THE tastes of Alexis Triona were not such as to lead him into
extravagant living on the fruits of his literary success. To quality of
food he was indifferent; wine he neither understood nor cared for; in
the use of other forms of alcohol he was abstemious; unlike most men
bred in Russia he smoked moderately, preferring the cigarettes he rolled
himself from Virginia tobacco to the more expensive Turkish or Egyptian
brands. His attire was simple. He would rather walk than be driven; and
he regarded his back-bedroom at the top of the Vanloo Hotel as a
luxurious habitation.
He had broken away from the easeful life at Medlow because, as he
explained to Blaise Olifant, it frightened him.
“I’m up against nothing here,” said he.
“You’re up against your novel,” replied Olifant. “A man’s work is always
his fiercest enemy.”
Triona would not accept the proposition. He and his novel were one and
indivisible. Together they must fight against something—he knew not
what. Perhaps, fight against time and opportunity. They wanted the
tense, stolen half-hours which he and his other book had enjoyed. Would
Olifant think him ungrateful if he picked up and went on his mission to
Helsingfors?
“My dear fellow,” said Olifant, “the man who resents a friend developing
his own personality in his own way doesn’t deserve to have a friend.”
“It’s like you to say that,” cried Triona. “I shall always remember.
When I get back I shall let you know.”
So Alexis Triona vanished from a uninspiring Medlow, and two months
afterwards gave Olifant his address at the Vanloo Hotel. Olifant, tired
by a long spell of close work, went up for an idle week in London.
“Come back and carry on as before,” he suggested.
But Triona ran his fingers through his brown hair and held out his hand.
“No. The wise man never tries to repeat a past pleasure. As a wise old
Russian friend of mine used to say—never relight a cigar.”
So after a few days of pleasant companionship in the soberer delights of
town, Blaise Olifant returned to Medlow and Triona remained in his
little back room in the Vanloo Hotel.
* * * * *
One night, a week or so after his visit to Olivia Gale, he threw down
his pen, read over the last sheet that he had written, and, with a
gesture of impatience, tore it up. Suddenly he discovered that he could
not breathe in the stuffy bedroom. He drew back the curtains and opened
the window and looked out on myriad chimney-pots and a full moon shining
on them from a windless sky. The bright air filled his lungs. Desire for
wider spaces beneath the moon shook him like a touch of claustrophobia.
He thrust on the coat which he had discarded, seized a hat, and,
switching off the light, hurried from the room. He went out into the
streets, noiseless save for the rare, swift motors that flashed by like
ghosts fleeing terrified from some earthly doom.
He walked and walked until he suddenly realized that he had emerged from
Whitehall and faced the moonlight beauty of the Houses of Parliament
standing in majestic challenge against the sky, and the Abbey sleeping
in its centuries of dreams.
Away across the Square, by Broad Sanctuary, was the opening of a great
thoroughfare, and, as his eyes sought it, he confessed to himself the
subconscious impulse that had led him thither. Yet was it not a cheat of
a subconscious impulse? Had he not gone out from the hotel in Kensington
with a definite purpose? As he crossed to Broad Sanctuary and the
entrance to Victoria Street, he argued it out with himself. Anyhow, it
was the most fool of fool-errands. But yet—he shrugged his shoulders
and laughed. To what errand could a fool’s errand be comparable? Only to
that of one pixy-led. He laughed at the thought of his disquisition to
Olivia on the Will-o’-the-Wisp. In the rare instances of the follower of
Faith had he not proclaimed its guidance to the Land of Promise?
Three days before he had seen her. He had been impelled by an
irresistible desire to see her. To call on her without shadow of excuse
was impossible. To telephone or write an invitation to lunch was an act
unsuggested by his limited social experience. Taking his chance that she
should emerge between eleven and twelve, he strolled up and down the
pavement, so that at last when fate favoured him and he advanced to meet
her, they greeted each other with a smiling air of surprise. They
explained their respective objectives. She was for buying a patent
coffee machine at the Army and Navy Stores, he for catching an
undesirable train at Victoria Station. A threatening morning suddenly
became a rainy noon. He turned back with her and they fled together and
just reached the Stores in time to escape from the full fury of the
downpour. There he bent his mind on coffee machines. His masculine
ignorance of the whole art of coffee-making, a flannel bag in a jug
being his primitive conception, moved her to light-hearted mirth. The
purchase made, the order given, they wandered idly through the great
establishment. They were prisoners, the outside world being weltering
deluge. For once in his lifetime, thought Triona, the elements warred on
his side. A wringing machine, before which he paused in wonderment at
its possible use, and an eager description on the part of the salesman,
put Olivia on the track of a game into which he entered with devoted
fervour. Let them suppose they were going to furnish a house. Oh! a
great big palace of a house. In imagination they bought innumerable
things, furnishing the mansion chiefly with hammocks and marquees and
garden chairs and lawn-mowers and grand pianos and egg-whisks. Her
heart, that morning, attuned to laughter, brought colour into her cheeks
and brightness into her eyes. To the young man’s ear she seemed to have
an adorable gift of phrase. She invested a rolling-pin with a humorous
individuality. She touched a tray of doughnuts with her fancy and turned
them into sacramental bread of Momus, exquisite Divinity of Mirth. She
was so free, so graceful, so intimate, so irresistible. He followed her,
a young man bemused. What he contributed to the game he scarcely knew.
He was only conscious of her charm and her whipping of his wit. They
stumbled into the department of men’s haberdashery. His brain conceived
a daring idea.
“I’ve been trying for weeks,” said he, “to make up my mind to buy a
tie.”
Olivia glanced swiftly round and sped to a counter.
“Ties, please.”
“What kind?” asked the salesman.
“Ordinary silk—sailor-knot. Show me all you’ve got.”
Before his entranced eyes she selected half a dozen, with a taste which
the artist within him knew was impeccable. He presented the bill bearing
her number at the cashier’s pigeon hole, and returning took the neat
packet from the salesman with the air of one receiving a decoration from
royalty. They made their way to the exit. She said:
“I’m afraid we’ve been criminally frivolous.”
“If such happiness is a crime I’d willingly swing for it.”
He noted a quick, uncomprehending question in her glance and the colour
mounted into his pale cheeks.
“My English idiom is not yet perfect,” he said. “I ought not to have
used that expression.”
Olivia laughed at his discomfiture.
“It’s generally used by dreadful people who threaten to do one another
in. But the metaphor’s thrilling, all the same.”
The rain had ceased. After a few moments the mackintoshed commissionaire
secured a taxi. Triona accompanied her to the door. She thrust out a
frank hand.
“Au revoir. It has been delightful to find you so human.”
She drove off. He stood, with a smile on his lips, watching the vehicle
disappear in the traffic. Her farewell was characteristic. What could
one expect of her but the unexpected?
That was three days ago. The image of her unconsciously alluring yet
frank to disconcertment, spiritually feminine yet materially impatient
of sex; the image of her in the three separate settings—the dark-eyed
princess in fur and flame beneath the electric light of the theatre
portico; the slim girl in simple blouse and skirt who, over the pretty
teacups, held so nice a balance between Olifant and himself; the gay
playmate of a rainy hour, in her fawn costume (he still felt the thrill
of the friendly touch of her fawn-coloured gloved hands on his
sleeve)—the composite image and vision of her had filled his sleeping
and waking thoughts to the destruction of his peace of mind and the
dislocation of his work.
Thus, on this warm night of spring, he stood, the most foolishly
romantical of mortals, at the entrance to Victoria Street, and with a
shrug of his shoulders proceeded on his errand of mute troubadour.
Perhaps the day of rapture might come when he would tell her how he
stood in the watches of the night and gazed up at what he had to imagine
was her window on the fifth floor of the undistinguished barrack that
was her home. It was poetic, fantastic, Russian, at any rate. It would
also mark the end of his excursion; it was a fair tramp back to South
Kensington.
An unheeded taxi-cab whizzed past him as he walked; but a few seconds
later, the faint sound of splintering glass and then the scrunch of
brakes suddenly applied awoke him from his smiling meditations. The cab
stopped, sharply outlined in the clear moonlight. The driver leaped from
his seat and flung open the door. A woman sprang out, followed by a man.
Both were in evening dress. Voices rose at once in altercation. Triona,
suspecting an accident, quickened his pace instinctively into a run and
joined the group.
“What’s up?”
But as the instinctive words passed his lips he became amazedly
conscious of Olivia standing there, quivering, as white as the white
dress and cloak she wore, her eyes ablaze. She flashed on him a
half-hysterical recognition and clutched his arm.
“You?”
He drew himself up to his slim height and looked first at the taxi
driver and then at the heavy, swarthy man in evening dress, and then at
her.
“What’s the matter? Tell me,” he rapped out.
“This man tried to insult me,” she gasped.
Olivia never knew how it happened: it happened like some instantaneous
visitation of God. The lithe young figure suddenly shot forward and the
heavy man rolled yards away on the pavement.
“Serve him damn well right,” said the driver; “but where do I come in
with my window broken?”
“Oh, you shall be paid, you shall be paid,” cried Olivia. “Pay him, Mr.
Triona, and let us go.”
Triona glanced up and down the street. “No, this gentleman’s going to
pay,” he said quietly and advanced to the heavy man who had scrambled to
unsteady feet.
“Just you settle up with that cabman, quick, do you hear, or I’ll knock
you down again. I could knock you down sixty times an hour. And so help
me, God, if a copper comes in sight I’ll murder you.”
“All right, all right,” said the man hurriedly. “I don’t want a scandal
for the lady’s sake.” He turned to the taxi man. “How much do you want?”
“With the damage it’ll be a matter of ten pound.”
The swarthy man in evening dress fished out his note-case.
“Here you are, you blackmailing thief.”
“None of your back-chat, or I’ll finish off what this gentleman has
begun,” said the taxi man, pocketing the money.
Until he saw summary justice accomplished, Triona stood in the lee of
the houses, his arm stretched protectingly in front of Olivia. Then he
drew her away.
“I’ll see the lady home. It’s only a few steps.”
“Right, sir. Good night, sir,” said the taxi man.
They moved on. Immediately in the silence of the night came the crisp
exchange of words.
“I’ll give you a pound to take me to Porchester Terrace.”
“And I’d give a pound to see you walk there,” said the driver, already
in his seat.
He threw in the clutch and with a cheery “Good night” passed the
extravagantly encountered pair.
“They say miracles don’t happen, but one has happened now,” said Olivia
breathlessly. “If you hadn’t come out of space——”
“Do tell me something about it,” he asked.
“But don’t you know?”
“You said that profit-merchant had insulted you and that was enough for
me.”
“Oh, my God! I’m so ashamed!” she cried, with a wild, pretty gesture of
her hands. “What will you think of me?”
Mad words rushed through his brain, but before they found utterance he
gripped himself. He had, once more, his hands on the controls.
“What I think of you, Miss Gale, it would be wiser not to say. I should
like to hear what has occurred. But, pardon me,” he said abruptly,
noticing her curious, uneven step, and glancing down instinctively at
her feet, “what has become of your shoe?”
“My slipper—why, of course——” She halted, suddenly aware of the loss.
“I must have left it in the cab. I stuck up my foot and reached for it
and broke the window with the heel. I also think I hit him in the face.”
“It seems as though he was down and out before I came up,” said Triona.
“If you hadn’t I don’t [know] how I should have carried on,” she
confessed.
They walked down the wide, empty street. The moon shone high above them,
the girl in her elegance, the man in his loose grey flannels and soft
felt hat, an incongruous couple, save for their common air of alert
youth. And while they walked she rapidly told her story. She had been to
Percy’s with the usual crowd, Lydia Dawlish her nominal chaperone. The
man, Edwin Mavenna, a city friend of Sydney Rooke, whom she had met a
half a dozen times, had offered to drive her home in his waiting taxi.
Tired, dependent for transport on Rooke and Lydia, who desired a further
hour of the night club’s dismal jocundity, and angry with Bobby Quinton,
who seemed to think that her ear had no other function than to listen to
tales of sentimenti-financial woe, she had accepted. Half-way home she
had begun to regret; three-quarters of the way she had been frightened.
As they turned into Victoria Street she had managed to free her arm and
wield the victorious slipper.
“I’ll never go to that abominable place again as long as I live,” she
cried.
“I should, if I were you,” he said quietly.
“Why?”
“I’d go once or twice, at any rate. To show yourself independent of it.
To prove to yourself that you’re not frightened of it.”
“But I am frightened of it. On the outside it’s as respectable as Medlow
Parish Church on Sunday. But below the surface there’s all sorts of
hideousness—and I’m frightened.”
“You’re not,” said he. “Things may startle you, infuriate you, put you
off your equilibrium; but they don’t frighten you. They didn’t this
evening. I’ve seen too many people frightened in my time not to know.
You’re not that sort.”
They had reached the door of the Mansions. She smiled at him, her gaiety
returning.
“You’re as comforting and consoling a Knight Errant as one could wish to
meet. The damsel in distress is greatly beholden to you. But how
the—whatever you like—you managed to time the rescue is beyond my
comprehension.”
“The stars guided me,” he replied, with an upward sweep of the hand.
“Mortals have striven to comprehend them for thousands of years—but
without success. I started out to wander about this great city—I often
do for hours—I’m a born wanderer—with the vagabond’s aimlessness and
trust in chance, or in the stars—and this time the stars brought me
where it was decreed that I should be.”
While he was speaking she had opened the door with her latchkey and now
stood, shimmering white in the gloom of the entrance. She held out her
hand.
“I’m afraid I’ve been too much occupied in trying not to seem frightened
and silly to thank you decently for what you’ve done. But I am grateful.
You don’t know how grateful. I’ll have to tell you some other time.”
“To-morrow?” he asked eagerly.
She hesitated for a moment. “Yes, to-morrow,” she replied softly. “I
shall be in all day. Goodnight.”
After the swift handshake the door closed on the enraptured young man,
and the hard, characterless street, down which he seemed to dance,
became transformed into a moonlit glade of fairyland.
It was four o’clock in the morning when he entered his back-bedroom at
the Vanloo Hotel. But he did not sleep. He had no desire for
sleep—youth resenting the veil drawn across a consciousness so
exquisitely alive. Sleep, when the stars in their courses were fighting
for him? Impossible, preposterous! Let him rather live, again and again,
over the night’s crowded adventure. Every detail of it set his pulses
throbbing. The mere glorious first recognition of her was the thrill of
a lifetime. He constructed and reconstructed the immortal picture. The
moonlit, silent street, its high, decorous buildings marked by the
feeble gas lamps melting into an indeterminate vanishing point. The
clear-cut scene. The taxi-cab. The three human figures. The stunted
driver. The massive, dark man, in silk hat which reflected the
moonlight, in black overcoat thrown open, revealing a patch of white
shirt and waistcoat; the slender, quivering, white form draped in white
fur, white gossamer, white what-not, crowned with dark glory of eyes and
hair. The masculine in him exulted in his physical strength and
skill—in the clean, straight, elementary yet scientific left-hander
that got the hulking swine between the eyes and sent him reeling and
sprawling and asking for no more punishment. And then—oh, it was a
great thing to command, to impose his will. To walk in triumph off with
the wonderful lady of his dreams. To feel, as she thanked him, that here
was something definite that he had done for her, something with a touch
of the romantic, the heroic, which, in its trivial way, justified belief
in the incidents of his adventurous career which he had so modestly, yet
so vividly described in the book that had brought him fame.
On this point of justification he was peculiarly sensitive. Various
Englishmen, soldiers sent out on secret missions to the fringes of the
areas of his activities, had questioned many of his statements, both in
the book and in descriptive articles which he had written for newspapers
and other periodicals, and asked for proofs. And he had replied, most
cogently, that the sphere of the Russian Secret Service in which he was
employed was, of necessity, beyond the ken of the secret service of any
other Power in Europe, and that official proofs were lost in the social
and political disintegration of Russia. One man, a great man, speaking
with unquestionable authority, silenced the horde of cavillers as far as
events prior to 1917 were concerned. But there were still some who
barked annoyingly at his heels. Proofs, of course, he had none to give.
How can a man give proofs when he is cast up, practically naked, on the
coast of England? He must be believed or not. And it was the haunting
terror of this sensitive boy of genius, whose face and eyes bore the
ineffaceable marks of suffering, that he should lose the credit which he
had gained.
At all hazards he must allow no doubts to arise in the mind of Olivia.
To fight them down he would do all manner of extravagant things. He
regretted the pusillanimous tameness of his late opponent. If the man
had only picked himself up and given battle! If only there had been half
a dozen abductors or insulters instead of one! His spirits (at seven
o’clock) sank at the logical conclusion that the conventional conditions
of post-war civilized life afforded a meagre probability of the
recurrence of such another opportunity. He had the temperament of those
whose hunger is only whetted by triumph, to whom attainment only gives
vision of new heights. When, after tossing sleepless in his bed, he rose
and dressed at nine, he had decided that, in knocking down a mere mass
of unresisting flesh, he had played a part almost inglorious, such as
any stay-at-home _embusqué_ could have played. By not one jot or tittle
did his act advance the credibility of his story. And on his story alone
could he found his hopes of finding favour in her marvellous eyes. Of
the touch of genius that inspired his literary work he thought little.
At this stage of his career he was filled with an incredulous wonder at
his possession of a knack which converted a page of scribble into a
cheque upon a bank. His writing meant money. Not money, wealth, on the
grand scale; but money to keep him as a modest gentleman on the social
grade to which he had attained, and to save him from the detested livery
of the chauffeur. The story which he was telling in the new book was but
a means to this end. The story which he had told was life itself. Nay,
now it was more: it was love itself; it was a girl who was more than
life.
He called at the Victoria Street flat at twelve o’clock. The austere
Myra looked on him disapprovingly. Tea-time was the visiting time for
stray young men, and even then she conveyed to them the impression that
she let them in on sufferance.
“What name?” she asked.
“Mr. Triona.”
“Miss Gale is in, sir,” she admitted grudgingly, having received
explicit orders from Olivia, “but she is dressing and I don’t know
whether she can see you.”
“Will you tell Miss Gale that I am entirely at her service, and if it’s
inconvenient for her to see me now I’ll call later.”
Myra left him standing in the little vestibule and gave the message to
Olivia, who, fully dressed, was polishing her nails in her bedroom.
“You’re the most impossible woman on earth,” Olivia declared, turning on
her. “Is that the way you would treat a man who had delivered you from a
dragon?”
“I don’t hold with men and I don’t hold with dragons,” replied Myra
unmoved. “The next time you’ll be wanting me to fall over a dragon who
has delivered you from a man!”
Olivia scarcely listened to the retort. She flew out and carried the
waiting Triona into the sitting-room.
“I’m so sorry. My maid’s a terror. She bites and doesn’t bark. But I
guarantee her non-venomous. How good of you to come so early.”
“I was anxious,” said Triona.
“About what?”
“Last night must have been a shock.”
“Of course it was,” she laughed; “but not enough to keep me all day long
in fainting fits with doctors and smelling-bottles.”
“I hope you slept all right.”
“No,” she replied frankly. “That I didn’t do. The adventure was a bit
too exciting. Besides——”
“Besides what?”
“It came into my head to make up my moral balance sheet. Figures of
arithmetic always send me to sleep; but figures of—well, of that kind
of thing, don’t you know—keep me broad awake.”
Olivia’s dark, eager face was of the kind that shows the traces of
fatigue in faint shadows under the eyes. He swiftly noted them and cried
out:
“You’re dead tired. It’s damnable.” He rose, suddenly angry. “You ought
to go to bed at once. Your maid was right. I had no business to come at
this hour and disturb you.”
“If you hadn’t come,” said Olivia, inwardly glowing at the tribute paid
by the indignant youth, “I should have imagined that you looked on last
night’s affair as a trumpery incident in the day’s work and went to bed
and forgot all about it.”
“That’s impossible,” said he. “I, too, haven’t slept a wink.”
She met and held his eyes longer than she, or anyone else, had held
them. Then, half angrily, she felt her cheeks grow hot and red.
“For you, who have faced death a hundred times, last night, as I’ve just
said, must be even dull. What was it to the night when you—you
know—the sentry—when you were unarmed and you fought with him and you
killed him with his own bayonet?”
He snapped his fingers and smiled. “That was unimportant. Whether I
lived or died didn’t matter to anybody. It didn’t matter much to me. It
was sheer animal instinct. But last night it was you. And that makes a
universe of difference.”
Olivia rose, and, with a “You’re not smoking,” offered him a box of
cigarettes.
“Yes,” she said, when he had lighted it, with fingers trembling ever so
slightly as they held the match, “I suppose a woman does make a
difference. We’re always in the way, somehow. Women and children first.
Why they don’t throw us overboard at once and let the really useful
people save themselves, I could never make out.”
His air of dismay was that of a devotee listening to a saint blaspheme.
Her laughter rippled, music to his ears.
“Do you know what I should like to do? Get out of London for a few hours
and fill my lungs with air. Richmond Park, for instance.”
“I, too.” He sighed. “If only I had a car!”
“There are such things as motor-buses.”
He sprang to delighted feet. His divinity on a bus top! It was like the
Paphian goddess condescending from her dove-drawn chariot to the joggle
of a four-wheeler cab.
“Would you really go on one?”
She would. She would start forthwith. The time only to put on a hat. She
left him to his heart-beats of happiness, presently to re-appear,
hatted, gloved, and smiling.
“You’re quite sure you would like to come? Your work?”
“My work needs the open air as much as I do,” said he.
They went forth, boy and girl on a jaunt, and side by side on the top of
the omnibus they gave themselves up to the laughter of the pure
sunshine. At Richmond they lunched, for youth must be fed, and
afterwards went through the streets of the old town, and stood on the
bridge watching the exquisite curve of the river embosomed in the very
newest of new greenery, and let its loveliness sink into their hearts.
Then they wandered deep into the Park and found a tree from beneath
which they could see the deer browsing in the shade; and there they sat,
happy in their freedom and isolation. What they said, most of the time,
was no great matter. Of the two, perhaps she talked the more; for he had
said:
“I am so tired of talking about myself. I have been obliged to, so that
it has become a professional habit. And what there is to be known about
me, you know. But you—you who have lived such a different life from
mine—I know so little of you. In fact, I’ve known nothing of English
women such as you. You’re a mystery. Tell me about yourself.”
So she had begun:
“Well, I was born—I shan’t tell you the year—of poor but honest
parents——”
And then, led on by his eager sympathy and his intimate knowledge of her
home, she had abandoned the jesting note and talked simply and frankly
of her secluded and eventless life. With feminine guile, and with last
night’s newborn mistrust of men, she set a little trap.
“Did you ever go into my mother’s room?”
“I don’t think so. Perhaps that was the one—the best bedroom—which
Olifant always kept locked.”
She felt ashamed of her unworthy suspicion; glad at the loyal keeping of
a promise, to the extent of not allowing a visitor even a peep inside
the forbidden chamber.
“I think Blaise Olifant is one of the finest types England breeds,” she
said warmly.
There was a touch of jealous fear in his swift glance; but he replied
with equal warmth:
“You needn’t tell me that. Brave, modest, of sensitive honour—Ah! A man
with a mind so cultivated that he seems to know nothing until you talk
with him, and then you find that he knows everything. I love him.”
“I’m glad to hear you say that.”
“Why? Do you admire him so much?”
“It isn’t that,” she parried. “It’s on your account. One man’s generous
praise of another does one’s heart good.” She threw out her arms as
though to embrace the rolling park of infinite sward and majestic trees.
“I love big things,” she said.
Whereupon Alexis Triona thanked his stars for having led him along the
true path.
Who can say that, in after years, these twain, when they shall have
grown old and have gone through whatever furnaces Fate—either personal
destiny or the Fate of Social Institutions—may prepare for them, will
not retain imperishable memories of the idyll of that sweet spring day?
There they sat, youth spiritually communing with youth; the girl urged
by feminine instinct to love him for the dangers he had passed; the
young man aflame with her beauty, her charm, her dryad elusiveness.
Here, for him, was yet another aspect of her, free, unseizable in the
woodland setting. And for her, another aspect of him, the simple,
clean-cut Englishman, divested of vague and disquieting Russian
citizenship, the perfect companion, responsive to every chord struck by
the spirit of the magic afternoon. In the years to come, who can say
that they will not remember this sweet and delicate adventure of their
souls creeping forth in trembling reconnaissance one of the other?
Perhaps it will be a more precious memory to the woman than to the man.
Men do not lay things up in lavender as women do.
If he had spoken, declared his passion in lover’s set terms, perhaps her
heart might have been caught by the glamour of it all, and she might
have surrendered to his kisses, and they might have journeyed back to
London in a state of unreprehensible yet commonplace beatitude. And the
memory would possibly have been marked by a white stone rising stark in
an airless distance. But he did not speak, held back by a rare reverence
of her maidenhood and her perfect trust; and in her heart flowered
gratitude for his sensitiveness to environment. So easy for a maladroit
touch to mar the perfection of an exquisite hour of blue mist and
mystery. So, again, who knows but that in the years to come the memory
will be marked by a fragrance, a shimmer of leaves, a haze over green
sward, incorporated impalpably with the dear ghost of an immortal day?
They returned on the top of the omnibus, rather late, and on the way
they spoke little. Now and then he glanced sideways at her and met her
eyes and caught her smile, and felt content. At the terminus of the
omnibus route, in the raging, busy precincts of the stations of
Victoria, they alighted. He walked with her to her door in Victoria
Street.
“Your words have been singing in my ears,” said he: “‘I love big
things.’ To me, to-day has seemed a big thing.”
“And I’ve loved it,” she replied.
“True?”
“True.”
She sped up to her room somewhat dazed, conscious of need to keep her
balance. So much had happened in the last four-and-twenty hours. The
shudder of the night had still horrified her flesh when she drew the
young man out into the wide daylight and the open air; and now it had
passed away, as though it had never been, and a new quivering of youth,
taking its place, ran like laughter through her bodily frame and her
heart and her mind.
“H’m. Your outing seems to have done you good,” said the impassive Myra,
letting her in.
“My first day’s escape from a fœtid prison,” she said.
“I suppose you know what you’re talking about,” said Myra.
Olivia laughed and threw her arm round Myra’s lean shoulders.
“Of course I do.”
“He ain’t much to look at.”
Olivia, flushing, turned on her.
“I never knew a more abominable woman.”
“Then you’re lucky,” retorted Myra, and faded away into her kitchen.
Olivia, mirthful, uplifted, danced, as it were, into the sitting-room
and began to pull off her gloves. Suddenly her glance fell on a letter
lying on her writing table. She frowned slightly as she opened it, and
as she read the frown grew deeper. It was from Bobby Quinton. What his
dearest of dear ladies would think of him he left on the joint knees of
the gods and of his dearest lady—but—but the wolves were at his heels.
He had thrown them all that he possessed—fur coat, watch and chain,
diamond studs, and, having gulped them all, they were still in fierce
pursuit. In a fortnight would he have ample funds to satisfy them. But
now he was at bay. He apologized for the mixture of metaphor. But still,
there he was _aux abois_. Fifty pounds, just for a fortnight. Could the
dearest of dear ladies see her way——-?
She went to her desk and wrote out a cheque which she enclosed in an
envelope. To save her soul alive she could not have written Bobby
Quinton an accompanying line.