“Fare is fowl, and fowl is broke;Take the white and leave for us the yolk.”
“Fare is fowl, and fowl is broke;Take the white and leave for us the yolk.”
“It was an impromptu effort,” the author apologized. “And then he didn’t see why the discovery of the End of Euston should be a supreme moment, even in the life of a lunatic.”
Peter could best have enlightened the Respectable Old Gentleman, to whom stations were stations, neither more nor less. Euston was her terminus for Thatch Lane; and on the many occasions that Stuart had accompanied her thither, they had taken to their hearts the grim portals and endless echoing approach, the labyrinth of platform and grey mystery of booking-hall, the infinite possibilities in its stretching regions and sinister corners. Very much less than station, when their whim was to treat it as a nursery of toys; and how much more than station, when its oppressive personality foredoomed it as a backcloth for the day when their mood should be of tragedy. Peter and Stuart viewed Euston with respect; but regarded it nevertheless as theirs by virtue of understanding, a kingdom into which even Merle could not stray.
In the balancing whereof—for Stuart was careful to dole even kingdoms and secrets with perfect equality and fairness—he and Merle were both Insiders of society, permitting them likewise to be Truants from society; a privilege Peter lacked, in that one cannot play truant from a stage one has never entered. But society, rumour-fed that the charming granddaughter of Madame des Essarts, and Heron, the fabulously wealthy young diamond-merchant, were of late to be seen frequently in company one of the other, society did approve of this most desirable union; and, furthermore, did seek to forward it by a system known as “throwing-together.” Merle and Stuart, meeting on the area-steps and by the back-doors of society, had no desire whatsoever for propinquity of the hall-portals and front drawing-room; so that Merle received with polite indifference the tidings that Stuart was to be present at some glittering function; and Stuart went so far as to refuse invitations to dinner-parties, carefully prepared with a view to placing him at Merle’s side during three solid hours of mastication.
Heron and des Essarts; riches and family; youth and beauty; it was an alliance altogether too suitable, and the parties involved felt it their bounden duty not to give it visible encouragement. “I—will—not—have you made easy for me,” Stuart muttered in his most clenched voice. Truants of society both, they enjoyed their truancy as much for what they left behind, as for what they went to seek.
Peter smiled sometimes, as she reflected how little of sordid niggling money worries, of harassing debts, of the snatching hour-to-hour existence that went on in the Bohemian underworld, was known to those who have a sufficiency of baths, and travel first-class as a matter of course. Perversely enough, she hugged to herself thememory of the few years she had spent on the border-line between respectability and squalor; was glad they were hers alone, unshared by Merle or Stuart. Her one-world! ... had they each a one-world, she mused, as well as their two-world and their three-world?
She and Merle had not as yet succeeded in locating the heel of their Achilles. Stuart was hard and ruthless, that they had agreed in their many confabulations on the subject; quite without sympathy for weakness or sentiment of any kind. But signs had betrayed a vulnerable spot in him, tantalizingly indicated, vanished as soon as they attempted to follow up the trail. Childish he certainly was at times. Childish in the quick look he was wont to throw, angling for approbation, after the successful performance of what they were pleased to term a “stunt.” Childishly annoyed at any reference on their part to the kingdom as it stood before he entered it. Childishly petulant on an occasion when the girls took him adventuring in a part of the world unfamiliar to him, so that initiative fell for once into their hands. Childishly ill-mannered on another occasion, when Peter, partly in the spirit of mischief, sought to make a quartette of trio by the introduction of a new discovery in the male line. Then Stuart, even as he had done previously with Mark St. Quentin, uprose mightily in his wrath, and hurled the unoffending youth from the topmost battlements into the moat of blackness. Whereat the girls gave their officious Prætorian clearly to understand that with them alone lay the orders for entrance and ejection:
“You were disgustingly rude. You were worse; you hurt his feelings!——” A furiously indignant Merle, ivory burning to rose, eyes storm-grey. “You hurt him,” she repeated.
“It’s not a serious wound,” thus the culprit, coolly. “You shall go and put balm upon it, Merle. I believe you keep a balm factory for applying relief to theendless victims of my ‘disgusting rudeness.’” He loved to tease Merle, who was soft-hearted.
“It sounds like margarine,” she cried, in distasteful reference to the balm. And the incident closed on a laugh.
But childishness was not weakness; nor could it account for those moments when he seemed mutely to plead to them for something. And then the memory would be swept away in a gale of swagger, loud crows of self-approval,—accompanied always by a twinkle in the unwindowed eye, that plainly betrayed amused knowledge of his own effrontery.
“Just where Stuart suffers,” remarked Peter to Merle, in a spasm of illumination, “is that his wings of swank will always be attributed to the uplifting effects of his money-bags, and condemned accordingly. Whereas I’m perfectly certain that without a penny he would still remain as magnificently and serenely confident. It’s in him, not in his pockets. But he’ll never get a chance to prove it. And he wears himself out in the invention of opportunities to wear himself out.”
“The qualities of a Stoic rotting in the bosom of a millionaire,” reflected the other girl. “He’s rather a dear,” she added with sudden inconsequence.
Peter surveyed her quizzically: “Quite sound as yet, are you? No bones broken?”
Merle felt herself: “Heart all right—thighs—ankles—shoulder-blades——Yes, thanks, I’m perfectly sound and rather happy. How are you?” politely.
Thus theirs was the advantage, to be able to make of him a subject for discussion. Stuart knew no such relief. His search for truth in this double she-encounter had of necessity to be a solitary quest. Nor did his previous she-encounters assist him one whit. He could rely on Merle and Peter to be thoroughly loyal to one another, and unblushingly disloyal towards him, which was baffling, by way of a beginning. They showed farcleverer than the sirens who had previously essayed to lure his boat to destruction, save when he sought to compare them with females renownedly intellectual, when by sheer perversity, the two would present themselves to his mental conception as capriciously feminine, exasperating in their swift changes of mood, in their demands upon him for the impossible, in their conscious and provoking mystery. No space of time to analyse them individually as separate Sphinxes for his unravelling. As yet they were still an undivided problem.
He knew they kept guarded and intact their innermost chambers of all. Well—did he not also retain his one-world? A world in which dwelt Stuart the metaphysician, who, stronger even than Stuart the leprechaun, recognized with dismay an ability to slip out of the trio and its pattern, its march-rhythm and its corkscrew wit; get glimpses of himself as a bit of a fool; of the whole edifice they had raised, as absurd, exaggerated; doubting whether such close comradeship with two girls, save with the outlook and excuse of pure masculinity, did not contain an element—yes, though he loathed the term, an element of the fantastic? In fact, when he could add himself to the collection that was to be left to the nation. But he limited these glimpses, as being contrary to the rules of the game; would have denied them himself altogether, had he not been convinced they added to the fun,—the fun of scrambling back, aware he had been outside, a truant from truancy! The metaphysician went in fear that the leprechaun would one day lose his scrambling abilities; that the intellect would predominate over the sense of worlds beyond the reach of facts. The metaphysician was wistfully envious of the leprechaun, who continued to kick up his heels in despite of disapproval.
There likewise dwelt in the one-world a Stuart Heron known to college friends, such as Oliver Strachey, who remembered him as the finest classical scholar of hisyear; and other men viewing him solely in the light of a keen sportsman; a fellow good to knock about with; not much of a talker; inclined to be a bit shattering and explosive at times, but apologizing for these ebullitions by a great excess of heartiness afterwards; excess indeed, for Stuart was apt to over-emphasize his normality.
Remained Heron the diamond-merchant, who was perhaps negligible—perhaps also not.
April this year had stolen some of June’s warm gold, so that devotees of the river could for once pay homage to tender mist of green, and mating bird-song. The trio had been afloat since early hours, before the sun had yet drunk all the diamond dew from the cobwebs, and Peter more than once apologized to Stuart for the continual reminders of his trade that sparkled from every grass-blade, every opening leaf.
Their boat had pushed first into all the locks, and shot first out, nose thrust between the slowly widening gates. They had discovered an island above the broken glinting shoulder of a weir; and, annexing it for their own, played Swiss Family Robinson thereon, with great contentment, save for some slight argument concerning the parts: “Little Franz for me,” Peter declared, “because of the rides. Whatever wild animal they catch, be it ostrich or donkey or tortoise, Arab steed or earwig, there’s always ‘just room for our little Franz upon its back.’ Franz has an easy time of it. His father makes him a quiverful of arrows, and ‘off he trots, looking like a Cupid,’ That’s me. Stuart, you shall be the father.”
“I’ve no vocation for impromptu sermons on the goodness of Heaven in permitting our pigs to find truffles,” retorted Stuart. “And I want to be ‘my wilful headstrong Fritz.’ Merle shall be father—andmother.”
Merle demurred. They always cast her for the “mother” parts, she complained, simply because her hair chose to remain tidier than other people’s. At which thrust, Peter renounced the entire game, and decided she wanted to play at hounds-among-the-undergrowth. Her companions looked puzzled.
“‘The Hound of the d’Urbervilles’? Sleuth-hounds? Hounds of Low? of Ditch? Hounds of Heaven? Or just Faithful Hounds? Peter, please specify, and I might even play at being just one tiny little puppy bloodhound myself.”
In the end Stuart was the entire pack, and Master of the Hounds to boot. And then they abandoned this new sport in favour of the Spanish Armada; sailed ignited fireships down a backwater, and roused volumes of sputtering and inarticulate wrath in the bosom of a mild man of peace whose skiff they had almost set in flames.
Now, subdued to a more twilit mood, they lie dark against the quenched amber and pearl of the sunset; and reviewing their April day, they find it good. Stuart, in ostentatious proof that he needs no rest from his Herculean labours with the pole, has allowed Peter to recline full-length in the punt, her head upon his knees, the while she lazily smokes a cigarette, and complains that his bones penetrate the thickness of four cushions, and hurt the back of her neck.
“Which proves that you are a Princess by birth,” laughs Merle, squatting, a graceful Dryad, on the adjoining bank. “You remember the incident of the pea under the twelve mattresses?”
And now it is that Peter solemnly propounds the question, as to whether (a) consciousness of swank and swagger, and (b) consciousness of the irritation produced in others by swank and swagger, could or could not be held as mitigating circumstances for aforesaid swank and swagger?
“Mitigating circumstances? No, I think not,” thoughtfully Merle raises a dusky purple grape to her crimson lips. The colour-scheme thus presented might have been one of Dulac’s exotic harmonies: blue-green shadow of the Quarry Woods behind; vivid blue jersey; bluish lights in the dense black of her hair. “I should rather say that the consciousness makes one accessory before the fact.”
Stuart joins in; “The form of the question might be altered to this: does my personality justify my swank?” impishly he grins down on the upturned face of Peter across his knees. He is very unlike a man at these minutes; gnome, pixie or hobgoblin might claim him brother.
Peter retorts: “That’s a different thing altogether. And why limit the problem to yourself? I was talking generally.”
“Deceive not thyself, my child. A long and careful study of the differences between male and female intellect has finally convinced me that the latter is incapable of generalities, of completely impersonal discussion. Follow the wriggling rivers of her speech backwards to their source, and you will discover the Subjective Sea. But do you know,” with renewed earnestness; “I believe my personalitydoesjustify my swank. Otherwise you wouldn’t put up with me as you do. And if it justifies my swank, then my swank is non-existent. Swank is a thing which proceeds from a misconception of one’s status.”
“Is his swank non-existent?” murmurs Merle to the swimming atoms in a last slanting sunray; “Oh, I trow not.”
“‘Swagger’ is slightly different again.” Stuart is enjoying himself immensely. “It is the outward and visible manifestation of the swank that resides in the soul. The ‘agger’ in fact. But your question respecting the mitigating circumstances of our consciousnessthereof, is rot, my dear Peter. Because swaggerisconsciousness, to start with. Shall we paddle her home, Merle?”
The haze of evening has crept up, white-footed, from the south. A Dryad moves from the bank, seats herself beside a Faun. The rhythmic dip and swirl of their paddles dies away into silence.
... And the pride of them was like wind sweeping through the hair; pride in their ability to maintain without disaster this strangely exhilarating friendship of one and two; flaunt it in the very face of the Inevitable.
“I want to go a-maying,” Peter announced. Nor was her ardour abated when Merle reminded her that April was still in its heyday.
“That makes no difference if the spirit of May-day be in me. The weather is a sheer intoxication, and calls for revelry. It’s not your birthday by any chance, is it?”
“If you can wait threeweeks——”
“I can’t! I can’t! I want to go a-maying.”
Merle looked at her helplessly. “But one doesn’t go a-maying in Regent Street,” she protested; “if you mean garlands and queens. I’ll crown you with hawthorn from Gerrard’s, if you insist, but the expense will be enormous. Or we’ll catch a cart-horse and plait its tail with red, white, and blue.OrI’ll treat you to an ice-cream soda at Fuller’s. You can choose between these rural delights.”
“Where’s Stuart?” Peter demanded suddenly. “I haven’t seen or heard of him for about a week.” One of Stuart’s habits was the treatment of each curt farewell as final, leaving his companions in a pleasant state of uncertainty as to his next summons to fellowship. “Where’s Stuart? P’raps it’shisbirthday. ’Tisn’t mine, I know. Merle, what do you say to a grand un-birthday festival? Stuart shall take us into the country to toss cowslip balls. We’ll rout him out from his Aladdin’s Cave. Who wants diamonds in springtime, inspringtime——”
“‘The only pretty ring-time,’” Merle added. “So you’re wrong about the diamonds.”
“We’ll go and look at his pretty rings.” Peter hesitated, came to a full-stop opposite one of Liberty’s windows, a tawny riot of gold and amber and copper tints. “Perhaps we’d better not,” she decided; “I hate the sort of female who can’t leave a man alone in business hours. And I hate still more the ponderous business face with which he receives her pretty importunities.”
“But Stuart!” laughed Merle. “You can surely trust Stuart enough to believe there is no City-spell on earth can hold him captive. Besides, he begged us to invade his premises one day and see him play at diamond-merchants. Don’t you remember?”
“In a silk hat; so he did. Come along then.” Peter wavered no longer, but hailed a Holborn ’bus, and followed by Merle, scrambled to the top. She was right about the weather: the warm air was a-stir with lilac promise, and passing faces gave evidence of spring-cleaning within, a more potent and magical spring-cleaning than ever achieved by mop and broom.
“I feel about six and a half,” Merle confessed gaily, as with a delighted sense of exploration they spelt out “Heron and Carr, Diamond-merchants, first floor,” among a bewilderment of brass plates, and mounted lightly the wide stone staircase.
“We want Mr. Stuart Heron, please,” to the office boy who answered their summons; and again, “We want Mr. Stuart Heron,” as a preoccupied clerk came slowly forward.
“Mr. Stuart?” The man looked reluctant. “Is it important?”
“Awfully important,” said Peter gravely. She was wondering what would be the man’s attitude if she explained that the youngest partner of the house was required for the purposes of an un-birthday celebration.
They were conducted through two or three apartments, containing nothing more thrilling than cupboards and clerks, so that Merle assumed the jewels were kept in glittering caverns below; and then ushered into an anteroom, formal and luxurious, in which were already seated several applicants for royal favour, grave men and grey, all.
“I think Mr. Stuart is engaged. What name shall I say?” The confidential clerk appeared curiously disapproving of their presence.
“Got your card-case, Merle?”
Of course Merle had her card-case. And a card. And white kid gloves with which to present it. More than could be said for Peter.
Their guide withdrew, having first motioned the girls to deep leather arm-chairs, into which they sank and were obliterated. The silence of the room became thick and muffled. A clock ticked ponderously from the chimney-piece. The assembled veterans made no sound, with the exception of one who played nervously with his feet, advancing these by slow stages towards one another, and then scurrying them apart, as if fearful of being caught in the act. Peter watched him, fascinated. It was fully ten minutes before hurried steps approached the door....
There had been changes in the firm of Heron and Carr since Stuart entered it, three years before. Uncle Arthur had embraced the opportunity to retire from business. Derwent Heron was growing old, and absented himself frequently from the office: Baldwin—well, Baldwin at the best of times was useful mostly as an ornament. Thus it befell that a great deal of responsibility fell on the shoulders of the new partner. Nor was Stuart averse to this. He was right when he said that a game lost its value unless played in all seriousness. On the whole he made few mistakes, though his lucky star ranthe risk, from overwork, of becoming somewhat frayed at the edges. Frequently he deplored the difficulty of truly reckless gambling, with that officious orbit fore-dooming him ever to success. Of late, certain events had decided him to buy in a vast amount of stock, giving mostly bills in exchange. Then, like a bolt from the blue, one Antoine Gobert, from Venezuela, made his sensational announcement: no less than the discovery of a cheap preparation for the making of diamonds. The days following this revelation were fraught with the greatest strain to the merchants in the trade. It was generally acknowledged that in the case of Heron and Carr the crash consequent upon proof of Gobert’s integrity would resound loudest. It was unlucky for the youngest diamond-merchant in London that he should have been buying in with such rapidity and vigour. His elders shook their grey heads over Stuart, but consulted him notwithstanding, in this period of crisis; an unconscious tribute to certain brilliant strokes made by the firm within the past three years.
Gobert, having flung his bombshell, did not seem inclined to part too easily with the mysteries of his prescription. Rumour was busy, and prices fluctuated wildly. With difficulty was a panic averted. Stuart firmly declared the magician a fraud; continued to assert it contrary to the opinions of the majority, older men, men of deep experience. It was felt that some decisive step would have to be taken, before Gobert should make newspaper babble of his secret. Already journalism was on the scent; and once known, the romance of the thing would cause it to be gobbled greedily by the public. So the wizard was approached; discreetly sounded; finally, an offer made to him by Sir Fergus Macpherson, of the firm of Grey, Macpherson and Sons, well-known diamond-merchants. An offer of twenty thousand pounds for the purpose of private experiment; a slip of paper, containing the exactingredients of the manufacture, to be placed, in token of good faith, at the Bank of England. Gobert refused twenty thousand pounds. Not enough. Fifty thousand then? So be it, fifty thousand. The money was paid over, and the experiments started. Then, somehow a doubt of Gobert arose and grew. And that very day, April the 16th, it was finally decided that the envelope was to be opened, the miracle laid bare. If genuine—so much the worse for dealers in diamonds; so much the worse for Stuart Heron in particular. The issue would not have loomed in his eyes so stupendous, were it not that he felt his credit with Derwent and Arthur at stake. The firm had relied on his judgment. So that, sitting in earnest consultation with Sir Fergus and a certain Rupert Rosenstein, his mouth was set in sterner lines than his age warranted, and a deep frown lay between his eyebrows.
“Well, in that case, SirFergus——”
The confidential clerk entered noiselessly, and handed him a card: ‘Miss Merle des Essarts.’
“Here?”
“Two young ladies, Mr. Heron. Said it was important.”
“Oh—very well. Say that I’m coming at once.”
But it was several minutes before Sir Fergus rose to take leave. And then there were so many matters that clamoured for his brain’s attention; all overshadowed by a persistently recurring vision of a factory ... ten factories ... a thousand factories; men working; swarms of busy little figures; myriads of tiny white crystals the result of their labours,—the result of a few lines of writing that awaited the evening’s examination. Glittering crystals, produced in such quantities as to flood the universe like dewfall ... pretty little crystals, but utterly valueless.
Stuart straightened his shoulders. No good anticipating the worst. He opened the door of the anteroom:“Ah, Digby, I wanted to see you,”—and he of the wandering feet looked gratified.
Peter and Merle were waiting, rather impatiently, at the far end of the apartment. Some of their April joyousness had been swamped by the oppressive atmosphere surrounding them. The sunshine, creeping through the heavily curtained window, was merely metallic here. So that they greeted Stuart with relief.
“The face is perfect,” laughed Peter. “All we expected, and more. And now please take it off. Or is it merely semi-detached?”
Stuart did not reply. Nor was there perceptible alteration in his demeanour. But Peter was too amused by his garments of black decorum, to note that to-day they were something more than skin-deep.
“But, oh, Stuart, where’s the hat? You promised us the hat! Don’t say you’ve left it in the hall?”
He turned to Merle; and though he spoke courteously, his thoughts seemed very far away.
“My clerk told me it was important. Are you in any trouble? Or—can I?”—he hesitated, obviously waiting an excuse for their presence. And Merle’s cheeks began to burn.
“We—it isn’t really important,” she faltered. “I only—we thought——” oh, to be safely down the steps and out in the street! How could she say to this stranger: “We wanted you to come a-maying because it is April.” The thrill of primroses in the air had dwindled to a pin-point of triviality.
“We wondered whether you would care to join us for a day in the country,” she finished at last, lamely.
“I’m sorry. I’m afraid it’s quite out of the question to-day.” He appeared to realize dimly that something more was expected of him. His eye fell on Digby, eager for attention. The confidential clerk entered: “You’re wanted on the telephone, sir. Mr. Grey.” “All right, Lewis; ask him to hold the line,” alert response now inhis voice; and he had already turned to the door, when he remembered his visitors. “We must be going,” said Merle quickly. He looked relieved. “Ah, then you’ll excuse me, I know. We’re rather rushed. Would you care to have a look round the place?”—he signalled to Lewis to wait, in case his services should be required as cicerone. “There’s nothing much to see, though. No treasure-vaults,” with a groping attempt to resume the language of which he had so patently mislaid the cipher.
And Merle, likewise clutching at her rags of self-respect, responded with a forced laugh: “You don’t make the diamonds, then?”
“No,” Stuart’s tones were somewhat grim. “We don’t make the diamonds.” He paused. Then, with a quick “Good-bye,” went to answer the telephone summons. “I’ll see you directly, Digby,” thrown out on his way to the door. Baldwin Carr appeared at another entrance: “Has Macpherson gone, Stuart? Derwent wanted to speak to you——” “Right! when I’ve polished off Grey.” Whatwasthe matter with all these men, that the wrinkle lay so deep between their eyebrows?
Baldwin glanced in some surprise at the figures of Peter and Merle, standing irresolutely by the window. Then returned to his private office.
The confidential clerk showed them out. A swinging door presented them with a snatch of telephonic conversation: “Yes, it’s Mr. Stuart Heron—Yes—No, not till to-night, nothing definite—we think——” The door swung to, cutting off the rest.
On the stone steps, they came face to face with a little shrivelled man, head cocked to one side; Arthur Heron, had they known it; rat about to rejoin the sinking ship.
Out in the push and clamour of Holborn, Merle drew a long breath, put both hands up to her hot face: “Iwonder if I shall ever grow cool again,” she said, rather tremulously. And: “I suppose we’ve made rather fools of ourselves.”
“Don’t!” gasped Peter. Every time she recalled the blank look which had received her first eager speeches it was as if someone had dealt her a blow in the face. Oh, the stinging ignominy which lay in the remembrance of Merle and herself, two blushing incoherent little—idiots, intruding with froth and futility into the world of real things, solid things, things that matter, world of men. And Stuart could so easily have averted humiliation from their heads: one look, one word, to prove his recollection of the thousand intimacies that had lain between them.—“A day in the country ... I’m sorry—Sorry!” She ejaculated the word aloud in accents of such furious scorn, that Merle looked round startled. He should be sorrier still, soon! His fault, every bit; not for ejecting them, but for ever having dared invite them—to meet with that.
With a sense of rawness that cried out for solitude, Peter suddenly bade Merle good-bye:
“I’m going home. Do you mind?”
And sorrowful for the mood of April so rudely shattered, Merle shook her head and passed on.
Thus Merle’s evening at Lancaster Gate was doomed to be a solitary one. For Madame des Essarts had sallied forth, in diamonds and dignity, to a banquet celebrating the arrival in office of a new Greek minister. The handsome old lady, with her social talents, her knowledge of foreign languages, her dainty pointed wit, the aura of martyrdom which clung to her enforced exile from the hated Republic of France—to which she could return whenever she pleased—was of the type that had, in ruffled and beruffled days, swayed kings and unmade ministers. Perhaps the secret of her lost art lay in the fact that she never for one moment forgot she was dealing with men, nor let them forget that she regarded them as such, lords and puppets. Not for Antoinette des Essarts the cheery comradeship, the quick sexless sympathy, the contempt of cajolery and intrigue, which distinguished the generation among which she now moved. And perhaps from her had come that ultra-feminine streak in Merle that expressed itself in the girl’s attitude towards Stuart; something which held out an involuntary hand for support, yet shrank, at once disdainful and startled, from too rough-and-ready an intimacy; even though, with Peter, she might rejoice at what she deemed the whole-hearted freedom of the trio.
In her soft gown ofeau-de-nil—for who, argues Madame des Essarts, who of the noblesse would appear by evening light save in silk attire and satin slipper?—shedined in lonely state; seated at one end of vast acres of dinner-table, with ever at her elbow a silent personage bearing the chef’s latest inspiration. Peter should by invitation have been keeping her company this night, and making exceeding merry over the ceremonial repast. And, it may be for the fiftieth time in the past two years, Merle des Essarts breathed devout thanks to the laughing young adventuress, who had brought her from regarding as unalterable essentialseau-de-niland a French chef, Watteau and ambassadors, all the incidentals of Merle’s quaintly formal setting, to the point of view that these were mere delightful ingredients in an ever-changing game of play; one costume, vastly becoming indeed, among a million in masquerade.
Yet to-night, lacking Peter, some of the old wistful regrets touched Merle with chilly fingers; followed her with ghostly trip into the little boudoir, grey and primrose, Lancret looped medallion-wise into the overmantel; whispered in lisping voices of a day that might possibly come when Dresden, with ribboned crook for sceptre, should again reign supreme in her life; pointed in light mockery to a picture that adorned the wall: Merle herself, aged eight, standing stiffly posed beside a sundial; hands busy with the ivory sticks of a painted fan; toes primly turned outwards; smooth, dark curls; high-waisted pink frock. One moment fixed indelibly to symbolize a whole childhood. And with whatever passionate zest she might play now, Merle knew, and hotly resented, that she could not make up for her cheated years of château and convent, of solitude and decorum andil-ne-faut-pas. To be sure, the latter phrase did not need to be said often;la petiteMerle and her brother Fernand had been ever ‘bien sage lui; et elle, un vrai petit ange.’ Of course she had! Who had taught her otherwise, before her twentieth birthday?
... An April shower of rain swept the panes, glowing sapphire-dark behind their primrose hangings. A musical pattering shower, unreal as a lit boudoir and a girl’s dreams....
—Crash! and an exquisite china clock lay shattered on the ground. A thin little chap, with freckled impertinent nose and pointed ears, looked up, startled, as Merle hastened to the rescue: “Couldn’t help it; just wanted to see how it took to pieces.”...
With wild hurrahs, a tangle of long legs and flying skirts whizzed down the banisters and landed in a heap at the foot.
Something delightful and sturdy, with dark red hair and blown-out cheeks, was marching to and fro on the polished drawing-room floor, waving flags and shouting....
Thus Merle drew from the Land of Corners, shadowy corners of the old house, dim unswept corners in her brain, dog-eared corners of forgotten picture-books, a whole host of children; ordinary, healthy, grubby youngsters, who would reduce the silent beautiful rooms to their proper state of scrum and chaos. Above all, naughty children; she collected the warm cosy naughtinesses that has never been hers; gloated over each separate deed of infamy; as if in offering to the prim sad-eyed daintily clothed image on the wall.
... Dick was for ever robbing orchards and being chased by irate farmers. But then how could he help it, this eldest son of hers, just entering that close-cropped hobnailed condition that betokens the schoolboy? And Merle liked to see his rough bullet-head buried in her lap, in moods of half-sullen contrition; would have kept it permanently there, had Dick been willing. Which he wasn’t.
... Nobody-loves-me came wandering in from the garden. Nobody-loves-me was the ugly duckling, of whom visitors were wont to say: “Never mind, my dear;the Ugly Duckling grew to be a swan, you know,” a prophecy which comforted the sufferer not a whit. She was given to brooding, this particular infant; and possessed, in addition, Bad Habits: Bad Habits, such as Biting Her Nails. And, suddenly aware of the Bitten Nails, Merle generously handed over Nobody-loves-me to Peter, who lived next door, and who could therefore be freely endowed with undesirable progeny, “because anyway,” reflected Merle, “they couldn’t all be mine.” And Dick and the Boy-girl, ringleaders both, kept her hands pretty full. Boy-girl it was who erstwhile slid the banisters; she, who climbed trees, and made ladders in her stockings—such as no young lady should—and blarneyed the cook; and once, by way of an experiment, cut short not only her own mane of hair, but also the straggly crop of Nobody-loves-me. The incarnation of swift and mischievous daring, Boy-girl; but who could be angry with her long, when she brought her coaxing Irish charm to bear on the situation?
—Why Irish? Merle was not quite sure. She knew only that it was, undeniably, Irish charm. And finally solved the riddle by making the (shadowy) father of this swarming brood, a son of Erin.
The little-mother-to-her-sisters-and-brothers, gentle, smooth-haired and fond of her needle, to be found in every well-regulated family, Merle, on consideration, also presented as a free gift to Peter. Her own unacknowledged favourite was the funny little beggar with the puck-like ears, three-cornered nostrils set to catch the rain, and scientific mind; which latter prompted him invariably to take articles to pieces for the sake of seeing how they worked. And they never worked again. There were many, many costly rarities in the house, Merle remembered happily, that literally asked for his attentions.
Or did she after all more tenderly incline to the delicate child with clustering pale-gold hair? whonervously refused to sleep without a night-light; who believed in fairies, and cherished all sorts of quaint fanciful notions about the little angels—Merle pulled herself up with a start, realizing that here she had in wanton enjoyment created a veritable chee-ild! Unable to slaughter in cold blood anything so lately born, she compromised by ... giving it to Peter. For anyhow (in guilty argument) Peter’s hair was of that peculiar pale-gold tint, and what more natural than that her offspring should inherit it?
Tumultuously alive now, all these ordinary healthy grubby youngsters; making walls within and sky without, resound with their whoops and coo-ees. A turbulent out-of-hand crew—Merle is rather afraid she is lacking in Proper Authority; in the balancing whereof, she endows the (shadowy) father with a “firm hand over the children,” in addition to his Irish birth and other excellent qualities.
A few stray naughtinesses yet to be collected from chimney-corner and rafter and cellar; such as leaving all doors open,—except, in swift amendment, when Dick rather chooses to bang them. Somebody, probably the gardener, lodges a complaint that “they chairs be rotted through again, left h’out all night in the damp.” And Nurse says it isn’t her fault that the young ladies and gentlemen won’t eat vegetables, since they will persist in stuffing chocolate just before their dinner; and Merle has much ado not to laugh, knowing, via some subtle instinct, that every secret opportunity is embraced to thrust tapioca, crusts, and spinach into the crevice between walls and cupboard; accumulated results only to be discovered at Spring-cleaning.
... Boy-girl dashes in to demand material for “dressing-up”; already she has helped herself pretty liberally; the polite request is an afterthought. The nurseries overflow with messy pets—nor does Puck everremember to feed his guinea-pig. Nobody-loves-me has run away, for the third time in a fortnight, because the others don’t want her to play with them. His sailor-suit very green and wet and messy from an afternoon’s fishing in the pond, Copper-curls (his brothers call him Carrots) stumbles into the boudoir, trailing behind him tackle and weed and worm on the pale grey carpet. Drowsily he cuddles his firm little body against Merle’seau-de-nil; slips a very hot hand between her cool fingers; droops his mouth to the semblance of a celestial choir-boy’s—so that she knows he has been very, very wicked, and requires forgiveness and absolution.
And now Stuart is standing before her, eyes full of trouble ... and the children tumble in quick confusion back to the Land of Corners....
Bewildered, Merle rubbed her eyes: “I didn’t hear you come in”; the door had been open, and the thick velvet pile a muffler to approaching footsteps.
“Merle, am I going to be hurled from the battlements, for failing to observe the divinity of play?”
She made no reply, not quite sure whether his mood be not of mockery. And suddenly, with a quick and—for him—rather clumsy movement, he dropped onto his knees beside her chair, buried his head deep in her lap; so that it almost seemed as if Dick ... Merle let her fingers stray, half-fearfully, among the rebellion of rough brown hair. For in the blur of twilight and dreams and pattering rain, she could not as yet entirely separate her phantom visitants from the real ones.
“Why, your coat is wet.” She bent forward to light the gas-fire in the grate. And with a gulp and a leap, the room was warm with a multitude of tiny blue tongues, licking and panting through their skull-like rings.
“I’ve been walking since five o’clock.” He was silent for a moment. Then it came out, not in a gratefulunburdening torrent, but in wrung jerky sentences, of which the last caught up and contained the whole hidden cause of pain:
“I was grown-up—didn’t hear the call ... and I wasn’t even aware of it.”
Something wrong here which lay too deep for her understanding. Merle asked no questions; content to dry his coat; touch lingeringly his hair and shoulders; give him the comfort she dimly felt he most needed.
“It didn’t matter, dear.”
“You’re not going to shut me out, you and Peter?”
“We couldn’t do without you, Stuart.”
“Thank you.” A tightness in his voice seemed to have snapped at her tender assurance. His fingers, which had gripped and twisted at hers till she could have cried out with the pain, now slackened their pressure. For the moment, the girl had succeeded in exorcising the demons which were so strangely tormenting his soul.
... A hush in the room. A hush so profound, that two little figures stirred restlessly in their corner, came tip-toeing hand-in-hand towards the door of the boudoir.But——
“It’s no good,” whispered Nobody-loves-me, as she tugged Puck backwards. “He’s still there.”...
Stuart looked up suddenly: “‘Wherefore to wait my pleasure, I put my Spring aside....’ I always knew it would be damnably easy—to slip beyond the pattern and never get back....” The demons were again at work within him. If only they would leave him in peace, just for a moment, mind and body.
“Stuart, don’t you ever get tired?” she cried pitifully.
He muttered: “Dead tired,” and closing his eyes,allowed himself to relax entirely to her comforting touch, the soft coolness of her presence; as if establishing the memory of a second against which, in future turmoil and stress, he might lay his cheek, and find rest.
“Merle.”
“Yes, dear?”
He said nothing, but still pleaded; and bending down her face to his, she found their lips clinging together.
After he had gone, Merle sat awhile, wondering how much of what had passed must be told to Peter. Loyalty, and the compact they had made: whatever happened, to keep the path unblocked between them, demanded an exact account of events. But that compact had been formed in alliance against a hard and ruthless Stuart of their imaginings. Her instincts were all to protect the boy who had come to her in his trouble. He had come to her—the thought was charged with sweetness. And here she experienced a pang of pity for the girl, the other girl, who looked like being the one left out. But Peter’s anger at the morning’s episode had been hot; she would not have known how to handle him with the gloves his soreness demanded. Peter didn’t like gloves.
... For an instant, Merle contemplated treachery.
No. It was popularly supposed that two girls couldn’t be square with one another, where a man was in question. Hers to disprove the theory. A secret unshared by Peter would, moreover, be an insult to the spirit of the trio; the first menace to its continued existence. Merle hesitated no longer, but sat down at the escritoire, and wrote her letter; a letter which omitted nothing, not even the final embrace—though she winced at the thought that Peter might possibly misconstrue it to something more of man and woman, less of child. Then she rang the bell and gave orders for the missive to be taken at once to the post.
... Up the hushed staircase, and into the vast shadowy bedroom. Had Stuart’s head really lain on her lap? Or was he but one of the fantastic crowd who had been abroad that night in Lancaster Gate; sliding the banisters, playing hide-and-seek in the passages, smashing the china—while the white-haired châtelaine of the house took wine with the King of the Hellenes’ minister.
On reaching home, Stuart found Baldwin Carr awaiting him in the dining-room.
“Hullo! you’re a late visitor.”
“I thought you’d want to know,” said Baldwin, from whose brow the unwonted lines of anxiety had now been ironed away. “The whole business was a fake—and Gobert has vanished off the face of the earth.”
This was sensational. Stuart helped himself to a whisky and soda.
“What do you mean by fake? theenvelope——”
“Empty, my boy. Blank bit of paper, that’s all. Jove! you should have seen the faces when it was opened. Old Rosenstein! Of course we smelt a rat, and sent round to Monsieur Antoine’s apartments. Not a sign of him. Left that morning, the landlady said; bag, baggage—and incidentally, our fifty thousand. Still, compared with what it might have cost us—well, what do you think of it?”
“I take off my hat to Gobert,” replied the other, with an amused chuckle; “fifty thou. isn’t too much to pay for the privilege of acquaintance with the swindler who can rob you of it.”
“Well—ah—I wouldn’t go so far as to say that. Pour me out a stiff one, Stuart, I’m just about done up. And then I must be off. Wanted to set your mind at rest first. Where have you been all these hours? Not that I blame you for bunking,”—Stuart smiled—“thestrain was intolerable. I’d have escaped from the office myself, only I thought it hardly fair to Derwent.”
Nor did his nephew seek to explain the real goad which had driven him forth to pace the streets from five o’clock that April afternoon.
Baldwin set down his glass: “Good night——” he paused. Something like emotion shook his voice. “We’ve pulled through,” he said. And Stuart, knowing the other was only recalled from adding: “we Herons,” by a consideration of facts, composed his face to lines befitting the occasion, and solemnly grasped the extended hand. Baldwin’s pulling may have been of a negative order, but of his pride in firm and family, no man could remain in doubt.
Stuart fell asleep that night lulled by memory of a sweet tremulous mouth, and dark eyes, deeply tender; of a blur ofeau-de-nilin a setting of pale primrose and dim grey; of cool fingers quelling to peace all the hot turbulence that tormented him; of a soft voice saying: “We can’t do without you, Stuart....”
He awoke next day to the same memory, lashing him with whips of shame. The deadly panic which had resulted from his conduct of the preceding morning, panic of clogging with moral and mental fat, his vision of worlds beyond and his capacity for play, was as nothing compared to the revolt with which he now viewed his breakdown of the evening: the brimming to the surface of weak sentiment, to find solace in a girl’s caresses. Twice—twice in twelve hours to have lost control of himself; to have taken his hand from the tiller twice; to have twice resigned stage management to an unseen power, which derided, even while it swung him from “a sense of business responsibility” to an extreme of maudlin hysteria. Stuart did not spare himself in terms of abuse. And Merle had encouraged him to make an exhibition of himself; Merle had lent a sympathetic ear to his woes; asked noquestions; flooded him with rosy forgiveness. Merle had made it easy for him—easy and comfortable; dried his coat.... Stuart smouldered and chafed, seeing the incident pictured in bright colours: “A Little Mother,” and framed on the nursery wall, valued supplement to a Xmas number.
Why, in Heaven’s name, hadn’t she met him with conflict of some sort; mockery that might have braced him to action; instead of just allowing him to—slop. Verb which to Stuart expressed the apex of abomination.
A sense of justice reasserted itself. Merle was charming, no doubt of it; her response to his appeal a very idyll of fragrance and simplicity. As for his curt behaviour when the two girls had called on him in the office, well, Stuart was hardly sorry any more; save when the leprechaun recognized a glorious opportunity missed: to have proved himself able to cope with both situations in the appropriate spirit; with the light-hearted “come out to play,” in the midst of the almost unbearable tension consequent on the danger threatening the affairs of Heron and Carr.
—“Couldn’t have devised it better myself,” mused Stuart regretfully, as he gave Peter’s number to the telephone clerk.
Peter sprang out of bed, hearing the postman’s knock; and pattering barefoot downstairs, she drew from the box, Merle’s letter, in company of an oblong bill, and an envelope bearing St. Quentin’s by now familiar handwriting. Then, returning to her room, she seated herself on the edge of the bed; and, a pale-haired gleaner in the early sunshine, proceeded to examine her harvest.
The bill contained an intimation to the effect that Mr. Lazarus, tailor, was amazed that Miss Kyndersley should have ignored his repeated applications for payment,and could only suppose they had slipped her memory, as otherwise doubtless, etc.
“I call that a delicate way of putting it,” reflected Peter, with thoughts all of sunny kindness towards Mr. Lazarus. “He’s trying to spare my feelings, bless him. He shall have free tickets for dad’s next pier concert.”
Of paying there could be no question. Peter, true to the traditions of her caste, never settled her debts till actually threatened by the law; when she would hastily sell her silver hair-brushes, or borrow from her aunt, or pledge the half-of-her-next-year-but-one income; diminutive amount at best, inherited from her dead mother. She also had what she called her “submerged” periods, when by dint of forswearing the world for an entire fortnight, and working hard eight hours a day at colouring art postcards, she scraped together a sufficient sum to extricate her for a short while from the perpetual webs with which finance encumbered her pathway. Never yet had she been altogether free from pecuniary embarrassments; would indeed have missed the background of their mutterings, as those who have dwelt long by the sea cannot bear to be deprived of its eternal swish.
Mark St. Quentin, striving to mingle in equal proportions formality with infatuation, begged leave to visit her at Thatch Lane the following Sunday. Peter dimpled mischievously; she would wear a white dress, and playfully beg him to help lay the knives and forks for supper: “We have only one servant, you see; and treat you as quite one of the family”—and she dimpled again at the thought of Stuart’s disgust on anyone treating him as one of any family, anywhere.
Stuart ... a slight contraction of her bare toes, as she remembered how the said gentleman had incurred her displeasure. She wondered what his attitude was likely to be. Then opened Merle’s letter—and found out.
Peter raised her head; gazed straight through the window, across garden and hedge and field, to where the Weald hunched its back against the sky. But her eyes missed the tender greens and misty blues of the landscape; could not share in the joy of the house on discovering it at last owned, after five gloomy months, a clear black shadow to lay upon the dew-wet grass.
For she was wondering how not to be jealous.
It was not the incident itself which rankled; but recognition of a fact that long ago had carried its conviction, though only now its results: Merle was allowed, by the unseen code, to be the more feminine of the twain. She, Peter, thrust willy-nilly into the bolder, more challenging position. Was it that she was born with a tilt to her soul, as well as to her nose and chin? She could not tell. But Stuart, gravitating to her for all stimulation, had nevertheless gone to Merle for comfort. And Peter wondered furthermore why she played up so persistently to the Laughing-Cavalier qualities, with which from the very first he had chosen to endow her. And, wondering, knew yet that she must continue boyish and defiant; though she, even as Merle, wanted how much to be tender to him in his present attire of sackcloth and ashes.
The getting-up gong sounded, and Peter returned to bed.
The breakfast-gong, half an hour later, led her to the bathroom; and another quite irrelevant gong saw her wrestling with stockings. Only when the gongs finally ceased from troubling, did she descend to the dining-room, there to find Aunt Esther deeply immersed in the “Daily Camera.”
“Peter, just look at these!”
‘These’ were startling pictorial presentments of Antoine Gobert, the notorious diamond wizard; flanked on the one side by Sir Fergus Macpherson, looking like a Jew, which he wasn’t; on the other, by an elderlyand speckled Stuart: “youngest partner in the firm of Heron & Carr.” Below appeared sensational accounts of the shameful fraud which had been practised, and the scene which took place in a private room of the Bank of England, at 6.30 p.m. of the previous day, when the bubble was pricked.
Peter’s lip curled as she read. So that accounted for Stuart’s sudden mood of contrition. Easy enough to find time for being sorry, after the cause of anxiety had been removed. It required no Stuart Heron for that. Nor did she consider that the strain adequately accounted for his preoccupation of the morning. According to his own standards, he should be strung up to response at any moment, however inopportune. If he could be exacting, why, so also could she. Quite cured of her yearnings towards womanly tenderness, she tossed aside the paper, and helped herself to eggs and bacon.
“Well, well,” quoth Miss Esther, “I always say that foreigners aren’t to be trusted; and I’m sure it’s very nice and pleasant to think young Mr. Heron isn’t going to be a bankrupt after all. Of course he has rather more money than he knows what to do with; but still, it’s better in the hands of a gentleman than a rogue. And these things will get in the papers, and there you are! What can you expect? However, there’s no harm done; the Bank of England is too wide-awake for that. And,” an after-thought, “Heaven will punish the swindler, I’ve no doubt.”
Thus having, according to custom, neatly packed away the entire set of events within her own private and particular boundaries; reduced each participant, including Heaven and the Bank of England, to a height convenient for patting on the head, Miss Esther Worthing asked for the marmalade.
The telephone bell rang. Peter dashed up the stairs, prepared to spurn still further into the dust the bowedand prostrate figure at the other end of the wire. Stuart’s cheery greeting, however, did not quite coincide with her expectations.
“Hullo! That you, Peter ... dear?” almost a sub-current of amusement in his tone. “What’s the attitude?”
“Bellicose,” was the spirited retort.
“Thought so. It would have been so much less obvious on your part, to have held out the hand of forgiveness.”
“You want a Briareus of forgiveness, it seems.”
“Oh. So you’ve heard from Merle.”
“Yes.”
Silence for a moment. Then:
“Doesn’t the fact that of my own accord I regained the sense of things—or rather the nonsense of things, doesn’t it all absolve me from your wrath?” still that slight mocking inflection. Peter thought how pleasant it would be to hurt him. Hurt him quite badly.
“Of your own accord?” she flung indignantly into the mouthpiece. “Why, I’ve seen the papers. Naturally,afteryour business troubles were so unexpectedly smoothed out, you had leisure to turn your attention to—minor matters.”
“As it happened,”—she could not complain now of too light a note in the icy incision of his speech, “I did not know that the Gobert thunderbolt had been averted, until I reached home after seeing Merle.”
“You didn’t know?”
“I did not know.”
“The envelope was opened towards half-past six, according to the Press.”
“I believe that’s correct.”
“And Merle writes that you turned up about nine o’clock.”
“To be exact, a quarter to nine.”
“And yet you knew nothing?”
“And yet I knew nothing.”
Their speeches followed each other with the thud and rebound of a swift rally over the tennis-net.
“The evidence is against you.”
“I’m not on my defence. I merely state facts.”
Peter said very gently: “Do you expect me to believe them?”
“You will—later. At present you are merely laying yourself open to the unpleasant necessity of apologizing.”
“Apologizing?” she cried, hotly resenting this turning of the tables. “For what?”
“For calling me a liar.”
“I didn’t use the word.”
“Then use it—now.”
“You’re a liar, Stuart.”
She was unable to tell if his evident anger were assumed or genuine. But, if the latter, so much the better; she anticipated a pleasurable excitement from the unexplored territory beyond the limits of his tolerance.
He was speaking again. And Peter wished he would free his voice from its straining bonds of control.
“Quite right. I am a liar. A very plausible and rather dangerous liar. But, quite by accident, in the present instance I happen to be speaking the truth. When you’ve recovered from your attitude of scepticism, ring me up. Good-bye.”
Peter went for a walk. She walked hard for a couple of hours; avoided the plunging soil of pasture-land, in favour of hard country roads, where her feet met with a ringing resistance. On reaching a village, six miles distant from Thatch Lane, she entered without hesitation the local post-office.
... “Hullo!”
“Stuart.”
“Yes?”
“I discard my attitude.”
“From weakness?”
“No. From conviction.”
“Good. Thank you.”
She rang off.
In this wise, the trio forfeited their first fine carelessness. Disintegration was imminent, though none could tell as yet which way it would manifest itself. Each of their words and actions, however trivial, took on a certain significance. For Stuart had heard in Peter’s voice the battle-ring, and tingled to its challenge. For Peter had known an instant’s jealousy of Merle. For Merle had battled with the temptation to be disloyal towards Peter. For Stuart had twice in a day ceased to be master of his moods, and vowed by all his gods these moods should neither recur again. For Merle cherished the second of them as a memory sweeter than music. For Merle had been visited by an old ghost, and by a merry host of new ones. For Peter had definitely flung her cloak, tossed her plume, donned the disguise which Stuart mistook for nature. For all these follies and cross-follies are the outcome of certain fatal desires to go a-maying on a day of April!
The girls knew that Stuart’s next act would be a carefully veiled apology to the spirit of the trio, for the moment he had been deaf to its call. Apology that would probably manifest itself in a deed of unwonted daring, originality and impudence, that none might suspect it of being an apology; deed which would firmly re-establish in the eyes of the twain his slightly shaken position. For though with Peter he had crossed swords in single combat, had known the pleasure of knocking from her grasp the weapon, the pleasure of stepping back to allow her to resume it,—not, most certainly, because he was a little gentleman, but because he preferred her blade in hand; for though with Merle he had walked awhile in a two-world too softly cushioned for his taste; yet with these things the spirit of the trio did not concern itself. Nor was it to be placated save by offering to the number three. So Peter and Merle were somewhat surprised when Stuart’s expected fireworks tamely resolved themselves into a verbally conveyed invitation to spend the first week in May with his elder sister, married to an owner of vast estates in Devonshire.
“The orchards will all be in bloom, and ought to look rather fine,” said Stuart; “by the way, did I mention that I’m invited as well? We can paint the place as red as we please; Dorothy and Ralph won’t interfere with us much. Dorothy wanted to know if she need write to you both separately, but I said it would be all right.”
“Dorothy—Ralph—Devonshire,” echoed Merle, when she was alone with Peter; “what a picture it conveys of flowered chintz and cream and low window-seats. I’m sure the tenants call her Mistress Dorothy, and she has calm grey eyes, and wears a fichu, and keys.”
“Rather an inadequate costume,” Peter murmured; “and I can’t imagine a sister of Stuart with ‘calm’ anything. Shall we accept? My country boots are done for.”
“Buy new ones.”
“New ones always take weeks to tame. I’d rather tame a bull than boots. The Bull and Boot sounds like a public-house. I wish Stuart hadn’t taught me to search for the hidden pub. in my most innocent phrases.”
“It’s rather a low habit,” Merle agreed. “Yes, I think we’ll visit Mistress Dorothy in Devon, if Grandmaman has no objections.”
Grandmaman had no objections whatever, though the invitation came somewhat too informally for her notions of etiquette. She was also at a loss how Merle was to make adequate return to her hostess, and insisted on the girl packing the gift of a three-tiered satin bonbonnière among her evening frocks, by way of a beginning in the balancing of ledgers.
Peter bought her boots; gladdened Miss Esther’s county soul by an entirely fabulous narrative relating to the ancient birth and lineage of Squire Ralph Orson of Orson Manor; and on the fifth of May, met her two fellow-travellers at Paddington. Stuart established her with Merle in a first-class carriage, with every possible luxury; for in detail-work he excelled, never allowing their schemes to be upset by a single hitch of the mechanical order. Then, to their astonishment, he begged leave to retire to a smoker.
“Aren’t we looking our best?” Peter demanded of Merle, as the train quitted the platform, and the belt of his Norfolk coat vanished down the corridor. “Or ishe trying to impress us with the fact that for the future he intends to Lead a Man’s Life?”
They saw nothing of him during the next few hours, not even in the luncheon-car. And towards three o’clock Peter declared they must be within that distance of Dawlish, the station for Orson Manor, when respectable people with rugs would begin strapping them:
“Not having any rugs, we’ll compromise by washing our faces.”
Merle leant out of the window, and took a deep breath of the sparkling air.
“Stuart didn’t say it was near the sea,” as the train ran alongside the broken silver line of wave. “Why, thisisDawlish! Peter, here we are—we——”
The engine gathered all its slumbering forces, and thundered at the speed of a mile a minute through the tiny station in its setting of bold red rock.
“It—hasn’t—stopped,” gasped Merle. Which was obvious, seeing that her slight figure against the window was flung from side to side by the reckless pace at which the express was pounding through Devon.
And: “Stuart, it hasn’t stopped!” as that gentleman, with a pleasant smile, and still carrying his pipe, entered their compartment and sat down.
“No; this is the ‘Cornishman.’ It goes right through from Plymouth to Penzance.”
“But your sister?”
“My sister is in bed with influenza. And anyway, she’s not expecting you. I doubt if she knows of your existence.”
He rose, and surveyed with a ferocious scowl his bewildered victims.
“I’ve abducted you!” quoth Stuart. “I’ve told you often enough that I was a pirate in disguise. You wouldn’t believe me. You played with fire. Now you’re abducted without the option of a fine. Open your mouths and scream, if you like; I don’t mind.”
Peter eyed him sternly: “You mean that the invitation was a hoax? You lured us from our homes on false pretences?”
He was humming a tune from the “Pirates of Penzance,” and at the same time polishing his eye-glass. So he merely nodded assent.
Merle said quietly: “This will mean an awful row for me.”
“No, it won’t,” he reassured her; “because nobody need ever know. To all intents and purposes we’re staying at Orson Manor. Dorothy only comes to town about once every four years, and I’ll tip her the wink to play up. She’ll do it for me,” finished the lord of the house of Heron.
“But where are we going?”
“Haven’t the remotest notion. We’ll see when we get to Penzance. And I’ll let you both have a say in the matter, though it isn’t usual in cases of abduction.”
He stole a glance at Peter; her eyes were dancing, and the corners of her mouth tilted upwards. So that he knew he had pleased her. Though she merely said: “So that’s why you refused to travel in our company, is it?”
“I couldn’t stand your innocent chatter about Dorothy and Devon,” he confessed; “it’s weak, I own, but even a pirate has a heart that bleeds for prattling babes.”
“Yes, but look here: suppose Madame des Essarts and Mrs. Heron should come together. Your mother will know that we are not where we seem. They do meet, don’t they, Merle?”
Merle took fright at the notion. “Not often; they’re in different sets. Grandmaman moves mainly among consuls, you know. But they visit on At Home days. Oh,Stuart——”
“D’you take me for a bloomin’ amateur?” hedemanded, “Haven’t I provided for every contingency? I sat me down and thought and thought and thought what one lady could be made to do, to mortally offend another. I repeat, to mortally offend another. All for the prevention of visits on At Home days. At last, I uprose, and put myrrh and frankincense upon my hair, and went unto my mother; and, ‘Mother dear,’ I said, soft as any cooing dove; ‘I can see you are harassed and beset. Would you like me to make out the list for your big reception next month?’ Fortunately, I’ve played the good son once or twice before, so my conduct couldn’t arouse the suspicions it deserved. Nay, she was touched almost to the point of tears. So I sat me down again at her desk, with lots of ceremonial and fuss—address-books heaped all round, a new ruler, and red ink, and a Bradshaw and Debrett and the telephone book; and made out a list of visitors, omitting the name of Madame des Essarts. Mark you this, Merle! Then I read the list aloud to my mother, including the name of Madame des Essarts. Mark you this also, Merle! Then my mother, well-pleased, handed to her private secretary the list, minus the name of Madame des Essarts. And Madame des Essarts, not receiving an invitation to the reception, will be mortally offended. And my mother, receiving no reply from Madame des Essarts, will likewise be mortally offended. Both mortally offended. The feud will probably extend over generations. Montague and Capulet. In consequence whereof, Merle and I will be forbidden to marry. And I’ll die for the love of a lady. ‘Lady, heyday, misery me——’”