II
SHADOWS BEFORE
Mrs. Barbour was a comely, wholesome-looking body upon the descending slope of fifty. Her face, like her daughter's, was of theteint mât, and her homely English figure had what a flippant mind has described as a "middle-aged spread" in its proportions. Her large oval brooch, a cunning device in hair, proclaimed to these skilled in rebus that without a cross there was no prospect of a crown, and a black bonnet of low church tendencies, trimmed with little jet-tipped tentacles that quivered and danced when she moved her head, honorably crowned her abundant silver locks. She had declined Ingram's proffered aid with a tenacity often to be noticed in those who have given hard service all their lives, and as she drooped with weary finality upon the sand, various parcels, string-bags, and small baskets were distributed to right and left.
"Oh dear," she gasped breathlessly; "those dreadful, dreadful dunes."
"Have they tired you very much, mummy?" the girl asked concernedly, as she unfastened the lavender bonnet-strings.
"The sand is so loose to-day with the great 'eat—heat." Mrs. Barbour added the corrected version with almost lightning rapidity. One of her peculiarities, which it is sufficient to have indicated once, was a constant snatch at evasive aspirates. They can scarcely be said to have really dropped; she caught them before they fell.
"No, Nelly," the good lady went on, while Ingram unravelled the mysteries of the string-bag, and gathered driftwood for the fire. "Here we are in France, where you've always wanted to be; but, another year, if I'm consulted, Bognor or Westgate for me, my dear. Two hours' comfortable travelling"—Mrs. Barbour ticked off the advantages of home travel on her fingers one by one, and unconsciously quoted some railway placard she had seen—"no Channel crossing, no customs, and the sea at your door. And even when you've come all this way, no amusement, unless you call a horrid Casino amusing, where grown men, and women who ought to be sent home to finish dressing, make donkeys of themselves over little lead horses."
"There's very good music there in the afternoon," Paul hazarded, who was shaving a stick into kindling after the fashion of the Western plains.
"Music—yes; but nothing really tuneful. Do you remember the Elite Pierrots at Westgate, Nelly, last year, with the blue masks. That dark-haired one, my dear, who used to sigh for the silvery moon and cough so terribly in the intervals. Don't tell me he wasn't some one in disguise. No! I hold to what I've said. The French don't understand amusement."
The fire was lit, the kettle boiled, and luncheon eaten amid such conversation as a garrulous old woman and two very preoccupied people could contrive. Nelly was particularly silent, and had lost, besides, what her mother was pleased to term her "sand appetite." The talk ranged hither and thither listlessly. Paul's inability to swim, so strange in a man who had girdled the earth, was discussed in all its bearings till it could be borne no longer; the lurid history of Simone, Mrs. Barbour's strapping, smiling bonne, unmarried and unmoral, was matter for another half-hour. Followed various excursions into the obvious, and a list of "discoveries" made that morning. Mrs. Barbour collected facts like shells, and made some very pretty castles with them, too, at times.
"... and Nelly, I believe I know who the two gentlemen are that you had your adventure with yesterday."
Ingram raised his head at the two odious words very much as a horse would do if you were to explode two fog signals under his nose in succession; quickly enough, indeed, to intercept a warning and reproachful glance that the girl sent her mother. Mrs. Barbour clapped both hands playfully over her mouth. "Oh! now Ihavedone it!" she exclaimed. Her eyes snapped with, perhaps, a shade more of malice than a kind-hearted old lady's should ever hold. Without being a scheming or a worldly woman, she resented a little, in her heart, the monopoly which this man had established over her child; a man so alien to her in thought, so sparing of speech, so remote from her ideal, which, diffuse enough in all truth, would perhaps have found it nearest realization just now in some florid, high-spirited lad, who would have brought her his socks to darn and his troubles to soothe of an evening, been "company," in a word, to the talkative, commonplace old woman. As far as she was concerned, Ingram swallowed his disappointments, and she rather suspected him of darning his own socks.
Fenella considered her mother for some time, though not as a resource to evade her lover's eye.
"What a rummy way you have of putting things, mother!" she said at last. "My 'adventure' with 'two gentlemen'!"
Paul's face was blank, like the page of a diary awaiting confidences.
Feeling herself at bay, Mrs. Barbour grew flustered and tearful.
"Well, well!" she exclaimed, waving her hands helplessly in the air. "I'm sure I'm sorry, Nelly, since you choose to make such a mystery of it. But what there is in it to make you both look as grave as judges, I can't see. I'm sure that, as your mother, I'd be the first to be offended if there was anything disrespectful."
An awkward silence followed her words, which Ingram was the first to break.
"I think, perhaps, you'd best tell now, Nelly," he said quietly.
The girl blushed and covered her eyes for a moment with her hands.
"It's so—sofoolish," she said, clenching them with an impatient movement. "Oh, well, if I must, I must.... It was yesterday morning while you were both at breakfast. I ran down, you know, to catch the tide. After I had come out—oh, well, there wasn't a soul in sight—I thought they would all be at breakfast at theGrande Falaise; I was chilly, too, and there was a kind of tune in the sea. So, after I'd taken off my wet bathing-suit, I threw on my kimono and began to practise the last dance Madame de Rudder has been teaching me—you know the one, mother, where she won't let me use my feet as much as I want—out on the sand where it was hard. And then, like a little fool I am, I forgot everything, until I heard some one clapping hands and saying, 'Bravo!'—and I looked up—and there were two men on the dunes, smoking cigars—I suppose they were coming from the golf links to the hotel, and I don't know how long they'd been watching me, and—and," with sudden passion, "I justhateyou, Paul, for dragging it out of me when I didn't want to tell."
And Fenella, already overwrought, hid her head in her mother's capacious lap and had her cry out.
Mrs. Barbour stroked the dark head gently, but like the wise old mother bird she was, made no attempt to check the burst of tears.
"Such a dancing girl she is," she murmured complacently, "and she does hate to have it talked about so. Do you know, Mr. Ingram, I only discovered it myself by accident, after it had been going on months and months. Do you remember, dearie, that awful day, the first time I was up after influenza, that Druce got the spot on her nose that the doctor said was erysipelas, and Twyford scalded her arm and hand making a poultice? It's the only time, I do believe, Nelly, I've ever spoken to you crossly."
A muffled voice, "You werehorrid, mummy."
"Well, there, I really was, Mr. Ingram. I pushed the child out of the way and said, 'If you can't help, don't hinder. Run upstairs and play with the other ornaments!' I didn't think any more about it, with all that trouble on my hands, till about half an hour afterward, when down comes Miss Rigby with her face white—you know what a coward she is, Nelly—and in her dressing-gown, at nearly twelve! 'Do come up, Mrs. Barbour,' she says, 'I believe Rock has gone mad in the box-room and is dashing himself against the wall.' Oh dear! I ran upstairs with the poker, and what do you think it was, Mr. Ingram. My own crazy child, dancing and waving her arms about. Such a picture of fun as she looked!"
A hand was laid suddenly on her mouth, and a face, very flushed and penitent in its tumbled dark hair, emerged from between the parental knees.
"I'm a silly"—sniff—"fool"—sniff—said Fenella. "Paul, gimme my hank."
Ingram passed the handkerchief across the smouldering blaze. The girl looked at him as she blew her nose. He seemed absorbed, not angry, butqueer, she thought. She had never seen his face look so wan and tired. He seemed to avoid her eyes.
"Aren't you well, Paul?" she asked at last.
Ingram seemed to shiver and then rouse himself. "I'm all right," he said; "but I think I'll go back to the chalêt. I've got letters to write. Isn't the sun grown pale? And I guess I've either caught cold or some one's walking backward and forward over my grave."
They went home together, for the women would not be left behind, taking the longer way in order to avoid the sand-hills. Along the loose, tiring beach—dried sea waifs crackling underfoot, by thedouanewith its toy battery and lounging sentry; up a narrow path that was half by-street and half flight of steps, near whose summit a Christ flung his saving arms wide over a yellowafficheof theCoursesat Wimereux, and into a straggling village of low-browed houses, cream, pink, light-blue, and strong as castles, through whose doorways leather-faced crones and tow-headed children swarmed and tumbled. They were nearing the inn of theToison d'Or, where the new road to the hotel turns out of the village, slowly, for Mrs. Barbour climbed with difficulty and rejected assistance, when two men in tweed jackets, flat-capped and flannel-trousered, swung round the corner. At their backs two shaggy town urchins straggled along, each with an arsenal of clubs and cleeks peeping over his shoulder. The two men raised their caps and bowed slightly, but certainly not in response to any recognition that any of the party accorded them. Fenella blushed and hung her head.
Paul turned sharply on his heel. "Are those the cads who stared at you?" he asked, in a voice which he took no pains to render inaudible.
Nelly caught his arm before she answered. "Hush, dear! Yes. You're not to be foolish," she added.
Her mother, glad of a respite, stopped and looked after them, too. She held it a legitimate source of pride that she had always had an eye for a fine man.
"Thosearethe two, then," she said triumphantly, with an air of sagacity justified. "Then, my dear, I can tell you who they are. The short, dark one is Mr. Dreyfus—no, Dollfus—who manages the 'Dominion' in London, and the big, handsome one with the loose hair under his cap at the back is Sir Bryan Lumsden, the millionaire, and afrightfulreputation, my dear. Mrs. Lesueur told me all about him this morning when she came in to borrow Simone for ironing."
Meantime, the two men whom they had passed turned likewise, but only to whistle up their caddies, who, with an avidity for the "p'tit sou" which would seem to be sucked in with the maternal milk in French Flanders, were holding out claw-like hands to the family party and more especially to Ingram, who had already acquired an unfortunate reputation in this respect.
"What d'you make of it, Dolly?" the big man asked. "Husband?"
The Jew shook his head decisively. "No, no, my boy! She's not a marrit woman. Relations, more likely. Eh?—ah?"
"Or lovers, likelier still. It's highly respectable, anyway. They've got the old lady to come along. That looks as if he were French."
"I'd like to meet the liddle girl, alone," said Dollfus, fervently.
"Some dark night?—eh, Dolly!" remarked Sir Bryan, beginning to whip the Dominion director's stout calves and thighs with the handle of the putter he was carrying. "You're such a devil—such a devil, Dolly."
Mr. Dollfus raised a corrective hand.
"Don't mithtake my meaning, Lumpsden," he said, getting out of the sportive baronet's long reach as quickly as was consistent with dignity. "I only wanter tell her she's got a forchune in her feet and legth if she'd go in training. I oughter know something about legth, oughtn't I, old fellow. Becoth it's my bizzyness, ain't it, Lumpsden?"
"Tell the lunatic in the red shirt instead," the baronet suggested, derisively. "She's bored, anyway. See her bat her eyelid when we bowed? Oh yes, she did, Dolly. Just one little flicker—but I caught it. Hullo! there's Grogan and old Moon at the tenth hole."
And, this being a world where the incredible is always happening, it is possible that Bryan Lumsden didn't think of Fenella again that day.