"I hear you're laid up and hope you'll soon be all right again. I didn't thank you properly the other night; I couldn't; you know what I mean. Don't worry about my not keeping my promise; that's all right; everything's as-you-were till you're about again. But then I want to see you as soon as ever you can. You get well and don't worry."D. R."
"I hear you're laid up and hope you'll soon be all right again. I didn't thank you properly the other night; I couldn't; you know what I mean. Don't worry about my not keeping my promise; that's all right; everything's as-you-were till you're about again. But then I want to see you as soon as ever you can. You get well and don't worry.
"D. R."
Slowly I folded up the note and put it into the pocket of my pyjama-jacket. She seemed fully to expect my silence. The shadow of a marten fled swiftly across the sill of the window. The house-martens built at Ker Annic.
At last, "I see," I said slowly. "I see."
She did not seem to think it necessary to reply. Neither was it.
"I see," I said again. Then, "Yesterday you wentcycling," I said. "What did you do the day before?"
"I went for a walk."
"And the day before that?"
"I went for a walk too."
"Jennie ... were they supposed to know about these walks—you know who I mean?"
"Father and mother? No."
"Where did they think you were?"
"Don't know. I didn't say anything at all."
"They've no idea you went for two walks and a bicycle ride with Monsieur Arnaud?"
No reply.
That is to say, no reply in words; but for anything else her reply was plain enough. In every line of her lovely resolute short-featured little face I read that they did not know, were not to know, and that in the last resort she didn't care a straw whether they knew or not. And I remembered that in the matter of the note it was she who had taken the initiative, not he. A beautiful young woman is the devil from the moment when she gets too old to slap.
But the thing was grave. He had given me an undertaking which, his note now assured me, he was faithfully keeping; but I had no undertaking from her. And bachelor as I am, I am under no delusions as to what happens when mine, the proud, stalking, choosing sex, is marked down by its demure, still and emotional opposite number. Something can be done with us; we give undertakings and abide by them; but what can be done when the Jennie Airds take the bit between those pearls of their teeth? I shook my head. I shake it over the same problem still.
"But look here, Jennie," I said quietly. "This is all very well, but is it quite—playing the game?"
This also she evidently expected. "About father and mother? I've left school. I'm old enough to think for myself. Mother says so. Anyway I'm going to. She always said I should."
"But mother doesn't know about these walks and bicycle rides."
Obstinately she contested every little point, even a casual plural.
"There's only been one bicycle ride."
"One then. She doesn't know about it."
"I can't help that."
"But of course you could——"
"No I couldn't," she rapped out. "I mean I justcan'thelp it. How can anybody help it? How can anybody do anything about it? It's a thing that happens to you, and it happened to them before, and I expect they did just as they liked about it, and didn't care a bit what anybody said! I can just see mother if anybody'd said she wasn't going for a walk with father!"
"You can't see anything of the sort, Jennie. If I remember rightly what your mother said, she had to sit still in her own carriage till her own footman opened the door. That was what happened when your mother was your age."
"Well, they don't do that nowadays, and mother knows it," she retorted.
The heartless logic of youth! It will turn your own words against you as soon as look at you. Because her mother had recognised that the world did not stand still she was to be made an accessory to this deception.
"Then," I said presently, "if they don't know, ought I to know?"
"You knew before," she said. "They didn't."
"But they're bound to find out."
"Oh, I expect everything will be settled by then!" she calmly announced.
The dickens it would! I lay back on my pillow. Fortunately the appearance of tea at that moment gave me a little time in which to collect my thoughts. Jennie removed various objects from the bedside table, took the tray from the maid, and began to pour out.
"Then," I said by and by, "why aren't you bicycling—or walking—this afternoon?" I wanted to have the position quite clear. If she could spend three days with him in succession, why not a fourth, and a fifth, and a sixth?
"I had to give that note to you," she said.
"Ah, the note! I forgot that.... Have you any idea what's in it?"
She blushed crimson, flamed with reproach. All the same, I contrasted her shameless deception of her parents with this point of honour about peeping into an unsealed note to myself. These heaven-born young beauties draw the line in such odd places.
"I never thought——", she said, biting her lip; and I hastened to set her right.
"Good heavens, Jennie, you can't think that I meantthat! I meant in a general way, what the subject of it is."
"I know what he thinks," she said, the fierce colour slowly retiring again.
"Well, what does he think?"
"He thinks you were perfectly ripping to him the other night, about not doing anything till you saw him again, and when I told him you were ill he was awfully upset, and tore a page out of his sketch-book and wrote the note that very moment."
The devil!... But I went on.
"So he was sketching, and you went with him?"
"Yes. He did a sweet sketch, with me in it," she breathed, her eyes softly shining.
Only to see her and to go for bicycle-rides with her—only to speak to her and to paint her among the glowing sarrasin, the green translucence of the woods, the golden seaweed of the rocks or wherever it was——
"Oh, he did! And where was this?"
It was neither among the sarrasin, nor in the green woods, nor on the shore.
"It was miles and miles away, right past Saint Samson, nearly at Dinan, at a château called La Garaye," she said softly. "I never saw anything so lovely. There's a huge wide avenue of beeches like a tunnel—it's all in the middle of a lovely beechwood—and there's a lovely soft grass-ride right down the middle. Then at the bottom there are two great masses of ivy that used to be the château gates. Andpast them are the little white bits of the ruins. And there was an enormous loud humming everywhere, like a hundred aeroplanes. That was them thrashing at the farm with four horses that went round and round. We rode our bicycles down the green ride and put them up by some farm-buildings. They don't a bit mind your going anywhere you like, and they said he could paint if he wanted to. So he got out his things and I watched him. He didn't want me for the picture at once, because he had all the other to do first. Then he made me lie down in a frightfully nettley place, but he only laughed and said I'd got to be just there because it was where he wanted me. My hands are all nettled yet, look. So he painted me, Uncle George, and that horse-thing never stopped humming, and oh, it was so hot and blue and drowsy—I nearly went to sleep once. But the loveliest thing of all was afterwards. We climbed about among all those stones and ivy, and then there was a tower. Just like a castle tower, Uncle George, but not a hole or a window anywhere, except a place at the bottom just big enough to creep through. And what it was was an old pigeon-place, where they used to keep pigeons. All honeycombed inside with holes for thousands and thousands of pigeons. But, of course, there weren't any pigeons there, only an old sitting hen among the nettles that scurried round and round and then clucked away. It was like being at the bottom of a kiln or something, with grasses and flowers and things round the top and the skye-ver so blue! And all those thousands of pigeon-holes, all grown up with birch and ivy and nettles and that silly old hen! I picked a bit of herb-robert. Oh, it was a heavenly place!"
Heavenly indeed, I thought grimly. Heaven enough inside that columbarium, with only a small hole to creep in at, and the muffled drone of that horse-gin, shut out by the walls that had once been filled with the cushing of a thousand doves and only God's blue looking down on them from the top!
Heavenly enough to make your heart ache when you remembered that there, in that ruined place of dead doves, heconscientiously sought to keep his promise to me—while she had given never a word to take back. Oh, I saw it all right. No question about that. She took very good care that I should see it....
For I was being as softly cajoled and canvassed and propagandised as ever I was in my life. Derry, piloting me from shop to shop into the Dinard Bazaar, had taken me by the arm; but she wound herself in among my very heartstrings. And her plan was to upheap me with unasked confidences before I could say her nay. After that, if I guessed her thoughts rightly, there would be nothing for me to do but to respect the sacred but unwanted encumbrance. I should then be enlisted against Alec and Madge. Those of us whom the years have perhaps mellowed a little are ever at the mercy of calculated guile of this sort. To tell somebody something they don't want to know—and then to put them upon their honour not to divulge it!
The boy, the father of the man, indeed! Save us from the machinations of the maiden who is mother of the woman!
For she was a woman. In little more than a week or two she had almost visibly altered, shot up into maturity. I had no doubt that he would keep his word to me; but—onlyto see her,onlyto speak to her! Only! Though it were but looking, what inch of beauty was there about her of which I could dare to say, "His eyes have not embraced that, his glance has not been as his very lips upon it?" Though it were but hearing, what tone was there in the sweet gamut of her voice of which I could tell myself, "His ears at any rate have not heard that?" Not one. And under the homage of his gazing, under the flattery of his hearing, the last particle of her girlhood had turned and altered. That hair, so recently a ruddy plait to be "put up" on occasion, was now a bride's single garland, its golden strands to be unwound again on an occasion that was not even her parents' concern. Disdain was now all that young Charterhouse, young Rugby had from those pebble-greyeyes. And that tongue of hers, lately so petulant with the world, was now her subtlest weapon, to get under my guard, to seduce me with her confidences about pigeon-towers and what not, and by and by (I had not the slightest doubt) to say with a touching and heartfelt sigh, "Oh, what a comfort it is to have one person one can tell everything to!"
But this was all very well. Quite excellent to pat my pillow, and ask me whether my flowers had been changed, and to fuss about pouring out tea for me. But, while I had more or less got their measure singly, I had no idea what double-dealing they might not be capable of together. So as she still sat with shining eyes, dreaming again of that columbarium, I pressed to the next point.
"So he painted you. All in one sitting?"
She dropped the eyes. "I think he said it might take three or four."
"In fact it might be cheaper in the long run to buy the bicycle instead of hiring it?"
She was demure. "Oh, I don't think so, Uncle George."
"What do they charge for the hire of a bicycle?"
"I don't know, Uncle George. I haven't paid anything yet."
"Then you still have it? Haven't they asked any questions about it?"
She looked quickly and innocently up. "Father?... Oh, it isn't here! You see the tram's almost as quick to St Briac."
"Oh! Then it's at St Briac?"
"Yes. In the kitchen."
"The kitchen where Coco lives?"
"Yes. That one. But, of course, Coco's outside except when it's raining. And he has sung 'Quand je bois mon vin clairet.' He sang it beautifully."
"I'm sure he did," I assented grimly.... "Now tell me a little more of what Monsieur Arnaud said when he was so grateful to me for not doing my plain duty."
Her eyes were full on mine, with an expression I did notunderstand. Somehow the pretty scatter of freckles across the bridge of her nose seemed to give the look an added directness. Her lips parted, but not in a smile.
"You needn't call him Monsieur Arnaud," she said.
"What then?" I asked quickly. "What do you call him, if I may ask?"
At her reply the teacup almost dropped from my hand.
"That's really what he said I had to tell you this afternoon," she said. "Of course I call him Derry, like you."
I was hardly ill enough to have a temperature-chart over the head of my bed; had there been one heaven knows how high into the hundreds it must have leaped. I had been prepared for progression, development. Swiftly as things seemed to have advanced, from taking a single bicycle ride with him to keeping a bicycle in his kitchen was after all only a matter of degree. But this, of so totally different a piece, positively stunned me.
"Derry!" I echoed stupidly. "Derry what?"
"Rose, of course." Then, rushing almost breathlessly to forestall me, "But of course I know it's the mostfr-r-right-ful secret! I know that only the three of us know. And it's splendid of you, darling Uncle George, to have stuck up for him the way you did! I wouldn't breathe a single word, not if they were to stick knives into me!"
Her eyes brimmed with thanks for my loyalty, disloyalty or whatever it was. But what, in God's name, had he been mad enough to tell her? Everything? Had he told her the whole story rather than strangle her on the spot?
"Tell me what he said," I moaned in a weak voice. Better know the worst and get it over.
"Of course I'm going to. But oh, how could I be so horrid to you about that note! As if youwouldthink that I should peep into a note anyway! You do forgive me, don't you?"
"If you're going to tell me tell me quickly," I groaned.
So this, if you please, is what came next:
"It was while we were in that pigeon-place, where the hen was. They look like rows and rows of little square holes, where the pigeons used to live I mean, but when you put your hand in they're quite big inside, all scooped out, lots of room for both pigeons and all their eggs. And one row hooks round inside one way and the other the other. I discovered that when I put my hand in, and I turned round to tell Derry. And do you know, Uncle George, he's got such a funny name for that place. He calls it the Tower of Oblivion. I didn't know what oblivion was, so I didn't know what he meant just at first, but I think it's a splendid name for it now. You see——"
"You were saying that you turned round to tell him something."
"I was just coming to that. So I turned round, and at first I had rather a fright, because I couldn't see him. I thought he'd gone, but I didn't see how he could, because there was only that one little way in and I was standing close to it. Then I saw him behind the bushes and things, all among the nettles, and his head was against the wall. I made a noise, but he didn't seem to hear me. So then I touched him.
"'What's the matter, M'sieur Arnaud?' I said. 'Is something the matter?'
"Well, he didn't move, Uncle George. For ever so long he didn't move. Then he turned round, and oh, his poor eyes! I don't mean he was crying. He didn't cry once all the time. But he made me so anxious I didn't know what to do.
"'What is the matter, M'sieur Arnaud? Do tell me what's the matter!' I said.
"'You mustn't call me that,' he said. 'It isn't my name.'
"'Not your name!' I said. 'But Sir George Coverham calls you that, and mother calls you that, and Sir George wouldn't have told mother so if it wasn't so, and they call you that where you live!'
"'They do, and it isn't my name,' he said. 'I want to tell you my name,' he said.
"Well, I thought it awfully funny everybody calling him something that wasn't his name. So I said, 'Well, whatisyour name?'
"'Rose,' he said.
"'What besides Rose?' I said.
"'Derwent,' he said. 'Derwent Rose. But George calls me Derry.'
"'George? Do you mean Sir George Coverham?' I said.
"'Yes. I sometimes call him George,' he said.
"And then, Uncle George, he put his head against the wall again and went on saying to himself, 'The Tower of Oblivion, the Tower of Oblivion,' over and over again."
I closed my eyes, but it was like closing them in a swing, so sick and dizzy did I feel. I had never seen that Tower in my life, yet somehow I seemed to be there—walled in, cut off from the rest of mankind, with only that hot deep blue overhead, and the grasses that fringed the circular top minutely bright and intense against it. The loud droning of the threshing-gin at the adjacent farm seemed to be in my ears, but in my heart was a more moving murmur. Gentle and forgotten place! With what croonings, what flutterings, had it not once been astir! Those little cavities into which she had thrust her hand were the cells of a once-throbbing heart. But who had built a Tower of stone to guard the dove's faithfulness? What masonry could make that, the very emblem of love, more secure? Of all birds, the constant dove to be thus immured? Towers are for the defence of the helpless, not of that invulnerable meekness and strength. All the stones in the world could not more fortify those soft immutable hearts. Such humility, yet so stable: such defencelessness, yet so steadfast! It was in this wondrous place, thrice strong without but ten times strong within, that Derwent Rose had sought his atonement. He too, hard without, was all tenderness within. He had no choice but to lie to the rest of the world, but she must be told the truth. Arnaud would do well enough for others,but he had no peace unless to her he was Derwent Rose. It was his comfort to tell her so, and that Tower was in truth his confessional, the Oblivion of his dead years.
"But of course you know all about it, Uncle George," she went on. "I didn't, you see, and that's what made it sound so queer. So I said to him, 'But why do you call yourself Arnaud if your name is Rose?'
"'Because something once happened to me,' he said.
"'What?' I asked him.
"'I don't know,' he said. 'George doesn't know. Nobody knows. A doctor once tried to tell me, but he didn't know either.'
"'But what sort of a thing?' I said. 'What does it do?'
"'It makes me younger,' he said. 'I'm years and years older than I look. I'm not young at all.'
"'But I don't understand,' I said. 'If it makes you young then youareyoung, aren't you?'
"And then he smiled. I was so glad to see him smile. He'd been fearfully mopey up to then.
"'That's so,' he said. 'And anyway it's all over now. If it wasn't I shouldn't be telling you. If it wasn't over I shouldn't be here, Jennie.'
"He called me Jennie for the first time. He hadn't called me anything up to then, ever.
"'Then if it's all over what are you bothering about it for?' I said. 'Was it your fault?'
"'No,' he said.
"'Then,' I said, 'if a thing isn't a person's fault I think we ought to be sorry for them, and it doesn't matter if it's all over. And,' I said, 'if Uncle George calls you Derry I'm going to call you Derry too. It really is all over, Derry dear?'
"'Look, Jennie,' he said.
"And then, Uncle George, he looked up at the sky out of the top of the Tower, and bent his knee and crossed himself three times, like this."
Over her young breast her hand did what his had done.
"'And you promise it wasn't your fault?' I said.
"'That was my promise, Jennie,' he said.
"'Then,' I said, 'I don't want to hear another word about it. I won't listen. You're not to tell me any more.'
"So I wouldn't listen, and when he opened his mouth I just did this——"
And laughingly, with her hands tight over her ears, she shook her head. She would no more peep behind his word than she would have peeped into his note.
"And all this was yesterday?"
"Yes."
"Where is he to-day?"
"I only saw him just for a minute this morning. He wouldn't let me go with him to-day. He said I must come to you and tell you what I've just told you. So I waited till father and mother had gone out and then I came."
"And when father and mother come back? How do I stand? What am I to do?"
She sat straight up. "To do, Uncle George? But youpromisedhim!"
"I promised him for the moment."
"Well, thisisthe moment, isn't it? You'll see him as soon as ever you get up again, won't you?"
"Between the two of you I don't seem to have very much choice," I muttered....
Suddenly through the open window came the sound of voices below. Alec and Madge had returned. Jennie flew to my glass, and then, apparently finding all well there, turned, smiled, and put her finger on her lips. She was busily packing up my tray when Madge entered.
"Well, decided to live, George?" the kind creature rallied me. "All sorts of sympathetic messages for you from the Nobles and the Fergusons and the Tank Beverleys—run-after creature that you are! Been to sleep?"
"No."
Jennie passed behind her mother with the tray. She gave me a half-veiled glance as she did so. Then, almost imperceptibly, she brushed her mother's shoulder with her lips.
And well, I thought, she might!
"Jennie been reading to you?" said Madge.
"No, we've just been talking."
"Well, you'll have somebody else to talk to the day after to-morrow. We didn't want to trouble you with the affairs of this world when you were at death's door, but who do you think's coming?"
I made a great effort. "Animal, vegetable or mineral?"
"Angel, whichever that is," said Madge.
"I've angels enough about me."
"Pooh!... Julia Oliphant's coming. So you'd better get your colour back in case she wants to paint that portrait here."
With which comforting words she took up my bowl of quite fresh flowers and marched off to get some more.
"But won't you find it a little cold?"
"Cold!" Julia laughed. "If Jennie can I can; why, it's a heavenly day! But are you quite warm? You're the one we have to coddle."
"Oh, I'm quite all right. Well, that's your tent, the green-striped one. I'll walk along to the rocks."
She took the escholtzia-hued robe and other fripperies from my arm, nodded smilingly, and passed up the beach.
The Airds and their set bathed, not from the crowded plage of Dinard proper, but in the quieter bay of St Enogat. The beach glistened with minute particles of mica, deposited in moiré patterns as the wavelets had left them, and to touch that sand with your hand was to withdraw it again all infinitesimally spangled. It sparkled like gun-metal in the rocks, floated in suspension in the green water. You would have said that the whole shore had been sown with that metallic powder with which children used to tinsel themselves at Christmas parties.
I crossed the tent-bordered plage towards the rocks. Already a dozen bathers splashed and played. Every contour of wet limb reflected the warm gold, every rubber-capped head had its piercing little flash of sunlight. I looked for Jennie's yellow cap, but did not see it; she was still in the tent whither she had preceded Julia five minutes before. But I saw the Beverley girls, of whose mutual sufficiency Madge so strongly disapproved. Jennie was not to be brought up on those lines....
I lay down on a purple-weeded rock and watched the fruit salad of the bathers. Scattered over the beach where they had dropped them lay their bright wraps, the prints of their sandals patterned the mica. Tank Beverley's head could be seen, a dark dot a quarter of a mile out, and in thegreen marge two little French children splashed, brown as nuts and innocent of any garment whatever. Their barefooted mother knitted a few yards from where I sat, their father lay by her side with his panama over his face. The sun shone honey-yellow through the wings of the gulls, and far out a little launch crept among the rocks and sent its soft "thut-thut" over the water.
Jennie and Julia were taking rather a long time to get ready, I thought, and I hoped all was well. For Jennie, if the truth must be told, was behaving abominably. She was far, far too submissive and sweet and self-effacing before the older woman—altogether too good to be true—and I happened to know that Madge had taken her to task about it a couple of days before.
"I don't see why you can't call her just Julia if it comes to that," she had rebuked her. "She isn't a hundred, anyway. I do wish you'd stop saying 'Aunt Julia.'"
"I'm very sorry, mother darling. Shall I call her Miss Oliphant?"
As a matter of fact I had not since heard her use any form of address whatever.
It was the third day after Julia's arrival, and my own longest walk since my touch of illness. Without even changing her travelling-things, Julia had come straight up into my room the moment of her arrival at Ker Annic, and, kneeling down by my bed, had taken both my hands into hers.
"You poor old George!" she had laughed. "So this is what you've been and gone and done to yourself! Well, we must see what an extra nurse can do."
"Had you a good crossing?"
"Well—crowded wasn't the word; but two nice dear men looked after me. I'd a scandalous flirtation with one of them; oh, I 'got off'; he was putting my collar round my neck for me before we passed the Needles. And may I solemnly assure you, George, that in Buckingham where I've been staying a male man wanted to marry me? Fact. And when I said No-could-do he accused me of encouraging him and left the house the next day. Such is human life so gliding on. Have you fallen in love with a Frenchwoman yet?"
"Not yet."
"Oh, but they're so wonderful! They walk like lines of poetry. There was one on the boat coming over; I suppose my cavalier didn't speak French very well, or he'd never have looked at me with her about. I don't know though—it gives you a lot of confidence when you've been proposed to.... Well, I must go and have a bath and change. I only peeped in to see you. 'Après le bain,' as the Salon pictures say—be good."
And with a nod over the collar of her terra-cotta blanket-coat she had left me.
Of our subsequent talk about Derwent Rose I will speak presently.
They appeared together from behind the green-striped bathing-tent. The wind-blown wrap of escholtzia-orange and the green turban were Julia's; Jennie wore her white towelling gathered closely about her, and the yellow cap was pulled as low as her eyebrows. Julia is only slightly taller than Jennie. A good four feet separated the orange and the white as they advanced towards me. Julia saw me and waved her hand; Jennie made no gesture. Julia looked freely about her; Jennie gazed straight ahead. The blowing aside of Julia's wrap showed a short-skirted bright green costume with ribboned sandals; Jennie bathed in her plain navy-blue "Club" and her feet were bare. I rose to take their wraps.
Except for one piece of advice she offered, Jennie did not speak to Julia.
"I don't think I'd go beyond the point there," she said as her towelling fell to her feet. "There's rather a rip."
She ran down to the water. Julia turned to me.
"You all right?" she asked. "Here"—laughingly she took the vivid wrap from my arm and put it about my shoulders. "There! Now you're all comfy. That'll keep both you and it warm for when I come out again."
She nodded and followed Jennie. Julia Oliphant has very little to learn about walking from any woman, French or not. With her robe about me I sat down on the rock again.
Atrociously Jennie was behaving. She had been told by Madge in plain words that she was expected to bathe with Julia that afternoon, and she intended that Julia should be quite aware of the quality of her obedience. Even in her little warning about the rip at the point there had been a delicately-measured ungeniality, and their attitude as they had walked from the tent together had been—well, polite. She had now joined the Beverley girls in the water, and if Miss Oliphant cared to go beyond the point after being warned not to that was her look-out. She did not fail of a single attention to the older woman; but every time she vacated a chair or asked Julia whether she could fetch her book she had the air of saying to herself, "There, I did that and mother can't say I didn't."
And I suppose it does make you a little cross when you are sent to bathe when you want to be off somewhere on a bicycle.
Julia Oliphant had not bathed during that week-end she had spent in my house in Surrey. It had been Derry who had done the swimming. But I fancied it would have been different had she had that week-end to live over again. She had remarkably little to be ashamed of in the water. The long arm she threw out thickened, rather surprisingly and very beautifully, up to its pit; and the man on the boat who had shown the solicitude about the collar of her blanket-coat had been quite a good judge of necks. Jennie's glistening dark-blue shape seemed still coltish and nubile by comparison with Julia's ampler mould. But the twenty-odd years that separated them were Jennie's stored and untouched riches, not Julia's. It was Jennie, not Julia, who could stay half a day in that water and come out without as much as the numbing of a finger-tip. And the difference between Jennie's navy-blue "skin" and that other smart and tricky green was the difference between the young leaf-bundle inits sticky sheath and the broad opened palms of the chestnut in midsummer.
As I sat there on the rocks, forgetting that escholtzia-yellow thing about my shoulders as the seniors forget their tissue-paper caps at a children's party, I pondered a resolve I had taken. Between Julia Oliphant and myself there had not hitherto been a single secret in anything that concerned Derwent Rose. But a secret there must now be. She might find out about Derry and Jennie for herself, but from me she should never hear it. Jennie was hardly likely to confide in her. Derry himself—who knew?—might. Him she had not yet seen.
But we had spoken of him, and almost my first question had been to ask her whether she had been staying on in England in the expectation of his return. Her reply had been curiously, smilingly nonchalant.
"No, I don't think so; not altogether, that is. What does it matter whether I see him there or here?"
"But you weren't seeing him, either there or here."
"Oh, there wasn't any hurry. It's only three weeks. That isn't very long."
"That depends. Three weeks with him might be a very long time indeed."
"Oh, but ifthathappened again you'd have told me," she had said, with the same off-handedness.
"I might not have done so. You left it entirely to me."
"Well, no news is usually good news. And I wasn't wasting my time. I did get a proposal."
"About that. And forgive me, because I don't mean it rudely. But is that a joke?"
"Not a bit of a joke. He did want to marry me. So you see that's Derry's too."
"What is?"
"Thatis. The more—let's say desirable I am, if I don't scandalise you, the more I have for him. And anyhow I'm here now."
"Did you ask Madge to ask you?"
"Yes. In the end I thought I would. There was nohurry, but there was no sense in positively wasting time. You say he's at St Briac. Where's that? I don't know this coast."
"Six or seven miles. A tram takes you all the way."
"Then we'll look him up. But I want to do a bit of shopping with Madge first. Must have a couple of hats. I hardly bought a single thing to come away with."
And her manner ever since had been for all the world as if something was inevitable, would come of itself, in its own good time, whether she lifted a finger to further it or not.
It may sound fantastic to you, but I could almost have believed that when she had taken that yellow thing from her own shoulders and had put it over mine, she had invested me with something more than a garment, something almost of herself. I had seen Jennie's disdainful glance at the coquetry with which she had cast it about me; almost insolently she had allowed her own towelling to drop where it would; and Julia now enveloped me in a double sense. Cloak or no cloak, she claimed all my thoughts, all my gazing. For I and I only knew why she was in France. Her errand was the deadlier the less haste she made. I had sought to interpose between him and Jennie because Jennie was too young; could I now step between him and Julia because Julia was too old? Moreover, both women now knew his terrific secret. The exquisite complication I had dreaded to entertain was upon us in its perfection. What, between the three of them, was to happen now?
For Julia he was on his way back to sixteen.For Jennie he hoped to go forward again.Julia's influence over him had been to rob him of eleven years in a single night.But I could guess what calm and healing had brooded over him as he stood with Jennie in the Tower.Julia had strangely made herself his scapegoat and had left him lighthearted, innocent, free.Jennie knew nothing of this, and yet had an instinct that Julia Oliphant was a person to be kept at arm's length.Julia was still unaware that apparently his years had ceased to ebb.Jennie, his partial confession in the Tower notwithstanding, was unaware that the matter had any great seriousness.Julia had her knowledge of his former youth.Jennie was in possession of his present one.Julia would walk through flame to find him.Jennie would do no less to keep him.
One drop of comfort I found in the whole extravaganza, and one only. Jennie's naughtiness might reach extremes of civility, but so far at any rate Julia was tolerantly good-humoured about it. For she could hardly be unconscious of the—well, the bracing temperature of the atmosphere. But how long was that likely to last? Once more Derry seemed to have us all entangled in the web of his unique condition. Already my own surreptitious visits to him had made me feel little better than a slinking conspirator; the presence of Jennie's bicycle in that St Briac kitchen did not improve matters; and now, to cap all, Julia and I were to seek him out.
Again I found myself weakly wishing that I could wash my hands of him. And again I knew that I could not. It seemed to me that there was nothing to do, not even anything to refrain from doing. The whole thing ran itself. It ran itself independently of any of us, as it had run itself with equal smoothness and efficiency whether Julia had stayed in England or had come over here.
And I sat contemplating it, wrapped in her vivid cloak, wrapped in her lurid thoughts, my looks alternately seeing and avoiding her shape in the water, while the sun flashed on the grapes and apricots and oranges of that fruit-salad in the waves of St Enogat's plage.
They came out again, dripping, gleaming, Julia laughing, Jennie without a smile.
"I'll wait here for you," I said to Julia as I replaced her wrap on her shoulders.
"Right you are. Ten minutes. Come along, Jennie——"
The billowing escholtzia-yellow and the closely-gathered white retreated up the beach again.
In a quarter of an hour Julia returned alone. She sat down by my side.
"Jennie wouldn't come. She's taken the things in. George," she suddenly demanded, "is that child in love?"
I parried. "Is that a thing I should be very likely to know?"
"Then I'll tell you. She is. All the signs—every one. She can't sit still in one place for five minutes. Poor little darling!" she smiled. "I remembersowell...."
"Wouldn't it be better if you were to take a walk after your bathe?"
"What about you? Sure it wouldn't be too much for you?"
"I should like a walk."
"Come along then. I suppose I did stay in as long as was good for me."
A steep stone staircase descends between the villas, in the chinks of which hawkweed and poppies and pimpernel have seeded themselves. At the top of it a winding lane leads to the church, and from this there branches off the Port Blanc road. In that direction we walked, and in ten minutes were among cornfields and hedges, clumps of elms and coppices of oak. Ploughs and chain-harrows lay by the footpaths, and the sea might have been a hundred miles away.
"Sure you're not overdoing it?" she asked as we took a little path under a convolvulus-starred hedge.
"Quite all right, thanks."
"Oh, smell the air! This is a jolly place! Which way is St Briac from here?"
"Over that way."
The dark eyes sent a message. "Well, now tell me what his painting's like. I expect it's as wonderful as his writing was."
"It rather struck me—I don't know much about it—but I fancied it was on somewhat similar lines."
"What sort of lines?"
"The old story—starting anew from the very beginning of everything—nothing to do with anything else, past, present or to come."
"Of course he would be the same.... But now tell me—we've hardly had ten words yet, what with Madge and shopping and your silly illness and one thing and another. You say he's got to twenty?"
"Thereabouts."
"And he hasn't moved since—you know what I mean?"
"That isn't quite clear."
"What isn't there clear about it?"
"He thinks he's moving—he hopes to move—forward again."
She stopped to stare at me. Already the few days' sun had softly browned her natural milky pallor.
"Hewhat!" she gasped.... "But that's wilder than all the rest put together!"
"It's what he thinks. There's simply his word for it. He can't explain it. But he's staking everything on it."
"Everything? What?"
"His future course, I suppose, whatever that is. By the way, has Madge said anything to you about him?"
She stared harder than ever. "Madge! Does Madge know him?"
"She doesn't know Derry. But she knows Arnaud. He's been to the house."
"He's been ... Oh-h-h-h!"
You may call me if you will the most dunderheaded fellow who ever meddled in things he did not understand. I deserve it all and more. All the same I must ask you tobelieve me when I say that it was not until that "Oh-h-h-h!" broke in an interminable contralto whisper from her lips that I saw what I had done. I had resolved that not one word of Jennie Aird's affairs should she learn from me. As much for her own sake as for Jennie's I had determined to spare her that.
And now I had gone and told her that very thing!
For the knowledge of it leaped full-blown out of that long record of her own heart. Jennie was in love; Arnaud had been to Ker Annic; therefore—she knew it, she knew it—Jennie was in love with Derry. How should anybody, seeing him as Julia Oliphant had seen him at his former twenty, not fall in love with him? Young, sunbrowned, beautiful, grave—only to see him, only to have him at the house for tea, was to be in love with him during the whole of the remaining days. Who knew this if Julia Oliphant did not? Jennie thenceforward would love him as she herself had loved him through the unbroken past. And if he thought his turning-point had now come, forward into the future again he and Jennie would go together.
That and nothing else was what I had told her.
"Oh-h-h-h!" she said again. "Isee!" And yet once more, "Oh-h-h-h! Isee!"
And, losing my head once, in that very same moment a wilder thing still rose up in my heart to crown it with folly. I forgot that between Julia Oliphant and myself there could never be any question of love. Little difference it made that I now loved her, knew now that I had long loved her. For me she could never care. Yet I forgot that. It seemed to me in that overwrought moment that if Derry really was right, and on the point of living normally forward again, in one way the field of the future could be left to him and to Jennie Aird. Julia and I together could leave it to them. She in my arms (I was distracted enough to think), Jennie in his, would at least cut the knot it passed our wits to untie. In any case Derry would never again look at Julia Oliphant. He never had looked at her. But I looked and found her desirable, as other men had found her desirable. And whyshould not I too have whatever of good the remaining years could give me?
So, under that convolvulus-starred hedge, with that sweet air in our nostrils and the whispering of the corn in our ears, I asked Julia Oliphant to marry me.
Before coming out she had picked up and put on her head one of Alec's panamas. For the rest she wore a sort of rough creamy crape, with a wide-open collar, elbow-length sleeves, a cord round her waist, grey silk stockings and suède shoes. Little wisps of her dark hair were still damp from her bathe, and her skirt was dusted with particles of mica from the sands. Since uttering that "Oh-h-h-h!" she had not moved.
"I see," she said again. "I see."
"Then, Julia——"
"Oh, I see! I ought to have known the very first moment!"
"Then——"
She turned towards me, but only for an instant. Then she looked away again. "What were you saying?" she asked.
"Very humbly, I asked you to marry me, Julia."
"Queer," she murmured.
"Is it so very queer?"
She gave a tremulous little laugh. "The way everything happens at once, I mean. Get yourself proposed to once and you go on. I shall know quite a lot about it soon.... I say, George——"
"What, Julia?"
"How long ago was that—when he came to the house, I mean?"
"About ten days ago."
"And you there! What nerve! Did he let himself be introduced to you, or what?"
"He came up and shook hands with me. In fact he carried everything off very competently."
"Carried everything off ..." she repeated, looking away over the corn. "And has he been since then?"
"We had tea with him in his garden one afternoon."
"One afternoon ..." she murmured again. "How does Jennie spend most of her time?"
"I've been laid up in bed."
"Of course," she nodded. Apparently she passed it as a good man's answer, as men's answers go.
But my own question she did not appear to dream of answering. Except to compare it with another man's similar question she might not have heard it. Nor had I asked that question only as the solution of an otherwise insoluble problem. Happy I, could I have taken her into my arms there and then. So I waited, my eyes in the shadow of her panama, while she continued to look far away.
Then, "I see," she said yet once more. "Of course I ought to have known in the tent."
"In the tent?"
"The bathing-tent. She could hardly bear to share it with me. But she let me have the little stool, and untied a knot for me, and carried my wet things home."
"Madge Aird's daughter wouldn't behave altogether too unlike a lady."
"Madge Aird's daughter's a woman," she replied.
Then her whole tone changed. She confronted me.
"That that you've just been saying is all nonsense, of course," she said abruptly. "You know it is. What happened in July puts that out of the question once for all. How can you possibly ask that woman to marry you?"
"I have asked her."
"She isn't her own to marry anybody. And I don't see how Derry can marry anybody either. What's he going to do—forge papers, or impersonate somebody?... No, George; my way was the only way—take what you can while you can."
"Marry me, come right away, and have done with it."
She gave me a slow sidelong look.
"Isthatthe idea—just a way out for everybody?"
"Don't think it. I didn't begin to love you this afternoon."
"Proposals pour in—once they start!" she admired. "Oh, how little we know when we're young, and how much when it's too late to make any difference!"
"Julia," I said abruptly, "what do you intend to do about him?"
She smiled, but without speaking.
"Are you going to see him?"
"That's a silly question. Of course I am."
"Is it wise?"
"I'm not wise. I suppose I should be Lady Coverham if I were wise."
"What are you going to do about Jennie?"
"Oh, I shan't fly out at her."
"Marry me and come away."
She shook her head. "That's the one thing Iamsure about."
"Then don't marry me, but come back to England."
"And leave the field clear? I see that too. Of course you want to give her to him."
"If you only knew how I've striven to prevent it!"
Her hand touched my sleeve for a moment. "Poor old George—always trying to prevent somebody from doing something! Has it ever occurred to you that that's sometimes the way to bring it about?" Then, imperiously, "Has he told you he's in love with her?"
"If he is in love with her, and has no eyes for any other woman living, and never will have, will you marry me then?"
"Oh, we had all that years ago. Has he told you he's in love with her?"
"Since you must know, he has."
"Now we're getting at it. I thought you'd something up your sleeve. Now just one more question. Do you happen to know whether he's toldherthat?"
You see what I was in her hands. She cut clean through my web of speculations as scissors go through cloth. I had resolved to tell her this, not to tell her that. The end of it was that I told her precisely what she wished to know.
"I've reason for thinking he hasn't," I said. "For one thing, he made me a promise."
But she flicked his promise aside as she flicked the convolvulus with her nail. She laughed a little.
"Anyway I don't suppose he has the least idea what's the matter with him. He never did know anything about women."
But ah, Julia Oliphant, whatever mistakes you made in your life, you never made a greater one than that! Me you might turn this way and that round your finger, but here was something beyond your knowledge and control. I knew what you did not know. I knew what had happened by those softly-illumined cars, by that earth-wall at Le Port gap, and that other night when Fréhel had bidden the Crucifix move and come to life. It was not now he who knew nothing about women, but you who knew nothing about him. I grant you all your other rightness; I grant you that I had drifted and bungled as men do drift and bungle in these things; but here I was right and you hopelessly and irretrievably wrong. He did know about women. Books he had flung aside, pictures he would fling aside, for these were but the dust out of which that loveliest flower bloomed. He did know about women, and all the beauty of his strange destiny had now swung over to Jennie. He had passed with her into the Tower of Oblivion, and Julia and I and the rest of the world for him and her were not.
The Tower of Oblivion! It was his own name for it. Jennie had not understood him; the name had merely sounded sweet to her because it was his; but what apter emblem of his own life? To find this new and smiling love in the place so hauntingly whispering with memories of the old! There, in the very middle of the busyness of life, with a threshing-gin droning and the lad's whip cracking among the walking horses and man's simple bread making as it was made in the beginning, he had shut himself in with her and the blue heaven overhead. They had not kissed, but—onlyto be there with her, only to be rid of the lie he lived to the rest of the world and to be all truth to her!... Julia Oliphant would but bruise her heart against the stones of that Tower, thrice-strong outside but impregnably strong within. God or gland, it vanquished us all. He had found what he had so long sought, and the sooner Julia became Lady Coverham the better.
I forget the precise words in which I reminded Miss Oliphant that I was still waiting for her answer. She turned on me with eyes that so kindled that for a moment I thought she had reconsidered it.
"George, tell me one thing. Do you really believe it—that his clock's really set forward again?"
I answered slowly. "I don't know. I won't say that I don't. Sometimes I almost have believed it. One has his word for the age he feels, and there's nothing else to go by. After all, going forward seems somehow more natural than going back. I've no other grounds for my belief."
Somehow my words had not in the least the effect I intended. Everything I said or did seemed to work contrary to my intention. I saw her making a swift mental calculation. She was a woman to be desired—very thoroughly she had made it her business to be so. If I wanted her, if other men wanted her, so (I read her thought) might he be made to want her. What stood in her way? A chit of seventeen in turkey-towelling! What was a trifle like that to daunt a ripe woman who knew coquetries with escholtzia-yellow bathing-wraps? If it only lasted a year ... six months ... the rest of the summer ... the rest of the summer of her life....
"Young and beautiful," she said softly with a quickening of her breath. "I remember—I remember——"
"Then forget. He'll never look at you."
"Ah, he thought that once before——"
"You brought him to the verge of ruin last July——"
"You say he's young and beautiful—that's what I brought him to—youth and beauty——"
"Unless he goes forward now—if he begins to slip back again—you know what he said his climacteric was—sixteen——"
She threw up the white-panama'd head on the long throat. My eyes dropped before hers, my question was blown to the winds that set the corn a-rustling. I told you at the beginning of this story that I had never married.
"And how," she said proudly, "if he had it in my arms?"
Whether Madge and Julia were friends because of, or in spite of, the differences in their nature, I will not attempt to say. In the situation now in course of development at Ker Annic, however, they struck me as not so much different as opposite. Madge's bark is always infinitely more terrifying than her bite; but the more mischief Julia meditated the stiller she always became, except for a little dancing play deep-drowned in her eyes. She had risk-taking eyes, and the expression in them, if you looked at her as if you wondered whether she had counted the cost, was one of detached surprise that you should pause to weigh chances with the gorgeous adventure plain before you.
And what a risk she now contemplated, certainly for him, perhaps more for herself! What the penalty of failure—or of success—might be to herself I cannot tell you, since I am not in the habit of speculating about what responsibilities ladies incur who love a man all their lives, grow up alongside him as a "jolly good sort," violently assail him when he clings as it were to a loop amid the dizzy curves of his life's track, and then, when he comes to rest and again begins slowly to revolve on the turn-table at the terminus, put out their hands to the lever once more. What she had taken from him, what she had given him in return, were mysteries beyond me. I merely realised that, if sheundertook this in the spirit of adventure, it was adventure on a well-nigh apocalyptic scale.
But what about him? For him it was not a question, as it was for her, of a few weeks' madness and then a folding of the hands, the Nunc Dimittis and darkness. She would merely be putting the seal on a life that already anticipated its close; but he would be asked to cut one off in the very moment of its re-flowering. He saw ahead of him that boon for which humanity has cried out ever since another woman gave her man the Knowledge in the Garden. "Ah, might I live again knowing what I know now!" ...Si jeunesse savait, si vieillesse pouvait!...He did know, he was able; and Julia Oliphant, discovering that she had done all for Jennie Aird, now sought to take it back again. For should ruin supervene, it would be Jennie, not Julia, who would now be robbed and wronged. I could hardly look at Julia, standing there by the hedge, without re-living those anguished moments in which I had ascended his stairs and knocked at his door, hardly daring to hope for an answer. He knew not that ultimately it was from Julia that he now had this manna and honey, this healing oil and wine. He only knew that he received them at Jennie's hands, and with this soft nourishment he had victualled his Tower.
So what disaster might not befall if Julia were to introduce that yeasty fermenting element of herself all over again?
Slowly we returned together across the cornfields, I and the woman who had hardly deigned to refuse me. Since our final rapid exchange, that had ended with her demand "How if he had it in my arms?" not a word had passed between us. In that one insolent sentence she had not merely put my pretensions out of existence: she had made them as if they had never been. That they could never be again I knew only too well. Therefore, in silence we passed under the shadow of St Enogat Church, crossed the little space opposite the Café de la Mer, and entered the winding lanes to Ker Annic.
At the gate of the villa Madge met us with a peremptory question.
"Where's Jennie? Isn't she with you?" she demanded. She gave a quick glance behind her as she spoke. Obviously she wasn't. Madge glanced over her shoulder again.
"Then don't for goodness sake say she hasn't been. Alec's stamping up and down the garden—says she's been seen with young Arnaud somewhere at the back of beyond on a bicycle. I sent her to bathe with you, Julia."
"She did," said Julia quickly.
"Then just tell him that and say she must have gone into town or something. I know she has been back, because I looked into her room and saw her half-dried costume. You quieten Alec down, George. Have you had tea?"
But in spite of my efforts to placate Alec, I found the fat badly in the fire at Ker Annic. Alec raged up and down the pergola as if he had been caged within it.
"Exactly what I said would happen! I knew it all along!" he stormed. "Noble saw 'em—no mistake possible, he says—pedalling all over Brittany with Tom, Dick and Harry.... Where did she get that bicycle? I haven't seen any bicycle about here! First I've heard of a bicycle!"
"Simmer down, Alec. There's no great harm in a bicycle ride after all."
"If she's been for one she's been for a dozen for all I know. She was sent off to bathe."
"Well, she did bathe."
"Were you there? Did you see her?" he challenged me, now suspicious at every point.
"Yes. She bathed with Julia. I waited for them."
"You waited for Julia, you mean. Nipped in and out so as to be able to say she'd been and then dashed off with this fellow, I suppose. Look here, he appears to be a protégé of yours, but I want to know more about him before there's any more of this. What does he go about in that rig for? Why does he talk French like that?" (This last headed the list of his offences in Alec's eyes.) "There's somethingfishy about the whole thing. Jennie sees him sketching, evidently doesn't know any more than the man in the moon who he is, and goes up to him and speaks to him in French and he answers in English! Then he says he's a level-time man, but touched in the bellows. He's about as much touched in the bellows as I am!... Who is he? Did he really stay with you? How did you get to know him?"
"He did stay with me. He's perfectly straight. Don't make such a fuss."
"Well, I expect Jennie's as much to blame as he is. They generally are. If I've told Madge once ... anyway it's got to stop. Of course if he's a friend of yours that's another matter, but gadding about all over the place has got to stop. Is she back yet? I want to see her when she does come in."
And so on. I left him in his cage, angrily knocking out his pipe against the lattice.
The worst of it was that Alec was so very much righter than he knew. I had ventured to assure him that our young French-speaker was perfectly straight, and you know how far that was true. In the wider sense who was crookeder, whose life more devious? Not one straight step did his circumstances permit him to take. Why, the only satisfactory way he had been able to hit on to provide himself with money had been his fantastic idea of fighting Georges Carpentier, the simplest way he had found of crossing the Channel had been to swim it! Straight? Too straight altogether. The world is not accustomed to people so straight that they go straight plumb into the heart of things like that.... And, merely as straightness, how was he now to acquire even an ordinary identity? Had hebeenanybody, had he in the past once possessed an identity he was able to acknowledge, ways might have been found. He would then have had a starting point. He might have invested himself with a name and place in the world by means of the French equivalent of a deed poll. He might have got himself cited by name in a civil court, have snatched a social existence even out of the formalities of registration attendant on a State Lottery. But not one of these ways was open to him. Nothing short of an act of creation could establish him. Nothing comes out of nothing, nothing can be made out of nothing. Stronger even than that Tower of stone is this other invisible Tower in which we all live, each stone an ego, its mortar the whole complicated everyday nexus of the social fabric. All that he was able to do was to make assertion that he was Arnaud, and let us take it or leave it at that. How Alec would take it there was very little doubt.
Nor was there much doubt in Madge's case either. She might talk family histories and hidden scandals till the cows came home, but, in the end, the Airds' would be the last household into which any suitor would penetrate without the strictest investigation. Derry might palm off his Somerset Trehernes upon us during a casual tea-hour, but Alec would now dive into the last pigeon-hole in Somerset House but he would know exactly who it was who aspired to become his son-in-law.
Jennie appeared at about half-past six, and Alec's first demand was to be told where that bicycle was.
"What bicycle?" she asked.
"Haven't you come home on a bicycle?"
"No, I came home by the tram, father."
"Where from?"
"From St Briac."
"Haven't you been out with that fellow on a bicycle, or has a mistake been made?"
The game was up. "I did go for a bicycle ride."
"With that fellow Arnaud?"
"Yes, father."
"You went immediately after your bathe?"
"Yes."
"Where's the bicycle now?"
"I left it at St Briac."
"Where in St Briac?"
"At his hotel, where mother and Uncle George and I went that day."
"Where did the bicycle come from?"
"I hired it, father."
"In St Briac?"
"No, in Dinard."
"And you keep it in St Briac?"
"Yes."
"Why there instead of here?"
No reply.
"Why in St Briac instead of here?"
Still no reply.
"How often have you been for these rides?"
"About eight or ten times, father."
"Did mother know about it?"
"No, father."
"Then that means that you've been practically every day for a fortnight?"
No reply.
"Very well, Jennie. Now listen to what I have to say."
Enough. You see the style of it. Alec is an affectionate father, but, his grumbling indulgence to Madge notwithstanding, there are no two ways about his being master in his own house. The upshot of it was that a maid was to be sent to fetch that bicycle first thing in the morning, and back it was to go to the shop where it had come from. Further, if Jennie wished to see this M. Arnaud again, it must only be by express permission from himself. There was plenty of amusement at the Tennis Club among young fellows they knew something about, and—not another word. It ought never to have begun, but anyway it was done with now and need not be referred to again. She had better go and have some tea if she hadn't had any, and as forthé dansantto-morrow afternoon, if she wanted a new frock for it she might have one. Now run along, and don't be late for dinner.
Of the five of us, Alec was easily the most cheerful at that evening's meal. His duty done—kindly, he hoped, but anyway done—he talked about anything but that afternoon's unpleasantness. Then, rather to my surprise, about half-way through dinner Julia began to second his efforts. We sat round the Ganymede, two men and three women, Alec between Julia and his wife, Jennie between Madge and myself. Everybody, Alec included, was kindness itself to the silent child, andthé dansantwas talked of. The Beverleys were giving it. They had engaged a room at one of the hotels, and Madge had been helping to decorate that afternoon.
"Those were the Beverley girls bathing with us this afternoon, weren't they, Jennie?" Julia asked across me.
"Yes."
"Aren't they just a little—stand-offish?"
"I don't know. I didn't notice. Are they?" said Jennie dully.
"They're——" Alec began, but checked himself. In the circumstances the upbringing of the Beverley girls was not the happiest of subjects, and Madge struck hastily in.
"One gets almost sick of the hydrangeas here, Julia, but they're really most extraordinarily effective. We've put four great tubs of them, ice-blue almost, in the corners, as big as this table nearly, and against all that cream-and-gold.... Oh, Jennie! You know father says you can have whichever of those frocks you like. I should say the voile. Which do you think?"