Oh, the little more, and how much it is!And the little less, and what worlds away!
A howling gale of wind from the south-east, and driving snow and darkness. The light of Cap Grisnez struggling out over the blackness of the Channel, and the two Foreland lights twinkling feebly from their snow-clad heights. A night to turn in one’s bed with a sleepy word of thanksgiving that one has a bed to turn in, and no pressing need to turn out of it.
The smaller fry of Channel shipping have crept into Dungeness or the Downs. Some of them have gone to the bottom. Two of them are breaking up on the Goodwins.
TheCroonahIndian liner is pounding into it all, with white decks and whistling shrouds. The passengers are below in their berths. Some of them--and not only the ladies--are sending up little shamefaced supplications to One who watches over the traveller in all places and at all times.
And on the bridge of theCroonaha man all eyes and stern resolve and maritime instinct. A man clad in his thickest clothes, and over all of them his black oilskins. A man with three hundred lives depending upon his keen eyes, his knowledge, and his judgment. A man whose name is Luke FitzHenry.
The captain has gone below for a few minutes to thaw, leaving the ship to FitzHenry. He does it with an easy conscience--as easy, that is, as the maritime conscience can well be in a gale of wind, with the Foreland lights ahead and infinite possibilities all around. The captain drinks his whisky and hot water with a certain slow appreciation of the merits of that reprehensible solution, and glances at the aneroid barometer on the bulkhead of his cabin.
Overhead, on the spidery bridge, far up in the howling night, Luke FitzHenry, returning from the enervating tropics, stares sternly into the night, heedless of the elemental warfare. For Luke FitzHenry has a grudge against the world, and people who have that take a certain pleasure in evil weather.
“The finest sailor that ever stepped,” reflects the captain of his second officer--and he no mean mariner himself.
TheCroonahhad groped her way up Channel through a snowstorm of three days’ duration, and the brunt of it had fallen by right of seniority on the captain and his second officer. Luke FitzHenry was indefatigable, and, better still, he was without enthusiasm. Here was the steady, unflinching combativeness which alone can master the elements. Here was the true genius of the sea.
With his craft at his fingers’ ends, Luke had that instinct of navigation by which some men seem to find their way upon the trackless waters. There are sailors who are no navigators just as there are hunting men who cannot ride. There are navigators who will steer you from London to Petersburg without taking a sight, from the Thames to the Suez Canal without looking at their sextant. Such a sailor as this was Luke FitzHenry. Perfectly trained, he assimilated each item of experience with an insatiable greed for knowledge--and it was all maritime knowledge. He was a sailor and nothing else. But it is already something--as they say in France--to be a good sailor.
Luke FitzHenry was a man of middle height, sturdy, with broad shoulders and a slow step. His clean-shaven face was a long oval, with pessimistic, brooding eyes--eyes that saw everything except the small modicum of good which is in all human things, and to this they were persistently blind. Taking into consideration the small, set mouth, it was eminently a pugnacious face--a face that might easily degenerate to the coarseness of passion in the trough of a losing fight. But, fortunately, Luke’s lines were cast upon the great waters, and he who fights the sea must learn to conquer, not by passionate effort, but by consistent, cool resolve. Those who worked with him feared him, and in so doing learnt the habit of his ways. The steersman, with one eye on the binnacle, knew always where to find him with the other; for Luke hardly moved during his entire watch on deck. He took his station at the starboard end of the narrow bridge when he came on duty, and from that spot he rarely moved. These little things betray a man, if one only has the patience to piece them together.
Those who go down to the sea in ships, and even those who take their pleasure on the great water, know the relative merits of the man who goes to his post and stays there, and of him who is all over the ship and restless.
Luke was standing now like a statue--black and gleaming amid the universal grey of the winter night, and his deep eyes, cat-like, pierced the surrounding gloom.
Here was a man militant. A man who must needs be fighting something, and Fate, with unusual foresight, had placed him in a position to fight Nature. Luke FitzHenry rather revelled in a night such as this - the gloom, the horror, and the patent danger of it suited his morose, combative nature. He loved danger and difficulty with the subtle form of love which a fighting man experiences for a relentless foe.
From light to light he pushed his intrepid way through the darkness and the bewildering intricacies of the Downs, and in due time, in the full sunlight of the next day, theCroonahsidled alongside the quay in the Tilbury Dock. The passengers, with their new lives before them, stumbled ashore, already forgetting the men who, smoke-begrimed and weary, had carried these lives within their hands during the last month or more. They crowded down the gangway and left Luke to go to his cabin.
There were two letters lying on the little table. One from Fitz at Mahon, the other in a handwriting which Luke had almost forgotten. He turned it over with the subtle smile of a man who has a grudge against women. But he opened it before the other.
“DEAR LUKE,--I am glad to hear from Fitz that you are making your way in the Merchant Service. He tells me that your steamer, theCroonah, has quite a reputation on the Indian route, and your fellow-officers are all gentlemen. I shall be pleased to see you to dinner the first evening you have at your disposal. I dine at seven-thirty.--Believe me, yours very truly, MARIAN HARRINGTON.
“P.S.--I shall deem it a favour if you will come in dress clothes, as I have visitors.”
And, strange to say, it was the feminine stab in the postscript that settled the matter. Luke sat down and wrote out a telegram at once, accepting Mrs. Harrington’s invitation for the same evening.
When he rang the bell of the great house in Grosvenor Gardens at precisely half-past seven that evening, he was conscious of a certain sense of elation. He was quite sure of himself.
He thought that the large drawing-room was empty when the butler ushered him into it, and some seconds elapsed before he discerned the form of a young lady in a deep chair near the fire.
The girl turned her head and rose from the chair with a smile and a certain grace of manner which seemed in some indefinite way to have been put on with her evening dress. For a moment Luke gazed at her, taken aback. Then he bowed gravely, and she burst into a merry laugh.
“How funny!” she cried. “You do not know me?”
“No-o-o,” he answered, searching his mind. For he was a passenger sailor, and many men and women crossed his path during the year.
She came forward with a coquettish little laugh and placed herself beneath the gas, inviting his inspection, sure of herself, confident in her dressmaker.
She was small and very upright, with a peculiarly confident carriage of the head, which might indicate determination or, possibly, a mere resolution to get her money’s worth. Her hair, perfectly dressed, was of the colour of a slow-worm. She called it fair. Her enemies said it reminded them of snakes. Her eyes were of a darker shade of ashen grey, verging on hazel. Her mouth was mobile, with thin lips and an expressive corner--the left-hand corner - and at this moment it suggested pert inquiry. Some people thought she had an expressive face, but then some people are singularly superficial in their mode of observation. There was really no power of expressing any feeling in the small, delicately cut face. It all lay in the mouth, in the left-hand corner thereof.
“Well?” she said, and Luke’s wonder gradually faded into admiration.
“I give it up,” he answered.
She shrugged her shoulders in pretended disgust.
“You are not polite,” she said, with a glance at his stalwart person which might have indicated that there were atoning merits. “I must say you are not polite, Luke. I do not think I will tell you. It would be still more humiliating to learn that you have forgotten my existence.”
“You cannot be Agatha!” he exclaimed.
“Can I not? It happens that IamAgatha Ingham-Baker - at your service!”
She swept him a low curtsey and sailed away to the mantelpiece, thereby giving him the benefit of the exquisite fit of her dress. She stood with one arm on the mantel-shelf, looking back at him over her shoulder, summing him up with a little introspective nod.
“I should like to know why I cannot be Agatha,” she asked, with that keen feminine scent for a personality which leads to the uttering of so much nonsense, and the brewing of so much mischief.
“I never thought--” he began.
“Yes?”
He laughed and refused to go any farther, although she certainly made the way easy for him.
“In fact,” she said mockingly, “you are disappointed. You never expected me to turn out such a horrid--”
“You know it isn’t that,” he interrupted, with a flash of his gloomy eyes.
“Not now,” she said quietly, glancing towards the door. “I hear Mrs. Harrington coming downstairs. You can tell me afterwards.”
Luke turned on his heel and greeted Mrs. Harrington with quite a pleasant smile, which did not belong to her by rights, but to the girl behind him.
Fitz had been away for two years. Mrs. Harrington in making overtures of peace to Luke had been prompted by the one consistent motive of her life, self-gratification. She was tired of the obsequious society of persons like the Ingham-Bakers, whom she mentally set down as parasites. There is a weariness of the flesh that comes to rich women uncontrolled. They weary of their own power. Tyranny palls. Mrs. Harrington was longing to be thwarted by some one stronger than herself. The FitzHenrys even in their boyhood had, by their sturdy independence, their simple, seamanlike self-assertion, touched some chord in this lone woman’s heart which would not vibrate to cringing fingers.
She had sent for Luke because Fitz was away. She wanted to be thwarted. She would have liked to be bullied. And also there was that subtle longing for the voice, the free gesture, the hearty manliness of one whose home is on the sea.
As Luke turned to greet her with the rare smile on his face he was marvellously like Fitz. He was well dressed. There was not the slightest doubt that this was a gentleman. Nay, more, he looked distinguished. And above all, he carried himself like a sailor. So the reconciliation was sudden and therefore complete. A reconciliation to be complete must be sudden. It is too delicate a thing to bear handling.
Luke had come intending to curse. He began to feel like staying to bless. He was quite genial and pleasant, greeting Mrs. Ingham-Baker as an old friend, and thereby distinctly upsetting that lady’s mental equilibrium. She had endeavoured to prevent this meeting, because she thought it was not fair to Fitz. She noted the approval with which Mrs. Harrington’s keen eyes rested on the young sailor, and endeavoured somewhat obviously to draw Agatha’s attention to it by frowns and heavily significant nods, which her dutiful daughter ignored.
Mrs. Harrington glanced impatiently at the clock.
“That stupid Count is late,” she said.
“Is the Count de Lloseta coming?” asked Mrs. Ingham-Baker eagerly.
From the strictly impartial standpoint of a mother she felt sure that the Count admired Agatha.
“Yes,” answered Mrs. Harrington, with a cynical smile.
And Mrs. Ingham-Baker, heedless of the sarcasm, was already engaged in an exhaustive examination of Agatha’s dress. She crossed the room and delicately rectified some microscopic disorder of the snake-like hair. With a final glance up and down, she crossed her arms at her waist and looked complacently towards the door.
The Count came in, and failed to realise the hope that apparently buoyed Mrs. Ingham-Baker’s maternal heart. He did not strike an attitude or cover his dazzled eyes when they rested on Agatha. He merely came forward with his gravest smile and uttered the pleasant fictions appropriate to the occasion. Mrs. Ingham-Baker was marked in her gracious reception of the Spaniard, and the hostess watched her effusions with a queer little smile.
At dinner Mrs. Ingham-Baker was opposite to the Count, who seemed preoccupied and somewhat absent-minded. Her attention was divided between an anticipatory appreciation of Mrs. Harrington’s cook and an evident admiration for her own daughter.
“Agatha was just saying,” observed the stout lady between the candle shades, “that we had not seen the Count de Lloseta for quite a long time. Only yesterday, was it not, dear?”
Agatha acquiesced.
“The loss,” answered the Count, “is mine. But it is more than made good by the news that my small absence was noted. I have been abroad.”
Mrs. Harrington at the end of the table looked up sharply, and a few drops of soup fell from her upraised spoon with a splash.
“In Spain?” she asked.
“In Spain.”
Beware equally of a sudden friend and a slow enemy.
A wise man had said of Cipriani de Lloseta that had he not been a Count he would have been a great musician. He had that singular facility with any instrument which is sometimes given to musical persons in recompense for voicelessness. The Count spoke like one who could sing, but his throat was delicate, and so the world lost a great singer. Of most instruments he spoke with a half-concealed contempt. But of the violin he said nothing. He was not a man to turn the conversational overflow upon self-evident facts.
He invariably brought his violin to Grosvenor Gardens when Mrs. Harrington invited him, in her commanding way, to dine. It amused Mrs. Harrington to accompany his instrument on the piano. Her music was of the accompanying order. It was heartless and correct. Some of us, by the way, have friends of this same order, and, like Mrs. Harrington’s music, they are not in themselves either interesting or pleasant.
The piano stood in the inner drawing-room, and thither the Count and Mrs. Harrington repaired when the gentlemen had joined the ladies. In the larger drawing-room Luke was fortunate enough to secure a seat near to Agatha--quite near, and a long way from Mrs. Ingham-Baker, digestively asleep in an armchair.
He did not exactly know how this arrangement was accomplished--it seemed to come. Possibly Agatha knew.
Mrs. Harrington struck a keynote and began playing the prelude of a piece well known to them both.
“Why did you not tell me that you were going to Spain?” she asked somewhat tersely, under cover of her own chords.
“Had I known that it would interest you--” murmured De Lloseta, tightening his bow. There was a singular gleam in his eye. The gleam that one sees in the eye of a dog which has been thrashed, telling the wise that one day the dog will turn.
“I am always interested,” said the grey lady slowly, “in Spain--and even in Mallorca.”
She used the Spanish name of the island with the soft roll in the throat that English people rarely acquire. He was prepared for it, standing with raised bow, looking past her iron-grey head to the music. She glanced back over her shoulder into his face with the cruel cat-like love of torture that some people possess. Far away in the distant wisdom of Providence it had been decreed that this woman should have no child less clever than herself to tease into hopelessness.
The Spaniard laid his magic bow to the strings, leaving her to follow. He tucked the violin against his collar with a little caressing motion of his chin, and in a few moments he seemed to forget all else than the voice of the instrument. There are a few musicians who can give to a violin the power of speech. They can make the instrument tell some story--not a cheery tale, but rather like the story that dogs tell us sometimes--a story which seems to have a sequence of its own, and to be quite intelligible to its teller; but to us it is only comprehensible in part, like a tale that is told dramatically in a tongue unknown.
The Count stood up and played with no fine frenzy, no rolling eyes, no swaying form; for such are the signs of a hopeless effort, hung out by the man who has heard the story and tries in vain to tell it himself.
Even Agatha was outdone, for Luke drifted off into absent-mindedness, and after a little effort she left him to return at his own time. She listened to the music herself, but it did not seem to touch her. For sound ascends, and this was already above Agatha Ingham-Baker’s head. The piece over, Mrs. Harrington selected another.
“You did not go across to Mallorca?” she inquired, in a voice that did not reach the other room. “No,” he answered, “I did not go across to Mallorca.”
He stepped back a pace to move a chair which was too near to him, and the movement made it impossible for her to continue the conversation without raising her voice. She countered at once by rising and laying the music aside.
“I am too tired for more,” she said. “You must ask Agatha to accompany you. She plays beautifully. I have it from her mother!”
Mrs. Harrington stood for a moment looking into the other room. Luke and Agatha were talking together with some animation.
“I have been very busy lately,” she said conversationally. “Perhaps you have failed to notice that I have had this room redecorated?”
He looked round the apartments with a smile, which somehow conveyed a colossal contempt. “Very charming,” he said.
“It was done by a good man and cost a round sum.” She paused, looking at him with a mocking glance. “In fact, I am rather in need of money. My balance at the bank is not so large as I could wish.”
The Count’s dark eyes rested on her face with the small gleam in their depths which has already been noted.
“I am not good at money matters,” he said. “But, so far as I recollect, you have already exceeded our--”
“Possibly.”
“And, unless my memory plays me false, there was a distinct promise that this should not occur again. Perhaps a lady’s promise--”
“Possibly.”
The Count contented himself with a derisive laugh beneath his breath, and waited for her to speak again. This she did as she moved towards the other room.
“I think five hundred pounds would suffice--at present. Agatha,” she continued, raising her voice, “come and play the Count’s accompaniment. He finds fault with me to-night.”
“No. I only suggested a littlepiù lento! You take it too fast.”
“Ah! Well, I want to talk to Luke. Come, Agatha.”
“I tremble at the thought of my own temerity,” said Miss Ingham-Baker, as she seated herself on a music-stool with a great rustle of silks and considerable play of her white arms.
“Are you bold?” inquired the Count, with impenetrable suavity.
“I am--to attempt your accompaniments. I expect to be found fault with.”
“It will at all events be a novelty,” he answered, setting the music in order.
The Spaniard opened the music-book and indicated the page. Agatha dashed at it with characteristic confidence, and the voice of the violin came singing softly into the melody. It was a better performance than the last. Agatha’s playing was much less correct, but as she went on she forgot herself, and she put something into the accompaniment which Mrs. Harrington had left out. It was not time, neither was it a stricter attention to the composer’s instructions. It was only a possibility, after all.
In the other room Mrs. Ingham-Baker slumbered still. Mrs. Harrington, unmoved in her grey silk dress, was talking with her usual incisiveness, and Luke was listening gravely. When the piece was done, Mrs. Harrington said over her shoulder--
“Go on. You get on splendidly together.”
And she returned to her conversation with Luke.
The Count looked through his music.
“How devoted she is to her nephews!” said Agatha, tapping the ivory keyboard with a dainty finger.
“Yes.”
“And apparently to both alike.”
There was a little flicker beneath the Count’s lowered eyelids.
“Apparently so,” he answered, with assumed hesitation.
Agatha continued playfully, tapping the ivory notes with her middle finger--the others being gracefully curled.
“You speak as if you doubted the impartiality.”
“I am happy to say I always doubt a woman’s impartiality.”
She laughed and drew the stool nearer to the piano. It would have been easier to drift away into the conversational channel of vague generality which he opened up. He waited with some curiosity.
“Do you think there is a preference?” she said, falling into his small trap.
“Ah! There you ask me something that is beyond my poor powers of discrimination. Mrs. Harrington does not wear her feelings on her sleeve. She is difficult.”
“Very,” admitted Agatha, with a little sigh.
“I am naturally interested in the FitzHenrys,” she went on after a little pause, with baffling frankness. “You see, we were children together.”
“So I understand. I too am interested in them--merely because I like them.”
“I am afraid,” continued Agatha, tentatively turning the pages of the music which he had set before her, speaking as if she was only half thinking of what she was saying--“I am afraid that Mrs. Harrington is the sort of person to do an injustice. She almost told my mother that she intended to leave all her money to one of them.”
Again that little flicker of the Count’s patient eyelids.
“Indeed!” he said. “To which one?”
Agatha shrugged her shoulders and began playing. “That is not so much the question. It is the principle--the injustice - that one objects to.”
“Of course,” murmured De Lloseta, with a little nod. “Of course.”
They went on playing, and in the other room Mrs. Harrington talked to Luke. Mrs. Ingham-Baker appeared to slumber, but her friend and hostess suspected her of listening. She therefore raised her voice at intervals, knowing the exquisite torture of unsatisfied curiosity, and Mrs. Ingham-Baker heard the word “Fitz,” and the magic syllables “money,” more than once, but no connecting phrase to soothe her aching mental palate.
“And is your life a hard one?” Mrs. Harrington was asking. She had been leading up to this question for some time--inviting his confidence, seeking the extent of her own power. A woman is not content with possessing power; she wishes to see the evidence of it in the lives of others.
“No,” answered Luke, unconsciously disappointing her; “I cannot say that it is.”
He was strictly, sternly on his guard. There was not the faintest possibility of his ever forgiving this woman.
“And you are getting on in your career?”
“Yes, thank you.”
Mrs. Harrington’s grey eyes rested on his face searchingly.
“Perhaps I could help you,” she said, “with my small influence, or--or by other means.”
“Thank you,” he said again without anger, serene in his complete independence.
Mrs. Harrington frowned. A dream passed through her mind--a great desire. What if she could crush this man’s pride? For his six years’ silence had never ceased to gall her. What if she could humble him so completely that he would come asking the help she so carelessly offered?
With a woman’s instinct she hit upon the only possible means of attaining this end. She did not pause to argue that a nature such as Luke’s would never ask anything for itself--that it is precisely such as he who have no pride when they ask for another, sacrificing even that for that other’s sake.
Following her own thoughts, Mrs. Harrington looked pensively into the room where Agatha was sitting. The girl was playing, with a little frown of concentration. The wonderful music close to her ear was busy arousing that small possibility. Agatha did not know that any one was looking at her. The two pink shades of the piano candles cast a becoming light upon her face and form.
Mrs. Harrington’s eyes came surreptitiously round. Luke also was looking at Agatha. And a queer little smile hovered across Mrs. Harrington’s lips. The dream was assuming more tangible proportions. Mrs. Harrington began to see her way; already her inordinate love of power was at work. She could not admit even to herself that Luke FitzHenry had escaped her. Women never know when they have had enough.
“How long are you to be in London?” she asked, with a sudden kindness.
“Only a fortnight.”
“Well, you must often come and see me. I shall have the Ingham-Bakers staying with me a few weeks longer. It is dull for poor Agatha with only two old women in the house. Come to lunch to-morrow, and we can do something in the afternoon.”
“Thank you very much,” said Luke.
“You will come?”
“I should like nothing better.”
And so the music went on--and the game. Some played a losing game from the beginning, and others played without quite knowing the stake. Some held to certain rules, while others made the rules as they went along--as children do--ignorant of the tears that must inevitably follow. But Fate placed all the best cards in Mrs. Harrington’s hand.
Luke and the Count Cipriani de Lloseta went out of the house together. They walked side by side for some yards while a watchful hansom followed.
“Can I give you a lift?” said De Lloseta at length. “I am going down to the Peregrinator’s.”
“Thanks, no. I shall go straight to my rooms. I have not had my clothes off for three nights.”
“Ah, you sailors! I am going down to have my half-hour over a book to compose my mind.”
“Do you read much?”
De Lloseta called the cab with a jerk of his head. Before stepping into it he looked keenly into his companion’s face.
“Yes, a good deal. I read somewhere, lately, that it is never wise to accept favours from a woman; she will always have more than her money’s worth. Good-night.”
And he drove away.
Ce qu’on dit à l’être à qui on dit tout n’est pas la moitié de ce qu’on lui cache.
Agatha sent her maid to bed and sat down before her bedroom fire to brush her hair.
Miss Ingham-Baker had, only four years earlier, left a fashionable South Coast boarding-school fully educated for the battle of life. There seem to be two classes of young ladies’ boarding-schools. In the one they are educated with a view of faring well in this world, in the other the teaching mostly bears upon matters connected with the next. In the last-mentioned class of establishment the young people get up early and have very little material food to eat. So Mrs. Ingham-Baker wisely sent her daughter to the worldly school. This astute lady knew that girls who get up very early to attend public worship in the dim hours, and have poor meals during the day, do not as a rule make good matches. They have no time to do their hair properly, and are not urged so much thereto as to punctuality at compline, or whatever the service may be. And it is thus that the little habits are acquired, and the little habits make the woman, therefore the little habits make the match.Quod erat demonstrandum.
So Agatha was sent to a worldly school, where they promenaded in the King’s Road, and were taught at an early age to recognise the glance of admiration when they saw it. They were brought up to desire nice clothes, and to wear the same stylishly. On Sunday they wore bonnets, and promenaded with additional enthusiasm. Their youthful backs were straightened out by some process which the writer, not having been educated at a girls’ school, cannot be expected to detail. They were given excellent meals at healthy hours, and the reprehensible habits of the lark were treated with contumely. They were given to understand that it was good to be smart always, and even smarter at church. Religious fervour, if it ran to limpness of dress, or form, or mind, was punishable according to law. A wholesome spirit of competition was encouraged, not in the taking of many prizes, the attending of many services, or the acquirement of much Euclid, but in dress, smartness, and the accomplishments.
“My girls always marry!” Miss Jones was wont to say with a complacent smile, and mothers advertised it.
Agatha had been an apt pupil. She came away from Miss Jones a finished article. Miss Jones had indeed looked in vain for Agatha’s name in that right-hand column of theMorning Postwhere fashionable arrangements are noted, and in the first column of theTimes, where further social events have precedence. But that was entirely Agatha’s fault. She came, and she saw, but she had not hitherto seen anything worth conquering. So many of her school friends had married on the impulse of the moment for mere sentimental reasons, remaining as awful and harassed warnings in suburban retreats where rents are moderate and the census on the flow. If there was one thing Miss Jones despised more than love in a cottage, it was that intangible commodity in a suburban villa.
Agatha, in a word, meant to do well for herself, and she was dimly grateful to her mother for having foreseen this situation and provided for it by a suitable education.
She was probably thinking over the matter while she brushed her hair, for she was deeply absorbed. There was a knock at the door--a timid, deprecatory knock.
“Oh, come in!” cried Agatha.
The door opened and disclosed Mrs. Ingham-Baker, stout and cringing, in a ludicrous purple dressing-gown.
“May I come and warm myself at your fire, dear?” she inquired humbly; “my own is so low.”
“That,” said Agatha, “is because you are afraid of the servants.”
Mrs. Ingham-Baker closed the door and came towards the fire with surreptitious steps. It would not be truthful to say that she came on tiptoe, her build not warranting that mode of progression. Agatha watched her without surprise. Mrs. Ingham-Baker always moved like that in her dressing-gown. Like many ladies, she put on stealth with that garment.
“How beautifully the Count plays!” said the mother.
“Beautifully!” answered Agatha.
And neither was thinking of Cipriani de Lloseta.
Mrs. Ingham-Baker gave a little sigh, and contemplated her wool-work bedroom slippers with an affection which their appearance certainly did not warrant. There was a suggestion of bygone defeats in sigh and attitude--defeats borne with the resignation that followeth on habit.
“I don’t believe,” she said, “that he will ever marry again.”
The girl tossed her pretty head.
“I shouldn’t think any one would have him!”
She was not of the campaigners who admit defeat. Mrs. Ingham-Baker sighed again, and put out the other slipper.
“He must be very rich!--a palace in Barcelona--apalace!”
“Other people have castles in Spain,” replied Agatha, without any of that filial respect which our grandmothers were pleased to affect. There was nothing old-fashioned or effete about Agatha - she was, on the contrary, essentially modern.
The elder lady did not catch the allusion, and dived deep into thought. She supposed that Agatha had met and danced with other rich Spaniards, and could have any one of them by the mere raising of her little finger. Her attitude towards her daughter was that of an old campaigner who, having done well in a bygone time, has the good sense to recognise the deeper science of a modern warfare, being quite content with a small command in the rear.
To carry out the simile, she now gathered from this conversational reconnaissance that the younger and abler general at the front was about to alter the object of attack. She had, in fact, come in not to warm, but to inform herself.
“Mrs. Harrington seemed to take to Luke,” said Agatha, behind her hair.
“Yes,” answered Mrs. Ingham-Baker, proceeding carefully, for she was well in hand--“wonderfully so! Poor Fitz seems to stand a very good chance of being cut out.”
“Fitz will have to look after himself,” opined the young lady. “Did she say anything to you after I came to bed? I came away on purpose.”
Mrs. Ingham-Baker glanced towards the door, and drew her dressing-gown more closely round her.
“Well,” she began volubly, “of course I said what a nice fellow Luke was, so manly and simple, and all that. And she quite agreed with me. I said that perhaps he would get on after all and not bring disgrace upon all her kindness.”
“What do you mean bythat?” inquired Agatha.
“I don’t know, my dear, but I said it. And she said she hoped so. Then I asked her if she knew what his wages or salary, or whatever they are called, amounted to, and what his prospects are. She said she knew nothing about his salary, but that his prospects were quite a different matter. I pretended I did not know what she meant. So she gave a little sigh and said that one could not expect to live for ever. I said that I was sure I wished some people could, and she smiled in a funny way.”
“You do not seem to have done it very well,” the younger and more scientific campaigner observed coldly.
“Oh, but it was all right, Agatha dear. I understand her so well. And I said I was sure that Luke would deserve anything he got; that of course it was different for Fitz, because his life is all set out straight before him. And she said I was quite right.”
The report was finished, and Agatha sat for some moments with the brush on her lap looking into the fire with the deep thoughtfulness of a cool tactician.
“I amsurehe was struck with you,” said the mother fervently.
After all she was only fit for a very small command very far in the rear. She never saw the singular light in Agatha’s eyes.
“Do you think so?” said the girl, half dreamily.
“I am sure of it.”
Agatha began brushing her hair again.
“What makes you think so?” she inquired through the snaky canopy.
“He never took his eyes off you when you were playing the Count’s accompaniment.”
The girl suddenly rose and went to the dressing-table. The candles there were lighted, one on each side of the mirror. Agatha saw that her mother was still admiring her bedroom slippers. Then she looked at the reflection of her own face with the smooth hair hanging straight down over either shoulder. She gazed long and curiously as if seeking something in the pleasant reflection.
“Did she say anything more about Fitz?” she asked suddenly, with an obvious change of the subject which Mrs. Ingham-Baker did not attempt to understand. She was not a subtle woman.
“Nothing.”
Agatha came back and sat down.
“And you are quite sure she said exactly what you have told me, about not expecting to live for ever.”
“Quite.”
Then followed a long silence. A belated cab rattled past beneath the windows. There was apparently a cowl on the chimney connected with Agatha’s room, for at intervals a faint groaning sound came, apparently from the fireplace.
Agatha leant forward with her chin on her two hands, her elbows on her knees. Her hair hung almost to the ground. She was looking into the coals with thoughtful eyes. The elder tactician waited in respectful silence.
“Suppose-- ” said the girl suddenly, and stopped.
“Yes, my darling.”
“Suppose we accept the Danefords’ invitation?”
“To go to Malta?”
“Yes, to go to Malta.”
Mrs. Ingham-Baker fell into a puzzled, harassed reverie. This modern warfare was so complicated. The younger, keener tactician did not seem to demand an answer to her supposition. She proceeded to follow out the train of her own thoughts in as complete an absorption as if she had been alone in the room.
“The voyage,” she said, “would be a pleasant change if we selected a good boat.”
Mrs. Ingham-Baker reflected for a moment.
“We might go in theCroonahwith Luke,” she then observed timidly.
“Ye-es.”
And after a little while Mrs. Ingham-Baker rose and bade her daughter good-night.
Agatha remained before the fire in the low chair with her face resting on her two hands, and who can tell all that she was thinking? For the thoughts of youth are very quick. They are different from the thoughts of maturity, inasmuch as they rise higher into happiness and descend deeper into misery. Agatha Ingham-Baker knew that she had her own life to shape, with only such blundering, well-meant assistance as her mother could give her. She had found out that the world cannot pause to help the stricken, or to give a hand to the fallen, but that it always has leisure to cringe and make way for the successful.
Other girls had been successful. Why should not she? And if--and if--
The next morning at breakfast Mrs. Ingham-Baker took an opportunity of asking Mrs. Harrington if she knew Malta.
“Malta,” answered the grey lady, “is a sort of Nursery India. I have known girls marry at Malta, but I have known more who were obliged to go to India.”
“That,” answered Mrs. Ingham-Baker, “is exactly what I am afraid of.”
“Having to go on to India?” inquired Mrs. Harrington, looking over her letters.
“No. I am afraid that Malta is not quite the place one would like to take one’s daughter to.”
“That depends, I should imagine, upon the views one may have respecting one’s daughter,” answered the lady of the house carelessly.
At this moment Agatha came in looking fresh and smart in a tweed dress. There was something about her that made people turn in the streets to look at her again. For years she had noted this with much satisfaction. But she was beginning to get a little tired of the homage of the pavement. Those who turned to glance a second time never came back to offer her a heart and a fortune. She was perhaps beginning faintly to suspect that which many of us know - namely, that she who has the admiration of many rarely has the love of one; and if by chance she gets this, she never knows its value and rarely keeps it.
“I was just asking Mrs. Harrington about Malta, dear,” exclaimed Mrs. Ingham-Baker. “It is a nice place, is it not, Marian?”
“I believe it is.”
“And somehow I quite want to go there. I can’t think why,” said Mrs. Ingham-Baker volubly. “It would be so nice to get a little sunshine after these grey skies, would it not, dear?”
Agatha gave a little shiver as she sat down.
“It would be very nice to feel really warm,” she said. “But there is the horrid sea voyage.”
“I dare say you would enjoy that very much after the first two days,” put in Mrs. Harrington.
“Especially if we select a nice large boat--one of those with two funnels?” put in Mrs. Ingham-Baker. “Now I wonder what boat we could go by?”
“Luke’s,” suggested Mrs. Harrington, with cynical curtness. There was a subtle suggestion of finality in her tone, a tiniest note of weariness which almost said--
“Now we have reached our goal.”
“I suppose,” said Mrs. Ingham-Baker doubtfully, “that it is really a fine vessel?”
“So I am told.”
“I really expect,” put in Agatha carelessly, “that one steamer is as good as another.”
Mrs. Harrington turned on her like suave lightning.
“But one boat is not so well officered as another, my dear!” she said.
Agatha--not to be brow-beaten, keen as the older fencer--looked Mrs. Harrington straight in the face.
“You mean Luke,” she said. “Of course I dare say he is a good officer. But one always feels doubtful about trusting one’s friends--does one not?”
“One does,” answered Mrs. Harrington, turning to her letters.