shewn into the untidiest room that he had ever seen, filled in equal
measure with the priceless and the worthless. The bindings of Riviere
rubbed shoulders with tattered paper-backs; a cabinet of Japanese
porcelain was outraged by foolish, intrusive china cats; there was a
shelf of Waterford glass with a dynasty of blown-glass pigs, descending
from the ten-inch-high parent to the thumb-nail baby of the
litter--gravely and ridiculously arranged in a serpentine procession.
Fifty kinds of trophy adorned the mantel-piece, ranging from a West
African idol at one end to a pathetic, brown-eyed Teddy Bear at the
other, with stiff, conventional photographs and occasional miniatures
for punctuation. He recognized his own silver flask--and passed on, with
a smile. Three small tables were almost buried beneath their load of
pink carnations; a box of cigarettes, half-open and half-empty, lay
tucked between the cushions in each of three arm-chairs, and the white
bearskin rug was littered with _The Times_, a round milliner's box, two
cheque-books and a volume of Ronsard.
The butler looked dispassionately at the confusion and withdrew, giving
it up as a hopeless task. A moment later he returned to inform Eric that
her ladyship would be with him immediately. Ten minutes later Barbara
came in by another door to find him cautiously picking his way through
the disorder and examining her books and pictures.
"I didn't expect you so early," she began. "Will you give me a little
kiss, or am I still a nuisance?"
"You didn't say any time, so I chanced half-past one," Eric answered.
"If you'd told me to come at two, you'd still have been ten minutes
late, wouldn't you?" he added with a laugh. "Lady Barbara, your
conception of tidiness----"
She opened her eyes wide at him in unfeigned surprise.
"My dear, but you should see my bedroom!" she suggested.
"The purple bedroom?"
"Did you remember that? I believe you're beginning to like me, Eric.
Come and sit down instead of fidgeting."
He paused to finish his inspection, ending up with the nursery
toy-cupboard on the mantel-piece.
"Hullo! I don't know this one of Jack Waring," he exclaimed on reaching
a cabinet photograph in a silver frame.
Barbara lighted a cigarette and came beside him, resting her hand on one
shoulder and looking over the other at the photograph, her hair brushing
against his cheek.
"He---- Give me another match, Eric; this is burning all down one
side---- It's good, don't you think?"
"The best I've ever seen of him, poor chap. I must get his sister to
give me one."
"And don't forget that you're going to find out whether they've had any
news of him, will you? Johnny Carstairs asked the Foreign Office to make
enquiries through Copenhagen and Madrid, but he hasn't been able to find
out anything."
"I should be afraid there's nothing to find out," Eric murmured. "He's
been missing for weeks."
"But if he's been wounded or lost his identification disc--a hundred
things. And it takes months to get news sometimes. D'you like my pig
family, Eric?"
"Not among Waterford glass," he answered. "Except as part of the general
setting for you."
She replaced the photograph, laughing, and took his arm, leading him
round the room and giving him the history of her trophies, until a
footman knocked and announced that luncheon was on the table.
Eric spent the next five minutes being pushed round a large library,
which seemed to contain twice as many voices as people, and introduced
to a second person before he had fixed the identity of the first. Lady
Crawleigh was timorous and subdued, with an air of having been all her
life interrupted in the middle of her sentences and with a compensating
pair of flashing pigeon's eyes which seemed to miss nothing.
"I'm so glad Babs gave us the opportunity of meeting you," she said to
Eric. "I enjoyed your play so much. Your first, wasn't it? It must be a
glorious sensation to make such a success at the outset."
("She takes in a thousand times more than she ever gives out," Eric said
to himself; then he found himself being spun through the rest of the
family. "Wonder what she does with it?")
Lord Crawleigh interrupted an indignant, staccato conversation with
Lady Maitland, who was holding her own with emphatic shakes of a massive
head, to touch finger-tips and introduce him to his sister--the whole
done cholerically and with the air of transacting a great deal of
tiresome business in a short time.
("Bullies the life out of every one, I've always heard," was Eric's
private comment, as he was introduced to a pair of tow-haired young
officers with limp hands; "except the girl. And she bullies him.")
"I knew you by sight at Oxford," said Lord Neave, withdrawing his limp
hand jerkily, as though he feared that it would be stolen. "You were at
Trinity, weren't you? You, er, know my brother Charles--Mr. Lane."
Eric grasped a second limp hand, received a quick, business-like nod
from John Gaymer and found himself confronted by the Duchess of Ross.
"No one will introduce us!" she cried shrilly with a vermillion pout.
"I've _so_ much wanted to meet you, Mr. Lane. You _wouldn't_ dine when I
asked you! Won't _some one_ introduce us _properly_!"
The babble of high-toned voices, the quick patter of speech, the sense
of hurry, the hyperbolical intimacy and enthusiasm were bewildering to a
man who was naturally shy and at that moment mentally tired. Eric
commended his soul to his humour and circumambulated the room, two steps
at a time, until a sudden lessening of noise and tension told him that
luncheon had dawned upon Lady Crawleigh as a thing to be not only
discussed but eaten.
"We've heard so _much_ about you from Babs," she said, struggling to
finish one of her interrupted sentences. "_So_ good of you to bring her
home the other night."
Eric poised himself on mental tip-toes, wondering, in general, how far
Barbara made her family a party to her life and, in particular, to which
night Lady Crawleigh was alluding.
"Really----," he began.
"She gets these turns," Lady Crawleigh pursued. "I blame myself
entirely; I allowed her to stay on working at the hospital when she
simply wasn't fit for it. Now _she_ has to pay for _my_ weakness."
Eric looked from one to the other.
"I should prescribe three months in the country, bed at ten--and make
her stay there for twelve hours."
"I should be out of my mind in a week," Barbara protested.
There was a pause, and Lady Crawleigh, with a rueful shrug, turned away
to speak to Gaymer.
"I _like_ the way you order me _into_ bed and _out_ of bed!" Barbara
whispered. "If you cared what happened to me, it would be one thing,
but, when I'm becoming a bit of a nuisance, you know. . . ."
Eric looked round cautiously and lowered his voice.
"Lady Barbara," he began.
"You persist in that?"
"Babs, then----"
"Yes, but you're receiving a favour, not conferring it."
He drew a deep breath.
"You are the most exasperating----"
"Dear Eric! I can't help teasing you! Are you the clever only child?
Well, you ought to be. . . . I don't believe any one's ever teased you
before. You mustn't _be_ exasperated by me!"
Her laughter was irresistible, and Eric joined in it.
"Lady Barbara--I'm sorry--Babs, this is serious. You say you'd be out of
your mind in a week, if you adopted my prescription. Let me tell you
this; if you go on as you're doing now, you _will_ go out of your
mind----"
"I shouldn't bother you, if I were in an asylum."
Eric stiffened and turned his attention to the food before him.
"You're not an _easy_ person to talk to----," he began.
"Oh, you dear child!" said Barbara, with a gurgle of laughter. "_Two_
minutes ago it was, 'Ahaw, Lady Crawleigh, I should prescribe . . .' And
_one_ minute ago you became earnest and loving and grand-paternal, with
your fond advice! Eric, I love you when you're like that! Now don't be
self-conscious! 'Your ideahs of tidiness, aw, Lady Barbarah . . .'
Whatever people may say, I believe you're intelligent. In time you'll
understand." Her eyes softened and ceased to laugh at him. "Less than
half a week! In time you'll know what you've done for me, what I very
humbly hope and pray you're going to go on doing for me. . . . You'll
know why I trust you and love you more than I've ever loved any one in
my life before. There! Is that plain enough? I don't say it excuses my
being 'tiresome,' but it may explain it. . . . Now don't say, 'Lady
Barbarah, I--er--I don't--aw--understand you!'" Her fingers twined their
way confidingly between his. "Why bother? Why not go on being just what
you are?" she whispered. "Something that's made me think life's still
worth living. I don't _claim_ it," she added with a change of tone. "I
ask it."
"And will you do something for me in return?" Eric asked. "Will you take
six months' complete rest in the country, drop smoking----?"
"But I told you I should go out of my mind in a week!"
"Will you go for six weeks, six _days_?"
"You want to get rid of me?"
Eric felt his patience ebbing.
"I want to see you looking less of a haggard little wreck than you do
now," he exclaimed.
"Then I'll go. Thank you, Eric."
From the end of the table Lord Crawleigh's voice penetrated
authoritatively.
"Barbara! . . . Barbara! Are you coming with us by the 4.10?"
She pressed Eric's hand before turning her head.
"I can't come till the 5.40," she said.
"But, my dear Barbara----"
"I--_can't_, father."
("Bullies the life out of every one, I've always heard," Eric repeated
to himself, as Lord Crawleigh subsided into inarticulate blustering.
"Except the girl. And she bullies him.")
"I did wonderful staff-work with Waterloo this morning," Barbara
confided. "The 5.40 stops at Winchester _and_ Crawleigh."
"I could have told you that," said Eric. "So could Bradshaw, deceased."
"But fancy looking at Bradshaw, when you can persuade some one to look
at it for you! . . . And you can't get _any_where in Bradshaw without
going through the Severn Tunnel and waiting two hours at Bletchley.
Besides, Waterloo rather loved me. Just my voice, you know. . . . We'll
go down together. You can wire to your people."
"I told them I'd come by the 5.40."
"But how lucky!"
"How--understanding," he amended.
* * * * *
"_If you can be sure of your opponent, you may win by throwing down
your weapon. It is the victory of the weak over the strong, the
'tyranny of tears.' Or perhaps it is the victory of the weak over
the weaker. But you must be sure of your opponent._"--From the Diary
of Eric Lane.
CHAPTER THREE
LASHMAR MILL-HOUSE
"I've come back . . . and I was the King of Kafiristan . . . and
you've been setting here ever since--O Lord!"
RUDYARD KIPLING: "THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING."
1
As the crow flies, Lashmar Mill-House is but five miles from Winchester.
By road, however, there are six miles of tolerable grey flint and rusty
gravel on the Winchester and Melton turnpike, followed by three Irish
miles of unaided forest track. Half of it lies under water for six
months of the year; but in the summer a rutted ride projects from stony
sand-pockets framed in velvet moss, with tidal-waves of bracken surging
up from the dells at the road-side and low branches meeting to net the
sun-shine.
At the end of the three miles Swanley Forest seems to have paused for
breath. There is a natural clearing a mile long and three quarters of a
mile broad--cherished common-land, where the Lashmar villagers walk many
assertive miles of a Sunday to preserve their rights of way; where, too,
tethered goats and errant geese make good their eleventh-century claim
to free pasturage. At one end of the down-soft clearing, a Methodist
chapel, two shops and five cottages constitute the village of Lashmar;
at the other lies Lashmar Mill-House, slumbering half-hidden by beech
trees to the unchanging murmur of the Bort. The relevant deeds and
charters prove beyond a doubt that the lord of Lashmar Mill-House has
the right to make Lashmar village grind its corn in his mill, paying
him in kind and yielding three days' labour a year to grind his. The
ambitions of Sir Francis Lane and of his eldest son, however, were not
feudal.
The autumn floods were lapping the road-side as Eric and his sister left
the twinkling lights behind and turned, after a crackling six miles of
metalled high-way, on to the primaeval ride that bored faint-heartedly
through the forest. He was tired and uncommunicative, though his journey
from Waterloo had been uneventful; once inside the carriage and tucked
warmly into a corner, Barbara had closed her eyes, sighed and dropped
asleep. Not until he stirred himself to collect his hat and coat did she
open her eyes and look round with a tired smile; as the train steamed
out of Winchester, an ungloved hand fluttered into sight for a moment.
It was Eric's first visit to Lashmar since the production of the
"Divorce" had made his name known throughout England; and he could not
conceal from himself that he was trying to render his return agreeably
dramatic. Lady Lane assisted the conspiracy by inviting their few
neighbours to meet him; Sybil was awaiting him on the platform with
ill-suppressed excitement; and it was entirely appropriate that Agnes
Waring should dine at the Mill-House on his first night at home.
"Geoff came home on leave yesterday," said Sybil.
"From Scapa? Oh, good! I haven't seen him for a long time," said Eric.
But for Basil, who was in Salonica, the party would be complete; and
Eric felt a moment's compunction at having allowed himself to be so much
caught up by the work and distractions of London. When the car stopped
at the door of the Mill-House, he looked with affection at its squat,
sleepy extent, punctuated with lifeless, dark windows and wrapped in
age-long slumber; as the door opened, he saw his mother silhouetted
against the golden light of the hall.
"At last, Eric!" she cried.
"It's good to be home again, mother," he answered, jumping out of the
car and embracing her.
While his sister drove round to the stables, Eric walked arm-in-arm with
his mother into the low, warm hall. For more than thirty years Lady Lane
had guarded, counselled and provided for an eccentric husband and a
turbulent family, shouldering the cares of all, budgeting, nursing and
educating on an income which slipped unrewardingly away until she
assumed control. She had learned Greek and Latin to help the boys with
their home-work and had trained their characters in an austere school of
aggressive Puritanism. If she were a little intolerant, at least she
reared her children to a lofty sense of honour, a cold chastity of life
and speech and a fierce refusal to compromise where truth or personal
reputation was concerned. Thanks to her, three boys and one girl were
now able to fend for themselves; Sybil, factotum and amanuensis to her
father ever since she had learned to read, could support herself
anywhere; Geoff was firmly on his feet in the Navy, Basil had passed
into the Civil Service a few weeks before the outbreak of war. Lady Lane
was justly content with her children; of Eric, whom she had kept alive
when the doctors despaired of him, she was justly proud.
"Come into the drawing-room," she said, giving his arm a gentle squeeze.
"I've got a fire there."
"Nothing's changed," said Eric wonderingly.
Lashmar Mill-House, for all its size, contained hardly more than two
rooms on the ground-floor; a vast, book-lined study for Sir Francis, an
equally vast living-room for the rest of the family and, between them, a
furtive, dark rectangle where they hurried through their meals. Eric had
begged for years to have the back wall removed from the hall to make an
adequate dining-room, but his mother had grown middle-aged in a
familiar compass and did not care to be told by him too explicitly how
the house should be run and improved. In the moment of arrival Eric was
too much pleased with his welcome to be critical.
"You look tired," she said, holding his face to the light. "Tell me what
you've been doing all this while. You've become a great celebrity,
Eric."
"There's nothing much to tell. I've been doing a lot of work, meeting a
lot of people. . . . It's been rather fun. . . ."
As soon as she had put away the car, Sybil joined them and stood with
her back to the fire and her hands in the pockets of a short tweed
skirt, staring idly at her own small feet in their brown stockings and
thick brogues and rousing herself with an abrupt jerk of the head when
she wanted to intervene with a question.
"You were _barely_ civil, when I rang you up the other night," she
interjected, in a pause, with the disconcerting directness of nineteen.
"I was late already, and you were making me later," Eric answered
patiently. "That night----? Oh, yes."
He detailed Lady Poynter's dinner to his mother and observed an
expression of mixed curiosity and disapproval settling upon his sister's
face.
"Mrs. O'Rane? Sonia Dainton that was? H'm," said Sybil. "And Lady
Barbara Neave. Are you being taken up by _that_ set now, Ricky?"
"I don't quite know what you mean by 'being taken up.' I met them at
dinner. . . . And I lunched with the Crawleighs to-day," he added
without filling in the intervening encounters. "Lady Crawleigh wants me
to go down there next week-end, but I'm too busy; and week-ends simply
wear me out."
"You _have_ made yourself popular with them all at once!" Sybil
commented. "What's Lady Barbara like?"
"Interesting girl," Eric answered, casually.
"Is she anything like what people make her out to be?"
Eric smiled tolerantly.
"I don't know enough of what people make her out to be," he replied.
Sybil was smiling mysteriously and exasperatingly to herself. . . . "Is
the guv'nor working?" he asked his mother.
Eric prowled through the hall to his father's big work-room. Sir Francis
was sitting bent over a litter of papers, with a green eye-shade clamped
to his lined forehead and an ill-smelling corn-cob drooping from beneath
his unassertive grey moustache. In an arm-chair before the fire Geoff
was contentedly dozing with the bog-mud steaming from his boots and a
half-cleaned gun across his knees. By his side an elderly retriever
peered reflectively into the flames and from time to time yawned
silently.
"'Evening, everybody," said Eric. "I've been sent to hunt you off to
dress, father. You asleep, Geoff? If not, how are you?"
Sir Francis pulled off the eye-shade and held out his hand with a wintry
smile. The boy in the arm-chair turned on to his other side and dropped
asleep again with a disgusted grunt.
"He's got about a year to make up," explained Sir Francis. "The Grand
Fleet doesn't do much sleeping. Well, Eric, what news?"
"Everything very much as usual," was the answer.
"Everything's always very much as usual here," said his father, as he
turned out the reading-lamp.
He sighed as he said it, and Eric tried to calculate the number of years
in which he had come down like this for the week-end--to be met, before
the era of motor-cars, by a fat pony and a governess cart, to be greeted
by his mother with affection which he never seemed able to repay, to
drift into the library and detach his lank, unaging father from his
studies. Sir Francis had accepted marriage and the presence of a wife as
he would have accepted a new house and strange house-keeper; children
had been born; after the publication of his Smaller Anglo-Saxon
Dictionary the friend of a friend had recommended him, through a
friend's friend, for a knighthood, and he had bestirred himself with
wide-eyed, childish surprise for the investiture and a congratulatory
dinner at the Athenaeum, returning to Lashmar Mill-House grievously
unsettled and discontented for as much as a week. He had talked of
running up to London occasionally, of having these fellows down for the
week-end; he had complained that he was growing rusty and losing touch
with the world. Then the murmur of the mill-stream had drugged his
senses, and he had settled to the Century Dictionary of Anglo-Saxon,
Volume VII E-G.
After the restlessness of London, Eric could not at once accommodate
himself to the leisurely contentment and placidity of Lashmar.
"Wake up, Geoff!" he cried.
The boy yawned and stretched himself like a cat, then became suddenly
active and projected himself across the room, turning in the door-way to
shout: "Bags I first bath, Ricky!"
"Well, don't take all the hot water," Eric begged. After the ingenious
comfort of his flat in Ryder Street, he could not at once accommodate
himself to the simplicity of the Mill-House. "Pity you never turned the
east room into a bathroom," he said to his father. "You talked about it
for years. We _need_ another one."
It was an old controversy and part of Eric's persistent but fruitless
campaign against the studiedly Spartan attitude of Lashmar Mill-House.
"It's rather an unnecessary expense. And we seem to struggle on without
it," said Sir Francis.
"I avoid unnecessary struggles as much as possible," Eric answered
shortly.
"You couldn't get the work done while the war's on," Sir Francis pointed
out, rooting himself firmly in the particular.
Eric walked upstairs, reflecting in moody dissatisfaction on unnecessary
struggles. No one ever laid out his dress clothes for him at Lashmar. It
never _had_ been done when he was a school-boy, carefully protected from
pampering. Sporadic attempts were made, whenever he launched an
offensive against the domestic economy of the house; but the maids were
always changing, Lady Lane believed that all men-servants drank or stole
the cigars. . . . In the last resort, these country-bred girls were so
difficult to teach. . . .
Down the passage came the sound of emptying taps and a voice singing
cheerfully in the bath.
"Don't stay there all night, Geoff!" Eric cried, banging on the door.
"It's a quarter to eight now."
It was five minutes to eight before the bathroom, sloppy and filled with
steam, was surrendered to him. No man could have a hot bath and dress in
five minutes; he was particularly anxious to appear at his best for the
meeting with Agnes. . . .
And the water was tepid. . . .
2
"I have been apologizing for you," said Lady Lane pointedly, as Eric
hurried late and ill-humoured into the drawing-room.
He had ready at hand a caustic little speech about inadequate hot-water
supply and insufficient bathrooms, but it was intended for domestic
consumption and, after one scowl at Geoff, he laid it aside. Family
altercations, like family jokes, should be reserved for the family,
though no one else emulated his moderation. He wondered whether the
servants grew as weary as he did of the story about the cross-country
journey from Oxford to Winchester; it was dragged up at his expense
whenever any one missed a train--and trains were missed weekly.
Servants, of course, could always leave; they always did. Perhaps they
made bets which would hear the Oxford-to-Winchester story most often in
three months; perhaps they met in sullen conspiracy and pledged
themselves to decamp in a body the next time any one heard it. . . .
That tepid bath had chilled his enjoyment of everything. . . .
"I'm sorry to be late," he murmured, stiffly impenitent.
Agnes Waring was in the foreground, talking to his father; he shook
hands shyly and squeezed past her to Nares, the apologetic, ineffectual
vicar, and from Nares to Mrs. Waring, who was talking to a young officer
whom she had brought over with her party. Colonel Waring stood by the
fire, retailing safe newspaper opinions on the war and representing to
Eric's theatre-trained eyes, with their passion for "types," almost too
perfect a picture of the younger brother who had passed from twenty
years in a cavalry regiment to half-pay retirement and a certain
military pretentiousness of daily life. There was no one else. Had their
lives depended on it, Lashmar could not yield another man or woman.
"Entertaining here always reminds me of a musical comedy," Eric murmured
to Sybil. "Where one goes, all go:
"_Oh, we're all of us a-going back to Lon-don,
Over ocean; that's the notion_. . . .
"Song and dance. Curtain. Who's the fellow in uniform?"
"Mr. Benyon. A friend of the Warings," Sybil answered. "You're not
going to be patronizing, _are_ you?"
Eric pulled up and banished the ill-humour induced generally by the
sleepiness of the country and, in particular, by that tepid bath-water.
He had looked forward to the week-end, he proposed to enjoy himself;
there was no need even to ask where he had been placed at dinner. Sybil,
at nineteen, worshipped every word and movement in Agnes Waring at
twenty-eight--her way of laughing and speaking, her phraseology, her
mental outlook; every opinion was introduced with the words, "Agnes
says----" Two years before, when the infatuation was in its perfervid
youth, Sybil had made up her mind that her brother was to marry Agnes;
the determination was still so strong that she was uneasy at the
presence of young Benyon.