Out on the ocean Lucilla Crespin missed her father more than he, alone
now in the vicarage, missed her. He had been bereaved too often to feel
overwhelming or insupportable shock from bereavement, and he was at home
with his house, his books, his garden, his people, his usual work and
his usual pastimes, with his church and his churchyard—and, above all,
at home with himself.
Lucilla was scarcely at home yet with her new self—that was the chief
difference—and she was out on the new, unbeaten paths now, crossing the
wide world, alone on the ocean, alone for the rest of the long years to
come with a stranger—a devoted and perfectly charming stranger, who
loved her amazingly, and whom she loved excitingly—but a stranger. She
had felt so closely acquainted with her lover, even before he had spoken
his love, but she found that she felt oddly and shyly unacquainted with
her husband. It was fascinating, the queer strangeness she felt, and it
made the smallest, ordinary, everyday things wonderful, almost
hairbreadth-escape adventure—changing her shoes, fastening a blouse,
winding her watch, washing her hands. But it was a strangeness. Antony
was wonderfully good to her, beautifully considerate. She found
something new to like in him every day, and discovered, almost as often,
some unexpected trait or attainment to admire. She told him so shyly one
evening, and he laughed with his face against hers.
“‘’Tis not a year or two shows us a man,’” he told her teasingly.
And, “So I begin to suspect,” his wife retorted.
She was very happy. The ocean and the sky above it did not seem large
enough to hold her happiness; and, as for her own heart, it ached
sometimes with the throb and the crowding of her hew joy. But she missed
her father sorely, and each mile farther from England she missed him the
more.
The boat was full of Anglo-Indians, of course, a few going out for the
first time to take up new appointments, boys with their first
commissions, men exchanging into Indian regiments, civil servants; but
for the most, service folk and civil servants returning from leave.
Lucilla noticed that they grumbled a deal at the heat and the “grind”
they were going back to, but it seemed to her as she listened, keenly
interested in even stray words that might tell her something of the new
world in which she was going to live, that their grumbling was more a
convention than a sincerity, and that they one and all were looking
forward to India as what one happy-faced subaltern frankly called it, “a
jolly good spree—what.” There were two or three globe-trotters aboard,
an isolated and cold-shouldered missionary, and three or four business
men. But these scarcely tinged the gathering, for none of them in the
least penetrated into the “service” fold. It was almost a secret society
the “service” people formed, she found; and certainly a jealously kept
and guarded caste, and the army people sat on the higher seats.
If Mrs. Crespin was proud of her good-looking, soldierly husband,
Captain Crespin was openly vain of his tall, handsome, girlish wife. And
because he was vain of her he genially encouraged the acquaintance that
soon buzzed about her.
The women admired her frocks, and the men admired her eyes and the way
she walked, and both women and men liked her for her fresh girlishness.
And, if some of the women envied her it, not one of them did it
cattishly; and several, already sallowed from long Indian years, pitied
her too, knowing that what India had done to their skins it probably
would do to hers. And it takes a very sour woman, and a woman a little
bad at core, to feel unkindness towards a bride.
Lucilla Crespin looked younger than her twenty years, and, tall as she
was, securely as she carried herself, girlishness was her most instantly
and insistently obvious point. Many a country priest’s motherless
daughter—especially an only daughter—looks and seems very much older
than her years. But in no sense had Mrs. Crespin ever been “her father’s
curate,” or the villagers’ “mother.” Parochial administration and
fad-philanthropy had never attracted her, and she had firmly left them
alone. They had not sat too heavily on Philip Reynolds himself, and had
shadowed the Vicar but little, and had shadowed the vicarage life and
Lucilla not at all. He was always readier with half-crowns than with
soup or jellies, and he prayed for his flock more than he fussed it.
He, not Lucilla, had been the housekeeper. He had a flair for
housekeeping, and she had not. He engaged the servants, arranged the
menus as a rule, paid the bills and planned hospitalities. Lucilla had
had an ample allowance—Reynolds liked things well done, and he
perfectly knew that that required money—but she never exceeded, rarely
spent, all of it, and more often than not consulted her father about the
color and material of a new frock. The result had justified her—if it
had not altogether fitted her for the selection of her own wardrobe
which lay before her now. It was thanks chiefly to the Reverend Philip
Reynolds that the women on the big P. and O. so admired young Mrs.
Crespin’s gowns. He had taken far more interest in Lucilla’s trousseau
than she had—and it had cost him a great deal of money. Little as she
knew of money, the bills for that trousseau would have appalled Lucilla,
if she ever had seen them; but they had warmed the Vicar’s heart like
good wine, and he wrote the checks with a glowing face, and with a
complacent flourish at the end of his scholarly signature. There would
not be a great deal to leave his girl at his death, but he had no wish
that they should have a very great deal; and Antony had enough. And
Helen’s modest inheritance was secure for Lucilla.
All this had kept Lucilla Reynolds very young. She had had few tasks,
and no burdens. She never had gone to school. She had had expensive and
highly efficient governesses—the best that large salaries, great care,
and the Vicar’s good sense and fine taste could procure: estimable women
who also were charming. But none of them had lived at the vicarage.
Lured from London and Paris, one of the conditions of their engagement
always had been that they should find for themselves or allow Mr.
Reynolds to find for them apartments at a reasonable distance from the
vicarage, but by no means close to its gates. Their holidays had been
long, and their teaching hours rather short. They had had no
sinecure—the Vicar knew the value of money, and always insisted upon
getting the value of his—but none of Lucilla Reynolds’ governesses had
been overworked. And none of them had been encouraged to “mother” the
girl, and certainly none of them had had any reason to regard as the
most remote possibility a translation from governess to step-mother.
They had been handsomely paid to teach, and so wisely had they been
chosen that they had done it handsomely. They had loved the girl too;
and she had liked them all, but she had loved none of them. Lucilla
Crespin had felt love but twice: love for her father, and love for the
soldier who was taking her with him to India now. And she scarcely had
had a girl friend. If this last had narrowed her, it too had preserved
her. It had made her a poor hand at some sorts of “small talk,” but it
had kept her mind fresh and undiscolored.
Philip Reynolds had “formed” his girl himself, he and the books he had
shared with her and the environment he had given her. And her actual
“education” he had officered even more than any of her paid teachers
had. Had their wills ever clashed or their tastes jarred, such constant
companionship might have rasped the girl. But their wills had been one,
and their tastes had too. Best of all, for her welfare, she never had
been able to feel for her father less than absolute respect. And she had
always had to be proud of him. She had never found her home life dull,
for the father had been a perfect playmate. It was small wonder that
she, whose girlhood had been so guarded, but never stagnant, and had
been so companioned—so rarely companioned—_was_ younger than her
years—and seemed even younger than she was. It was no wonder at all
that she missed her father. She missed him terribly.
* * * * *
There were a number of men and several women on board whom Captain
Crespin had known in India, had met in the hills, at Calcutta and in
leaves in Kashmir; but none of his regiment, or of his own station in
the Punjab. But at Malta two brother officers, returning from a shorter
leave than his, joined the ship. As a matter of course they “chummed up”
with the Crespins and Crespin with them.
They had heard of his marriage, and were not a little anxious to know
just what manner of girl was coming “on to their strength.” There were
only four women in the regiment—that is, actually in the station—just
now, and in the small station there was no other regiment, and no social
life whatever beyond what the regiment made for itself. Where the women
were so few it was distinctly important what manner of women they were:
how much to be liked, how far congenial and helpful. Two of the ladies
already with the regimental colors were dearly loved by every man in it;
two were not. The new Mrs. Crespin would make the preponderance for
social comfort or discomfort. Which? Bruce and Crossland wondered. They
didn’t say so to each other, of course. India’s a gossipy
place—Anglo-India—and in the Punjabi dearth even the soldier-men
“talk” over their tobacco. But only the “bounders” ever discuss the
women folk of brother officers, and there are very few bounders
commissioned into the British army, and the few that are are rather apt
to drift out: they are apt to find that there is not comfortable room
for them in their regiment.
Crossland and Bruce had never so much as hinted to each other their hope
and their fear as to how far Crespin’s wife might sweeten or bitter
their next few years. But both knew that (and what) both were hoping and
fearing somewhat acutely.
* * * * *
The sun was setting over Valetta as the great P. and O. swung and
throbbed back to her course. Malta lay rose and gold in the sunset, the
Church of St John looked gold inlaid with pink and amber, the old
_auberges_ where the Knights once kept their palaced state sparkled red
and gold in the heat of the sun’s dying radiance, and the exquisite
high-walled little gardens looked chips of garnet, emerald and topaz,
and even the carob-trees and prickly pears in the sparcer bare and rocky
valleys were jeweled and gay in the waning splendor. Back of and over
the city of Valetta, with its queer, steep, twisted streets and its
picturesque and magnificent buildings—more flowers, more great and
varied architecture, and more human beings and homes are packed into
Malta’s teeming ninety-five square miles than are in the same space
anywhere else—hung the sunset’s gorgeous curtain of ever-changing
amethyst and gold, crimson and rose and apple-green and fire-shot lemon,
and here in front of the island at her feet the great blue ocean rippled
and spread like a tremulous carpet woven of blue and green gems.
And this was the background against which, when they came on to the
deck, after hastily changing for dinner, Bruce and Crossland first saw
their regiment’s latest recruit—Captain Crespin’s girl-wife.
The Crespins too already were dressed to dine, and she, in her soft
frock of delicate blue, with touches here and there of vivid green
velvet, which the Vicar had proudly pronounced “most happy,” an inch of
silvery gray fur at its fluted hem, a great bunch of saffron and lemon
roses, that Crespin had bought her in Valetta’s fragrant flower market,
in her hands, and a rose—one of the deep ones—at her breast, and
loosely over her hair the shawl of black Maltese lace that Antony too
had bought as they wandered about the old, once Phœnician town of the
Hospitalers, looked for all her palpably English tea-rose face not
unlike some exquisite Maltese.
They were standing by the rail, watching the sunset city—the
Crespins—but Antony was more particularly watching her, his face turned
a little towards the deck, and he saw his brother officers, and hailed
them.
When he introduced them to “my wife,” Bruce, forgetting it was for her
to grant it, if she chose, not for him to ask it, impulsively held out
his hand—after all she was one of _them_ now—and Lucilla instantly and
cordially gave him hers; and when he let it go, not too quickly, she
held it out with a pretty friendly gesture, half girlish, half matronly
to Dr. Crossland, and said to them both, “How jolly! I thought I should
have to wait until we got to Sumnee before I knew any of you. This is
ever so much nicer.” And her big blue eyes, deep and clear as sapphires,
but softer under their curled fringe of long dark lashes, said shyly,
“Please like me.”
“By Jove, Mrs. Crespin”—she was not very used yet to being called so,
and she flushed deliciously, and a dimple trembled at one corner of her
bow-shaped red mouth—“By Jove, it is ripping of you to say so,” Bruce
stammered delightedly. And Crossland looked what Bruce had said.
They saw without looking the relief in each other’s faces.
Crespin saw it too, and laughed aloud.
“What is it?” Lucilla demanded.
“Ask them,” Antony chuckled, and sauntered off, leaving the three alone.
“What was Tony laughing at?” the girl persisted.
Dr. Crossland smiled sagely, but shook his head decidedly.
“I’ll tell you some day, if I dare, Mrs. Crespin,” Bruce promised her.
“Wouldn’t dare tell you now, don’t you know. My hat, I’m glad we’ve
hopped on to your boat—no end a _tamasha_ we’ll have getting out to our
306-in-the-shade paradise. I say, don’t you let Crespin give us the slip
in Calcutta, will you?”
“Why _did_ he laugh? What was funny? Do tell me.”
But neither man would do that.
But they each fell very industriously to making particularly good
friends with Antony Crespin’s wife.
And that night in the stateroom they shared each made a cryptic remark,
one to his hair-brush, one to the shoe he kicked off.
“Thank the Lord!” Tom Bruce told his shoe audibly.
George Crossland, under his breath said to his brush, frowning at it,
“Poor girl!”