TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE:
—Obvious print and punctuation errors were corrected.
LUCINDA
ANTHONY HOPE
LUCINDA
BY
ANTHONY HOPE
AUTHOR OF “THE SECRET OF THE TOWER,” “THE PRISONER
OF ZENDA,” “RUPERT OF HENTZAU,” ETC.
THE RYERSON PRESS
TORONTO
1920
COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY
ANTHONY HOPE HAWKINS
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. THE FACE IN THE TAXI 1
II. THE SIGNAL 13
III. A HIGH EXPLOSIVE 26
IV. THE FOURTH PARTY 38
V. CATCH WHO CATCH CAN! 52
VI. VENICE 64
VII. SELF-DEFENSE 78
VIII. THE NEEDLEWOMAN 91
IX. LIKE TO LIKE 103
X. HER LADYSHIP 116
XI. DUNDRANNANIZATION 131
XII. A SECRET VISIT 144
XIII. AN INTRODUCTION 157
XIV. FOR AULD LANG SYNE 171
XV. THE SYSTEM WORKS 186
XVI. PURPLE—AND FINE LINEN 199
XVII. REBELLION 211
XVIII. THE WINNING TICKET 225
XIX. VIEWS AND WHIMS 239
XX. LIVING FUNNILY 252
XXI. PARTIE CARRÉE 264
XXII. SUITABLE SURROUNDINGS 276
XXIII. THE BANQUET 288
XXIV. THE MASCOT 299
XXV. HOMAGE 312
XXVI. THE AIR ON THE COAST 325
XXVII. IN FIVE YEARS 339
LUCINDA
CHAPTER I
THE FACE IN THE TAXI
HIS “Business Ambassador” was the title which my old chief, Ezekiel
Coldston, used to give me. I daresay that it served as well as any
other to describe with a pleasant mixture of dignity and playfulness,
the sort of glorified bag-man or drummer that I was. It was my job
to go into all quarters of the earth where the old man had scented a
concession or a contract—and what a nose he had for them!—and make it
appear to powerful persons that the Coldston firm would pay more for
the concession (more in the long run, at all events) or ask less for
the contract (less in the first instance, at all events) than any other
responsible firm, company, or corporation in the world. Sir Ezekiel (as
in due course he became) took me from a very low rung of the regular
diplomatic ladder into his service on the recommendation of my uncle,
Sir Paget Rillington, who was then at the top of that same ladder. My
employer was good enough to tell me more than once that I had justified
the recommendation.
“You’ve excellent manners, Julius,” he told me. “Indeed, quite
engaging. Plenty of tact! You work—fairly hard; your gift for
languages is of a great value, and, if you have no absolute genius for
business—well, I’m at the other end of the cable. I’ve no cause to be
dissatisfied.”
“As much as you could expect of the public school and varsity brand,
sir?” I suggested.
“More,” said Ezekiel decisively.
I liked the job. I was very well paid. I saw the world; I met all
sorts of people; and I was always royally treated, since, if I was
always trying to get on the right side of my business or political
friends, they were equally anxious to get on the right side of
me—which meant, in their sanguine imaginations, the right side of
Sir Ezekiel; a position which I believe to correspond rather to an
abstract mathematical conception than to anything actually realizable
in experience.
However, I do not want to talk about all that. I mention the few
foregoing circumstances only to account for the fact that I found
myself in town in the summer of 1914, back from a long and distant
excursion, temporary occupant of a furnished flat (I was a homeless
creature) in Buckingham Gate, enjoying the prospect of a few months’
holiday, and desirous of picking up the thread of my family and social
connections—perhaps with an eye to country house visits and a bit of
shooting or fishing by and by. First of all, though, after a short
spell of London, I was due at Cragsfoot, to see Sir Paget, tell him
about my last trip, and console him for the loss of Waldo’s society.
Not that anything tragic had happened to Waldo. On the contrary, he
was going to be married. I had heard of the engagement a month before
I sailed from Buenos Aires, and the news had sent my thoughts back to
an autumn stay at Cragsfoot two years before, with Sir Paget and old
Miss Fleming (we were great friends, she and I); the two boys, Waldo
and Arsenio, just down from Oxford; respectable Mrs. Knyvett—oh, most
indubitably respectable Mrs. Knyvett;—myself, older than the boys,
younger than the seniors, and so with an agreeable alternation of
atmosphere offered to me—and Lucinda! True that Nina Frost was a good
deal there too, coming over from that atrocious big villa along the
coast—Briarmount they called it—still, she was not of the house party;
there was always a last talk, or frolic, after Nina had gone home, and
after Mrs. Knyvett had gone to bed. Miss Fleming, “Aunt Bertha,” liked
talks and frolics; and Sir Paget was popularly believed not to go to
bed at all; he used to say that he had got out of the habit in Russia.
So it was a merry time—a merry, thoughtless——!
Why, no, not the least thoughtless. I had nearly fallen into a
_cliché_, a spurious commonplace. Youth may not count and calculate.
It thinks like the deuce—and is not ashamed to talk its thoughts right
out. You remember the Oxford talk, any of you who have been there,
not (with submission to critics) all about football and the Gaiety,
but through half the night about the Trinity, or the Nature of the
Absolute, or Community of Goods, or why in Tennyson (this is my date
rather than Waldo’s) Arthur had no children by Guinevere, or whether
the working classes ought to limit—well, and so on. The boys brought
us all that atmosphere, if not precisely those topics, and mighty
were the discussions,—with Sir Paget to whet the blades, if ever they
grew blunt, with one of his aphorisms, and Aunt Bertha to round up a
discussion with an anecdote.
And now Lucinda had accepted Waldo! They were to be married
now—directly. She had settled in practice the problem we had once
debated through a moonlight evening on the terrace that looked out
to sea. At what age should man and woman marry? He at thirty, she at
twenty-five, said one side—in the interest of individual happiness.
He at twenty-one, she at eighteen, said the other, in the interest
of social wellbeing. (Mrs. Knyvett had gone to bed.) Lucinda was now
twenty-one and Waldo twenty-six. It was a compromise—though, when I
come to think of it, she had taken no part in discussing the problem.
“I should do as I felt,” had been her one and only contribution;
and she also went to bed in the early stages of the wordy battle.
Incidentally I may observe that Lucinda’s exits were among the best
things that she did—yes, even in those early days, when they were all
instinct and no art. From Sir Paget downwards we men felt that, had
the problem been set for present solution, we should all have felt
poignantly interested in what Lucinda felt that she would do. No man
of sensibility—as they used to say before we learnt really colloquial
English—could have felt otherwise.
I will not run on with these recollections just now, but I was
chuckling over them on the morning of Waldo’s and Lucinda’s wedding
day—a very fine day in July, on which, after late and leisurely
breakfast, I looked across the road on the easy and scattered activity
of the barracks’ yard. That scene was soon to change—but the future
wore its veil. With a mind vacant of foreboding, I was planning only
how to spend the time till half-past two. I decided to dress myself, go
to the club, read the papers, lunch, and so on to St. George’s. For, of
course, St. George’s it was to be. Mrs. Knyvett had a temporary flat in
Mount Street; Sir Paget had no town house, but put up at Claridge’s; he
and Waldo—and Aunt Bertha—had been due to arrive there from Cragsfoot
yesterday. Perhaps it was a little curious that Waldo had not been in
town for the last week; but he had not, and I had seen none of the
Cragsfoot folk since I got home. I had left a card on Mrs. Knyvett,
but—well, I suppose that she and her daughter were much too busy to
take any notice. I am afraid that I was rather glad of it; apprehensive
visions of a _partie carrée_—the lovers mutually absorbed, and myself
left to engross Mrs. Knyvett—faded harmlessly into the might-have-beens.
I walked along the Mall, making for my club in St. James’s Street. At
the corner by Marlborough House I had to wait before crossing the road;
a succession of motors and taxis held me up. I was still thinking of
Lucinda; at least I told myself a moment later that I must have been
still thinking of Lucinda, because only in that way could I account,
on rational lines, for what happened to me. It was one o’clock—the
Palace clock had just struck. The wedding was at half-past two, and
the bride was, beyond reasonable doubt, now being decked out for it,
or, perchance, taking necessary sustenance. But not driving straight
away from the scene of operations, not looking out of the window of
that last taxi which had just whisked by me! Yet the face at the taxi
window—I could have sworn it was Lucinda’s. It wore her smile—and
not many faces did that. Stranger still, it dazzled with that vivid
flush which she herself—the real Lucinda—exhibited only on the rarest
occasions, the moments of high feeling. It had come on the evening when
Waldo and Arsenio Valdez quarreled at Cragsfoot.
The vision came and went, but left me strangely taken aback, in a way
ashamed of myself, feeling a fool. I shrugged my shoulders angrily as I
crossed Pall Mall. As I reached the pavement on the other tide, I took
out my cigarette case; I wanted to be normal and reasonable; I would
smoke.
“Take a light from mine, Julius,” said a smooth and dainty voice.
It may seem absurd—an affectation of language—to call a voice “dainty,”
but the epithet is really appropriate to Arsenio Valdez’s way of
talking, whether in Spanish, Italian, or English. As was natural, he
spoke them all with equal ease and mastery, but he used none of them
familiarly; each was treated as an art, not in the choice of words—that
would be tedious in every-day life—but in articulation. We others used
often to chaff him about it, but he always asserted that it was the
“note of a Castilian.”
There he stood, at the bottom corner of St. James’s Street, neat, cool,
and trim as usual—like myself, he was wearing a wedding garment—and
looking his least romantic and his most monkeyish: he could do wonders
in either direction.
“Hullo! what tree have you dropped from, Monkey?” I asked. But then I
went on, without waiting for an answer. “I say, that taxi must have
passed you too, didn’t it?”
“A lot of taxis have been passing. Which one?”
“The one with the girl in it—the girl like Lucinda. Didn’t you see her?”
“I never saw a girl like Lucinda—except Lucinda herself. Have you
lunched? No, I mean the question quite innocently, old chap. Because,
if you haven’t, we might together. Of course you’re bound for the
wedding as I am? At least, I can just manage, if the bride’s punctual.
I’ve got an appointment that I must keep at three-fifteen.”
“That gives you time enough. Come and have lunch with me at White’s.”
I put my arm in his and we walked up the street. I forgot my little
excitement over the girl in the cab.
Though he was a pure-blooded Spaniard, though he had been educated
at Beaumont and Christ Church, Valdez was more at home in Italy than
anywhere else. His parents had settled there, in the train of the
exiled Don Carlos, and the son still owned a small _palazzo_ at Venice
and derived the bulk of his means (or so I understood) from letting
the more eligible floors of it, keeping the attics for himself.
Here he consorted with wits, poets, and “Futurists,” writing a bit
himself—Italian was the language he employed for his verses—till he
wanted a change, when he would shoot off to the Riviera, or Spain, or
Paris, or London, as the mood took him. But he had not been to England
for nearly two years now; he gave me to understand that the years of
education had given him, for the time, a surfeit of my native land: not
a surprising thing, perhaps.
“So I lit out soon after our stay at Cragsfoot, and didn’t come back
again till a fortnight ago, when some business brought me over. And I’m
off again directly, in a day or two at longest.”
“Lucky you’ve hit the wedding. I suppose you haven’t seen anything of
my folks then—or of the Knyvetts?”
“I haven’t seen Waldo or Sir Paget, but I’ve been seeing something of
Mrs. Knyvett and Lucinda since I got here. And they were out in Venice
last autumn; and, as they took an apartment in my house, I saw a good
deal of them there.”
“Oh, I didn’t know they’d been to Venice. Nobody ever writes to tell me
anything when I’m away.”
“Poor old chap! Get a wife, and she’ll write to tell you she’s in debt.
I say, oughtn’t we to be moving? It won’t look well to be late, you
know.”
“Don’t be fidgety. We’ve got half an hour, and it’s not above ten
minutes’ walk.”
“There’ll be a squash, and I want a good place. Come on, Julius.” He
rose from the table rather abruptly; indeed, with an air of something
like impatience or irritation.
“Hang it! you might be going to be married yourself, you’re in such a
hurry,” I said, as I finished my glass of brandy.
As we walked, Valdez was silent. I looked at his profile; the delicate
fine lines were of a poet’s, or what a poet’s should be to our fancy.
Not so much as a touch of the monkey! That touch, indeed, when it did
come, came on the lips; and it came seldom. It was the devastating
acumen and the ruthless cruelty of boyhood that had winged the shaft
of his school nickname. Yet it had followed him to the varsity; it
followed him now; I myself often called him by it. “Monkey Valdez”!
Not pretty, you know. It did not annoy him in the least. He thought it
just insular; possibly that is all it was. But such persistence is some
evidence of a truthfulness in it.
“Have you been trying a fall with Dame Fortune lately?” I asked.
He turned his face to me, smiling. “I’m a reformed character. At least,
I was till a fortnight ago. I hadn’t touched a card or seen a table for
above a year. Seemed not to want to! A great change, eh? But I didn’t
miss it. Then when—when I decided to come over here, I thought I would
go round by the Riviera, and just get out at Monte Carlo, and have a
shot—between trains, you know. I wanted to see if my luck was in. So
I got off, had lunch, and walked into the rooms. I backed my number
everyway I could—_en plein_, _impair_, all the rest. I stood to win
about two hundred louis.”
“Lost, of course?”
“Not a bit of it. I won.”
“And then lost?”
“No. I pouched the lot and caught my train. I wasn’t going to spoil the
omen.” He was smiling now—very contentedly.
“What was the number?”
“Twenty-one.”
“This is the twenty-first of July,” I observed.
“Gamblers must be guided by something, some fancy, some omen,” he said.
“I had just heard that Waldo and Lucinda were to be married on the
twenty-first.”
The monkey did peep out for a moment then; but we were already in
George Street; the church was in sight, and my attention was diverted.
“Better for you if you’d lost,” I murmured carelessly.
“Aye, aye, dull prudence!” he said mockingly. “But—the sensation! I can
feel it now!”
We were on the other side of the road from the church, but almost
opposite to it, as he spoke, and it was only then that I noticed
anything peculiar. The first thing which I marked was an unusual
animation in the usual small crowd of the “general public” clustered on
either side of the steps: they were talking a lot to one another. Still
more peculiar was the fact that all the people in carriages and cars
seemed to have made a mistake; they drew up for a moment before the
entrance; a beadle, or some official of that semi-ecclesiastical order,
said something to them, and they moved on again—nobody got out! To
crown it, a royal brougham drove up—every Londoner can tell one yards
away, if it were only by the horses—and stopped. My uncle, Sir Paget
himself, came down the steps, took off his tall hat, and put his head
in at the carriage window for a moment; then he signed, and no doubt
spoke, to the footman, who had not even jumped down from the box or
taken off his hat. And the royal brougham drove on.
“Well, I’m damned!” said I.
Valdez jerked his head in a quick sideways nod. “Something wrong? Looks
like it!”
I crossed the road quickly, and he kept pace with me. My intention was
to join Sir Paget, but that beadle intercepted us.
“Wedding’s unavoidably postponed, gentlemen,” he said. “Sudden
indisposition of the bride.”
There it was! I turned to Valdez in dismay—with a sudden, almost
comical, sense of being let down, choused, made a fool of. “Well,
twenty-one’s not been a lucky number for poor Lucinda, at all events!”
I said—rather pointlessly; but his story had been running in my head.
He made no direct reply; a little shrug seemed at once to accuse and to
accept destiny. “Sir Paget’s beckoning to you,” he said. “Do you think
I might come too?”
“Why, of course, my dear fellow. We both want to know what’s wrong,
don’t we?”