CHAPTER XII
It was a warm, clear evening in late September, but autumn was no less evident in the quality of colour in the blue dome of the sky than in the spots and streaks of orange that had begun to flame among the green of the beech-trees and bracken that lay above and beyond the lake at Brayton. The paleness and coolness of that blue was reflected there; it was no midsummer sky that the lake mirrored, but the clearness of an evening which, though warm, might yet prove to be frosty before morning, and blacken the gay dahlia-heads, a little overbonneted, a little overcoiffured, that stood in stiff rows behind the audacious scarlet of the salvias in the formal garden-beds just outside the roofed terrace of the house. No sultriness of day-lit hours stained the heavens; a few little crimson wisps of cloud floated there, and were reflected below, as if the angel of sunset had moulted a score of downy feathers from his wings before plunging westward into the jubilance of the burning horizon. There some ribbons and patches of more substantial cloud of soberer hue floated like little windless, tropic islands on a sea of palest green; below them, and just above the pearl-coloured, half-opaque mists that hung over the valley where Brixham lay, a streak of intense orange burned along the hills.
The note of autumn, indeed, vibrated everywhere. A torrid August had scorched the lawn to a faded yellow, and already a fortnight ago the big, loose-leaved Virginia creeper on the house had burst into flame, and now only grey and brown ash remained to mark where that triumphant conflagration had flared. The big chestnut by the lake had yellowed, and in the cool of the sunset hour the large five-fingered leaves were detaching themselves, and falling without turn or twist in the still air on to the lawn beneath. Basket-chairs, some four or five in number, were placed in the trees' ample shade, and the seats of gaudy chintz were speckled with the fallen foliage. From the surface of the lake the lilies, leaf and flower alike, had withered and vanished, and it spread out its cool reflecting plain unencumbered to the sky. All summer it had been clothed in green and ivory and gold; now, by some wayward perversion of things, it unrobed itself at the approach of frost. The birds were already a-bed; occasionally a thrush fluted a little hoarsely from the bushes, but the lawn was empty of its bright-eyed scurriers; they dined early so as not to risk the chance of finding a frozen table after sunset.
But inside the terrace there was no hint of the autumnal; it flared with colour, not the protesting vividness of dying leaves that fruitlessly asserted their vitality, but with the crimson of the banner of summer. The great Syrian curtains and hangings which had been hung there for the Brayton week in July had been brought out again; it was arranged once more as a huge, half out-of-door sitting-room with tables and Persian rugs and groups of chairs. And here, looking out between the brick columns that supported it, Edgar was sitting alone, regarding the sunset with unconscious appreciation, but with only half his conscious attention. He looked rather colourless, a little bleached instead of sunburnt by the summer, and in his eyes one might say there was already something akin to autumn. But though expectancy was still there, the balance trembled; spring still hoped, but long waiting had tired it a little.
Yet it had not tired it so much that he failed to catch the earliest news of a footfall in the drawing-room behind, when to a less listening sense the sound would still have been inaudible. Something of love-quickness still sharpened his senses, and he knew the footfall. Then came the whisper of a skirt, and then came Lucia.
She held an open letter in her hand, which she was still reading, and the habitual radiance of her face was a little dimmed. It was almost impossible for her to look annoyed, so serenely was her flesh and skin laid over her bones, so deliciously was set a little dimple in each cheek, so used to smiles was the fine curve of her mouth, but a shade of perplexity, a hint of complaint, was in her face. Then, raising her eyes, she saw her husband.
"Ah, dear Edgar," she said, "but I was looking for you. It is rather a nuisance; I am in a bit of a hole. I have just heard from Aunt Cathie."
"She is coming to pay us a visit, I hope," said Edgar. "I remember I begged you to write from Scotland, asking her to propose herself any time after we got back."
"I know. I did so. And she has proposed herself for next week. It really is rather awkward; the whole world will be here. Had I not better telegraph and put her off?"
"But on what pretext?" asked Edgar. "And for what reason?"
Lucia laughed. She wanted to get her way about this, and she always tried good-natured means first. It was such a pity to be cross and tiresome unless it was necessary.
"I see the distinction," she said. "But can't we find a pretext that would also be a reason? The house will be very full; you will be shooting all day with the men, and I shall have my hands full with the women. I shall simply not be able to look after her at all. She will know none of the others; she will feel so out of it. Oh, I know it is my fault for not remembering the party and asking her to come any time during September after we got back. It is quite my fault; I will say so!"
A certain look cqme into Edgar's face that Lucia had long learned to dislike, and in a manner to fear. It included a little compression of his mouth, a slight raising of his eyebrows. It implied displeasure, and it implied the sort of firmness which she was accustomed to think of as obstinacy.
"That, no doubt, is an admirable pretext," he said, "and I am sure you would put it delightfully. But it is not your reason."
Lucia glanced at the letter again.
"Ah, then here is a reason," she said. "Poor Aunt Elizabeth is not well, and Aunt Cathie says she is a little anxious about her—at least, no, she doesn't say it, but I feel sure she is. If we put it off, they can come together. That would be much better."
"Pretext again, my dear," said he a shade pedantically.
Lucia was used to resenting the shadows of implied rebukes which he occasionally cast across her path. The shadow was there now. But she still remained outwardly genial.
"Then tell me the reason, since you are so quick at these distinctions," she observed.
The pedant, the schoolmaster, became a little more marked in Edgar's face.
"I am not sure that you will like it," he said, "when stated. You will see it is not worthy of you."
"Ah, let us hear it," she remarked. "We can discuss it afterwards if necessary."
"Well, then, you are a little ashamed of your Aunt Cathie. The truth is that you do not want her to be in the house with your other friends. My dear Lucia, she is a lady, and that is all that can be asked of a woman."
"Of course she is a lady," said Lucia quickly, forgetting for the moment to disclaim this as being her reason, "but she is a very odd one."
"So that was your reason," said he.
Lucia was quite well aware that she had come out second best over this, but she still kept her annoyance to herself. Also it was no use trying to explain that away; she had made a slip, and he had put his finger on it.
"Well, for all these reasons and pretexts I think it would be much wiser to put Aunt Cathie off till after next week," she said. "I may also remind you that the burden of entertaining her will fall on me and not on you."
Edgar laughed.
"Nonsense," he said. "Aunt Cathie will entertain herself very well. And I have a very sound reason for not putting her off: it is that I know she will love seeing you as the hostess of a big party. It will give her the intensest pleasure, and perhaps she has not many pleasures. She adores you; she will love to see you shining."
Lucia did not answer at once; but, looking out over the garden, the mists above Brixham caught her eye for a moment, and her mind went back over those very lean years that she had spent there. It seemed almost incredible that it was she who had been caged there, yet she felt that the individuality which had looked out so savagely on to the narrow limits of her world there was the same exactly as that which looked out so eagerly now over its widened horizon. It had not changed at all; it still "wanted" with the same lust of living. After all, too, she owed Aunt Cathie something, and if, as Edgar said, it was true that the old dear would love to see her shining, as he put it, it was rather darling of her. It would be an inexhaustible subject of conversation, too, with her for the winter, a loaded granary. Also, she would have no end of a tussle with her husband if she was to get her way, and even with a tussle she did not feel sure that she would secure it. So, with the admirable common sense that she found reaped so sure a reward in the affairs of life, she yielded, not ungraciously, but with the most disarming charm. She turned on him with a smile.
"So, if it please my lord," she said, "I will send a telegram, shall I, to Aunt Cathie, with the warmest welcome for next week? Will that please you?"
Suddenly she paused
"Oh, Edgar," she said, "but we both forgot. We are giving 'Salome' on the Thursday. Tell me, can you imagine Aunt Cathie looking at 'Salome'? If you can, I make my compliments to your imagination. It is brilliant."
Edgar had not thought of that.
"But it's in German," he said rather feebly. "She probably won't understand it."
"John the Baptist's head isn't in German," remarked Lucia.
"It can't be helped," he said, after a pause. "Most likely she will not care to come, when you tell her."
"Ah, when I tell her!" said Lucia softly to herself.
Edgar did not hear this: Lucia had not meant him to. She was not the sort of woman who speaks asides in order to have them heard. When she wanted to be heard, she spoke out loud.
"Indeed, I am not altogether pleased myself that we are going to give it," he said, getting up. "There was that French play, too, which we gave at the end of the week in July, that I think we had better have done without. We don't want it characteristic of the house that you see here plays which the censor would not sanction for the London stage."
"We couldn't help ourselves about 'La Rouille,'" said Lucia. "The Princess asked us to have it."
Lucia had sat down at a writing-table, and taken from the stationery desk a case of telegraph forms, to send one to Aunt Cathie. Edgar, however, as his habit was when a little agitated, was pacing up and down between two columns of the terrace, four quick steps one way, a quick turn, and four quick steps in the opposite direction. The action in itself always slightly annoyed Lucia; she disliked it also for a further reason—namely, that it implied that Edgar was preparing to discuss something that troubled him. She had begun to hate the word "discussion." She immediately heard it.
"I should like to have a little discussion with you, Lucia," he said, "about several questions which arise from and are connected with what we have just been saying. To begin with, you say we could not help ourselves about 'La Rouille' because the Princess Olga asked us to have it. There I part company with you. I disagree altogether. In the ordering of our house, in dthat the entertainments we give, in the guests we invite, I hold we should consult nobody but ourselves and our own tastes."
He paused for a moment in his "quarter-decking." as Lucia called it, and looked at her. She met his glance quite calmly and spoke quite politely.
"Excuse me," she said, "but if you want to discuss those affairs with me at any length, I will interrupt you at once, instead of later, to ask you if this telegram will do:
"'Edgar and I charmed to see you on Tuesday. Pray stop a full week. Delighted you can come.'"
Edgar rang a bell.
"Yes, excellent," he said; and when the servant had taken it: "I should like to discuss things with you at some length, as you say."
Lucia had felt for many weeks now that something of this sort was simmering in her husband's mind. Times innumerable she had felt by that sixth sense of instinct, which is surer than all the other senses put together, that their life was not coming up to his expectations. Brilliant as it all was, it was another style of brilliance than that which she had planned for him. That idea of hers which had so appealed to him, and been so identical with his own that they should be at Brayton a great deal, entertain largely but locally, and throw culture broadcast over Brixham, as a ripe mushroom scatters spores, had, to say the truth, not been realized at present; nor, indeed, in Lucia's plans for the autumn and winter did it seem likely to be realized. During the Brayton week, it is true, she had asked—so she said at the time—every man, woman, and child in Brixham, including Mayor, Aldermen, and even the Coroner, to an immense garden-party, and had even entertained a large number to dinner and a French farce, but the experiment had not been a success. Brixham, it was evident to her, did not mix at all with the other guests in her house; and though she introduced all Brixham whose names she knew to all London, they had nothing whatever to say to each other, and soon all Brixham congregated together among itself again, like some large lump of food that would not be assimilated. Even more disastrous was the French play, because the Dean's wife, who knew French, got up in the middle, and signalled to her daughters and her husband to follow her. But he, most unfortunately, was asleep, and she hissed at him in awful tones, "Come away, Henry; it is not right for us to stop," until she made him, like beautiful Evelyn Hope, "awake and remember and understand." It had been screamingly funny, but at the same time it had its annoying side. Lucia did not want to risk such a thing occurring again.
The sequel had annoyed her as well, though, like the incident, it was broad farce. Brixham, it appeared, had had a battle-royal over the affair, having, as usual, nothing whatever to talk about; and the faction of the Dean's wife alluded to Lucia as "that Lady Brayton," while her supporters, of whom there were many, chiefly said that Mrs. Gopsall did not understand French. Aunt Cathie's contribution to the skirmish had been to attempt to get an English translation of the play, so that she could judge for herself. This, fortunately, was not to be had. All that was but a teacup storm; it was, however, symptomatic of what Lucia knew would be the nature of this discussion with her husband. It was only gradually that Edgar had seen how utterly divergent his projected line was from that of his wife, for there was much that was common to both. But they led not so distantly to regions very far apart.
"We are alone," said Lucia quietly. "We can discuss these points. But I should be grateful, Edgar, if you would sit down. Your incessant turning rather confuses me."
Lucia did not say that wantonly; she was aware that she would probably need to have all her wits about her. The discussion, she foresaw, would be rather vital. She meant also that it should be.
He sat down sideways to her, and she spoke.
You said that you do not want it to be thought characteristic of this house that we give here plays that the censor would not allow on the London stage," she said. "Now, as we both of us know, it is I who really am responsible for the quality of our entertainments, and when you say a thing like that, you make a direct reflection on me. Very well: I am here to discuss this with you. Will you please state your case?"
He looked up at her, startled.
"Ah, Lucia, I don't mean that," he said. "How can you so misunderstand me?"
Lucia had swiftly considered her position, and had spoken advisedly. She thought, rightly or wrongly, that the time had come for Edgar to say all that had been in his mind for so many weeks. There had been an uneasy atmosphere abroad for some time, and she wished for a clearing of the air, whether or no a thunderstorm was necessary for it. It was advisedly that she spoke again.
"I think you will see that you do mean that when you come to express yourself," she said. "You don't like the tone of omen tor tainmente, for which I am certainly responsible, and I don't think that you entirely like the tone of my friends. Is that not so also?"
"Many of them I like immensely," he said.
"Lot us revise the visiting-list, then," she said. "My dear, do come to the point at once, instead of beating about the bush. Who is it?"
"It is Lady Heron," he said.
"So I supposed. Now, as you know, I have not been very long in London, but I see her received everywhere; and as I am particularly fond of her, I see no reason why I should not be intimate with her."
"People talk about her," said Edgar. "Abominable things are said about her."
"Ah, there is the difference between us," said Lucia. "You listen to gossip, I don't. But since you have done so, please tell me what things are said about her. I mean, by the way, to tell her all you tell me. She is my friend; I think she ought to know."
That sounded gloriously unworldly, and it had the effect of making Edgar's heart go out to his wife in a sudden rush of essential admiration. But it was even more gloriously worldly; it was a piece of supreme wisdom. For the moment she completely disarmed him.
"Ah, Lucia, you are such a child," he said. "You are unspotted; it was loyalty itself that spoke there. But you can't go through this rough-and-tumble of a world on those lines. People are brutes; they say that to touch pitch is to be defiled. It isn't so, of course, with you"
But she interrupted him again.
"Oh, let us be frank," she said. "The pitch—you allude Madge in that way. What do you mean? Let us have it out. I wish to tell Madge what people say about her. Of course, I shall not say who told me."
He was silent: simply he could not tell her.
"Cannot you take my word for it," he said, "that it would be wiser of you not to see quite so much of Lady Heron? It is true she has a great position, but people, nice people"
Lucia rose in wrath. How far it was genuine concerned herself only, but certainly some of it was.
"It comes to this, then," she said—"that you make vile insinuations, the nature of which I do not choose to guess, against my best friend, and then refuse to toll me what they are. I don't ask you again; the nature of the statement itself, whatever it is, doesn't interest me in the least. Luckily, since you do not tell me what it is all about, I can judge of the quality of what you have heard. That sort of stuff is dropped from the garret into the gutter. It only disgraces those who drop it, and defiles those who sit in the gutter. I do not, nor does she."
Lucia was conscious that her tongue was running away with her, and she stopped abruptly. Yet even as she stopped, hearing her own words in her head, she endorsed them. With all her huge faults, she at any rate lacked the scratching nails and forked tongue of the mischief-maker. She had the serene indulgence towards the doings of others which, though it may only spring from indifference to morals, is yet a factor in the world that makes for peace and pleasantness. But though she thoroughly approved her own sentiments, she realized that she had said enough, if not more than enough, and with the almost superhuman control that she had over herself she throw her anger from her.
She had risen, but now sat down again, and as if her passion had heated her, she cast back the little cape that she had on her shoulders, and unpinned her hat. Her mood changed altogether. She loaned forward towards him, her chin a little raised, almost suppliant.
"Oh, my dear," she said. "I know how all you have said to me is prompted by the best, the very best, motives, but it is such a mistake. Let us go to the root of it all. Has Madge had lovers, not her husband? I dare say. But what then? It doesn't concern either you or me. It is her own business. Supposing somebody came to me to-morrow, and told me you were—anything, thief, adulterer—do you suppose I should listen? Don't you understand? What concerns me about you is what I know of you—what you are to me, not what other people tell me about you. I don't care whether your informants are correct or not in what they tell you. It isn't my affair. That is all, I think. Let us dismiss the matter entirely. I will forget it."
But these few sentences of Lucia's, spoken so quietly after her anger had left her, seemed to come to Edgar in fiery stabs. For the moment he could scarcely believe that Lucia had said these things, so astounding and shocking were they. He got up and began his quarter-decking again, and this time Lucia did not appear to notice. There was drama in the air that demanded her whole attention.
"I am afraid we cannot dismiss the matter, as you suggest," he said. "Perhaps I have misunderstood you, but what I gather you mean is that the character and morals of your friends is a matter of indifference to you. Do you mean that?"
He looked at her with a face gone suddenly pale and haggard. A few minutes ago only he had with all sincerity called Lucia a child, a thing unspotted, but was it a child who had said this?
He came a step nearer and paused, clenching his hands together.
"Quick," he said, "what do you mean? You have said that the whole moral code—that is what it comes to—is a matter of indifference to you."
Lucia saw now where they stood. The whole thing was ghastly in its simplicity. Her words had been perfectly sincere, perfectly natural, and they had come to her husband in the light of some horrible revelation, a thing that she saw at once might easily and swiftly spoil their lives if it was allowed lodgment in his mind. She had to dispose of it somehow; she had, with all the force of her quick and ingenious brain, to twist her words from the sense in which she had meant them and the sense in which he had understood them, and give them some fresh turn of meaning. She stood up also.
"Really, it seems to me that I am very good-natured to discuss things with you at all," she said, "for either, my dear Edgar, you wilfully distort my meaning, which I should be sorry to suppose was the case, or else either you or I must be very stupid—I in having stated things very badly, or you in not being able to understand what appears to me to be a very simple affair."
She paused a moment, but only for a moment, and it was really rather a difficult task that lay before her, but there was clearly no time to think things over.
"You seem to think," she said, "that I have nothing better to do than listen to you making vile insinuations about my friends and saying dreadful things about me. Yes, I must go back to that; for though I said I would dismiss it, you refused to do so. It seems that it is not enough for you to repeat the gossip of the gutter to me about Madge, but you say that you understand that the whole moral code is a thing of indifference to me. You say I have said so myself. That, Edgar, is not true. I said that the stories which people choose to circulate about my friends do not concern me at all."
She saw her way clearly now.
"Please attend carefully. Even the truth or the falsity of such idle tales does not concern me at all; I will not listen to a word of them. If someone told me hideous tales about you, would it not be vile in me to listen to them? Must not my very trust in you prevent my even considering whether such things are true or not?"
Lucia began to tremble; like all profound actors, she was genuinely affected by what she was saying. He would have interrupted her, but she held up her hand to stop him.
"Please listen," she said. "I don't know, Edgar—indeed, I am beginning to be afraid that I do not know what you mean by love; but to my mind absolute trust is an integral part of it. And if one trusts a person, it seems to me quite impossible to listen to anything against him. You appear to think otherwise. In that case I am afraid I differ from you radically and completely. I hope I shall always differ from you. But"—here Lucia's mouth quivered so that she could hardly form the words—"but I do not know what I have done that you should think these things of me. It is shameful of you."
Edgar felt his brain swim. Two minutes ago Lucia had been saying things that filled him with horror, that shocked and astounded him, and yet now she was all but repeating her own words, and those words had become a perfect gospel of sublime and exalted thought. He had to choose: to stick to his first interpretation of them, or accept the perfectly sound reading of them which Lucia, with tears in her voice and mouth quivering with outraged feeling, now offered him. Such a choice was foregone.
"Ah, Lucia, it was shameful of me," he cried—"shameful. I can't even ask your forgiveness; but if only you would give it me."
She seemed not to be able to speak for a moment, and her hand gripped the back of the chair by which she stood with trembling tension. Then slowly a smile, like the moon looking out from the flying wreaths of storm-cloud, shone through the quivering of her lips, serene and unshaken by the turmoil that had gone on so far below it.
"Oh, my dear!" she said, and held out both hands to him.
She said no other word at all, and when he would have spoken, she laid her cool fingers on his mouth. And in that heavenly silence, he, poor fool! thought only how wonderful, how beyond compare with all other women she was. That was very near the truth, but it was not near the particular truth that he waa thinking about.
Then, after a moment or two, Lucia spoke again.
"Do you know, darling," she said, "I differ from you about the question of doing 'Salome' here, and if you are not busy, I should like to discuss it with you. But let us walk about: let us go down to the end of the garden and back; it gets a little chilly sitting down."
It was daring, and she knew it, to bring the conversation back at once to the subject on which they had so radically disagreed so little a while before. But she did it with intention; it was an admirable way of showing him how utterly she had expunged all that had passed from her mind to discuss at once a subject which had been the cause of bitter words.
He winced at her suggestion.
"Ah, no, no," he said. "I don't think I can."
Here was more opportunity.
"Oh, but really we had better," she said. "I am sure we shall not disagree if we only talk about it. Because my view is this, Edgar: it is such a mistake to think, to demand, that works of art should conform to any moral code. All art, if it is art, is indifferent to morals."
That was intentional, too; she purposely used the words that had stung to show there was no sting in them.
"And the odd thing about us," she said, "is that we don't demand morals from the classical plays, but only from modern ones. That is what the French mean by our English hypocrisy, I think, and they are quite right. What can be more intensely immoral than 'Othello'? Supposing you called Othello Mr. Jones, and Desdemona Mrs. Jones, and Iago the Honourable Desmond O'Brien, and laid the scene in Brixham, there is no question whatever that the censor would refuse to license the play, especially if it was written, not in blank verse, but in prose. Of course, we are quite right in our admiration for the play 'Othello,' but where we are quite wrong is in making a distinction between what is modern and what is ancient and classical. We are not shocked with the great Catherine of Russia, but if the present Empress behaved like that we probably should be. Yes, darling, I am coming to the point. The fact that we accept Catherine of Russia—who is real life, by the way—and Othello shows that we do not really demand morals from art, and we are squeamish only when the characters talk our own language, and wear the clothes of the day. 'La Rouille,' for instance, is not nearly so corrupt as 'Othello'"
And so forth, with apparently complete success. Edgar grew animated over it. Lucia was animated already. But the success was superficial: she had but put a layer of paint over a crack that went down into the centre of the machinery of life; and when, half an hour later, they came in and parted with a little secret hand-pressing, he to his room to read the prophetic works of Blake, she to rest a little before dressing, each sat silent for a while, and Edgar's page was long unturned, and Lucia looked at the little sparkle of fire that she had lit in her bedroom without much thought of rest. Utterly as he had yielded, genuinely as he had owned himself shameful, to him mysterious characters, like the writing on the wall, began to show themselves again. Lucia had been perfectly reasonable—yes, yes, in her explanation—but her original words had borne a far more obvious interpretation. But it would not do to think of that; he was wrong about it; no doubt he was wrong about it. He must dismiss it altogether; it must leave his mind.
It left the surface of his mind, but it did not leave his mind. It sank, instead, so deep down that for the present it was out of sight.
And Lucia looked at her fire. Certain words of Madge Heron's came back to her mind. "You must settle if your string is to be black or white; are you going to be good or to be bad?"
She had done a deplorably mean thing that afternoon, and she knew it. She had, by accident, shown Edgar a bit of her real self, and it had shocked him intolerably. Then, so to speak, she had quickly put a sort of distorting mirror in front of him, herself crouching behind it, so that he might not see her, but a deformed image of himself. When he was sufficiently disgusted with it, she had dexterously tweaked it away, and again shown him herself, smiling, generous, forgiving. It was not nice, but it was clever. He had not an idea how this wonderful conjuring feat was done. It had completely taken him in. But it was necessary to take him in; there would have been ruin otherwise. And if somewhere deep down in her a little voice—conscience, perhaps, or the voice of God—said, "I am hurt; it hurts me that you should be like that," the voice was very little, very far away, very much covered up with the pillows and conveniences of life. And Madge Heron was coming next week; Lucia felt that she must tell her about it all. Madge liked her immensely, but she did not do her justice; she said she only tinkled. Surely when she knew how splendidly loyal Lucia had been, how she had risked a great deal for the sake of a friend, and for the management of a husband, Madge would do her better justice.
The charming telegram which Lucia had sent off to Aunt Cathie was received by that lady some half an hour later, and threw her into a state of agitation that was not without its pleasing side. Nothing could be done that evening, except acquaint Elizabeth, who had so far recovered from an attack of bronchial catarrh that she was able to come downstairs and keep all the windows shut, with the cordiality of her welcome, but Aunt Cathie foresaw busy days to follow. For the Hampshire Express had announced this very morning that there would be a large shooting-party at Brayton the following week, and the question of dresses was of extraordinary complication. Had Cathie known that there was to be a party, it was doubtful whether she would have proposed herself, but, having done so, in innocence of the subsequent knowledge, she turned a firm but excited face towards the event. She wished, however, that Elizabeth would play her patience and not read the Hampshire Express. She might come across that fragment of information, and Cathie saw that the result would be irony.
Elizabeth gave a rather thick cough; usually she gave thin coughs, but there had been bronchial catarrh. But Cathie knew what the cough meant. Elizabeth laid down the Hampshire Express.
"I see you have chosen your date for going to Brayton with some care, Catherine," she said. "You will get there on the day the large shooting-party assembles."
"Yes; didn't know it when I suggested Tuesday next week," said Cathie.
Elizabeth tottered to the patience table with eyebrows markedly raised. That sort of silence with her implied dissent. Then after a suitable pause she spoke in a faint voice.
"I hope you will have a very pleasant week, Catherine," she said, "and not feel that you are thrusting yourself into circles to which you do not belong. I suppose times have changed, or I dare say it is I who am getting old-fashioned; but in years that you can remember even better than I we should not have thought of leaving home in October when we had been away all August. Yes, the ace is at the bottom, as usual. You will no doubt take a great many dresses with you, and a good deal of jewellery. As I shall be alone in the house, it will be a relief to know that the amethysts are not at the beck and call of the first burglar who cares to walk into your bedroom. No doubt you would like to take my pearls also. I shall be delighted to lend you them. I dare say Lucia will not remember that they are mine, and not yours, and think that you are masquerading about in other people's things. And it is very unlikely that anybody else will be there who knows either of us."
Cathie could easily afford to overlook what bitter sarcasm there was in this peculiarly acid speech. She was often afraid she thought far too much about dress, and as a matter of fact the question of jewellery had been much in her mind since Lucia's telegram had arrived. But Elizabeth's offer to lend her the pearls made a solid foundation for a varied gorgeousness. The pearls were magnificent—Roman, and three large and lustrous rows of them.
"Thanks, dear Elizabeth," she said. "Shall like the pearls. Kind of you. Amethysts one night, pearls the next."
A great project was in Cathie's mind. But she looked with a diplomatic eye at her sister's patience to see if it was prospering before she broached the subject to her, for it was daring. For a little while it hung in the balance; then by some stroke of great good fortune Elizabeth got no less than two spaces, and began piling up cards with a hand that was fevered with success. Black knaves went on to red queens, red queens nestled under black kings, aces flowed out on the table, and showers of twos and threes and fours were poured on them.
Then Cathie spoke, for Elizabeth was actually smiling.
"I've been thinking, Elizabeth," she said, "whether I wouldn't take Jane with me to Brayton as my maid. It's a big party, you see: everybody will have maids. Then my shoulder has been very rheumatic lately. Who's to rub it if I don't take someone? Can't reach it myself, and I shouldn't like to ask a strange housemaid. And with the amethysts and your pearls, I should be easier if I knew that Jane was looking after them. Besides, there's the tipping to think of. If another servant looks after me and rubs me, I shall have to give her something handsome, and all you set against that is Jane's fare to Brayton and back, but two stations away. The cab's the same, whether I take her or not. And if I want tea in the morning, or have to ring my bell, it will be better that Jane should answer it. Having a maid will make me seem more like the rest of them, too. One doesn't want to be peculiar."
Elizabeth did not answer for a moment, for "Empress" was rapidly coming out, a thing that she had not done since August. There was a moment's check; then there was another space, and the thing was done. It was no time for sarcasm or fault-finding.
"It's out," she said. "Last time was the last night but three at Littlehampton. Yes, Cathie, I see no objection. I think it is a sensible plan; it will do Jane good, too, if she feels up to it."
"Then that's settled," said Aunt Cathie quickly, for fear Elizabeth might see objections. "And it's most thrilling that your patience has come out. I well remember the last time."
Elizabeth gathered up the cards.
"I feel better," she said. "I shall get a good night's rest, I hope."
With morning storm and stress really began for Cathie. She acquainted Jane with her destiny at breakfast, and told her that while they were at Brayton she would be Jane no longer, but Arbuthnot, and that she must be very careful, in case she saw Miss Lucia, to say "My lady" instead. It was settled also that Cathie should begin calling Jane by her surname at once, so that it might not seem strange to either of them when the thing had to be done in earnest. Otherwise Cathie was sure that she would stammer, or that Jane would not recognize that she was being spoken to. And Arbuthnot she was when the urn came in.
Then there was the tremendous question of dresses. Without further ado, Cathie sent Arbuthnot to the paper-shop at the corner of the road, where residential Brixham became mercantile, to get current copies of all the ladies' papers, up to a maximum of four, that she could find there. An hour's studious perusal of these gave her sufficient information as to what people were wearing now, and an entire turn out of her wardrobe followed. Walking-dresses, she was glad to see on the authority of Ladies' Dress, were very simple this autumn, and cut much on the lines of what was known as the "old speckledy." But the old speckledy was certainly old, and a little uncertain about its shape, while the new speckledy, which Cathie had on at the moment, was, by the standard of Ladies' Dress, unsuitably florid.
She surveyed this, comparing it with that which the very small-headed female was wearing in Ladies' Dress in the pier-glass of her wardrobe.
"Most unfortunate," she said to herself. "The old speckledy a year or two ago would have been just the thing now. Perhaps, if Ja—Arbuthnot irons it. It's just like 'walking-dress, suitable for going out with the shooters.' It's as like it as a pea."
Aunt Cathie rang the bell, and Arbuthnot appeared.
"I'll take the old speckledy," she said, "and the blue serge with the yellow facings, and I shall travel in what I've got on. That will be three. And the Sunday satin."
"Yes, miss. Did you ring, miss?" asked Arbuthnot. The question was excusable, since there were eight complete days yet before she need begin to pack. It could hardly have been for this that Aunt Cathie rang.
"Yes; the dresses as I tell you. Iron the old speckledy, Jane; that was what I rang about. Iron it to-day, please, and let me see how it comes out. That will be four day-gowns, won't it?"
Arbuthnot looked incredulous.
"Four day-gowns for a week's visit?" she asked.
Cathie was strong on the subject.
"Yes, certainly four," she said. "There's the old speckledy, Take it down now. One can't tell. It may turn out all right. I've seen a dress so altered by a good ironing that you wouldn't know it."
Still following the lines so uncompromisingly laid down in these papers, a tea-gown was the next question for decision. Shortly before lunch-time Cathie decided against it. With a maid in attendance, she could easily have tea upstairs when she came in from walking with the shooters, and rest in her room till dinner, since no amount of carpentering, however drastic, would transform any of the gowns at her disposal into a resemblance, however distant, to what a "lady of title" said was being worn now at tea. Then came the question of evening-gowns, and over these Cathie could breathe a sigh, not of resignation, but of passionate content. She was more than neat in respect of them: she was gorgeous. Even her second-best was like—quite like—a new confection from Paris; and as for the puce-coloured silk, which had practically no sleeves at all, it resembled nothing so much as the dress that the Duchess of Wiltshire had worn at the last drawing-room in July. It was even more complete than that which so voluptuously figured in the full-page illustration, for Cathie's gown had a Watteau sacque behind, and insertions of lace, rather like wedges, at the bottom of the skirt. It was comparatively unused, too. If she had been taking it abroad, she might easily have been charged duty on it, for she had only worn it on great occasions, such as the Mayoral banquet or dinner at the Bishop's three or four times every year for the last five years. Elizabeth had occasionally made pungent remarks about it, but Catherine felt now that her daring in buying the puce silk originally was triumphantly vindicated now that she was going to stay in the house of an Earl with a shooting-party. How few years had passed since Lucia had come to them—orphaned, forlorn, nearly penniless, and now it was necessary for Aunt Catherine to look out her very smartest clothes when she was going to visit Lucia! The puce silk had lived through all this period, and today its shining folds, smelling but faintly of camphor, made a brave show. It warmed Cathie's heart that the puce silk was coming out for Lucia, and it had warmed her heart to receive that welcoming telegram. For it was to no quiet week-end that she was being asked; she was asked for the whole of a week, in which the first shooting-party of the year was to assemble. Cathie was not of snobbish nature, nor anything resembling it. But it pleased her quite enormously to be so cordially asked to what Ladies' Dress would call a smart party. Chiefly it pleased her because Lucia had not altered, had remained as affectionate and considerate as she had always been.
Aunt Cathie turned from the consideration of dress and from consideration of sentiment to another important affair. But she was equally free from anxiety there also. After Elizabeth's splendid offer of last night, she need take no thought for jewellery. There were the amethysts, necklace, bracelets, and brooch, firmly set in pure gold. There were the three rows of Roman pearls, very large and lustrous, and of a magnificence indistinguishable from the authentic article. Indeed, if they were distinguishable at all, they were distinguishable the other way round, so to speak, as the little clasp of real pearls which fastened them were less remarkable, since they were small and rather stale-looking. But even they were but the frame of a superb garnet. There were other embellishments, too, for the day—a row of amber beade which Professor Joblis had pronounced to be very fine, and probably Egyptian, and which exactly matched the yellow facings of the blue serge; a pink coral brooch, a malachite cross, and a large pin for fastening flowers, from the head of which depended a solid silver pig. Aunt Cathie, whether she had flowers or not, was accustomed to wear this pinned to the front of her dress. People said it was so quaint, and it made a good opening for conversation.
Aunt Cathie came down rather late to lunch, feeling she had spent a thoroughly delightful though very strenuous morning. At intervals it had occurred to her whether it was right to think so much about dress, but, on the whole, she believed her busy hours to have been justified, for since Lucia had ascended into the ranks of those whose dresses formed illustrations for sixpenny papers, and had asked Cathie to join her there, it was clear that for Lucia's sake, as well as her own, she must appear in suitable apparel. It would never do if Lucia had cause to be ashamed of her shabbiness. But though much had been done, much still remained to do. Hats, gloves, boots, jackets, all required thought and inspection. Cathie saw that the eight days that would still elapse before she started would be none too many for all that had got to be crammed into them.
On coming down she found Elizabeth waiting for her in a most sarcastic mood. The excitement of "Empress" coming out had apparently kept her awake, and when she asked Cathie if there was anything of interest in the papers, it soon came out that Cathie's absorption in dress had prevented her from even glancing at them.
Elizabeth, having ferreted out these frivolous secrets, sat for a while silently thinking out a comment.
"All I beg you, Cathie," she said at last, "is not to go and make a guy of yourself. A plain grey dress for the day and your high black satin for evening would be far more suitable than puce silks. And do you propose to wear pearls with puce?"
Cathie could not be daunted to-day.
"No," she said, "my amethysts will go with the puce. The pearls will go with the grey."
Then she did what was rare with her: she made an appeal to her sister.
"Oh, Elizabeth," she said, "right or wrong, I am enjoying it so. Please don't try to spoil it."
"I should have thought lending you my pearls wasn't spoiling it," observed Elizabeth.
That had to be said; it was only doing the barest justice to herself. But after that, in spite of her sleepless night, she said no more, and, indeed, magnanimously changed the subject, remarking that wasps were plentiful.