Love and Lucy
Square for the season, and the sisters saw much of each other. Now it
happened that one day Mabel had seen Lucy with Urquhart walking down
Bond Street, at noon or thereabouts, and had passed by on the other
side with no more than a wave of the hand. It was all much simpler
than it looked, really, because Lucy had been to James's office, which
was in Cork Street, and coming away had met Jimmy Urquhart in
Burlington Gardens. He had strolled on with her, and was telling her
that he had been waterplaning on Chichester Harbour and was getting
rather bitten with the whole business of flight. "I'm too old, I know,
but I'm still ass enough to take risks. I think I shall get the
ticket," he had said. What ticket? The pilot's ticket, or whatever
they might call it. "I expect you are too old," she had said, and
then-- "How old are you, by the way?" He told her. "We call it
forty-two." "Exactly James's age; and exactly ten years older than me.
Yes, too old. I think I wouldn't."
He had laughed. "I'm certain I shall. It appeals to me." Then he had
told her, "The first time I saw a man flying I assure you I could have
shed tears." She remembered that this was out of his power. "Odd
thing! What's gravitation to me, or I to gravitation? A commonplace
whereby I walk the world. Never mind. There was that young man
breaking a law of this planet. Well--that's a miracle. I tell you I
might have wept. And then I said to myself, "My man, you'll do this or
perish." Then she: "And have you done it?" and he: "I have not, but
I'm going to." She had suddenly said, "No, please don't." His quick
look at her she remembered, and the suffusion on his burnt face. "Oh,
but I shall. Do you wish to know why? Because you don't mean it;
because you wouldn't like me if I obeyed you." She said gravely, "You
can't know that." "Yes, but I do. You like me--assume that--" Lucy
said, "You may"; and he, "I do. You like me because I am such as I am.
If I obeyed you in this I should cease to be such as I am and become
such as I am not and never have been. You might like me more--but you
might not. No, that's too much of a risk. I can't afford it." She had
said, "That's absurd," but she hadn't thought it so.
Mabel came to her for lunch and rallied her. "I saw you, my dear. But
I wouldn't spoil sport. All right--you might do much worse. He's very
much alive. Anyhow, he doesn't wear an--" Then Lucy was hurt. "Oh,
Mabel, that's horrid. You know I hate you to talk like that." Mabel
stood rebuked. "It was beastly of me. But you know I never could stand
his eyeglass. It is what they call anti-social in their novels.
Really, you might as well live in the Crystal Palace." Then she held
out her hand, and Lucy took it after some hesitation. But Mabel was
irrepressible. Almost immediately she had jumped into the fray again,
with "You're both going to his place in Hampshire, aren't you?" Then
Lucy had flushed; and Mabel had given her a queer look.
"That's all right," she presently said. "He asked us, you know, but we
can't. I hear that Vera Nugent is to be hostess. I rather liked her,
though of course you can never tell how such copious conversation will
wear. I don't think she stopped talking for a single moment. Laurence
thought he was going mad. It makes him broody, you know, like a hen.
He rubs his ears, and says his wattles are inflamed."
It was either that day, or another such day--it really doesn't matter
which day it was--that Mabel drifted into the subject of what she
called "the James romance." Did James--? Had James--? And where were
we standing now? Lucy, whose feelings upon the subject were more
complicated than they had been at first, was not very communicative;
but she owned there had been repetitions. Mabel, who was desperately
quick to notice, judged that she was mildly bored. "I see," she said;
"I see. But--that's all."
"All!" cried Lucy. "Yes, indeed."
Mabel said again, "I see." Lucy, who certainly didn't see, was silent;
and then Mabel with appalling candour said, "I suppose you would have
it out with him if you weren't afraid to."
Lucy was able to cope with that kind of thing. "Nothing would induce
me to do it. I shouldn't be able to lift my head up if I did. It would
not only be--well, horrible, but it would be very cruel as well. I
should feel myself a brute." On Mabel's shrug she was stung into an
attack of her own. "And whatever you may say, to me, I know that you
couldn't bring yourself to such a point. No woman could do it, who
respected herself." Mabel had the worst of it in the centre, but by a
flanking movement recovered most of the ground. She became very vague.
She said, as if to herself, "After all, you know, you may be mistaken.
Perhaps the less you say the better."
Mistaken! And "the less you say"! Lucy's grey eyes took intense
direction. "Please tell me what you mean, my dear. Do you think I'm
out of my senses? Do you really think I've imagined it all?"
"No, no," said Mabel quickly, and visibly disturbed. "No, no, of
course I don't. I really don't know what I meant. It's all too
confusing for simple people like you and me. Let's talk about
something else." Lucy, to whom the matter was distasteful, agreed; but
the thought persisted. Mistaken ... and "the less you say...!"
CHAPTER X
AT A WORLD'S EDGE
It was after that queer look, after her too conscious blush that she
began to envisage the state of her affairs. She was going to Martley
Thicket for Whitsuntide; it was an old engagement, comparatively old,
that is; she did want to go, and now she knew that she did. Well, how
much did she want to go? Ought she to want it? What had happened?
Questions thronged her when once she had opened a window. What did it
matter to her whether Urquhart qualified as an aviator or not? What
had made her ask him not to do it? How had she allowed him to say
"Assume that you like me"? The short dialogue stared at her in red
letters upon the dark. "Assume that you like me--" "You may assume
it." "I do." She read the packed little sentences over and over, and
studied herself with care. No, honestly, nothing jarred. There was no
harm; she didn't feel any tarnish upon her. And yet--she was looking
forward to Martley Thicket with a livelier blood than she had felt
since Easter when James had kissed her in the shrouded garden. A
livelier blood? Hazarding the looking-glass, she thought that she
could detect a livelier iris too. What had happened? Well, of course,
the answer to that question was involved in another: how much was she
to assume? How much did Urquhart like her? She hoped, against
conviction, that she might have answered these questions before she
met him again--which would probably be at Martley. Just now, stoutly
bearing her disapproval, he was doubtless at Byfleet or elsewhere
risking his neck. She answered a question possibly arising out of this
by a shrewd smile. "Of course I don't disapprove. He knows that. I
shiver; but I know he's perfectly right. He may be sure." The meeting
at Martley would, at the very least, be extremely interesting. She
left it there for the moment.
But having once begun to pay attention to such matters as these, she
pursued her researches--in and out of season. It was a busy time of
year, and James always laid great stress on what he called "the duties
of her station." She must edge up crowded stairways behind him, stand
at his side in hot and humming rooms where the head spun with the
effort not to hear what other people were saying--so much more
important, always, than what your partner was. James's height and
eyeglass seemed to give him an impartial air at these dreadful
ceremonies. Behind his glass disk he could afford to be impertinent.
And he was certainly rude enough to be an Under-Secretary. Without
that shining buckler of the soul he would have been simply nobody;
with it, he was a demi-god. Here then, under the very shadow of his
immortality, Lucy pursued her researches. What of the romantic,
hidden, eponymous James? Where did he stand now in her regard?
Since Easter at Wycross, James had not been her veiled Eros, but the
possibilities were all there. He was not a garden god, by any means,
nor a genius of the Spring. January and Onslow Square had not frozen
his currents; February and the Opera House had heightened his passion.
At any moment he might resume his devotional habit--even here in
Carlton House Terrace. And what then? Well--and this was odd--this
ought to have produced a state of tension very trying to the nerves;
and, well--it hadn't. That's all. At that very party in Carlton House
Terrace, with a band braying under the stairs, and a fat lord
shouting in her ear, her secret soul was trembling on a brink. She was
finding out to her half-rueful dismay--it was only half--that she was
prepared to be touched, prepared to be greatly impressed, but not
prepared to be thrilled as she had been, if James should kiss her
again. She was prepared, in fact, to present--as statesmen do when
they write to their sovereign--her grateful, humble duty--and no more.
In vain the band brayed, in vain Lord J----, crimson by her ear,
roared about the weather in the West of Ireland, Lucy's soul was
peering over the edge of her old world into the stretches of a misty
new one.
This was bad enough, and occupied her through busy nights and days;
but there was more disturbing matter to come, stirred up to cloud her
mind by Mabel's unwonted discretion. Mabel had been more than
discreet. She had been frightened. Pushing out into a stream of new
surmise, she had suddenly faltered and hooked at the quay. Lucy
herself was at first merely curious. She had no doubts, certainly no
fears. What had been the matter with Mabel, when she hinted that
perhaps, after all, James had never done anything? What could Mabel
know, or guess, or suspect? Lucy owned to herself, candidly, that
James was incomprehensible. After thirteen years, or was it
fourteen?--suddenly--with no warning symptoms, to plunge into such
devotion as never before, when everything had been new, and he only
engaged--! Men were like that when they were engaged. They aren't
certain of one, and leave no chances. But James, even as an engaged
man, had always been certain. He had taken her, and everything else,
for granted. She remembered how her sisters, not only Mabel, but the
critical Agnes (now Mrs. Riddell in the North), had discussed him and
found him too cocksure to be quite gallant. Kissed her? Of course he
had kissed her. Good Heavens. Yes, but not as he had that night at the
Opera. "You darling! You darling!" Now James had called her "my
darling" as often as you please--but never until then "you darling."
There's a world of difference. Anybody can see it.
And then--after the beautiful, the thrilling, the deeply touching
episode--the moment after it--there was the old, indifferent, slightly
bored James with the screwed eye and the disk. Not a hint, not a
ripple, not the remains of a flush. It was the most bewildering, the
most baffling jig-saw of a business she had ever heard of. You would
have said that he was two quite separate people; you might have
said--Mabel would have said at once--that James had had nothing to do
with it.
But she _had_ said so! The discovery stabbed Lucy in the eyes like a
flash of lightning, left her blind and quivering, with a swim of red
before her hurt vision. That was why Mabel had been frightened. And
now Lucy herself was frightened.
Francis Lingen, absurd! Mr. Urquhart? Ah, that was quite another
thing. She grew hot, she grew quite cold, and suddenly she began to
sob. Oh, no, no, not that. A flood of tossing thoughts came rioting
and racing in, flinging crests of foam, like white and beaten water.
She for a time was swept about, a weed in this fury of storm. She was