XII
Nevertheless, Rosie Graham’s anecdote of the girl who had gone to Port Said, and her vehement advice to have nothing to do with the Greek, continued to haunt Lydia’s mind.
Neither had she forgotten Miss Nettleship’s warning, and the sense that the manageress was watching her with melancholy anxiety caused her to surmise that Mr. Margoliouth had not yet made good his assurance of payment.
She refused an invitation to go to the play with him, but was too anxious that the boarders should continue to look upon her as the heroine of an exciting love-affair to discourage him altogether, although she had really made up her mind that she should not care to be engaged to Margoliouth.
If the first man who had made her acquaintance since she left school showed so much tendency to make love to her, Lydia shrewdly told herself, there would certainly be others. She could well afford to wait, in the certainty of eventually finding a man who would possess such attractions and advantages as the Greek could not boast.
Meanwhile, Margoliouth made life interesting, and Lydia a subject of universal observation and discussion.
She was feeling agreeably conscious of this on the Saturday following her conversation with the manageress,as she came into the boarding-house in time for the midday meal.
Miss Nettleship was hovering at the foot of the stairs and failed to return Lydia’s smile.
“He’ll have to go,” she said without preliminary. “I got his cheque, and the Bank has returned it. You see how it is, dear—a terrible business. I don’t know whether I shan’t have to call the police in even now before I get my money. He’s leaving on Monday, and if I’ve not had the cash down from him, I don’t know what’ll happen, I’m sure.”
“Oh, Miss Nettleship, how dreadful! Iamsorry for you,” said Lydia, giving expression to the surface emotion of her mind only, from habit and instinct alike.
“Don’t you have anything more to do with him, dear,” said Miss Nettleship distractedly. “That Agnes is letting something burn downstairs. I can smell it as plain as anything. I’ll have to go. Poor old Agnes! she means well but you quite understand how it is——”
The manageress hastened down the stairs to the basement.
Lydia could not help glancing at her neighbour in the dining-room with a good deal of anxiety. He seemed quite imperturbable, and said nothing about his departure.
Lydia, whose opinion of Miss Nettleship’s mentality was not an exalted one, began to think that Mr. Margoliouth knew quite well that he could pay his bills before Monday, and had no intention of going away at all.
Otherwise, why was he not more uneasy? Far from uneasy, Margoliouth seemed to be livelier than usual, paid Lydia one or two small compliments with his usual half-condescending, half-sardonic expression, andasked her if she would come out to tea with him that afternoon.
Miss Nettleship was on one of her periodical excursions to the kitchen, and Miss Forster, Mrs. Clarence, and Mrs. Bulteel were listening with all their ears, and with as detached an expression as each could contrive to assume.
“Thank you very much, I should like to,” said Lydia demurely.
They went to a newly-opened corner shop in Piccadilly, where a small orchestra was playing, and little shaded pink lights stood upon all the tables. The contrast with the foggy December dusk outside struck pleasantly upon Lydia’s imagination, and she enjoyed herself, and was talkative and animated.
Margoliouth stared at her with his unwinking black gaze, and when they had finished tea he left his chair, and came to sit beside her on the low plush sofa, that had its back to the wall.
“A girl like you shouldn’t go about London alone,” he suddenly remarked, with a sort of unctuousness. “At least, not until she knows something about life.”
“Oh, I can take care of myself,” said Lydia hastily.
“But you don’t know the dangers that a young girl of your attraction is exposed to,” he persisted. “You don’t know what sort of brutes men can be, do you?”
“No girl need ever be annoyed—unless shewantsto be,” quoted Lydia primly from Aunt Beryl’s wisdom.
“You think so, do you? Now, I wonder if you’ll still say that in three years’ time. Do you know that you are the sort of woman to make either a very good saint or a very good sinner?”
The world-old lure was too potent for Lydia’s youth and her vanity.
“Am I?” she said eagerly. “Sometimes I’ve thought that, too.”
The Greek put his hand upon her, slipping his arm through hers in his favourite manner.
“Tell me about your little self, won’t you?” he said ingratiatingly.
“Always let the other people talk about themselves.”
Oh, inconvenient and ill-timed recollection of Grandpapa’s high, decisive old voice! So vividly was it forced upon the ear of Lydia’s unwilling memory that she could almost have believed herself at Regency Terrace once more. The illusion checked her eager, irrepressible grasp at the opportunity held out by the foreigner. The game was spoilt.
“There’s nothing to tell,” she said abruptly, suddenly grown weary.
Grandpapa had said that long stories about oneself always bored other people, whether or no they politely affected an appearance of interest.
No doubt it was true.
Lydia knew that she herself was not apt to take any very real interest, for instance, in Nathalie Palmer’s long letters about her home, and the parish, and the new experiment of keeping hens at the vicarage, nor in the many stories, all of them personal, told by the girls at Elena’s, nor even in the monotonous recital of Miss Nettleship’s difficulties with her servants.
Why should the Greek be interested in hearing Lydia’s opinion of Lydia?
She cynically determined that it would not be worth while to put him to the test.
“Let’s go home,” she said.
Margoliouth raised his eyebrows.
“I suppose that all women are capricious.”
His use of the word “women,” as applied to her nineteen-year-old self, always insensibly flattered Lydia.
She let him take her back to the Bloomsbury boarding-house in a hansom, and remained passive, although unresponsive, when he put his arm round her, and pressed her against him in the narrow confinement of the cab.
“Dear little girl!” sighed Margoliouth sentimentally, as he reluctantly released her from his clasp when the cab stopped.
Lydia ran up the steps, agreeably surprised at the instant opening of the door, and anxious to exchange the raw and foggy atmosphere outside for the comparative warmth and light of the hall.
The dining-room door also stood open, and as Lydia came in Miss Forster rushed out upon her.
“I’ve been waiting for you!” she cried effusively. “Come in here, my dear, won’t you?”
“Into the dining-room?” said Lydia, amazed. “Why, there’s no fire there! I’m going upstairs.”
“No, no,” said Miss Forster still more urgently, and laying a tightly-gloved white-kid hand on Lydia’s arm. “There’s someone up there.”
She pointed mysteriously to the ceiling.
Lydia looked up, bewildered, but only saw Miss Nettleship, the gas-light shining full on her pale, troubled face, hastening down the stairs. She passed Lydia and Miss Forster unperceiving, and went straight up to the Greek, who had just closed the street door behind him.
“Mr. Margoliouth!” she said, in her usual breathless fashion. “You see how it is—it’s quite all right, I’m sure ... but your wife has come. She’s in the drawing-room.”
Margoliouth uttered a stifled exclamation, and then went upstairs without another word.
Miss Forster almost dragged Lydia into the dining-room.
“There! Of course you didn’t know he was married, did you? Neither did any of us, and I must say I think he’s behaved abominably.”
“But who is she? When did she come?” asked Lydia, still wholly bewildered at the suddenness of the revelation.
“Sit down, and I’ll tell you all about it.”
Miss Forster settled her ample person in a chair, with a general expression of undeniable satisfaction.
“Just about half an hour after you’d left the house, I was just wondering if I should find dear Lady Honoret at home if I ran round—you know my great friends, Sir Rupert and Lady Honoret. I’m sure I’ve often mentioned them; they’re quite well-known people—but I thought, of course, there wouldn’t be a chance of finding them disengaged—she’s alwayssomewhere—so Mrs. Bulteel and I were settling down to a nice, cosy time over the fire. Irene had actually made up quite a good fire, for once. And then the door opened”—Miss Forster flung open an invisible portal with characteristic energy—“and in comes Miss Nettleship—and I remember thinking to myself at the time, in a sort of flash, you know: Miss Nettleship lookspale—a sort of startled look—it just flashed through my mind. And this woman was just behind her.”
“What is she like?”
Lydia was conscious of disappointment and humiliation, but she was principally aware of extreme curiosity.
“Just what you’d expect,” said Miss Forster, with a decisiveness that somehow mitigated the extremely cryptic nature of the description. “The moment I saw her and realized who she was—and I’m bound to say Miss Nettleship spoke her nameat once—that moment I said to myself that she was just what I should have expected her to be.”
Lydia, less eager for details of Miss Forster’s remarkable prescience than for further information, still looked at her inquiringly.
“Dark, you know,” said Miss Forster. “Very dark—and stout.”
She described a circle of immense and improbable width. “Older than he is, I should say—without a doubt. And wearing a white veil, and one of those foreign-looking black hats tilted right over her eyes—you know the sort of thing. And boots—buttoned boots. With a check costume—exactly like a foreigner.”
“I suppose sheisa foreigner.”
“I spoke in French at once,” said Miss Forster. “It was most awkward, of course—and I could see that Mrs. Bulteel was completely taken aback. Not muchsavoir fairethere, between ourselves, is there? But, of course, as a woman of the world, I spoke up at once, the moment Miss Nettleship performed the introduction. ‘Comment vous trouvez-vous, M’dahme?’ I said. Of course, not shaking hands—simply bowing.”
“What did she say?” Lydia asked breathlessly, as Miss Forster straightened herself with a little gasp, after a stiff but profound inclination of her person from the waist downwards.
“She answered in English. She has an accent, of course—doesn’t speak nearly as well as he does. Something about us knowing her husband. ‘Do you mean Mr. Margoliouth?’ I said. Naughty of me, though, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, very,” said Lydia hastily. “But what did she say?”
“Took it quite seriously,” crowed Miss Forster, suddenly convulsed. “Really, some people havenosense of the ludicrous. I said it for a bit of mischief, you know. ‘Do you mean Mr. Margoliouth?’ I said—and she answered me quite solemnly, ‘Yes, of course.’”
Then it really was Margoliouth’s wife. Lydia began to realize the fact that until now had carried no sort of conviction to her mind.
Margoliouth, a married man, had been making a fool of her before all these people. Such was the aspect of her case that flashed across her with sudden, furious indignation.
She perceived that Miss Forster was looking at her with curiosity.
“I didn’t know that he was married at all,” said Lydia calmly.
“No one could have guessed it for a moment, and he never gave us a hint,” said Miss Forster indignantly. “You won’t mind me saying, dear, that I wanted to get you in here and tell you quietly before you went up and found her there, sitting on the sofa as calm as you please.”
“Thank you,” said Lydia. “But really, you know, it doesn’t matter to me if Mr. Margoliouthismarried. Only I think he ought to have told Miss Nettleship, and—and all of us.”
“The cad!” cried Miss Forster energetically, andstriking the rather tight lap of her silk dress with a violence that threatened to split the white-kid glove. “What we women have to put up with, I always say! Only a man could behave like that, and what can we do to defend ourselves? Nothing at all. I was telling Sir Rupert Honoret the other day—those friends of mine who live in Lexham Gardens, you know—I was telling him what I thought of the whole sex. Oh, I’ve the courage of my opinions, I know. Men are brutes—there’s no doubt about it.”
“I suppose he didn’t expect her here?” said Lydia dreamily, still referring to the Margoliouthménage.
Miss Forster understood.
“Not he! You saw what a fool he looked when the manageress told him she was here. She’s come to fetch him away, that’s what it is. She as good as said so. But they’ll be here till Monday morning, I’m afraid—the pair of them. Ugh!——” Miss Forster gave a most realistic shudder. “I don’t know how I shall sit at table with them. Miss Nettleship has no business to take in people of that sort—she ought to have made inquiries about the man in the first place, and I shall tell her so.”
“Oh, no,” said Lydia gently. “Please don’t. She’ll be so upset at the whole thing already.”
“Very generous!” Miss Forster declared, her hand pressed heavily on Lydia’s shoulder. “Of course, it’s you one can’t help thinking of—a young girl like you. Oh, the cad! If I were a man, I’d horsewhip a fellow like that.”
She indulged in a vigorous illustrative pantomime.
“I shall be all right,” Lydia said quickly—insensibly adopting the most dignified attitude at her command.
She moved to the door.
“Have some supper sent up to your room, do,” urged Miss Forster. “I’m sure Irene would get a tray ready, and I’ll bring it up to you myself. Then you won’t have to come down to the dining-room.”
“Thank you very much, but I’d rather come down.”
Lydia was speaking literal truth, as, with her usual clear-sightedness, she soon began to realize.
Not only was her curiosity undeniably strong, both to behold the recent arrival, and to observe Margoliouth’s behaviour in these new and undoubtedly disconcerting circumstances—but it was slowly borne in upon her that she could not afford to relinquish the opportunity of standing in the lime-light with the attention of her entire audience undeviatingly fixed upon herself.
Her humiliation could be turned into a triumph.
Lydia set her teeth.
She had been very angry with Margoliouth, and was so still—less because he had deceived her than because the discovery of his deceit must destroy all her prestige as the youthful recipient of exclusive attentions. But after all, she could still be the heroine of this boarding-house drama.
Lydia reflected grimly that there were more ways than one of being a heroine.
She looked at herself in the glass. Anger and excitement had given her a colour, and she did not feel at all inclined to cry. She was, in fact, perfectly aware that she was really not in the least unhappy. But the people downstairs would think that she was proudly concealing a broken heart.
Lydia dressed her thick mass of hair very carefully, thrust the high, carved comb into one side of the greatblack twist at just the right angle, and put on a blouse of soft, dark-red silk that suited her particularly well.
There was a knock at her door.
Lydia went to open it, and saw Miss Nettleship on the threshold.
“Oh, my dear, I am so sorry, and if you want a tray upstairs for this once, it’ll be quite all right, and I’ll give the girl the order myself. You aren’t thinking of coming down to-night, are you?”
“Yes, I am,” said Lydia steadily. “It’s very kind of you, but I’d rather come down just as usual.”
“It’s as you like, of course,” said the manageress in unhappy accents. “Miss Forster came to me about you—you know what she is. But I’m so vexed you should have heard all in a minute like, only you understand how it was, dear, don’t you? And his wife has paid up the bills, all in cash, and wants to stay over Sunday.”
“There’s the bell,” said Lydia.
“Then I must go, dear—you know how it is. That old Miss Lillicrap is such a terror with the vegetables. I do feel so vexed about it all—and your auntie will be upset, won’t she? Are you ready, dear?”
Lydia saw that the kind woman was waiting to accompany her downstairs to the dining-room, but she had every intention of making her entrance unescorted.
“I’m not quite ready,” she said coolly. “Please don’t wait—I know you want to be downstairs.”
The manageress looked bewildered, and as though she felt herself to have been rebuffed, but she spoke in her usual rather incoherently good-natured fashion as she hastened down the stairs.
“Just whatever you like, and it’ll be quite all right.I quite understand. I wish I could wait, dear, but really I daren’t....”
Lydia was very glad that Miss Nettleship dared not wait.
She herself remained upstairs for another full five minutes, although her remaining preparations were easily completed in one.
At the end of the five minutes she felt sure that all the boarders must be assembled. Hardly anyone was ever late for a meal, since meals for most of the women, at any rate, contributed the principal variety in the day’s occupation.
Nevertheless, Lydia went downstairs very slowly, until the sound of clattering plates and dishes, broken by occasional outbreaks of conversation, told her that dinner was in progress.
Then she quickly opened the dining-room door.
They were all there, and they all looked up as she came in.
Her accustomed seat at the far end of the table, next to the Greek, was empty, but on Margoliouth’s other side sat a strange woman, whom Lydia was at no pains to identify, even had Miss Forster’s description not at once returned to her mind. “Very dark—and stout—and dressed like a foreigner.”
Mrs. Margoliouth was all that.
Lydia saw the room and everyone in it, in a flash, as she closed the door behind her.
Miss Lillicrap, clutching her knife and fork, almost as though she were afraid that her food might be snatched from her plate while she peered across the room with eager, malevolent curiosity—Miss Nettleship, suddenly silent in the midst of some babbled triviality, and evidently undecided whether to get upor to remain seated—Mrs. Bulteel, her sharp gaze fixed upon Lydia and her pinched mouth half open—Miss Forster, also staring undisguisedly—Mrs. Clarence, with her foolish, red-rimmed eyes almost starting from her head—the youth, Hector Bulteel, his mouth still half-full and a tumbler arrested in mid-career in his hand—his father’s sallow face turned towards the door, wrinkled with an evident discomfiture.
Mrs. Margoliouth herself had raised a pair of black, hostile-looking eyes, set in a heavy, pasty face, to fix them upon Lydia.
Irene had stopped her shuffling progress round the table, and turned her head over her shoulder.
Only Margoliouth remained with his head bent over his plate, apparently absorbed in the food that he was sedulously cutting up into small pieces.
In the momentary silence Lydia advanced. Her heart was beating very quickly, but she was conscious of distinct exhilaration, and she remembered to tilt her chin a little upward and to walk slowly.
There was the sudden scraping of a chair, and pale, ugly Mr. Bulteel had sprung forward, and come down the room to meet her.
The unexpected little act of chivalry, which obviously came as a surprise to himself as to everybody else, nearly startled Lydia out of her predetermined composure.
She looked up at him and smiled rather tremulously, and he pulled out her chair for her, and waited until she was seated before returning to his own place again.
The meal went on, and the atmosphere was electric. Contrary to her custom, Miss Nettleship made no attempt at introducing the new-comer, and Margoliouth did not seek to rectify the omission.
He ate silently, his eyes on his plate. Twice Lydia addressed small, commonplace remarks to him, each time in the midst of a silence, wherein her voice sounded very clear and steady. He answered politely but briefly, and the other women at the table exchanged glances, and one or two of them looked admiringly at Lydia.
It was this consciousness that kept her outwardly composed, for she found the position far more of an ordeal than she had expected it to be. She was even aware that, under the table, a certain nervous trembling that she could not repress was causing her knees to knock together.
She felt very glad when the meal was over and old Miss Lillicrap—who always gave the signal for dispersal—had pushed her chair back, and said venomously:
“Well, I can’t say, ‘Thank you for my good dinner.’ The fowl was tough, and I didn’t get my fair share of sauce with the pudding.”
“Are we having a rubber to-night?” Miss Forster inquired loudly of no one in particular, with the evident intention of silencing Miss Lillicrap.
Lydia saw Mrs. Bulteel frown and shake her head, as though in warning.
Margoliouth, however, had at last looked up.
“I’m not playing to-night,” he said sullenly.
“Doesn’t your wife play Bridge?” Miss Forster inquired rather maliciously.
“No.”
“You’re tired with your journey perhaps,” piped Mrs. Clarence, looking inquisitively at the stranger.
Mrs. Margoliouth stared back at her with lack-lustre and rather contemptuous-looking black eyes.
“What journey?” she said in a thick voice. “I’ve only come up from Clapham, where we go back on Monday. Our house is at Clapham. The children are there.”
“The children?” repeated Mrs. Clarence foolishly.
“We have five children,” said Mrs. Margoliouth impassively, but she cast a fierce glance at her husband as she spoke.
Miss Forster suddenly thrust herself forward, and demonstratively put her arm round Lydia’s waist.
“I suppose you’re going upstairs to your scribbling, as usual, you naughty girl?” she inquired affectionately.
“I ought to,” Lydia said, smiling faintly. “It isn’t cold in my room now that I’ve got a little oil-stove. I got the idea from a girl I went to supper with the other night, who lives in rooms.”
“How splendid!” said Miss Forster, with loud conviction, her tone and manner leaving no room for doubt that she was paying a tribute to something other than the inspiration of the oil-stove.
Lydia smiled again, and went upstairs.
The other boarders were going upstairs too, and as Lydia turned the corner of the higher flights that led to her own room, she could hear them on the landing below.
“I do think that girl’s behaving most splendidly!”
Miss Forster’s emphatic superlatives were unmistakable.
“She looks like a sort of queen to-night,” said an awed voice, that Lydia recognized with surprise as belonging to the usually inarticulate Hector Bulteel.
She had not missed her effect, then.
Lydia did not write that evening. She went to bedalmost at once, glad of the darkness, and feeling strangely tired. After she was in bed she even found, to her own surprise, that she was shedding tears that she could not altogether check at will.
Then, after all, sheminded?
Lydia could not analyze her own emotion, and as the strain of the day relaxed, she quietly cried herself to sleep like a child.
But the eventual analysis of the whole episode, made by Lydia with characteristic detachment, brought home to her various certainties.
Margoliouth’s defection had hurt her vanity slightly—her heart not at all.
She could calmly look back upon her brief relations with him as experience, and therefore to be valued.
But perhaps the conviction that penetrated her mind most strongly, was that one which she faced with her most unflinching cynicism, although it would have vexed her to put it into words for any other human being. No grief or bereavement that her youth was yet able to conceive of could hurt her sufficiently to discount the lasting and fundamental satisfaction of thebeau rôlethat it would bestow upon her in the view of the onlookers.