I did it then! It's like a red-hot needle at the back of the eyes...."
She picked up her gloves and held out a hand, as the butler announced
that the cars were at the door. "I'll say good-night and good-bye. I
hope you'll enjoy yourself. And I hope I've not been too unutterably
boring."
Jack felt her hand pulling gently against his.
"When I'm trying to persuade you to come on with us?" he asked.
Lady Barbara shut her eyes in a second spasm of pain.
"Do you really want me to?"
"If you're up to it."
"I will, if you want me to," she promised.
For many years longer than Jack could remember, the Croxton Ball had
taken place in the vast and half-derelict "King's Arms," once famous,
with its long coffee-room and unlimited stabling, as the best
posting-house in the county and the beginning of the last stage for
coaches running from the east and northeast coast through Oxford to
South Wales and the west. Once a year the dingy grey-stone hotel,
filling one side of the market-place, blazed with unaccustomed light;
and the barrack of stables behind awoke to welcome the procession of
tightly-packed cars that explored their way with long white fingers down
the broad, uneven village street.
Jack changed his clothes and joined a shivering group by the fire in the
Commercial Room. Lady Barbara was sitting apart, sniffing a bottle of
salts and gently repelling those who tried to engage her for a dance.
"She oughtn't to have come," murmured Lady Pentyre, who neither
understood nor forgave her son for this eleventh-hour addition. After
the disgraceful episode of the poker-party, she had vowed never to have
the girl in her house again; and these later scandals were no
recommendation to leniency. But, before she could hint at her
objections, she was told that the invitation had already been issued.
"If she's beginning a chill or anything----"
Jack crossed to the distant chair and was welcomed with a smile.
"How nice you look in that coat!" Lady Barbara cried. "Are those the
Croxton buttons?"
"Yes.... May I sit and talk, if you didn't have too much of me at
dinner? I feel responsible for bringing you here, you know."
"But I love doing what people ask me! It's my greatest self-indulgence.
When are they going to begin, and what's all the fuss about in the
hall?"
A babble of angry voices floated through the open door--criticism,
suggestions and conflicting orders. The Secretary came in frowning and
snatched at all members of the Committee within reach.
"I'll never go to those people again!" he thundered. "After all these
years, too. Band hung up on the road. Wrong train. They won't be here
for half an hour!"
A murmur of disappointment swelled through the room, eddying round the
hall and rising from group to group on the stairs and in the ball-room.
Lady Barbara sat up alert, without any trace of headache or fatigue. The
red lips were parted expectantly, with a gleam of small white teeth.
"I'll play!"
She darted from her chair, humming to herself and only pausing to
crumple her scarf into a ball and to toss it with her gloves to Jack. He
caught it mechanically, wonderingly. In a moment the grave-voiced girl
with the tragic eyes and hint of consumption had transformed herself
into something untamed, with shining eyes and irresponsible
restlessness. He listened to her voice growing fainter on the stairs,
then looked with some embarrassment at the crumpled scarf and gloves.
"Sometime, somehow, somewhere--
How should I know or care?--
It is written above
That fortune and love
Are waiting for me somewhere..."
The strict waltz rhythm was slightly modified to give scope to the
voice; but no one had began to dance when Jack went upstairs, and Lady
Barbara had to break off and say:
"Do begin, some one!"
"We want to hear you sing," murmured a diffident voice.
"Rubbish! What d'you like? Ragtime? A waltz?"
"When you are in love,
All the world is fair;
Hearts are light with laughter gay;
Roses,--roses all the way..."
Bobby Pentyre and Sally Farwell edged through the door; Summertown and
his partner followed, and within two minutes the room was
three-quarters full. Jack squeezed his way forward for a better view.
Lady Barbara played tirelessly, modulating from waltz to waltz, humming
a line here, whistling two bars there, until the Master panted up to the
piano and cried "time." She laughed and sat back on the music-stool,
softly fingering the keys and looking round the ball-room to see who was
there. Jack stood self-consciously stranded by the door, assuring
himself of the line of his tie, pulling down his waistcoat and glancing
at the hang of his knee-breeches. Her eyes met his, and she smiled.
"Say when you want me to begin again," she called out.
"Give us just a moment," begged the Secretary.
She struck a chord and threw "Lord Rendel" at them with such tragic
intensity that, at the end, Summertown raised a husky view-holloa of
applause and the decorous group at the door clapped noiselessly. Jack
always freely confessed that he knew nothing of music, but he felt
bathed in delightful irresponsibility, as Lady Barbara mingled old
English ballads with plantation songs and jolting ragtime with waltzes
which seemed to draw his heart out of his body. She was gloriously free
from self-consciousness. After two false starts, which were not lost on
her, he crossed the room in the wake of a little party which went to beg
for its favourite tunes.
"Awfully good of you to play like this," he said, as the others edged
away. "I hope you're not making the headache worse?"
"I love making people happy." She stretched out her foot and pulled a
chair beside her stool. "Tell me what you'd like me to play. D'you know
"Deirdre of the Sorrows"? Not the play, but the waltz. Little O'Rane
wrote it. You know him, I expect, he's a great friend of my cousin Jim."
At the first chords of the waltz, couples from all round the room rose
and began to dance. Jack threw one leg over the other and pushed his
chair a short way back, faintly and belatedly embarrassed to find
himself marooned on the dais by her side. "Mr. Waring----"
"Yes?"
"I want to ask you one question. You needn't answer it, unless you
like.... And then we'll leave it alone. I'm not as bad as you expected?"
Though he had warned himself at the beginning of dinner to be untiringly
on his guard, Jack looked up with a start. She was absorbed in the
music; her head was bowed, and she only raised it to glance with
half-closed eyes at the dancers, occasionally concentrating on one
couple and regulating her time by theirs.
"You've answered your own question. Rather inadequately," he added.
"Thank you ... I wish you danced! You're missing such a lot!"
"Am I? Lady Barbara, why on earth did you ask me that?"
Her head drooped lower over the keys.
"Because it hurt so!" she whispered tremulously. "Am I so vulgar?"
"Do you imagine you're quoting me?"
"Oh, Mr. Waring, be honest! You despised me before you met me. Do you
now?"
"It's the last thing I should dream of doing."
"Well, wasn't it rather unfair--before you even knew me? It's done me a
lot of harm ... and it hurt so terribly. If you were just to say you
were sorry----?"
Her humility was so unexpected as to be bewildering.
"My dear Lady Barbara, I've only seen you once before!" he exclaimed. "I
_did_ say something about you then; I criticized the people you went
about with, if you're referring to that."
"Then you don't despise _me_?"
"You're the greatest revelation I've ever had."
As the waltz quickened to the coda, a stout, flamboyant figure appeared
in the doorway, attended by a sallow escort armed with music-cases and
instruments. The Secretary ended a warm exchange of invective to cross
the room and thank Lady Barbara. Refusing to give an encore to the
waltz, she bowed to Jack and hurried out of the room.
Half-way down the stairs he overtook her and asked to be allowed to sit
out the next dance with her.
"We can hardly leave it like this, can we?" he urged.
"Like what? I must get some air! My head will burst, if I don't!"
She ran across the hall, rattled at the door-handle and hurried into the
Market Square. The December night air lashed him like a jet of icy water
and cut through his clothes; thirty yards ahead, Lady Barbara was
running with arms outstretched and jumping from side to side over the
grey-black puddles of dull, frozen water. A group of chauffeurs by the
village pound removed their pipes and watched her; then replaced them;
then removed them a second time as a second figure, in pink coat and
knee-breeches, pounded along the echoing street. Once she glanced back
on hearing the sound of footsteps; then ran on without changing her
pace. They had overshot the last house and were facing an unhedged
expanse of roots and crisp furrows before he overtook her.
"I say, what _are_ you doing?" he panted, angry at being made
conspicuous by her aimless freak.
Lady Barbara pressed a hand to her side, breathing quickly. Her hair had
blown into disorder, her bosom was rising and falling; and once she
kicked off a shoe to caress a bruised foot, balancing herself with her
other hand on his shoulder.
"Impulse," she answered.
By moonlight her eyes were black; and, as she panted gently, her parted
lips and rounded cheeks made a child of her. It was at least her third
incarnation since eight o'clock, but Jack had lost strict count. As she
squeezed the pebble out of her shoe, he noticed the provocative
whiteness of her shoulders and the softness of her hair. His own pink
coat and knee-breeches added the last touch to his discomfiture; and he
knew that he could never equal her in creating the unconventional in
order to master it.
"I was afraid your head might have made you faint," he murmured,
consciously fatuous.
"It was only partly my head. Sometimes.... Did you see "_Justice_"? You
remember the man in solitary confinement? He _knew_ he mustn't pound on
the door; he _knew_ he'd be punished, if he did. He pounded all the
same.... I've got too much vitality; I seem sometimes as if I'm in
prison...." She shivered and gave a slight cough. "Is it very cold?"
"Not more than ten degrees of frost. I thought of bringing you a cloak,
but I was afraid of losing you. If you don't come back at once, impulse
will land you in double pneumonia."
She slipped her arm through his and began to walk, with a slight limp,
back to the hotel.
"We had a gipsy in the family, though no one's ever allowed to mention
her," she announced abruptly. "D'you call me pretty? I think you would,
rather. Val Arden says I'm the 'haggard Venus.' Well, any looks we've
got come from her."
"With a dash of temperament thrown in. Suppose we go a _bit_ faster and
then look for a fire? You're quite well enough to dance now."
"But I'd sooner talk to you. A girl told me the other day that you
were--what was the word? 'sticky'; you never had anything to say, you
were prim and old maidish----"
"I'm no good at ordinary social patter," he interrupted. "But you'd
hardly apply that term to our conversation to-night."
They strode incongruously down the broad village street, past the group
of expectant chauffeurs and into an ill-ventilated box described as the
"reading-room." Both were emotionally out of breath, and the lights of
the hotel made Jack self-conscious; he stole a sidelong glance at her
and waited for the next change. Wistful appeal passed into effervescent
irresponsibility; the self-possession of a woman of the world alternated
with the radiant joyousness of a child.... And six months earlier she
had left a German Jew's ornate carnival to drive with a sodden debauchee
in a stolen car and had impaled an unknown chauffeur on the grey angle
of a jutting wall in Hertfordshire. And there was the aeroplane
accident; and the poker-party; and a dozen other things.... His glance
held admiration as well as curiosity, and she smiled with glowing
friendliness.
"Aren't you going to dance at all?" he asked.
"I didn't come here for that.... Now I'm going to pay you a compliment.
I got myself invited because I heard you were coming; I wanted to give
you a chance of judging me at first hand. There's an opportunity for
returning the compliment, if you care to take it."
Jack looked at her with a surprise which he tried to veil, as he
reminded himself again that he must be on his guard.
"I only hinted that your friends weren't good enough for you," he
answered. "Knowing who you were and the positions your father had
held----"
"Dear Jack, don't drag in father! Isn't that what I have to fight
against? Having my personality submerged by his dead pomp and glory?"
Her use of his Christian name startled him; and she watched with
amusement his stiff attempt not to seem startled.
"I'd sooner think of you as Lord Crawleigh's daughter than as Sir Adolf
Erckmann's friend."
Her eyes half closed, and she looked at him through the long black
lashes.
"I believe you're falling in love with me."
Jack lazily threw away the end of his cigarette, dusted imaginary specks
of ash from his breeches and rose slowly to his feet.
"I was only thinking what I should feel about you, if you were my
sister," he said. "Ought we to be going upstairs? Lady Pentyre's rather
concerned about you."
"I'll reassure her," said Lady Barbara. "Don't bother to come up; you
won't be dancing."
Though she had a reserve of self-control for scenic emergencies, he had
snubbed her so wantonly that she darted like a black and silver moth out
of the room before he could mark a change of expression. Jack followed
in time to see her locate Lady Pentyre and take the chair by her side.
The warm, scented air of the ball-room struck and flushed his cheeks
like the heavy breath of a hot-house. Summertown, waltzing by,
disengaged one hand and whistled shrilly on his fingers above the boom
and wail of the band.
"Missing two, Babs?" he called out.
Lady Barbara pressed her hand against her eyes, then drew it away and
shook her head.
"I'm not dancing to-night," she answered.
Lady Pentyre turned to her with mingled anxiety and impatience.
"Aren't you feeling any better?" she asked.
"I can't say that I am. When I stand, the floor goes up and down; and,
when I sit down, the room goes gently round me."
Jack was leaning aimlessly against the door, and Lady Pentyre beckoned
to him. She had no intention of leaving her son to make a fool of
himself with Sally Farwell; and, if she told him or young Summertown to
take Lady Barbara home, she would next hear that all three had fallen
down a shaft in Durham.
"Mr. Waring, you're not dancing! _Do_ you think you could find one of
the cars and take this child back to bed? I hardly like to send her
alone, you know, and every one here has a party of her own to look
after."
Jack bowed with adequate graciousness, but Lady Barbara intervened with
a vigorous refusal.
"I couldn't think of dragging him away," she exclaimed. "This is the
only ball he ever comes to; and he's been looking after me so much that
he hasn't had time to see any of his friends."
"But he can be back within an hour," Lady Pentyre urged. "It's still
quite early."
Lady Barbara looked uncertainly at Jack, waiting for him to become more
inviting. His face expressed no concern, and he was patiently gaining
time by consulting his watch and looking from one to the other of them,
as though he had no personal interest in the decision.
"Would that be agreeable to you?" he asked her at length.
"I don't feel that I have any right to spoil your evening."
"_Illness_ is hardly within your control, is it?"
She walked downstairs with a novel sense of failure and a misgiving that
she had overestimated his stupidity; yet a man must be more than
ordinarily stupid not to appreciate her after the trouble that she had
taken. Insisting on an open car, she settled herself in one corner and
looked thoughtfully at her companion's reflection in the jolting mirror
of the wind-screen. Valentine Arden, who allowed disparagement to become
a disease, told her to her face that she had genius; George Oakleigh had
said that she had "the clearest-cut personality of her time." And these
things were industriously repeated to her.
_Rather Lord Crawleigh's daughter than Sir Adolf Erckmann's friend_....
But Lord Crawleigh's world had no place for any woman who was above the
average. In Canada, in Ireland and in India she had tasted greater
personal success before she was sixteen than London could offer her in
a life-time. She had seen the government of India at very close
quarters; and, after that, it was impossible to feel Sonia Dainton's
elation at bobbing to Royalty at the Bodmin Lodge ball in Ascot week. At
other times and in other places, dusty, long streets, dazzling white and
quivering with heat, had been cleared for her and lined with picked
native troops; in an Empire crowded with immemorial soveranties she had
been the only daughter of a man who was vicegerent of the Emperor-King.
"You spoke too soon in saying you didn't despise me," she murmured.
They had covered but two of the ten miles, and Jack instinctively
avoided altercation. He was no longer interested in a girl who
deliberately invited herself to the same house, singled him out and
detached him, in an open car and a north-east wind, to pick a quarrel or
justify herself.
"If you're feeling ill, why don't you try to go to sleep instead of
making conversation?" he suggested.
"I'm not _making_ conversation!" she answered impatiently. "You attacked
me on such slender evidence that I was wondering whether you'd any
better excuse for attacking people like Sir Adolf, who's a very fine
musician----"
"And an impossible bounder," Jack interrupted. "My father pilled him at
his club ten years ago; if he put up again, _I'd_ pill him; if he got
in, I'd _resign_."
"And I suppose you'd 'pill' Villon and Benvenuto Cellini and
Verlaine----"
"I would, if they were friends of Erckmann," Jack answered cheerfully.
She shivered and lapsed into silence. Talking to Jack was like
explaining colour to a blind man. She had never sought out the Erckmann
circle; it was one of innumerable circles which a connoisseur in life
patronized and sampled for its distinctive atmosphere. Her god-father,
Dick Freyton, had kept a string of race-horses at Oxford and taken a
double first; he had dined with the Queen one day and entertained a
party of comedians and jockeys the next; he had been a gentleman-rider
and an ambassador, a soldier and a collector of early printed Bibles, a
competent sportsman and a more than competent poet. Touching life at
every angle, there was an Elizabethan spaciousness about him;--Loring's
father did not forbid him the house because Bessie Galton took her
company to Liverpool and he invited them all to stay with him at
Poolcup. Freyton was too big to be compromised. And the world had
developed so fast that nowadays a woman could touch life at as many
angles; for some it was the only thing to do. The queens of the salon
were dead, the political hostesses were dying. There was room for one
universalist.
They drove to the lodge of Croxton Hall in silence. It was only when she
saw him dropping asleep that she fanned the discussion to life.
"It's men like you who kill art in this country," she sighed.
"I can never see why there should be a special code of morals for a
fellow because he grows his hair long and plays the fiddle," Jack
answered, as he helped her out of the car and rang the bell.
While he explained their return to the butler, Lady Barbara let fall her
cloak into a chair and walked to a glowing fire at the end of the hall.
In the fender stood a tureen of soup and an urn of cocoa; behind her a
big table was invitingly set with sandwiches, cake, fruit, syphons and
decanters. Jack watched her for a moment and then explored the table
critically.
"Is there anything you'd like me to bring you?" he asked as he chose a
cigar and poured himself a brandy and soda. "Don't forget you've had no
supper."
She looked at him over one shoulder and sighed contemptuously.
"_How_ characteristic! The indecent irregularity of missing a meal! I
eat because I love nice things; one gets a new emotion sometimes. When
we were at Ottawa, father took me down to Washington, and one of the
secretaries at our embassy fell in love with me. We met at twelve and he
was in love with me by a quarter past. I suppose he was a man of method,
like you, and never declared his passion under half an hour, so for five
minutes we talked about food, and he asked me if I'd ever tasted
Baltimore crab-flake. I hadn't. His car was at the door of the chancery,
we both got in without a word; at 12:23 we were flying down Connecticut
Avenue. We drove to Baltimore without a stop, had our crab-flake and
returned to Washington in time for me to have a good rest before dinner.
When father began looking for me, some one explained that I'd been taken
to see the Congressional Library, and everything was all right till the
papers next day came out with great head-lines--'Breakneck Race for a
Crab-Flake.' 'Just Bully, Says British Governor-General's Daughter' Then
there was the usual unpleasantness.... But the crab-flake _was_ a new
emotion." She turned from the fire and joined him at the table. "If I
start eating caviar, I never stop."
The butler returned to announce that her maid had gone to bed and to ask
whether she should be called.
"Oh, it's all right, thanks," she answered. "I'm feeling much better."
She had talked herself into good-humour and, when they were alone again,
she looked at Jack with a smile. "Are you enjoying yourself? You look so
bored. What shall I do to amuse you?"
She pulled a chair to the fire and beckoned him to her side.
"I'm sorry to seem ungracious," said Jack, as he put down his empty
glass, "but I've been commissioned to send you to bed."
"But the others won't be back for hours!"
"Exactly. Barring the servants, we're alone in the house, and it
wouldn't look well for us to bolt away from the ball and then sit here
talking all night."
Lady Barbara sprang from the chair and faced him with amazement in her
eyes.
"My dear creature, do you imagine you're compromising me?"
"That's a strong word. I'm some years older than you, Lady Barbara," he
added meaningly.
"But if you _knew_----"
Jack interrupted her with a shake of the head.
"If you're trying to tell me some of the things you _have_ done, you may
spare yourself the trouble. I used to think you were being swept off
your feet by the people you went about with. The more stories you tell
me, the more I'm tempted to wonder whether you don't set the fashion.
Some one's frightfully to blame for not pulling you up, though I know
Jim did his best. Does it make no difference to you when a man like that
refuses to have you inside his house?"
Lady Barbara walked slowly to the table.
"You must apologize for that, Mr. Waring."
She imagined that she was contending with one man over a single hasty
sentence; but behind Jack stood his father, his father's regiment and
his father's club, all honestly conservative and gently self-approving.
Behind the sentence there lay in support a social philosophy framed in
days before England was corrupted by the uncertain morals of the east
and the uncouth manners of the west.
"Isn't it true?" demanded Jack, unabashed. "He cabled to his mother from
Surinam after the motor smash and that inquest. I wasn't told the exact
words, but you _haven't_ been to the house very lately, have you?"
He was so certain of himself--he was always so certain of himself--that
the question rang out like a taunt. Lady Barbara felt her self-control
weakening.
"And your informant?" she asked, still trying not to yield ground.
"I've really forgotten. Obviously no one in the family. So, you see,
there must be several people who know. For what it's worth, I have _not_
handed the story on."
"How chivalrous!--And to a girl that you'd never met!"
"I didn't want Jim to be mixed up in a fresh scandal. And you've driven
this country near enough to revolution as it is."
He picked up his hat and was starting towards the stairs, when an
unexpected sound stopped him, and he turned to see her burying her face
in her hands. It was a surprising collapse in one who seemed to be made
of steel, though he wondered whether the tears were an artifice or a
novel indulgence of emotion.
"You _didn't_ mean what you said!" she sobbed. "Please say you were only
punishing me for taking you away from the ball!"