VIII
'TWIXT SHINE AND SHADE
To be young, to be beautiful, to be free; to radiate a charm which it is felt not ungracious alone but ridiculous to pretend to withstand, and to be paid for its exercise in the tangible form that renders all else possible; to wake one morning and discover that pleasure, change of scene, and gracious surroundings have become the anxious concern of good genii whose motives are too evident to make any demands upon gratitude: to find each day a fairy vista wherein, by a happy perversion of the gray old rule, fulfilment waits upon desire: in one word, to be "the vogue." Has life ever offered more than this? and is it not a mere question of time how long any memory of old defeat, any regret for a lost Eden, can resist an assault by happiness made from so many quarters?
I think, if the whole truth could be known, Fenella's state of mind during her two years of furore would be a curious psychological study. I have just been looking through a pile ofSceptresandPrattlers, the issue of those enchanted years. It is hardly an exaggeration to say her photograph appeared in one or the other every week.—Fenella at Ascot—"The Secret of Success. One favorite whispers it to another."—"Look pleasant, please! A recent snapshot of Lord Lulford's popular niece." (I forget who invented this phrase. It was rather done to death.) Here are more: "Commons idol among the 'backwoodsmen' at the Burbery point-to-point. Names from left to right: Miss Barbour, Sir Bryan Lumsden, et cetera, et cetera." "Will 'No. 8' go up to-night? After a strenuous day with the North Herts, Miss Barbour has to hustle to catch the London train." I say, take out all the palpable poses, all the profitable winsomeness of poster or postcard—there must be one or two where she was taken off her guard—and then try to trace the shadow poor Paul fancied he saw. I can only say I have failed. Complete absorption in the business of the moment—that is all I ever found.
Of course I know that people in the world do not wear their hearts upon their sleeves, and that there are all sorts of dodges whereby if not happiness, at any rate the peace of mind necessary for due enjoyment of life, can be secured. The sad thought can be kept moving on a day ahead, an hour ahead; always in sight, as it were, but always out of one's mental reach. Even so, the question remains whether such a shifty process can be continued indefinitely, and if a day does not come when the harassed ghost, weary, like poor Joe, of incessant moving on, takes wing, once and for all, for the land of oblivion.
I was years making up my mind about Fenella. I sometimes fancied the dear lady knew it, and that that was the reason my brooding glances were never surprised. It would have been so easy to look up and catch them. "A penny for your thoughts, Mr. Prentice." And then—remember I'm a journalist, and used to seeing truth sold at the price—"I was wondering whether I wasn't only just in time, after all."
She did catch me at last. It was on that night, I fancy, that I passed once and for all from the sober status of "my husband's great friend" to the more vertiginous one of "my own." Paul was out at some committee meeting or another—he leaves her a good deal alone—and would not be in till late. I had been sitting silent a long while, watching the busy slender fingers and the sweet puckered brow. Knitting is rather a rite with Fenella, but I pity the naked she clothes if they had to wait on the work of her own hands. She had dropped a stitch. "One—two—three," she was counting under her breath—"oneandtwoandthree!" and then——Oh, I protest, madam! it was an unfair advantage that you took. I forget what answer I stammered out. She stuck her needles into the wool, glanced at the clock and told me everything.
A long electric launch, whose stern was covered by a white awning lined with green, skimmed its way through the lines of moored yachts, and across the blue Solent, its prow held high like the breast of a diving sea-bird. Over the bows, from which two sheets of water spurted away, clear and convex as blown glass, a seaman sat, dressed in ducks, and holding a long boat-hook in his hand. Round the ribbon of his glazed hat, in letters of gold, the legend ran—
S.Y.Castadiva, R.Y.C.
Amidships a tall, broad-shouldered man in blue serge, very sunburnt, and wearing a peaked cap, sat, or rather sprawled, in conversation, probably technical, with the driver of the dynamo, whose head and shoulders only appeared above the half-deck. Under the awning a girl was sitting alone. Her furled parasol made a vivid splash of scarlet against her snowy dress.
Near the jetty of the yacht club the engine ceased to flutter, and the sailor, putting out his boat-hook, drew the launch to shore. The man in blue jumped out and, extending a long arm, helped the girl to land.
"Moor her where you can to-night, Mr. Weeks," he said to the head and shoulders. "I'll see the commodore to-morrow and find out why we're not given our usual berth."
"Ay, ay, sir."
"And, Weeks, have the launch sent back at three sharp, with the baggage on board. Becket needn't come. I'm going to Beverbrook immediately after lunch, and shall sleep there. Good-day, Weeks."
"Good day, Sir Bryan."
Meantime, the girl, unfurling her parasol and balancing it daintily on her shoulder, walked toward the land, looking about her with a bright interest at the blue bay, the white sails of the yachts, and the smartly dressed crowd loitering outside the yacht club enclosure. She wore a white linen princesse robe, its costly simplicity adorned only by a wide band of embroidery that ran from throat to hem, and a big gray straw hat trimmed with a wreath of what roses would look like if nature had had the good taste to make them the color of pansies—the roses that bloom in the Rue de la Paix.
Slowly as she walked, she had reached the hedge of the enclosure before her companion overtook her. Inside the lawn was not crowded. The big regatta had taken place the day before, and it was lunch hour. Such groups as were strolling up and down or sitting in little encampments of canopied arm-chairs stopped flirting or talking to stare and whisper. On some of the women's faces appeared the dubious admiration that is kept for social audacity in their sex. The girl seemed unconscious of the effect she was creating and looked about her indifferently. Espying some friends in a far corner, she signalled vigorously with her open parasol.
"Bryan, there's Lady Carphilly and Mrs. Rolf d'Oyley. I must go and talk to them. Will you come too, or wait?"
"I'll wait," the man answered shortly. "I've sent in for my letters and I'll open them here. We ought to have lunch soon. Don't be long, Flash."
A club waiter who had been standing in the offing with a pile of letters on a salver and an initialled leather dispatch case, approached and disposed them on a table near the chair into which the baronet had flung himself. Lumsden bestowed a casual glance upon the pile and looked toward the man's free hand.
"What have you got there?"
"A telegram for Miss Barbour, Sir Bryan."
"Give it to me."
The man handed it over without demur. Bryan ripped it open and read the message through. He looked thoughtful.
"How long has this been here?"
"Two days, Sir Bryan."
"Didn't they try to get it through by wireless?"
"I can't say, Sir Bryan. I'll ask if you wish."
"No: it doesn't matter. Bring me a 'John Henry'."
He slipped the opened telegram into his coat pocket and, lighting a cigar, proceeded to read his mail through, systematically, but with a pre-occupied brow.
The past twelve months had dealt hardly with Bryan. There is probably in the life of most of us some day, or preferably some night, when fate chooses to pay us the arrears of years, in which the hours as they pass over our heads grizzle them, and our tears, if tears we can shed, are a corrosive acid that bite their record upon our cheeks for all time. No one honestly mistook Lumsden for a young man after his little son's death.
It may have been something in one of the letters he had just read—may be, who knows, something even in the telegram, that made him, after he had swept his correspondence, with various pencil scribblings on the margins, into the dispatch case, recall that night with rather more deliberation than he usually permitted himself, and stare gloomily at the group into which, with much embracing and chatter, pitched in a key of congratulatory envy, Fenella had been drawn.
How she had changed! How she had changed since then! To-day, as for many a day past, it was in nothing more precise than this loose mental phrase that his ill-defined dissatisfaction could find vent. Beyond it he seemed unable to go, and was even forced to admit a certain flimsiness in a charge out of which no better indictment could be framed. Because, whatever strain upon his finer perceptions had made the year of probation the torture it had undoubtedly been, he could not deny that she had remained true as steel to the bargain made with him in the house of death—a bargain so vague that scarcely any pretext would have been too tawdry to discharge her from it had she wished. She had sacrificed her good repute to him forthwith; had even seemed eager for circumstances that, as far as the world was concerned, should put the sacrifice past doubt, and if, of late, it had been coming back to her, as most women's is conveyed from them, in whispers, the rehabilitation was not of her own devising, but rather part of the observed tendency of murder and other violations of established usage to "out." Strangely enough, her fame fared better at women's hands than at men's, and worse among those who were convinced of her technical integrity (the phrase was even invented for her) than with those who inclined to give the ominous face of appearances its full value. I don't know why this should have been so. Perhaps vice has its own hypocrisies and canting code of law, and her resistance to the spirit after the letter had been so admirably fulfilled was held an outrage. At least she gave him no anxiety, although he knew that temptation had reached her, once from a quarter so exalted that it is not usually taken into account—even suspected one wooing as honorable as perfunctory, and although all his money and all his good will could not make him as young as the hot blood that besieged her. Her house was always open to him, at hours which his own forbearance was trusted to keep within the limits set by decorum; she kept whisky and cigars for him in her sideboard, with even the little sprig of vanilla in the cigar cabinet that she must have seen and taken note of in his own rooms. She never denied him her company nor discovered affinities among his friends; she even seemed to have a tender conscience in this regard, and looked round anxiously for him whenever the ripple of her little triumphs carried her temporarily out of hail. Whence then his secret dissatisfaction? Oh, this termless war of attainment with desire, old in human story as the history of David's unruly sons! Was Bryan the first to set a snare and grudge the fair plumage he had coveted for the marks of his own springe upon it?
She was a great success, socially. She entered the smart world, it is true, under his auspices, and because he was sulky if she was not asked to the same houses, and because it was important to a good many people that Bryan Lumsden, to say nothing of Calvert & Co., should be kept in good humor. But, once in, her own talents were quite competent to keep her in the place he had made for her. She had even reached a point now where her successes were her own, and no longer were held to throw reflected lustre upon her sponsor. She fitted quickly and easily into what, after all, was her own class. In a year she rode hard and straight and had developed a heady but hitherto successful system of tactics at bridge. Bryan no longer got the credit of her clothes, but it was generally understood she was frightfully in debt and would marry him when her creditors delivered their ultimatum. She had an infantile wit and a faculty for what the French termchoses inouïes. One of her riddles became proverbial.
"What did the fishes say to Noah when he asked them into the ark?" "No tanks."
I subjoin a few more specimens, not with any hope that their charm will subsist in print, but just to show with what things, on pretty lips, the weary old world is prepared to be amused.
Once she was trying to collect money for some charity and no one had change. This happens sometimes even in smart society. "Oh, dear," sighed Fenella, "everybody has the hand-to-mouth disease."
She was slightly angered at a restraining clause in one of her contracts, discovered when too late.
"You're a bad man," she told the flustered manager, "and you deserve to come to a nasty sticky end."
To Rock, of ill odor in the Park, after his senile advances had been rebuffed by a snobby little Pekinese: "Don't whine,dee-ar! I don't believe that kind of dog knows whether it's a dog or a poll-parrot or an insect."
"Bryan's caught cold, I think," she said one morning. "He keeps calling for 'Letitia'."
If these are fair samples of the parts she put at the disposal of her new friends, her reputation is not the surprise it might be to a man who knows that the dear lady to this day conducts her conversation upon an economical little vocabulary of about three hundred words.
Maybe the conscience we have spoken of had been pricking her, for when Lumsden raised his head from his reverie the world had gone red, and he was looking at the sun through her parasol.
"You look glum, old man," said Fenella. "What's the matter? Do you want your lunch?"
Lumsden got up and stretched. He had been pulling at his moustache, and one hair—a white one—was on the shoulder of his blue reefer. She picked it off, held it up to the light, looked unfathomably at him and blew it daintily into the air.
"Perhaps we'd best have lunch now," she said. "I want to get to Beverbrook soon and see what arrangements they've made. Do you remember Edmaston, Bryan, where they put that dreadful polish down—Takko or Stikko or something—and when my foot stuck I buzzed and every one laughed?"
"Don't you feel nervous, Flash?"
"Just a teeny. When doTheycome?"
"Oh, to dinner; but you won't be introduced till you've danced. And remember, Flash, you must only speak when you're spoken to by Them. Just answer questions."
"I'll try not to disgrace you," she said airily, and led the way to the pavilion.