Kate plus 10
reached the door of his imposing residence and his hand was on the
bell when he heard his name called. He had noticed as he walked up to
his door that a little distance along the road was a big motor car,
its head lamps gleaming and a chauffeur busy tinkering with the
engine.
“I am afraid you don’t know me,” said a sweet voice.
Sir Ralph raised his hat.
The girl who stood on the sidewalk was obviously a lady. She was as
obviously beautifully dressed, and Sir Ralph who had an appraising eye
valued the ermine cloak she wore at something not far short of a
thousand pounds. A single broad collar of diamonds about her slender
throat was all the jewellery she wore.
“I am afraid I don’t,” he said.
“I only met you once,” said the girl timidly, “in Paris. You were
introduced to me in the foyer of--”
“Oh, yes, at the Opera, of course,” said Sir Ralph who, amongst other
things, was a patron of the Arts.
She nodded and seemed pleased that he had remembered her, a compliment
which Sir Ralph did not fail to observe.
“My car has broken down,” she said, “and I was wondering if I could
beg your hospitality. It is so horribly shivery here.”
She drew her cloak tighter around her.
“With all the pleasure in life,” said Sir Ralph heartily, “but I have
only a bachelor’s establishment, you know,” he laughed.
He rang the bell and the door was opened instantly.
“Put some lights in the drawing room,” he said to the servant. “Is
there a fire there?”
“Yes, Sir Ralph,” said the man.
“Can I get you some coffee or a little wine?”
She had pulled a big chair up before the blaze and was resting her
little white slippers upon the silver fender. Her shapely hands were
outspread to the fire and Sir Ralph noted that on her fingers there
was no sign of the plain gold circle of bondage.
“You will think it awfully rude in me, but I cannot recall your name,”
he said, when the servant had gone.
“I don’t suppose you do, my name is rather a barbarous one,” she
laughed. “I am the Princess Bacheffski.”
“Why, of course!” said Sir Ralph heartily, “I remember distinctly
now.”
To do him justice, Russian princesses are not unusual phenomena in
Paris and he had a very bad memory for foreign names.
“I suppose I am being very unconventional,” she said with a little
grimace, and for the first time he noticed that she spoke with the
slightest accent, “but needs must when the devil drives, and I had
either to sit in that cold car or grasp the good fortune which fate
threw in my way. And you, Sir Ralph, are looking just the same as when
I saw you last. You are one of the big business men in London, aren’t
you?”
“I have a few interests,” admitted Sir Ralph modestly.
They talked of Paris which Sir Ralph knew, and of Russia through which
he had travelled on one occasion, and of London, and then the coffee
came and a few minutes later, her chauffeur, to tell her that the
repairs had been effected.
“Before I go I want to ask you one favour, Sir Ralph,” she said.
She was a little embarrassed and nervously twisted a ring on her
finger. Sir Ralph saw this and wondered.
“You have only to ask anything, Princess, and it is granted,” he said
gallantly.
She hesitated a moment and bit her lip in thought.
“I am going to take you into my confidence, and I know as a man of
honour” (Sir Ralph bowed) “you will not betray me. I am in London, but
I am not supposed to be in London.”
She looked at him anxiously as she made this confession.
“I understand,” said Sir Ralph, which was not true.
“You have probably noticed--you were so quick at seeing those
things--that I am not wearing my wedding ring. Well,” she hesitated,
“Dimitri and I have quarrelled, and I do not want him to find me. I
haven’t been to the Embassy or to call on any of my old friends.”
“You may be sure,” said Sir Ralph, “that your secret is safe. I may
say,” he added, “that this is not the first time I have been entrusted
with a confidence as delicate.”
“I know I can trust you,” she said, warmly gripping his hand.
“I am staying in a little furnished flat which I have taken in
Half Moon Street. I have a duenna with me for the sake of the
proprieties--Dimitri is so funny about those things--so if a busy man
can spare the time, I am always in between four and five--”
“It will give me the greatest happiness to renew the acquaintance,”
said Sir Ralph and raised her hand to his lips.
Sir Ralph retired to rest that night more pleased with himself than
ever.
CHAPTER VIII.
AN ARTIST MAKES AN EXHIBITION
OF HIMSELF
No man has ever understood a woman, for the simple reason that woman
is unintelligible even to her own kind. If she were not, and if she
were susceptible to explanation by her own sisters, be sure that her
own sisters would lose no time in telling the first man she met all
about her.
Lady Moya Felton possessed that rare combination of talents, beauty
and acumen. She dressed well, she spoke well, and she looked well. She
was a product of Newnham, an institution which, more often than not,
gives the world a being which is something less than a woman and
something more than a babu. This being is crammed with erudition and
for many years fights life with a textbook. Sometimes she continues to
the end, very self-assured, very confident of the facts she has culled
from the printed page and very determined that she will never
surrender her mechanical facts or her machine-made values. Sometimes,
she succumbs to the humanising influences which daily contact with the
verities of life bring to her and develops into a useful and charming
member of society.
Moya had absorbed just as much of life as she thought was necessary to
her comfort. She stopped short of the supreme lesson which finds
expression in cheerful sacrifice but she was an eminently pleasing
person and never discussed biological justice or gave forth as her own
the shoddy philosophies she had acquired in hall. Therefore, she was
bearable. Moreover, by realising--here her instinct served her--that
Newnham had turned her out fit for nothing better than a church-going
school ma’am, she conveyed an impression of her education rather than
declaimed the fact.
Practical as she was, she had a guilty secret, not only a very dear
one, to be hugged tight to her heart, but one which evoked the unusual
emotion of profound disapproval in the more ordered compartments of
her mind. Moya was a dreamer, a cold-blooded romanticist who had
wonderful adventures with wonderful people whenever she walked or rode
abroad. In the privacy of her big limousine, she would be absorbed in
events of her own creation, wholly monopolised by men and women who
bore no likeness to and had no relation with any person in her
somewhat extensive list of acquaintances. She would often find herself
in situations so absurdly impossible that even the penny novelette
reader would have rejected them with the scorn which their crudity
deserved. She did not dream of living people, the mere mental
suggestion--for the roving mind has a trick of taking charge at
times--that any of her visionary heroes had his prototype in flesh and
blood ensured the ejection of the offending dream-man and the
substitution of another, more wildly improbable but at the same time
more unlikely to challenge relationship with anybody in the material
world.
She could dream and yet accept the cold practicality of a Ralph Sapson
and calmly consider a marriage so hopelessly prosaic.
That was inexplicable.
For an engaged lover Ralph had been singularly remiss. He had called
once since his unemotional declaration of love. To do him justice he
had skipped the tender demonstrations which usually accompany even the
most formal engagements and had got down to the question of settlement
in the shortest space of time. This was as Moya could wish, for she
also was embarrassed at the thought that a human being might possibly
approach--suffering in comparison--the extravagance, wordless and
intangible as it was, of her shadowy friends.
It is a remarkable circumstance that romance in concrete form did not
come to Moya, until the very week she engaged herself to marry Sir
Ralph Sapson. It came in a curious way. She had driven to Leicester
Square to see an exhibition of pictures. It was one of those
collections which dawn upon London, bringing in its wake a name which
has never been heard before, save in a very select circle and is never
heard again outside of that circle; an orbit which swings beyond the
ken of ordinary mortals.
She went into the gallery and found it a veritable desert. Save for a
young man and a small, pinched and preoccupied girl, wearing a large
pendant in which was inserted the photograph of her uninteresting
fiancé, the place was empty. The girl with the pendant carried her
excuse in her hand, in the shape of a bunch of catalogues. There was
less excuse for the young man for he was healthy in appearance and it
was not raining.
Moya began a conscientious inspection of the pictures, chiefly
remarkable for their colouring and for the atmosphere which the artist
had managed to secure. Indeed, the pictures were all atmosphere. The
girl made a slow progress along the wall, comparing each framed
atrocity with her catalogue and striving to sense, dimly, something of
the artist’s honourable intentions.
She looked around once to discover what effect the pictures had upon
her fellow sightseer. He was standing before a long panel
representing, if the catalogue had been rightly compiled, “A Blue Wind
on a Green Hill.” His face bore an expression of the deepest gloom,
his hat was tilted to the back of his head and his hands were thrust
deeply into his trousers pockets. The longer he looked at the “Blue
Wind on the Green Hill” the more morose and unhappy did he appear.
This then was the attitude which the new colourist school demanded,
one of fierce but approving antagonism if the paradox be permitted.
She moved up till she was almost by his side, never thinking that in
the presence of the girl with the programmes and the photographic
miniature, he would dare address her. Yet he did.
“What do you think of that one?” he asked without turning his head.
She was taken aback and was prepared to be chilly and non-committal.
She looked at his face and the nearer view was a pleasing one. He was
very fair, very good-looking and had the bluest eyes she had ever seen
in a man. He was also unshaven and his collar was not clean, but he
was well dressed enough and his tone was wholly Oxford--and Balliol at
that.
“I think it is rather weird,” she said.
“So do I,” he nodded vigorously. “I think it is--‘weird’ is the word.
As a work of art how does it strike you?”
She hesitated. She had a full range of studio jargon which she had
acquired in the course of her after-education and could speak glibly
on atmosphere, tone and light. She knew that it was possible to refer
to a still-life study of a bunch of bananas as being “full of
movement” without being guilty of an absurdity. In fact, she knew
enough about art to have occupied a position on any average newspaper
as a critic.
“As a work of art,” she said, “it is original and a little eccentric.”
“Frankly?” he demanded fiercely.
All the time he spoke he was glaring at the picture and had not turned
his head toward her.
“Frankly,” she replied, “I think these are monstrosities.”
He nodded again.
“I agree with you,” he said, “and I know better than anybody else how
monstrous they are--I painted ’em!”
Moya gasped.
“I am awfully sorry,” she began.
“I am sorry, too--that I painted them,” he replied. “I am not sorry
that I exhibited them, because all my friends told me that they were
wonderful and naturally I get some satisfaction from proving that my