WHEN he hobbled into her drawing-room and saw her without her hat,
crowned with the glory of her hair, thick, of silky texture and of
baffling colour, now almost black, now gleaming with sombre gold, and
her slender figure clad in a blue dress which deepened the magical blue
in her eyes, Godfrey thought she was more wonderful still. The clasp of
her bare hand with its long, capable fingers, thrilled him. Her voice
had the added caress of welcome to her house. When, later, she reminded
him of their promised heart to heart talk about fathers, it was in his
heart to say, “The pedantic old bat calls you a type—you, unique among
women!” The criticism had buzzed in his head all the week and on
occasions he had laughed out loud at its ineptitude. It buzzed in his
head while he was being introduced to Lady Northby, the wife of a
distinguished General, and it was with an effort that he cleared his
mind enough to say:
“I had the honour of serving under the General in France. Oh, a long,
long way under, all the time I was out.”
“Then you’re friends at once,” cried Lady Edna. “You’ll join Lady
Northby’s collection.”
“Of what, pray?” asked Baltazar.
“Of Sir Edward’s officers.”
“I don’t know whether Mr. Baltazar would like to be collected,” said
Lady Northby. She was a tiny, dark-faced, kind-eyed woman of fifty. Her
smile of invitation was very pleasant.
“Can you doubt it?” replied the young man. “It must be a glorious
company. I’m only afraid I’m a poor specimen.”
“Won’t you sit down?” She indicated a place on the sofa by her side. And
when Godfrey had obeyed her, she said in a low voice: “That and
that”—with the faintest motion of her hand she indicated decoration and
footless leg—“entitle you to a place of honour.” Then as if she had
touched sensitive ground, she added hastily, almost apologetically:
“Lady Edna always teases me about my collection, as she calls it; but
there’s a little truth in it. My husband is very proud of his Division,
and so am I, and the only way I can try to realize it as a living thing,
is to get to know some of his officers.”
“By Jove!” cried Godfrey, his eyes suddenly sparkling. “That accounts
for it.”
“For what?”
“For the Division being the most splendid Division, bar none, at the
Front. For the magical influence the General has over it. I’ve only seen
him once or twice and then I shook in my boots as he passed by. But
there isn’t an officer or man who doesn’t feel that he’s under the tips
of his fingers. I never could account for it. Now I can.”
She smiled again. “I don’t quite follow you, Mr. Baltazar.”
Suddenly he became aware of his audacity. Subalterns in social relations
with the wives of their Divisional Generals were supposed to be the
meekest things on earth. He was not sure whether their demeanour was not
prescribed in paragraph something or the other of Army Orders. His fair
face blushed ingenuous scarlet. In the meanwhile in her eyes shone
amused and kindly enquiry; and, to render confusion worse confounded,
Lady Edna and his father appeared to have suspended their casual talk in
order to listen to his reply. There was no help for it. He summoned up
his courage, and with an invisible snap of the fingers said:
“It was you behind the Division all the time.”
The modest lady blushed too. The boy’s sincerity was manifest. Lady Edna
rose with a laugh, as a servant entered the room.
“The hand that rocks the subaltern rules the Division. Let us see if we
can find something to eat.”
There were only the four of them. At first Lady Edna Donnithorpe had
thought of inviting a numerous company to meet Baltazar. Her young
consciousness of power delighted in the homage of the fine flower of
London around her table. Baltazar’s story (heard before she met him) had
fascinated her, he himself had impressed her with a sense of his
vitality and vast erudition, and after the dinner party she had been
haunted by his personality. Here was a great force at a loose end. How
could she apply it? People were beginning to talk about him. The new Rip
Van Winkle. The Freak of the War. It would be a triumph to manœuvre him
into the position of a National Asset. She had already drawn up a list
of the all-important people whom it was essential for him to know—her
husband did not count—and was ticking off the guests for the proposed
luncheon party when suddenly she tore it up, she scarcely knew why.
Better perhaps gauge her protégé more accurately before opening her
campaign. The son added a complication. A fine pathetic figure of a boy.
Perhaps she might be able to do something for him, too, if she knew what
he wanted. She liked his eyes and the set of his head. Besides, the
stuffy lot who would be useful to the father would bore the young man to
death. She regarded the boredom of a guest in her house as an
unimaginable calamity. Edgar, her husband, was the only person ever
bored in it, and that was his own doing. He had reduced self-boredom in
private life to a fine art. She decided that young Baltazar should not
run the risk of boredom. Having tom up her list, she ran across Lady
Northby, dearest of women, the ideal fourth.
At the beginning of lunch, while Baltazar happened to be engaged in
eager argument with Lady Northby, she devoted herself to Godfrey. In her
sympathetic contralto she questioned him, and, under the spell of it, he
answered. He would have revealed the inmost secrets of his soul, had she
demanded them. As it was, he told her an astonishing lot of things about
himself.
Presently the talk became general. Lady Northby, in her gentle way, shed
light, from the point of view of a divisional commander’s wife, on many
obscure phases of the war. Lady Edna held a flaming torch over black and
abysmal corners of diplomacy. Godfrey sat awed by her knowledge of facts
and her swift deductions from them. He had never met a woman like her,
scarcely dreamed that such a woman existed. She had been in personal
touch with all the great ones of the earth, from the Kaiser upwards, and
she judged them shrewdly and with a neat taste in epigram.
“If the Kaiser and the Crown Prince had been ordinary middle-class
folk,” she said, “they would have been in gaol long ago. The father for
swindling the public on a grand scale; the son for stealing milk-cans.”
She had met King Constantine, then a thorn in the Allied flesh, whose
sufferance for so long on the Greek throne is still a mystery to the
plain Briton.
“What a degradation of a name for Constantine the Great,” said Baltazar.
“That’s just it,” she flashed. “His awful wife says ‘_In hoc signo
vinces_,’ and dangles before his eyes the Iron Cross.”
No. Godfrey had never met a woman remotely like her. She was
incomparable.
The talk developed quickly from the name of Constantine to names in
general. The degradation of names. Uriah, for instance, that of the most
tragic victim of dastardly treachery in history, now brought low by its
association with Heep.
“I love the old Saxon names,” said Lady Northby, with some irrelevance.
“Yours, dear, for instance.”
“It’s a beautiful name,” said Baltazar, “but it’s not Saxon. It’s far
older.”
“Surely it’s Saxon,” said Lady Edna.
“Edna was the wife of Raguel and the mother-in-law of Tobias, the son of
Tobit, the delightful young gentleman carrying a fish and accompanied by
the Angel Raphael, whom you see in the Italian pictures.”
Lady Edna was impressed. “I wonder if there’s anything you don’t know?”
He laughed. “I only remember what I’ve read. My early wrestling with
Chinese, I suppose, has trained my memory for detail. I’m also very fond
of the Apocrypha. The Book of Esdras, for instance, is a well of
wonderful names. I love Hieremoth and Carabasion.”
Presently she said to Godfrey: “Your father always makes me feel so
humble and ignorant. Have you ever read the Apocrypha?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“Neither have I. If you said you had, I should want to sink under the
table. The pair of you would be too much for me.”
Her confession of ignorance delighted him as much as her display of
knowledge filled him with wonder. It made her deliciously human.
When lunch was over and they went up to the drawing-room she left the
elders together and sat for a while apart with him.
“You’ll go and see Lady Northby, of course,” she said.
“I should just think so,” he replied boyishly. “You see, I’m New Army
and have never had a chance of meeting a General’s wife. If they’re all
like that, no wonder the Army’s what it is.”
Lady Edna smiled indulgently. “She’s a dear. I thought you would fall in
love with her.”
“But you couldn’t have known I was in General Northby’s Division,
unless——”
“Unless what?”
“Unless you’re a witch.”
With a quick glance she read the tribute in his young eyes. It almost
persuaded her that she possessed uncanny powers. She looked charmingly
mysterious.
“Let us leave it at that,” she said. “Anyhow,” she added, “Lady Northby
can be very useful indeed to a young officer.”
“Useful?” His cheek flushed. “But I couldn’t go to see any
lady—socially—with the idea of getting things out of her. It would be
awful.”
“Why?”
He met her eyes. “It’s obvious.”
She broke into pleasant laughter. “I’m so glad you said that. If you
hadn’t, I should have been dreadfully disappointed.”
“But how could you have thought me capable of such a thing?”
His real concern touched her. Inured to her world of intrigue which had
little in it that was so sensitive on the point of honour, she had taken
for granted his appreciation of Lady Northby’s potential influence. She
was too crafty a diplomatist, however, to let him guess her surprise;
still less suspect her little pang of realization that his standards
might be just a little higher than her own; or her lightning glance back
to her girlhood when her standards were just the same. She gave him
smilingly to understand that it was a playful trap she had set for him,
so that resentment at an implied accusation was instantaneously
submerged beneath a wave of wonder at the gracious beauty of her soul.
This boy of twenty, instinctive soldier, half-conscious thereof when he
came to exercise his power, could play on fifty rough and violent men as
on an instrument, and make them do his bidding lovingly in the ease of
camp and follow him in battle into the jaws of hell, as they had done,
but he was outclassed in his unwitting struggle with the girl of
five-and-twenty, instinctive schemer after power, her clear brain as yet
undisturbed by any clamourings of the heart.
Baltazar, desiring to bring brightness into the boy’s life, had brought
it with a vengeance. He had not heard of Dorothy. He had no idea of the
state of mind of the Rosaline-rejected young Romeo of a son of his.
Unconscious of peril, he cast him into the furnace. “An interesting
type. A woman of the moment,” commented placid and philosophic Fifty.
“Oh! she doth teach the torches to burn bright!” sang Twenty. Et cetera,
et cetera, et cetera. See the part of Romeo _passim_. Away with
Rosaline! His “love did read by rote and could not spell.”
Rosaline-Dorothy was blotted out of his Book of Existence for ever.
“What are your plans?” asked Lady Edna, as soon as the little cloud had
melted beneath the very eager sunshine.
“As soon as I get a new foot I’ll spend every day at the War Office
until they give me something to do.”
“You oughtn’t to have any difficulty. There are lots of billets going, I
know.”
“Yes. But what kind? I’m not going to sit in an office all day filling
up forms. I want to get a man’s job. Active service again.”
“How splendid of you!”
Her commendation was something to live for. After the British way,
however, he deprecated claims to splendour.
“Not a bit. It’s only that one feels rather rotten doing nothing while
other fellows are fighting. They may take me in the Flying Corps. But
I’d sooner go where I belong—to the job I know. Perhaps I’m rather an
ass to think of it.”
“Not at all. Where there’s a will there’s a way.”
“I’m going to have a try for it, anyhow,” said he.
He thought vindictively of Dorothy’s light patronage, which would have
resulted in a soft job. No soft jobs for him. He had had a lucky escape.
Dorothy and her inconsequence and flapperish immaturity, and the
paralysing work that General Mackworth would doubtless have found for
him—recording issues of bully-beef or keeping stock of dead men’s kits!
Never in life! In those bright eyes raining influence—no, they were not
bright—they were muffled stars—that was the fascination of them—he
would make himself something to be considered, respected, admired. He
would be the one one-footed man in the British Army to arrive at
greatness. The splendid end compelled the means. Until that moment he
had never contemplated an heroic continuance of his military career.
Lady Edna, pathetically young, in spite of myriad ageing worldlinesses,
including a half-humorous, half-repellant marriage of calculation, was
caught by his enthusiasm.
“I should love to see you back again!”
“That alone is enough,” said he, “to make me move heaven and earth to
get there.”
She flushed beneath his downright eyes and hid a moment’s embarrassment
by a laugh.
“That’s a very pretty speech,” she said lightly. “I’m glad to find the
Army is going back to its old tradition of manners.”
“I perfectly agree with you,” exclaimed Baltazar, for her tone had been
purposely pitched higher than that of the preceding conversation. “I’ve
been greatly struck by it.”
The little intimate talk was over; but enough had been said before
father and son took their leave, to make Godfrey treasure every one of
her beautiful words and repeat them over and over again. Especially her
last words, spoken in a low voice for him alone: “I don’t want to lose
track of you. One so often does in London. If ever you’re at a loose
end, come and report progress. Ring me up beforehand.” She gave him her
number. Victoria 9857. A Golden Number. The figures had a magical
significance.
It was not long before he ventured to obey her, and rang up the Golden
Number. He spent with her an enchanted hour, the precursor of many hours
which Lady Edna stole from her manifold activities in order to devote
them to the young man’s further enchantment.
* * * * *
In the meanwhile Quong Ho arrived at Godalming. Quong Ho delighted with
himself, in his ready-made suit and soft felt hat, in spite of the loss
of his pigtail, which the treatment of his cracked skull had
necessitated. Baltazar, too, cast an eye of approbation on his European
appearance, regarding him somewhat as a creation of his own. His pride,
however, was dashed by Godfrey, who on being asked, eagerly, after the
first interview, what he thought of Quong Ho, cried:
“For Heaven’s sake, sir, get the poor devil a new kit!”
“Why—Why?” asked Baltazar, in his impatient way, “what’s the matter
with his clothes?”
“They fit like a flag at the end of a pole in a dead calm,” said
Godfrey. “Or like sails round a mast. You’d have to get a pack of hounds
in order to find his arms and legs. And that red and purple tie! It’s
awful. Ask Marcelle.”
Baltazar had walked Quong Ho over to Churton Towers, and after they had
said good-bye at the gates, he had rushed back to put his question,
leaving Quong Ho in the road.
Marcelle smiled at his disconcerted face. “It would be scarcely well
received at Cambridge.”
“Give the chap a chance, sir,” said Godfrey.
“I want to give him every chance,” exclaimed Baltazar. “I want to
overwhelm him with chances. If his clothes won’t do, get him some
others.”
At his summons the Chinaman came up. Baltazar caught him by his loose
sleeve.
“Godfrey doesn’t approve of garments not made to the precise
measurements of the individual human figure. He’ll take you to his
tailor and hosier and hatter and rig you out properly. He knows what’s
right and I don’t. When can you do it? The sooner the better.”
“I’ll see what my engagements are,” said Godfrey stiffly.
“That’s right,” cried Baltazar. “Telephone me this evening. His time’s
yours. Get him all he wants. Brushes, combs, shirts, pyjamas, boots. You
know.”
He wrung his hand, waved his hat to Marcelle and marched off with Quong
Ho.
Godfrey regarded the retreating figures speechless. Then he turned to
Marcelle.
“Of all the cool cheek! Without by your leave or with your leave! I’m to
cart this infernal Chinee about Bond Street. My God! My tailor will have
a fit.”
“So long as Quong Ho gets one, it doesn’t matter,” laughed Marcelle.
But he was in no humour for pleasantry. He dug his crutch viciously in
the ground as he walked.
“He takes it for granted that I’d love to be saddled with this scarecrow
of a Chinaman. Don’t you see? It’s preposterous. My God! I’ve a jolly
good mind to set him up regardless, like a pre-war nut—with solid
silver boot-trees and the rest to correspond. It would serve J. B.
right.”
Said Marcelle with a sidelong glance—in her Sister’s uniform she looked
very demure—
“Why didn’t you refuse?”
He fumed. “How could I? I couldn’t hurt the poor chap’s feelings.
Besides——”
“Besides what?”
“This father of mine—his big gestures, his ugly mouth—and his infernal
dancing eyes—and behind them something so pathetic and appealing—I
don’t know. Sometimes I think I loathe the sight of him, and, at others,
I feel that I’d be a beast if I shut my heart against him. And always I
feel just like a rabbit before a boa-constrictor. I’m not a little boy.
I’ve seen life naked. I’m on my own. I object to being bossed. In the
Army it’s different—it’s part of the game; but outside—no!”
He limped along to the house full of his grievance. It was not so much
the clothing of Quong Ho that annoyed him, though he could well have
spared himself the irritating embarrassment, as the sense of his gradual
subordination to a dominating personality. The disconnected dynamo was
hitching itself on to him, and he resented the process.
“How you’ve escaped being married out of hand, I don’t know,” said he.
Marcelle flushed. “The moment he realizes other people’s feelings,” she
replied, “he becomes the gentlest creature on earth.”
“I wish to goodness he’d begin to realize mine,” growled the young man.
When they reached the front steps of Churton Towers, Marcelle said:
“I wonder whether I could be of any help to you in your shopping?”
“You? Why——” He beamed suddenly on her.
“I’m free on Friday. I could go up to town with you.”
“You’re an angel!” he declared. “A winged angel from heaven.” The boy in
him broke out sunnily. “That’ll make all the difference. What a dear you
are. Won’t we have a time! I’ll love to see you choosing the beast’s
pyjamas.”
“They shall be stout and sober flannel,” said Marcelle.
“No. Silk. Green, red, yellow and violet. The sort of thing the
chameleon committed suicide on.”
“Who’s going to run the show—you or I?”
“Oh you. You all the time.”
He laughed and hobbled up the steps in high good humour.
Marcelle went off to her duties smiling pensively. What a happy woman
would be the right woman for Godfrey. Wax in her hands—but wax of the
purest. She was astonished at the transformation from cloud to sunshine
which she, elderly spinster nearly double his age, had effected, and her
nerves tingled with a sense of feminine power. Her thoughts switched off
from son to father. They were so much alike—from the feminine point of
view, basically children. Were not her fears groundless? Could she not
play upon the man as she played upon the boy? Recent experience answered
yes.
But then she faced the root difference. To the boy she surrendered
nothing. To the man she would have to pay for any measure of domination
the price of an indurated habit of existence, the change of which was
fraught with intolerable fear. No. She could take, take all that she
wanted. But she could not give. There was nothing in her to give. Better
this beautiful autumn friendship than a false recrudescence of spring,
in which lay disaster and misery and disillusion.
As for the boy, God was good to have brought him into her life.
Meanwhile, Baltazar walked home to Godalming with Quong Ho in gay
spirits. It was just like the modern young Englishman to shy at the
depths and attack the surface. And, after all, as a more alert glance
assured him, the surface of Quong Ho deserved the censure of any
reasonable being. One could almost hear his garments flap in the autumn
wind.
“I fear,” said Quong Ho apologetically, “that my care in selecting this
costume was not sufficiently meticulous.”
“Godfrey’ll soon put that right,” laughed Baltazar. “Anyhow, it’s the
man inside the clothes that matters.”
And when he came to think of it, he perceived that the man inside had
had little opportunity of revealing himself, he, Baltazar, having done
the talking for the two of them. Quong Ho had comported himself very
ceremoniously. His manners, though somewhat florid in English eyes, had
been unexceptionable, devoid of self-consciousness and awkward attempts
at imitation. He had responded politely to the conventional questions of
Marcelle and Godfrey, but there his conversation had stopped. Of the
rare gem presented to them they had no notion. Never mind. Once let
Quong Ho give them a taste of his quality, and they could not choose but
take him to their bosoms.
Which, by the end of the Friday shopping excursion, was an accomplished
fact.
Now that Marcelle had assumed responsibility, Godfrey, after the way of
man, regarded the attiring of Quong Ho as a glorious jest. His bright
influence melted Quong Ho’s Oriental reserve. Encouraged to talk, he
gave them sidelights on the life at Spendale Farm which neither had
suspected. His description, in his formal, unhumorous English, of the
boxing lessons, delighted Godfrey.
“The old man must be a good sport,” he remarked to Marcelle.
“Ah!” said Quong Ho, bending forward—they were in the train—“A ‘sport’
is a term of which I have long desired to know the significance. Will
you have the gracious kindness to expound it?”
“Lord! That’s rather a teaser,” said Godfrey. “I suppose a sport is a
chap that can do everything and says nothing, and doesn’t care a damn
for anything.”
Quong Ho nodded sagely. “That is most illuminating. I regret that I have
not my notebook with me. But I shall remember. Incidentally, you have
summed up exactly the character of your honourable father and my most
venerated patron.”
“He’s a joy,” Godfrey whispered to Marcelle as they left the train. “I
could listen to him all day long. He talks like the books my grandmother
used to read when she was a kid. Mr. Ho,” said he, as they proceeded up
the platform to the gates, “you have now a unique opportunity of
studying the Western woman. Miss Baring is going shopping. You see in
her eye the sign that she is going to have the time of her life.”
“Madam,” said Quong Ho, taking off his hat, to the surprise not only of
Godfrey but of the scurrying passengers, “that is also the superlative
achievement of the ladies of my country.”
They shopped, they lunched merrily in a select little restaurant off
Shaftesbury Avenue, they shopped again. Godfrey stood aloof and gave
advice; sketched the programme in broad outlines; Marcelle filled in the
details and became responsible for the selection of the various
articles; Quong Ho smiled politely and submitted the various parts of
his body, to be measured. Only once did he venture to interfere, and
that was when Marcelle was matching ties and socks in the Bond Street
hosier’s.
“I beg most humbly your pardon,” said he, picking out a tie other than
the one selected, “but this shade is the more exact.”
“Surely it’s the same,” exclaimed Marcelle, putting the ties together.
“The gentleman is right, madam,” said the shopman. “But not one person
out of ten thousand could tell the difference. I couldn’t, myself, if I
hadn’t been trained at Lyons. I wonder, madam, whether you would allow
me to try a little experiment?”
He disappeared into a back room and returned with a pinkish mass of silk
threads.
“This is a colour test. There are twenty different shades. Can you sort
them?”
Godfrey, amused, took half the mass, and for several minutes he and
Marcelle laboriously sorted the threads. Presently the shopman turned to
Quong Ho.
“Now you, sir.”
Quong Ho, without hesitation, made havoc of the piles and swiftly
arranged the twenty groups in an ascending scale of red.
“There’s not another man in London who could have done that under an
hour,” said the shopman admiringly.
“When did you learn it?” asked Godfrey.
“Vain boasting, sir,” replied Quong Ho, “is far from my habits, but to
me these differences are as obvious as black from white. It is only a
matter of informative astonishment that they are not perceptible both to
you and”—he took off his hat again—“to the most accomplished madam.”
“Look here, old chap,” said Godfrey, “what I want to know is this. How
could you, with your exquisite colour sense, go about in that awful red
and purple tie?”
“To assume the perfection of English pink,” replied Quong Ho, “I would
make any sacrifice. At the same time, it gives me infinite satisfaction
to discover that the taste of Water End is not that of the metropolis.
_Non omnes arbusta juvant humilesque myricae._”
“I beg your pardon?” cried Godfrey, with a start, almost, upsetting the
high counter chair on which he was sitting.
Quong Ho, perched between Godfrey and Marcelle, turned with a smile.
“It is the Latin poet Virgilius.”
“Yes, I know that.”
“He says that shrubs and other bucolic appurtenances do not please
everybody—by which he means the sophisticated inhabitants of capital
cities, who prefer such delectable harmonies of colour”—he waved a hand
to the pile of shirts, socks, ties and pyjamas on the counter—“to the
red and purple atrocities which form the delight of the rural
population.”
Godfrey, elbow on counter and head on hand, regarded him wonderingly.
“Mr. Ho,” said he, “you’re immense. Do tell me. I don’t mean to be
impertinent. But for a Chinaman to quote Virgil—pat—How do you manage
to do it?”
“During my convalescence,” replied Quong Ho, with his engaging smile, “I
read through the works of the poet with considerable interest. Dr.
Rewsby was kind enough to obtain for me the edition in the series of the
Oxford Pocket Classics, _P. Virgilii Maronis Opera Omnia. Oxonii.
MDCCCCXIII_, from which date I concluded that I was reading the most
authoritative text known to English scholarship.”
“In the meanwhile,” said Marcelle, “Mr. Ho is in need of winter
underclothing.”
Not the least noteworthy of the day’s incidents was the meeting between
Quong Ho and Lady Edna, who, proceeding on foot to a War Committee in
Grosvenor Street, and wearing the blue serge coat and skirt of serious
affairs, ran into them as they waited for a taxi on the Bond Street
kerb. She stopped, with outstretched hand.
“Why, Godfrey, I didn’t know you were in town to-day.”
Then, suddenly catching Marcelle’s curious glance, she became conscious
of his companions and her cheek flushed. He hastened to explain.
“We’re on outfit duty—indenting for clothing for Mr. Ho, who was badly
bombed, if you remember, with my father.”
He performed the introductions.
“I have heard about you, Mr. Ho,” she said graciously. “You’re a great
mathematician.”
Godfrey wondered at her royal memory. Quong Ho, bare-headed, said:
“I but follow painfully in the footsteps of my illustrious master.”
She laughed. “You must let Mr. Godfrey bring you round to see me one of
these days.”
“Madam,” replied Quong Ho, with a low bow. “As the Italians say, it will
be a thousand years until I have the honour to avail myself of so
precious a privilege.”
“We must fix something up soon, then—one day next week.”
She shook hands with Marcelle, nodded to the others, and went away
wreathed in smiles. Quong Ho followed her with his eyes; then to
Godfrey:
“I have never seen a more beauteous and worshipful lady. One might say
she was one of the goddesses so vividly described by Publius Virgilius
Maro.”
“Your taste seems to be impeccable, sir,” replied Godfrey.
In the train, on the homeward journey, Marcelle, who was sitting by
Godfrey’s side—Quong Ho sat opposite reading an evening paper—said to
him:
“You seem to be great friends with Lady Edna Donnithorpe.”
“The best,” said he.
“Do you usually let her know when you’re coming up to town?”
Godfrey reflected for the fraction of a second. Lady Edna had certainly
committed the unprecedented act of giving herself away. Frankness was
therefore the best policy.
“Sometimes I do,” he replied innocently. “On the off chance of her being
able to give me a cup of tea. It’s only once in a blue moon that she
can, for she’s always all over the place.”
“She’s a very beautiful woman, my dear.”
“Your taste is as perfect as Quong Ho’s.”
Quong Ho, hearing his name, looked with enquiring politeness over the
top of his newspaper.
“Miss Baring and I were talking of Lady Edna.”
“Ah!” said Quong Ho, with a very large smile.
Before they parted, on reaching Churton Towers, Marcelle put her hand on
Godfrey’s shoulder.
“Perhaps I oughtn’t to have asked you that question in the train—I had
no right——”
He interrupted her with his boyish laugh.
“You dear old thing! You have every right to cross-question me on my
wicked doings. Haven’t I adopted you as a sort of young mother?
Iolanthe. Or the Paphian one which Quong Ho was gassing about. Now, look
here. You just come to me in a rosy cloud whenever you like, and I’ll
tell you everything.”
“Swear it?”
“I swear it.”
He kissed her finger-tips, and she went away half-reassured. But she was
sufficiently in the confidence of the Baltazars, father and son, to know
that, for both of them, Lady Edna Donnithorpe was but a recent
acquaintance. And to her the boy was “Godfrey,” and his presence in
London without her knowledge a matter of surprise.
A few days later came the order for Godfrey to be transferred to an
orthopædic hospital, where he should learn the new art of walking with
an artificial foot. He parted from her with reiterated vows of undying
affection. From his Iolanthe mother the secrets of his heart would never
be hidden. If she wanted a real good time, she would chuck the
nursing—Heaven knew she had done her bit in the war—and come and be a
real mother and keep house for him. She smiled through her tears.
“Preposterous child!” she called him.
“You seem to forget,” said he, “that you’re the only female thing
associated with my family I’ve ever cared a hang about. I’ve adopted
you, and don’t you forget it. When I’ve got my foot, I’ll march in like
a regimental sergeant-major and take you by the scruff of your Sister’s
cap, and off you come.”
She laughed, trying to attune herself to his gay spirits; but when she
lost the last faint sound on the gravel-path of the motor-cab that took
him away, she went up to her room and cried foolishly, as she had not
cried for years.