloved on the altar of State
necessities. But with the best-beloved installed under her
roof, occupying an unreasonable amount of cubic space, and
demanding daily sacrifices instead of providing the raw material
for one, her feelings were tinged with irritation rather than
affection. She might have forgiven Comus generously for
misdeeds of some gravity committed in another continent, but she
could never overlook the fact that out of a dish of five
plovers’ eggs he was certain to take three. The
absent may be always wrong, but they are seldom in a position to
be inconsiderate.</p>
<p>Thus a wall of ice had grown up gradually between mother and
son, a barrier across which they could hold converse, but which
gave a wintry chill even to the sparkle of their lightest
words. The boy had the gift of being irresistibly amusing
when he chose to exert himself in that direction, and after a
long series of moody or jangling meal-sittings he would break
forth into a torrential flow of small talk, scandal and malicious
anecdote, true or more generally invented, to which Francesca
listened with a relish and appreciation, that was all the more
flattering from being so unwillingly bestowed.</p>
<p>“If you chose your friends from a rather more reputable
set you would be doubtless less amusing, but there would be
compensating advantages.”</p>
<p>Francesca snapped the remark out at lunch one day when she had
been betrayed into a broader smile than she considered the
circumstances of her attitude towards Comus warranted.</p>
<p>“I’m going to move in quite decent society
to-night,” replied Comus with a pleased chuckle;
“I’m going to meet you and Uncle Henry and heaps of
nice dull God-fearing people at dinner.”</p>
<p>Francesca gave a little gasp of surprise and annoyance.</p>
<p>“You don’t mean to say Caroline has asked you to
dinner to-night?” she said; “and of course without
telling me. How exceedingly like her!”</p>
<p>Lady Caroline Benaresq had reached that age when you can say
and do what you like in defiance of people’s most sensitive
feelings and most cherished antipathies. Not that she had
waited to attain her present age before pursuing that line of
conduct; she came of a family whose individual members went
through life, from the nursery to the grave, with as much tact
and consideration as a cactus-hedge might show in going through a
crowded bathing tent. It was a compensating mercy that they
disagreed rather more among themselves than they did with the
outside world; every known variety and shade of religion and
politics had been pressed into the family service to avoid the
possibility of any agreement on the larger essentials of life,
and such unlooked-for happenings as the Home Rule schism, the
Tariff-Reform upheaval and the Suffragette crusade were
thankfully seized on as furnishing occasion for further
differences and sub-divisions. Lady Caroline’s
favourite scheme of entertaining was to bring jarring and
antagonistic elements into close contact and play them
remorselessly one against the other. “One gets much
better results under those circumstances” she used to
observe, “than by asking people who wish to meet each
other. Few people talk as brilliantly to impress a friend
as they do to depress an enemy.”</p>
<p>She admitted that her theory broke down rather badly if you
applied it to Parliamentary debates. At her own dinner
table its success was usually triumphantly vindicated.</p>
<p>“Who else is to be there?” Francesca asked, with
some pardonable misgiving.</p>
<p>“Courtenay Youghal. He’ll probably sit next
to you, so you’d better think out a lot of annihilating
remarks in readiness. And Elaine de Frey.”</p>
<p>“I don’t think I’ve heard of her. Who
is she?”</p>
<p>“Nobody in particular, but rather nice-looking in a
solemn sort of way, and almost indecently rich.”</p>
<p>“Marry her” was the advice which sprang to
Francesca’s lips, but she choked it back with a salted
almond, having a rare perception of the fact that words are
sometimes given to us to defeat our purposes.</p>
<p>“Caroline has probably marked her down for Toby or one
of the grand-nephews,” she said, carelessly; “a
little money would be rather useful in that quarter, I
imagine.”</p>
<p>Comus tucked in his underlip with just the shade of pugnacity
that she wanted to see.</p>
<p>An advantageous marriage was so obviously the most sensible
course for him to embark on that she scarcely dared to hope that
he would seriously entertain it; yet there was just a chance that
if he got as far as the flirtation stage with an attractive (and
attracted) girl who was also an heiress, the sheer perversity of
his nature might carry him on to more definite courtship, if only
from the desire to thrust other more genuinely enamoured suitors
into the background. It was a forlorn hope; so forlorn that
the idea even crossed her mind of throwing herself on the mercy
of her <i>bête noire</i>, Courtenay Youghal, and trying to
enlist the influence which he seemed to possess over Comus for
the purpose of furthering her hurriedly conceived project.
Anyhow, the dinner promised to be more interesting than she had
originally anticipated.</p>
<p>Lady Caroline was a professed Socialist in politics, chiefly,
it was believed, because she was thus enabled to disagree with
most of the Liberals and Conservatives, and all the Socialists of
the day. She did not permit her Socialism, however, to
penetrate below stairs; her cook and butler had every
encouragement to be Individualists. Francesca, who was a
keen and intelligent food critic, harboured no misgivings as to
her hostess’s kitchen and cellar departments; some of the
human side-dishes at the feast gave her more ground for
uneasiness. Courtenay Youghal, for instance, would probably
be brilliantly silent; her brother Henry would almost certainly
be the reverse.</p>
<p>The dinner party was a large one and Francesca arrived late
with little time to take preliminary stock of the guests; a card
with the name, “Miss de Frey,” immediately opposite
her own place at the other side of the table, indicated, however,
the whereabouts of the heiress. It was characteristic of
Francesca that she first carefully read the menu from end to end,
and then indulged in an equally careful though less open scrutiny
of the girl who sat opposite her, the girl who was nobody in
particular, but whose income was everything that could be
desired. She was pretty in a restrained nut-brown fashion,
and had a look of grave reflective calm that probably masked a
speculative unsettled temperament. Her pose, if one wished
to be critical, was just a little too elaborately careless.
She wore some excellently set rubies with that indefinable air of
having more at home that is so difficult to improvise.
Francesca was distinctly pleased with her survey.</p>
<p>“You seem interested in your
<i>vis-à-vis</i>,” said Courtenay Youghal.</p>
<p>“I almost think I’ve seen her before,” said
Francesca; “her face seems familiar to me.”</p>
<p>“The narrow gallery at the Louvre; attributed to
Leonardo da Vinci,” said Youghal.</p>
<p>“Of course,” said Francesca, her feelings divided
between satisfaction at capturing an elusive impression and
annoyance that Youghal should have been her helper. A
stronger tinge of annoyance possessed her when she heard the
voice of Henry Greech raised in painful prominence at Lady
Caroline’s end of the table.</p>
<p>“I called on the Trudhams yesterday,” he
announced; “it was their Silver Wedding, you know, at least
the day before was. Such lots of silver presents, quite a
show. Of course there were a great many duplicates, but
still, very nice to have. I think they were very pleased to
get so many.”</p>
<p>“We must not grudge them their show of presents after
their twenty-five years of married life,” said Lady
Caroline, gently; “it is the silver lining to their
cloud.”</p>
<p>A third of the guests present were related to the
Trudhams.</p>
<p>“Lady Caroline is beginning well,” murmured
Courtenay Youghal.</p>
<p>“I should hardly call twenty-five years of married life
a cloud,” said Henry Greech, lamely.</p>
<p>“Don’t let’s talk about married life,”
said a tall handsome woman, who looked like some modern
painter’s conception of the goddess Bellona;
“it’s my misfortune to write eternally about husbands
and wives and their variants. My public expects it of
me. I do so envy journalists who can write about plagues
and strikes and Anarchist plots, and other pleasing things,
instead of being tied down to one stale old topic.”</p>
<p>“Who is that woman and what has she written?”
Francesca asked Youghal; she dimly remembered having seen her at
one of Serena Golackly’s gatherings, surrounded by a little
Court of admirers.</p>
<p>“I forget her name; she has a villa at San Remo or
Mentone, or somewhere where one does have villas, and plays an
extraordinary good game of bridge. Also she has the
reputation, rather rare in your sex, of being a wonderfully sound
judge of wine.”</p>
<p>“But what has she written?”</p>
<p>“Oh, several novels of the thinnish ice order. Her
last one, ‘The Woman who wished it was Wednesday,’
has been banned at all the libraries. I expect you’ve
read it.”</p>
<p>“I don’t see why you should think so,” said
Francesca, coldly.</p>
<p>“Only because Comus lent me your copy yesterday,”
said Youghal. He threw back his handsome head and gave her
a sidelong glance of quizzical amusement. He knew that she
hated his intimacy with Comus, and he was secretly rather proud
of his influence over the boy, shallow and negative though he
knew it to be. It had been, on his part, an unsought
intimacy, and it would probably fall to pieces the moment he
tried seriously to take up the <i>rôle</i> of mentor.
The fact that Comus’s mother openly disapproved of the
friendship gave it perhaps its chief interest in the young
politician’s eyes.</p>
<p>Francesca turned her attention to her brother’s end of
the table. Henry Greech had willingly availed himself of
the invitation to leave the subject of married life, and had
launched forthwith into the equally well-worn theme of current
politics. He was not a person who was in much demand for
public meetings, and the House showed no great impatience to hear
his views on the topics of the moment; its impatience, indeed,
was manifested rather in the opposite direction. Hence he
was prone to unburden himself of accumulated political wisdom as
occasion presented itself—sometimes, indeed, to assume an
occasion that was hardly visible to the naked intelligence.</p>
<p>“Our opponents are engaged in a hopelessly uphill
struggle, and they know it,” he chirruped, defiantly;
“they’ve become possessed, like the Gadarene swine,
with a whole legion of—”</p>
<p>“Surely the Gadarene swine went downhill,” put in
Lady Caroline in a gently enquiring voice.</p>
<p>Henry Greech hastily abandoned simile and fell back on
platitude and the safer kinds of fact.</p>
<p>Francesca did not regard her brother’s views on
statecraft either in the light of gospel or revelation; as Comus
once remarked, they more usually suggested exodus. In the
present instance she found distraction in a renewed scrutiny of
the girl opposite her, who seemed to be only moderately
interested in the conversational efforts of the diners on either
side of her. Comus who was looking and talking his best,
was sitting at the further end of the table, and Francesca was
quick to notice in which direction the girl’s glances were
continually straying. Once or twice the eyes of the young
people met and a swift flush of pleasure and a half-smile that
spoke of good understanding came to the heiress’s
face. It did not need the gift of the traditional intuition
of her sex to enable Francesca to guess that the girl with the
desirable banking account was already considerably attracted by
the lively young Pagan who had, when he cared to practise it,
such an art of winning admiration. For the first time for
many, many months Francesca saw her son’s prospects in a
rose-coloured setting, and she began, unconsciously, to wonder
exactly how much wealth was summed up in the expressive label
“almost indecently rich.” A wife with a really
large fortune and a correspondingly big dower of character and
ambition, might, perhaps, succeed in turning Comus’s latent
energies into a groove which would provide him, if not with a
career, at least with an occupation, and the young serious face
opposite looked as if its owner lacked neither character or
ambition. Francesca’s speculations took a more
personal turn. Out of the well-filled coffers with which
her imagination was toying, an inconsiderable sum might
eventually be devoted to the leasing, or even perhaps the
purchase of, the house in Blue Street when the present convenient
arrangement should have come to an end, and Francesca and the Van
der Meulen would not be obliged to seek fresh quarters.</p>
<p>A woman’s voice, talking in a discreet undertone on the
other side of Courtenay Youghal, broke in on her
bridge-building.</p>
<p>“Tons of money and really very presentable. Just
the wife for a rising young politician. Go in and win her
before she’s snapped up by some fortune hunter.”</p>
<p>Youghal and his instructress in worldly wisdom were looking
straight across the table at the Leonardo da Vinci girl with the
grave reflective eyes and the over-emphasised air of
repose. Francesca felt a quick throb of anger against her
match-making neighbour; why, she asked herself, must some women,
with no end or purpose of their own to serve, except the sheer
love of meddling in the affairs of others, plunge their hands
into plots and schemings of this sort, in which the happiness of
more than one person was concerned? And more clearly than
ever she realised how thoroughly she detested Courtenay
Youghal. She had disliked him as an evil influence, setting
before her son an example of showy ambition that he was not in
the least likely to follow, and providing him with a model of
extravagant dandyism that he was only too certain to copy.
In her heart she knew that Comus would have embarked just as
surely on his present course of idle self-indulgence if he had
never known of the existence of Youghal, but she chose to regard
that young man as her son’s evil genius, and now he seemed
likely to justify more than ever the character she had fastened
on to him. For once in his life Comus appeared to have an
idea of behaving sensibly and making some use of his
opportunities, and almost at the same moment Courtenay Youghal
arrived on the scene as a possible and very dangerous
rival. Against the good looks and fitful powers of
fascination that Comus could bring into the field, the young
politician could match half-a-dozen dazzling qualities which
would go far to recommend him in the eyes of a woman of the
world, still more in those of a young girl in search of an
ideal. Good-looking in his own way, if not on such showy
lines as Comus, always well turned-out, witty, self-confident
without being bumptious, with a conspicuous Parliamentary career
alongside him, and heaven knew what else in front of him,
Courtenay Youghal certainly was not a rival whose chances could
be held very lightly. Francesca laughed bitterly to herself
as she remembered that a few hours ago she had entertained the
idea of begging for his good offices in helping on Comus’s
wooing. One consolation, at least, she found for herself:
if Youghal really meant to step in and try and cut out his young
friend, the latter at any rate had snatched a useful start.
Comus had mentioned Miss de Frey at luncheon that day, casually
and dispassionately; if the subject of the dinner guests had not
come up he would probably not have mentioned her at all.
But they were obviously already very good friends. It was
part and parcel of the state of domestic tension at Blue Street
that Francesca should only have come to know of this highly
interesting heiress by an accidental sorting of guests at a
dinner party.</p>
<p>Lady Caroline’s voice broke in on her reflections; it
was a gentle purring voice, that possessed an uncanny quality of
being able to make itself heard down the longest dinner
table.</p>
<p>“The dear Archdeacon is getting so absent-minded.
He read a list of box-holders for the opera as the First Lesson
the other Sunday, instead of the families and lots of the tribes
of Israel that entered Canaan. Fortunately no one noticed
the mistake.”</p>
<h2>CHAPTER V</h2>
<p><span class="smcap">On</span> a conveniently secluded bench
facing the Northern Pheasantry in the Zoological Society’s
Gardens, Regent’s Park, Courtenay Youghal sat immersed in
mature flirtation with a lady, who, though certainly young in
fact and appearance, was some four or five years his
senior. When he was a schoolboy of sixteen, Molly McQuade
had personally conducted him to the Zoo and stood him dinner
afterwards at Kettner’s, and whenever the two of them
happened to be in town on the anniversary of that bygone
festivity they religiously repeated the programme in its
entirety. Even the menu of the dinner was adhered to as
nearly as possible; the original selection of food and wine that
schoolboy exuberance, tempered by schoolboy shyness, had pitched
on those many years ago, confronted Youghal on those occasions,
as a drowning man’s past life is said to rise up and parade
itself in his last moments of consciousness.</p>
<p>The flirtation which was thus perennially restored to its
old-time footing owed its longevity more to the enterprising
solicitude of Miss McQuade than to any conscious sentimental
effort on the part of Youghal himself. Molly McQuade was
known to her neighbours in a minor hunting shire as a hard-riding
conventionally unconventional type of young woman, who came
naturally into the classification, “a good
sort.” She was just sufficiently good-looking,
sufficiently reticent about her own illnesses, when she had any,
and sufficiently appreciative of her neighbours’ gardens,
children and hunters to be generally popular. Most men
liked her, and the percentage of women who disliked her was not
inconveniently high. One of these days, it was assumed, she
would marry a brewer or a Master of Otter Hounds, and, after a
brief interval, be known to the world as the mother of a boy or
two at Malvern or some similar seat of learning. The
romantic side of her nature was altogether unguessed by the
countryside.</p>
<p>Her romances were mostly in serial form and suffered perhaps
in fervour from their disconnected course what they gained in
length of days. Her affectionate interest in the several
young men who figured in her affairs of the heart was perfectly
honest, and she certainly made no attempt either to conceal their
separate existences, or to play them off one against the
other. Neither could it be said that she was a husband
hunter; she had made up her mind what sort of man she was likely
to marry, and her forecast did not differ very widely from that
formed by her local acquaintances. If her married life were
eventually to turn out a failure, at least she looked forward to
it with very moderate expectations. Her love affairs she
put on a very different footing and apparently they were the
all-absorbing element in her life. She possessed the
happily constituted temperament which enables a man or woman to
be a “pluralist,” and to observe the sage precaution
of not putting all one’s eggs into one basket. Her
demands were not exacting; she required of her affinity that he
should be young, good-looking, and at least, moderately amusing;
she would have preferred him to be invariably faithful, but, with
her own example before her, she was prepared for the probability,
bordering on certainty, that he would be nothing of the
sort. The philosophy of the “Garden of Kama”
was the compass by which she steered her barque and thus far, if
she had encountered some storms and buffeting, she had at least
escaped being either shipwrecked or becalmed.</p>
<p>Courtenay Youghal had not been designed by Nature to fulfil
the <i>rôle</i> of an ardent or devoted lover, and he
scrupulously respected the limits which Nature had laid
down. For Molly, however, he had a certain responsive
affection. She had always obviously admired him, and at the
same time she never beset him with crude flattery; the principal
reason why the flirtation had stood the test of so many years was
the fact that it only flared into active existence at convenient
intervals. In an age when the telephone has undermined
almost every fastness of human privacy, and the sanctity of
one’s seclusion depends often on the ability for tactful
falsehood shown by a club pageboy, Youghal was duly appreciative
of the circumstance that his lady fair spent a large part of the
year pursuing foxes, in lieu of pursuing him. Also the
honestly admitted fact that, in her human hunting, she rode after
more than one quarry, made the inevitable break-up of the affair
a matter to which both could look forward without a sense of
coming embarrassment and recrimination. When the time for
gathering ye rosebuds should be over, neither of them could
accuse the other of having wrecked his or her entire life.
At the most they would only have disorganised a week-end.</p>
<p>On this particular afternoon, when old reminiscences had been
gone through, and the intervening gossip of past months duly
recounted, a lull in the conversation made itself rather
obstinately felt. Molly had already guessed that matters
were about to slip into a new phase; the affair had reached
maturity long ago, and a new phase must be in the nature of a
wane.</p>
<p>“You’re a clever brute,” she said, suddenly,
with an air of affectionate regret; “I always knew
you’d get on in the House, but I hardly expected you to
come to the front so soon.”</p>
<p>“I’m coming to the front,” admitted Youghal,
judicially; “the problem is, shall I be able to stay
there. Unless something happens in the financial line
before long, I don’t see how I’m to stay in
Parliament at all. Economy is out of the question. It
would open people’s eyes, I fancy, if they knew how little
I exist on as it is. And I’m living so far beyond my
income that we may almost be said to be living apart.”</p>
<p>“It will have to be a rich wife, I suppose,” said
Molly, slowly; “that’s the worst of success, it
imposes so many conditions. I rather knew, from something
in your manner, that you were drifting that way.”</p>
<p>Youghal said nothing in the way of contradiction; he gazed
steadfastly at the aviary in front of him as though exotic
pheasants were for the moment the most absorbing study in the
world. As a matter of fact, his mind was centred on the
image of Elaine de Frey, with her clear untroubled eyes and her
Leonardo da Vinci air. He was wondering whether he was
likely to fall into a frame of mind concerning her which would be
in the least like falling in love.</p>
<p>“I shall mind horribly,” continued Molly, after a
pause, “but, of course, I have always known that something
of the sort would have to happen one of these days. When a
man goes into politics he can’t call his soul his own, and
I suppose his heart becomes an impersonal possession in the same
way.”</p>
<p>“Most people who know me would tell you that I
haven’t got a heart,” said Youghal.</p>
<p>“I’ve often felt inclined to agree with
them,” said Molly; “and then, now and again, I think
you have a heart tucked away somewhere.”</p>
<p>“I hope I have,” said Youghal, “because
I’m trying to break to you the fact that I think I’m
falling in love with somebody.”</p>
<p>Molly McQuade turned sharply to look at her companion, who
still fixed his gaze on the pheasant run in front of him.</p>
<p>“Don’t tell me you’re losing your head over
somebody useless, someone without money,” she said;
“I don’t think I could stand that.”</p>
<p>For the moment she feared that Courtenay’s selfishness
might have taken an unexpected turn, in which ambition had given
way to the fancy of the hour; he might be going to sacrifice his
Parliamentary career for a life of stupid lounging in momentarily
attractive company. He quickly undeceived her.</p>
<p>“She’s got heaps of money.”</p>
<p>Molly gave a grunt of relief. Her affection for
Courtenay had produced the anxiety which underlay her first
question; a natural jealousy prompted the next one.</p>
<p>“Is she young and pretty and all that sort of thing, or
is she just a good sort with a sympathetic manner and nice
eyes? As a rule that’s the kind that goes with a lot
of money.”</p>
<p>“Young and quite good-looking in her way, and a distinct
style of her own. Some people would call her
beautiful. As a political hostess I should think
she’d be splendid. I imagine I’m rather in love
with her.”</p>
<p>“And is she in love with you?”</p>
<p>Youghal threw back his head with the slight assertive movement
that Molly knew and liked.</p>
<p>“She’s a girl who I fancy would let judgment
influence her a lot. And without being stupidly conceited,
I think I may say she might do worse than throw herself away on
me. I’m young and quite good-looking, and I’m
making a name for myself in the House; she’ll be able to
read all sorts of nice and horrid things about me in the papers
at breakfast-time. I can be brilliantly amusing at times,
and I understand the value of silence; there is no fear that I
shall ever degenerate into that fearsome thing—a cheerful
talkative husband. For a girl with money and social
ambitions I should think I was rather a good thing.”</p>
<p>“You are certainly in love, Courtenay,” said
Molly, “but it’s the old love and not a new
one. I’m rather glad. I should have hated to
have you head-over-heels in love with a pretty woman, even for a
short time. You’ll be much happier as it is.
And I’m going to put all my feelings in the background, and
tell you to go in and win. You’ve got to marry a rich
woman, and if she’s nice and will make a good hostess, so
much the better for everybody. You’ll be happier in
your married life than I shall be in mine, when it comes;
you’ll have other interests to absorb you. I shall
just have the garden and dairy and nursery and lending library,
as like as two peas to all the gardens and dairies and nurseries
for hundreds of miles round. You won’t care for your
wife enough to be worried every time she has a finger-ache, and
you’ll like her well enough to be pleased to meet her
sometimes at your own house. I shouldn’t wonder if
you were quite happy. She will probably be miserable, but
any woman who married you would be.”</p>
<p>There was a short pause; they were both staring at the
pheasant cages. Then Molly spoke again, with the swift
nervous tone of a general who is hurriedly altering the
disposition of his forces for a strategic retreat.</p>
<p>“When you are safely married and honey-mooned and all
that sort of thing, and have put your wife through her paces as a
political hostess, some time, when the House isn’t sitting,
you must come down by yourself, and do a little hunting with
us. Will you? It won’t be quite the same as old
times, but it will be something to look forward to when I’m
reading the endless paragraphs about your fashionable political
wedding.”</p>
<p>“You’re looking forward pretty far,” laughed
Youghal; “the lady may take your view as to the probable
unhappiness of a future shared with me, and I may have to content
myself with penurious political bachelorhood. Anyhow, the
present is still with us. We dine at Kettner’s
to-night, don’t we?”</p>
<p>“Rather,” said Molly, “though it will be
more or less a throat-lumpy feast as far as I am concerned.
We shall have to drink to the health of the future Mrs.
Youghal. By the way, it’s rather characteristic of
you that you haven’t told me who she is, and of me that I
haven’t asked. And now, like a dear boy, trot away
and leave me. I haven’t got to say good-bye to you
yet, but I’m going to take a quiet farewell of the
Pheasantry. We’ve had some jolly good talks, you and
I, sitting on this seat, haven’t we? And I know, as
well as I know anything, that this is the last of them.
Eight o’clock to-night, as punctually as
possible.”</p>
<p>She watched his retreating figure with eyes that grew slowly
misty; he had been such a jolly comely boy-friend, and they had
had such good times together. The mist deepened on her
lashes as she looked round at the familiar rendezvous where they
had so often kept tryst since the day when they had first come
there together, he a schoolboy and she but lately out of her
teens. For the moment she felt herself in the thrall of a
very real sorrow.</p>
<p>Then, with the admirable energy of one who is only in town for
a fleeting fortnight, she raced away to have tea with a
world-faring naval admirer at his club. Pluralism is a
merciful narcotic.</p>
<h2>CHAPTER VI</h2>
<p><span class="smcap">Elaine de Frey</span> sat at ease—at
bodily ease—at any rate—in a low wicker chair placed
under the shade of a group of cedars in the heart of a stately
spacious garden that had almost made up its mind to be a
park. The shallow stone basin of an old fountain, on whose
wide ledge a leaden-moulded otter for ever preyed on a leaden
salmon, filled a conspicuous place in the immediate
foreground. Around its rim ran an inscription in Latin,
warning mortal man that time flows as swiftly as water and
exhorting him to make the most of his hours; after which piece of
Jacobean moralising it set itself shamelessly to beguile all who
might pass that way into an abandonment of contemplative
repose. On all sides of it a stretch of smooth turf spread
away, broken up here and there by groups of dwarfish chestnut and
mulberry trees, whose leaves and branches cast a laced pattern of
shade beneath them. On one side the lawn sloped gently down
to a small lake, whereon floated a quartette of swans, their
movements suggestive of a certain mournful listlessness, as
though a weary dignity of caste held them back from the joyous
bustling life of the lesser waterfowl. Elaine liked to
imagine that they re-embodied the souls of unhappy boys who had
been forced by family interests to become high ecclesiastical
dignitaries and had grown prematurely Right Reverend. A low
stone balustrade fenced part of the shore of the lake, making a
miniature terrace above its level, and here roses grew in a rich
multitude. Other rose bushes, carefully pruned and tended,
formed little oases of colour and perfume amid the restful green
of the sward, and in the distance the eye caught the variegated
blaze of a many-hued hedge of rhododendron. With these
favoured exceptions flowers were hard to find in this
well-ordered garden; the misguided tyranny of staring geranium
beds and beflowered archways leading to nowhere, so dear to the
suburban gardener, found no expression here. Magnificent
Amherst pheasants, whose plumage challenged and almost shamed the
peacock on his own ground, stepped to and fro over the emerald
turf with the assured self-conscious pride of reigning
sultans. It was a garden where summer seemed a
part-proprietor rather than a hurried visitor.</p>
<p>By the side of Elaine’s chair under the shadow of the
cedars a wicker table was set out with the paraphernalia of
afternoon tea. On some cushions at her feet reclined
Courtenay Youghal, smoothly preened and youthfully elegant, the
personification of decorative repose; equally decorative, but
with the showy restlessness of a dragonfly, Comus disported his
flannelled person over a considerable span of the available
foreground.</p>
<p>The intimacy existing between the two young men had suffered
no immediate dislocation from the circumstance that they were
tacitly paying court to the same lady. It was an intimacy
founded not in the least on friendship or community of tastes and
ideas, but owed its existence to the fact that each was amused
and interested by the other. Youghal found Comus, for the
time being at any rate, just as amusing and interesting as a
rival for Elaine’s favour as he had been in the
<i>rôle</i> of scapegrace boy-about-Town; Comus for his
part did not wish to lose touch with Youghal, who among other
attractions possessed the recommendation of being under the ban
of Comus’s mother. She disapproved, it is true, of a
great many of her son’s friends and associates, but this
particular one was a special and persistent source of irritation
to her from the fact that he figured prominently and more or less
successfully in the public life of the day. There was
something peculiarly exasperating in reading a brilliant and
incisive attack on the Government’s rash handling of public
expenditure delivered by a young man who encouraged her son in
every imaginable extravagance. The actual extent of
Youghal’s influence over the boy was of the slightest;
Comus was quite capable of deriving encouragement to rash outlay
and frivolous conversation from an anchorite or an East-end
parson if he had been thrown into close companionship with such
an individual. Francesca, however, exercised a
mother’s privilege in assuming her son’s bachelor
associates to be industrious in labouring to achieve his
undoing. Therefore the young politician was a source of
unconcealed annoyance to her, and in the same degree as she
expressed her disapproval of him Comus was careful to maintain
and parade the intimacy. Its existence, or rather its
continued existence, was one of the things that faintly puzzled
the young lady whose sought-for favour might have been expected
to furnish an occasion for its rapid dissolution.</p>
<p>With two suitors, one of whom at least she found markedly
attractive, courting her at the same moment, Elaine should have
had reasonable cause for being on good terms with the world, and
with herself in particular. Happiness was not, however, at
this auspicious moment, her dominant mood. The grave calm
of her face masked as usual a certain degree of grave
perturbation. A succession of well-meaning governesses and
a plentiful supply of moralising aunts on both sides of her
family, had impressed on her young mind the theoretical fact that
wealth is a great responsibility. The consciousness of her
responsibility set her continually wondering, not as to her own
fitness to discharge her “stewardship,” but as to the
motives and merits of people with whom she came in contact.
The knowledge that there was so much in the world that she could
buy, invited speculation as to how much there was that was worth
buying. Gradually she had come to regard her mind as a sort
of appeal court before whose secret sittings were examined and
judged the motives and actions, the motives especially, of the
world in general. In her schoolroom days she had sat in
conscientious judgment on the motives that guided or misguided
Charles and Cromwell and Monck, Wallenstein and Savonarola.
In her present stage she was equally occupied in examining the
political sincerity of the Secretary for Foreign Affairs, the
good-faith of a honey-tongued but possibly loyal-hearted
waiting-maid, and the disinterestedness of a whole circle of
indulgent and flattering acquaintances. Even more
absorbing, and in her eyes, more urgently necessary, was the task
of dissecting and appraising the characters of the two young men
who were favouring her with their attentions. And herein
lay cause for much thinking and some perturbation. Youghal,
for example, might have baffled a more experienced observer of
human nature. Elaine was too clever to confound his
dandyism with foppishness or self-advertisement. He admired
his own toilet effect in a mirror from a genuine sense of
pleasure in a thing good to look upon, just as he would feel a
sensuous appreciation of the sight of a well-bred, well-matched,
well-turned-out pair of horses. Behind his careful
political flippancy and cynicism one might also detect a certain
careless sincerity, which would probably in the long run save him
from moderate success, and turn him into one of the brilliant
failures of his day. Beyond this it was difficult to form
an exact appreciation of Courtenay Youghal, and Elaine, who liked
to have her impressions distinctly labelled and pigeon-holed, was
perpetually scrutinising the outer surface of his characteristics
and utterances, like a baffled art critic vainly searching
beneath the varnish and scratches of a doubtfully assigned
picture for an enlightening signature. The young man added
to her perplexities by his deliberate policy of never trying to
show himself in a favourable light even when most anxious to
impart a favourable impression. He preferred that people
should hunt for his good qualities, and merely took very good
care that as far as possible they should never draw blank; even
in the matter of selfishness, which was the anchor-sheet of his
existence, he contrived to be noted, and justly noted, for doing
remarkably unselfish things. As a ruler he would have been
reasonably popular; as a husband he would probably be
unendurable.</p>
<p>Comus was to a certain extent as great a mystification as
Youghal, but here Elaine was herself responsible for some of the
perplexity which enshrouded his character in her eyes. She
had taken more than a passing fancy for the boy—for the boy
as he might be, that was to say—and she was desperately
unwilling to see him and appraise him as he really was.
Thus the mental court of appeal was constantly engaged in
examining witnesses as to character, most of whom signally failed
to give any testimony which would support the favourable judgment
which the tribunal was so anxious to arrive at. A woman
with wider experience of the world’s ways and shortcomings
would probably have contented herself with an endeavour to find
out whether her liking for the boy outweighed her dislike of his
characteristics; Elaine took her judgments too seriously to
approach the matter from such a simple and convenient
standpoint. The fact that she was much more than half in
love with Comus made it dreadfully important that she should
discover him to have a lovable soul, and Comus, it must be
confessed, did little to help forward the discovery.</p>
<p>“At any rate he is honest,” she would observe to
herself, after some outspoken admission of unprincipled conduct
on his part, and then she would ruefully recall certain episodes
in which he had figured, from which honesty had been
conspicuously absent. What she tried to label honesty in
his candour was probably only a cynical defiance of the laws of
right and wrong.</p>
<p>“You look more than usually thoughtful this
afternoon,” said Comus to her, “as if you had
invented this summer day and were trying to think out
improvements.”</p>
<p>“If I had the power to create improvements anywhere I
think I should begin with you,” retorted Elaine.</p>
<p>“I’m sure it’s much better to leave me as I
am,” protested Comus; “you’re like a relative
of mine up in Argyllshire, who spends his time producing improved
breeds of sheep and pigs and chickens. So patronising and
irritating to the Almighty I should think, to go about putting
superior finishing touches to Creation.”</p>
<p>Elaine frowned, and then laughed, and finally gave a little
sigh.</p>
<p>“It’s not easy to talk sense to you,” she
said.</p>
<p>“Whatever else you take in hand,” said Youghal,
“you must never improve this garden. It’s what
our idea of Heaven might be like if the Jews hadn’t
invented one for us on totally different lines. It’s
dreadful that we should accept them as the impresarios of our
religious dreamland instead of the Greeks.”</p>
<p>“You are not very fond of the Jews,” said
Elaine.</p>
<p>“I’ve travelled and lived a good deal in Eastern
Europe,” said Youghal.</p>
<p>“It seems largely a question of geography,” said
Elaine; “in England no one really is
anti-Semitic.”</p>
<p>Youghal shook his head. “I know a great many Jews
who are.”</p>
<p>Servants had quietly, almost reverently, placed tea and its
accessories on the wicker table, and quietly receded from the
landscape. Elaine sat like a grave young goddess about to
dispense some mysterious potion to her devotees. Her mind
was still sitting in judgment on the Jewish question.</p>
<p>Comus scrambled to his feet.</p>
<p>“It’s too hot for tea,” he said; “I
shall go and feed the swans.”</p>
<p>And he walked off with a little silver basket-dish containing
brown bread-and-butter.</p>
<p>Elaine laughed quietly.</p>
<p>“It’s so like Comus,” she said, “to go
off with our one dish of bread-and-butter.”</p>
<p>Youghal chuckled responsively. It was an undoubted
opportunity for him to put in some disparaging criticism of
Comus, and Elaine sat alert in readiness to judge the critic and
reserve judgment on the criticised.</p>
<p>“His selfishness is splendid but absolutely
futile,” said Youghal; “now my selfishness is
commonplace, but always thoroughly practical and
calculated. He will have great difficulty in getting the
swans to accept his offering, and he incurs the odium of reducing
us to a bread-and-butterless condition. Incidentally he
will get very hot.”</p>
<p>Elaine again had the sense of being thoroughly baffled.
If Youghal had said anything unkind it was about himself.</p>
<p>“If my cousin Suzette had been here,” she
observed, with the shadow of a malicious smile on her lips,
“I believe she would have gone into a flood of tears at the
loss of her bread-and-butter, and Comus would have figured ever
after in her mind as something black and destroying and
hateful. In fact I don’t really know why we took our
loss so unprotestingly.”</p>
<p>“For two reasons,” said Youghal; “you are
rather fond of Comus. And I—am not very fond of
bread-and-butter.”</p>
<p>The jesting remark brought a throb of pleasure to
Elaine’s heart. She had known full well that she
cared for Comus, but now that Courtenay Youghal had openly
proclaimed the fact as something unchallenged and understood
matters seemed placed at once on a more advanced footing.
The warm sunlit garden grew suddenly into a Heaven that held the
secret of eternal happiness. Youth and comeliness would
always walk here, under the low-boughed mulberry trees, as
unchanging as the leaden otter that for ever preyed on the leaden
salmon on the edge of the old fountain, and somehow the lovers
would always wear the aspect of herself and the boy who was
talking to the four white swans by the water steps. Youghal
was right; this was the real Heaven of one’s dreams and
longings, immeasurably removed from that Rue de la Paix Paradise
about which one professed utterly insincere hankerings in places
of public worship. Elaine drank her tea in a happy silence;
besides being a brilliant talker Youghal understood the rarer art
of being a non-talker on occasion.</p>
<p>Comus came back across the grass swinging the empty
basket-dish in his hand.</p>
<p>“Swans were very pleased,” he cried, gaily,
“and said they hoped I would keep the bread-and-butter dish
as a souvenir of a happy tea-party. I may really have it,
mayn’t I?” he continued in an anxious voice;
“it will do to keep studs and things in. You
don’t want it.”</p>
<p>“It’s got the family crest on it,” said
Elaine. Some of the happiness had died out of her eyes.</p>
<p>“I’ll have that scratched off and my own put
on,” said Comus.</p>
<p>“It’s been in the family for generations,”
protested Elaine, who did not share Comus’s view that
because you were rich your lesser possessions could have no value
in your eyes.</p>
<p>“I want it dreadfully,” said Comus, sulkily,
“and you’ve heaps of other things to put
bread-and-butter in.”</p>
<p>For the moment he was possessed by an overmastering desire to
keep the dish at all costs; a look of greedy determination
dominated his face, and he had not for an instant relaxed his
grip of the coveted object.</p>
<p>Elaine was genuinely angry by this time, and was busily
telling herself that it was absurd to be put out over such a
trifle; at the same moment a sense of justice was telling her
that Comus was displaying a good deal of rather shabby
selfishness. And somehow her chief anxiety at the moment
was to keep Courtenay Youghal from seeing that she was angry.</p>
<p>“I know you don’t really want it, so I’m
going to keep it,” persisted Comus.</p>
<p>“It’s too hot to argue,” said Elaine.</p>
<p>“Happy mistress of your destinies,” laughed
Youghal; “you can suit your disputations to the desired
time and temperature. I have to go and argue, or what is
worse, listen to other people’s arguments, in a hot and
doctored atmosphere suitable to an invalid lizard.”</p>
<p>“You haven’t got to argue about a bread-and-butter
dish,” said Elaine.</p>
<p>“Chiefly about bread-and-butter,” said Youghal;
“our great preoccupation is other people’s
bread-and-butter. They earn or produce the material, but we
busy ourselves with making rules how it shall be cut up, and the
size of the slices, and how much butter shall go on how much
bread. That is what is called legislation. If we
could only make rules as to how the bread-and-butter should be
digested we should be quite happy.”</p>
<p>Elaine had been brought up to regard Parliaments as something
to be treated with cheerful solemnity, like illness or family
re-unions. Youghal’s flippant disparagement of the
career in which he was involved did not, however, jar on her
susceptibilities. She knew him to be not only a lively and
effective debater but an industrious worker on committees.
If he made light of his labours, at least he afforded no one else
a loophole for doing so. And certainly, the Parliamentary
atmosphere was not inviting on this hot afternoon.</p>
<p>“When must you go?” she asked,
sympathetically.</p>
<p>Youghal looked ruefully at his watch. Before he could
answer, a cheerful hoot came through the air, as of an owl
joyously challenging the sunlight with a foreboding of the coming
night. He sprang laughing to his feet.</p>
<p>“Listen! My summons back to my galley,” he
cried. “The Gods have given me an hour in this
enchanted garden, so I must not complain.”</p>
<p>Then in a lower voice he almost whispered, “It’s
the Persian debate to-night.”</p>
<p>It was the one hint he had given in the midst of his talking
and laughing that he was really keenly enthralled in the work
that lay before him. It was the one little intimate touch
that gave Elaine the knowledge that he cared for her opinion of
his work.</p>
<p>Comus, who had emptied his cigarette-case, became suddenly
clamorous at the prospect of being temporarily stranded without a
smoke. Youghal took the last remaining cigarette from his
own case and gravely bisected it.</p>
<p>“Friendship could go no further,” he observed, as
he gave one-half to the doubtfully appeased Comus, and lit the
other himself.</p>
<p>“There are heaps more in the hall,” said
Elaine.</p>
<p>“It was only done for the Saint Martin of Tours
effect,” said Youghal; “I hate smoking when I’m
rushing through the air. Good-bye.”</p>
<p>The departing galley-slave stepped forth into the sunlight,
radiant and confident. A few minutes later Elaine could see
glimpses of his white car as it rushed past the rhododendron
bushes. He woos best who leaves first, particularly if he
goes forth to battle or the semblance of battle.</p>
<p>Somehow Elaine’s garden of Eternal Youth had already
become clouded in its imagery. The girl-figure who walked
in it was still distinctly and unchangingly herself, but her
companion was more blurred and undefined, as a picture that has
been superimposed on another.</p>
<p>Youghal sped townward well satisfied with himself.
To-morrow, he reflected, Elaine would read his speech in her
morning paper, and he knew in advance that it was not going to be
one of his worst efforts. He knew almost exactly where the
punctuations of laughter and applause would burst in, he knew
that nimble fingers in the Press Gallery would be taking down
each gibe and argument as he flung it at the impassive Minister
confronting him, and that the fair lady of his desire would be
able to judge what manner of young man this was who spent his
afternoon in her garden, lazily chaffing himself and his
world.</p>
<p>And he further reflected, with an amused chuckle, that she
would be vividly reminded of Comus for days to come, when she
took her afternoon tea, and saw the bread-and-butter reposing in
an unaccustomed dish.</p>
<h2>CHAPTER VII</h2>
<p><span class="smcap">Towards</span> four o’clock on a hot
afternoon Francesca stepped out from a shop entrance near the
Piccadilly end of Bond Street and ran almost into the arms of
Merla Blathlington. The afternoon seemed to get instantly
hotter. Merla was one of those human flies that buzz; in
crowded streets, at bazaars and in warm weather, she attained to
the proportions of a human bluebottle. Lady Caroline
Benaresq had openly predicted that a special fly-paper was being
reserved for her accommodation in another world; others, however,
held the opinion that she would be miraculously multiplied in a
future state, and that four or more Merla Blathlingtons,
according to deserts, would be in perpetual and unremitting
attendance on each lost soul.</p>
<p>“Here we are,” she cried, with a glad eager buzz,
“popping in and out of shops like rabbits; not that rabbits
do pop in and out of shops very extensively.”</p>
<p>It was evidently one of her bluebottle days.</p>
<p>“Don’t you love Bond Street?” she gabbled
on. “There’s something so unusual and
distinctive about it; no other street anywhere else is quite like
it. Don’t you know those ikons and images and things
scattered up and down Europe, that are supposed to have been
painted or carved, as the case may be, by St. Luke or Zaccheus,
or somebody of that sort; I always like to think that some
notable person of those times designed Bond Street. St.
Paul, perhaps. He travelled about a lot.”</p>
<p>“Not in Middlesex, though,” said Francesca.</p>
<p>“One can’t be sure,” persisted Merla;
“when one wanders about as much as he did one gets mixed up
and forgets where one <i>has</i> been. I can never remember
whether I’ve been to the Tyrol twice and St. Moritz once,
or the other way about; I always have to ask my maid. And
there’s something about the name Bond that suggests St.
Paul; didn’t he write a lot about the bond and the
free?”</p>
<p>“I fancy he wrote in Hebrew or Greek,” objected
Francesca; “the word wouldn’t have the least
resemblance.”</p>
<p>“So dreadfully non-committal to go about pamphleteering
in those bizarre languages,” complained Merla;
“that’s what makes all those people so elusive.
As soon as you try to pin them down to a definite statement about
anything you’re told that some vitally important word has
fifteen other meanings in the original. I wonder our
Cabinet Ministers and politicians don’t adopt a sort of
dog-Latin or Esperanto jargon to deliver their speeches in; what
a lot of subsequent explaining away would be saved. But to
go back to Bond Street—not that we’ve left
it—”</p>
<p>“I’m afraid I must leave it now,” said
Francesca, preparing to turn up Grafton Street;
“Good-bye.”</p>
<p>“Must you be going? Come and have tea
somewhere. I know of a cosy little place where one can talk
undisturbed.”</p>
<p>Francesca repressed a shudder and pleaded an urgent
engagement.</p>
<p>“I know where you’re going,” said Merla,
with the resentful buzz of a bluebottle that finds itself
thwarted by the cold unreasoning resistance of a
windowpane. “You’re going to play bridge at
Serena Golackly’s. She never asks me to her bridge
parties.”</p>
<p>Francesca shuddered openly this time; the prospect of having
to play bridge anywhere in the near neighbourhood of
Merla’s voice was not one that could be contemplated with
ordinary calmness.</p>
<p>“Good-bye,” she said again firmly, and passed out
of earshot; it was rather like leaving the machinery section of
an exhibition. Merla’s diagnosis of her destination
had been a correct one; Francesca made her way slowly through the
hot streets in the direction of Serena Golackly’s house on
the far side of Berkeley Square. To the blessed certainty
of finding a game of bridge, she hopefully added the possibility
of hearing some fragments of news which might prove interesting
and enlightening. And of enlightenment on a particular
subject, in which she was acutely and personally interested, she
stood in some need. Comus of late had been provokingly
reticent as to his movements and doings; partly, perhaps, because
it was his nature to be provoking, partly because the daily
bickerings over money matters were gradually choking other forms
of conversation. Francesca had seen him once or twice in
the Park in the desirable company of Elaine de Frey, and from
time to time she heard of the young people as having danced
together at various houses; on the other hand, she had seen and
heard quite as much evidence to connect the heiress’s name
with that of Courtenay Youghal. Beyond this meagre and
conflicting and altogether tantalising information, her knowledge
of the present position of affairs did not go. If either of
the young men was seriously “making the running,” it
was probable that she would hear some sly hint or open comment
about it from one of Serena’s gossip-laden friends, without
having to go out of her way to introduce the subject and unduly
disclose her own state of ignorance. And a game of bridge,
played for moderately high points, gave ample excuse for
convenient lapses into reticence; if questions took an
embarrassingly inquisitive turn, one could always find refuge in
a defensive spade.</p>
<p>The afternoon was too warm to make bridge a generally popular
diversion, and Serena’s party was a comparatively small
one. Only one table was incomplete when Francesca made her
appearance on the scene; at it was seated Serena herself,
confronted by Ada Spelvexit, whom everyone was wont to explain as
“one of the Cheshire Spelvexits,” as though any other
variety would have been intolerable. Ada Spelvexit was one
of those naturally stagnant souls who take infinite pleasure in
what are called “movements.” “Most of the
really great lessons I have learned have been taught me by the
Poor,” was one of her favourite statements. The one
great lesson that the Poor in general would have liked to have
taught her, that their kitchens and sickrooms were not
unreservedly at her disposal as private lecture halls, she had
never been able to assimilate. She was ready to give them
unlimited advice as to how they should keep the wolf from their
doors, but in return she claimed and enforced for herself the
penetrating powers of an east wind or a dust storm. Her
visits among her wealthier acquaintances were equally extensive
and enterprising, and hardly more welcome; in country-house
parties, while partaking to the fullest extent of the hospitality
offered her, she made a practice of unburdening herself of
homilies on the evils of leisure and luxury, which did not
particularly endear her to her fellow guests. Hostesses
regarded her philosophically as a form of social measles which
everyone had to have once.</p>
<p>The third prospective player, Francesca noted without any
special enthusiasm, was Lady Caroline Benaresq. Lady
Caroline was far from being a remarkably good bridge player, but
she always managed to domineer mercilessly over any table that
was favoured with her presence, and generally managed to
win. A domineering player usually inflicts the chief damage
and demoralisation on his partner; Lady Caroline’s special
achievement was to harass and demoralise partner and opponents
alike.</p>
<p>“Weak and weak,” she announced in her gentle
voice, as she cut her hostess for a partner; “I suppose we
had better play only five shillings a hundred.”</p>
<p>Francesca wondered at the old woman’s moderate
assessment of the stake, knowing her fondness for highish play
and her usual good luck in card holding.</p>
<p>“I don’t mind what we play,” said Ada
Spelvexit, with an incautious parade of elegant indifference; as
a matter of fact she was inwardly relieved and rejoicing at the
reasonable figure proposed by Lady Caroline, and she would
certainly have demurred if a higher stake had been
suggested. She was not as a rule a successful player, and
money lost at cards was always a poignant bereavement to her.</p>
<p>“Then as you don’t mind we’ll make it ten
shillings a hundred,” said Lady Caroline, with the pleased
chuckle of one who has spread a net in the sight of a bird and
disproved the vanity of the proceeding.</p>
<p>It proved a tiresome ding-dong rubber, with the strength of
the cards slightly on Francesca’s side, and the luck of the
table going mostly the other way. She was too keen a player
not to feel a certain absorption in the game once it had started,
but she was conscious to-day of a distracting interest that
competed with the momentary importance of leads and discards and
declarations. The little accumulations of talk that were
unpent during the dealing of the hands became as noteworthy to
her alert attention as the play of the hands themselves.</p>
<p>“Yes, quite a small party this afternoon,” said
Serena, in reply to a seemingly casual remark on
Francesca’s part; “and two or three non-players,
which is unusual on a Wednesday. Canon Besomley was here
just before you came; you know, the big preaching man.”</p>
<p>“I’ve been to hear him scold the human race once
or twice,” said Francesca.</p>
<p>“A strong man with a wonderfully strong message,”
said Ada Spelvexit, in an impressive and assertive tone.</p>
<p>“The sort of popular pulpiteer who spanks the vices of
his age and lunches with them afterwards,” said Lady
Caroline.</p>
<p>“Hardly a fair summary of the man and his work,”
protested Ada. “I’ve been to hear him many
times when I’ve been depressed or discouraged, and I simply
can’t tell you the impression his words
leave—”</p>
<p>“At least you can tell us what you intend to make
trumps,” broke in Lady Caroline, gently.</p>
<p>“Diamonds,” pronounced Ada, after a rather
flurried survey of her hand.</p>
<p>“Doubled,” said Lady Caroline, with increased
gentleness, and a few minutes later she was pencilling an
addition of twenty-four to her score.</p>
<p>“I stayed with his people down in Herefordshire last
May,” said Ada, returning to the unfinished theme of the
Canon; “such an exquisite rural retreat, and so restful and
healing to the nerves. Real country scenery; apple blossom
everywhere.”</p>
<p>“Surely only on the apple trees,” said Lady
Caroline.</p>
<p>Ada Spelvexit gave up the attempt to reproduce the decorative
setting of the Canon’s homelife, and fell back on the small
but practical consolation of scoring the odd trick in her
opponent’s declaration of hearts.</p>
<p>“If you had led your highest club to start with, instead
of the nine, we should have saved the trick,” remarked Lady
Caroline to her partner in a tone of coldly, gentle reproof;
“it’s no use, my dear,” she continued, as
Serena flustered out a halting apology, “no earthly use to
attempt to play bridge at one table and try to see and hear
what’s going on at two or three other tables.”</p>
<p>“I can generally manage to attend to more than one thing
at a time,” said Serena, rashly; “I think I must have
a sort of double brain.”</p>
<p>“Much better to economise and have one really good
one,” observed Lady Caroline.</p>
<p>“<i>La belle dame sans merci</i> scoring a verbal trick
or two as usual,” said a player at another table in a
discreet undertone.</p>
<p>“Did I tell you Sir Edward Roan is coming to my next big
evening,” said Serena, hurriedly, by way, perhaps, of
restoring herself a little in her own esteem.</p>
<p>“Poor dear, good Sir Edward. What have you made
trumps?” asked Lady Caroline, in one breath.</p>
<p>“Clubs,” said Francesca; “and pray, why
these adjectives of commiseration?”</p>
<p>Francesca was a Ministerialist by family interest and
allegiance, and was inclined to take up the cudgels at the
suggested disparagement aimed at the Foreign Secretary.</p>
<p>“He amuses me so much,” purred Lady
Caroline. Her amusement was usually of the sort that a
sporting cat derives from watching the Swedish exercises of a
well-spent and carefully thought-out mouse.</p>
<p>“Really? He has been rather a brilliant success at
the Foreign Office, you know,” said Francesca.</p>
<p>“He reminds one so of a circus elephant—infinitely
more intelligent than the people who direct him, but quite
content to go on putting his foot down or taking it up as may be
required, quite unconcerned whether he steps on a meringue or a
hornet’s nest in the process of going where he’s
expected to go.”</p>
<p>“How can you say such things?” protested
Francesca.</p>
<p>“I can’t,” said Lady Caroline;
“Courtenay Youghal said it in the House last night.
Didn’t you read the debate? He was really rather in
form. I disagree entirely with his point of view, of
course, but some of the things he says have just enough truth
behind them to redeem them from being merely smart; for instance,
his summing up of the Government’s attitude towards our
embarrassing Colonial Empire in the wistful phrase ‘happy
is the country that has no geography.’”</p>
<p>“What an absurdly unjust thing to say,” put in
Francesca; “I daresay some of our Party at some time have
taken up that attitude, but every one knows that Sir Edward is a
sound Imperialist at heart.”</p>
<p>“Most politicians are something or other at heart, but
no one would be rash enough to insure a politician against heart
failure. Particularly when he happens to be in
office.”</p>
<p>“Anyhow, I don’t see that the Opposition leaders
would have acted any differently in the present case,” said
Francesca.</p>
<p>“One should always speak guardedly of the Opposition
leaders,” said Lady Caroline, in her gentlest voice;
“one never knows what a turn in the situation may do for
them.”</p>
<p>“You mean they may one day be at the head of
affairs?” asked Serena, briskly.</p>
<p>“I mean they may one day lead the Opposition. One
never knows.”</p>
<p>Lady Caroline had just remembered that her hostess was on the
Opposition side in politics.</p>
<p>Francesca and her partner scored four tricks in clubs; the
game stood irresolutely at twenty-four all.</p>
<p>“If you had followed the excellent lyrical advice given
to the Maid of Athens and returned my heart we should have made
two more tricks and gone game,” said Lady Caroline to her
partner.</p>
<p>“Mr. Youghal seems pushing himself to the fore of
late,” remarked Francesca, as Serena took up the cards to
deal. Since the young politician’s name had been
introduced into their conversation the opportunity for turning
the talk more directly on him and his affairs was too good to be
missed.</p>
<p>“I think he’s got a career before him,” said
Serena; “the House always fills when he’s speaking,
and that’s a good sign. And then he’s young and
got rather an attractive personality, which is always something
in the political world.”</p>
<p>“His lack of money will handicap him, unless he can find
himself a rich wife or persuade someone to die and leave him a
fat legacy,” said Francesca; “since M.P.’s have
become the recipients of a salary rather more is expected and
demanded of them in the expenditure line than before.”</p>
<p>“Yes, the House of Commons still remains rather at the
opposite pole to the Kingdom of Heaven as regards entrance
qualifications,” observed Lady Caroline.</p>
<p>“There ought to be no difficulty about Youghal picking
up a girl with money,” said Serena; “with his
prospects he would make an excellent husband for any woman with
social ambitions.”</p>
<p>And she half sighed, as though she almost regretted that a
previous matrimonial arrangement precluded her from entering into
the competition on her own account.</p>
<p>Francesca, under an assumption of languid interest, was
watching Lady Caroline narrowly for some hint of suppressed
knowledge of Youghal’s courtship of Miss de Frey.</p>
<p>“Whom are you marrying and giving in
marriage?”</p>
<p>The question came from George St. Michael, who had strayed
over from a neighbouring table, attracted by the fragments of
small-talk that had reached his ears.</p>
<p>St. Michael was one of those dapper bird-like
illusorily-active men, who seem to have been in a certain stage
of middle-age for as long as human memory can recall them.
A close-cut peaked beard lent a certain dignity to his
appearance—a loan which the rest of his features and
mannerisms were continually and successfully repudiating.
His profession, if he had one, was submerged in his hobby, which
consisted of being an advance-agent for small happenings or
possible happenings that were or seemed imminent in the social
world around him; he found a perpetual and unflagging
satisfaction in acquiring and retailing any stray items of gossip
or information, particularly of a matrimonial nature, that
chanced to come his way. Given the bare outline of an
officially announced engagement he would immediately fill it in
with all manner of details, true or, at any rate, probable, drawn
from his own imagination or from some equally exclusive
source. The <i>Morning Post</i> might content itself with
the mere statement of the arrangement which would shortly take
place, but it was St. Michael’s breathless little voice
that proclaimed how the contracting parties had originally met
over a salmon-fishing incident, why the Guards’ Chapel
would not be used, why her Aunt Mary had at first opposed the
match, how the question of the children’s religious
upbringing had been compromised, etc., etc., to all whom it might
interest and to many whom it might not. Beyond his
industriously-earned pre-eminence in this special branch of
intelligence, he was chiefly noteworthy for having a wife reputed
to be the tallest and thinnest woman in the Home Counties.
The two were sometimes seen together in Society, where they
passed under the collective name of St. Michael and All
Angles.</p>
<p>“We are trying to find a rich wife for Courtenay
Youghal,” said Serena, in answer to St. Michael’s
question.</p>
<p>“Ah, there I’m afraid you’re a little
late,” he observed, glowing with the importance of pending
revelation; “I’m afraid you’re a little
late,” he repeated, watching the effect of his words as a
gardener might watch the development of a bed of carefully tended
asparagus. “I think the young gentleman has been
before you and already found himself a rich mate in
prospect.”</p>
<p>He lowered his voice as he spoke, not with a view to imparting
impressive mystery to his statement, but because there were other
table groups within hearing to whom he hoped presently to have
the privilege of re-disclosing his revelation.</p>
<p>“Do you mean—?” began Serena.</p>
<p>“Miss de Frey,” broke in St. Michael, hurriedly,
fearful lest his revelation should be forestalled, even in
guesswork; “quite an ideal choice, the very wife for a man
who means to make his mark in politics. Twenty-four
thousand a year, with prospects of more to come, and a charming
place of her own not too far from town. Quite the type of
girl, too, who will make a good political hostess, brains without
being brainy, you know. Just the right thing. Of
course, it would be premature to make any definite announcement
at present—”</p>
<p>“It would hardly be premature for my partner to announce
what she means to make trumps,” interrupted Lady Caroline,
in a voice of such sinister gentleness that St. Michael fled
headlong back to his own table.</p>
<p>“Oh, is it me? I beg your pardon. I leave
it,” said Serena.</p>
<p>“Thank you. No trumps,” declared Lady
Caroline. The hand was successful, and the rubber
ultimately fell to her with a comfortable margin of
honours. The same partners cut together again, and this
time the cards went distinctly against Francesca and Ada
Spelvexit, and a heavily piled-up score confronted them at the
close of the rubber. Francesca was conscious that a certain
amount of rather erratic play on her part had at least
contributed to the result. St. Michael’s incursion
into the conversation had proved rather a powerful distraction to
her ordinarily sound bridge-craft.</p>
<p>Ada Spelvexit emptied her purse of several gold pieces and
infused a corresponding degree of superiority into her
manner.</p>
<p>“I must be going now,” she announced;
“I’m dining early. I have to give an address to
some charwomen afterwards.”</p>
<p>“Why?” asked Lady Caroline, with a disconcerting
directness that was one of her most formidable
characteristics.</p>
<p>“Oh, well, I have some things to say to them that I
daresay they will like to hear,” said Ada, with a thin
laugh.</p>
<p>Her statement was received with a silence that betokened
profound unbelief in any such probability.</p>
<p>“I go about a good deal among working-class
women,” she added.</p>
<p>“No one has ever said it,” observed Lady Caroline,
“but how painfully true it is that the poor have us always
with them.”</p>
<p>Ada Spelvexit hastened her departure; the marred
impressiveness of her retreat came as a culminating discomfiture
on the top of her ill-fortune at the card-table. Possibly,
however, the multiplication of her own annoyances enabled her to
survey charwomen’s troubles with increased
cheerfulness. None of them, at any rate, had spent an
afternoon with Lady Caroline.</p>
<p>Francesca cut in at another table and with better fortune
attending on her, succeeded in winning back most of her
losses. A sense of satisfaction was distinctly dominant as
she took leave of her hostess. St. Michael’s gossip,
or rather the manner in which it had been received, had given her
a clue to the real state of affairs, which, however slender and
conjectural, at least pointed in the desired direction. At
first she had been horribly afraid lest she should be listening
to a definite announcement which would have been the death-blow
to her hopes, but as the recitation went on without any of those
assured little minor details which St. Michael so loved to
supply, she had come to the conclusion that it was merely a piece
of intelligent guesswork. And if Lady Caroline had really
believed in the story of Elaine de Frey’s virtual
engagement to Courtenay Youghal she would have taken a malicious
pleasure in encouraging St. Michael in his confidences, and in
watching Francesca’s discomfiture under the recital.
The irritated manner in which she had cut short the discussion
betrayed the fact, that, as far as the old woman’s
information went, it was Comus and not Courtenay Youghal who held
the field. And in this particular case Lady
Caroline’s information was likely to be nearer the truth
than St. Michael’s confident gossip.</p>
<p>Francesca always gave a penny to the first crossing-sweeper or
match-seller she chanced across after a successful sitting at
bridge. This afternoon she had come out of the fray some
fifteen shillings to the bad, but she gave two pennies to a
crossing-sweeper at the north-west corner of Berkeley Square as a
sort of thank-offering to the Gods.</p>
<h2>CHAPTER VIII</h2>
<p><span class="smcap">It</span> was a fresh rain-repentant
afternoon, following a morning that had been sultry and
torrentially wet by turns; the sort of afternoon that impels
people to talk graciously of the rain as having done a lot of
good, its chief merit in their eyes probably having been its
recognition of the art of moderation. Also it was an
afternoon that invited bodily activity after the convalescent
languor of the earlier part of the day. Elaine had
instinctively found her way into her riding-habit and sent an
order down to the stables—a blessed oasis that still smelt
sweetly of horse and hay and cleanliness in a world that reeked
of petrol, and now she set her mare at a smart pace through a
succession of long-stretching country lanes. She was due
some time that afternoon at a garden-party, but she rode with
determination in an opposite direction. In the first place
neither Comus or Courtenay would be at the party, which fact
seemed to remove any valid reason that could be thought of for
inviting her attendance thereat; in the second place about a
hundred human beings would be gathered there, and human
gatherings were not her most crying need at the present
moment. Since her last encounter with her wooers, under the
cedars in her own garden, Elaine realised that she was either
very happy or cruelly unhappy, she could not quite determine
which. She seemed to have what she most wanted in the world
lying at her feet, and she was dreadfully uncertain in her more
reflective moments whether she really wanted to stretch out her
hand and take it. It was all very like some situation in an
Arabian Nights tale or a story of Pagan Hellas, and consequently
the more puzzling and disconcerting to a girl brought up on the
methodical lines of Victorian Christianity. Her appeal
court was in permanent session these last few days, but it gave
no decisions, at least none that she would listen to. And
the ride on her fast light-stepping little mare, alone and
unattended, through the fresh-smelling leafy lanes into
unexplored country, seemed just what she wanted at the
moment. The mare made some small delicate pretence of being
roadshy, not the staring dolt-like kind of nervousness that shows
itself in an irritating hanging-back as each conspicuous wayside
object presents itself, but the nerve-flutter of an imaginative
animal that merely results in a quick whisk of the head and a
swifter bound forward. She might have paraphrased the
mental attitude of the immortalised Peter Bell into</p>
<blockquote><p>A basket underneath a tree<br />
A yellow tiger is to me,<br />
If it is nothing
more.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The more really alarming episodes of the road, the hoot and
whir of a passing motor-car or the loud vibrating hum of a
wayside threshing-machine, were treated with indifference.</p>
<p>On turning a corner out of a narrow coppice-bordered lane into
a wider road that sloped steadily upward in a long stretch of
hill Elaine saw, coming toward her at no great distance, a string
of yellow-painted vans, drawn for the most part by skewbald or
speckled horses. A certain rakish air about these oncoming
road-craft proclaimed them as belonging to a travelling
wild-beast show, decked out in the rich primitive colouring that
one’s taste in childhood would have insisted on before it
had been schooled in the artistic value of dulness. It was
an unlooked-for and distinctly unwelcome encounter. The
mare had already commenced a sixfold scrutiny with nostrils, eyes
and daintily-pricked ears; one ear made hurried little backward
movements to hear what Elaine was saying about the eminent
niceness and respectability of the approaching caravan, but even
Elaine felt that she would be unable satisfactorily to explain
the elephants and camels that would certainly form part of the
procession. To turn back would seem rather craven, and the
mare might take fright at the manœuvre and try to bolt; a
gate standing ajar at the entrance to a farmyard lane provided a
convenient way out of the difficulty.</p>
<p>As Elaine pushed her way through she became aware of a man
standing just inside the lane, who made a movement forward to
open the gate for her.</p>
<p>“Thank you. I’m just getting out of the way
of a wild-beast show,” she explained; “my mare is
tolerant of motors and traction-engines, but I expect
camels—hullo,” she broke off, recognising the man as
an old acquaintance, “I heard you had taken rooms in a
farmhouse somewhere. Fancy meeting you in this
way.”</p>
<p>In the not very distant days of her little-girlhood, Tom
Keriway had been a man to be looked upon with a certain awe and
envy; indeed the glamour of his roving career would have fired
the imagination, and wistful desire to do likewise, of many young
Englishmen. It seemed to be the grown-up realisation of the
games played in dark rooms in winter fire-lit evenings, and the
dreams dreamed over favourite books of adventure. Making
Vienna his headquarters, almost his home, he had rambled where he
listed through the lands of the Near and Middle East as leisurely
and thoroughly as tamer souls might explore Paris. He had
wandered through Hungarian horse-fairs, hunted shy crafty beasts
on lonely Balkan hillsides, dropped himself pebble-wise into the
stagnant human pool of some Bulgarian monastery, threaded his way
through the strange racial mosaic of Salonika, listened with
amused politeness to the shallow ultra-modern opinions of a
voluble editor or lawyer in some wayside Russian town, or learned
wisdom from a chance tavern companion, one of the atoms of the
busy ant-stream of men and merchandise that moves untiringly
round the shores of the Black Sea. And far and wide as he
might roam he always managed to turn up at frequent intervals, at
ball and supper and theatre, in the gay Hauptstadt of the
Habsburgs, haunting his favourite cafés and wine-vaults,
skimming through his favourite news-sheets, greeting old
acquaintances and friends, from ambassadors down to cobblers in
the social scale. He seldom talked of his travels, but it
might be said that his travels talked of him; there was an air
about him that a German diplomat once summed up in a phrase:
“a man that wolves have sniffed at.”</p>
<p>And then two things happened, which he had not mapped out in
his route; a severe illness shook half the life and all the
energy out of him, and a heavy money loss brought him almost to
the door of destitution. With something, perhaps, of the
impulse which drives a stricken animal away from its kind, Tom
Keriway left the haunts where he had known so much happiness, and
withdrew into the shelter of a secluded farmhouse lodging; more
than ever he became to Elaine a hearsay personality. And
now the chance meeting with the caravan had flung her across the
threshold of his retreat.</p>
<p>“What a charming little nook you’ve got hold
of,” she exclaimed with instinctive politeness, and then
looked searchingly round, and discovered that she had spoken the
truth; it really was charming. The farmhouse had that
intensely English look that one seldom sees out of
Normandy. Over the whole scene of rickyard, garden,
outbuildings, horsepond and orchard, brooded that air which seems
rightfully to belong to out-of-the-way farmyards, an air of
wakeful dreaminess which suggests that here, man and beast and
bird have got up so early that the rest of the world has never
caught them up and never will.</p>
<p>Elaine dismounted, and Keriway led the mare round to a little
paddock by the side of a great grey barn. At the end of the
lane they could see the show go past, a string of lumbering vans
and great striding beasts that seemed to link the vast silences
of the desert with the noises and sights and smells, the
naphtha-flares and advertisement hoardings and trampled
orange-peel, of an endless succession of towns.</p>
<p>“You had better let the caravan pass well on its way
before you get on the road again,” said Keriway; “the
smell of the beasts may make your mare nervous and restive going
home.”</p>
<p>Then he called to a boy who was busy with a hoe among some
defiantly prosperous weeds, to fetch the lady a glass of milk and
a piece of currant loaf.</p>
<p>“I don’t know when I’ve seen anything so
utterly charming and peaceful,” said Elaine, propping
herself on a seat that a pear-tree had obligingly designed in the
fantastic curve of its trunk.</p>
<p>“Charming, certainly,” said Keriway, “but
too full of the stress of its own little life struggle to be
peaceful. Since I have lived here I’ve learnt, what
I’ve always suspected, that a country farmhouse, set away
in a world of its own, is one of the most wonderful studies of
interwoven happenings and tragedies that can be imagined.
It is like the old chronicles of medieval Europe in the days when
there was a sort of ordered anarchy between feudal lords and
overlords, and burg-grafs, and mitred abbots, and prince-bishops,
robber barons and merchant guilds, and Electors and so forth, all
striving and contending and counter-plotting, and interfering
with each other under some vague code of loosely-applied
rules. Here one sees it reproduced under one’s eyes,
like a musty page of black-letter come to life. Look at one
little section of it, the poultry-life on the farm. Villa
poultry, dull egg-machines, with records kept of how many ounces
of food they eat, and how many pennyworths of eggs they lay, give
you no idea of the wonder-life of these farm-birds; their feuds
and jealousies, and carefully maintained prerogatives, their
unsparing tyrannies and persecutions, their calculated courage
and bravado or sedulously hidden cowardice, it might all be some
human chapter from the annals of the old Rhineland or medieval
Italy. And then, outside their own bickering wars and
hates, the grim enemies that come up against them from the
woodlands; the hawk that dashes among the coops like a
moss-trooper raiding the border, knowing well that a charge of
shot may tear him to bits at any moment. And the stoat, a
creeping slip of brown fur a few inches long, intently and
unstayably out for blood. And the hunger-taught master of
craft, the red fox, who has waited perhaps half the afternoon for
his chance while the fowls were dusting themselves under the
hedge, and just as they were turning supper-ward to the yard one
has stopped a moment to give her feathers a final shake and found
death springing upon her. Do you know,” he continued,
as Elaine fed herself and the mare with morsels of currant-loaf,
“I don’t think any tragedy in literature that I have
ever come across impressed me so much as the first one, that I
spelled out slowly for myself in words of three letters: the bad
fox has got the red hen. There was something so
dramatically complete about it; the badness of the fox, added to
all the traditional guile of his race, seemed to heighten the
horror of the hen’s fate, and there was such a suggestion
of masterful malice about the word ‘got.’ One
felt that a countryside in arms would not get that hen away from
the bad fox. They used to think me a slow dull reader for
not getting on with my lesson, but I used to sit and picture to
myself the red hen, with its wings beating helplessly, screeching
in terrified protest, or perhaps, if he had got it by the neck,
with beak wide agape and silent, and eyes staring, as it left the
farmyard for ever. I have seen blood-spillings and
down-crushings and abject defeat here and there in my time, but
the red hen has remained in my mind as the type of helpless
tragedy.” He was silent for a moment as if he were
again musing over the three-letter drama that had so dwelt in his
childhood’s imagination. “Tell me some of the
things you have seen in your time,” was the request that
was nearly on Elaine’s lips, but she hastily checked
herself and substituted another.</p>
<p>“Tell me more about the farm, please.”</p>
<p>And he told her of a whole world, or rather of several
intermingled worlds, set apart in this sleepy hollow in the
hills, of beast lore and wood lore and farm craft, at times
touching almost the border of witchcraft—passing lightly
here, not with the probing eagerness of those who know nothing,
but with the averted glance of those who fear to see too
much. He told her of those things that slept and those that
prowled when the dusk fell, of strange hunting cats, of the yard
swine and the stalled cattle, of the farm folk themselves, as
curious and remote in their way, in their ideas and fears and
wants and tragedies, as the brutes and feathered stock that they
tended. It seemed to Elaine as if a musty store of
old-world children’s books had been fetched down from some
cobwebbed lumber-room and brought to life. Sitting there in
the little paddock, grown thickly with tall weeds and rank
grasses, and shadowed by the weather-beaten old grey barn,
listening to this chronicle of wonderful things, half fanciful,
half very real, she could scarcely believe that a few miles away
there was a garden-party in full swing, with smart frocks and
smart conversation, fashionable refreshments and fashionable
music, and a fevered undercurrent of social strivings and
snubbings. Did Vienna and the Balkan Mountains and the
Black Sea seem as remote and hard to believe in, she wondered, to
the man sitting by her side, who had discovered or invented this
wonderful fairyland? Was it a true and merciful arrangement
of fate and life that the things of the moment thrust out the
after-taste of the things that had been? Here was one who
had held much that was priceless in the hollow of his hand and
lost it all, and he was happy and absorbed and well-content with
the little wayside corner of the world into which he had
crept. And Elaine, who held so many desirable things in the
hollow of her hand, could not make up her mind to be even
moderately happy. She did not even know whether to take
this hero of her childhood down from his pedestal, or to place
him on a higher one; on the whole she was inclined to resent
rather than approve the idea that ill-health and misfortune could
so completely subdue and tame an erstwhile bold and roving
spirit.</p>
<p>The mare was showing signs of delicately-hinted impatience;
the paddock, with its teasing insects and very indifferent
grazing, had not thrust out the image of her own comfortable
well-foddered loose-box. Elaine divested her habit of some
remaining crumbs of bun-loaf and jumped lightly on to her
saddle. As she rode slowly down the lane, with Keriway
escorting her as far as its gate, she looked round at what had
seemed to her, a short while ago, just a picturesque old
farmstead, a place of bee-hives and hollyhocks and gabled
cart-sheds; now it was in her eyes a magic city, with an
undercurrent of reality beneath its magic.</p>
<p>“You are a person to be envied,” she said to
Keriway; “you have created a fairyland, and you are living
in it yourself.”</p>
<p>“Envied?”</p>
<p>He shot the question out with sudden bitterness. She
looked down and saw the wistful misery that had come into his
face.</p>
<p>“Once,” he said to her, “in a German paper I
read a short story about a tame crippled crane that lived in the
park of some small town. I forget what happened in the
story, but there was one line that I shall always remember:
‘it was lame, that is why it was tame.’”</p>
<p>He had created a fairyland, but assuredly he was not living in
it.</p>
<h2>CHAPTER IX</h2>
<p><span class="smcap">In</span> the warmth of a late June
morning the long shaded stretch of raked earth, gravel-walk and
rhododendron bush that is known affectionately as the Row was
alive with the monotonous movement and alert stagnation
appropriate to the time and place. The seekers after
health, the seekers after notoriety and recognition, and the
lovers of good exercise were all well represented on the
galloping ground; the gravel-walk and chairs and long seats held
a population whose varied instincts and motives would have
baffled a social catalogue-maker. The children, handled or
in perambulators, might be excused from instinct or motive; they
were brought.</p>
<p>Pleasingly conspicuous among a bunch of indifferent riders
pacing along by the rails where the onlookers were thickest was
Courtenay Youghal, on his handsome plum-roan gelding Anne de
Joyeuse. That delicately stepping animal had taken a prize
at Islington and nearly taken the life of a stable-boy of whom he
disapproved, but his strongest claims to distinction were his
good looks and his high opinion of himself. Youghal
evidently believed in thorough accord between horse and
rider.</p>
<p>“Please stop and talk to me,” said a quiet
beckoning voice from the other side of the rails, and Youghal
drew rein and greeted Lady Veula Croot. Lady Veula had
married into a family of commercial solidity and enterprising
political nonentity. She had a devoted husband, some blonde
teachable children, and a look of unutterable weariness in her
eyes. To see her standing at the top of an expensively
horticultured staircase receiving her husband’s guests was
rather like watching an animal performing on a music-hall
stage.</p>
<p>One always tells oneself that the animal likes it, and one
always knows that it doesn’t.</p>
<p>“Lady Veula is an ardent Free Trader, isn’t
she?” someone once remarked to Lady Caroline.</p>
<p>“I wonder,” said Lady Caroline, in her gently
questioning voice; “a woman whose dresses are made in Paris
and whose marriage has been made in Heaven might be equally
biassed for and against free imports.”</p>
<p>Lady Veula looked at Youghal and his mount with slow critical
appraisement, and there was a note of blended raillery and
wistfulness in her voice.</p>
<p>“You two dear things, I should love to stroke you both,
but I’m not sure how Joyeuse would take it. So
I’ll stroke you down verbally instead. I admired your
attack on Sir Edward immensely, though of course I don’t
agree with a word of it. Your description of him building a
hedge round the German cuckoo and hoping he was isolating it was
rather sweet. Seriously though, I regard him as one of the
pillars of the Administration.”</p>
<p>“So do I,” said Youghal; “the misfortune is
that he is merely propping up a canvas roof. It’s
just his regrettable solidity and integrity that makes him so
expensively dangerous. The average Briton arrives at the
same judgment about Roan’s handling of foreign affairs as
Omar does of the Supreme Being in his dealings with the world:
He’s a good fellow and ’twill all be
well.’”</p>
<p>Lady Veula laughed lightly. “My Party is in power
so I may exercise the privilege of being optimistic. Who is
that who bowed to you?” she continued, as a dark young man
with an inclination to stoutness passed by them on foot;
“I’ve seen him about a good deal lately.
He’s been to one or two of my dances.”</p>
<p>“Andrei Drakoloff,” said Youghal;
“he’s just produced a play that has had a big success
in Moscow and is certain to be extremely popular all over
Russia. In the first three acts the heroine is supposed to
be dying of consumption; in the last act they find she is really
dying of cancer.”</p>
<p>“Are the Russians really such a gloomy
people?”</p>
<p>“Gloom-loving but not in the least gloomy. They
merely take their sadness pleasurably, just as we are accused of
taking our pleasures sadly. Have you noticed that dreadful
Klopstock youth has been pounding past us at shortening
intervals. He’ll come up and talk if he half catches
your eye.”</p>
<p>“I only just know him. Isn’t he at an
agricultural college or something of the sort?”</p>
<p>“Yes, studying to be a gentleman farmer, he told
me. I didn’t ask if both subjects were
compulsory.”</p>
<p>“You’re really rather dreadful,” said Lady
Veula, trying to look as if she thought so; “remember, we
are all equal in the sight of Heaven.”</p>
<p>For a preacher of wholesome truths her voice rather lacked
conviction.</p>
<p>“If I and Ernest Klopstock are really equal in the sight
of Heaven,” said Youghal, with intense complacency,
“I should recommend Heaven to consult an eye
specialist.”</p>
<p>There was a heavy spattering of loose earth, and a squelching
of saddle-leather, as the Klopstock youth lumbered up to the
rails and delivered himself of loud, cheerful greetings. Joyeuse
laid his ears well back as the ungainly bay cob and his
appropriately matched rider drew up beside him; his verdict was
reflected and endorsed by the cold stare of Youghal’s
eyes.</p>
<p>“I’ve been having a nailing fine time,”
recounted the newcomer with clamorous enthusiasm; “I was
over in Paris last month and had lots of strawberries there, then
I had a lot more in London, and now I’ve been having a late
crop of them in Herefordshire, so I’ve had quite a lot this
year.” And he laughed as one who had deserved well
and received well of Fate.</p>
<p>“The charm of that story,” said Youghal, “is
that it can be told in any drawing-room.” And with a
sweep of his wide-brimmed hat to Lady Veula he turned the
impatient Joyeuse into the moving stream of horse and
horsemen.</p>
<p>“That woman reminds me of some verse I’ve read and
liked,” thought Youghal, as Joyeuse sprang into a light
showy canter that gave full recognition to the existence of
observant human beings along the side walk. “Ah, I
have it.”</p>
<p>And he quoted almost aloud, as one does in the exhilaration of
a canter:</p>
<blockquote><p>“How much I loved that way you had<br />
Of smiling most, when very sad,<br />
A smile which carried tender hints<br />
Of sun and spring,<br />
And yet, more than all other thing,<br />
Of weariness beyond all words.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>And having satisfactorily fitted Lady Veula on to a quotation
he dismissed her from his mind. With the constancy of her
sex she thought about him, his good looks and his youth and his
railing tongue, till late in the afternoon.</p>
<p>While Youghal was putting Joyeuse through his paces under the
elm trees of the Row a little drama in which he was directly
interested was being played out not many hundred yards
away. Elaine and Comus were indulging themselves in two
pennyworths of Park chair, drawn aside just a little from the
serried rows of sitters who were set out like bedded plants over
an acre or so of turf. Comus was, for the moment, in a mood
of pugnacious gaiety, disbursing a fund of pointed criticism and
unsparing anecdote concerning those of the promenaders or
loungers whom he knew personally or by sight. Elaine was
rather quieter than usual, and the grave serenity of the Leonardo
da Vinci portrait seemed intensified in her face this
morning. In his leisurely courtship Comus had relied almost
exclusively on his physical attraction and the fitful drollery of
his wit and high spirits, and these graces had gone far to make
him seem a very desirable and rather lovable thing in
Elaine’s eyes. But he had left out of account the
disfavour which he constantly risked and sometimes incurred from
his frank and undisguised indifference to other people’s
interests and wishes, including, at times, Elaine’s.
And the more that she felt that she liked him the more she was
irritated by his lack of consideration for her. Without
expecting that her every wish should become a law to him she
would at least have liked it to reach the formality of a Second
Reading. Another important factor he had also left out of
his reckoning, namely the presence on the scene of another
suitor, who also had youth and wit to recommend him, and who
certainly did not lack physical attractions. Comus,
marching carelessly through unknown country to effect what seemed
already an assured victory, made the mistake of disregarding the
existence of an unbeaten army on his flank.</p>
<p>To-day Elaine felt that, without having actually quarrelled,
she and Comus had drifted a little bit out of sympathy with one
another. The fault she knew was scarcely hers, in fact from
the most good-natured point of view it could hardly be denied
that it was almost entirely his. The incident of the silver
dish had lacked even the attraction of novelty; it had been one
of a series, all bearing a strong connecting likeness.
There had been small unrepaid loans which Elaine would not have
grudged in themselves, though the application for them brought a
certain qualm of distaste; with the perversity which seemed
inseparable from his doings, Comus had always flung away a
portion of his borrowings in some ostentatious piece of glaring
and utterly profitless extravagance, which outraged all the
canons of her upbringing without bringing him an atom of
understandable satisfaction. Under these repeated
discouragements it was not surprising that some small part of her
affection should have slipped away, but she had come to the Park
that morning with an unconfessed expectation of being gently
wooed back to the mood of gracious forgetfulness that she was
only too eager to assume. It was almost worth while being
angry with Comus for the sake of experiencing the pleasure of
being coaxed into friendliness again with the charm which he knew
so well how to exert. It was delicious here under the trees
on this perfect June morning, and Elaine had the blessed
assurance that most of the women within range were envying her
the companionship of the handsome merry-hearted youth who sat by
her side. With special complacence she contemplated her
cousin Suzette, who was self-consciously but not very elatedly
basking in the attentions of her fiancé, an
earnest-looking young man who was superintendent of a
People’s something-or-other on the south side of the river,
and whose clothes Comus had described as having been made in
Southwark rather than in anger.</p>
<p>Most of the pleasures in life must be paid for, and the
chair-ticket vendor in due time made his appearance in quest of
pennies.</p>
<p>Comus paid him from out of a varied assortment of coins and
then balanced the remainder in the palm of his hand. Elaine
felt a sudden foreknowledge of something disagreeable about to
happen and a red spot deepened in her cheeks.</p>
<p>“Four shillings and fivepence and a half-penny,”
said Comus, reflectively. “It’s a ridiculous
sum to last me for the next three days, and I owe a card debt of
over two pounds.”</p>
<p>“Yes?” commented Elaine dryly and with an apparent
lack of interest in his exchequer statement. Surely, she
was thinking hurriedly to herself, he could not be foolish enough
to broach the matter of another loan.</p>
<p>“The card debt is rather a nuisance,” pursued
Comus, with fatalistic persistency.</p>
<p>“You won seven pounds last week, didn’t
you?” asked Elaine; “don’t you put by any of
your winnings to balance losses?”</p>
<p>“The four shillings and the fivepence and the half-penny
represent the rearguard of the seven pounds,” said Comus;
“the rest have fallen by the way. If I can pay the
two pounds to-day I daresay I shall win something more to go on
with; I’m holding rather good cards just now. But if
I can’t pay it of course I shan’t show up at the
club. So you see the fix I am in.”</p>
<p>Elaine took no notice of this indirect application. The
Appeal Court was assembling in haste to consider new evidence,
and this time there was the rapidity of sudden determination
about its movement.</p>
<p>The conversation strayed away from the fateful topic for a few
moments and then Comus brought it deliberately back to the danger
zone.</p>
<p>“It would be awfully nice if you would let me have a
fiver for a few days, Elaine,” he said quickly; “if
you don’t I really don’t know what I shall
do.”</p>
<p>“If you are really bothered about your card debt I will
send you the two pounds by messenger boy early this
afternoon.” She spoke quietly and with great
decision. “And I shall not be at the Connor’s
dance to-night,” she continued; “it’s too hot
for dancing. I’m going home now; please don’t
bother to accompany me, I particularly wish to go
alone.”</p>
<p>Comus saw that he had overstepped the mark of her good
nature. Wisely he made no immediate attempt to force
himself back into her good graces. He would wait till her
indignation had cooled.</p>
<p>His tactics would have been excellent if he had not forgotten
that unbeaten army on his flank.</p>
<p>Elaine de Frey had known very clearly what qualities she had
wanted in Comus, and she had known, against all efforts at
self-deception, that he fell far short of those qualities.
She had been willing to lower her standard of moral requirements
in proportion as she was fond of the boy, but there was a point
beyond which she would not go. He had hurt her pride
besides alarming her sense of caution.</p>
<p>Suzette, on whom she felt a thoroughly justified tendency to
look down, had at any rate an attentive and considerate
lover. Elaine walked towards the Park gates feeling that in
one essential Suzette possessed something that had been denied to
her, and at the gates she met Joyeuse and his spruce young rider
preparing to turn homeward.</p>
<p>“Get rid of Joyeuse and come and take me out to lunch
somewhere,” demanded Elaine.</p>
<p>“How jolly,” said Youghal.
“Let’s go to the Corridor Restaurant. The head
waiter there is an old Viennese friend of mine and looks after me
beautifully. I’ve never been there with a lady
before, and he’s sure to ask me afterwards, in his fatherly
way, if we’re engaged.”</p>
<p>The lunch was a success in every way. There was just
enough orchestral effort to immerse the conversation without
drowning it, and Youghal was an attentive and inspired
host. Through an open doorway Elaine could see the
café reading-room, with its imposing array of <i>Neue
Freie Presse</i>, <i>Berliner Tageblatt</i>, and other exotic
newspapers hanging on the wall. She looked across at the
young man seated opposite her, who gave one the impression of
having centred the most serious efforts of his brain on his
toilet and his food, and recalled some of the flattering remarks
that the press had bestowed on his recent speeches.</p>
<p>“Doesn’t it make you conceited, Courtenay,”
she asked, “to look at all those foreign newspapers hanging
there and know that most of them have got paragraphs and articles
about your Persian speech?”</p>
<p>Youghal laughed.</p>
<p>“There’s always a chastening corrective in the
thought that some of them may have printed your portrait.
When once you’ve seen your features hurriedly reproduced in
the <i>Matin</i>, for instance, you feel you would like to be a
veiled Turkish woman for the rest of your life.”</p>
<p>And Youghal gazed long and lovingly at his reflection in the
nearest mirror, as an antidote against possible incitements to
humility in the portrait gallery of fame.</p>
<p>Elaine felt a certain soothed satisfaction in the fact that
this young man, whose knowledge of the Middle East was an
embarrassment to Ministers at question time and in debate, was
showing himself equally well-informed on the subject of her
culinary likes and dislikes. If Suzette could have been
forced to attend as a witness at a neighbouring table she would
have felt even happier.</p>
<p>“Did the head waiter ask if we were engaged?”
asked Elaine, when Courtenay had settled the bill, and she had
finished collecting her sunshade and gloves and other impedimenta
from the hands of obsequious attendants.</p>
<p>“Yes,” said Youghal, “and he seemed quite
crestfallen when I had to say ‘no.’”</p>
<p>“It would be horrid to disappoint him when he’s
looked after us so charmingly,” said Elaine; “tell
him that we are.”</p>
<h2>CHAPTER X</h2>
<p><span class="smcap">The</span> Rutland Galleries were crowded,
especially in the neighbourhood of the tea-buffet, by a
fashionable throng of art-patrons which had gathered to inspect
Mervyn Quentock’s collection of Society portraits.
Quentock was a young artist whose abilities were just receiving
due recognition from the critics; that the recognition was not
overdue he owed largely to his perception of the fact that if one
hides one’s talent under a bushel one must be careful to
point out to everyone the exact bushel under which it is
hidden. There are two manners of receiving recognition: one
is to be discovered so long after one’s death that
one’s grandchildren have to write to the papers to
establish their relationship; the other is to be discovered, like
the infant Moses, at the very outset of one’s career.
Mervyn Quentock had chosen the latter and happier manner.
In an age when many aspiring young men strive to advertise their
wares by imparting to them a freakish imbecility, Quentock turned
out work that was characterised by a pleasing delicate restraint,
but he contrived to herald his output with a certain fanfare of
personal eccentricity, thereby compelling an attention which
might otherwise have strayed past his studio. In appearance
he was the ordinary cleanly young Englishman, except, perhaps,
that his eyes rather suggested a library edition of the Arabian
Nights; his clothes matched his appearance and showed no taint of
the sartorial disorder by which the bourgeois of the garden-city
and the Latin Quarter anxiously seeks to proclaim his kinship
with art and thought. His eccentricity took the form of
flying in the face of some of the prevailing social currents of
the day, but as a reactionary, never as a reformer. He
produced a gasp of admiring astonishment in fashionable circles
by refusing to paint actresses—except, of course, those who
had left the legitimate drama to appear between the boards of
Debrett. He absolutely declined to execute portraits of
Americans unless they hailed from certain favoured States.
His “water-colour-line,” as a New York paper phrased
it, earned for him a crop of angry criticisms and a shoal of
Transatlantic commissions, and criticism and commissions were the
things that Quentock most wanted.</p>
<p>“Of course he is perfectly right,” said Lady
Caroline Benaresq, calmly rescuing a piled-up plate of caviare
sandwiches from the neighbourhood of a trio of young ladies who
had established themselves hopefully within easy reach of
it. “Art,” she continued, addressing herself to
the Rev. Poltimore Vardon, “has always been geographically
exclusive. London may be more important from most points of
view than Venice, but the art of portrait painting, which would
never concern itself with a Lord Mayor, simply grovels at the
feet of the Doges. As a Socialist I’m bound to
recognise the right of Ealing to compare itself with Avignon, but
one cannot expect the Muses to put the two on a level.”</p>
<p>“Exclusiveness,” said the Reverend Poltimore,
“has been the salvation of Art, just as the lack of it is
proving the downfall of religion. My colleagues of the
cloth go about zealously proclaiming the fact that Christianity,
in some form or other, is attracting shoals of converts among all
sorts of races and tribes, that one had scarcely ever heard of,
except in reviews of books of travel that one never read.
That sort of thing was all very well when the world was more
sparsely populated, but nowadays, when it simply teems with human
beings, no one is particularly impressed by the fact that a few
million, more or less, of converts, of a low stage of mental
development, have accepted the teachings of some particular
religion. It not only chills one’s enthusiasm, it
positively shakes one’s convictions when one hears that the
things one has been brought up to believe as true are being very
favourably spoken of by Buriats and Samoyeds and
Kanakas.”</p>
<p>The Rev. Poltimore Vardon had once seen a resemblance in
himself to Voltaire, and had lived alongside the comparison ever
since.</p>
<p>“No modern cult or fashion,” he continued,
“would be favourably influenced by considerations based on
statistics; fancy adopting a certain style of hat or cut of coat,
because it was being largely worn in Lancashire and the Midlands;
fancy favouring a certain brand of champagne because it was being
extensively patronised in German summer resorts. No wonder
that religion is falling into disuse in this country under such
ill-directed methods.”</p>
<p>“You can’t prevent the heathen being converted if
they choose to be,” said Lady Caroline; “this is an
age of toleration.”</p>
<p>“You could always deny it,” said the Rev.
Poltimore, “like the Belgians do with regrettable
occurrences in the Congo. But I would go further than
that. I would stimulate the waning enthusiasm for
Christianity in this country by labelling it as the exclusive
possession of a privileged few. If one could induce the
Duchess of Pelm, for instance, to assert that the Kingdom of
Heaven, as far as the British Isles are concerned, is strictly
limited to herself, two of the under-gardeners at Pelmby, and,
possibly, but not certainly, the Dean of Dunster, there would be
an instant reshaping of the popular attitude towards religious
convictions and observances. Once let the idea get about
that the Christian Church is rather more exclusive than the Lawn
at Ascot, and you would have a quickening of religious life such
as this generation has never witnessed. But as long as the
clergy and the religious organisations advertise their creed on
the lines of ‘Everybody ought to believe in us: millions
do,’ one can expect nothing but indifference and waning
faith.”</p>
<p>“Time is just as exclusive in its way as Art,”
said Lady Caroline.</p>
<p>“In what way?” said the Reverend Poltimore.</p>
<p>“Your pleasantries about religion would have sounded
quite clever and advanced in the early ’nineties.
To-day they have a dreadfully warmed-up flavour. That is
the great delusion of you would-be advanced satirists; you
imagine you can sit down comfortably for a couple of decades
saying daring and startling things about the age you live in,
which, whatever other defects it may have, is certainly not
standing still. The whole of the Sherard Blaw school of
discursive drama suggests, to my mind, Early Victorian furniture
in a travelling circus. However, you will always have
relays of people from the suburbs to listen to the Mocking Bird
of yesterday, and sincerely imagine it is the harbinger of
something new and revolutionising.”</p>
<p>“<i>Would</i> you mind passing that plate of
sandwiches,” asked one of the trio of young ladies,
emboldened by famine.</p>
<p>“With pleasure,” said Lady Caroline, deftly
passing her a nearly empty plate of bread-and-butter.</p>
<p>“I meant the place of caviare sandwiches. So sorry
to trouble you,” persisted the young lady.</p>
<p>Her sorrow was misapplied; Lady Caroline had turned her
attention to a newcomer.</p>
<p>“A very interesting exhibition,” Ada Spelvexit was
saying; “faultless technique, as far as I am a judge of
technique, and quite a master-touch in the way of poses.
But have you noticed how very animal his art is? He seems
to shut out the soul from his portraits. I nearly cried
when I saw dear Winifred depicted simply as a good-looking
healthy blonde.”</p>
<p>“I wish you had,” said Lady Caroline; “the
spectacle of a strong, brave woman weeping at a private view in
the Rutland Galleries would have been so sensational. It
would certainly have been reproduced in the next Drury Lane
drama. And I’m so unlucky; I never see these
sensational events. I was ill with appendicitis, you know,
when Lulu Braminguard dramatically forgave her husband, after
seventeen years of estrangement, during a State luncheon party at
Windsor. The old queen was furious about it. She said
it was so disrespectful to the cook to be thinking of such a
thing at such a time.”</p>
<p>Lady Caroline’s recollections of things that
hadn’t happened at the Court of Queen Victoria were
notoriously vivid; it was the very widespread fear that she might
one day write a book of reminiscences that made her so
universally respected.</p>
<p>“As for his full-length picture of Lady
Brickfield,” continued Ada, ignoring Lady Caroline’s
commentary as far as possible, “all the expression seems to
have been deliberately concentrated in the feet; beautiful feet,
no doubt, but still, hardly the most distinctive part of a human
being.”</p>
<p>“To paint the right people at the wrong end may be an
eccentricity, but it is scarcely an indiscretion,”
pronounced Lady Caroline.</p>
<p>One of the portraits which attracted more than a passing
flutter of attention was a costume study of Francesca
Bassington. Francesca had secured some highly desirable
patronage for the young artist, and in return he had enriched her
pantheon of personal possessions with a clever piece of work into
which he had thrown an unusual amount of imaginative
detail. He had painted her in a costume of the great
Louis’s brightest period, seated in front of a tapestry
that was so prominent in the composition that it could scarcely
be said to form part of the background. Flowers and fruit,
in exotic profusion, were its dominant note; quinces,
pomegranates, passion-flowers, giant convolvulus, great
mauve-pink roses, and grapes that were already being pressed by
gleeful cupids in a riotous Arcadian vintage, stood out on its
woven texture. The same note was struck in the beflowered
satin of the lady’s kirtle, and in the pomegranate pattern
of the brocade that draped the couch on which she was
seated. The artist had called his picture
“Recolte.” And after one had taken in all the
details of fruit and flower and foliage that earned the
composition its name, one noted the landscape that showed through
a broad casement in the left-hand corner. It was a
landscape clutched in the grip of winter, naked, bleak,
black-frozen; a winter in which things died and knew no
rewakening. If the picture typified harvest, it was a
harvest of artificial growth.</p>
<p>“It leaves a great deal to the imagination,
doesn’t it?” said Ada Spelvexit, who had edged away
from the range of Lady Caroline’s tongue.</p>
<p>“At any rate one can tell who it’s meant
for,” said Serena Golackly.</p>
<p>“Oh, yes, it’s a good likeness of dear
Francesca,” admitted Ada; “of course, it flatters
her.”</p>
<p>“That, too, is a fault on the right side in portrait
painting,” said Serena; “after all, if posterity is
going to stare at one for centuries it’s only kind and
reasonable to be looking just a little better than one’s
best.”</p>
<p>“What a curiously unequal style the artist has,”
continued Ada, almost as if she felt a personal grievance against
him; “I was just noticing what a lack of soul there was in
most of his portraits. Dear Winifred, you know, who speaks
so beautifully and feelingly at my gatherings for old women,
he’s made her look just an ordinary dairy-maidish blonde;
and Francesca, who is quite the most soulless woman I’ve
ever met, well, he’s given her quite—”</p>
<p>“Hush,” said Serena, “the Bassington boy is
just behind you.”</p>
<p>Comus stood looking at the portrait of his mother with the
feeling of one who comes suddenly across a once-familiar
half-forgotten acquaintance in unfamiliar surroundings. The
likeness was undoubtedly a good one, but the artist had caught an
expression in Francesca’s eyes which few people had ever
seen there. It was the expression of a woman who had
forgotten for one short moment to be absorbed in the small cares
and excitements of her life, the money worries and little social
plannings, and had found time to send a look of half-wistful
friendliness to some sympathetic companion. Comus could
recall that look, fitful and fleeting, in his mother’s eyes
when she had been a few years younger, before her world had grown
to be such a committee-room of ways and means. Almost as a
re-discovery he remembered that she had once figured in his
boyish mind as a “rather good sort,” more ready to
see the laughable side of a piece of mischief than to labour
forth a reproof. That the bygone feeling of good fellowship
had been stamped out was, he knew, probably in great part his own
doing, and it was possible that the old friendliness was still
there under the surface of things, ready to show itself again if
he willed it, and friends were becoming scarcer with him than
enemies in these days. Looking at the picture with its
wistful hint of a long ago comradeship, Comus made up his mind
that he very much wanted things to be back on their earlier
footing, and to see again on his mother’s face the look
that the artist had caught and perpetuated in its momentary
flitting. If the projected Elaine-marriage came off, and in
spite of recent maladroit behaviour on his part he still counted
it an assured thing, much of the immediate cause for estrangement
between himself and his mother would be removed, or at any rate,
easily removable. With the influence of Elaine’s
money behind him he promised himself that he would find some
occupation that would remove from himself the reproach of being a
waster and idler. There were lots of careers, he told
himself, that were open to a man with solid financial backing and
good connections. There might yet be jolly times ahead, in
which his mother would have her share of the good things that
were going, and carking thin-lipped Henry Greech and other of
Comus’s detractors could take their sour looks and words
out of sight and hearing. Thus, staring at the picture as
though he were studying its every detail, and seeing really only
that wistful friendly smile, Comus made his plans and
dispositions for a battle that was already fought and lost.</p>
<p>The crowd grew thicker in the galleries, cheerfully enduring
an amount of overcrowding that would have been fiercely resented
in a railway carriage. Near the entrance Mervyn Quentock
was talking to a Serene Highness, a lady who led a life of
obtrusive usefulness, largely imposed on her by a good-natured
inability to say “No.” “That woman
creates a positive draught with the number of bazaars she
opens,” a frivolously-spoken ex-Cabinet Minister had once
remarked. At the present moment she was being whimsically
apologetic.</p>
<p>“When I think of the legions of well-meaning young men
and women to whom I’ve given away prizes for proficiency in
art-school curriculum, I feel that I ought not to show my face
inside a picture gallery. I always imagine that my
punishment in another world will be perpetually sharpening
pencils and cleaning palettes for unending relays of misguided
young people whom I deliberately encouraged in their artistic
delusions.”</p>
<p>“Do you suppose we shall all get appropriate punishments
in another world for our sins in this?” asked Quentock.</p>
<p>“Not so much for our sins as for our indiscretions; they
are the things which do the most harm and cause the greatest
trouble. I feel certain that Christopher Columbus will
undergo the endless torment of being discovered by parties of
American tourists. You see I am quite old fashioned in my
ideas about the terrors and inconveniences of the next
world. And now I must be running away; I’ve got to
open a Free Library somewhere. You know the sort of thing
that happens—one unveils a bust of Carlyle and makes a
speech about Ruskin, and then people come in their thousands and
read ‘Rabid Ralph, or Should he have Bitten
Her?’ Don’t forget, please, I’m going to
have the medallion with the fat cupid sitting on a sundial.
And just one thing more—perhaps I ought not to ask you, but
you have such nice kind eyes, you embolden one to make daring
requests, would you send me the recipe for those lovely
chestnut-and-chicken-liver sandwiches? I know the
ingredients of course, but it’s the proportions that make
such a difference—just how much liver to how much chestnut,
and what amount of red pepper and other things. Thank you
so much. I really am going now.”</p>
<p>Staring round with a vague half-smile at everybody within
nodding distance, Her Serene Highness made one of her
characteristic exits, which Lady Caroline declared always
reminded her of a scrambled egg slipping off a piece of
toast. At the entrance she stopped for a moment to exchange
a word or two with a young man who had just arrived. From a
corner where he was momentarily hemmed in by a group of
tea-consuming dowagers, Comus recognised the newcomer as
Courtenay Youghal, and began slowly to labour his way towards
him. Youghal was not at the moment the person whose society
he most craved for in the world, but there was at least the
possibility that he might provide an opportunity for a game of
bridge, which was the dominant desire of the moment. The
young politician was already surrounded by a group of friends and
acquaintances, and was evidently being made the recipient of a
salvo of congratulation—presumably on his recent
performances in the Foreign Office debate, Comus concluded.
But Youghal himself seemed to be announcing the event with which
the congratulations were connected. Had some dramatic
catastrophe overtaken the Government, Comus wondered. And
then, as he pressed nearer, a chance word, the coupling of two
names, told him the news.</p>
<h2>CHAPTER XI</h2>
<p><span class="smcap">After</span> the momentous lunch at the
Corridor Restaurant Elaine had returned to Manchester Square
(where she was staying with one of her numerous aunts) in a frame
of mind that embraced a tangle of competing emotions. In
the first place she was conscious of a dominant feeling of
relief; in a moment of impetuosity, not wholly uninfluenced by
pique, she had settled the problem which hours of hard thinking
and serious heart-searching had brought no nearer to solution,
and, although she felt just a little inclined to be scared at the
headlong manner of her final decision, she had now very little
doubt in her own mind that the decision had been the right
one. In fact the wonder seemed rather that she should have
been so long in doubt as to which of her wooers really enjoyed
her honest approval. She had been in love, these many weeks
past with an imaginary Comus, but now that she had definitely
walked out of her dreamland she saw that nearly all the qualities
that had appealed to her on his behalf had been absent from, or
only fitfully present in, the character of the real Comus.
And now that she had installed Youghal in the first place of her
affections he had rapidly acquired in her eyes some of the
qualities which ranked highest in her estimation. Like the
proverbial buyer she had the happy feminine tendency of
magnifying the worth of her possession as soon as she had
acquired it. And Courtenay Youghal gave Elaine some
justification for her sense of having chosen wisely. Above
all other things, selfish and cynical though he might appear at
times, he was unfailingly courteous and considerate towards
her. That was a circumstance which would always have
carried weight with her in judging any man; in this case its
value was enormously heightened by contrast with the behaviour of
her other wooer. And Youghal had in her eyes the advantage
which the glamour of combat, even the combat of words and
wire-pulling, throws over the fighter. He stood well in the
forefront of a battle which however carefully stage-managed,
however honeycombed with personal insincerities and overlaid with
calculated mock-heroics, really meant something, really counted
for good or wrong in the nation’s development and the
world’s history. Shrewd parliamentary observers might
have warned her that Youghal would never stand much higher in the
political world than he did at present, as a brilliant Opposition
freelance, leading lively and rather meaningless forays against
the dull and rather purposeless foreign policy of a Government
that was scarcely either to be blamed for or congratulated on its
handling of foreign affairs. The young politician had not
the strength of character or convictions that keeps a man
naturally in the forefront of affairs and gives his counsels a
sterling value, and on the other hand his insincerity was not
deep enough to allow him to pose artificially and successfully as
a leader of men and shaper of movements. For the moment,
however, his place in public life was sufficiently marked out to
give him a secure footing in that world where people are counted
individually and not in herds. The woman whom he would make
his wife would have the chance, too, if she had the will and the
skill, to become an individual who counted.</p>
<p>There was balm to Elaine in this reflection, yet it did not
wholly suffice to drive out the feeling of pique which Comus had
called into being by his slighting view of her as a convenient
cash supply in moments of emergency. She found a certain
satisfaction in scrupulously observing her promise, made earlier
on that eventful day, and sent off a messenger with the
stipulated loan. Then a reaction of compunction set in, and
she reminded herself that in fairness she ought to write and tell
her news in as friendly a fashion as possible to her dismissed
suitor before it burst upon him from some other quarter.
They had parted on more or less quarrelling terms it was true,
but neither of them had foreseen the finality of the parting nor
the permanence of the breach between them; Comus might even now
be thinking himself half-forgiven, and the awakening would be
rather cruel. The letter, however, did not prove an easy
one to write; not only did it present difficulties of its own but
it suffered from the competing urgency of a desire to be doing
something far pleasanter than writing explanatory and valedictory
phrases. Elaine was possessed with an unusual but quite
overmastering hankering to visit her cousin Suzette
Brankley. They met but rarely at each other’s houses
and very seldom anywhere else, and Elaine for her part was never
conscious of feeling that their opportunities for intercourse
lacked anything in the way of adequacy. Suzette accorded
her just that touch of patronage which a moderately well-off and
immoderately dull girl will usually try to mete out to an
acquaintance who is known to be wealthy and suspected of
possessing brains. In return Elaine armed herself with that
particular brand of mock humility which can be so terribly
disconcerting if properly wielded. No quarrel of any
description stood between them and one could not legitimately
have described them as enemies, but they never disarmed in one
another’s presence. A misfortune of any magnitude
falling on one of them would have been sincerely regretted by the
other, but any minor discomfiture would have produced a feeling
very much akin to satisfaction. Human nature knows millions
of these inconsequent little feuds, springing up and flourishing
apart from any basis of racial, political, religious or economic
causes, as a hint perhaps to crass unseeing altruists that enmity
has its place and purpose in the world as well as
benevolence.</p>
<p>Elaine had not personally congratulated Suzette since the
formal announcement of her engagement to the young man with the
dissentient tailoring effects. The impulse to go and do so
now, overmastered her sense of what was due to Comus in the way
of explanation. The letter was still in its blank unwritten
stage, an unmarshalled sequence of sentences forming in her
brain, when she ordered her car and made a hurried but
well-thought-out change into her most sumptuously sober afternoon
toilette. Suzette, she felt tolerably sure, would still be
in the costume that she had worn in the Park that morning, a
costume that aimed at elaboration of detail, and was damned with
overmuch success.</p>
<p>Suzette’s mother welcomed her unexpected visitor with
obvious satisfaction. Her daughter’s engagement, she
explained, was not so brilliant from the social point of view as
a girl of Suzette’s attractions and advantages might have
legitimately aspired to, but Egbert was a thoroughly commendable
and dependable young man, who would very probably win his way
before long to membership of the County Council.</p>
<p>“From there, of course, the road would be open to him to
higher things.”</p>
<p>“Yes,” said Elaine, “he might become an
alderman.”</p>
<p>“Have you seen their photographs, taken together?”
asked Mrs. Brankley, abandoning the subject of Egbert’s
prospective career.</p>
<p>“No, do show me,” said Elaine, with a flattering
show of interest; “I’ve never seen that sort of thing
before. It used to be the fashion once for engaged couples
to be photographed together, didn’t it?”</p>
<p>“It’s <i>very</i> much the fashion now,”
said Mrs. Brankley assertively, but some of the complacency had
filtered out of her voice. Suzette came into the room,
wearing the dress that she had worn in the Park that morning.</p>
<p>“Of course, you’ve been hearing all about
<i>the</i> engagement from mother,” she cried, and then set
to work conscientiously to cover the same ground.</p>
<p>“We met at Grindelwald, you know. He always calls
me his Ice Maiden because we first got to know each other on the
skating rink. Quite romantic, wasn’t it? Then
we asked him to tea one day, and we got to be quite
friendly. Then he proposed.”</p>
<p>“He wasn’t the only one who was smitten with
Suzette,” Mrs. Brankley hastened to put in, fearful lest
Elaine might suppose that Egbert had had things all his own
way. “There was an American millionaire who was quite
taken with her, and a Polish count of a very old family. I
assure you I felt quite nervous at some of our
tea-parties.”</p>
<p>Mrs. Brankley had given Grindelwald a sinister but rather
alluring reputation among a large circle of untravelled friends
as a place where the insolence of birth and wealth was held in
precarious check from breaking forth into scenes of savage
violence.</p>
<p>“My marriage with Egbert will, of course, enlarge the
sphere of my life enormously,” pursued Suzette.</p>
<p>“Yes,” said Elaine; her eyes were rather
remorselessly taking in the details of her cousin’s
toilette. It is said that nothing is sadder than victory
except defeat. Suzette began to feel that the tragedy of
both was concentrated in the creation which had given her such
unalloyed gratification, till Elaine had come on the scene.</p>
<p>“A woman can be so immensely helpful in the social way
to a man who is making a career for himself. And I’m
so glad to find that we’ve a great many ideas in
common. We each made out a list of our idea of the hundred
best books, and quite a number of them were the same.”</p>
<p>“He looks bookish,” said Elaine, with a critical
glance at the photograph.</p>
<p>“Oh, he’s not at all a bookworm,” said
Suzette quickly, “though he’s tremendously
well-read. He’s quite the man of action.”</p>
<p>“Does he hunt?” asked Elaine.</p>
<p>“No, he doesn’t get much time or opportunity for
riding.”</p>
<p>“What a pity,” commented Elaine; “I
don’t think I could marry a man who wasn’t fond of
riding.”</p>
<p>“Of course that’s a matter of taste,” said
Suzette, stiffly; “horsey men are not usually gifted with
overmuch brains, are they?”</p>
<p>“There is as much difference between a horseman and a
horsey man as there is between a well-dressed man and a dressy
one,” said Elaine, judicially; “and you may have
noticed how seldom a dressy woman really knows how to
dress. As an old lady of my acquaintance observed the other
day, some people are born with a sense of how to clothe
themselves, others acquire it, others look as if their clothes
had been thrust upon them.”</p>
<p>She gave Lady Caroline her due quotation marks, but the sudden
tactfulness with which she looked away from her cousin’s
frock was entirely her own idea.</p>
<p>A young man entering the room at this moment caused a
diversion that was rather welcome to Suzette.</p>
<p>“Here comes Egbert,” she announced, with an air of
subdued triumph; it was at least a satisfaction to be able to
produce the captive of her charms, alive and in good condition,
on the scene. Elaine might be as critical as she pleased,
but a live lover outweighed any number of well-dressed
straight-riding cavaliers who existed only as a distant vision of
the delectable husband.</p>
<p>Egbert was one of those men who have no small talk, but
possess an inexhaustible supply of the larger variety. In
whatever society he happened to be, and particularly in the
immediate neighbourhood of an afternoon-tea table, with a limited
audience of womenfolk, he gave the impression of someone who was
addressing a public meeting, and would be happy to answer
questions afterwards. A suggestion of gas-lit
mission-halls, wet umbrellas, and discreet applause seemed to
accompany him everywhere. He was an exponent, among other
things, of what he called New Thought, which seemed to lend
itself conveniently to the employment of a good deal of rather
stale phraseology. Probably in the course of some thirty
odd years of existence he had never been of any notable use to
man, woman, child or animal, but it was his firmly-announced
intention to leave the world a better, happier, purer place than
he had found it; against the danger of any relapse to earlier
conditions after his disappearance from the scene, he was, of
course, powerless to guard. ’Tis not in mortals to
insure succession, and Egbert was admittedly mortal.</p>
<p>Elaine found him immensely entertaining, and would certainly
have exerted herself to draw him out if such a proceeding had
been at all necessary. She listened to his conversation
with the complacent appreciation that one bestows on a stage
tragedy, from whose calamities one can escape at any moment by
the simple process of leaving one’s seat. When at
last he checked the flow of his opinions by a hurried reference
to his watch, and declared that he must be moving on elsewhere,
Elaine almost expected a vote of thanks to be accorded him, or to
be asked to signify herself in favour of some resolution by
holding up her hand.</p>
<p>When the young man had bidden the company a rapid
business-like farewell, tempered in Suzette’s case by the
exact degree of tender intimacy that it would have been
considered improper to omit or overstep, Elaine turned to her
expectant cousin with an air of cordial congratulation.</p>
<p>“He is exactly the husband I should have chosen for you,
Suzette.”</p>
<p>For the second time that afternoon Suzette felt a sense of
waning enthusiasm for one of her possessions.</p>
<p>Mrs. Brankley detected the note of ironical congratulation in
her visitor’s verdict.</p>
<p>“I suppose she means he’s not her idea of a
husband, but, he’s good enough for Suzette,” she
observed to herself, with a snort that expressed itself somewhere
in the nostrils of the brain. Then with a smiling air of
heavy patronage she delivered herself of her one idea of a
damaging counter-stroke.</p>
<p>“And when are we to hear of your engagement, my
dear?”</p>
<p>“Now,” said Elaine quietly, but with electrical
effect; “I came to announce it to you but I wanted to hear
all about Suzette first. It will be formally announced in
the papers in a day or two.”</p>
<p>“But who is it? Is it the young man who was with
you in the Park this morning?” asked Suzette.</p>
<p>“Let me see, who was I with in the Park this
morning? A very good-looking dark boy? Oh no, not
Comus Bassington. Someone you know by name, anyway, and I
expect you’ve seen his portrait in the papers.”</p>
<p>“A flying-man?” asked Mrs. Brankley.</p>
<p>“Courtenay Youghal,” said Elaine.</p>
<p>Mrs. Brankley and Suzette had often rehearsed in the privacy
of their minds the occasion when Elaine should come to pay her
personal congratulations to her engaged cousin. It had
never been in the least like this.</p>
<p>On her return from her enjoyable afternoon visit Elaine found
an express messenger letter waiting for her. It was from
Comus, thanking her for her loan—and returning it.</p>
<p>“I suppose I ought never to have asked you for
it,” he wrote, “but you are always so deliciously
solemn about money matters that I couldn’t resist.
Just heard the news of your engagement to Courtenay.
Congrats. to you both. I’m far too stoney broke to
buy you a wedding present so I’m going to give you back the
bread-and-butter dish. Luckily it still has your crest on
it. I shall love to think of you and Courtenay eating
bread-and-butter out of it for the rest of your lives.”</p>
<p>That was all he had to say on the matter about which Elaine
had been preparing to write a long and kindly-expressed letter,
closing a rather momentous chapter in her life and his.
There was not a trace of regret or upbraiding in his note; he had
walked out of their mutual fairyland as abruptly as she had, and
to all appearances far more unconcernedly. Reading the
letter again and again Elaine could come to no decision as to
whether this was merely a courageous gibe at defeat, or whether
it represented the real value that Comus set on the thing that he
had lost.</p>
<p>And she would never know. If Comus possessed one useless
gift to perfection it was the gift of laughing at Fate even when
it had struck him hardest. One day, perhaps, the laughter
and mockery would be silent on his lips, and Fate would have the
advantage of laughing last.</p>
<h2>CHAPTER XII</h2>
<p><span class="smcap">A door</span> closed and Francesca
Bassington sat alone in her well-beloved drawing-room. The
visitor who had been enjoying the hospitality of her
afternoon-tea table had just taken his departure. The
tête-à-tête had not been a pleasant one, at
any rate as far as Francesca was concerned, but at least it had
brought her the information for which she had been seeking.
Her rôle of looker-on from a tactful distance had
necessarily left her much in the dark concerning the progress of
the all-important wooing, but during the last few hours she had,
on slender though significant evidence, exchanged her complacent
expectancy for a conviction that something had gone wrong.
She had spent the previous evening at her brother’s house,
and had naturally seen nothing of Comus in that uncongenial
quarter; neither had he put in an appearance at the breakfast
table the following morning. She had met him in the hall at
eleven o’clock, and he had hurried past her, merely
imparting the information that he would not be in till dinner
that evening. He spoke in his sulkiest tone, and his face
wore a look of defeat, thinly masked by an air of defiance; it
was not the defiance of a man who is losing, but of one who has
already lost.</p>
<p>Francesca’s conviction that things had gone wrong
between Comus and Elaine de Frey grew in strength as the day wore
on. She lunched at a friend’s house, but it was not a
quarter where special social information of any importance was
likely to come early to hand. Instead of the news she was
hankering for, she had to listen to trivial gossip and
speculation on the flirtations and “cases” and
“affairs” of a string of acquaintances whose
matrimonial projects interested her about as much as the nesting
arrangements of the wildfowl in St. James’s Park.</p>
<p>“Of course,” said her hostess, with the duly
impressive emphasis of a privileged chronicler,
“we’ve always regarded Claire as the marrying one of
the family, so when Emily came to us and said, ‘I’ve
got some news for you,’ we all said, ‘Claire’s
engaged!’ ‘Oh, no,’ said Emily,
‘it’s not Claire this time, it’s
me.’ So then we had to guess who the lucky man
was. ‘It can’t be Captain Parminter,’ we
all said, ‘because he’s always been sweet on
Joan.’ And then Emily said—”</p>
<p>The recording voice reeled off the catalogue of inane remarks
with a comfortable purring complacency that held out no hope of
an early abandoning of the topic. Francesca sat and
wondered why the innocent acceptance of a cutlet and a glass of
indifferent claret should lay one open to such unsparing
punishment.</p>
<p>A stroll homeward through the Park after lunch brought no
further enlightenment on the subject that was uppermost in her
mind; what was worse, it brought her, without possibility of
escape, within hailing distance of Merla Blathington, who
fastened on to her with the enthusiasm of a lonely tsetse fly
encountering an outpost of civilisation.</p>
<p>“Just think,” she buzzed inconsequently, “my
sister in Cambridgeshire has hatched out thirty-three White
Orpington chickens in her incubator!”</p>
<p>“What eggs did she put in it?” asked
Francesca.</p>
<p>“Oh, some very special strain of White
Orpington.”</p>
<p>“Then I don’t see anything remarkable in the
result. If she had put in crocodile’s eggs and
hatched out White Orpingtons, there might have been something to
write to <i>Country Life</i> about.”</p>
<p>“What funny fascinating things these little green
park-chairs are,” said Merla, starting off on a fresh
topic; “they always look so quaint and knowing when
they’re stuck away in pairs by themselves under the trees,
as if they were having a heart-to-heart talk or discussing a
piece of very private scandal. If they could only speak,
what tragedies and comedies they could tell us of, what
flirtations and proposals.”</p>
<p>“Let us be devoutly thankful that they
can’t,” said Francesca, with a shuddering
recollection of the luncheon-table conversation.</p>
<p>“Of course, it would make one very careful what one said
before them—or above them rather,” Merla rattled on,
and then, to Francesca’s infinite relief, she espied
another acquaintance sitting in unprotected solitude, who
promised to supply a more durable audience than her present
rapidly moving companion. Francesca was free to return to
her drawing-room in Blue Street to await with such patience as
she could command the coming of some visitor who might be able to
throw light on the subject that was puzzling and disquieting
her. The arrival of George St. Michael boded bad news, but
at any rate news, and she gave him an almost cordial welcome.</p>
<p>“Well, you see I wasn’t far wrong about Miss de
Frey and Courtenay Youghal, was I?” he chirruped, almost
before he had seated himself. Francesca was to be spared
any further spinning-out of her period of uncertainty.
“Yes, it’s officially given out,” he went on,
“and it’s to appear in the <i>Morning Post</i>
to-morrow. I heard it from Colonel Deel this morning, and
he had it direct from Youghal himself. Yes, please, one
lump; I’m not fashionable, you see.” He had
made the same remark about the sugar in his tea with unfailing
regularity for at least thirty years. Fashions in sugar are
apparently stationary. “They say,” he
continued, hurriedly, “that he proposed to her on the
Terrace of the House, and a division bell rang, and he had to
hurry off before she had time to give her answer, and when he got
back she simply said, ‘the Ayes have
it.’” St. Michael paused in his narrative to
give an appreciative giggle.</p>
<p>“Just the sort of inanity that would go the
rounds,” remarked Francesca, with the satisfaction of
knowing that she was making the criticism direct to the author
and begetter of the inanity in question. Now that the blow
had fallen and she knew the full extent of its weight, her
feeling towards the bringer of bad news, who sat complacently
nibbling at her tea-cakes and scattering crumbs of tiresome
small-talk at her feet, was one of wholehearted dislike.
She could sympathise with, or at any rate understand, the
tendency of oriental despots to inflict death or ignominious
chastisement on messengers bearing tidings of misfortune and
defeat, and St. Michael, she perfectly well knew, was thoroughly
aware of the fact that her hopes and wishes had been centred on
the possibility of having Elaine for a daughter-in-law; every
purring remark that his mean little soul prompted him to
contribute to the conversation had an easily recognizable
undercurrent of malice. Fortunately for her powers of
polite endurance, which had been put to such searching and
repeated tests that day, St. Michael had planned out for himself
a busy little time-table of afternoon visits, at each of which
his self-appointed task of forestalling and embellishing the
newspaper announcements of the Youghal-de Frey engagement would
be hurriedly but thoroughly performed.</p>
<p>“They’ll be quite one of the best-looking and most
interesting couples of the Season, won’t they?” he
cried, by way of farewell. The door closed and Francesca
Bassington sat alone in her drawing-room.</p>
<p>Before she could give way to the bitter luxury of reflection
on the downfall of her hopes, it was prudent to take
precautionary measures against unwelcome intrusion.
Summoning the maid who had just speeded the departing St.
Michael, she gave the order: “I am not at home this
afternoon to Lady Caroline Benaresq.” On second
thoughts she extended the taboo to all possible callers, and sent
a telephone message to catch Comus at his club, asking him to
come and see her as soon as he could manage before it was time to
dress for dinner. Then she sat down to think, and her
thinking was beyond the relief of tears.</p>
<p>She had built herself a castle of hopes, and it had not been a
castle in Spain, but a structure well on the probable side of the
Pyrenees. There had been a solid foundation on which to
build. Miss de Frey’s fortune was an assured and
unhampered one, her liking for Comus had been an obvious fact;
his courtship of her a serious reality. The young people
had been much together in public, and their names had naturally
been coupled in the match-making gossip of the day. The
only serious shadow cast over the scene had been the persistent
presence, in foreground or background, of Courtenay
Youghal. And now the shadow suddenly stood forth as the
reality, and the castle of hopes was a ruin, a hideous
mortification of dust and débris, with the skeleton
outlines of its chambers still standing to make mockery of its
discomfited architect. The daily anxiety about Comus and
his extravagant ways and intractable disposition had been
gradually lulled by the prospect of his making an advantageous
marriage, which would have transformed him from a
ne’er-do-well and adventurer into a wealthy idler. He
might even have been moulded, by the resourceful influence of an
ambitious wife, into a man with some definite purpose in
life. The prospect had vanished with cruel suddenness, and
the anxieties were crowding back again, more insistent than
ever. The boy had had his one good chance in the
matrimonial market and missed it; if he were to transfer his
attentions to some other well-dowered girl he would be marked
down at once as a fortune-hunter, and that would constitute a
heavy handicap to the most plausible of wooers. His liking
for Elaine had evidently been genuine in its way, though perhaps
it would have been rash to read any deeper sentiment into it, but
even with the spur of his own inclination to assist him he had
failed to win the prize that had seemed so temptingly within his
reach. And in the dashing of his prospects, Francesca saw
the threatening of her own. The old anxiety as to her
precarious tenure of her present quarters put on again all its
familiar terrors. One day, she foresaw, in the horribly
near future, George St. Michael would come pattering up her
stairs with the breathless intelligence that Emmeline Chetrof was
going to marry somebody or other in the Guards or the Record
Office as the case might be, and then there would be an uprooting
of her life from its home and haven in Blue Street and a
wandering forth to some cheap unhappy far-off dwelling, where the
stately Van der Meulen and its companion host of beautiful and
desirable things would be stuffed and stowed away in soulless
surroundings, like courtly émigrés fallen on evil
days. It was unthinkable, but the trouble was that it had
to be thought about. And if Comus had played his cards well
and transformed himself from an encumbrance into a son with
wealth at his command, the tragedy which she saw looming in front
of her might have been avoided or at the worst whittled down to
easily bearable proportions. With money behind one, the
problem of where to live approaches more nearly to the simple
question of where do you wish to live, and a rich daughter-in-law
would have surely seen to it that she did not have to leave her
square mile of Mecca and go out into the wilderness of bricks and
mortar. If the house in Blue Street could not have been
compounded for there were other desirable residences which would
have been capable of consoling Francesca for her lost Eden.
And now the detested Courtenay Youghal, with his mocking eyes and
air of youthful cynicism, had stepped in and overthrown those
golden hopes and plans whose non-fulfilment would make such a
world of change in her future. Assuredly she had reason to
feel bitter against that young man, and she was not disposed to
take a very lenient view of Comus’s own mismanagement of
the affair; her greeting when he at last arrived, was not couched
in a sympathetic strain.</p>
<p>“So you have lost your chance with the heiress,”
she remarked abruptly.</p>
<p>“Yes,” said Comus, coolly; “Courtenay
Youghal has added her to his other successes.”</p>
<p>“And you have added her to your other failures,”
pursued Francesca, relentlessly; her temper had been tried that
day beyond ordinary limits.</p>
<p>“I thought you seemed getting along so well with
her,” she continued, as Comus remained uncommunicative.</p>
<p>“We hit it off rather well together,” said Comus,
and added with deliberate bluntness, “I suppose she got
rather sick at my borrowing money from her. She thought it
was all I was after.”</p>
<p>“You borrowed money from her!” said Francesca;
“you were fool enough to borrow money from a girl who was
favourably disposed towards you, and with Courtenay Youghal in
the background waiting to step in and oust you!”</p>
<p>Francesca’s voice trembled with misery and rage.
This great stroke of good luck that had seemed about to fall into
their laps had been thrust aside by an act or series of acts of
wanton paltry folly. The good ship had been lost for the
sake of the traditional ha’porth of tar. Comus had
paid some pressing tailor’s or tobacconist’s bill
with a loan unwillingly put at his disposal by the girl he was
courting, and had flung away his chances of securing a wealthy
and in every way desirable bride. Elaine de Frey and her
fortune might have been the making of Comus, but he had hurried
in as usual to effect his own undoing. Calmness did not in
this case come with reflection; the more Francesca thought about
the matter, the more exasperated she grew. Comus threw
himself down in a low chair and watched her without a trace of
embarrassment or concern at her mortification. He had come
to her feeling rather sorry for himself, and bitterly conscious
of his defeat, and she had met him with a taunt and without the
least hint of sympathy; he determined that she should be
tantalised with the knowledge of how small and stupid a thing had
stood between the realisation and ruin of her hopes for him.</p>
<p>“And to think she should be captured by Courtenay
Youghal,” said Francesca, bitterly; “I’ve
always deplored your intimacy with that young man.”</p>
<p>“It’s hardly my intimacy with him that’s
made Elaine accept him,” said Comus.</p>
<p>Francesca realised the futility of further upbraiding.
Through the tears of vexation that stood in her eyes, she looked
across at the handsome boy who sat opposite her, mocking at his
own misfortune, perversely indifferent to his folly, seemingly
almost indifferent to its consequences.</p>
<p>“Comus,” she said quietly and wearily, “you
are an exact reversal of the legend of Pandora’s Box.
You have all the charm and advantages that a boy could want to
help him on in the world, and behind it all there is the fatal
damning gift of utter hopelessness.”</p>
<p>“I think,” said Comus, “that is the best
description that anyone has ever given of me.”</p>
<p>For the moment there was a flush of sympathy and something
like outspoken affection between mother and son. They
seemed very much alone in the world just now, and in the general
overturn of hopes and plans, there flickered a chance that each
might stretch out a hand to the other, and summon back to their
lives an old dead love that was the best and strongest feeling
either of them had known. But the sting of disappointment
was too keen, and the flood of resentment mounted too high on
either side to allow the chance more than a moment in which to
flicker away into nothingness. The old fatal topic of
estrangement came to the fore, the question of immediate ways and
means, and mother and son faced themselves again as antagonists
on a well-disputed field.</p>
<p>“What is done is done,” said Francesca, with a
movement of tragic impatience that belied the philosophy of her
words; “there is nothing to be gained by crying over spilt
milk. There is the present and the future to be thought
about, though. One can’t go on indefinitely as a
tenant-for-life in a fools’ paradise.” Then she
pulled herself together and proceeded to deliver an ultimatum
which the force of circumstances no longer permitted her to hold
in reserve.</p>
<p>“It’s not much use talking to you about money, as
I know from long experience, but I can only tell you this, that
in the middle of the Season I’m already obliged to be
thinking of leaving Town. And you, I’m afraid, will
have to be thinking of leaving England at equally short
notice. Henry told me the other day that he can get you
something out in West Africa. You’ve had your chance
of doing something better for yourself from the financial point
of view, and you’ve thrown it away for the sake of
borrowing a little ready money for your luxuries, so now you must
take what you can get. The pay won’t be very good at
first, but living is not dear out there.”</p>
<p>“West Africa,” said Comus, reflectively;
“it’s a sort of modern substitute for the
old-fashioned <i>oubliette</i>, a convenient depository for
tiresome people. Dear Uncle Henry may talk lugubriously
about the burden of Empire, but he evidently recognises its uses
as a refuse consumer.”</p>
<p>“My dear Comus, you are talking of the West Africa of
yesterday. While you have been wasting your time at school,
and worse than wasting your time in the West End, other people
have been grappling with the study of tropical diseases, and the
West African coast country is being rapidly transformed from a
lethal chamber into a sanatorium.”</p>
<p>Comus laughed mockingly.</p>
<p>“What a beautiful bit of persuasive prose; it reminds
one of the Psalms and even more of a company prospectus. If
you were honest you’d confess that you lifted it straight
out of a rubber or railway promotion scheme. Seriously,
mother, if I must grub about for a living, why can’t I do
it in England? I could go into a brewery for
instance.”</p>
<p>Francesca shook her head decisively; she could foresee the
sort of steady work Comus was likely to accomplish, with the
lodestone of Town and the minor attractions of race-meetings and
similar festivities always beckoning to him from a conveniently
attainable distance, but apart from that aspect of the case there
was a financial obstacle in the way of his obtaining any
employment at home.</p>
<p>“Breweries and all those sort of things necessitate
money to start with; one has to pay premiums or invest capital in
the undertaking, and so forth. And as we have no money
available, and can scarcely pay our debts as it is, it’s no
use thinking about it.”</p>
<p>“Can’t we sell something?” asked Comus.</p>
<p>He made no actual suggestion as to what should be sacrificed,
but he was looking straight at the Van der Meulen.</p>
<p>For a moment Francesca felt a stifling sensation of weakness,
as though her heart was going to stop beating. Then she sat
forward in her chair and spoke with energy, almost
fierceness.</p>
<p>“When I am dead my things can be sold and
dispersed. As long as I am alive I prefer to keep them by
me.”</p>
<p>In her holy place, with all her treasured possessions around
her, this dreadful suggestion had been made. Some of her
cherished household gods, souvenirs and keepsakes from past days,
would, perhaps, not have fetched a very considerable sum in the
auction-room, others had a distinct value of their own, but to
her they were all precious. And the Van der Meulen, at
which Comus had looked with impious appraising eyes, was the most
sacred of them all. When Francesca had been away from her
Town residence or had been confined to her bedroom through
illness, the great picture with its stately solemn representation
of a long-ago battle-scene, painted to flatter the
flattery-loving soul of a warrior-king who was dignified even in
his campaigns—this was the first thing she visited on her
return to Town or convalescence. If an alarm of fire had
been raised it would have been the first thing for whose safety
she would have troubled. And Comus had almost suggested
that it should be parted with, as one sold railway shares and
other soulless things.</p>
<p>Scolding, she had long ago realised, was a useless waste of
time and energy where Comus was concerned, but this evening she
unloosed her tongue for the mere relief that it gave to her
surcharged feelings. He sat listening without comment,
though she purposely let fall remarks that she hoped might sting
him into self-defence or protest. It was an unsparing
indictment, the more damaging in that it was so irrefutably true,
the more tragic in that it came from perhaps the one person in
the world whose opinion he had ever cared for. And he sat
through it as silent and seemingly unmoved as though she had been
rehearsing a speech for some drawing-room comedy. When she
had had her say his method of retort was not the soft answer that
turneth away wrath but the inconsequent one that shelves it.</p>
<p>“Let’s go and dress for dinner.”</p>
<p>The meal, like so many that Francesca and Comus had eaten in
each other’s company of late, was a silent one. Now
that the full bearings of the disaster had been discussed in all
its aspects there was nothing more to be said. Any attempt
at ignoring the situation, and passing on to less controversial
topics would have been a mockery and pretence which neither of
them would have troubled to sustain. So the meal went
forward with its dragged-out dreary intimacy of two people who
were separated by a gulf of bitterness, and whose hearts were
hard with resentment against one another.</p>
<p>Francesca felt a sense of relief when she was able to give the
maid the order to serve her coffee upstairs. Comus had a
sullen scowl on his face, but he looked up as she rose to leave
the room, and gave his half-mocking little laugh.</p>
<p>“You needn’t look so tragic,” he said,
“You’re going to have your own way. I’ll
go out to that West African hole.”</p>
<h2>CHAPTER XIII</h2>
<p><span class="smcap">Comus</span> found his way to his seat in
the stalls of the Straw Exchange Theatre and turned to watch the
stream of distinguished and distinguishable people who made their
appearance as a matter of course at a First Night in the height
of the Season. Pit and gallery were already packed with a
throng, tense, expectant and alert, that waited for the rise of
the curtain with the eager patience of a terrier watching a
dilatory human prepare for outdoor exercises. Stalls and
boxes filled slowly and hesitatingly with a crowd whose component
units seemed for the most part to recognise the probability that
they were quite as interesting as any play they were likely to
see. Those who bore no particular face-value themselves
derived a certain amount of social dignity from the near
neighbourhood of obvious notabilities; if one could not obtain
recognition oneself there was some vague pleasure in being able
to recognise notoriety at intimately close quarters.</p>
<p>“Who is that woman with the auburn hair and a rather
effective belligerent gleam in her eyes?” asked a man
sitting just behind Comus; “she looks as if she might have
created the world in six days and destroyed it on the
seventh.”</p>
<p>“I forget her name,” said his neighbour;
“she writes. She’s the author of that book,
‘The Woman who wished it was Wednesday,’ you
know. It used to be the convention that women writers
should be plain and dowdy; now we have gone to the other extreme
and build them on extravagantly decorative lines.”</p>
<p>A buzz of recognition came from the front rows of the pit,
together with a craning of necks on the part of those in less
favoured seats. It heralded the arrival of Sherard Blaw,
the dramatist who had discovered himself, and who had given so
ungrudgingly of his discovery to the world. Lady Caroline,
who was already directing little conversational onslaughts from
her box, gazed gently for a moment at the new arrival, and then
turned to the silver-haired Archdeacon sitting beside her.</p>
<p>“They say the poor man is haunted by the fear that he
will die during a general election, and that his obituary notices
will be seriously curtailed by the space taken up by the election
results. The curse of our party system, from his point of
view, is that it takes up so much room in the press.”</p>
<p>The Archdeacon smiled indulgently. As a man he was so
exquisitely worldly that he fully merited the name of the
Heavenly Worldling bestowed on him by an admiring duchess, and
withal his texture was shot with a pattern of such genuine
saintliness that one felt that whoever else might hold the keys
of Paradise he, at least, possessed a private latchkey to that
abode.</p>
<p>“Is it not significant of the altered grouping of
things,” he observed, “that the Church, as
represented by me, sympathises with the message of Sherard Blaw,
while neither the man nor his message find acceptance with
unbelievers like you, Lady Caroline.”</p>
<p>Lady Caroline blinked her eyes. “My dear
Archdeacon,” she said, “no one can be an unbeliever
nowadays. The Christian Apologists have left one nothing to
disbelieve.”</p>
<p>The Archdeacon rose with a delighted chuckle. “I
must go and tell that to De la Poulett,” he said,
indicating a clerical figure sitting in the third row of the
stalls; “he spends his life explaining from his pulpit that
the glory of Christianity consists in the fact that though it is
not true it has been found necessary to invent it.”</p>
<p>The door of the box opened and Courtenay Youghal entered,
bringing with him subtle suggestion of chaminade and an
atmosphere of political tension. The Government had fallen
out of the good graces of a section of its supporters, and those
who were not in the know were busy predicting a serious crisis
over a forthcoming division in the Committee stage of an
important Bill. This was Saturday night, and unless some
successful cajolery were effected between now and Monday
afternoon, Ministers would be, seemingly, in danger of
defeat.</p>
<p>“Ah, here is Youghal,” said the Archdeacon;
“he will be able to tell us what is going to happen in the
next forty-eight hours. I hear the Prime Minister says it
is a matter of conscience, and they will stand or fall by
it.”</p>
<p>His hopes and sympathies were notoriously on the Ministerial
side.</p>
<p>Youghal greeted Lady Caroline and subsided gracefully into a
chair well in the front of the box. A buzz of recognition
rippled slowly across the house.</p>
<p>“For the Government to fall on a matter of
conscience,” he said, “would be like a man cutting
himself with a safety razor.”</p>
<p>Lady Caroline purred a gentle approval.</p>
<p>“I’m afraid it’s true, Archdeacon,”
she said.</p>
<p>No one can effectively defend a Government when it’s
been in office several years. The Archdeacon took refuge in
light skirmishing.</p>
<p>“I believe Lady Caroline sees the makings of a great
Socialist statesman in you, Youghal,” he observed.</p>
<p>“Great Socialist statesmen aren’t made,
they’re stillborn,” replied Youghal.</p>
<p>“What is the play about to-night?” asked a pale
young woman who had taken no part in the talk.</p>
<p>“I don’t know,” said Lady Caroline,
“but I hope it’s dull. If there is any
brilliant conversation in it I shall burst into tears.”</p>
<p>In the front row of the upper circle a woman with a restless
starling-voice was discussing the work of a temporarily
fashionable composer, chiefly in relation to her own emotions,
which she seemed to think might prove generally interesting to
those around her.</p>
<p>“Whenever I hear his music I feel that I want to go up
into a mountain and pray. Can you understand that
feeling?”</p>
<p>The girl to whom she was unburdening herself shook her
head.</p>
<p>“You see, I’ve heard his music chiefly in
Switzerland, and we were up among the mountains all the time, so
it wouldn’t have made any difference.”</p>
<p>“In that case,” said the woman, who seemed to have
emergency emotions to suit all geographical conditions, “I
should have wanted to be in a great silent plain by the side of a
rushing river.”</p>
<p>“What I think is so splendid about his
music—” commenced another starling-voice on the
further side of the girl. Like sheep that feed greedily
before the coming of a storm the starling-voices seemed impelled
to extra effort by the knowledge of four imminent intervals of
acting during which they would be hushed into constrained
silence.</p>
<p>In the back row of the dress circle a late-comer, after a
cursory glance at the programme, had settled down into a
comfortable narrative, which was evidently the resumed thread of
an unfinished taxi-drive monologue.</p>
<p>“We all said ‘it can’t be Captain Parminter,
because he’s always been sweet on Joan,’ and then
Emily said—”</p>
<p>The curtain went up, and Emily’s contribution to the
discussion had to be held over till the entr’acte.</p>
<p>The play promised to be a success. The author, avoiding
the pitfall of brilliancy, had aimed at being interesting and as
far as possible, bearing in mind that his play was a comedy, he
had striven to be amusing. Above all he had remembered that
in the laws of stage proportions it is permissible and generally
desirable that the part should be greater than the whole; hence
he had been careful to give the leading lady such a clear and
commanding lead over the other characters of the play that it was
impossible for any of them ever to get on level terms with
her. The action of the piece was now and then delayed
thereby, but the duration of its run would be materially
prolonged.</p>
<p>The curtain came down on the first act amid an encouraging
instalment of applause, and the audience turned its back on the
stage and began to take a renewed interest in itself. The
authoress of “The Woman who wished it was Wednesday”
had swept like a convalescent whirlwind, subdued but potentially
tempestuous, into Lady Caroline’s box.</p>
<p>“I’ve just trodden with all my weight on the foot
of an eminent publisher as I was leaving my seat,” she
cried, with a peal of delighted laughter. “He was
such a dear about it; I said I hoped I hadn’t hurt him, and
he said, ‘I suppose you think, who drives hard bargains
should himself be hard.’ Wasn’t it pet-lamb of
him?”</p>
<p>“I’ve never trodden on a pet lamb,” said
Lady Caroline, “so I’ve no idea what its behaviour
would be under the circumstances.”</p>
<p>“Tell me,” said the authoress, coming to the front
of the box, the better to survey the house, and perhaps also with
a charitable desire to make things easy for those who might
pardonably wish to survey her, “tell me, please, where is
the girl sitting whom Courtenay Youghal is engaged to?”</p>
<p>Elaine was pointed out to her, sitting in the fourth row of
the stalls, on the opposite side of the house to where Comus had
his seat. Once during the interval she had turned to give
him a friendly nod of recognition as he stood in one of the side
gangways, but he was absorbed at the moment in looking at himself
in the glass panel. The grave brown eyes and the mocking
green-grey ones had looked their last into each other’s
depths.</p>
<p>For Comus this first-night performance, with its brilliant
gathering of spectators, its groups and coteries of lively
talkers, even its counterfoil of dull chatterers, its pervading
atmosphere of stage and social movement, and its intruding
undercurrent of political flutter, all this composed a tragedy in
which he was the chief character. It was the life he knew
and loved and basked in, and it was the life he was
leaving. It would go on reproducing itself again and again,
with its stage interest and social interest and intruding outside
interests, with the same lively chattering crowd, the people who
had done things being pointed out by people who recognised them
to people who didn’t—it would all go on with
unflagging animation and sparkle and enjoyment, and for him it
would have stopped utterly. He would be in some unheard-of
sun-blistered wilderness, where natives and pariah dogs and
raucous-throated crows fringed round mockingly on one’s
loneliness, where one rode for sweltering miles for the chance of
meeting a collector or police officer, with whom most likely on
closer acquaintance one had hardly two ideas in common, where
female society was represented at long intervals by some
climate-withered woman missionary or official’s wife, where
food and sickness and veterinary lore became at last the three
outstanding subjects on which the mind settled or rather
sank. That was the life he foresaw and dreaded, and that
was the life he was going to. For a boy who went out to it
from the dulness of some country rectory, from a neighbourhood
where a flower show and a cricket match formed the social
landmarks of the year, the feeling of exile might not be very
crushing, might indeed be lost in the sense of change and
adventure. But Comus had lived too thoroughly in the centre
of things to regard life in a backwater as anything else than
stagnation, and stagnation while one is young he justly regarded
as an offence against nature and reason, in keeping with the
perverted mockery that sends decrepit invalids touring painfully
about the world and shuts panthers up in narrow cages. He
was being put aside, as a wine is put aside, but to deteriorate
instead of gaining in the process, to lose the best time of his
youth and health and good looks in a world where youth and health
and good looks count for much and where time never returns lost
possessions. And thus, as the curtain swept down on the
close of each act, Comus felt a sense of depression and
deprivation sweep down on himself; bitterly he watched his last
evening of social gaiety slipping away to its end. In less
than an hour it would be over; in a few months’ time it
would be an unreal memory.</p>
<p>In the third interval, as he gazed round at the chattering
house, someone touched him on the arm. It was Lady Veula
Croot.</p>
<p>“I suppose in a week’s time you’ll be on the
high seas,” she said. “I’m coming to your
farewell dinner, you know; your mother has just asked me.
I’m not going to talk the usual rot to you about how much
you will like it and so on. I sometimes think that one of
the advantages of Hell will be that no one will have the
impertinence to point out to you that you’re really better
off than you would be anywhere else. What do you think of
the play? Of course one can foresee the end; she will come
to her husband with the announcement that their longed-for child
is going to be born, and that will smooth over everything.
So conveniently effective, to wind up a comedy with the
commencement of someone else’s tragedy. And every one
will go away saying ‘I’m glad it had a happy
ending.’”</p>
<p>Lady Veula moved back to her seat, with her pleasant smile on
her lips and the look of infinite weariness in her eyes.</p>
<p>The interval, the last interval, was drawing to a close and
the house began to turn with fidgetty attention towards the stage
for the unfolding of the final phase of the play. Francesca
sat in Serena Golackly’s box listening to Colonel
Springfield’s story of what happened to a pigeon-cote in
his compound at Poona. Everyone who knew the Colonel had to
listen to that story a good many times, but Lady Caroline had
mitigated the boredom of the infliction, and in fact invested it
with a certain sporting interest, by offering a prize to the
person who heard it oftenest in the course of the Season, the
competitors being under an honourable understanding not to lead
up to the subject. Ada Spelvexit and a boy in the Foreign
Office were at present at the top of the list with five recitals
each to their score, but the former was suspected of doubtful
adherence to the rules and spirit of the competition.</p>
<p>“And there, dear lady,” concluded the Colonel,
“were the eleven dead pigeons. What had become of the
bandicoot no one ever knew.”</p>
<p>Francesca thanked him for his story, and complacently
inscribed the figure 4 on the margin of her theatre
programme. Almost at the same moment she heard George St.
Michael’s voice pattering out a breathless piece of
intelligence for the edification of Serena Golackly and anyone
else who might care to listen. Francesca galvanised into
sudden attention.</p>
<p>“Emmeline Chetrof to a fellow in the Indian Forest
Department. He’s got nothing but his pay and they
can’t be married for four or five years; an absurdly long
engagement, don’t you think so? All very well to wait
seven years for a wife in patriarchal times, when you probably
had others to go on with, and you lived long enough to celebrate
your own tercentenary, but under modern conditions it seems a
foolish arrangement.”</p>
<p>St. Michael spoke almost with a sense of grievance. A
marriage project that tied up all the small pleasant nuptial
gossip-items about bridesmaids and honeymoon and recalcitrant
aunts and so forth, for an indefinite number of years seemed
scarcely decent in his eyes, and there was little satisfaction or
importance to be derived from early and special knowledge of an
event which loomed as far distant as a Presidential Election or a
change of Viceroy. But to Francesca, who had listened with
startled apprehension at the mention of Emmeline Chetrof’s
name, the news came in a flood of relief and thankfulness.
Short of entering a nunnery and taking celibate vows, Emmeline
could hardly have behaved more conveniently than in tying herself
up to a lover whose circumstances made it necessary to relegate
marriage to the distant future. For four or five years
Francesca was assured of undisturbed possession of the house in
Blue Street, and after that period who knew what might
happen? The engagement might stretch on indefinitely, it
might even come to nothing under the weight of its accumulated
years, as sometimes happened with these protracted affairs.
Emmeline might lose her fancy for her absentee lover, and might
never replace him with another. A golden possibility of
perpetual tenancy of her present home began to float once more
through Francesca’s mind. As long as Emmeline had
been unbespoken in the marriage market there had always been the
haunting likelihood of seeing the dreaded announcement, “a
marriage has been arranged and will shortly take place,” in
connection with her name. And now a marriage had been
arranged and would not shortly take place, might indeed never
take place. St. Michael’s information was likely to
be correct in this instance; he would never have invented a piece
of matrimonial intelligence which gave such little scope for
supplementary detail of the kind he loved to supply. As
Francesca turned to watch the fourth act of the play, her mind
was singing a pæan of thankfulness and exultation. It
was as though some artificer sent by the Gods had reinforced with
a substantial cord the horsehair thread that held up the sword of
Damocles over her head. Her love for her home, for her
treasured household possessions, and her pleasant social life was
able to expand once more in present security, and feed on future
hope. She was still young enough to count four or five
years as a long time, and to-night she was optimistic enough to
prophesy smooth things of the future that lay beyond that
span. Of the fourth act, with its carefully held back but
obviously imminent reconciliation between the leading characters,
she took in but little, except that she vaguely understood it to
have a happy ending. As the lights went up she looked round
on the dispersing audience with a feeling of friendliness
uppermost in her mind; even the sight of Elaine de Frey and
Courtenay Youghal leaving the theatre together did not inspire
her with a tenth part of the annoyance that their entrance had
caused her. Serena’s invitation to go on to the Savoy
for supper fitted in exactly with her mood of exhilaration.
It would be a fit and appropriate wind-up to an auspicious
evening. The cold chicken and modest brand of Chablis
waiting for her at home should give way to a banquet of more
festive nature.</p>
<p>In the crush of the vestibule, friends and enemies, personal
and political, were jostled and locked together in the general
effort to rejoin temporarily estranged garments and secure the
attendance of elusive vehicles. Lady Caroline found herself
at close quarters with the estimable Henry Greech, and
experienced some of the joy which comes to the homeward wending
sportsman when a chance shot presents itself on which he may
expend his remaining cartridges.</p>
<p>“So the Government is going to climb down, after
all,” she said, with a provocative assumption of private
information on the subject.</p>
<p>“I assure you the Government will do nothing of the
kind,” replied the Member of Parliament with befitting
dignity; “the Prime Minister told me last night that under
no circumstances—”</p>
<p>“My dear Mr. Greech,” said Lady Caroline,
“we all know that Prime Ministers are wedded to the truth,
but like other wedded couples they sometimes live
apart.”</p>
<p>For her, at any rate, the comedy had had a happy ending.</p>
<p>Comus made his way slowly and lingeringly from the stalls, so
slowly that the lights were already being turned down and great
shroud-like dust-cloths were being swaythed over the ornamental
gilt-work. The laughing, chattering, yawning throng had
filtered out of the vestibule, and was melting away in final
groups from the steps of the theatre. An impatient
attendant gave him his coat and locked up the cloak room.
Comus stepped out under the portico; he looked at the posters
announcing the play, and in anticipation he could see other
posters announcing its 200th performance. Two hundred
performances; by that time the Straw Exchange Theatre would be to
him something so remote and unreal that it would hardly seem to
exist or to have ever existed except in his fancy. And to
the laughing chattering throng that would pass in under that
portico to the 200th performance, he would be, to those that had
known him, something equally remote and non-existent.
“The good-looking Bassington boy? Oh, dead, or
rubber-growing or sheep-farming or something of that
sort.”</p>
<h2>CHAPTER XIV</h2>
<p><span class="smcap">The</span> farewell dinner which Francesca
had hurriedly organised in honour of her son’s departure
threatened from the outset to be a doubtfully successful
function. In the first place, as he observed privately,
there was very little of Comus and a good deal of farewell in
it. His own particular friends were unrepresented.
Courtenay Youghal was out of the question; and though Francesca
would have stretched a point and welcomed some of his other male
associates of whom she scarcely approved, he himself had been
opposed to including any of them in the invitations. On the
other hand, as Henry Greech had provided Comus with this job that
he was going out to, and was, moreover, finding part of the money
for the necessary outfit, Francesca had felt it her duty to ask
him and his wife to the dinner; the obtuseness that seems to
cling to some people like a garment throughout their life had
caused Mr. Greech to accept the invitation. When Comus
heard of the circumstance he laughed long and boisterously; his
spirits, Francesca noted, seemed to be rising fast as the hour
for departure drew near.</p>
<p>The other guests included Serena Golackly and Lady Veula, the
latter having been asked on the inspiration of the moment at the
theatrical first-night. In the height of the Season it was
not easy to get together a goodly selection of guests at short
notice, and Francesca had gladly fallen in with Serena’s
suggestion of bringing with her Stephen Thorle, who was alleged,
in loose feminine phrasing, to “know all about”
tropical Africa. His travels and experiences in those
regions probably did not cover much ground or stretch over any
great length of time, but he was one of those individuals who can
describe a continent on the strength of a few days’ stay in
a coast town as intimately and dogmatically as a paleontologist
will reconstruct an extinct mammal from the evidence of a stray
shin bone. He had the loud penetrating voice and the
prominent penetrating eyes of a man who can do no listening in
the ordinary way and whose eyes have to perform the function of
listening for him. His vanity did not necessarily make him
unbearable, unless one had to spend much time in his society, and
his need for a wide field of audience and admiration was
mercifully calculated to spread his operations over a
considerable human area. Moreover, his craving for
attentive listeners forced him to interest himself in a wonderful
variety of subjects on which he was able to discourse fluently
and with a certain semblance of special knowledge. Politics
he avoided; the ground was too well known, and there was a
definite no to every definite yes that could be put
forward. Moreover, argument was not congenial to his
disposition, which preferred an unchallenged flow of dissertation
modified by occasional helpful questions which formed the
starting point for new offshoots of word-spinning. The
promotion of cottage industries, the prevention of juvenile
street trading, the extension of the Borstal prison system, the
furtherance of vague talkative religious movements the fostering
of inter-racial <i>ententes</i>, all found in him a tireless
exponent, a fluent and entertaining, though perhaps not very
convincing, advocate. With the real motive power behind
these various causes he was not very closely identified; to the
spade-workers who carried on the actual labours of each
particular movement he bore the relation of a trowel-worker,
delving superficially at the surface, but able to devote a
proportionately far greater amount of time to the advertisement
of his progress and achievements. Such was Stephen Thorle,
a governess in the nursery of Chelsea-bred religions, a skilled
window-dresser in the emporium of his own personality, and
needless to say, evanescently popular amid a wide but shifting
circle of acquaintances. He improved on the record of a
socially much-travelled individual whose experience has become
classical, and went to most of the best houses—twice.</p>
<p>His inclusion as a guest at this particular dinner-party was
not a very happy inspiration. He was inclined to patronise
Comus, as well as the African continent, and on even slighter
acquaintance. With the exception of Henry Greech, whose
feelings towards his nephew had been soured by many years of
overt antagonism, there was an uncomfortable feeling among those
present that the topic of the black-sheep export trade, as Comus
would have himself expressed it, was being given undue prominence
in what should have been a festive farewell banquet. And
Comus, in whose honour the feast was given, did not contribute
much towards its success; though his spirits seemed strung up to
a high pitch his merriment was more the merriment of a cynical
and amused onlooker than of one who responds to the gaiety of his
companions. Sometimes he laughed quietly to himself at some
chance remark of a scarcely mirth-provoking nature, and Lady
Veula, watching him narrowly, came to the conclusion that an
element of fear was blended with his seemingly buoyant
spirits. Once or twice he caught her eye across the table,
and a certain sympathy seemed to grow up between them, as though
they were both consciously watching some lugubrious comedy that
was being played out before them.</p>
<p>An untoward little incident had marked the commencement of the
meal. A small still-life picture that hung over the
sideboard had snapped its cord and slid down with an alarming
clatter on to the crowded board beneath it. The picture
itself was scarcely damaged, but its fall had been accompanied by
a tinkle of broken glass, and it was found that a liqueur glass,
one out of a set of seven that would be impossible to match, had
been shivered into fragments. Francesca’s almost
motherly love for her possessions made her peculiarly sensible to
a feeling of annoyance and depression at the accident, but she
turned politely to listen to Mrs. Greech’s account of a
misfortune in which four soup-plates were involved. Mrs.
Henry was not a brilliant conversationalist, and her flank was
speedily turned by Stephen Thorle, who recounted a slum
experience in which two entire families did all their feeding out
of one damaged soup-plate.</p>
<p>“The gratitude of those poor creatures when I presented
them with a set of table crockery apiece, the tears in their eyes
and in their voices when they thanked me, would be impossible to
describe.”</p>
<p>“Thank you all the same for describing it,” said
Comus.</p>
<p>The listening eyes went swiftly round the table to gather
evidence as to how this rather disconcerting remark had been
received, but Thorle’s voice continued uninterruptedly to
retail stories of East-end gratitude, never failing to mention
the particular deeds of disinterested charity on his part which
had evoked and justified the gratitude. Mrs. Greech had to
suppress the interesting sequel to her broken-crockery narrative,
to wit, how she subsequently matched the shattered soup-plates at
Harrod’s. Like an imported plant species that
sometimes flourishes exceedingly, and makes itself at home to the
dwarfing and overshadowing of all native species, Thorle
dominated the dinner-party and thrust its original purport
somewhat into the background. Serena began to look
helplessly apologetic. It was altogether rather a relief
when the filling of champagne glasses gave Francesca an excuse
for bringing matters back to their intended footing.</p>
<p>“We must all drink a health,” she said;
“Comus, my own dear boy, a safe and happy voyage to you,
much prosperity in the life you are going out to, and in due time
a safe and happy return—”</p>
<p>Her hand gave an involuntary jerk in the act of raising the
glass, and the wine went streaming across the tablecloth in a
froth of yellow bubbles. It certainly was not turning out a
comfortable or auspicious dinner party.</p>
<p>“My dear mother,” cried Comus, “you must
have been drinking healths all the afternoon to make your hand so
unsteady.”</p>
<p>He laughed gaily and with apparent carelessness, but again
Lady Veula caught the frightened note in his laughter. Mrs.
Henry, with practical sympathy, was telling Francesca two good
ways for getting wine stains out of tablecloths. The
smaller economies of life were an unnecessary branch of learning
for Mrs. Greech, but she studied them as carefully and
conscientiously as a stay-at-home plain-dwelling English child
commits to memory the measurements and altitudes of the
world’s principal mountain peaks. Some women of her
temperament and mentality know by heart the favourite colours,
flowers and hymn-tunes of all the members of the Royal Family;
Mrs. Greech would possibly have failed in an examination of that
nature, but she knew what to do with carrots that have been
over-long in storage.</p>
<p>Francesca did not renew her speech-making; a chill seemed to
have fallen over all efforts at festivity, and she contented
herself with refilling her glass and simply drinking to her
boy’s good health. The others followed her example,
and Comus drained his glass with a brief “thank you all
very much.” The sense of constraint which hung over
the company was not, however, marked by any uncomfortable pause
in the conversation. Henry Greech was a fluent thinker, of
the kind that prefer to do their thinking aloud; the silence that
descended on him as a mantle in the House of Commons was an
official livery of which he divested himself as thoroughly as
possible in private life. He did not propose to sit through
dinner as a mere listener to Mr. Thorle’s personal
narrative of philanthropic movements and experiences, and took
the first opportunity of launching himself into a flow of
satirical observations on current political affairs. Lady
Veula was inured to this sort of thing in her own home circle,
and sat listening with the stoical indifference with which an
Esquimau might accept the occurrence of one snowstorm the more,
in the course of an Arctic winter. Serena Golackly felt a
certain relief at the fact that her imported guest was not, after
all, monopolising the conversation. But the latter was too
determined a personality to allow himself to be thrust aside for
many minutes by the talkative M.P. Henry Greech paused for
an instant to chuckle at one of his own shafts of satire, and
immediately Thorle’s penetrating voice swept across the
table.</p>
<p>“Oh, you politicians!” he exclaimed, with pleasant
superiority; “you are always fighting about how things
should be done, and the consequence is you are never able to do
anything. Would you like me to tell you what a Unitarian
horsedealer said to me at Brindisi about politicians?”</p>
<p>A Unitarian horsedealer at Brindisi had all the allurement of
the unexpected. Henry Greech’s witticisms at the
expense of the Front Opposition bench were destined to remain as
unfinished as his wife’s history of the broken
soup-plates. Thorle was primed with an ample succession of
stories and themes, chiefly concerning poverty, thriftlessness,
reclamation, reformed characters, and so forth, which carried him
in an almost uninterrupted sequence through the remainder of the
dinner.</p>
<p>“What I want to do is to make people think,” he
said, turning his prominent eyes on to his hostess;
“it’s so hard to make people think.”</p>
<p>“At any rate you give them the opportunity,” said
Comus, cryptically.</p>
<p>As the ladies rose to leave the table Comus crossed over to
pick up one of Lady Veula’s gloves that had fallen to the
floor.</p>
<p>“I did not know you kept a dog,” said Lady
Veula.</p>
<p>“We don’t,” said Comus, “there
isn’t one in the house.”</p>
<p>“I could have sworn I saw one follow you across the hall
this evening,” she said.</p>
<p>“A small black dog, something like a schipperke?”
asked Comus in a low voice.</p>
<p>“Yes, that was it.”</p>
<p>“I saw it myself to-night; it ran from behind my chair
just as I was sitting down. Don’t say anything to the
others about it; it would frighten my mother.”</p>
<p>“Have you ever seen it before?” Lady Veula asked
quickly.</p>
<p>“Once, when I was six years old. It followed my
father downstairs.”</p>
<p>Lady Veula said nothing. She knew that Comus had lost
his father at the age of six.</p>
<p>In the drawing-room Serena made nervous excuses for her
talkative friend.</p>
<p>“Really, rather an interesting man, you know, and up to
the eyes in all sorts of movements. Just the sort of person
to turn loose at a drawing-room meeting, or to send down to a
mission-hall in some unheard-of neighbourhood. Given a
sounding-board and a harmonium, and a titled woman of some sort
in the chair, and he’ll be perfectly happy; I must say I
hadn’t realised how overpowering he might be at a small
dinner-party.”</p>
<p>“I should say he was a very good man,” said Mrs.
Greech; she had forgiven the mutilation of her soup-plate
story.</p>
<p>The party broke up early as most of the guests had other
engagements to keep. With a belated recognition of the
farewell nature of the occasion they made pleasant little
good-bye remarks to Comus, with the usual predictions of
prosperity and anticipations of an ultimate auspicious
return. Even Henry Greech sank his personal dislike of the
boy for the moment, and made hearty jocular allusions to a
home-coming, which, in the elder man’s eyes, seemed
possibly pleasantly remote. Lady Veula alone made no
reference to the future; she simply said, “Good-bye,
Comus,” but her voice was the kindest of all and he
responded with a look of gratitude. The weariness in her
eyes was more marked than ever as she lay back against the
cushions of her carriage.</p>
<p>“What a tragedy life is,” she said, aloud to
herself.</p>
<p>Serena and Stephen Thorle were the last to leave, and
Francesca stood alone for a moment at the head of the stairway
watching Comus laughing and chatting as he escorted the departing
guests to the door. The ice-wall was melting under the
influence of coming separation, and never had he looked more
adorably handsome in her eyes, never had his merry laugh and
mischief-loving gaiety seemed more infectious than on this night
of his farewell banquet. She was glad enough that he was
going away from a life of idleness and extravagance and
temptation, but she began to suspect that she would miss, for a
little while at any rate, the high-spirited boy who could be so
attractive in his better moods. Her impulse, after the
guests had gone, was to call him to her and hold him once more in
her arms, and repeat her wishes for his happiness and good-luck
in the land he was going to, and her promise of his welcome back,
some not too distant day, to the land he was leaving. She
wanted to forget, and to make him forget, the months of irritable
jangling and sharp discussions, the months of cold aloofness and
indifference and to remember only that he was her own dear Comus
as in the days of yore, before he had grown from an unmanageable
pickle into a weariful problem. But she feared lest she
should break down, and she did not wish to cloud his
light-hearted gaiety on the very eve of his departure. She
watched him for a moment as he stood in the hall, settling his
tie before a mirror, and then went quietly back to her
drawing-room. It had not been a very successful dinner
party, and the general effect it had left on her was one of
depression.</p>
<p>Comus, with a lively musical-comedy air on his lips, and a
look of wretchedness in his eyes, went out to visit the haunts
that he was leaving so soon.</p>
<h2>CHAPTER XV</h2>
<p><span class="smcap">Elaine Youghal</span> sat at lunch in the
Speise Saal of one of Vienna’s costlier hotels. The
double-headed eagle, with its “K.u.K.” legend,
everywhere met the eye and announced the imperial favour in which
the establishment basked. Some several square yards of
yellow bunting, charged with the image of another double-headed
eagle, floating from the highest flag-staff above the building,
betrayed to the initiated the fact that a Russian Grand Duke was
concealed somewhere on the premises. Unannounced by
heraldic symbolism but unconcealable by reason of nature’s
own blazonry, were several citizens and citizenesses of the great
republic of the Western world. One or two Cobdenite members
of the British Parliament engaged in the useful task of proving
that the cost of living in Vienna was on an exorbitant scale,
flitted with restrained importance through a land whose fatness
they had come to spy out; every fancied over-charge in their
bills was welcome as providing another nail in the coffin of
their fiscal opponents. It is the glory of democracies that
they may be misled but never driven. Here and there, like
brave deeds in a dust-patterned world, flashed and glittered the
sumptuous uniforms of representatives of the Austrian military
caste. Also in evidence, at discreet intervals, were stray
units of the Semetic tribe that nineteen centuries of European
neglect had been unable to mislay.</p>
<p>Elaine sitting with Courtenay at an elaborately appointed
luncheon table, gay with high goblets of Bohemian glassware, was
mistress of three discoveries. First, to her
disappointment, that if you frequent the more expensive hotels of
Europe you must be prepared to find, in whatever country you may
chance to be staying, a depressing international likeness between
them all. Secondly, to her relief, that one is not expected
to be sentimentally amorous during a modern honeymoon.
Thirdly, rather to her dismay, that Courtenay Youghal did not
necessarily expect her to be markedly affectionate in
private. Someone had described him, after their marriage,
as one of Nature’s bachelors, and she began to see how
aptly the description fitted him.</p>
<p>“Will those Germans on our left never stop
talking?” she asked, as an undying flow of Teutonic small
talk rattled and jangled across the intervening stretch of
carpet. “Not one of those three women has ceased
talking for an instant since we’ve been sitting
here.”</p>
<p>“They will presently, if only for a moment,” said
Courtenay; “when the dish you have ordered comes in there
will be a deathly silence at the next table. No German can
see a <i>plat</i> brought in for someone else without being
possessed with a great fear that it represents a more toothsome
morsel or a better money’s worth than what he has ordered
for himself.”</p>
<p>The exuberant Teutonic chatter was balanced on the other side
of the room by an even more penetrating conversation unflaggingly
maintained by a party of Americans, who were sitting in judgment
on the cuisine of the country they were passing through, and
finding few extenuating circumstances.</p>
<p>“What Mr. Lonkins wants is a real <i>deep</i> cherry
pie,” announced a lady in a tone of dramatic and honest
conviction.</p>
<p>“Why, yes, that is so,” corroborated a gentleman
who was apparently the Mr. Lonkins in question; “a real
<i>deep</i> cherry pie.”</p>
<p>“We had the same trouble way back in Paris,”
proclaimed another lady; “little Jerome and the girls
don’t want to eat any more <i>crème
renversée</i>. I’d give anything if they could
get some real cherry pie.”</p>
<p>“Real <i>deep</i> cherry pie,” assented Mr.
Lonkins.</p>
<p>“Way down in Ohio we used to have peach pie that was
real good,” said Mrs. Lonkins, turning on a tap of
reminiscence that presently flowed to a cascade. The
subject of pies seemed to lend itself to indefinite
expansion.</p>
<p>“Do those people think of nothing but their food?”
asked Elaine, as the virtues of roasted mutton suddenly came to
the fore and received emphatic recognition, even the absent and
youthful Jerome being quoted in its favour.</p>
<p>“On the contrary,” said Courtenay, “they are
a widely-travelled set, and the man has had a notably interesting
career. It is a form of home-sickness with them to discuss
and lament the cookery and foods that they’ve never had the
leisure to stay at home and digest. The Wandering Jew
probably babbled unremittingly about some breakfast dish that
took so long to prepare that he had never time to eat
it.”</p>
<p>A waiter deposited a dish of Wiener Nierenbraten in front of
Elaine. At the same moment a magic hush fell upon the three
German ladies at the adjoining table, and the flicker of a great
fear passed across their eyes. Then they burst forth again
into tumultuous chatter. Courtenay had proved a reliable
prophet.</p>
<p>Almost at the same moment as the luncheon-dish appeared on the
scene, two ladies arrived at a neighbouring table, and bowed with
dignified cordiality to Elaine and Courtenay. They were two
of the more worldly and travelled of Elaine’s extensive
stock of aunts, and they happened to be making a short stay at
the same hotel as the young couple. They were far too
correct and rationally minded to intrude themselves on their
niece, but it was significant of Elaine’s altered view as
to the sanctity of honeymoon life that she secretly rather
welcomed the presence of her two relatives in the hotel, and had
found time and occasion to give them more of her society than she
would have considered necessary or desirable a few weeks
ago. The younger of the two she rather liked, in a
restrained fashion, as one likes an unpretentious watering-place
or a restaurant that does not try to give one a musical education
in addition to one’s dinner. One felt instinctively
about her that she would never wear rather more valuable diamonds
than any other woman in the room, and would never be the only
person to be saved in a steamboat disaster or hotel fire.
As a child she might have been perfectly well able to recite
“On Linden when the sun was low,” but one felt
certain that nothing ever induced her to do so. The elder
aunt, Mrs. Goldbrook, did not share her sister’s character
as a human rest-cure; most people found her rather disturbing,
chiefly, perhaps, from her habit of asking unimportant questions
with enormous solemnity. Her manner of enquiring after a
trifling ailment gave one the impression that she was more
concerned with the fortunes of the malady than with oneself, and
when one got rid of a cold one felt that she almost expected to
be given its postal address. Probably her manner was merely
the defensive outwork of an innate shyness, but she was not a
woman who commanded confidences.</p>
<p>“A telephone call for Courtenay,” commented the
younger of the two women as Youghal hurriedly flashed through the
room; “the telephone system seems to enter very largely
into that young man’s life.”</p>
<p>“The telephone has robbed matrimony of most of its
sting,” said the elder; “so much more discreet than
pen and ink communications which get read by the wrong
people.”</p>
<p>Elaine’s aunts were conscientiously worldly; they were
the natural outcome of a stock that had been conscientiously
straight-laced for many generations.</p>
<p>Elaine had progressed to the pancake stage before Courtenay
returned.</p>
<p>“Sorry to be away so long,” he said, “but
I’ve arranged something rather nice for to-night.
There’s rather a jolly masquerade ball on. I’ve
’phoned about getting a costume for you and it’s
alright. It will suit you beautifully, and I’ve got
my harlequin dress with me. Madame Kelnicort, excellent
soul, is going to chaperone you, and she’ll take you back
any time you like; I’m quite unreliable when I get into
fancy dress. I shall probably keep going till some
unearthly hour of the morning.”</p>
<p>A masquerade ball in a strange city hardly represented
Elaine’s idea of enjoyment. Carefully to disguise
one’s identity in a neighbourhood where one was entirely
unknown seemed to her rather meaningless. With Courtenay,
of course, it was different; he seemed to have friends and
acquaintances everywhere. However, the matter had
progressed to a point which would have made a refusal to go seem
rather ungracious. Elaine finished her pancake and began to
take a polite interest in her costume.</p>
<p>“What is your character?” asked Madame Kelnicort
that evening, as they uncloaked, preparatory to entering the
already crowded ball-room.</p>
<p>“I believe I’m supposed to represent Marjolaine de
Montfort, whoever she may have been,” said Elaine.
“Courtenay declares he only wanted to marry me because
I’m his ideal of her.”</p>
<p>“But what a mistake to go as a character you know
nothing about. To enjoy a masquerade ball you ought to
throw away your own self and be the character you
represent. Now Courtenay has been Harlequin since half-way
through dinner; I could see it dancing in his eyes. At
about six o’clock to-morrow morning he will fall asleep and
wake up a member of the British House of Parliament on his
honeymoon, but to-night he is unrestrainedly
Harlequin.”</p>
<p>Elaine stood in the ball-room surrounded by a laughing
jostling throng of pierrots, jockeys, Dresden-china
shepherdesses, Roumanian peasant-girls and all the lively
make-believe creatures that form the ingredients of a fancy-dress
ball. As she stood watching them she experienced a growing
feeling of annoyance, chiefly with herself. She was
assisting, as the French say, at one of the gayest scenes of
Europe’s gayest capital, and she was conscious of being
absolutely unaffected by the gaiety around her. The
costumes were certainly interesting to look at, and the music
good to listen to, and to that extent she was amused, but the
<i>abandon</i> of the scene made no appeal to her. It was
like watching a game of which you did not know the rules, and in
the issue of which you were not interested. Elaine began to
wonder what was the earliest moment at which she could drag
Madame Kelnicort away from the revel without being guilty of
sheer cruelty. Then Courtenay wriggled out of the crush and
came towards her, a joyous laughing Courtenay, looking younger
and handsomer than she had ever seen him. She could
scarcely recognise in him to-night the rising young debater who
made embarrassing onslaughts on the Government’s foreign
policy before a crowded House of Commons. He claimed her
for the dance that was just starting, and steered her dexterously
into the heart of the waltzing crowd.</p>
<p>“You look more like Marjolaine than I should have
thought a mortal woman of these days could look,” he
declared, “only Marjolaine did smile sometimes. You
have rather the air of wondering if you’d left out enough
tea for the servants’ breakfast. Don’t mind my
teasing; I love you to look like that, and besides, it makes a
splendid foil to my Harlequin—my selfishness coming to the
fore again, you see. But you really are to go home the
moment you’re bored; the excellent Kelnicort gets heaps of
dances throughout the winter, so don’t mind sacrificing
her.”</p>
<p>A little later in the evening Elaine found herself standing
out a dance with a grave young gentleman from the Russian
Embassy.</p>
<p>“Monsieur Courtenay enjoys himself, doesn’t
he?” he observed, as the youthful-looking harlequin flashed
past them, looking like some restless gorgeous-hued dragonfly;
“why is it that the good God has given your countrymen the
boon of eternal youth? Some of your countrywomen, too, but
all of the men.”</p>
<p>Elaine could think of many of her countrymen who were not and
never could have been youthful, but as far as Courtenay was
concerned she recognised the fitness of the remark. And the
recognition carried with it a sense of depression. Would he
always remain youthful and keen on gaiety and revelling while she
grew staid and retiring? She had thrust the lively
intractable Comus out of her mind, as by his perverseness he had
thrust himself out of her heart, and she had chosen the brilliant
young man of affairs as her husband. He had honestly let
her see the selfish side of his character while he was courting
her, but she had been prepared to make due sacrifices to the
selfishness of a public man who had his career to consider above
all other things. Would she also have to make sacrifices to
the harlequin spirit which was now revealing itself as an
undercurrent in his nature? When one has inured oneself to
the idea of a particular form of victimisation it is
disconcerting to be confronted with another. Many a man who
would patiently undergo martyrdom for religion’s sake would
be furiously unwilling to be a martyr to neuralgia.</p>
<p>“I think that is why you English love animals so
much,” pursued the young diplomat; “you are such
splendid animals yourselves. You are lively because you
want to be lively, not because people are looking on at
you. Monsieur Courtenay is certainly an animal. I
mean it as a high compliment.”</p>
<p>“Am I an animal?” asked Elaine.</p>
<p>“I was going to say you are an angel,” said the
Russian, in some embarrassment, “but I do not think that
would do; angels and animals would never get on together.
To get on with animals you must have a sense of humour, and I
don’t suppose angels have any sense of humour; you see it
would be no use to them as they never hear any jokes.”</p>
<p>“Perhaps,” said Elaine, with a tinge of bitterness
in her voice, “perhaps I am a vegetable.”</p>
<p>“I think you most remind me of a picture,” said
the Russian.</p>
<p>It was not the first time Elaine had heard the simile.</p>
<p>“I know,” she said, “the Narrow Gallery at
the Louvre; attributed to Leonardo da Vinci.”</p>
<p>Evidently the impression she made on people was solely one of
externals.</p>
<p>Was that how Courtenay regarded her? Was that to be her
function and place in life, a painted background, a decorative
setting to other people’s triumphs and tragedies?
Somehow to-night she had the feeling that a general might have
who brought imposing forces into the field and could do nothing
with them. She possessed youth and good looks, considerable
wealth, and had just made what would be thought by most people a
very satisfactory marriage. And already she seemed to be
standing aside as an onlooker where she had expected herself to
be taking a leading part.</p>
<p>“Does this sort of thing appeal to you?” she asked
the young Russian, nodding towards the gay scrimmage of
masqueraders and rather prepared to hear an amused
negative.”</p>
<p>“But yes, of course,” he answered; “costume
balls, fancy fairs, café chantant, casino, anything that
is not real life appeals to us Russians. Real life with us
is the sort of thing that Maxim Gorki deals in. It
interests us immensely, but we like to get away from it
sometimes.”</p>
<p>Madame Kelnicort came up with another prospective partner, and
Elaine delivered her ukase: one more dance and then back to the
hotel. Without any special regret she made her retreat from
the revel which Courtenay was enjoying under the impression that
it was life and the young Russian under the firm conviction that
it was not.</p>
<p>Elaine breakfasted at her aunts’ table the next morning
at much her usual hour. Courtenay was sleeping the sleep of
a happy tired animal. He had given instructions to be
called at eleven o’clock, from which time onward the
<i>Neue Freie Presse</i>, the <i>Zeit</i>, and his toilet would
occupy his attention till he appeared at the luncheon
table. There were not many people breakfasting when Elaine
arrived on the scene, but the room seemed to be fuller than it
really was by reason of a penetrating voice that was engaged in
recounting how far the standard of Viennese breakfast fare fell
below the expectations and desires of little Jerome and the
girls.</p>
<p>“If ever little Jerome becomes President of the United
States,” said Elaine, “I shall be able to contribute
quite an informing article on his gastronomic likes and dislikes
to the papers.”</p>
<p>The aunts were discreetly inquisitive as to the previous
evening’s entertainment.</p>
<p>“If Elaine would flirt mildly with somebody it would be
such a good thing,” said Mrs. Goldbrook; “it would
remind Courtenay that he’s not the only attractive young
man in the world.”</p>
<p>Elaine, however, did not gratify their hopes; she referred to
the ball with the detachment she would have shown in describing a
drawing-room show of cottage industries. It was not
difficult to discern in her description of the affair the
confession that she had been slightly bored. From
Courtenay, later in the day, the aunts received a much livelier
impression of the festivities, from which it was abundantly clear
that he at any rate had managed to amuse himself. Neither
did it appear that his good opinion of his own attractions had
suffered any serious shock. He was distinctly in a very
good temper.</p>
<p>“The secret of enjoying a honeymoon,” said Mrs.
Goldbrook afterwards to her sister, “is not to attempt too
much.”</p>
<p>“You mean—?”</p>
<p>“Courtenay is content to try and keep one person amused
and happy, and he thoroughly succeeds.”</p>
<p>“I certainly don’t think Elaine is going to be
very happy,” said her sister, “but at least Courtenay
saved her from making the greatest mistake she could have
made—marrying that young Bassington.”</p>
<p>“He has also,” said Mrs. Goldbrook, “helped
her to make the next biggest mistake of her life—marrying
Courtenay Youghal.”</p>
<h2>CHAPTER XVI</h2>
<p><span class="smcap">It</span> was late afternoon by the banks
of a swiftly rushing river, a river that gave back a haze of heat
from its waters as though it were some stagnant steaming lagoon,
and yet seemed to be whirling onward with the determination of a
living thing, perpetually eager and remorseless, leaping savagely
at any obstacle that attempted to stay its course; an unfriendly
river, to whose waters you committed yourself at your
peril. Under the hot breathless shade of the trees on its
shore arose that acrid all-pervading smell that seems to hang
everywhere about the tropics, a smell as of some monstrous musty
still-room where herbs and spices have been crushed and distilled
and stored for hundreds of years, and where the windows have
seldom been opened. In the dazzling heat that still held
undisputed sway over the scene, insects and birds seemed
preposterously alive and active, flitting their gay colours
through the sunbeams, and crawling over the baked dust in the
full swing and pursuit of their several businesses; the flies
engaged in Heaven knows what, and the fly-catchers busy with the
flies. Beasts and humans showed no such indifference to the
temperature; the sun would have to slant yet further downward
before the earth would become a fit arena for their revived
activities. In the sheltered basement of a wayside
rest-house a gang of native hammock-bearers slept or chattered
drowsily through the last hours of the long mid-day halt; wide
awake, yet almost motionless in the thrall of a heavy lassitude,
their European master sat alone in an upper chamber, staring out
through a narrow window-opening at the native village, spreading
away in thick clusters of huts girt around with cultivated
vegetation. It seemed a vast human ant-hill, which would
presently be astir with its teeming human life, as though the Sun
God in his last departing stride had roused it with a careless
kick. Even as Comus watched he could see the beginnings of
the evening’s awakening. Women, squatting in front of
their huts, began to pound away at the rice or maize that would
form the evening meal, girls were collecting their water pots
preparatory to a walk down to the river, and enterprising goats
made tentative forays through gaps in the ill-kept fences of
neighbouring garden plots; their hurried retreats showed that
here at least someone was keeping alert and wakeful vigil.
Behind a hut perched on a steep hillside, just opposite to the
rest-house, two boys were splitting wood with a certain languid
industry; further down the road a group of dogs were leisurely
working themselves up to quarrelling pitch. Here and there,
bands of evil-looking pigs roamed about, busy with foraging
excursions that came unpleasantly athwart the border-line of
scavenging. And from the trees that bounded and intersected
the village rose the horrible, tireless, spiteful-sounding
squawking of the iron-throated crows.</p>
<p>Comus sat and watched it all with a sense of growing aching
depression. It was so utterly trivial to his eyes, so
devoid of interest, and yet it was so real, so serious, so
implacable in its continuity. The brain grew tired with the
thought of its unceasing reproduction. It had all gone on,
as it was going on now, by the side of the great rushing swirling
river, this tilling and planting and harvesting, marketing and
store-keeping, feast-making and fetish-worship and love-making,
burying and giving in marriage, child-bearing and child-rearing,
all this had been going on, in the shimmering, blistering heat
and the warm nights, while he had been a youngster at school,
dimly recognising Africa as a division of the earth’s
surface that it was advisable to have a certain nodding
acquaintance with.</p>
<p>It had been going on in all its trifling detail, all its
serious intensity, when his father and his grandfather in their
day had been little boys at school, it would go on just as
intently as ever long after Comus and his generation had passed
away, just as the shadows would lengthen and fade under the
mulberry trees in that far away English garden, round the old
stone fountain where a leaden otter for ever preyed on a leaden
salmon.</p>
<p>Comus rose impatiently from his seat, and walked wearily
across the hut to another window-opening which commanded a broad
view of the river. There was something which fascinated and
then depressed one in its ceaseless hurrying onward sweep, its
tons of water rushing on for all time, as long as the face of the
earth should remain unchanged. On its further shore could
be seen spread out at intervals other teeming villages, with
their cultivated plots and pasture clearings, their moving dots
which meant cattle and goats and dogs and children. And far
up its course, lost in the forest growth that fringed its banks,
were hidden away yet more villages, human herding-grounds where
men dwelt and worked and bartered, squabbled and worshipped,
sickened and perished, while the river went by with its endless
swirl and rush of gleaming waters. One could well
understand primitive early races making propitiatory sacrifices
to the spirit of a great river on whose shores they dwelt.
Time and the river were the two great forces that seemed to
matter here.</p>
<p>It was almost a relief to turn back to that other outlook and
watch the village life that was now beginning to wake in
earnest. The procession of water-fetchers had formed itself
in a long chattering line that stretched river-wards. Comus
wondered how many tens of thousands of times that procession had
been formed since first the village came into existence.
They had been doing it while he was playing in the cricket-fields
at school, while he was spending Christmas holidays in Paris,
while he was going his careless round of theatres, dances,
suppers and card-parties, just as they were doing it now; they
would be doing it when there was no one alive who remembered
Comus Bassington. This thought recurred again and again
with painful persistence, a morbid growth arising in part from
his loneliness.</p>
<p>Staring dumbly out at the toiling sweltering human ant-hill
Comus marvelled how missionary enthusiasts could labour hopefully
at the work of transplanting their religion, with its homegrown
accretions of fatherly parochial benevolence, in this
heat-blistered, fever-scourged wilderness, where men lived like
groundbait and died like flies. Demons one might believe
in, if one did not hold one’s imagination in healthy check,
but a kindly all-managing God, never. Somewhere in the west
country of England Comus had an uncle who lived in a
rose-smothered rectory and taught a wholesome gentle-hearted
creed that expressed itself in the spirit of “Little lamb,
who made thee?” and faithfully reflected the beautiful
homely Christ-child sentiment of Saxon Europe. What a far
away, unreal fairy story it all seemed here in this West African
land, where the bodies of men were of as little account as the
bubbles that floated on the oily froth of the great flowing
river, and where it required a stretch of wild profitless
imagination to credit them with undying souls. In the life
he had come from Comus had been accustomed to think of
individuals as definite masterful personalities, making their
several marks on the circumstances that revolved around them;
they did well or ill, or in most cases indifferently, and were
criticised, praised, blamed, thwarted or tolerated, or given way
to. In any case, humdrum or outstanding, they had their
spheres of importance, little or big. They dominated a
breakfast table or harassed a Government, according to their
capabilities or opportunities, or perhaps they merely had
irritating mannerisms. At any rate it seemed highly
probable that they had souls. Here a man simply made a unit
in an unnumbered population, an inconsequent dot in a
loosely-compiled deathroll. Even his own position as a
white man exalted conspicuously above a horde of black natives
did not save Comus from the depressing sense of nothingness which
his first experience of fever had thrown over him. He was a
lost, soulless body in this great uncaring land; if he died
another would take his place, his few effects would be
inventoried and sent down to the coast, someone else would finish
off any tea or whisky that he left behind—that would be
all.</p>
<p>It was nearly time to be starting towards the next halting
place where he would dine or at any rate eat something. But
the lassitude which the fever had bequeathed him made the tedium
of travelling through interminable forest-tracks a weariness to
be deferred as long as possible. The bearers were nothing
loth to let another half-hour or so slip by, and Comus dragged a
battered paper-covered novel from the pocket of his coat.
It was a story dealing with the elaborately tangled love affairs
of a surpassingly uninteresting couple, and even in his almost
bookless state Comus had not been able to plough his way through
more than two-thirds of its dull length; bound up with the cover,
however, were some pages of advertisement, and these the exile
scanned with a hungry intentness that the romance itself could
never have commanded. The name of a shop, of a street, the
address of a restaurant, came to him as a bitter reminder of the
world he had lost, a world that ate and drank and flirted,
gambled and made merry, a world that debated and intrigued and
wire-pulled, fought or compromised political battles—and
recked nothing of its outcasts wandering through forest paths and
steamy swamps or lying in the grip of fever. Comus read and
re-read those few lines of advertisement, just as he treasured a
much-crumpled programme of a first-night performance at the Straw
Exchange Theatre; they seemed to make a little more real the past
that was already so shadowy and so utterly remote. For a
moment he could almost capture the sensation of being once again
in those haunts that he loved; then he looked round and pushed
the book wearily from him. The steaming heat, the forest,
the rushing river hemmed him in on all sides.</p>
<p>The two boys who had been splitting wood ceased from their
labours and straightened their backs; suddenly the smaller of the
two gave the other a resounding whack with a split lath that he
still held in his hand, and flew up the hillside with a scream of
laughter and simulated terror, the bigger lad following in hot
pursuit. Up and down the steep bush-grown slope they raced
and twisted and dodged, coming sometimes to close quarters in a
hurricane of squeals and smacks, rolling over and over like
fighting kittens, and breaking away again to start fresh
provocation and fresh pursuit. Now and again they would lie
for a time panting in what seemed the last stage of exhaustion,
and then they would be off in another wild scamper, their dusky
bodies flitting through the bushes, disappearing and reappearing
with equal suddenness. Presently two girls of their own
age, who had returned from the water-fetching, sprang out on them
from ambush, and the four joined in one joyous gambol that lit up
the hillside with shrill echoes and glimpses of flying
limbs. Comus sat and watched, at first with an amused
interest, then with a returning flood of depression and
heart-ache. Those wild young human kittens represented the
joy of life, he was the outsider, the lonely alien, watching
something in which he could not join, a happiness in which he had
no part or lot. He would pass presently out of the village
and his bearers’ feet would leave their indentations in the
dust; that would be his most permanent memorial in this little
oasis of teeming life. And that other life, in which he
once moved with such confident sense of his own necessary
participation in it, how completely he had passed out of
it. Amid all its laughing throngs, its card parties and
race-meetings and country-house gatherings, he was just a mere
name, remembered or forgotten, Comus Bassington, the boy who went
away. He had loved himself very well and never troubled
greatly whether anyone else really loved him, and now he realised
what he had made of his life. And at the same time he knew
that if his chance were to come again he would throw it away just
as surely, just as perversely. Fate played with him with
loaded dice; he would lose always.</p>
<p>One person in the whole world had cared for him, for longer
than he could remember, cared for him perhaps more than he knew,
cared for him perhaps now. But a wall of ice had mounted up
between him and her, and across it there blew that cold-breath
that chills or kills affection.</p>
<p>The words of a well-known old song, the wistful cry of a lost
cause, rang with insistent mockery through his brain:</p>
<blockquote><p>“Better loved you canna be,<br />
Will ye ne’er come back again?”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>If it was love that was to bring him back he must be an exile
for ever. His epitaph in the mouths of those that
remembered him would be, Comus Bassington, the boy who never came
back.</p>
<p>And in his unutterable loneliness he bowed his head on his
arms, that he might not see the joyous scrambling frolic on
yonder hillside.</p>
<h2>CHAPTER XVII</h2>
<p><span class="smcap">The</span> bleak rawness of a grey
December day held sway over St. James’s Park, that
sanctuary of lawn and tree and pool, into which the bourgeois
innovator has rushed ambitiously time and again, to find that he
must take the patent leather from off his feet, for the ground on
which he stands is hallowed ground.</p>
<p>In the lonely hour of early afternoon, when the workers had
gone back to their work, and the loiterers were scarcely yet
gathered again, Francesca Bassington made her way restlessly
along the stretches of gravelled walk that bordered the
ornamental water. The overmastering unhappiness that filled
her heart and stifled her thinking powers found answering echo in
her surroundings. There is a sorrow that lingers in old
parks and gardens that the busy streets have no leisure to keep
by them; the dead must bury their dead in Whitehall or the Place
de la Concorde, but there are quieter spots where they may still
keep tryst with the living and intrude the memory of their bygone
selves on generations that have almost forgotten them. Even
in tourist-trampled Versailles the desolation of a tragedy that
cannot die haunts the terraces and fountains like a bloodstain
that will not wash out; in the Saxon Garden at Warsaw there
broods the memory of long-dead things, coeval with the stately
trees that shade its walks, and with the carp that swim to-day in
its ponds as they doubtless swam there when “Lieber
Augustin” was a living person and not as yet an immortal
couplet. And St. James’s Park, with its lawns and
walks and waterfowl, harbours still its associations with a
bygone order of men and women, whose happiness and sadness are
woven into its history, dim and grey as they were once bright and
glowing, like the faded pattern worked into the fabric of an old
tapestry. It was here that Francesca had made her way when
the intolerable inaction of waiting had driven her forth from her
home. She was waiting for that worst news of all, the news
which does not kill hope, because there has been none to kill,
but merely ends suspense. An early message had said that
Comus was ill, which might have meant much or little; then there
had come that morning a cablegram which only meant one thing; in
a few hours she would get a final message, of which this was the
preparatory forerunner. She already knew as much as that
awaited message would tell her. She knew that she would
never see Comus again, and she knew now that she loved him beyond
all things that the world could hold for her. It was no
sudden rush of pity or compunction that clouded her judgment or
gilded her recollection of him; she saw him as he was, the
beautiful, wayward, laughing boy, with his naughtiness, his
exasperating selfishness, his insurmountable folly and
perverseness, his cruelty that spared not even himself, and as he
was, as he always had been, she knew that he was the one thing
that the Fates had willed that she should love. She did not
stop to accuse or excuse herself for having sent him forth to
what was to prove his death. It was, doubtless, right and
reasonable that he should have gone out there, as hundreds of
other men went out, in pursuit of careers; the terrible thing was
that he would never come back. The old cruel hopelessness
that had always chequered her pride and pleasure in his good
looks and high spirits and fitfully charming ways had dealt her a
last crushing blow; he was dying somewhere thousands of miles
away without hope of recovery, without a word of love to comfort
him, and without hope or shred of consolation she was waiting to
hear of the end. The end; that last dreadful piece of news
which would write “nevermore” across his life and
hers.</p>
<p>The lively bustle in the streets had been a torture that she
could not bear. It wanted but two days to Christmas and the
gaiety of the season, forced or genuine, rang out
everywhere. Christmas shopping, with its anxious solicitude
or self-centred absorption, overspread the West End and made the
pavements scarcely passable at certain favoured points.
Proud parents, parcel-laden and surrounded by escorts of their
young people, compared notes with one another on the looks and
qualities of their offspring and exchanged loud hurried
confidences on the difficulty or success which each had
experienced in getting the right presents for one and all.
Shouted directions where to find this or that article at its best
mingled with salvos of Christmas good wishes. To Francesca,
making her way frantically through the carnival of happiness with
that lonely deathbed in her eyes, it had seemed a callous mockery
of her pain; could not people remember that there were
crucifixions as well as joyous birthdays in the world?
Every mother that she passed happy in the company of a
fresh-looking clean-limbed schoolboy son sent a fresh stab at her
heart, and the very shops had their bitter memories. There
was the tea-shop where he and she had often taken tea together,
or, in the days of their estrangement, sat with their separate
friends at separate tables. There were other shops where
extravagantly-incurred bills had furnished material for those
frequently recurring scenes of recrimination, and the Colonial
outfitters, where, as he had phrased it in whimsical mockery, he
had bought grave-clothes for his burying-alive. The
“oubliette!” She remembered the bitter petulant
name he had flung at his destined exile. There at least he
had been harder on himself than the Fates were pleased to will;
never, as long as Francesca lived and had a brain that served
her, would she be able to forget. That narcotic would never
be given to her. Unrelenting, unsparing memory would be
with her always to remind her of those last days of
tragedy. Already her mind was dwelling on the details of
that ghastly farewell dinner-party and recalling one by one the
incidents of ill-omen that had marked it; how they had sat down
seven to table and how one liqueur glass in the set of seven had
been shivered into fragments; how her glass had slipped from her
hand as she raised it to her lips to wish Comus a safe return;
and the strange, quiet hopelessness of Lady Veula’s
“good-bye”; she remembered now how it had chilled and
frightened her at the moment.</p>
<p>The park was filling again with its floating population of
loiterers, and Francesca’s footsteps began to take a
homeward direction. Something seemed to tell her that the
message for which she waited had arrived and was lying there on
the hall table. Her brother, who had announced his
intention of visiting her early in the afternoon would have gone
by now; he knew nothing of this morning’s bad
news—the instinct of a wounded animal to creep away by
itself had prompted her to keep her sorrow from him as long as
possible. His visit did not necessitate her presence; he
was bringing an Austrian friend, who was compiling a work on the
Franco-Flemish school of painting, to inspect the Van der Meulen,
which Henry Greech hoped might perhaps figure as an illustration
in the book. They were due to arrive shortly after lunch,
and Francesca had left a note of apology, pleading an urgent
engagement elsewhere. As she turned to make her way across
the Mall into the Green Park a gentle voice hailed her from a
carriage that was just drawing up by the sidewalk. Lady
Caroline Benaresq had been favouring the Victoria Memorial with a
long unfriendly stare.</p>
<p>“In primitive days,” she remarked, “I
believe it was the fashion for great chiefs and rulers to have
large numbers of their relatives and dependents killed and buried
with them; in these more enlightened times we have invented quite
another way of making a great Sovereign universally
regretted. My dear Francesca,” she broke off
suddenly, catching the misery that had settled in the
other’s eyes, “what is the matter? Have you had
bad news from out there?”</p>
<p>“I am waiting for very bad news,” said Francesca,
and Lady Caroline knew what had happened.</p>
<p>“I wish I could say something; I
can’t.” Lady Caroline spoke in a harsh,
grunting voice that few people had ever heard her use.</p>
<p>Francesca crossed the Mall and the carriage drove on.</p>
<p>“Heaven help that poor woman,” said Lady Caroline;
which was, for her, startlingly like a prayer.</p>
<p>As Francesca entered the hall she gave a quick look at the
table; several packages, evidently an early batch of Christmas
presents, were there, and two or three letters. On a salver
by itself was the cablegram for which she had waited. A
maid, who had evidently been on the lookout for her, brought her
the salver. The servants were well aware of the dreadful
thing that was happening, and there was pity on the girl’s
face and in her voice.</p>
<p>“This came for you ten minutes ago, ma’am, and Mr.
Greech has been here, ma’am, with another gentleman, and
was sorry you weren’t at home. Mr. Greech said he
would call again in about half-an-hour.”</p>
<p>Francesca carried the cablegram unopened into the drawing-room
and sat down for a moment to think. There was no need to
read it yet, for she knew what she would find written
there. For a few pitiful moments Comus would seem less
hopelessly lost to her if she put off the reading of that last
terrible message. She rose and crossed over to the windows
and pulled down the blinds, shutting out the waning December day,
and then reseated herself. Perhaps in the shadowy
half-light her boy would come and sit with her again for awhile
and let her look her last upon his loved face; she could never
touch him again or hear his laughing, petulant voice, but surely
she might look on her dead. And her starving eyes saw only
the hateful soulless things of bronze and silver and porcelain
that she had set up and worshipped as gods; look where she would
they were there around her, the cold ruling deities of the home
that held no place for her dead boy. He had moved in and
out among them, the warm, living, breathing thing that had been
hers to love, and she had turned her eyes from that youthful
comely figure to adore a few feet of painted canvas, a musty
relic of a long departed craftsman. And now he was gone
from her sight, from her touch, from her hearing for ever,
without even a thought to flash between them for all the dreary
years that she should live, and these things of canvas and
pigment and wrought metal would stay with her. They were
her soul. And what shall it profit a man if he save his
soul and slay his heart in torment?</p>
<p>On a small table by her side was Mervyn Quentock’s
portrait of her—the prophetic symbol of her tragedy; the
rich dead harvest of unreal things that had never known life, and
the bleak thrall of black unending Winter, a Winter in which
things died and knew no re-awakening.</p>
<p>Francesca turned to the small envelope lying in her lap; very
slowly she opened it and read the short message. Then she
sat numb and silent for a long, long time, or perhaps only for
minutes. The voice of Henry Greech in the hall, enquiring
for her, called her to herself. Hurriedly she crushed the piece
of paper out of sight; he would have to be told, of course, but
just yet her pain seemed too dreadful to be laid bare.
“Comus is dead” was a sentence beyond her power to
speak.</p>
<p>“I have bad news for you, Francesca, I’m sorry to
say,” Henry announced. Had he heard, too?</p>
<p>“Henneberg has been here and looked at the
picture,” he continued, seating himself by her side,
“and though he admired it immensely as a work of art he
gave me a disagreeable surprise by assuring me that it’s
not a genuine Van der Meulen. It’s a splendid copy,
but still, unfortunately, only a copy.”</p>
<p>Henry paused and glanced at his sister to see how she had
taken the unwelcome announcement. Even in the dim light he
caught some of the anguish in her eyes.</p>
<p>“My dear Francesca,” he said soothingly, laying
his hand affectionately on her arm, “I know that this must
be a great disappointment to you, you’ve always set such
store by this picture, but you mustn’t take it too much to
heart. These disagreeable discoveries come at times to most
picture fanciers and owners. Why, about twenty per cent. of
the alleged Old Masters in the Louvre are supposed to be wrongly
attributed. And there are heaps of similar cases in this
country. Lady Dovecourt was telling me the other day that
they simply daren’t have an expert in to examine the Van
Dykes at Columbey for fear of unwelcome disclosures. And
besides, your picture is such an excellent copy that it’s
by no means without a value of its own. You must get over
the disappointment you naturally feel, and take a philosophical
view of the matter. . . ”</p>
<p>Francesca sat in stricken silence, crushing the folded morsel
of paper tightly in her hand and wondering if the thin, cheerful
voice with its pitiless, ghastly mockery of consolation would
never stop.</p>
<p>***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE UNBEARABLE BASSINGTON***</p>
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