V
CICISPEO
The next morning was stirless but bracing. Snow covered the park in soft mounds and waves, with a little black pit round the roots of each tree, as though some hibernating animal were breathing beneath. The laden branches balanced their fairy load daintily, against a sky, low, buff-colored and heavy with the promise of a further fall toward afternoon. The atmosphere was so still that the shouts of children snowballing in the village half a mile beyond the lodge gates, the rattling of antlers round the feeding-trough, reached the terrace, swept and sand-strewn already, where Fenella walked before breakfast, her arms folded under a warm golfing cape that she had found hanging in the hall. In the morning light, austere, temperate and shadowless, a good many of the misgivings that had robbed her of sleep were re-examined and found ludicrously unworthy of the sacrifice. There was no mistake about it. She had had her hour of unreasoning panic—had even meditated excuses that should cover a precipitate homeward flight. But that mood was over now. Women have their own code of bravery in the only warfare they know—their own perception of the ignominy of flight. If they act oftener upon their fears than upon the braver impulse, it is only because, in this warfare, it is their adversary himself who has set the rules and poisoned the weapons, decreeing that the slightest wound as well as the mortal shall be held matter for shame.
"I've heard of you—from Dollfus." What did that mean? What could be said of her yet? Of course, afterward, she was prepared for far worse. She was going on the stage with her eyes remarkably wide open. But that women—girls like herself, living at home, protected and obscure—should be made subject of men's conversation, she felt was an injustice—a treacherous thrust before the battle was joined. What was its motive? To rob her of self-respect before her character could be assailed? To cheapen, degrade her in her own eyes at the outset?
All at once a light dawned upon her—a light that beamed softly through her eyes, that wreathed her lips with the faintest, saddest little smile that ever was near neighbor to tears.
"It's all your fault, darling," she murmured. "It's all through you. You've been and lost me my character, Paul. Oh, my dear, my dear! What a joke! If the beasts only knew you?"
A foot grated upon the sand behind her. She turned and saw Sir Bryan, very fresh and smart and youthful in his tweeds and breeches.
"Good-morning, Miss Barbour. I'm sent to call you into breakfast."
"I never heard the gong."
"You don't hear it from this side." He came nearer and drew in great breaths of the cold, pure air. "Feeding's a bore, isn't it, a morning like this? I like houses where everything's kept hot and you eat any time; don't you?"
"I don't know. I haven't visited very much."
She tried to meet his new impersonal tone with perfunctory brightness; but Bryan knew how a woman looks who hasn't slept.
"You look tired," he said. "I'm afraid I worried you a bit last night."
"I did think you a little—a little——"
"Disrespectful, eh?" Lumsden hazarded. He had that useful sort of tact in conversation which consists in supplying the word that suits one's own purpose best.
"We were such strangers, you see," urged Fenella, with gentle reproof. "That time in France shouldn't have counted at all."
"If it did, the score was on your side," the baronet said quickly. "But I'm content so long as you don't mark it against me."
"Then you hinted people were talking about me," Nelly went on, reddening, but gaining confidence. "It was that worried me. It was so vague."
"We were interrupted just then," Lumsden reminded her. "A word or two would have explained, but you wouldn't let me get near you the whole evening."
"Why should I? When women are talked about it's neverwell."
"Oh, isn't it?" said Lumsden. "I'm not a philanthropist, but I assure you I've done my part bravely in holding lots of shaky reputations together."
She raised her head now, and looked him quite proudly in the eyes.
"Thank you. I'm not conscious mine's in bad repair."
It was a different voice and another woman. Lumsden leaned over the parapet and gathered a handful of snow.
"Snow's packing," he said. "We'll have sleighing after lunch. Ever been on a bob-sleigh?"
"No," said Fenella. Maidenly dignity relented a little. It sounded "fun."
Sir Bryan gave a boyish laugh.
"You've missed half your life," said he, making use of one of a collection of phrases he had brought from over the Atlantic. "Look here!" He touched her ever so lightly on the shoulder and pointed across the park. "From the Belvedere down to the 'ha-ha' there's two hundred and fifty yards if you know how. We laid it out years ago, and marked it with stones. It's known all round. Lots of people, probably, will turn up here this afternoon. You'll let me take you down, won't you, Miss Barbour? I say; do I have to go on calling you 'Miss Barbour'?"
"Yes," demurely; "I think it's best."
"For how long?"
She faced him with her hand upon the sash of the long French window. If it was "just flirting," Fenella was "all there."
"Until you've told me truthfully what Mr. Dollfus said."
"I'll do it while we're sleighing. It won't take ten minutes."
The conversation, however, lasted more than ten minutes, and it was one Fenella was never to forget. As Bryan had prophesied, the news that the slide was being banked and made spread rapidly, and a host of people turned up in the afternoon, in country carts with sledges trailing and bumping behind, or in motor-cars, with an occasional pair of skis sticking up in the air. The run had been laid out years ago under Lumsden's own direction, when "crooked run" tobogganing was a newly discovered rapture. More than one future hero of the Kloster or Cresta had taken his first powdery tumble, amid ecstatic laughter from friends and relations, on the snowy slopes of Freres Lulford, and even now, after the sophistication had set in that so quickly reduces any English pastime to a science, with its canting vocabulary and inner circle of the expert, whenever snow fell thickly enough to stop shooting and hunting, two or three days' sleighing in Lulford Park was thought rather "sport" by a society watchfully anxious never to be thrown upon its intellectual resources by any trick of wind or weather.
Game-keepers and gardeners had been at work all the morning, and after lunch people began to arrive. Fenella had met a good many of them before—Lord Warrener, with his fiery whiskered cheeks and grave little Philadelphia wife; Bill Arkcoll, whose gray face, seamed with a million tiny wrinkles, was twisted into a permanent grin round a black-rimmed eyeglass, which he had, moreover, a disconcerting habit in the evening of letting fall with a sudden crash on his shirt front; "Snip" Hannaford, the gentleman jockey, who had sacrificed his chest to the sport of kings; finally Lady Wills-Pechell, alone condescendingly literary on the strength of half a dozen pottering little garden books: "Among my Syringas," "The Chatelaine's Year," "Shadow and Sun on Spurlock Edge." Lady Warrener was of the latest type of trans-Atlantic heiress, devoted to the peerage from the nursery, and "very carefully brought up" by an ambitious and circumspect mother. Her opinions were predigested and all her life nothing really unforeseen had ever happened her, except twins. She adored her husband and babies, thought Bryan's occasional Americanisms vulgar, and her favorite comment was, "Oh, fahncy!"
As a class they had for some time ceased to force comparisons upon Fenella; but this afternoon their low, clear voices, frank, unimpressed greetings, absence of anxiety, and general air of being all afloat together upon a stream that might be trusted never to carry them too far out of one another's reach struck pleasantly upon her senses. A great coke stove had been lighted in the Belvedere and the curved stone benches covered with carriage-rugs and cushions. The trampled snow outside was littered with an assortment of bob-sleighs, "Cheshires" and frail steel clipper-sleds. The run started practically at the door, with a nearly sheer fall of twenty feet; ran out a hundred yards into the straight, turned—at first gently, then more sharply—on a heaped embankment around the shoulder of the hill, and finished close to the old carp pond, whose black ramparts and pointed turrets of yew were roofed and spired to-day with a white thatch of snow. From the gardens a sort of rough stairway, made of faggots and bundles of brush-wood, had been made to the top of the hill. A few belated guests were straggling up it, pulling up their sleds to one side through the snow. Round the stove the vocabulary of the sport was being briskly interchanged.
"Sprawlon Battledore, and use your right foot, not your left." "Never got beyond the duffer's handicap myself." "You'll 'yaw' all over, Arkcoll, if you use rakes on the straight." "Hands are best." "No, they're not: 'gouties,' when they get a bit worn, are just as good." "He was killed because he held on, Warrener. Let go and bunch yourself, and you can't be more than bruised even there." "Who's going to start?" "That thing's no good on a snow-run, Barbour."
Jack Barbour was standing on the edge of the descent, a light steel frame with a cushion held against his chest. He put it down and glanced at his pretty cousin.
"Shall we show 'em how?"
Fenella caught her breath, but nodded.
"Oh, Jack, take care of her!" reproachfully, from his sister, while Warrener, in the background, already a littleépris, expressed an opinion that it was "damned dangerous."
"Dangerous? Down that thing?" cried Barbour scornfully, pushing the nose of what is technically known as a "tin-bottom" over the slope.
"What am I to do?" asked Nelly.
"Just sit still and hang on to my knees. Now, are you ready?"
Fenella bit her lip and suppressed a vulgar inclination to scream. The toboggan seemed to fall headlong—to rebound—to shoot out with the evident intention of either burying itself in the embankment or of leaping it altogether. When its nose was not more than ten yards away she felt the speed suddenly slacken, the toboggan slewed round with a twist that nearly overset it, and, steadying, slipped swiftly and cleanly round a wide curve. Almost before the rapture of the unaccustomed motion had been realized, it came to a stop, for want of snow, in the shadow of the prior's garden.
"How do you like it?" asked cousin Jack, brushing the snow off his sleeve.
"Oh, Jack!"—Fenella pressed her mittened hands together—"it's—it'sglorious!"
Barbour smiled at her glowing face. "Pooh! You should see the real thing. Ask Lumsden. He did the Kloster in five-fifteen once."
"Is he very good at it?"
"He's good at everything he takes up," said Jack, unreservedly. "How do you like him, Flash? I forgot to ask."
Jack Barbour had heard of this old school nickname from a brother officer who had had a sister at Sharland College and seldom called her by any other.
"M—m—pretty well. Is he really a cousin of—of—ours?"
"Not really, I think. It's a kind of old joke."
"Why is he so much at home here, then, Jack?"
Barbour had evidently found the situation ready made, and had never thought of questioning it.
"I think he and the governor were racing partners once. There are some of his horses here now: I don't mean hunters. Saleratus is his, the big bay. We all hope he's going to win some races next year. Snip Hannaford's going to ride him."
"Is he married, Jack?"
Barbour laughed sarcastically. "Bryan married! No fear! He knows too much."
"Jack!"
"Oh! I'm sorry, coz. It wasn't a very pretty speech to a lady. I mean he's a bit spoilt. Shall we go up?"
"No; let us sit here awhile. It's so warm. Why is he spoilt?"
"'Cos he's awful rich."
"Heaps of people are rich."
"Well, then, he's got a good deal to do with theatres, and knows that kind of people. The Dominion really belongs to him. Why, your teeth are chattering, Flash. Are you cold?"
"No. It's nothing. I thought Mr. Dollfus was the manager of the Dominion."
"He is in a way. I don't quite understand these things, but I suppose Bryan puts up the money."
"I see," said Fenella, with the accent of full comprehension. "Jack," she said, after a moment, "do you think it's quite right to have a man like that meeting—proper women?"
Barbour jerked his head. He was a rather nice lad, singularly susceptible to the influence of the moment.
"I suppose it isn't, when one thinks of it. We've thrashed this out before, haven't we, Flash? Same law for both, eh?"
"I think men, and women too, ought to choose what kind of people they're going to know, and be madestickto that sort. I don't likemixings. Come, let's go up. Here come some others. Oh, Jack! aren't you glad you're young? Ihatemen after twenty-five."
The sport was over, together with the short-lived day, before she stood in the same place with the older man. Servants carrying tea-baskets and kettles had made their way up the slope. Lanterns twinkled in the pergola, and gay chat floated down to them. She had kept out of his way all the afternoon without difficulty. It was not until she had made the tantalizingly short descent with one man after another, and finally, amid much vain dissuasion and subsequent applause, headforemost by herself on Jack's steel clipper, that he came to her side and asked her, without a trace of the manner she resented, to take the last run with him. It was growing dark, and meaning glances were not wanting, but she had consented without any hesitation. She felt the glances, but she felt also a strange elation and a consciousness of strength that made her a very different creature to the nervous tongue-tied little girl of the night before. She did not quite know why, but, as she stood, a little breathless from her upward climb, with the first flakes of the new fall melting on her glowing cheek, life, even shadowed life such as was hers, seemed something intensely interesting, and something that, given courage, might be mastered as easily as the sport she was essaying now. He was the first to speak when they reached the sheltered gloom below.
"Don't you think our explanation's about due?"
He saw her smile. "I'm not a bit anxious for it now, Sir Bryan."
"I can believe that. You've even seemed to me to be keeping out of its way, or out of mine, which comes to the same thing, all the afternoon."
"It's not really worth worrying over. When you've given it there won't be much gained."
"You mean calling you—your name. It was your own idea to wait, you know."
"You can call me it now without any conditions. Jack has told me we're kind of cousins."
"Is that all he's told you?"
"A little more."
"Oh! Enough to make you hesitate about a certain step you had thought of taking?"
"Enough to make me think I'd better take it in some other place."
"Don't take it anywhere else"—earnestly.
She was startled at his intensity, and looked uneasily up the hill.
"Cousin Fenella, does history bore you?"
"It must be a very short lesson, please."
"A few minutes is enough. Years ago, then, cousin, in certain parts of Italy, when a bride was starting her new life, besides the usual stuff about pin-money, settlements, etcetera, the marriage contract contained another clause that seems to our insular minds intensely shocking. You'd never guess what it provided for."
"If it's shocking, I'd best not try."
His mouth twitched. "Baldly, then, one friend—neither more nor less. A third partner in the terrestrial paradise. Seems rather a scandalous person, doesn't he?"
"I think so."
Lumsden lit a cigar. "And yet"—puff! puff!—"the more one thinks of him the more reasonable he becomes. Men were so busy in those days, cousin. Fighting, don't you know—treaty making—in prison for indefinite periods. Don't you see with how much easier mind the soldier or diplomatic or captive husband must have laid his head on his lonely pillow for knowing there was a stout arm, ready blade, keen wit at home, authorized to keep marauders off. Do you wonder why I'm telling you all this?"
"To frighten me, perhaps."
"Pshaw! I know better than that. Come! put prejudice aside. Remember, too, that his name was probably the worst thing about him. Some poor relative, unrewarded soldier, I always imagine him—generally a cousin, by the way. Still wondering?"
No answer.
"Cousin Fenella, listen to me! Under ordinary conditions, for a girl like yourself to dance on the stage would be to risk more unhappiness and humiliation and treachery than you'd believe if I told you. There's one place in which a word from me can secure you your peace of mind. That's the Dominion. Don't turn away from luck."
"You mean that I—that you——"
"That the mere hint, in quarters where it's most wanted, that you're aprotégéeof mine will rid you once for all of unwelcome attentions."
Fenella considered. "In fact, in order to keep my peace of mind, I must lose my reputation."
"Do you care very much what the world says? Do you have to—still?"
The last word was pitched so low that she hardly caught it. But, whisper as it was, it decided her.
"No. I don't care. Not—that." She snapped her fingers.
"That's right," said the sporting baronet encouragingly. "It's a bargain then? Dominion or nothing?"
"Yes."
"I'm writing Joe to-night. Shall I tell him we go into training after Christmas?"
"Yes."
He put his hands in his pockets and puffed his cigar to a glow.
"Quite ready to fight the world, ain't you, cousin?"
"Theworld."
"——but not me, eh? Oh! I keep my word. I'm Cicispeo."
"Who?"
"The man who's history I've just been telling you."
"Why are you taking all this trouble then?"
"Good! I like a 'facer' sometimes. Well, it's because I admire pluck. Because I saw you swim a mile out at Palèze. Oh! I often watched you. Because you took a header down that slide just now. What'll you be at next. Shall we go back to the house or will you go up with me and face the Wills-Pechell eye? It's celebrated, I warn you—got enough pluck left for that?"
And as she climbed the brushwood path—her hand in this new friend's—Fenella, all her elation gone, was wondering how much share after all her will had had in the choice just made, and whether this dazzling dream-vista of success and applause, out of which, as earnest of her right to all it promised, a rush of warm-scented air seemed to meet her through the snow-filled dusk, were not really a decree of fate, hostile and inexorable to her heart's desire as death would have seemed three months ago—peace, salty suffocation on the dark, lonely, foreign beach, clasped in her lover's arms.
And Lumsden, quite possibly, was measuring the moral distance between the cad who shoots a pheasant on the ground and the sportsman who flushes it and gives it a fly for its life. Or for better sport—which is it?—and to take a surer aim.