Nevertheless, Rosie Graham’s anecdote of the girl who had gone to Port
Said, and her vehement advice to have nothing to do with the Greek,
continued to haunt Lydia’s mind.
Neither had she forgotten Miss Nettleship’s warning, and the sense that
the manageress was watching her with melancholy anxiety caused her to
surmise that Mr. Margoliouth had not yet made good his assurance of
payment.
She refused an invitation to go to the play with him, but was too
anxious that the boarders should continue to look upon her as the
heroine of an exciting love-affair to discourage him altogether,
although she had really made up her mind that she should not care to be
engaged to Margoliouth.
If the first man who had made her acquaintance since she left school
showed so much tendency to make love to her, Lydia shrewdly told
herself, there would certainly be others. She could well afford to
wait, in the certainty of eventually finding a man who would possess
such attractions and advantages as the Greek could not boast.
Meanwhile, Margoliouth made life interesting, and Lydia a subject of
universal observation and discussion.
She was feeling agreeably conscious of this on the Saturday following
her conversation with the manageress, as she came into the
boarding-house in time for the midday meal.
Miss Nettleship was hovering at the foot of the stairs and failed to
return Lydia’s smile.
“He’ll have to go,” she said without preliminary. “I got his cheque,
and the Bank has returned it. You see how it is, dear--a terrible
business. I don’t know whether I shan’t have to call the police in even
now before I get my money. He’s leaving on Monday, and if I’ve not had
the cash down from him, I don’t know what’ll happen, I’m sure.”
“Oh, Miss Nettleship, how dreadful! I _am_ sorry for you,” said Lydia,
giving expression to the surface emotion of her mind only, from habit
and instinct alike.
“Don’t you have anything more to do with him, dear,” said Miss
Nettleship distractedly. “That Agnes is letting something burn
downstairs. I can smell it as plain as anything. I’ll have to go. Poor
old Agnes! she means well but you quite understand how it is----”
The manageress hastened down the stairs to the basement.
Lydia could not help glancing at her neighbour in the dining-room with
a good deal of anxiety. He seemed quite imperturbable, and said nothing
about his departure.
Lydia, whose opinion of Miss Nettleship’s mentality was not an exalted
one, began to think that Mr. Margoliouth knew quite well that he could
pay his bills before Monday, and had no intention of going away at all.
Otherwise, why was he not more uneasy? Far from uneasy, Margoliouth
seemed to be livelier than usual, paid Lydia one or two small
compliments with his usual half-condescending, half-sardonic
expression, and asked her if she would come out to tea with him that
afternoon.
Miss Nettleship was on one of her periodical excursions to the kitchen,
and Miss Forster, Mrs. Clarence, and Mrs. Bulteel were listening with
all their ears, and with as detached an expression as each could
contrive to assume.
“Thank you very much, I should like to,” said Lydia demurely.
They went to a newly-opened corner shop in Piccadilly, where a small
orchestra was playing, and little shaded pink lights stood upon all
the tables. The contrast with the foggy December dusk outside struck
pleasantly upon Lydia’s imagination, and she enjoyed herself, and was
talkative and animated.
Margoliouth stared at her with his unwinking black gaze, and when they
had finished tea he left his chair, and came to sit beside her on the
low plush sofa, that had its back to the wall.
“A girl like you shouldn’t go about London alone,” he suddenly
remarked, with a sort of unctuousness. “At least, not until she knows
something about life.”
“Oh, I can take care of myself,” said Lydia hastily.
“But you don’t know the dangers that a young girl of your attraction is
exposed to,” he persisted. “You don’t know what sort of brutes men can
be, do you?”
“No girl need ever be annoyed--unless she _wants_ to be,” quoted Lydia
primly from Aunt Beryl’s wisdom.
“You think so, do you? Now, I wonder if you’ll still say that in three
years’ time. Do you know that you are the sort of woman to make either
a very good saint or a very good sinner?”
The world-old lure was too potent for Lydia’s youth and her vanity.
“Am I?” she said eagerly. “Sometimes I’ve thought that, too.”
The Greek put his hand upon her, slipping his arm through hers in his
favourite manner.
“Tell me about your little self, won’t you?” he said ingratiatingly.
“_Always let the other people talk about themselves._”
Oh, inconvenient and ill-timed recollection of Grandpapa’s high,
decisive old voice! So vividly was it forced upon the ear of Lydia’s
unwilling memory that she could almost have believed herself at Regency
Terrace once more. The illusion checked her eager, irrepressible grasp
at the opportunity held out by the foreigner. The game was spoilt.
“There’s nothing to tell,” she said abruptly, suddenly grown weary.
Grandpapa had said that long stories about oneself always bored other
people, whether or no they politely affected an appearance of interest.
No doubt it was true.
Lydia knew that she herself was not apt to take any very real interest,
for instance, in Nathalie Palmer’s long letters about her home, and the
parish, and the new experiment of keeping hens at the vicarage, nor in
the many stories, all of them personal, told by the girls at Elena’s,
nor even in the monotonous recital of Miss Nettleship’s difficulties
with her servants.
Why should the Greek be interested in hearing Lydia’s opinion of Lydia?
She cynically determined that it would not be worth while to put him to
the test.
“Let’s go home,” she said.
Margoliouth raised his eyebrows.
“I suppose that all women are capricious.”
His use of the word “women,” as applied to her nineteen-year-old self,
always insensibly flattered Lydia.
She let him take her back to the Bloomsbury boarding-house in a hansom,
and remained passive, although unresponsive, when he put his arm round
her, and pressed her against him in the narrow confinement of the cab.
“Dear little girl!” sighed Margoliouth sentimentally, as he reluctantly
released her from his clasp when the cab stopped.
Lydia ran up the steps, agreeably surprised at the instant opening of
the door, and anxious to exchange the raw and foggy atmosphere outside
for the comparative warmth and light of the hall.
The dining-room door also stood open, and as Lydia came in Miss Forster
rushed out upon her.
“I’ve been waiting for you!” she cried effusively. “Come in here, my
dear, won’t you?”
“Into the dining-room?” said Lydia, amazed. “Why, there’s no fire
there! I’m going upstairs.”
“No, no,” said Miss Forster still more urgently, and laying a
tightly-gloved white-kid hand on Lydia’s arm. “There’s someone up
there.”
She pointed mysteriously to the ceiling.
Lydia looked up, bewildered, but only saw Miss Nettleship, the
gas-light shining full on her pale, troubled face, hastening down
the stairs. She passed Lydia and Miss Forster unperceiving, and went
straight up to the Greek, who had just closed the street door behind
him.
“Mr. Margoliouth!” she said, in her usual breathless fashion. “You see
how it is--it’s quite all right, I’m sure ... but your wife has come.
She’s in the drawing-room.”
Margoliouth uttered a stifled exclamation, and then went upstairs
without another word.
Miss Forster almost dragged Lydia into the dining-room.
“There! Of course you didn’t know he was married, did you? Neither did
any of us, and I must say I think he’s behaved abominably.”
“But who is she? When did she come?” asked Lydia, still wholly
bewildered at the suddenness of the revelation.
“Sit down, and I’ll tell you all about it.”
Miss Forster settled her ample person in a chair, with a general
expression of undeniable satisfaction.
“Just about half an hour after you’d left the house, I was just
wondering if I should find dear Lady Honoret at home if I ran
round--you know my great friends, Sir Rupert and Lady Honoret. I’m
sure I’ve often mentioned them; they’re quite well-known people--but
I thought, of course, there wouldn’t be a chance of finding them
disengaged--she’s always _somewhere_--so Mrs. Bulteel and I were
settling down to a nice, cosy time over the fire. Irene had actually
made up quite a good fire, for once. And then the door opened”--Miss
Forster flung open an invisible portal with characteristic energy--“and
in comes Miss Nettleship--and I remember thinking to myself at the
time, in a sort of flash, you know: Miss Nettleship looks _pale_--a
sort of startled look--it just flashed through my mind. And this woman
was just behind her.”
“What is she like?”
Lydia was conscious of disappointment and humiliation, but she was
principally aware of extreme curiosity.
“Just what you’d expect,” said Miss Forster, with a decisiveness that
somehow mitigated the extremely cryptic nature of the description. “The
moment I saw her and realized who she was--and I’m bound to say Miss
Nettleship spoke her name _at once_--that moment I said to myself that
she was just what I should have expected her to be.”
Lydia, less eager for details of Miss Forster’s remarkable prescience
than for further information, still looked at her inquiringly.
“Dark, you know,” said Miss Forster. “Very dark--and stout.”
She described a circle of immense and improbable width. “Older than he
is, I should say--without a doubt. And wearing a white veil, and one
of those foreign-looking black hats tilted right over her eyes--you
know the sort of thing. And boots--buttoned boots. With a check
costume--exactly like a foreigner.”
“I suppose she _is_ a foreigner.”
“I spoke in French at once,” said Miss Forster. “It was most awkward,
of course--and I could see that Mrs. Bulteel was completely taken
aback. Not much _savoir faire_ there, between ourselves, is there? But,
of course, as a woman of the world, I spoke up at once, the moment Miss
Nettleship performed the introduction. ‘_Comment vous trouvez-vous,
M’dahme?_’ I said. Of course, not shaking hands--simply bowing.”
“What did she say?” Lydia asked breathlessly, as Miss Forster
straightened herself with a little gasp, after a stiff but profound
inclination of her person from the waist downwards.
“She answered in English. She has an accent, of course--doesn’t speak
nearly as well as he does. Something about us knowing her husband. ‘Do
you mean Mr. Margoliouth?’ I said. Naughty of me, though, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, very,” said Lydia hastily. “But what did she say?”
“Took it quite seriously,” crowed Miss Forster, suddenly convulsed.
“Really, some people have _no_ sense of the ludicrous. I said it for a
bit of mischief, you know. ‘Do you mean Mr. Margoliouth?’ I said--and
she answered me quite solemnly, ‘Yes, of course.’”
Then it really was Margoliouth’s wife. Lydia began to realize the fact
that until now had carried no sort of conviction to her mind.
Margoliouth, a married man, had been making a fool of her before all
these people. Such was the aspect of her case that flashed across her
with sudden, furious indignation.
She perceived that Miss Forster was looking at her with curiosity.
“I didn’t know that he was married at all,” said Lydia calmly.
“No one could have guessed it for a moment, and he never gave us a
hint,” said Miss Forster indignantly. “You won’t mind me saying, dear,
that I wanted to get you in here and tell you quietly before you went
up and found her there, sitting on the sofa as calm as you please.”
“Thank you,” said Lydia. “But really, you know, it doesn’t matter to
me if Mr. Margoliouth _is_ married. Only I think he ought to have told
Miss Nettleship, and--and all of us.”
“The cad!” cried Miss Forster energetically, and striking the rather
tight lap of her silk dress with a violence that threatened to split
the white-kid glove. “What we women have to put up with, I always
say! Only a man could behave like that, and what can we do to defend
ourselves? Nothing at all. I was telling Sir Rupert Honoret the other
day--those friends of mine who live in Lexham Gardens, you know--I was
telling him what I thought of the whole sex. Oh, I’ve the courage of my
opinions, I know. Men are brutes--there’s no doubt about it.”
“I suppose he didn’t expect her here?” said Lydia dreamily, still
referring to the Margoliouth _ménage_.
Miss Forster understood.
“Not he! You saw what a fool he looked when the manageress told him she
was here. She’s come to fetch him away, that’s what it is. She as good
as said so. But they’ll be here till Monday morning, I’m afraid--the
pair of them. Ugh!----” Miss Forster gave a most realistic shudder.
“I don’t know how I shall sit at table with them. Miss Nettleship has
no business to take in people of that sort--she ought to have made
inquiries about the man in the first place, and I shall tell her so.”
“Oh, no,” said Lydia gently. “Please don’t. She’ll be so upset at the
whole thing already.”
“Very generous!” Miss Forster declared, her hand pressed heavily on
Lydia’s shoulder. “Of course, it’s you one can’t help thinking of--a
young girl like you. Oh, the cad! If I were a man, I’d horsewhip a
fellow like that.”
She indulged in a vigorous illustrative pantomime.
“I shall be all right,” Lydia said quickly--insensibly adopting the
most dignified attitude at her command.
She moved to the door.
“Have some supper sent up to your room, do,” urged Miss Forster. “I’m
sure Irene would get a tray ready, and I’ll bring it up to you myself.
Then you won’t have to come down to the dining-room.”
“Thank you very much, but I’d rather come down.”
Lydia was speaking literal truth, as, with her usual clear-sightedness,
she soon began to realize.
Not only was her curiosity undeniably strong, both to behold the
recent arrival, and to observe Margoliouth’s behaviour in these new
and undoubtedly disconcerting circumstances--but it was slowly borne
in upon her that she could not afford to relinquish the opportunity of
standing in the lime-light with the attention of her entire audience
undeviatingly fixed upon herself.
Her humiliation could be turned into a triumph.
Lydia set her teeth.
She had been very angry with Margoliouth, and was so still--less
because he had deceived her than because the discovery of his deceit
must destroy all her prestige as the youthful recipient of exclusive
attentions. But after all, she could still be the heroine of this
boarding-house drama.
Lydia reflected grimly that there were more ways than one of being a
heroine.
She looked at herself in the glass. Anger and excitement had given her
a colour, and she did not feel at all inclined to cry. She was, in
fact, perfectly aware that she was really not in the least unhappy. But
the people downstairs would think that she was proudly concealing a
broken heart.
Lydia dressed her thick mass of hair very carefully, thrust the high,
carved comb into one side of the great black twist at just the right
angle, and put on a blouse of soft, dark-red silk that suited her
particularly well.
There was a knock at her door.
Lydia went to open it, and saw Miss Nettleship on the threshold.
“Oh, my dear, I am so sorry, and if you want a tray upstairs for this
once, it’ll be quite all right, and I’ll give the girl the order
myself. You aren’t thinking of coming down to-night, are you?”
“Yes, I am,” said Lydia steadily. “It’s very kind of you, but I’d
rather come down just as usual.”
“It’s as you like, of course,” said the manageress in unhappy accents.
“Miss Forster came to me about you--you know what she is. But I’m so
vexed you should have heard all in a minute like, only you understand
how it was, dear, don’t you? And his wife has paid up the bills, all in
cash, and wants to stay over Sunday.”
“There’s the bell,” said Lydia.
“Then I must go, dear--you know how it is. That old Miss Lillicrap is
such a terror with the vegetables. I do feel so vexed about it all--and
your auntie will be upset, won’t she? Are you ready, dear?”
Lydia saw that the kind woman was waiting to accompany her downstairs
to the dining-room, but she had every intention of making her entrance
unescorted.
“I’m not quite ready,” she said coolly. “Please don’t wait--I know you
want to be downstairs.”
The manageress looked bewildered, and as though she felt herself to
have been rebuffed, but she spoke in her usual rather incoherently
good-natured fashion as she hastened down the stairs.
“Just whatever you like, and it’ll be quite all right. I quite
understand. I wish I could wait, dear, but really I daren’t....”
Lydia was very glad that Miss Nettleship dared not wait.
She herself remained upstairs for another full five minutes, although
her remaining preparations were easily completed in one.
At the end of the five minutes she felt sure that all the boarders must
be assembled. Hardly anyone was ever late for a meal, since meals for
most of the women, at any rate, contributed the principal variety in
the day’s occupation.
Nevertheless, Lydia went downstairs very slowly, until the sound
of clattering plates and dishes, broken by occasional outbreaks of
conversation, told her that dinner was in progress.
Then she quickly opened the dining-room door.
They were all there, and they all looked up as she came in.
Her accustomed seat at the far end of the table, next to the Greek, was
empty, but on Margoliouth’s other side sat a strange woman, whom Lydia
was at no pains to identify, even had Miss Forster’s description not at
once returned to her mind. “Very dark--and stout--and dressed like a
foreigner.”
Mrs. Margoliouth was all that.
Lydia saw the room and everyone in it, in a flash, as she closed the
door behind her.
Miss Lillicrap, clutching her knife and fork, almost as though she were
afraid that her food might be snatched from her plate while she peered
across the room with eager, malevolent curiosity--Miss Nettleship,
suddenly silent in the midst of some babbled triviality, and evidently
undecided whether to get up or to remain seated--Mrs. Bulteel, her
sharp gaze fixed upon Lydia and her pinched mouth half open--Miss
Forster, also staring undisguisedly--Mrs. Clarence, with her foolish,
red-rimmed eyes almost starting from her head--the youth, Hector
Bulteel, his mouth still half-full and a tumbler arrested in mid-career
in his hand--his father’s sallow face turned towards the door, wrinkled
with an evident discomfiture.
Mrs. Margoliouth herself had raised a pair of black, hostile-looking
eyes, set in a heavy, pasty face, to fix them upon Lydia.
Irene had stopped her shuffling progress round the table, and turned
her head over her shoulder.
Only Margoliouth remained with his head bent over his plate, apparently
absorbed in the food that he was sedulously cutting up into small
pieces.
In the momentary silence Lydia advanced. Her heart was beating very
quickly, but she was conscious of distinct exhilaration, and she
remembered to tilt her chin a little upward and to walk slowly.
There was the sudden scraping of a chair, and pale, ugly Mr. Bulteel
had sprung forward, and come down the room to meet her.
The unexpected little act of chivalry, which obviously came as a
surprise to himself as to everybody else, nearly startled Lydia out of
her predetermined composure.
She looked up at him and smiled rather tremulously, and he pulled out
her chair for her, and waited until she was seated before returning to
his own place again.
The meal went on, and the atmosphere was electric. Contrary to her
custom, Miss Nettleship made no attempt at introducing the newcomer,
and Margoliouth did not seek to rectify the omission.
He ate silently, his eyes on his plate. Twice Lydia addressed small,
commonplace remarks to him, each time in the midst of a silence,
wherein her voice sounded very clear and steady. He answered politely
but briefly, and the other women at the table exchanged glances, and
one or two of them looked admiringly at Lydia.
It was this consciousness that kept her outwardly composed, for she
found the position far more of an ordeal than she had expected it
to be. She was even aware that, under the table, a certain nervous
trembling that she could not repress was causing her knees to knock
together.
She felt very glad when the meal was over and old Miss Lillicrap--who
always gave the signal for dispersal--had pushed her chair back, and
said venomously:
“Well, I can’t say, ‘Thank you for my good dinner.’ The fowl was tough,
and I didn’t get my fair share of sauce with the pudding.”
“Are we having a rubber to-night?” Miss Forster inquired loudly of
no one in particular, with the evident intention of silencing Miss
Lillicrap.
Lydia saw Mrs. Bulteel frown and shake her head, as though in warning.
Margoliouth, however, had at last looked up.
“I’m not playing to-night,” he said sullenly.
“Doesn’t your wife play Bridge?” Miss Forster inquired rather
maliciously.
“No.”
“You’re tired with your journey perhaps,” piped Mrs. Clarence, looking
inquisitively at the stranger.
Mrs. Margoliouth stared back at her with lack-lustre and rather
contemptuous-looking black eyes.
“What journey?” she said in a thick voice. “I’ve only come up from
Clapham, where we go back on Monday. Our house is at Clapham. The
children are there.”
“The children?” repeated Mrs. Clarence foolishly.
“We have five children,” said Mrs. Margoliouth impassively, but she
cast a fierce glance at her husband as she spoke.
Miss Forster suddenly thrust herself forward, and demonstratively put
her arm round Lydia’s waist.
“I suppose you’re going upstairs to your scribbling, as usual, you
naughty girl?” she inquired affectionately.
“I ought to,” Lydia said, smiling faintly. “It isn’t cold in my room
now that I’ve got a little oil-stove. I got the idea from a girl I went
to supper with the other night, who lives in rooms.”
“How splendid!” said Miss Forster, with loud conviction, her tone and
manner leaving no room for doubt that she was paying a tribute to
something other than the inspiration of the oil-stove.
Lydia smiled again, and went upstairs.
The other boarders were going upstairs too, and as Lydia turned the
corner of the higher flights that led to her own room, she could hear
them on the landing below.
“I do think that girl’s behaving most splendidly!”
Miss Forster’s emphatic superlatives were unmistakable.
“She looks like a sort of queen to-night,” said an awed voice, that
Lydia recognized with surprise as belonging to the usually inarticulate
Hector Bulteel.
She had not missed her effect, then.
Lydia did not write that evening. She went to bed almost at once, glad
of the darkness, and feeling strangely tired. After she was in bed she
even found, to her own surprise, that she was shedding tears that she
could not altogether check at will.
Then, after all, she _minded_?
Lydia could not analyze her own emotion, and as the strain of the day
relaxed, she quietly cried herself to sleep like a child.
But the eventual analysis of the whole episode, made by Lydia with
characteristic detachment, brought home to her various certainties.
Margoliouth’s defection had hurt her vanity slightly--her heart not at
all.
She could calmly look back upon her brief relations with him as
experience, and therefore to be valued.
But perhaps the conviction that penetrated her mind most strongly, was
that one which she faced with her most unflinching cynicism, although
it would have vexed her to put it into words for any other human being.
No grief or bereavement that her youth was yet able to conceive of
could hurt her sufficiently to discount the lasting and fundamental
satisfaction of the _beau rôle_ that it would bestow upon her in the
view of the onlookers.