Love and Lucy
noticed it? He stopped midway of the stairs, and passers-by may have
thought he was looking for a dropt sixpence. Not at all. The earth
seemed to be heaving beneath his feet. But a wave of courage surged up
through him. Pooh! no woman yet ever disregarded the homage of a man.
He would send some roses to-morrow, without a card. She would
understand. And so it went on. Wagner came back to his own.
On this occasion, after this second great adventure, Lucy had no
conflict with fate. Thankfully she took the gift of the God; she took
it as final, as a thing complete in itself, a thing most beautiful,
most touching, most honourable to giver and recipient. It revived all
her warmth of feeling, but this time without a bitter lees to the
dram. And she was immensely the better for it. She felt in charity
with all the world, her attitude to James was one of clear sight. Oh,
now she understood him through and through. She would await the
fulness of time; sufficient for the day was the light of the day.
She was happier than she had been for many years. Half-term was
approaching, when she would be allowed to go down and see Lancelot; in
these days she felt Spring in the air. February can be kind to us, and
show a golden threshold to March. She had a letter from Mabel telling
her of Mr. Urquhart's feats in the hunting field.... "He's quite mad,
I think, and mostly talks about you and Lancelot. He calls you
Proserpine. As for his riding, my dear, it curdles the blood. He
doesn't ride, he drives; sits well back, and accelerates on the near
side. He brought his own horses, luckily for ours and his neck. They
seem to understand it. He hunted every day but one; and then he rushed
up to town to keep some appointment and came back to a very late
dinner, driving himself in his motor. He is a tempestuous person, but
can be very grave when he likes. He talked beautifully one
evening--mostly about you." Lucy's eyes smiled wisely over this
letter. She liked to think that she could induce gravity upon a
hunting party. She had never quite approved of the Peltry atmosphere.
Hard riding seemed to involve hard living, and hard swearing. She had
once heard Laurence let himself go to some rider over hounds, and had
put him on a back shelf in her mind--him and his Peltry with him. A
prude? No, she was sure she was nothing of the sort; but she liked
people to keep a hold on themselves.
A gay little dinner-party, one of hers, as she told James, finished a
month of high light. The young Pierson couple, some Warreners, a Mrs.
Treveer and Jimmy Urquhart--eight with themselves. The faithful
Francis Lingen was left out as a concession to James and love in the
dark. She noticed, with quiet amusement, how gratified James was. He
was so gratified that he did not even remark upon it. Now James's
little weakness, or one of them, let us say, was that he could not
resist a cutting phrase, when the thing did not matter. Therefore--she
reasoned--Francis Lingen, absurdly enough, did matter. That he
should, that anything of the sort should matter to James was one more
sign to her of the promise, just as the weather was one. The Spring
was at hand, and soon we should all go a-maying.
So we dined at one table, and had a blaze of daffodils from Wycross,
and everybody seemed to talk at once. Pierson told her after dinner
that Madge thought Urquhart ripping (as she had thought Wagner); and
certainly he was one to make a dinner-party go. He was ridiculous
about Laurence Corbet and his sacred foxes. "Don't _shoot_ that thing!
God of Heaven, what are you about?" "Oh, I beg your pardon, I
thought--" "Are you out of your senses? That must be torn to pieces by
dogs." He was very good at simulating savagery, but had a favourite
trick of dropping it suddenly, or turning it on himself. He caught
Mrs. Treveer, a lady of ardour not tempered by insight. She agreed
with him about hunting. "Oh, you are so right! Now can't something be
done about it? Couldn't a little paper be written--in that vein, you
know?" "Not by me," said Urquhart. "I'm a hunting man, you see." Mrs.
Treveer held up her fan, but took no offence.
Lucy, with Mabel's letter in mind, gave her guest some attention; but
for the life of her could not see that he paid her any beyond what he
had for the others or for his dinner. He joined Pierson at her side,
and made no effort to oust him. He did not flatter her by recalling
Lancelot; he seemed rather to muse out loud. James with his coat-tails
to the fire was quite at his ease--and when Urquhart offered to drive
her down to Westgate for the half-term (which she herself mentioned),
it was James who said, "Capital! That will be jolly for you." "But
_you_ wouldn't come, would you?" "My child, it is that I _couldn't_
come. A motor in March! I should die. Besides," he added, "as you
know, I have to be at Brighton that Sunday." She had known it, and she
had known also that Brighton was an excuse. One of the bogies she kept
locked in a cupboard was James's _ennui_ when Lancelot was to the
fore. Could this too be jealousy!
"I'll tell you what I'll do," Jimmy Urquhart said. "The run down would
be rather jolly, but the run back in the dark might be a bore. The
Nugents have got a house at Sandwich. Why shouldn't you go there? You
know my sister Nugent, as they used to say."
"Yes, of course I do," Lucy said, "but I couldn't really--"
"But she is there, my dear ma'am. That's the point. I'll drop you
there on my way back. I wish I could stop too, but that's not
possible. She'll arrange it."
James thought it an excellent plan; but Lucy had qualms. Odd, that the
visit of Eros should a second time be succeeded by a motor-jaunt! To
go motoring, again, with a Mr. Urquhart--oh! But she owned that she
was absurd. James did not conceal his sarcasms. "She either fears her
fate too much..." he quoted at her. She pleaded with him.
"Darling," she said--and he was immensely complacent over that--"I
suppose it's a sign of old age, but-- After all, why shouldn't I go by
train--or in our own car, if it comes to that?"
"Firstly," said James through his eyeglass, "because Urquhart asks you
to go in his--a terror that destroyeth in the noonday compared to
ours; and secondly because, if you don't want it, I should rather like
to go to Brighton in mine."
"Oh," said she, "then you don't mind motoring in March!"
"Not in a closed car," said James--"and not to Brighton." This acted
as an extinguisher of the warmer feelings. Let Mr. Urquhart do his
worst then.
CHAPTER IX
SUNDRY ROMANTIC EPISODES
A little cloud of witness, assembled at will like seagulls out of the
blue inane, would come about her in after years. That madly
exhilarating rush to Westgate, for instance, on a keen March morning;
and that sudden question of hers to Urquhart, "What made you think of
asking me?" And his laconic answer, given without a turn of the head,
"Because I knew you would like it. You did before, you know. And that
was January." There was one. Another, connected with it, was her going
alone up to the schoolhouse, and her flush of pleasure when Lancelot
said, "Oh, I say, did He bring you down? Good--then we'll go
immediately and see the car; perhaps it's a new one." She could afford
to recall that--after a long interval. They had had a roaring day,
"all over the place," as Lancelot said afterwards to a friend; and
then there had been her parting with Urquhart in the dark at the open
door of Queendon Court. "Aren't you going to stop?" "No, my dear."
She remembered being amused with that. "Aren't you even coming in?" "I
am not. Good-bye. You enjoyed yourself?" "Oh, immensely." "That's what
I like," he had said, and "pushed off," as his own phrase went. Atop
of that, the return to James, and to nothingness. For nothing
happened, except that he had been in a good temper throughout, which
may easily have been because she had been in one herself--until the
Easter holidays, when he had been very cross indeed. Poor James, to
get him to begin to understand Lancelot's bluntness, intensity, and
passion for something or other, did seem hopeless.
They were at Wycross, on her urgent entreaty, and James was bored at
Wycross, she sometimes thought, because she loved it so much.
Jealousy. A man's wife ought to devote herself. She should love
nothing but her husband. He had spent his days at the golf course, not
coming home to lunch. Urquhart was asked for a Sunday--on Lancelot's
account--but couldn't come, or said so at least. Then, on the
Saturday, when he should have been there, James suddenly kissed her in
the garden--and, of course, in the dark.
She hadn't known that he was in the house yet. He had contracted the
habit of having tea at the club-house and talking on till dark. He did
that, as she believed, because she always read to Lancelot in the
evenings: she gave up the holidays entirely to him. Well, Lancelot
that afternoon had been otherwise engaged--with friends of a
neighbour. She had cried off on the score of "seeing something of
Father," at which Lancelot had winked. But James was not in to tea,
and at six--and no sign of him--she yielded to the liquid calling of a
thrush in the thickening lilacs, and had gone out. There she stayed
till it was dark, in a favourite place--a circular garden of her
contriving, with a pond, and a golden privet hedge, so arranged as to
throw yellow reflections in the water. Standing there, it grew
perfectly dark--deeply and softly dark. The night had come down warm
and wet, like manifold blue-black gauze. She heard his quick, light
step. Her heart hammered, but she did not move. He came behind her,
clasped and held her close. "Oh, you've come--I wondered. Oh, how
sweet, how sweet--" And then "My love!" had been said, and she had
been kissed. In a moment he was gone. She had stayed on motionless,
enthralled by the beauty of the act--and when she had withdrawn
herself at last, and had tiptoed to the house, she saw his lamp on the
table, and himself reading the _Spectator_ before a wood fire!
Recalling all that, she remembered the happy little breath of laughter
which had caught her. "If it wasn't so perfectly sweet and beautiful,
it would be the most comic thing in the world!" she had said to
herself.
A telegram from Jimmy Urquhart came that night just before dinner.
"Arriving to-morrow say ten-thirty for an hour or so, Urquhart." It
was sent from St. James's Street. Lancelot had said, "Stout fellow,"
and James took it quite well. She herself remembered her feeling of
annoyance, how clearly she foresaw an interrupted reverie and a
hampered Sunday--and also how easily he had falsified her prevision.
There had been an animated morning of garden inspection, in the course
of which she had shown him (with a softly fluttering heart and perhaps
enhanced colour) the hedged oval of last night's romance; a pony race;
a game of single cricket in the paddock--Lancelot badly beaten; lunch,
and great debate with James about aeroplanes, wherein Lancelot showed
himself a bitter and unscrupulous adversary of his parent. Finally,
the trial of the new car: an engine of destruction such as Lancelot
had never dreamed of. It was admittedly too high-powered for England;
you were across the county in about a minute. And then he had departed
in a kind of thunderstorm of his own making. Lancelot, preternaturally
moved, said to his mother, "I say, Mamma, what a man--eh?" She,
lightly, "Yes, isn't he wonderful?" and Lancelot, with a snort: "A
man? Ten rather small men--easily." And James, poor James, saw nothing
kissable in that!
It hadn't been till May of that year that Lucy began to think about
Urquhart--or rather it was in May that she discovered herself to be
thinking about him. Mabel assisted her there. Mabel was in Cadogan