ANGLESEY LODGE—MY INTERVIEW WITH LUCY IN KENSINGTON GARDENS—NOT
SO SATISFACTORY AS I COULD DESIRE
THERE was a piano-organ playing in front of Anglesey Lodge as I drove
up; it was playing the old “Les Roses” waltz, and quite dramatic and
affecting the music sounded as I impatiently waited in the drawing-room,
hung with Doré’s works to impress parents, and with a model of the Taj
under glass, done in soapstone, and sent by some girl-pupil, I imagine,
who had married and gone out to India.
The aunt soon joined me, smiling, with Mr. Thatcher’s open letter in her
hand, and a very handsome woman she must have been—indeed, still
was—with traces, on a florid scale, of Lucy’s simple and yet delicate
beauty.
She was so friendly, and made herself so fascinating, it was fully half
an hour before I could get away. She told me Lucy was out with some of
the pupils, and that, if I went to Kensington Gardens and walked down
the Broad Walk, I should be sure to see them. Further, if we made it up
(as we surely should, she graciously added), she begged me to come back
to lunch at half-past one; though she must ask me not to walk home with
the young ladies through the streets for fear of adverse neighborly
comments, and upsetting them for the afternoon studies.
I was soon at the entrance to the gardens in the Bayswater Road, where
the keeper’s lodge is, with its glass bottles of sweets and half-penny
rock-buns; and, true enough, there was dear Lucy, sitting on one of the
seats facing the walk, reading to one of the little girls, while the
other bigger ones, perhaps half a dozen of them, were playing rounders
in French, among the trees and the dead leaves.
“_Combien de rounders avez-vous?_” cried one of them as I came up; and
“_Courrez, Maud, courrez!_” cried another, clapping her hands, as the
tennis-ball in its torn cover whizzed close by me, whacked by a young
person with a racquet, who was soon off on her round in a short frock
but with uncommonly long legs.
I came quite close behind Lucy, taking care not to make the leaves
rustle. She was reading Bonnechose’s _History of France_ aloud,
something about the wars of the Fronde and Cardinal Richelieu.
“‘_The conduct of the cardinal at this juncture_—’” she was saying with
great seriousness, when the little girl beside her, who naturally wasn’t
attending, looked up and saw me. I gave her a friendly smile, and after
that moment’s careful scrutiny which females of all ages indulge in, she
smiled back. The next moment Lucy looked at her and then round up at me,
giving a soft, frightened “Hah!” and then going as white as a sheet.
Really, it is quite impossible to say at what age a comprehension of
love, its torments and its joys, arises in the fresh girlish breast. The
pretty creature seated at Lucy’s side couldn’t have been more than
eleven, but she saw at once I loved her teacher and desired to be alone
with her; so she immediately rose, staid and composed as a woman, shook
her long hair, and, with complete unconsciousness, strolled off and
joined the other older girls; while they, not to be behindhand in
delicacy, soon stopped their somewhat noisy game, and, forming a
sympathetic group at some little distance under an elm, stood there
talking in whispers with their backs to us; pretending to be immensely
interested and absorbed in the ’buses rumbling down the Bayswater Road.
But for her little frightened cry, Lucy received me in silence, and
didn’t even give me her hand. She sat there on the seat—cut and scarred
with other, happier lovers’ records—with her head slightly turned away
from me; perfectly composed, apparently, after the first shock and
natural agitation of seeing me again so suddenly were over.
I asked her how she was and how long she had been in town; she said she
was quite well, and had been there since the day before yesterday.
Then she said, calmly, “Can you tell me the time, please?” and on my
replying it was a quarter to one, murmured she must be going home to
dinner, and made as if she would rise.
I stopped her with, “Please, Lucy, let me speak to you first.” So she
remained perfectly still, though with her pretty head still turned away
from me.
Eloquent, or, at all events, talkative, as I generally am with the sex,
I admit I couldn’t for the life of me tell how to begin.
At last I said I was afraid she must think badly of me, and then waited
of course for her contradiction; but as it never came, and she never
made a sign, I went on to say I shouldn’t dare approach her were it not
I was a free man; that my affair with—with the other lady was finally
at an end, and so I came to her first and at once with my whole heart.
As I spoke, I watched her closely, if only in the hope I might detect
some slight twitching of her small ungloved hands, or some involuntary
twittering of her eyes or lips, when I told her I was free; but she sat
so like an antique, or, for the matter of that, a modern statue, I began
to grow frightened, since I know very well how implacable even the
tenderest of women can sometimes be when it suits them.
“Oh, Lucy dear!” I stammered, “d-don’t be hard on me. I loved you the
moment I saw you. I never really loved the other one. Since the day I
first set eyes on you, I have never given any other woman a serious
thought. You can’t be so unkind as to break my life in pieces, merely
because I’ve been careless, merely because I spoke to you before I was
quite sure I was free? Why, I was free of her directly I saw you, and if
she hadn’t released me of her own accord, as she has done—Oh, Lucy!
don’t leave me in this dreadful suspense! Do, my dear girl, say
something kind to me, for mercy’s sake!”
“I don’t feel kindly towards you, Mr. Blacker,” Lucy answered, cold and
stern, “and I can’t pretend. I know quite well what’s happened. You
thought I was only an innkeeper’s daughter—”
“Oh, Lucy!”
“And that so long as you were staying there you might as well amuse
yourself.”
“Love is no amusement, Lucy—it’s a most fearful trial.”
“But did you ever, when you were daring to make love to me,” she said,
suddenly turning on me with amazing fierceness, “even cease writing love
letters to her? Tell me that, Mr. Vincent Blacker!”
I groaned; for the truth is I had written more warmly to Mabel Harker
all that delightful month at “The French Horn” than usual; from the
simple fact that, myself feeling happier, I naturally wished Mabel to
share, in a sense, in my joy. So what could I do but groan?
“If we hadn’t found out quite by accident you were engaged,” Lucy went
on, “should we have ever found it out from you? Were you making any
effort of any sort to free yourself? You were acting an untruth to me
all that time. How can I tell you are not acting an untruth to me now?”
“I wasn’t in the least acting an untruth when I said I loved you. How
can you say such a thing, Lucy dear?”
“You mustn’t call me by my Christian name,” she answered, pale, and
setting her lips tight; and then she was silent again.
“You are very hard on me,” I cried, after a pause, “and I hope you will
never live to regret it. What could a man do differently, situate so
unfortunately as I was?”
“You should have been perfectly honest and frank. At least, you should
have made sure you were off with the old love before you tried to be on
with the new.”
“But you talk as if these things always lay within our power! I didn’t
purposely fall in love with you—I simply couldn’t help myself! And into
the other affair I had been more or less entrapped.”
“Yes,” she replied, with some scorn, “and three months hence you will be
saying exactly the same thing to the next girl.”
“I shall never speak to any one again,” I answered, solemnly and truly,
“as I am speaking now to you. You can believe me or not, as you please,
but I can never think of any one as I think of you, and I never have. If
you will only think of me kindly, and try to make excuses for me; if you
will only consult your own heart a little—”
“I mustn’t allow myself to be turned round by a few soft speeches,” said
Lucy, looking almost frightened and rising before I could prevent her.
“You have hurt me very much, and I don’t know that my feelings will ever
alter, or that I should allow them to.”
“But you will let me see you again?” I humbly entreated.
“I don’t know. Certainly not for some little time.”
“I may write to you?”
“No, certainly not!”
“This is all very poor comfort, Lucy,” I groaned, “after the journey I
have taken on purpose to see you and make it all right.”
“What other comfort do you deserve, Mr. Blacker?” she asked me,
haughtily, and immediately moved away from the seat towards her young
ladies.
“I will come down at Christmas, if I may,” I said, tenderly and humbly;
but she never replied, and the next moment was marshalling the girls for
walking home.
They walked to the gate in the Bayswater Road in a group, and formed up
two and two as they got outside.
Lucy never turned her head once, but nearly every young lady treated
herself to a look behind; when they might have seen me plunged down in
melancholy on the seat, digging a morose pattern into the Broad Walk
with the point of my stick.
I drawled back unhappily across the Gardens and down the empty Row to
Hyde Park Corner, along Piccadilly, and to the club.
Christmas! and this was only October!
Sympathetic readers (and I desire no others) can have no conception what
I suffered during the next few days.