And now she was going home to tell Lilac. She had walked down West Hill
and taken the tram to Clapham Junction so as to go the longest way round
and have the bit across the Bridge before she went in. It would be seven
o’clock before she got to the river, and the tide would be full. Over in
the rose-and-lavender distance the flattened bubble of the Lambeth
gas-vat, like some pearly white moon would be rising from the stuff of
the Earth ready to detach itself to soar up, up, into the highways where
satellites travel the sky. The window-boxes and painted tubs along
Cheyne Walk would make a bright mosaic against the shadow beneath the
sunset, and all the sparrows in the garden in Chancery would be
chirruping over their evening crumbs. And Lilac would be laying the
table for supper and wondering why Gillian was late. Gillian was not at
all sure how Lilac would take the news.
Lilac took it very well. She had finished laying the table when Gillian
got in and was sewing two enormous mauve satin ribbons on to a white
crinoline hat.
“I’ve washed them,” she said as Gillian opened the door which led
straight off the top-floor landing into their little sitting-room. “I’ve
washed them in cold water with salt in it, and they’re as good as new.
Sophie does get the best of everything.”
“Was it one of Sophie’s hats?” asked Gillian.
“No. I bought the hat myself, but the strings come off that orchid-mauve
frock Sophie gave me at Easter and the rose was in a hat of hers. I’ve
put them all together and they’re exactly like a model I saw in Sloane
Street last week.”
“Lilac,” said Gillian, “I’ve been excommunicated. Mrs. Lysaght and the
Bishop have turned me out of Pelham House.”
“The beetles!” said Lilac. “The black beetles!—the cockroaches! And
you’ve worked for them like a steam-engine. Go and get into your white
muslin and we’ll have _all_ the butter with the green peas. I’ve put an
onion and some mint to boil with them as you told me.”
Friday was the night the Armstrongs cooked their own supper on a Primus.
On other evenings they had what was called the House dinner sent up from
the Club kitchen.
Over the late strawberries which followed the green peas (not that the
Armstrongs were vegetarians, but you can’t cook meat on a Primus in the
scullery), Lilac pronounced herself on Mrs. Lysaght’s side.
“It’s a mercy,” said Lilac severely, “that I kept _The Garden of Karma_
locked up in my side of the wardrobe or you’d have given them ‘Pale
hands I love’ for daily bread.”
“No, I shouldn’t. It’s slip-slop.”
“It’s luscious,” said Lilac; “besides, how do you know, when I haven’t
let you read it?”
“I read it in Brussels last year when I was staying with Henriette,”
said Gillian. “I wouldn’t give it to a railway porter.”
“Well, a railway porter wouldn’t want a book of poetry,” said Lilac with
that sententious, definitive air which characterized the close of most
of her arguments with her elder sister.
* * * * *
That night, long after Gillian had supposed her to be asleep, Lilac
called out in a soft little voice across the room from the bed under the
window:
“Jilly dear,” she said, “what _are_ you going to do?”
“Pray,” said Gillian; “it’s the only thing I can do to-night.”
“I suppose it is,” said Lilac. “I’ll say a threefold Ah-ah-men for you.”
“Thank you, Laylock. I didn’t know you were awake——”
“Oh, I just woke up. I suppose you were praying something fierce, and
that always disturbs me.”
“Sorry,” said Gillian.
“Granted, Miss Armstrong, I’m sure,” said Lilac.
And then they both fell asleep.
CHAPTER TWO.
LILAC
I
On the prospectus it was called _The Mordaunt Club_, but in practice no
one ever thought of saying anything but “The Hen House” when speaking of
the block of unselfcontained flats near the river in which Gillian and
Lilac Armstrong had lived ever since their mother’s death.
Sir John Mordaunt, its founder, had built it out of the remnants of
Buckingham Palace. This material he had acquired at what a later age has
called bargain prices, from one of the contractors when the Royal
dwelling was finished and there were bricks and mortar and fine-faced
stone to be had for the carting away. Being of the period, the Mordaunt
Club building was rock-like in stolidity and forbidding of aspect.
Framed to shelter poor spinsters of the governing-classes in their
declining years, it consisted of two gaunt five-storied houses, one on
each side of a courtyard graced by one plane-tree and a laburnum.
Kindness without consideration had directed the scheme. The buildings
faced due north and south. There were four flats, or sets of rooms on
each floor into two of which the sun never shone; the other two from
March to October being intolerable unless their occupants were able to
obtain for themselves the sunblinds philanthropy had not provided. The
flats consisted of two small intercommunicating rooms, the outer one
opening on to a common hall out of which, on each floor, two bleak
corridors with coal-bin, oil-tank, sink, cold-water tap and lavatory
(also of the period) served the tenants of the four flats as joint
domestic offices. Two members living together were allowed one extra and
separate room, if they could get it. And the rent, which was small,
included a certain amount of service.
There was a communal kitchen in the basement of one of the buildings,
from which, twice a day, at one o’clock and at half-past seven, the
roast beef of old England or the boiled mutton of her Antipodean island,
was sent up accompanied by potatoes, boiled, with turnips, carrots or
cabbage according to their season, and followed by milk-pudding, and on
Sundays by apple-pie. These viands, served between two hot plates, were
placed on the table in each sitting-room, whether it were laid for a
meal or spread, as the Armstrongs’ often was, with Gillian’s
school-books or Lilac’s millinery, by small hard-working maids. They
came from Battersea, these servers, and were ruled over by the janitor
Mr. Gordon, and by his wife Mrs. Gordon, who roasted beef and boiled
mutton for the “Ladies” (this was how the basement referred to the
landings) and fried and grilled and souffléed choicer viands for her
husband and the maids to consume at less conventional hours.
Mr. Gordon was only parts of a man: he had a wooden leg, a glass eye and
one other contrivance of the surgical-instrument maker, the precise
nature and location of which was most decently unrevealed, though its
existence was well known and always spoken of as “Mr. Gordon’s trouble.”
For some time after they came to the Mordaunt Club the Armstrongs had
supposed Mr. Gordon’s trouble to be the one which was always very
troublesome on Saturday evenings and had caused him one night to make an
earnest attempt at locking the courtyard gate with a tablespoon. This
delusion, fostered by the constant references to it in Mrs. Gordon’s
conversation, and by the frequency with which it was cited by the maids
as a complete explanation for their lateness on any occasion, was
dispelled, or rather was thrust further into mystery by Mrs. Gordon
herself.
“I wonder if you’d mind paying by cheque, miss,” said Mrs. Gordon on her
weekly visit to collect the dinner-money. “If I take it all downstairs
in cash, nothing’ll hold Mr. Gordon. They’ve told him at the Orspittle
that he can have a new spring fitted to his trouble, and he’s that set
on it—you know what men are, miss—that he can’t wait to find out whether
it reely will do any good work or whether it’s just one of them try-ons.
Larst year he had six little buttons put on, instead of the strap. And
believe me, miss, there ’asn’t been a week since when one or other of
them buttons ’asn’t popped off. And he won’t have boot-buttons sewed on
at home instead. Not he. You know what men are, miss. Back to the shop
it must go—and a shillin’ a time unless I can find the button in his
close. So I’ve took to keepin’ the buttons till four’s off at a time.
And wot it’ll be like if he gets a spring put on as well you can guess
for yourself, miss. It’s cost us a pretty penny has Mr. Gordon’s
trouble, miss; not but wot her ladyship didn’t come down very handsome
at first, but Mr. Gordon never was one to let well alone. And he _will_
read the papers. You know what men are, miss. All them nasty
advertisements putting ideas into his head. So, if you don’t mind, miss,
I’ll take a cheque, and give you all the cash I’ve collected from Number
Six and Number Nine—Eight’s out—and that’ll leave me just enough to do
the shoppin’ meself this morning, and Mr. Gordon won’t be tempted even
if he does get hold of my clean apron.”
Mrs. Gordon’s clean apron, a highly starched affair, was remarkable for
two pockets, in one of which she kept change, in the other a photograph
of Miss Gordon, Mr. Gordon’s daughter by an earlier and evidently
ill-judged union. Gillian was, from the first, at a loss to account for
the frequency with which Mrs. Gordon, diving for change, would put her
hand in the wrong pocket and withdraw the picture exclaiming:
“There now! if I haven’t gone and got out Miss Gordon’s photograph
instead of arf a crown. P’r’aps, as I have got it out, you’d like to
look at it, miss. It’s a new one. She brought it in the other day when
she come to see me and Mr. Gordon.”
And it very often was a new one. Miss Gordon seemed to be able to afford
a great many very new photographs, many of them taken in deep evening
dress, though the first one that had emerged from the housekeeper’s
pocket was a tinted affair on a thick bevelled card and represented Miss
Gordon in tennis clothes, “pure white to her feet” as Mrs. Gordon
pointed out, with racket in hand and balls on the ground, and a
tennis-net faintly sketched in on the blank background.
“It’s more than her own mother ever saw,” had been Mrs. Gordon’s cryptic
reply to Gillian’s congratulations on the handsome effect produced by
this effigy, “nor deserved to,” she had added as one who could, if
encouraged, expatiate on a rich theme.
Gillian would have liked to know more, but Lilac had discouraged this
curiosity in her sister as being not only vulgar but idle.
“For goodness’ sake, Gillian,” she said, “don’t let the woman talk more
than she must. She’ll stay here all day if you listen to her with both
eyes like that.”
“But I think she’s wonderful,” said Gillian, “and such a rest from Mrs.
Lysaght. She talks about real things and makes them deep and funny.”
Lilac snorted, “Rather a good description of her apple-pies. The crust
had sunk in deep enough last Sunday and there was a bit of carrot in the
apple when I got to it. Besides, she isn’t here to amuse you—and she
doesn’t amuse me. Go and talk to Mrs. Barraclough if you must be amused
in the Club. She’ll tell you things that are some use and she might get
old Lady Mordaunt to let me sell roses on Alexandra Day.”
Mrs. Barraclough was the Club treasurer. She lived in the flat at the
top of the kitchen stairs, and every Monday from 4 to 6, she sat at the
receipt of custom. The members—it was understood that they should not be
known as “tenants,” lest the Club lose caste—called on her to gossip, or
left their rent on the first Friday of the month in notes in her
letter-box according to their dispositions, some ladies being far more
delicate over finance than others. So delicate indeed was Miss Parsons
who lived in the flat immediately opposite Lilac and Gillian, that she
always paid her rent anonymously and late at night, stealing down to
slip a sealed envelope into Mrs. Barraclough’s letter-box, after Mr.
Gordon had gone his rounds at ten o’clock, when he put out the
landing-lights and locked the Club up till morning.
Mrs. Barraclough was the widow of a Yorkshire squire—but Mr.
Barraclough’s passage through her life had been so short and so sudden
that if it had ever mitigated her essential qualities, the change had
long been rectified. She was one of seven Irish daughters, all reckless,
as only the children of a Resident Magistrate in the eighteen-eighties
could be; and, after a youth of hard riding to and after hounds, had
eloped from the hunting-field with Tom Barraclough, and had seen him
drown before her eyes six months later, when their wild, protracted
honeymoon ended in the Aran Islands.
The child, which was born the following year, was a girl, and her mother
had never forgiven her for it. In consequence of the child’s failure to
be a man she had seen the small estate pass to a cousin, from whom her
tiny jointure had to be wrung year by year by a solicitor whose charges
for obtaining it halved, and in very bad years, quartered the total
which eventually reached the widow’s pocket.
Mrs. Barraclough’s life had been one long scrimmage and the training
served her well. For none but a woman inured to battle could hope to
keep the semblance of peace and order in such a hornet’s nest as the
Club was framed to become in any of those emergencies to which communal
life is liable. She had obtained the post by nepotism of the frankest
kind. Lilias her daughter had escaped early from the chronic friction of
home, by way of marriage with a naval lieutenant, a grandson of the
Club’s founder; and the present Sir John Mordaunt, a man of affairs and
used to cutting knots, had solved the problem of his daughter-in-law’s
relations with her mother by pulling such strings as were necessary to
get his son appointed to a ship in the China Seas. Having done this he
set Lilias up in a flat in Yokohama and, by himself, appointed Mrs.
Barraclough to the post of Treasurer of the Club. Mrs. Barraclough’s
book-keeping was entirely her own affair, but it was sufficient, and she
was in Debrett. To be in Debrett had originally been the first
qualification for membership of the Mordaunt. Lilac and Gillian were not
there. They had figured in _Who’s Who_ as “_2 daughters_” until Gerald
Armstrong’s death and that was all. But, as Mrs. Barraclough explained
when interviewing them, things had slackened terribly since the War. She
was referring to the Boer War which had filled the two years immediately
following her appointment to the Club.
“It is now enough to be the widow, or the orphan of any officer,” said
Mrs. Barraclough, “or of a missionary, and I understand that your aunt
was a missionary.”
Gillian was indignant.
“Aunt Elizabeth was nothing of the kind,” she protested. “She was
engaged for many years to a celibate clergyman in Rhodesia—who died two
years after their marriage—and neither Lilac nor I is her, or his,
orphan.”
“That’s what I was just saying,” said Mrs. Barraclough who, being Irish,
always knew what she meant, and knew it most especially clearly when her
hearers were most confused by what she actually said.
“Wasn’t it because Miss Armstrong was so well known to Mrs. Middleton
that you ever came to hear of the Club yourselves? And she’s a
missionary born and bred, though how she came by such a daughter as
Jessie is one of those things I’d like to ask someone who knows.”
“Well, anyway,” Gillian insisted, “we’re not missionaries.”
“No,” said Mrs. Barraclough, “you’re not, neither of you. Though if one
of you was it wouldn’t be that fluffy little sister of yours. I saw her
going out in a frill of muslin yesterday, which had no missionary in its
pedigree.”
“Lilac won’t ever be a missionary, even though she wants to go to India
more than anything in this world.”
“Then to India she’ll go,” said Mrs. Barraclough. “Lilac is the kind of
girl that gets what she wants, and sooner than late. But I’ll tell you,”
she went on with one of those sudden changes of theme which made her
conversation so stimulating, “I’ll tell you who is. The new tenant at
44. Miss Victoria Vanderleyden—she’s a missionary.”
“She sounds much more like an American,” said Gillian.
“She’s that too,” said Mrs. Barraclough. “American on one side and
missionary on the other—I forget which is which—and a manicurist by
profession.”
“I thought you said she was a missionary.”
“By birth, yes. But now that she’s got in on the strength of having been
born in Java or some such outlandish place, I find that she works in one
of those sinks of iniquity in Bond Street where you get your face ironed
out and your finger-nails made to look as though you’d been eating hot
muffins and got melted butter all over ’em. You ring the bell before you
can get in, and you pay a guinea before you can get out, and it mostly
goes in curtains and cushions.”
“Not a shop?” asked Gillian.
“No,” Mrs. Barraclough snorted, “a parlour. The Spider and the Fly it
should be called. I went there once to see.”
“Did you pay a guinea?” asked Gillian.
“I did not. I rang the bell and asked for a price-list. I might have
dropped an ‘h’ with a crash by the horrors they had. They don’t have a
price-list. It’s called a ‘brochure,’ and it says very little about
prices. It isn’t exactly a shop, but it’s so nearly one that I’d never
have let that young woman in if I’d known about it before she was in. I
must wink at it now.”
Mrs. Barraclough spent a good deal of time in winking at things which
were not strictly within the order of the Club, but which did not
disturb its peace. It was this capacity to wink with discretion that,
more than anything else in her methods, had established her power over
the members and also over the Committee which loomed behind her
administration.
“She’s a nice creature to look at and very quiet.”
“She’s young then?” Gillian was interested.
“She seems young to me, but she’s not a baby. You two are all I want in
the infant line at present.”
At one time the Club took no one under forty; but that meant separating
mother from daughters. At first they had excluded widows. That was in
old Sir John’s time. The idea of a man who didn’t provide for his wife
made the philanthropist so angry that he refused to do anything for the
consequences.
“The Club’s full of widows now,” said Gillian. “There’s the Countess.”
“There is,” said Mrs. Barraclough, “and it’s about the Countess I’ve got
to talk to you, Miss Armstrong. I’ve had a letter of complaint from
her.”
“She’s a terrible complainer,” said Gillian. “I suppose it’s her
nationality. Poles do have a greater sensibility to grievances than
other people.”
“Oh, well, so do the Irish,” said Mrs. Barraclough. “But the Countess
has complained of you.”
“Of me? But I never do anything but say good-morning, and take in her
parcels if I’m in and she’s out. I don’t share her scullery. She’s on
Miss Parsons’ side.”
“That is the trouble. She says she’s timed the maids and that it took
Beatrice twice as long to empty your slops last week when your sister
was away as it did Gladys to deal with hers and Miss Parsons’.”
“Well, so long as it didn’t interfere with Gladys I don’t see that it
matters. Beatrice is on our side and she never complains.”
“You don’t understand. It’s the principle of the thing. You are getting
twice as much service as she is whoever serves you. She says, in the
postscript, that she cannot avoid the suspicion that you have a hot bath
every morning.”
“But of course.”
“That’s what she supposes, she says, ‘as a matter of course.’”
“What have you said to her?”
“I’ve written to say that I am speaking to you on the subject, Miss
Armstrong, and I’ve pointed out that the remedy lies in her own hands.
But being a Papist I doubt if she is allowed to bathe at all during
Lent.”
“Did you put that last bit in your letter?”
“I did not. I’m warning you that whatever you do, whether it’s washing
yourself as a Christian should, or having tea-parties on Sunday will be
used against you and reported to me—and now you may go, I’ve got to see
Mrs. Middleton about the new fireplace she’s putting into No. 6.”
“I shall complain about the Countess and her piano,” said Gillian from
the threshold, “and that’ll be cutting off my nose to spite her face,
because she plays gorgeously. It will be a terrible pity, but perhaps it
will all be for the best, because if she thinks I don’t like her playing
she’ll play much more than she does now. I think I shall complain
chiefly about the Debussy and the Folk-Songs and then she’ll be put off
Rachmaninoff and Liszt.”
“Go away, you chatterbox,” said Mrs. Barraclough, throwing a stone out
of her own glass house with vigour and conviction.
This conversation had taken place soon after Gillian had made her entry
into the Club, having walked to Chelsea from Wimbledon beside the
greengrocer’s van in which the Armstrong furniture was piled, because
the greengrocer and his boy, who were officiating, had refused to start
unless William’s voice were stilled and their own safety insured.
William was a sulphur-crested cockatoo who could, and did, sing “God
save the King” as far as the syllable “Gra——” and no further, whenever
in his opinion things had gone far enough. He sang very loud and harsh,
and danced as he sang, accompanying himself with crest outspread and
great beating of wings. Having his cage tied on to the top of a
greengrocer’s wagon full of furniture on a cold-hearted day in December,
was one of the things no cockatoo could be expected to encourage, and
William had burst into the National Anthem before he had been actually
roped on as the finishing touch to the already overloaded cart. Several
repetitions of this fragment having collected a crowd, William had grown
emphatic and reaching a loud “Gray” for the sixth time, stayed there
shrieking “Gray—Gray—Gray” and shaking his cage with a furious dance of
protest. So Gillian, who had intended to make the journey by omnibus,
was obliged to go with William who would listen to her and to nobody
else. And William, once he had been persuaded that she was not going to
desert him, folded wings and crest, and cocking his head on one side
kept one bright, round eye fixed on his mistress as she walked on the
pavement beside him and occasionally calling “Puss, Puss” to a passing
horse, arrived at the Club at nightfall and was carried into the little
flat before anyone quite realized his nature. William had fallen into
the category of the things Mrs. Barraclough winked at, partly because
she liked Gillian and also because William had remarked, “Good day—what
weather!” and had offered her his claw to shake when, quite by chance,
she had met him, for the first time, alone on the staircase below the
landing where he lived. William lived out of his cage as much as he
could, and had a passion for visiting those he liked. William was no
respecter of persons. If he liked you he liked you, if he did not there
was no persuading him. He liked Mrs. Barraclough and he adored the
postman, and for the time that was enough.
It was Mrs. Barraclough who came to the rescue in the matter of what
Lilac called “carving Gillian’s career.” Lilac had £100 a year of her
own, as well as the £50 a year with which she and Gillian were each left
when Mrs. Armstrong’s annuity perished with her. So Lilac stayed at home
and devoted the considerable leisure left her when the domestic
arrangements of life in the Mordaunt Club had been disposed of for the
day, to the management of her toilet and wardrobe, while Gillian went
forth to carve her career with what had so far proved the worst possible
incompetence. Carving a career, as Lilac pointed out, demanded common
sense, and of common sense Gillian had no grasp.
“You might have known that stuff about Venus was no use in a school,”
said Lilac. “I suppose you think that any word beginning with a ‘v’ is
beautiful because of violet. The _violet_, the _viol_ and the _vine_ and
all that nonsense.”
“But it wasn’t Venus. I didn’t give them that line. It was the one about
Minos et Pasiphaë,” Gillian protested.
“It’s the same thing, only worse. I shall ask Mrs. Barraclough if she
knows of any safe job for a mild lunatic who knows three languages and a
lot of poetry.”
Mrs. Barraclough did not endorse Lilac’s estimate of her sister.
“Gillian’s all right,” she said, “only a little unprejudiced. I’ll go
and see if old Winona wants another secretary.”
Old Winona, or Winona Lady Bottomley as she was described on her large
glazed and gilt-edged visiting-cards, was out of a secretary when Mrs.
Barraclough called. Old Winona seldom kept a secretary for more than a
few weeks at a time. They either left of their own accord or were sent
away in a great hurry laden with compensatory gold. Some of them took
prolonged sick-leave, and to these Old Winona was very kind.
“She’s the second wife and first widow of Bottomley’s Bicycles,” said
Mrs. Barraclough, “and she doesn’t know how rich she is. The lawyers
don’t tell her—they think her reason might give way. But she keeps three
secretaries, one in Belfast and one in London and one to travel up and
down with her, and they’re never the same secretary except the one in
Belfast, who’s a man. The others are girls. Poor things. You’re to go to
see her at twenty minutes past eleven to-morrow morning, and to take a
signed photograph of your father with you.”
“But I haven’t got one,” said Gillian, “my father never signed a
photograph in his life.”
“Then take any photograph you’ve got and say it’s your father’s,” said
Mrs. Barraclough, who had no use for purely academic scruples in
business.
“The only signed photograph she’s got,” said Lilac, “is one of William
Gillette as Sherlock Holmes, and that’s a picture post-card. And it’s so
worn out with being hidden by me when I had good reason for worrying
Gillian that it’s no use for carving and careering. But I’ll lend
Gillian a black hat and my good umbrella and see her to the top of
Sloane Street by 11:15 myself. I’ll watch her across the road and we
must leave the rest to God.”
“Do I call her ‘Winona Lady,’ as they do Adeline Duchess?” asked
Gillian.
“No; you don’t know her well enough to make game of her title,” said
Mrs. Barraclough, “and you must be very careful about it. There _is_ a
Lady Bottomley, Toby’s wife, but she’s never mentioned, she’s one of the
Oh No’s.”
“What are they?” asked Lilac, who knew the importance of social
distinctions and the wisdom of not being too proud to ask questions.
“It’s poetry,” said Mrs. Barraclough, as one who had very little use for
the article. “‘Oh no, we never mention him, his name is never heard,’ a
famous poem, ‘my lips are now forbid to speak that once familiar word.’”
“I know,” said Gillian.
“‘From sport to sport they hurry me
To banish my regret
And when they only worry me——’”
“I don’t think it ends like that,” said Mrs. Barraclough.
“That was Andrew Lang,” said Gillian, “he didn’t like Haynes Bayley—he
was quite right. He wrote ‘O think not Heleena of leaving us yet,’ when
it might just as well have been ‘O, Helena, think not——’”
“For William’s sake, my poor idiot, if not for your own and mine, try to
forget about how things sound for the next twenty-four hours. It’s far
more important to find out how things are. I’ve met Toby Bottomley,”
Lilac went on, turning to Mrs. Barraclough, “but I didn’t know he’d a
wife.”
“She’s not noticeable, I grant you that. Not where Toby is. She’s on the
stage, in America. There was a rumour that Toby was divorcing her, but
Old Winona don’t believe in divorce. Her own two husbands died. And Toby
only gets an allowance while she lives, so I dare say it’s all hanging
fire.”
Lilac was silent and Gillian noticed that her pretty face sharpened, the
blue eyes narrowing and the soft mouth tightening to a hard, red line
for a moment, as they did when Lilac was planning a move in the very
successful game she was already playing with life.
Gillian never understood the moves or the game, but she knew that Lilac
played and won, and she was often a little uncomfortable about it. For
Lilac had a way of letting her sister in at some advanced stage in an
affair of the kind and expecting her to co-operate in the dark. A pang
of suspicion thrust itself through her mind. It was Lilac who had gone
to Mrs. Barraclough. Had Lilac a reason for wishing Gillian to work for
Lady Bottomley? But, on the contrary, Lilac was rather annoyed about the
prospect.
“If I’d known,” said Lilac as soon as the door had closed behind Mrs.
Barraclough. “If I’d had the slightest suspicion that Mrs. Barraclough
knew the Bottomleys, I’d—I’d—well, Gillian, will you _promise_ me not to
tell the old lady that I know Toby?”
“Well,” said Gillian, “I won’t start off by saying, ‘Oh, dear Lady
Bottomley, my sister knows your son,’ but if she asks me if I’m the Miss
Armstrong her son knows....”
“She won’t. She doesn’t know.”
“Lilac,” said Gillian, “what is it?”
“Oh, it’s quite all right. I met him at Glynde, at Sophie’s birthday
revels, and he’s generally at Eaton Square on Sundays. Sophie knows all
about it. It was Toby who gave that dinner at the Savoy last week.”
“I thought it was Stephen and Sophie’s party. That was why I wondered
why they didn’t ask me.”
“Well, it wasn’t. It was Toby’s. Stephen and Sophie were asked—and
me—and we went to _Kismet_ after dinner. In a box. There wouldn’t have
been room for you.”
“Oh, well, I’m glad it was Toby’s party. There isn’t nearly so much iron
in my soul now that I know,” said Gillian, “and if Lady Bottomley
doesn’t know about you she can’t suspect me of being your sister.
Besides, it may not come to anything.”
“No, p’r’aps it mayn’t,” said Lilac, “and, I forgot to tell you, I had a
letter from Sophie this morning. They’re going to Glynde after Ascot,
and they’ve asked me to go, and you. They’ll have a Goodwood Party, but
you needn’t go to the races.”
“If I become that old lady’s third secretary,” said Gillian, “I shan’t
be able to go to Glynde at all, except perhaps for a week-end. I’ll
write to Sophie myself.”
“Oh, all right,” said Lilac; but she was not pleased.
Sophie Glynde had originally been Gillian’s friend. She was German on
her father’s side and had been at a school in Lausanne where Gillian had
spent six months of her sixteenth year. Her English mother was a Glynde,
and Sophie, who was startlingly pretty, had married her second cousin
Stephen almost at sight the summer she came to England. She would, if
Stephen’s elder brother went on being a bachelor until he died of
riotous living, be the Mistress of Glynde Regis one day.
Sophie had been very kind to the Armstrongs. But gradually her butterfly
affections had settled on the younger sister who, not being under the
pressing necessity of carving a career, was able to put herself more
unreservedly at Mrs. Glynde’s disposition on those frequent occasions
when that lovely being, who had a horror of solitude, was deprived of
the solace of her husband’s company. Sophie was now Lilac’s friend. And
Lilac, who took the same size in shoes, gloves and garments as Sophie
did, inherited all the clothes of which Sophie grew tired before they
were reduced to the condition in which they automatically passed into
her maid’s possession. Lilac, who had a genius for dress, spent
laborious days in achieving the raiment for triumphant nights from this
spoil, and no one but Gillian, who pinned her into the never quite
securely finished results, knew how precariously the lace from one gown,
the satin from another, were held together to form a third more
wonderful than either in its outward and dazzling effect.
Lilac, naturally, met a great many people at the Glyndes’ of whom
Gillian had no knowledge, or whose names she knew without importance;
but Lilac’s reserve about this one person, this Toby Bottomley, was
unusual and significant. Lilac, clearly, would prefer that Gillian
should not become Toby’s mother’s secretary.
But Lilac was to be disappointed.
She fulfilled her promise, lent Gillian the black hat, completed the
loan with a pair of grey suède gloves and took her to the top of Sloane
Street the following morning. Her last words as she pushed her sister
off the island were:
“For Heaven’s sake, remember you’ve never heard of me.”