LXX

It is Fate who comes hurrying to Lynette under the becoming shadow of a

red umbrella, on the starched and rustling skirts of the agitated nurse,

whose mouth is seen to be shaping sentences long before she can be heard

panting:

"Did you call, 'm? Her ladyship thought you did, and might have found ...

Oh, ma'am! have you seen a baby? We've lost ours!"

Lynette nods and laughs reassuringly, pointing down into the hollow. The

nurse, with a squawk of relief, leaves her perambulator bogged in the

sand, flutters up the powdery rise like some large species of seagull,

squawks again, and swoops to retrieve her lost charge. Miss Baby,

perfectly contented until the scarlet face and whipping ribbons of her

attendant appear over the edge of her Paradise, throws herself backwards,

strikes out with kicking, dimpled legs, and sets up an indignant roar.

"There now--there! 'A was a pessus!" vociferates the owner of the

streaming ribbons and the scarlet countenance. "And did she tumble out of

her pram, the duck, and wicked Polly never see her? And thank Good

Gracious, not a bruise on her blessed little body-woddy, nor nothing but

the very tiddiest scratch!"

"Which is not your fault, Watkins, I am compelled to say it," pronounces

the Red Umbrella, arriving breathless and decidedly indignant, on the

scene. "The idea of a person of your class being so wrapped up in a rotten

penny novel that you can't even keep your eye upon the darling entrusted

to your charge is too perfectly shameful for words. Baby, don't cry," she

continues, as the repentant Polly appears, bearing the retrieved treasure.

"Come to mummy and kiss her, and tell her all about it, do!"

"I sa-t!" bellows Baby, now keenly alive to the pathos of the situation,

and digging a sandy pink fist into either eye ...

"Don't, then, you obstinate little pig!" returns Red Umbrella, with

maternal asperity. She looks up to the fair vision that stands on high

amongst the poppies, and nods and smiles. "However I am to thank you!...

Such a turn when we missed her!..." She utters these incoherences with a

great deal of eye-play, pressing a small, plump, jewelled hand, with

short, broad fingers, and squat, though elaborately rouged and polished,

nails, upon the bountiful curve of a Parisian corsage. "My heart did a

double flip-flap ... hasn't done thumping yet. Am I pale still, Watkins?"

She appeals to the recreant Watkins, who is busily repacking Baby in her

luxurious perambulator. "I felt to go as white as chalk!"

"Perfect gassly, my lady!" agrees Watkins, and it occurs to Lynette that

the process of blanching must, taking into consideration the artificial

blushes that bloom so thickly upon the pretty, piquante face under the red

umbrella, have been attended with some difficulty.

Everything is round in the coquettish face, shaded by a hat that is an

expensive triumph of Parisian millinery, trimmed with a whole branch of

wistaria in bloom. The big brown eyes are round, so is the cherry-stained

mouth, so is the pert, button nose. The thick, dark eyebrows are like

inky half-moons, in the middle of the little round chin a circular dimple

is cunningly set. Round, pinky-olive shoulders and rounded arms gleam

temptingly through the bodice of heliotrope chiffon. Other roundnesses,

artfully exaggerated by the Parisian _modiste_, are liberally suggested,

as Red Umbrella gathers her frothy draperies about her hips, lifting her

multitudinous frills to reveal black and scarlet openwork silk stockings,

bedecking her plump legs and tiny feet, whose high-heeled silver-buckled

shoes are sinking in the hot, white, powdery sand.

"Please don't go on! I haven't half thanked you," she pleads, still

pressing the podgy little bejewelled paw upon the heaving corsage. Then

she sinks, with an air of graceful languor, down upon a long, prostrate

monolith of granite, that is thickly crusted with velvety orange lichen

and grey-green moss, starred with infinitesimal yellow flowers. And

Lynette, habitually courteous and rather amused, and not at all unwilling

to know a little more of the affected, slangy, overdressed little woman,

sits down upon the other end of the sprawling stone column, and says,

smiling at Baby, who is clutching at a hovering butterfly with her eager,

dimpled hands:

"Of course, it was a terrible shock to you when you missed her. She is

such a darling! Aren't you, Baby?"

Baby, her long, grey-green eyes melting and gleaming dangerously, her

golden head tilted coquettishly, and a gay, provoking laugh on the bold

red mouth, makes another snatch, captures the hovering blue butterfly,

opens the rosy hand, and with a wry face of disgust, drops the crushed

morsel over the edge of the perambulator. The superb, unconscious cruelty

of the act gives Lynette a little pang even as she goes on:

"She was not in the least shy. I think we should soon be very great

friends. May her nurse bring her to see me sometimes? Most babies love

flowers, and there is a garden full of them where I am staying. Do you

live here?"

"Live here? Gracious, no!" Red Umbrella opens the round, brown eyes that

Baby's are so unlike in shape and expression, and shrugs her pretty

shoulders as high as the big ruby buttons that blaze in her pretty ears.

"Me and Baby are only visiting--stopping with her nurse and my two maids

for a change at the Herion Arms--me having been recommended sea-air by the

doctors for tonsils in the throat. The house is advertised as an

up-to-date hotel in the ABC Railway Guide, but diggings more wretched I

never struck, and you do fetch up in some queer places on tour in the

Provinces, let alone the States," says Red Umbrella, tossing the

wistaria-wreathed hat. "Which may be a surprise to people who think it

must be nothing but jam for those ladies and gentlemen that have made

their mark in the Profession."

"Yes?"

Lynette's golden eyes smile back into the laughing brown ones with

pleasant friendliness, combined with an irritating lack of comprehension.

And Red Umbrella, who derives a considerable income from percentages upon

the sale of her photographs, and is conscious that her celebrated features

are figuring upon several of the postcards that hang up for sale in the

window of the only stationer in Herion, is a little nettled.

"I refer to the stage, of course." She fingers a long neck-chain of

sapphires, and tinkles her innumerable bangles with their load of jingling

charms. "But perhaps you're not a Londoner? Or you don't patronise the

theatre?"

"Oh yes. We have a house in Harley Street. And I am very fond of the

Opera," says Lynette, smiling still, "and of seeing plays too; and I often

go to the theatre with Lord and Lady Castleclare, or Major Wrynche and

Lady Hannah, when my husband is too much engaged to take me. One of the

last pieces we saw before we left town was 'The Chiffon Girl' at The

Variety," she adds.

"Indeed! And how did you like 'The Chiffon Girl'?" asks the lady of the

red umbrella, with a gracious and encouraging smile. Unconscious tribute

rendered to one's beauty and one's genius is ever well worth the having.

And the editor of the _Keyhole_, a certain weekly journal of caterings for

the curious, will gladly publish any little anecdote which will serve the

dual purpose of amusing his readers and keeping the name of Miss Lessie

Lavigne before the public eye. "How did you enjoy the performance of the

lady who played the part?"

Lynette ponders, and her fine brows knit. Vexed and indignant, Red

Umbrella, scanning the thoughtful face, admits its youth, its

high-breeding, its delicate, chiselled beauty, and the slender grace of

the supple figure in the grey-blue serge skirt and white silk blouse; nor

is she slow to appreciate the value of the diamond keeper on the slight,

fine, ungloved hand that rests upon the sun-hot moss between them.

"I think I felt rather sorry for her," says the soft cultured voice with

the exquisite, precise inflections. The golden eyes look dreamily out over

the undulating sand-dunes beyond the crisp line of foam to the silken

shimmer of the smoothing water. The little wind has fallen. It is very

still. The nurse, sitting on a hillock of bents in dutiful nearness to the

perambulator, has taken out her paper-covered volume, and is deep in a

story of blood and woe. And Baby, a sleepy, pink rosebud, dozes among her

white embroidered pillows, undisturbed by Red Umbrella's shrill

exclamation:

"Sorry for her! Why on earth should you be?"

The shriek startles Lynette. She brings back her grave eyes from the

distance, flushing faint coral pink to the red-brown waves at her fair

temples.

"She--she had on so few clothes!" she says. And there is a profound

silence, broken by Lessie's saying with icy dignity:

"If the Lord Chamberlain opined I'd got enough on, I expect that ought to

do for you!"

"I--don't quite understand."

Lynette opens her golden eyes in sincere wonder at the marvellous change

that has been wrought in the little lady who sits beside her.

"_I_ am Miss Lessie Lavigne," says the little lady, with an angry toss of

the pretty head, adorned with the wistaria-trimmed hat. "At least, that is

the name I am known by in the profession."

"I beg your pardon," Lynette falters. "I did not recognise you. I am

afraid you must think me rather rude!"

"Oh, pray don't mention it!" cries the owner of the red umbrella.

"Rude?--not in the least!"

Mere rudeness would be preferable, infinitely, to the outrage the little

lady has suffered. She, Lessie Lavigne, the original exponent of the role

of "The Chiffon Girl," the idol of the pit and gallery, Queen regnant over

the hearts beating behind the polished shirt-fronts in the stalls, has

lived to hear herself pitied--not envied, but commiserated--for the

scantiness of the costume in which it is alike her privilege and her joy

to trill and caper seven times in the week before her patrons and adorers.

Small wonder that she feels her carefully-manicured nails elongating with

the desire to scratch and rend.

Then she reveals the chief arrow in her quiver. Not for nothing is she the

widow of an English nobleman. With all the hereditary dignities of the

Foltlebarres she will arm herself, and reduce this presuming stranger to

the level of the dust. At the thought of the humiliation it is in her

power to inflict she smiles quite pleasantly, displaying a complete double

row of beautifully stopped teeth. And she says, as she fumbles in a

chatelaine bag of golden links, studded with turquoises, and with

elaborately ostentatious dignity produces therefrom a card-case, as

precious as regards material, and emblazoned with a monogram and coronet,

enriched with diamonds and pearls:

"I think you mentioned that you lived in the neighbourhood? May I know who

I have the a--pleasure of being indebted to for finding my daughter

to-day?"

"I am Mrs. Owen Saxham. I live at that grey stone house up there on the

cliff. 'Plas Bendigaid,' they call it," explains Lynette, a little

nervously, as her reluctant eyes scan the face and figure of the woman who

owns the legal right to bear Beauvayse's name. The encounter is

distasteful to her. She is painfully conscious of an acute sensation of

antagonism and dislike. "The house belongs to my husband, and this is my

first visit to Herion," she adds hurriedly, "because we--my husband and

I--have not been very long married. But I like the place. And the house is

charming, and there is a hall that was once the chapel, when it was a

Convent. It shall be a chapel again; that is"--the wild-rose colour

deepens on the lovely face--"if my husband agrees? To have it so restored

would make the Plas seem more like a home, because I was brought up in a

Convent, though not in England."

Her eyes stray back to the sun-kissed beauty of Nantmadoc Bay and the

dotted line of white spots that indicate the town of St. Tudwalls at the

base of the green promontory beyond the Roads. She forgets that this

little overdressed person is Beauvayse's wife. She forgets in the moment

that she herself is Saxham's. She is back in the beloved past with the

Mother.

"It was in South Africa, my Convent ... more than a thousand miles from

Cape Town, in British Baraland, on the Transvaal Border--in a little

village-town, dumped down in the middle of the veld."

"What on earth is the veld?" asks the lady of the red umbrella, with

acerbity. "I'm sick of seeing the word in the papers, and nobody seems to

know what it means."

Lynette's soft voice answers:

"You can never know what it means until you have lived its life, and it

has become part of yours. It spreads away farther than your eyes can

follow it, for miles and miles. It is jade colour in spring, blue-green in

early summer, desolate, scorching yellow-brown in winter, with dreadful

black tracts of cinders, where it has been burned to let the young grass

grow up. There is hardly a tree; there is scarcely a bird, except a

vulture, a black speck high in the hot blue sky. There are flat-topped

mountains and cone-shaped kopjes, reddish, or pale pink, or

mauve-coloured, as they are nearer or farther away. And that is all!"

"All?"

"All, except the sunshine, bathing everything, soaking you through and

through."

"But there is not always sunshine? It must be sometimes night?" argues

Lessie, a little peevishly.

"There are deep violet nights, full of great white stars," Lynette

answers. "There are storms of dust and rain, lightning and thunder, such

as are only read of here.... There are plots, conspiracies, raids,

robberies, murders, slumps and losses, plagues and massacres. There are

rebellions of white men, and native risings. There have been wars; there

is war to-day, and there will be war again in the days that are yet to

come!"

She has almost forgotten the little woman beside her, staring at her with

big, brown, rather animal eyes. Now she turns to her with her rare and

lovely smile:

"The war that is going on now began at the little village-town where I was

a Convent schoolgirl. We were shut for months within the lines. But, of

course, you have read the newspaper accounts of the Siege of Gueldersdorp?

I am only telling you what you know!"

Lessie laughs, and the laugh has the hard, unpleasant, mirthless little

tinkle of a toy dog's collar-bell, or bits of crushed ice rattled in a

champagne-glass.

"What I have good reason to know!"

Her podgy, jewelled hands are clenching and unclenching in her heliotrope

chiffon lap; there is a well-defined scowl between the black arched

eyebrows, and the murky light of battle gleams in the eyes that no longer

languish between their bistred eyelids as she scans the pure pale face

under the sweep of her heavily blackened lashes. She would almost give the

ruby buttons out of her ears to see it wince and quiver, and crimson into

angry blushes. And yet Lessie is rather amiable than otherwise in her

attitude towards other women. True, she has never before met one who had

the insolence to pity her to her face.

"So quite too interesting!" she says, with an exaggerated affectation of

amiability, and in high, fashionable accents, "you having been at

Gueldersdorp through the Siege and all. Were you ever--I suppose you must

have been sometimes--shot at with a gun?"

The faintest quiver of a smile comes over the lovely face her grudging

eyes are trying to find a flaw in.

"Often when I have been crossing the veld between the town and the

Hospital, the Mauser bullets have hummed past like bees, or raised little

spurts of dust close by my feet where they had hit the ground. And once a

shell burst close to us, and a splinter knocked off my hat and tore a

corner of her veil----"

"Weren't you in a petrified fright?" demands Lessie.

"I was with her!"

"Who was she?"

A swift change of sudden, quickening, poignant emotion passes over the

still face. A sudden swelling of the white throat, a rising mist in the

golden eyes, suggests to Lessie that she has been fortunate enough to

touch upon a painful subject, and that possibly this presumptuous young

woman who has pitied a Viscountess may be going to cry! But Lynette drives

back the tears.

"She was the Reverend Mother, the Mother-Superior of the Convent where I

lived at Gueldersdorp."

"Where is she now?"

"She is with God."

"With----"

Lessie is oddly nonplussed by the calm, direct answer. People who talk in

that strangely familiar way of--of subjects that properly belong to

parsons are rare in her world. She hastens to put her next question.

"Was yours the only Convent in Gueldersdorp where young ladies were

taught?"

"It is the only Convent there."

"Did you know--among the pupils--a young person by the name of Mildare?"

There is such concentrated essence of spite in Lessie's utterance of the

name, that Lynette winces a little, and the faint, sweet colour rises in

her cheeks.

"I--know her, certainly; as far as one can be said to know oneself. My

unmarried name was Mildare."

"You--don't say so! Lord, how funny!"

The seagulls fishing in the shallows beyond the foam-line, rise up

affrighted by the shrill peal of triumphant laughter with which Lessie

makes her discovery.

"Ha, ha, ha! Talk of a situation!... On the boards I've never seen one to

touch it!" She jumps from the boulder, with more bounce than dignity,

dropping the red umbrella and the jewelled card-case, and, extending in

one pudgy ringed hand a highly-glazed and coroneted card, "Permit me to

introduce myself," she says through set teeth, smiling rancorously. "My

professional name, as I have had the honour and pleasure of explaining to

you, is Lessie Lavigne, but in private"--the dignity of the speaker's tone

is marred by its extreme huffiness--"in private I am Lady Beauvayse."

As Lynette looks in the painted, angry, piquante face she is more than

ever conscious of that feeling of antagonism. Then her eyes, turning from

it, encounter the cherub rosily sleeping on embroidered pillows, and a

rush of blood colours her to the hair. His child--his child by the

dancer--this dimpled creature she has clasped and kissed! The icy,

tinkling giggle of the mother breaks in upon the thought.

"Of all the queer situations I ever struck, I do call this the queerest!

Me, meeting you like this, and both of us getting quite pally! All over

Baby, too!... Lord! isn't it enough to make you die? Don't mind me being a

bit hysterical!" Lady Beauvayse dabs her tearful eyes with a cobwebby

square of laced cambric. "It'll be over in a sec. And then, Miss

Mildare--I beg pardon--Mrs. Saxham--you and me will have it out!"

"I am afraid I must be going." Lynette rises, and stands beside Lessie,

looking down in painful hesitation at the blinking, reddened eyelids and

the working mouth. "I have guests waiting for me at the Plas. And would it

not be wise of you to go home and lie down?"

The words, for some obscure reason or other, convey an intolerable sting.

Lessie jumps in her buckled Louis Quinze shoes, wheels, and confronts her

newly-discovered enemy with glaring eyes.

"Go home ... lie down!" she shrieks, so shrilly that the sleeping cherub

awakens, and adds her frightened roars to the clamour that scares the

gulls. "If I _had_ lain down and gone to my long home eighteen months ago,

when you were cooped up in Gueldersdorp with my husband, it would have

suited you both down to the ground!" She turns, with a stamp of her

imperious little foot, upon the scared nurse, who is vainly endeavouring

to still Baby. "Take her away! Carry her out of hearing! Do what you're

told, you silly fool!" she orders. "And you"--she wheels again upon

Lynette, her wistarias nodding, her chains and bangles clanking--"why do

you stand there, like a white deer in a park--like an image cut out of

ivory? Don't you understand that I, the woman you've pitied--my God!

pitied, for singing and dancing on the public stage 'with so few clothes

on'"--she savagely mimics the manner and tone--"I am the lawful wife of

the man you tried to trap--the Right Honourable John Basil Edward Tobart!"

The painted lips sneer savagely. "Beautiful Beau, who never went back on a

man, or told the truth to a woman!--that's his character, and it pretty

well sizes him up!"

Lessie stops, gasping and out of breath, the plump, jewelled hand

clutching at her heaving bosom. The theatrical instinct in the daughter of

the footlights has led her to work up the scene; but her rage of wounded

love and jealousy is genuine enough, though not as real as the innocence

in the eyes that meet hers, less poignant than the shame and indignation

that drive the blood from those ivory cheeks.

"He married me on the strict QT at the Registrar's at Cookham," goes on

Lessie, her painted mouth twisting, "a fortnight before he was ordered out

on the Staff. We'd been friends for over a year. There was a child coming,

since we're by way of being plain-spoken," says Lessie, picking up the

prostrate red umbrella and the jewelled card-case, possibly to conceal a

blush; "and he swore he'd never look at another woman, and write by every

mail. And so he did at first, and I used to cry over the blooming piffle

he put into his letters, and wish I'd been a straighter woman, for his

sake. And then the Siege began, and the letters stopped coming, and I

cried enough to spoil my voice, little thinking how my husband was playing

the giddy bachelor thousands of miles away. And then came the news of the

Relief, and despatches, saying that he"--her pretty face is distorted by

the wry grimace of genuine anguish--"_he_ was killed! And a month later I

got a copy of a rotten Siege newspaper, sent me by I don't know who, and

never shall, with a flowery paragraph in it, announcing his lordship's

engagement to Miss Something Mildare. Oh! it was merry hell to know how

he'd done me--me that worshipped the very ground he trod!... Me that had

made a Judy of myself in crape and weepers--widow's weepers for the man

that wished me dead!"

Her voice is thick with rage. Her face is convulsed. Her eyes are burning

coals. She has never been so nearly a great actress, this meretricious

little dancer and comedian, as in this moment when she forgets her art.

"Picture it, you!... Don't you fancy me in 'em? Don't you see me in my

bedroom tearing 'em off?" She rends her flimsy cobweb of a handkerchief

into tatters and spurns them from her. "So!... so!... that's what I did

to 'em!" She snarls with a sudden access of tigerishness. "And if that

white face of yours had been within reach of my ten fingers, I'd have

ragged it into ribbons like the blooming fallals. Don't dare tell me you'd

not have done the same! Perhaps, though, you wouldn't. You're a lady, born

and bred," owns Lessie grudgingly, "and I was a jobbing tailor's kid, that

worked to keep myself and other folks as a baby imp in Pantomime, while

you were being coddled up and kept in cotton-wool!"

She ends with a husky laugh and a shrug of the shoulders. The swollen face

with the wet eyes is averted, or Lessie might be roused to fresh

resentment by the tenderness of pity that is dawning in Lynette's.

"You have suffered cruelly, Lady Beauvayse; but I was not knowingly or

wilfully to blame. Please try to believe it!"

Lessie blows her small nose with a toot of incredulity, and says through

an intervening wad of damp lace-edged cambric:

"Go on!"

"I met Lord Beauvayse out at Gueldersdorp." The voice that comes from

Lynette's pale lips is singularly level and quiet. "He was very handsome

and very brave; he was an officer of the Colonel's Staff. He asked me to

marry him, and I--I believed him honourable and true, and I said, 'Yes.'

... That was one Sunday, when we were sitting by the river. On Thursday he

was killed, and later--nearly a year after my marriage to Dr. Saxham--I

found out the truth."

Lessie shrugs her pretty shoulders, but the face and voice of the speaker

have brought conviction. She realises that if she has been injured, her

rival has suffered equal wrong.

"You were pretty quick in taking on another man, it strikes me. But that's

not my business. You say you found out?" She shows her admirably preserved

teeth in a little grin of sardonic contempt--"nearly a year after your

marriage. Don't tell me your husband let you go on burning joss-sticks to

Beau's angelic memory when he might have made you spit on it by telling

you the truth!"

Lynette's lip curls, and she lifts her little head proudly.

"He never once hinted at the truth. Nor was it through him I learned it!"

"Ought to be kept under glass, then," comments Lessie, "as a model

husband. Now, my poor----"

Lynette interrupts, with angry emphasis:

"I will not hear Dr. Saxham mentioned in the same breath with Lord

Beauvayse!"

"He's dead--let him be!" Beau's widow snarls, her mouth twisting. Yet in

the same breath, with another of the mental pirouettes characteristic of

her class and type, she adds: "Do you suppose I don't know my own husband?

Take him one way with another, you might have sifted the world for liars,

and never found the equal of Beau."

She gathers up the red umbrella and the jewelled card-case with reviving

briskness, and shakes out her crumpled chiffons in the bright hot sun.

"Me and Baby are leaving to-morrow. I don't suppose we're likely ever to

come across you again. Good-bye! I forgive you for pitying me," she says

frankly, holding out the plump, over-jewelled hand. "As for the other

grudge.... What, are you going to kiss me?... Give Baby another before you

go, dear ... and ... forgive _him_ when you can!"