[Cover Illustration]
THE TALE OF TRIONA
=_BY THE SAME AUTHOR_=
IDOLS
JAFFERY
VIVIETTE
SEPTIMUS
DERELICTS
THE USURPER
STELLA MARIS
WHERE LOVE IS
THE ROUGH ROAD
THE MOUNTEBANK
THE RED PLANET
THE WHITE DOVE
FAR-AWAY STORIES
SIMON THE JESTER
A STUDY IN SHADOWS
A CHRISTMAS MYSTERY
THE WONDERFUL YEAR
THE HOUSE OF BALTAZAR
THE FORTUNATE YOUTH
THE BELOVÈD VAGABOND
AT THE GATE OF SAMARIA
THE GLORY OF CLEMENTINA
THE MORALS OF MARCUS ORDEYNE
THE DEMAGOGUE AND LADY PHAYRE
THE JOYOUS ADVENTURES OF ARISTIDE PUJOL
THE TALE OF TRIONA
BY
WILLIAM J. LOCKE
Author of “The Belovèd Vagabond,” “The Morals of
Marcus Ordeyne,” etc.
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
1922
Copyright, 1922
By DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY, Inc.
PRINTED IN U. S. A.
THE TALE OF TRIONA
THE TALE OF TRIONA
CHAPTER I
OLIVIA GALE leaned back in her chair at the end of the dining-room
table, and looked first at the elderly gentleman on her right, and then
at the elderly gentleman on her left.
“You’re both of you as kind as can be, and I’m more than grateful for
all you’ve done; but I do wish you’d see that it’s no use arguing. It
only hurts and makes us tired. Do help yourself, Mr. Trivett.
And—another cup of tea, Mr. Fenmarch?”
Mr. Fenmarch, on her left, passed his cup with a sigh. He was a dusty,
greyish man, his face covered with an indeterminate growth of thin short
hair. His eyes were of a dull, unspeculative blue.
“As your solicitor, my dear Olivia,” said he, “I can only obey
instructions. As the friend of your family, I venture to give you
advice.”
“Why the deuce your father didn’t tie you up in a trusteeship till you
were twenty-five, at any rate,” said Mr. Trivett on her right, helping
himself to whisky and soda—the table, covered with a green baize cloth,
was littered with papers and afternoon refreshments. “Why the
dickens——” he began again after a sizzling gulp.
“Yes, it’s most unfortunate,” said Mr. Fenmarch, cutting off his
friend’s period. “And what you are going to do with yourself, all alone
in the world, with this enormous amount of liquid money is more than I
can imagine.”
Olivia smiled and tapped the blue-veined hand that set down his teacup.
“Of course you can’t. If imagination ran away with a solicitor, it would
land him in the workhouse.”
“That’s where it will land you, Olivia,” said Mr. Trivett. “Common sense
is the better mount.”
“That’s rather neat,” she said.
“If it wasn’t, I wouldn’t have said it,” retorted Mr. Trivett, sinking
his red jowls into his collar, which made them redder than before.
“You’re so quick and clever,” said Olivia, “that I can’t understand why
you won’t see things from my point of view.”
“You’ve got to learn that a man of experience can’t take the view of a
wrong-headed young woman.”
Mr. Trivett emphasized the asperity of his tone by a thump of his palm
on the table.
As a matter of fact, he was genuinely angry. He was the senior partner
in Trivett and Gale, Auctioneers and Estate Agents, in the comfortable
little Shropshire town of Medlow; or rather the only surviving partner,
for Gale, Olivia’s father, and his two sons had one after the other been
wiped out in a recent world accident. Olivia’s decision, inspired from
no other fount he could think of than lunacy, involved the withdrawal of
considerable capital from the business. This, of course, being an
honourable man, he could not dispute; but here were peace and
reconstruction and inflated prices, and heaven knew how much percentage
on the middleman’s capital, and here was this inexperienced girl
throwing away a safe income and clamouring for a settlement in full.
They had argued and argued. It may be stated here that Mr. Trivett was
the Executor of her father’s estate, which made his position the more
delicate and exasperating.
And now Mr. Trivett’s exasperation reached the table-thumping point.
Olivia smiled wearily.
“It’s such a pity.”
“What’s a pity?”
“Oh, everything. One thing is that there’s no more gold. Of course, I
know you can’t understand. But that’s your fault, not mine. I should
have liked to realize all that I’ve got in sovereigns. Do you think
they’d fill a bath? Have you ever thought how lovely it would be to
wallow in a bath of sovereigns? Treasury notes are not the same thing.
They’re either very dirty and smell of plumbers, or very new and smell
of rancid oil. Gold is the real basis of Romance.”
He put her down for a mere female fool, and replied practically:
“We’ll not see a gold coin in England again for the next fifty years.”
“Well, well,” she said; “anyhow, there’s still some romance in mounting
the deadly breech of the bank counter with a drawn cheque in one’s
hand.”
“I’m afraid, my dear Olivia,” said Mr. Fenmarch mildly, “I don’t quite
see what we’re talking about.”
“Why, we’ve discussed it every day for the last three months,” cried
Olivia, “and now this is the very last end of everything. A final
settlement, as you call it! That’s what you two dears have come for,
isn’t it?”
“Unfortunately, yes,” said Mr. Fenmarch.
“Then it’s all so simple. You’ve shown me this”—she picked up a
foolscap document and dropped it—“the full statement of account of my
father’s estate, and I approve—I being the only person concerned.
You’ve got to give me one last cheque for that amount”—she tapped the
document—“and I give you my receipt, signed over a penny stamp—you’ll
have to stand me a penny stamp, for I’ve only got three-halfpenny ones
in the house—and there’s an end of the matter.”
“My clerk made out the receipt and put the penny stamp on,” said Mr.
Fenmarch, untroubled by her smile. “Here it is.”
“Solicitors’ clerks seem to think of everything,” said Olivia. “Fancy
his remembering the penny stamp!”
“It’s charged up against you, in Fenmarch’s bill—item ‘sundries,’”
remarked Mr. Trivett, pointing a fat forefinger.
“Why, naturally. Why should Mr. Fenmarch shower pennies on me? It’s the
delicate thoughtfulness that I admire. I hope you’ll raise that young
man’s salary.”
Mr. Fenmarch looked pained, like a horse to whom one had offered wooden
oats, and swung his head away. Mr. Trivett opened his mouth to speak,
but before he spoke finished his whisky and soda.
“My dear Olivia,” said he, “I’m sorry to see you so flippant. You’ve
disappointed me and Mrs. Trivett who’ve known you since you were born,
more than I can say. Until your poor mother died—God bless her—we
thought you the most capable, level-headed young woman in this town. But
for the last three months—you’ll forgive my freedom in saying so—you
have shown yourself to be quite impossible.”
He paused, angry. Olivia smiled and drummed on the table.
“Have some more whisky.”
“No, I won’t,” he said in a loud voice. “Whisky’s too expensive to ladle
out in that offhand fashion. It’s a luxury, as you’ll jolly well soon
discover. I’m talking for your good, Olivia. That’s why Fenmarch and I
are here. Two minutes will wind up the business. But we have your
interests at heart, my girl, and we want to make a last appeal.”
She covered with hers the back of his red-glazed hand and spoke in a
softened voice:—
“Yes, I know, I know. I’ve said already that you and Mr. Fenmarch were
dears. But what would you have me do? I’m twenty-three. Alone in the
world.”
“You have your uncle and aunt at Clapham,” said Mr. Trivett.
“I’ve also some sort of relations in the monkey cage at the Zoo,” said
Olivia.
The repartee to the effect that it was the fittest home for her only
occurring to Mr. Trivett when he was getting into bed that night, he
merely stared at her gaspingly. She continued:
“I’m absolutely alone in the world. Do you think it reasonable for me to
stay in this dull old house, in this mouldering old town, where one
never sees a man from one year’s end to another, living for the rest of
my life on the few hundreds a year which I could get if my capital were
properly invested?”
“We don’t grant your premises, Olivia,” said Mr. Fenmarch. “‘The Towers’
may be old, but it is not dull. Medlow is not mouldering, but singularly
progressive, and the place seems to—to pullulate with young men. So I
think our advice to you is eminently reasonable.”
“Oh, dear!” sighed Olivia. “That’s where all the trouble comes in. Our
ideas of dullness, mouldering and pullu—what you call it; don’t
correspond. Mother was very fond of a story of Sydney Smith. Perhaps she
told you. He was walking one day with a friend through the slums and
came across two women quarrelling across the street, through opposite
windows. And Sydney Smith said: ‘They’ll never come to an agreement,
because they are arguing from different premises.’”
There was a silence.
“I’ll have a drop more whisky,” said Mr. Trivett.
“I think I see the point of the remark,” said Mr. Fenmarch greyly. “It
was a play on the two meanings of the word.”
“That was what my mother gave me to understand,” said Olivia.
Then, after another spell of chill silence, she cried, her nerves on
edge:
“Do let us come to the end of it!”
“We will,” said Mr. Trivett impressively. “But not before I’ve made a
few remarks in protest, with Fenmarch as witness. I’m sorry there’s not
another witness——”
“Oh, I’ll get one!” cried Olivia. “Myra—the faithful Myra.”
“Myra’s a servant, also a fool; and you’ve got her under your thumb,”
said Mr. Trivett.
“Well, well,” said Olivia, “we’ll give Myra a miss. But I know what
you’re going to say—and the kind heart that makes you say it.”
A touch of real tenderness crept into her fine dark eyes and almost
softened Mr. Trivett. She looked so young, so slender, so immature in
her simple mourning. Her soft black hair clustered over her forehead in
a manner which he felt was inconsistent with a woman fighting her way
alone in the world. She hadn’t a bit of colour in her cheeks; wanted
feeding up, he thought. She was capable enough in her own sphere, the
management of her house, the care of a bed-ridden mother, the
appreciation of legal technicalities. Until she had got this bee in her
bonnet he had admired her prodigiously; though, with the reserve which
every Englishman makes in his admiration, he deplored the shrewdness of
her tongue. But this idea of hers, to realize all her money in hard cash
at the bank and go off into unknown perils was preposterous. She was not
fit for it. You could take her by the neck in one hand and by the waist
in another and break her to bits. . . . He was a good, honest man with
fatherly instincts developed by the possession of daughters of his own,
strapping red-cheeked girls, who had stayed soberly at home until the
right young man had come along and carried them off to modest homes of
unimpeachable respectability. So when he met the tenderness in Olivia’s
eyes he mitigated the asperities of his projected discourse and preached
her a very human little sermon. While he spoke, Mr. Fenmarch nodded his
unhumorous head and stroked the straggling grey hairs on his cheek. When
he had ended, Mr. Fenmarch seconded, as it were, the resolution.
Then Olivia thanked them prettily, promised to avoid extravagance, and,
in case of difficulty, to come to them for advice. The final cheque was
passed over, the final receipt signed across the penny stamp provided
with such forethought, and Olivia Gale entered into uncontrolled
possession of her fortune.
The men rose to take their leave. Olivia held the hand of the burly
red-faced man who had been her father’s partner and looked up at him.
“I know, if you could have your way, you would give me a good hiding.”
He laughed grimly. “Not the least doubt of it.” Then he patted her
roughly on the shoulder.
“And you, Mr. Fenmarch?”
He regarded her drearily. “After a long experience in my profession,
Olivia, I have come to one conclusion—clients are a mistake. Good-bye.”
Left alone, Olivia stood for a moment wondering whether, after all, the
dusty lawyer had a jaded sense of humour. Then she turned and caught up
the cheque and sketched a few triumphant dancing steps. Suddenly,
holding it in her hand, she rushed out into the hall, where the men were
putting on their overcoats.
“We’ve forgotten the most important thing, Mr. Trivett. You wrote me
something about an offer for the house.”
“An enquiry—not an offer,” replied Mr. Trivett. “Yes. I forgot to
mention it. A Major somebody. Wait——” He lugged out a fat pocket-book
which he consulted. “That’s it. Major Olifant. Coming down here
to-morrow to look over it. Appointment at twelve, if that suits you.
Unfortunately, I’ve an engagement and can’t show him round. But I’ll
send Perkins, if you like.”
“If the Major wants to eat me, he’ll eat up poor little Mr. Perkins,
too,” said Olivia. “So don’t worry.”
She waited until Myra, the maid, had helped them into their overcoats
and opened the front door. After final leavetakings, they were gone.
Olivia put up her hands, one of them still holding the cheque, on Myra’s
gaunt shoulders and shook her and laughed.
“I’ve beaten them at last. I knew I should. Now you and I are going to
have the devil’s own time.”
“We’ll have, Miss Olivia,” said Myra, withdrawing like a wooden
automaton from the embrace, “the time we’ll be deserving.”
Myra was long, lean, and angular, dressed precisely in parlourmaid’s
black; but the absence of cap on her faultlessly neat iron grey hair and
the black apron suggested a cross between the housekeeper and personal
maid. She shared, with a cook and a vague, print-attired help, the whole
service of the house. The fact of Myra had been one of the earliest
implanted in the consciousness of Olivia’s awakening childhood. Myra was
there, perdurable as father and mother, as Polly, the parrot, whose
“Drat the child” of that morning was the same echo of Myra’s voice, as
it was when, at the age of two, she began to interpret the bird’s
articulate speech. And, as far as she could remember, Myra had always
been the same. Age had not withered her, nor had custom staled her
infinite invariability. She had been withered since the beginning of
time, and she had been as unchanging in aspect and flavour as Olivia’s
lifelong breakfast egg. Myra’s origins were hidden in mystery. A family
legend declared her a foundling. She had come as a girl from Essex,
recommended by a friend, long since dead, of Mrs. Gale. She never spoke
of father, mother, sisters, and brothers; but every year, when she took
her holiday, she was presumed to return to her native county. With that
exception she seemed to have far less of a private life than the
household cat. It never occurred to Olivia that she could possibly lead
an independent existence. Her age was about forty-five.
“They think I’m either mad or immoral,” said Olivia. “Thank God, they’re
not religious, or they’d be holding prayer meetings over me.”
“They might do worse,” replied Myra.
The girl laughed. “So you disapprove, too, do you? Well, you’ll have to
get over it.”
“I’ve got over many things—one more or less don’t matter. And if I were
you, Miss, I wouldn’t stand in this draughty hall.”
“All that I’m thinking of,” said Olivia, in high good humour, “is that,
with you as duenna, I shall look too respectable. No one will believe it
possible for any one except an adventuress.”
“That’s what I gather you’re going to be,” said Myra. If she had put any
sting into her words it would have been a retort. But no one knew what
emotions guided Myra’s speech. With the same tonelessness she would have
proclaimed the house to be on fire, or dinner to be ready, or the day to
be fine.
“Well, if you don’t like the prospect, Myra, you needn’t come,” said
Olivia. “I’ll easily find something fluffy in short skirts and silk
stockings to do for me.”
“We’re wasting gas, Miss,” said Myra, pulling the little chain of the
bye-pass and thereby plunging the hall in darkness.
“Oh, bother you!” cried Olivia, stumbling into the passage and knocking
against the parrot’s cage outside the dining-room door, and Polly
shrieked out:
“Drat the child! Drat the child!”
Before entering the dining-room she aimed a Parthian shot at Myra.
“I suppose you agree with the little beast. Well, the two of you’ll have
to look after each other, and I wish you joy.”
She cleared the dining-room table of the tea things and the whisky and
glasses and the superfluous papers, and opened the window to let out the
smell of Mr. Trivett’s strong cigar, and crossed the passage to the
drawing-room opposite, where a small fire was still burning. And there,
in spite of the exultation of her triumph over Mr. Trivett and Mr.
Fenmarch, she suddenly felt very dreadfully alone; also just a whit
frightened. The precious cheque, symbol of independence, which she had
taken up, laid down, taken up again, during her little household duties,
fell to the ground as she lay in the arm-chair by the fireside.
Was her victory, and all it implied, that of a reasonable being and a
decent girl, or that of a little fool and a hussy?
Perhaps the mother whom she worshipped and to whom she had devotedly
sacrificed the last four years of her young life was the inspiration of
her revolt. For her mother had been a highly bred woman, of a proud old
Anglo-Indian family, all Generals and Colonels and Sirs and Ladies,
whose names had been involved in the history of British India for
generations; and when she threw the Anglo-Indian family halo over the
windmills and married young Stephen Gale, who used to stand in the
market-place of Medlow and bawl out the bidding for pigs and sheep, the
family turned her down with the Anglo-Indian thoroughness that had
compelled her mother to lose her life in a plague-stricken district and
her father to lose his on the North-West Frontier. The family argument
was simple. When you—or everything mattering that means you—have ruled
provinces and commanded armies and been Sahibs from the beginning of
Anglo-Indian time, you can’t go and marry a man who sells pigs at
auction, and remain alive. None of the family deigned to gauge the
personal value of the pig-seller. The Anglo-Brahmin lost caste. It is
true that, afterwards, patronizing efforts were made by Brahminical
uncles and aunts and cousins to bridge over the impassable gulf; but
Mrs. Gale, very much in love with her pig-selling husband, snapped her
fingers at them and told them, in individually opposite terms, to go
hang.
It was a love match right enough. And a love match it remained to the
very end of all things; after she had borne him two sons and a daughter;
all through the young lives of the children; up to the day when the
telegram came announcing the death of their elder son—the younger had
been killed in the curious world accident a month or so before—and
Stephen Gale stood by her bedside—she had even then succumbed to her
incurable malady—and said, shaken with an emotion to which one does not
refer nowadays:
“Mary, my dear, what am I to do?”
And she, the blood in her speaking—the blood that had given itself at
Agra, Lucknow, Khandahar, Chitral—replied:
“Go, dear.”
Olivia, sitting by, gripped her young hands in mingled horror and grief
and passionate wonder. And Stephen Gale, just fifty, went out to avenge
his sons and do what was right in his wife’s eyes—for his wife was his
country incarnate, her voice, being England’s voice. A love match it was
and a love match it remained while he stuck it for two or three
years—an elderly man at an inglorious Base, until he died of
pneumonia—over there.
Mrs. Gale had lingered for a year, and, close as their relations had
been all Olivia’s life, they grew infinitely closer during this period
of bereavement. It was only then that the mother gave delicate
expression to the nostalgia of half a lifetime, the longing for her own
kind, and the ways and thoughts and imponderable principles of her own
caste. And, imperceptibly, Olivia’s eyes were opened to the essential
differences between her mother and the social circle into which she had
married. Olivia, ever since her shrewd child’s mind began to appreciate
values, knew perfectly well that the Trivetts and the Gales were not
accounted as gentlefolk in the town. She early became aware of the
socially divided line across which she could not pass so as to enter
Blair Park, the high-class girls’ school on the hill, but narrowed her
to Landsdowne House, where the daughters of the tradespeople received
their education. And when the two crocodiles happened to pass each other
on country walks she hated the smug, stuckup Blair Park girls with their
pretty blue and white ribbons round their straw hats, and hated her red
ribbon with “LH” embroidered on it, as a badge of servitude. When she
grew up she accepted countless other social facts as immutable
conditions of existence. Mortals were divided by her unquestioning
father into three categories—“the swells,” “homely folk like
ourselves,” and “common people.” So long as each member of the three
sections knew his place and respected it, the world was as comfortable a
planet as sentient being could desire. That was one factor in his
worship of his wife: she had stepped from her higher plane to his and
had loyally, unmurmuringly identified herself with it. He had never a
notion, good man, of the shocks, the inner wounds, the instinctive
revolts, the longings that she hid behind her loving eyes. Nor had
Olivia; although as a schoolgirl she knew and felt proud that her mother
really belonged to Blair Park and not to Landsdowne House. As she grew
up, she realized her mother’s refining influence, and, as far as young
blood would allow, used her as a model of speech and manner. And during
the long invalid years, when she read aloud and discussed a wide range
of literature, she received unconsciously a sensitive education. But it
was only in this last poignant intimacy, when they were left starkly
alone together, that she sounded the depths of the loyal, loving, and
yet strangely suffering woman.
“I remember once, long ago, when you were a mite of five,” Mrs. Gale had
said in a memorable confidence, “we were staying at a hotel in
Eastbourne, and I got into conversation on the verandah with a Colonel
somebody—I forget his name—with whom we had spoken several times
before—one of those spare brown, blue-eyed men, all leather and taut
string, that wear their clothes like uniform. You see, I was born and
bred among them, dear. And we talked and we talked and I didn’t know how
the time flew, and I missed an appointment with your father in the town.
And he came and found us together—and he was very angry. It was the
only time in our lives he said an unkind word to me. It was the only
time I gave him any sort of cause for jealousy. But he really hadn’t. It
was only just the joy of talking to a gentleman again. And I couldn’t
tell him. It would have broken his dear heart.”
This was the first flashlight across her mother’s soul, and in its
illumination vanished many obscure and haunting perplexities of her
girlhood. Had Mrs. Gale lived the normal life of women, surrounded by
those that loved her, she would doubtless have gone to her grave without
revealing her inner self to living mortal. But infinite sorrow and the
weakness engendered by constant physical pain had transformed her into a
spirituality just breathing the breath of life and regarding her
daughter less as a woman than as a kindred essence from whom no secrets
could be hid. At her bedside Olivia thus learned the mystery of birth
and life and death. Chiefly the mystery of life, which appealed more to
her ardent maidenhood.
So when at last her mother faded out of existence and Olivia’s vigil was
over, she faced a world of changing values with a new set of values of
her own. She could not formulate them; but she was acutely conscious
that they were different from those of the good, honest Mr. Trivett and
the dull and honourable Mr. Fenmarch, and that to all the social circle
which these two represented they would be unintelligible. In a way, she
found herself possessed of a new calculus in which she trusted to solve
the problems which defied the simple arithmetic of the homely folk of
Medlow.
* * * * *
All these memories and vague certainties passed through the girl’s mind
as she sat before the fire in self-examination after her victory, and
conflicted with the prosaic and indicatively common-sense arguments of
her late advisers. She knew that father and brothers, all beloved and
revered, would have been staunchly on the side of the Trivetts. On the
other hand, her mother, as she had said to her husband on the edge of a
far, far greater adventure, would have said: “Go, dear.” Of that she had
no doubt. . . . Yet it meant cutting herself adrift from Medlow and all
its ways and all its associations. It meant a definite struggle to raise
herself from her father’s second social category to the first. It meant,
therefore, justifying herself against odious insinuations on the part of
her scant acquaintance.
And then the youth in her rose insistent. During all these years of
stress and fever which had marked her development from child into woman
she had done nothing but remain immured within the walls familiar from
her babyhood. Other girls had gone afar, in strange independence, to
vivid scenes, to unforgettable adventures, in the service of their
country, in the service of mankind—just as her brothers and father had
gone—and she had stayed there, ineradicable, in that one little tiny
spot. The sick-room, the kitchen, the shops in Old Street, where, in
defiance of Food Controller, she had fought for cream and butter and
eggs and English meat so that her mother could live; the sick-room
again, the simple white and green bedroom which meant to her little more
than the sleep of exhaustion; the sick-room once more, with its pathos
of spiritual love and physical repulsion—such had been the iron
environment of her life. Sorrow after sorrow, and mourning after
mourning had come, and the little gaieties of the “homely folk” of her
father’s definition had gone on without her participation. And her girl
friends of Landsdowne House had either married rising young tradesmen in
distant towns, or had found some further scope for their energies at the
end of the Great Adventure and were far away. In the meanwhile other
homely folk whom she did not know had poured into the town. All kinds of
people seemed to be settling there, anyhow, without rhyme or reason. It
was only when there was not a house to be rented in the neighbourhood
that she understood why.
“You have a comfortable home of your own. Why, on earth, don’t you stay
in it?” Mr. Trivett had asked.
But she had stayed in it, alone, for the three months since her mother’s
death, waiting on the law’s delays; and those three months had been
foretaste enough of the dreary infinite years that would lie before her,
should she remain. She was too young, too full of sap, to face the
blight of sunlessness. She longed for the sights and the sounds and the
freedom of the great world. What she would do when she got into it, she
did not exactly know. Possibly she might meet a fairy prince. If such a
speculation was that of a hussy, why then, she argued, all women are
hussies from birth. As for being a fool for defying advice on the proper
investment of her money—well, perhaps she was not quite such a fool as
Mr. Trivett imagined. If she did not spend her capital, it would be just
as safe lying on deposit at the bank as invested in stocks and shares;
safer, for she had lately had wearisome experience of the depreciation
of securities. She would not be senselessly extravagant; in fact, with
the sanguineness of youth she hoped to be able to live on the interest
on her deposit and the rent of the furnished house. But behind her,
definite, tangible, uninfluenced by Stock Exchange fluctuations, would
be her fortune. And then—a contingency which she did not put before Mr.
Trivett and Mr. Fenmarch, for a woman seldom discloses her main argument
to a male adversary—there might come a glorious moment in some now
unconjecturable adventure when it might be essential for her to draw
cheques for dazzling sums which she could put in her pocket and go over
mysterious hills and far away. She stood on the edge of her dull
tableland and gazed wide-eyed at the rolling Land of Romance veiled by
gold and purple mist. And in that Land, from immemorial time, people
carried their money in bags, into which they dipped their hands, as
occasion required, and cast the unmeaning counters at the feet of
poverty or into the lap of greed.
When she sat down to her solitary supper, she had decided that she was
neither hussy nor fool. She held baffling discourse with Myra, who could
not be enticed into enthusiasm over the immediate future. Teasing Myra
had been her joy from infancy. She sketched their career—that of female
Don Quixote and Sancho Panza—that of knights of old in quest of
glorious adventure. She quoted, mock heroically:
“The ride abroad redressing human wrong.”
“Better redress the young London women which I see the pictures of in
the illustrated papers,” said Myra.
Olivia laughed. “You are a dear old blessing, you know.”
“I’m sure of it,” said Myra, with an expressionless face. “Anyways,
you’re not going to buy one of them things when you get to London.”
“I am,” replied Olivia. “And you’ll have to help me put it on.”
“You can’t help folks put on nothing,” said Myra.
“What do you think you’ll do when you’re really shocked?” asked Olivia.
“I never think what I’ll do,” replied Myra. “It’s waste of time.”
Olivia enjoyed her supper.