It was hot in the little book-lined room up under the roof of the
Mordaunt Club. Gillian sat on the window-sill and leaned out over the
dark well of the courtyard across which beams of light from the other
open windows made slanting, transparent, misty bridges. She sat out of
the circle of lamplight made by the painted shade over the oil-lamp
which stood on a table in front of the largest bookcase.
Stephen was in the light. It shone on his red, fine skin, on his smooth,
shiny hair, on the patent leather of his shoes, on the shining curve of
his dress-shirt that bulged, ever so little, over the dull repp of his
white waistcoat. Gillian was liking Stephen more every minute. He was so
comfortingly at his ease in life. Here, in their little book-room; that
afternoon, before the appalling splendours of old Winona’s tea-table, he
was just the same Stephen as he was at Glynde. He wasn’t like Toby, who
had been nervous even though he chattered in his own library and sulky
in his mother’s drawing-room, and who now sat in the corner of the
red-leather chesterfield making jerks of speech and ruffling up the
pink-and-blue Samarkand rug with his feet. Lilac sat in the other
corner, quite in shadow, very slim in her thin white frock with its wide
angel sleeves that hung down over her hands as they lay folded in her
lap. Her eyes, dark with excitement, looked black in the shade, and the
fluff of her fair hair seemed grey with no light to bring out its golden
shimmer.
“Been to the Russian Ballet?” jerked Toby.
“Not again,” said Lilac.
Money was sometimes a disadvantageous possession—sometimes. Stephen
hadn’t half as much as Toby, but he had been born into his place in
life, and it never occurred to him to doubt his perfect right to be
wherever his life took him. You could see he never thought about paying
for anything; he took it for granted that things were paid for! Stephen
was free. Toby, who could buy real Dürers in St. James’s Street and have
horses at Newmarket, was afraid. Money had robbed him of the place he
was born into and he didn’t fit in the place it had bought for him. He
was too nice to be apologetic, but he was always ready to be a little
angry. He said “How annoying!” over everything that went at all wrong.
He’d said it about his Swinburnes; and when Lady Bottomley had said that
she’d promised he should open a bazaar in September; and when he’d
dropped the spoon out of his coffee-cup saucer as he took it from Lilac
just now.
It was odd that Lilac, whose every movement was so finished and
effectual, and who knew exactly not only what she wanted but how she was
going to get it—it was perhaps not really odd that Lilac should want
this gentle, undecided Toby. It was clear that he wanted her. Of that
Gillian had been sure from the moment he had come into the flat. You
could see that Toby saw, that he _could_ see nothing but Lilac. It was
dreadful, Gillian felt, to have that feeling about another person,
particularly if you had a wife in America and couldn’t have the person
you wanted like that. It was rather dreadful of Lilac to let him want
her when he couldn’t have her. Dreadfully cruel. Perhaps Lilac didn’t
know. Perhaps Toby had never looked at her in this way before. Lilac
couldn’t let him go on like that. She was keeping very still, almost as
if she were half asleep. She must be making up her mind to put a stop to
it; not to see Toby again. Nobody could bear to be wanted so badly, to
be looked at with such unhappy eyes.
Then, very quietly, and without looking at Toby, or at Gillian, or at
Stephen, softly and slowly, but deliberately and not at all as if she
were dreaming, Lilac raised one hand and smoothed back the long loose
sleeve from the arm that still lay in her lap. Stephen was lighting a
cigarette and didn’t notice. But Gillian saw. And she saw how Toby
leaned forward a little and stopped in the middle of asking something
quite dull to let his eyes drop from Lilac’s face to her hand. And Lilac
raised her hand and pushed it along the top of the chesterfield, playing
a little, light, slow five-finger exercise on the red leather until her
bare arm up to the elbow, lay out beyond the shadow, cream-pale and
soft, the skin taut and smooth over the wrist-joints, with tiny sparkles
of gold hair catching the yellow lamplight as the round finger-tips
tapped out their noiseless tune.
“Guess what I’m playing,” said Lilac softly, in the voice of a young
witch casting a spell. “It’s something you know,” and her two long front
teeth gleamed in the shadow, breaking the rose of her mouth as she spoke
and smiled.
“I can’t guess,” said Toby hoarsely. “Tell me,” said Toby, as though his
life depended on being told.
“No—you must guess,” said Lilac, her voice shaking a little in her
throat with laughter. “You know it quite well,” and she emphasized the
“quite” delicately so that it rang in the air like a chiming bell.
Toby bent on his elbows; his crimson hands clutched each other between
his spread knees. His head, thrust into the circle of lamplight, showed
his damp hair sticking to his brow.
“Lilac, I _can’t_ guess. Not while you do that.”
Gillian slipped down from the window-seat.
“It’s _Ach du lieber Augustin_, the tune the pipkin sang when it boiled,
in the story of the prince who went back into his kingdom and slammed
the door,” she said.
Lilac jumped up from her corner and the sleeve fell back again over her
arm.
“Oh, Gillian, how mean of you!” she cried. But her voice was happy and
satisfied as it had not been before that day. And presently Stephen took
Toby away. They were driving down to Esher that night, as Toby had
horses arriving from Ireland with a new groom whom he didn’t quite
trust, and he wanted to be on the spot himself first thing the next
morning.
* * * * *
Lilac went to lunch next day, and on to the nice concert with Lady
Bottomley. She arrived, very pretty and rather pathetic in the large
crinoline hat trimmed with the pink rose she’d bought in Sloane Street,
and the mauve ribbon she’d salved from part of Sophie’s largesse, while
Gillian was pumice-stoning the copying-ink from her fingers after her
morning’s work. All old Winona’s letters were preserved in duplicate,
even the third-person refusals to add to her cheque-signing toil.
Gillian had already traced the original hands and the varying imitations
of six of her predecessors through the flimsy pages of the copy-files
which, also bound into crested volumes, filled a shelf below the
newspaper-cutting tomes in the library at 99. Gillian had been taught by
her father to burn all letters, even his own lively, brilliant letters
written when she stayed behind at school and he sent her his diaries
with their little pen and pencil drawings on every page. So she added
her daily sheaf to this unvaluable collection, consoling herself with
the quotation from La Rochefoucauld, which she could never quite get by
heart, about considering the kind of people to whom He gave the most of
it when you wanted to know what God really thought of money.
“And, of course,” said Gillian, being honest with herself as she
scrubbed her inky hands, “it wasn’t God who gave old Winona money to
spend on having a quite young crest put on everything she possesses, but
John Bottomley who did make the best bicycles that ever spun and
deserved to be ‘a perfect Crocus’; and Toby will do beautiful things
with it when old Winona dies. I wonder if she’ll have a tomb all made of
precious stones. I do hope she will. I do wish she would. And order it
now, while I’m with her like the Bishop, at St. Praxed’s.”
But there wouldn’t be any ordering of jewelled monuments for a day or
two at any rate, for by the time Gillian came into the drawing-room
Lilac had made such headway with Toby’s mother that that lady was
insisting that Gillian must take the week-end until Tuesday and go with
her sister to Glynde.
“And, of course,” said Lilac, “if Gillian is not quite rested by
Tuesday, I can come back and do your letters myself for a day or two. I
don’t pretend to be as clever as Gillian, but I’m _very_ industrious,
and I’d try not to let you miss her too dreadfully, Lady Bottomley,
indeed I would.”
Lady Bottomley was archly playful.
“I am sure, Miss Lilac, that you would be a delightful secretary, but I
always spend August in Ireland, where my male secretary attends to all
my requirements, and _my_ Miss Armstrong will only have to look in for
an hour or two in the mornings when she gets back from Glynde. I should
be sorry,” and she tapped Lilac’s cheek with the whole bunch of her
fingers, “for such a pretty little person as yourself to leave her
friends on my account. Mr. and Mrs. Glynde would never forgive me for
robbing them of such bright eyes.”
So Gillian went to Glynde with Lilac by the five-o’clock train out of
Victoria on Friday afternoon. And when they got there, there was no
Toby.
Stephen met them with the car at Lewes.
“Toby’s gone to America,” he told them. “He was very bored at Sandown
and didn’t seem to care whether the Buster won or not. I think he’s gone
after that wife of his.”
“Oh,” said Lilac. “You don’t think he’ll bring her back, do you?”
“Alive or dead,” said Stephen. “Dead, possibly. I dare say he’s gone out
to murder her. There’s sure to be one of the properly free states where
a decent fellow like Toby can kill a wife from time to time! How long
have you known about her?”
“Only since I went to Lady Bottomley,” said Gillian. “I thought you and
Sophie didn’t.”
“Sophie don’t,” said Stephen; “but Toby told me the whole story, and he
says he told Lilac.”
“Yes,” said Lilac, “he wrote to me about it, yesterday. But I’d known
for some time. And I told Sophie.”
“You did, did you?” said Stephen. “That’s all to the good,” and he
changed the subject.