There is on an olive-covered slope near the Mediterranean a certain
shabby pink villa which is remarkable for one thing. In it, years ago,
dwelt for a long time a man and a woman who, having no legal right to
love, yet not only loved, but were perfectly happy. They lived almost
alone, they had little money, the house was shabby even then, they had
few servants and but indifferent Italian food, and nothing but
old-fashioned tin baths to wash in. Yet they were English, and they were
happy because they loved each other so much that nothing else mattered.
Now this phrase about nothing else mattering is as common in love
affairs as the pathetic abuse of the poor old word eternity; but in the
case I instance, it fitted. Nothing else did matter. Not even, to any
extent, the presence of the one child that had come to them. Contrary to
all ethical and reasonable law, these two sinners were happy in their
pink house by the sea, and years after they had left it there seemed to
hang about the old place a kind of atmosphere of romance, as if the sun
and the moon, that have seen so much changeableness, loved still to look
down at the place where two human beings had been faithful to each
other.
These two people were Pamela Lensky's father and mother, and hither
came, early in the November that followed her meeting with Victor
Joyselle, Lady Brigit Mead as the guest of the Lenskys. And here she
stayed, while the mild, sunny winter days drifted by unmarked, a silent,
ungenial guest.
The Lenskys were happy people and enjoyed life as it came. He, a slim,
blond, exceedingly well-dressed little man, was attached to the Russian
Embassy in London, in some more or less permanent quality, having given
up his secretaryship after a miserable sojourn in a Continental city
that he and his wife both hated.
They had money enough to live comfortably, in the quiet way they both
liked, in England, and a year before that November his mother had died,
leaving them the richer by a few hundred pounds a year. So they were
well-off in the sense that they had plenty of money to spend, and the
certainty that their children would one day be in still better
circumstances.
One day in January Mrs. de Lensky was sitting on the floor in the
brick-floored nursery, building a Moorish palace for her son, aged
eighteen months.
She was a thin woman of thirty-six or seven, with large dark eyes,
somewhat hollow now, and a brown vivid face on which life had put
several deep lines--all of which, though unbeautiful in themselves, were
good lines, and made for character.
"And here's the tower in which the little boy lived," she said to the
baby, who, very fat and peculiarly blond, regarded her rapturously,
"and here's the dungeon where they put him when he was naughty. If
Thaddeus bites Elvira again," she added gravely, "what will happen to
him?"
But Thaddeus, who was possessed of the courage incidental to a sound
digestion and dormant nerves, only laughed and showed the wicked fangs
that had bitten the nurse.
It was a pleasant, bare, sunny room, the rug covered with shabby toys,
the walls nearly hidden by pictures from illustrated papers. Through an
open door one saw a table at which sat a little girl of six, bending
over a book with the unmistakable air of a child learning something
uninteresting.
"Eliza!"
"Yes, mother?" Eliza looked up. She too was blonde, but her eyes were
dark.
"Where is Pammy, dear?"
"I don't know, mother. Perhaps she's eating plaster again," suggested
Eliza, with the alertness that even charming children sometimes show
when face to face with the crime of some contemporary.
Pam did not laugh. Plaster-eating may be funny in other people's
children, but seven-year-old Pammy, her adopted daughter, was too old to
persist in the habit, and punishment seemed to have no effect on it. The
house was old, and the walls defective in many places, and Pammy's joy
was to dig out bits of ancient plaster and consume it on the sly. It was
presumably bad for her stomach and indubitably bad for her character, as
the child persisted in it with a quiet effrontery that baulked
discipline. So Mrs. de Lensky rose, and bidding Eliza look after the
baby, started in search of the wicked one.
January was spring at the Villa Arcadie, and as she went downstairs a
strong scent of heliotrope and narcissi was wafted towards her. A boy
stood in the hall carrying a basket.
"_Buon giorno_, Beppino. Oh, what lovely flowers! Tell Giovanni to bring
them to me in the _salone_, will you?" Crossing the hall she went into
the dining-room, and there, as she had expected, sat Pammy.
Years before, when she had, half out of kindness, half out of
loneliness, adopted the little new-born girl, she had never meant to
marry. And when she did marry, neither she nor her husband wished to get
rid of the child. But the result had not been particularly satisfactory,
for Pammy had grown to be a very fat, very stolid person, with no nose
to speak of and no sense of humour at all, and every day that passed
seemed to leave her a little more unattractive than she had been the day
before.
Now, at seven, she was as tall as most children of ten, immensely fat,
with pendulous red cheeks that in spite of cold cream and soft water
always looked as though they had just been rubbed with a grater. Her
hair, long and fair, was dank, hanging in two emaciated pig-tails nearly
to her waist, and her nails--another ineradicable trick--bitten to the
deepest depths possible.
"Pammy, dear, what have you been doing?" inquired Pam, gently.
"Looking out the window--and I ate some more plaster." Stolidly, with
lack-lustre eyes, the culprit gazed at her benefactor.