Mrs. Glamorys herself gave "At Homes," every Sunday afternoon, and so,
on the morrow, after a sleepless night mitigated by perpended sonnets,
the love-sick young tutor presented himself by invitation at the
beautiful old house in Hampstead. He was enchanted to find his heart's
mistress set in an eighteenth-century frame of small-paned windows and
of high oak-panelling, and at once began to image her dancing minuets
and playing on virginals. Her husband was absent, but a broad band
of velvet round Winifred's neck was a painful reminder of his
possibilities. Winifred, however, said it was only a touch of sore
throat caught in the garden. Her eyes added that there was nothing in
the pathological dictionary which she would not willingly have caught
for the sake of those divine, if draughty moments; but that, alas! it
was more than a mere bodily ailment she had caught there.
There were a great many visitors in the two delightfully quaint
rooms, among whom he wandered disconsolate and admired, jealous of her
scattered smiles, but presently he found himself seated by her side on
a "cosy corner" near the open folding-doors, with all the other guests
huddled round a violinist in the inner room. How Winifred had managed
it he did not know, but she sat plausibly in the outer room, awaiting
new-comers, and this particular niche was invisible, save to a
determined eye. He took her unresisting hand--that dear, warm hand,
with its begemmed artistic fingers, and held it in uneasy beatitude.
How wonderful! She--the beautiful and adored hostess, of whose
sweetness and charm he heard even her own guests murmur to one
another--it was her actual flesh-and-blood hand that lay in
his--thrillingly tangible. Oh, adventure beyond all merit, beyond
all hoping!
But every now and then, the outer door facing them would open on some
new-comer, and John had hastily to release her soft magnetic fingers
and sit demure, and jealously overhear her effusive welcome to those
innocent intruders, nor did his brow clear till she had shepherded
them within the inner fold. Fortunately, the refreshments were in this
section, so that once therein, few of the sheep strayed back, and
the jiggling wail of the violin was succeeded by a shrill babble
of tongues and the clatter of cups and spoons. "Get me an ice,
please--strawberry," she ordered John during one of these forced
intervals in manual flirtation; and when he had steered laboriously
to and fro, he found a young actor beside her _their_ hands dispart. He
stood over them with a sickly smile, while Winifred ate her ice. When
he returned from depositing the empty saucer, the player-fellow was
gone, and in remorse for his mad suspicion he stooped and reverently
lifted her fragrant finger-tips to his lips. The door behind his back
opened abruptly.
"Good-by," she said, rising in a flash. The words had the calm
conventional cadence, and instantly extorted from him--amid all his
dazedness--the corresponding "Good-by." When he turned and saw it was
Mr. Glamorys who had come in, his heart leapt wildly at the
nearness of his escape. As he passed this masked ruffian, he nodded
perfunctorily and received a cordial smile. Yes, he was handsome and
fascinating enough externally, this blonde savage.
"A man may smile and smile and be a villain," John thought. "I wonder
how he'd feel, if he knew I knew he beats women."
Already John had generalised the charge. "I hope Cecilia will keep him
at arm's length," he had said to Winifred, "if only that she may not
smart for it some day."
He lingered purposely in the hall to get an impression of the brute,
who had begun talking loudly to a friend with irritating bursts of
laughter, speciously frank-ringing. Golf, fishing, comic operas--ah,
the Boeotian! These were the men who monopolised the ethereal
divinities.
But this brusque separation from his particular divinity was
disconcerting. How to see her again? He must go up to Oxford in the
morning, he wrote her that night, but if she could possibly let him
call during the week he would manage to run down again.
"Oh, my dear, dreaming poet," she wrote to Oxford, "how could you
possibly send me a letter to be laid on the breakfast-table beside
_The Times_! With a poem in it, too. Fortunately my husband was in
a hurry to get down to the City, and he neglected to read my
correspondence. ('The unchivalrous blackguard,' John commented. 'But
what can be expected of a woman beater?') Never, never write to me
again at the house. A letter, care of Mrs. Best, 8A Foley Street,
W.C., will always find me. She is my maid's mother. And you must not
come here either, my dear handsome head-in-the-clouds, except to my
'At Homes,' and then only at judicious intervals. I shall be walking
round the pond in Kensington Gardens at four next Wednesday, unless
Mrs. Best brings me a letter to the contrary. And now thank you for
your delicious poem; I do not recognise my humble self in the dainty
lines, but I shall always be proud to think I inspired them. Will it
be in the new volume? I have never been in print before; it will be
a novel sensation. I cannot pay you song for song, only feeling for
feeling. Oh, John Lefolle, why did we not meet when I had still my
girlish dreams? Now, I have grown to distrust all men--to fear the
brute beneath the cavalier...."
Mrs. Best did bring her a letter, but it was not to cancel the
appointment, only to say he was not surprised at her horror of the
male sex, but that she must beware of false generalisations. Life was
still a wonderful and beautiful thing--_vide_ poem enclosed. He was
counting the minutes till Wednesday afternoon. It was surely a popular
mistake that only sixty went to the hour.
This chronometrical reflection recurred to him even more poignantly in
the hour that he circumambulated the pond in Kensington Gardens.
Had she forgotten--had her husband locked her up? What could have
happened? It seemed six hundred minutes, ere, at ten past five she
came tripping daintily towards him. His brain had been reduced to
insanely devising problems for his pupils--if a man walks two strides
of one and a half feet a second round a lake fifty acres in area,
in how many turns will he overtake a lady who walks half as fast and
isn't there?--but the moment her pink parasol loomed on the horizon,
all his long misery vanished in an ineffable peace and uplifting.
He hurried, bare-headed, to clasp her little gloved hand. He had
forgotten her unpunctuality, nor did she remind him of it.
"How sweet of you to come all that way," was all she said, and it was
a sufficient reward for the hours in the train and the six hundred
minutes among the nursemaids and perambulators. The elms were in their
glory, the birds were singing briskly, the water sparkled, the sunlit
sward stretched fresh and green--it was the loveliest, coolest moment
of the afternoon. John instinctively turned down a leafy avenue.
Nature and Love! What more could poet ask?
"No, we can't have tea by the Kiosk," Mrs. Glamorys protested. "Of
course I love anything that savours of Paris, but it's become so
fashionable. There will be heaps of people who know me. I suppose
you've forgotten it's the height of the season. I know a quiet little
place in the High Street." She led him, unresisting but bemused,
towards the gate, and into a confectioner's. Conversation languished
on the way.
"Tea," he was about to instruct the pretty attendant.
"Strawberry ices," Mrs. Glamorys remarked gently. "And some of those
nice French cakes."
The ice restored his spirits, it was really delicious, and he had
got so hot and tired, pacing round the pond. Decidedly Winifred was
a practical person and he was a dreamer. The pastry he dared not
touch--being a genius--but he was charmed at the gaiety with which
Winifred crammed cake after cake into her rosebud of a mouth. What an
enchanting creature! How bravely she covered up her life's tragedy!
The thought made him glance at her velvet band--it was broader than
ever.
"He has beaten you again!" he murmured furiously. Her joyous eyes
saddened, she hung her head, and her fingers crumbled the cake. "What
is his pretext?" he asked, his blood burning.
"Jealousy," she whispered.
His blood lost its glow, ran cold. He felt the bully's blows on his
own skin, his romance turning suddenly sordid. But he recovered his
courage. He, too, had muscles. "But I thought he just missed seeing me
kiss your hand."