The Rustle of Silk
as plain as the nose on my face. The Government, always in terror of
labor, has been amazingly supported in this business by the whole sanity
of England, but the end of it will be that the miners will be given less
wages but large shares in the profits of the coal owners. I shall
probably be able to make a better living by becoming a miner myself. You
sit there petulant and annoyed because I am in the depths of
despondency. You'll cry out for cake when bread has run out, like all
the women of your kind, but you see in me a doomed man unable to raise a
finger to save property which has been in my family for several
generations. I simply can't jibber and giggle and crack jokes with you
and talk innuendoes. I was a fool to come down at all."
"Oh," said Mrs. Malwood aghast. "Oh--I suppose you think that I ought to
amuse _you_?"
"Yes, I do," said Dowth.
And Mrs. Malwood also was at a loss for adjectives.
And when, presently, Rip Van Winkle appeared, smiling and sun-tanned to
join what he expected to be a jovial group, he found a strange silence
and a most uncomfortable air of jarring temperaments. He was well
accustomed to these little parties of Feo's and to watch her at work
with new men whom she collected on her way through life. Usually they
were rather riotous affairs, filled with mirth and daring. What in the
name of all that was wonderful had happened to this one? He joined his
son and put his hand on the boy's shoulder.
"Gibbie," he said, "enlighten me."
But he got no explanation from this young man, who seemed to be like a
bird whose wings had been cut. "My dear Father," he said, "I've no
sympathy with Feo's little pranks. She and the Malwood girl seem to have
picked up a bounder and a shivering Welsh terrier this time, and even
they probably regret it. I ran over this afternoon to yarn with you, as
a matter of fact. Come on, let's get out of this. Let's go down to the
stream and sit under the trees and have it out."
And so they left together, unnoticed by that disconcerted foursome with
whose little games fate had had the impudence to interfere. And
presently, seated on the bank of the brook which ran through the lower
part of the park, Lord Gilbert Jermyn, ex-major Royal Air Force, D. S.
O., M. C., got it off his chest. "O God," he began, "how fed up I am
with this infernal peace."
The old man gazed at his son with amazement. "I don't follow you," he
said. "Peace? My dear lad, we have all been praying for it and we
haven't got it yet."
The boy, and he was nothing more than that, sat with rounded shoulders
and a deep frown on his face, hunched up, flicking pieces of earth into
the bubbling water.
"I know all about that," he went on. "Of course you've prayed for peace.
So did everybody over twenty-four. But what about us,--we who were
caught as kids, before we knew anything, and taught the art of flying
and sent up at any old time, careless of death, the eyes of the
artillery, the protectors of the artillery, the supermen with beardless
faces. What about us in this so-called peace of yours? Here we are at a
loose end, with no education, because that was utterly interrupted, able
to do absolutely nothing for a living,--let down, let out, looked on
rather as though we were brigands because we have grown into the habit
of breaking records, smashing conventions and killing as a pastime. Do
you see my point, old boy? We herd together in civics when we're not in
the police courts for bashing bobbies and not in the divorce courts for
running off with other people's wives, and we ask ourselves, in pretty
direct English, what the hell is going to become of us,--and echo
answers what. But I can tell you this. What we want is war, perpetual
bloody war, never mind who's the enemy. You made us want it, you fitted
us for it and for nothing else. We're all pretty excellent in the air
and in consequence utterly useless on earth. And when I read the papers,
and I never read more than the headlines anyway, I long to see that
Germany is going to take advantage of the damned stupidity of all the
Allied governments, including that of America, gather up the weapons
that she hasn't returned and the men who are going to refuse to pay
reparations and start the whole business over again. My God, how eagerly
I'd get back into my uniform, polish up my buttons, stop drinking and
smoking and get fit for flying once more. I'd sing like Caruso up there
among the clouds and empty my machine gun at the first Boche who came
along with a thrill of joy. That's my job. I know no other."
The old man's hair stood on end,--all of it, like a white bush.
IV
Something happened that afternoon which might have swung Lola's life on
to an entirely different set of rails and put Fallaray even farther out
of her reach. The unrest which had followed the War had made the
acquisition of servants very difficult. The young country girls who had
been glad enough to go into service in the large houses now preferred to
stick to their factories, because they were able to have free evenings.
The housekeeper at Chilton Park was very short-handed and in consequence
asked Lola and Mrs. Malwood's maid if they would make themselves useful.
Mrs. Malwood's didn't see it. She had been well bitten by the
trades-union bug and, therefore, was not going to do anything of any
sort except her specific duties, and those as carelessly as she could.
The housekeeper could go and hang herself. Violet, the girl in question,
intended to lie on her bed and read _Scarlet Bits_ until she was needed
by her mistress. Lola, whose blood was good, was very glad to lend a
hand. With perfect willingness she committed an offence against lady's
maids which shocked Violet to the very roots of her system. She donned a
little cap and apron and turned herself into a parlor maid, a creature,
as all the world knows, many pegs of the ladder beneath her own position
as a lady's maid. When, therefore, tea was served on the terrace, Lola
assisted the butler, looking daintier than ever, and so utterly free
from coquetry, because there was no man in the world except Fallaray for
her, that she might have been a little ghost.
But the trained eye of Gordon Macquarie looked her over immediately. He
turned to Lady Feo, to whom he had not addressed a word for twenty
minutes, and said with a sudden flash of enthusiasm, "Ye gods and little
fishes, what a picture of a girl! Wouldn't she look perfectly wonderful
in the front line of the chorus on the O. P. side! An actress too, I bet
you. Look at the way she's pretending not to be alive. Of course she
knows how perfectly sweet she looks in that saucy make-up."
If Mr. Gordon Macquarie had deliberately gone out of his way to discover
the most brilliant method of sentencing himself to the lethal chamber he
could not have been more successful than by using that outpouring of
gushing words. Feo had fully realized, from the moment that she had left
the dining room, that in acquiring Gordon Macquarie she had committed
the gravest _faux pas_ of her life. Not only was he a bounder but he did
not possess the imagination and the sense of proportion to know that in
being invited down to Chilton Park by Lady Feo he had metaphorically
been decorated with a much coverted order. His egotism and his whining
fright had made him unable to maintain his fourth wall and at least
imitate the ways of a gentleman. Never before in her history had Feo
spent an afternoon so unpleasant and so humiliating, and now, to be
obliged to listen to a paean of praise about her maid, if you please,
was the last straw. Any other woman would probably have risen from her
place among her cushions, followed Lola into the house and either boxed
her ears or ordered her back to town.
But Feo had humor, and although her pride was wounded and she would
willingly have given orders for Macquarie to be shot through the head,
she pursued a slightly different method. She rose, gave Macquarie a most
curious smile, waited until Lola had retired from the terrace, followed
her and called her back just as she was about to disappear into the
servants' quarters. "Lola," she said, "run up at once and pack my
things. We are going back to town. Say nothing to anybody. Be nippy,"
the word was Simpkins's, "and in the meantime I will telephone for a
car. Do you understand?"
"Yes, my lady." In Lola's voice there must have been something of the
tremendous disappointment that swept over her. But it was ignored or
unnoticed by her mistress. To leave Chilton Park almost as soon as she
had seen it,--not to be able to creep secretly into Fallaray's room and
stand there all alone and get from it the feeling of the man, the
vibrations of his thoughts,--not to be able to steal out in the
moonlight and wander among the Italian gardens made magic by the white
light and picture to herself the tall ascetic lonely figure in front of
whom some night she intended to move Heaven and earth to stand.
But she turned away quickly, obeyed orders without a single question and
ran up the wide staircase blindly, because, for the moment, her eyes
were filled with tears. But only for the moment. After all, there was
nothing in this visit that could help her scheme along. She must keep
her courage and her nerve, continue her course of study, watch her
opportunities and be ready to seize the real chance when it presented
itself. Lady Feo was bored,--which, of course, was a crime. Macquarie
was a false coin. Lola could have told her that. How many exactly
similar men had ogled her in the street and attempted to capture her
attention. She had been amazed to see him join Lady Feo at Paddington
station that morning. She instantly put him down as a counter jumper
from a second-rate linen draper's in the upper reaches of Oxford
Street.--She was ready for Feo when she came up to put on her hat. Her
deft fingers had worked quickly, and she was alert and bright, in spite
of her huge disappointment.
It was characteristic of Feo to break up her houseparty with the most
unscrupulous disregard for the convenience of the other members of it,
and to care nothing for the fact that she would spoil the pleasure of
her father. He and her brother, her little friend, Mrs. Malwood, and the
two disappointing men must pay her bill. She never paid. It was
characteristic of her, also, to turn her mind quickly, before leaving,
upon some other way of obtaining amusement, as she dreaded to face a
dull and barren Sunday in London. She remembered suddenly that Penelope
Winchfield, one of the "gang," had opened her house near Aylesbury,
which was only a short drive from Princes Risborough. It was a brain
wave. So she went to the telephone and rang up, invited herself for the
week-end and went finally into the car and slipped away with Lola
without saying good-by to a single person. "How I hate this place," she
said. "Something always goes wrong here." And she turned and made a face
at the old building like a naughty child.
Any other woman--at any rate, any other woman whose upbringing had been
as harum-scarum as Feo's--would have given Lola her notice and dropped
her like an old shoe. But she had humor.
V
Queen's Road, Bayswater, so far as the jeweler's little shop was
concerned, was in for a surprise that evening. Just as Lola's mother was
about to close up after a rather depressing day which had brought very
little business--a few wrist watches to be attended to, nothing more--a
car drove up, and from it descended Lola, carrying a handbag and smiling
like a girl let out of school.
"Why, my dear," cried Mrs. Breezy, "what does this mean? I thought you
were going to Chilton Park." But she held her ewe lamb warmly and gladly
in her arms, while a shout of welcome came from behind the glass screen