CHAPTER VII
Two mornings after the day on which Lord Brayton had lunched, the unexpected and the dreadful happened. The tenant who had intended to take the Miss Grimsons' house for September died suddenly, and since it was extremely unlikely that another occupant would spring up, mushroom-like, Aunt Cathie spoke sound common-sense when she said, "We might as well go to Littlestone now as not, instead of grilling like beefsteaks."
It was at breakfast on a singularly hot morning when she made this pronouncement. Aunt Elizabeth really agreed with her—in fact, she intended to go immediately, whatever Catherine said, but she was so constituted that she had to object. She also took the fact of their intended tenant's death as a personal insult to her, levelled at her by a malignant power of some kind. It had hit its mark, too; she was grossly affronted.
"Of course, you will do as you like, Catherine," she said, "but I only beg of you not to lay it up to me, if we are all in the workhouse before Christmas. We have taken Sea View Cottage, as it is, for September, and we shall have to pay the rent of it till the end of the month, unless we conveniently die also. If we go now, it will make another fortnight. And more board wages."
Aunt Catherine went through some slow arithmetical processes in her mind, and while she was yet silent the fire kindled in Aunt Elizabeth, and she attacked, as if running amuck, everything within sight. Indeed, she attacked what was not within sight also.
"It is the third morning that Lucia has both missed prayers and not come down yet," she said. "I wonder you can sleep at night, Catherine, in the way you do, for if I heard you snoring once last night, it would be false if I said you didn't wake me up a dozen times, with the thought of how you spoil the girl, filling her head with all sorts of notions of marrying into other stations"
Aunt Cathie snorted.
"Yes, you may interrupt me, Catherine," said Elizabeth, "and I am sure I make no complaint. But when it comes to having millionaires and peers of the realm to lunch, while you go and look at broad beans without a hat afterwards, it is enough to cover me with blushes for my sister. Pray do not allude to the matter again."
"I didn't," said Cathie.
"You may think you didn't, but let us dismiss the affair, unless you wish to lay the blame on me. Let us talk about Littlestone. As I say, it will mean that we take Sea View Cottage for six weeks, and I'm sure the garden stuff that they let us have there doesn't pay for the fire we use to cook it with. And as for broiling here like beefsteaks, it will be well if we've got the money to pay for the broiling of one."
"But who talked about going there for six weeks?" cried Cathie, determined to get her word in. "I only meant to telegraph to Mrs. Morris to ask if we could have Sea View from the fifteenth of this month till the fifteenth of next month, instead of having it through September. You speak so hastily, Elizabeth, and tell me that I mean to do all sorts of things that never entered my head."
"Pray telegraph all over the country, then," said Elizabeth.
She rose and took her egg out of the copper egg-boiler and cracked it in silence.
"It was as if he did it to spite us," she said, "though I am sure that I don't wish to speak evil of the dead. But if a man of his age can't walk downstairs without falling on his head at the bottom, they ought to have somebody to look after him. I don't blame him; I blame those who should have seen what his condition was. People with fits should not be allowed to rampage all over the house.
She sniffed doubtfully at her egg, and then put it by.
"It is better economy, Catherine," she said, "to pay three-halfpence for an egg you can eat than a penny for one you can't. Perhaps after this you will allow me to go back to Mr. Tibbit, instead of making me buy eggs and butter from Johnson's wife. I make no complaint."
"Try another," said Cathie.
"I will not," said Elizabeth, rather excitedly. "Though Lucia may choose to come down to breakfast at the time when they ought to be laying for lunch, I do not wish to deprive her of any meal she may be kind enough to appear at. Let us speak of Littlestone. I gather that you have made up your mind to go telegraphing to Mrs. Morris, and find out whether we can take Sea View from—from to-morrow, I think you said."
"Yes; I don't see why we shouldn't go to-morrow," said Catherine.
Elizabeth rose.
"Then, if you will excuse me," she said, "and will make my excuses to Lucia, I will go and make up the household books. Board wages, I understand, are to begin from to-morrow. Is that your wish?"
Lucia entered at this moment.
"Oh, I am late," she said, "but I was so sleepy. Good-morning, Aunt Elizabeth; dear Aunt Cathie, do forgive me."
Elizabeth laid out a distant cheek to Lucia.
"We shall meet at lunch, no doubt," she said, "unless you are going to some fine house in the neighbourhood. Could you make it convenient to let me have a quiet hour after your breakfast, Lucia, without piano-playing? I have a great deal to do this morning. No doubt Catherine will tell you the plans she has made."
Elizabeth tottered out of the room, closing the door with extreme care, as if it was the entrance to a sick-room.
"Cross as two sticks," observed Aunt Cathie. "Poor old Elizabeth! She'll be better in a few days if we can get Sea View."
Lucia had half poured out her cup of tea, but stopped.
"Is that the plan?" she asked.
"Yes. We'll go to-morrow, if we can get it. I'm sure we can. Mrs. Morris said it was unlet throughout August. Why broil here? 'Tisn't as if it was in Australia."
Aunt Cathie meant a deep significance in that speech—a significance that she could not have expressed in direct words. She was alluding to that which she dared not openly allude to. But whether Lucia saw the allusion or not, she had no idea, for she gave no outward sign.
"Then we stop there till the middle of September, instead of the end?" she asked.
"Hope so. Why?"
"Only that I must write to Maud, and say that she must come early in September, instead of in the middle. I have no doubt she will be able to manage it."
Though Aunt Cathie had joined in the French lessons, and had beaten time (except for the Tschaikowsky), and had shown Lucia many "touches" in the matter of sketching, she felt dumbly and barrenly that there was a part of Lucia that she had never been given admittance to. That sense was with her now. Though Lucia gave an excellent reason for this tiny adjustment of her own affairs, she felt that she was silently making another adjustment, and silently planning something further. But Lucia's silence, which was the main cause of this imaginative effort on Aunt Cathie's part, was soon broken, and, as if with a weight removed, she became herself again.
"Ah! it will be heavenly," she said; "and I love to think of the cool sea and the fresh winds on this sort of morning. I must go into the town after breakfast, and tell them to send my bathing-dress at once. I only said I should want one; now I must have it. And, Aunt Cathie, wouldn't it be nice to have a little tent of our own on the beach? I saw one yesterday in Tompkinson's, quite nice and quite cheap. We might put it up on the lawn here, too, and at your garden-parties you might have tea and ices in it. It was only two pounds; do let me give half, and it will be yours and mine. It was quite waterproof, the man said; if it proved not to be, he would take it back. Besides, if we jmt up our own tent on the beach, it will save a shilling each time we bathe. If we are there a month, do you see, there is thirty shillings off the two pounds instantly. Fancy getting a waterproof tent for ten shillings: that is what it comes to."
But Lucia revolved many things when she started on her bicycle after breakfast to conclude matters with Mr. Tompkinson. In especial, this premature and pre-dated departure from Littlestone vexed her. She had contemplated another fortnight more of what should be a dull August for Lord Brayton, and she knew she would have behaved differently when he lunched with them, if she had thought that that was to be their last meeting for a month or more. In September he was going to Scotland, and she had certainly meant to bring matters to a crisis, if possible, before he went there. She had conducted the affair of the lunch as if they were going to meet again before long, and though she had done a certain amount of quiet fine work on that occasion, she would, so she felt now, have done more, if she had known that she was making ultimate speeches instead of penultimate. She would have given the impression of even greater perception than she had done; she would have given (or rather have allowed him to give) a more personal tone to the conversation; she would have been even more tenderly solicitous over the top of Aunt Cathie's head than she had been, would have run into the house to get an extra cushion. But her regret was not of a poignant nature; she still believed that she had done pretty well.
Aunt Cathie had given her the telegram to Mrs. Morris of Sea View to send off, prepaying the answer. And as she pedalled slowly along the white dusty road, the expediency of not sending it, so that no answer could be received, occurred to her. But though she knew that she had quite sufficient immoral courage to do this, if it really helped her, she saw at once that there would only be the gain of a day or two at the outside, since Aunt Cathie would telegraph again, and a day or two was of no particular use, since Lord Brayton, as she knew, had a party coming to-day, and was not likely to be bored or dull (which she wished him to be) while they were there. Had she only known to what maturity his thoughts had arrived on the evening when he walked out alone below the stars and looked towards the amber lights of the town, she would have spared herself this trouble and perplexity, and have gone to Littlestone or anywhere else with triumphant confidence. But not knowing that, she had to make the best plans on the data that were hers. Certainly a day or two days more in Brixham would not materially benefit her; she might just as well send that telegram as not. Then suddenly she said "Oh!" quite out loud, broke into an enchanting smile, and exchanged her strolling progression for a much brisker rate. She even passed the tent-shop without getting off, and went straight to the office to dispatch the telegram as quickly as possible. A perfectly simple idea, and one that would embody the advantage of another interview, had occurred to her.
Lucia was always transparently honest in her dealings with herself; she never covered up a piece of her mind and pretended it was not there, though she habitually showed to other people just that which she thought it would be good for them (or for her) to see. She was aware that such an attitude might have been called hypocrisy, but she preferred herself to call it diplomacy. And on returning, after ordering the tent and her bathing-dress, and sending the telegram, she went up to her room, and proceeded to exercise her gift. A rough copy was needful, and she wrote on the back of an old French exercise.
"Dear Lord Brayton"—
(Lucia paused for a moment: she must have some perfectly prosaic reason for writing. She soon thought of one)—
"I am sending you back your copy of Omar, with many thanks. As a matter of fact, I have not really quite finished transferring the alterations into my own copy, and I shall venture to ask you to lend it me again in the autumn. The fact is that both my aunts are feeling rather pulled down with this stuffy weather, and I have persuaded them to pack up at once and go to Littlestone for their holiday, instead of waiting another fortnight here, and I simply dare not take your precious book to seaside lodgings. So many thanks for the loan of it!
"I long sometimes to hear more of your schemes. It all seemed so big and wonderful, and it will all be true, the most beautiful fairy story that ever happened.
"I must go; Aunt Cathie is calling me, who is in the throes of packing. The dear always leaves out what she particularly wants to take, and must be superintended.
The rough copy was after all quite unnecessary. Lucia read it through twice, found nothing to alter, and having made a fair copy of it and a neat parcel of Omar, put the two carefully away until it was certain that they would start to-morrow.
"That ought to produce something if there is anything to produce," she observed frankly. "Now about Maud."
The answer to the telegram had been satisfactory, and one morning a few days later Lucia was sitting on the sands just to the east of the single row of houses that fronts the sea at Littlestone, letting her hair dry in the sun and wind after her bath. The sand, trodden by the wavelet feet of the outgoing tide, was wet and shiny, and covered with little ripples, while beyond stretched the great pearly levels of the sea, basking and vacant. After the confined heat of Brixham, the warm salt breezes and fresh heat of the seaside was unspeakably invigorating; and this morning, while Lucia bathed, Aunt Cathie, in the glow of rejuvenation, had pulled off her boots and stockings, tucked up her skirts, and had magisterially waded nearly up to her large knees, heedless of the scorn of Elizabeth, who warned her of the danger of cold salt water to the aged.
"Most bracing and refreshing," Aunt Cathie had said decisively as she put on her stockings again; "it has done me a world of good, Elizabeth, and I shall paddle every day while we are here. Fancy never having thought of it all these years! What a waste!"
"Then don't blame me if you are a cripple all the winter," said Elizabeth.
Aunt Cathie strained her eyes seaward.
"I will not," she said. "Dear me, I wish Lucia would not swim so far out. There may be currents, and I am told there are some dreadfully deep holes about. But she won't hear if I do call. I shall go up to the house, Elizabeth, and bring down letters and papers. Shall I bring yours?"
"I should sit in the shade of the tent and rest, if I were you," said Elizabeth. "You will send the blood to your head, walking in the sun after paddling, so don't say afterwards that I didn't warn you. It seems to me that all we get out of the tent, which was a great extravagance, is to be permitted to sit outside in the shade of it, as Lucia or her clothes always occupy the interior."
"For one hour a day?" said Cathie; "you can sit in it and welcome for the other twenty-three. Then I shall bring your letters, shall I?"
"No, pray do not touch them," said Elizabeth; "as like as not you will drop them, carrying them about. I warn you about your head, Cathie."
So Cathie went off, and soon Lucia came out from the sea, bare-legged and bare-armed, with her bathing-dress clinging close to her slim figure, and sat down dripping by Aunt Elizabeth, who instantly closed her eyes.
"Lucia, I beg you to go into the tent at once," she said. "There was a man passed ten minutes ago, and it is likely that he'll soon be back. Though I have no doubt that it is thought quite proper now for a girl to show more arms and legs than I should like to specify, your bathing-dress, being wet, clings very closely."
Lucia looked round.
"There is neither man, woman, nor child for miles, dear," she said, "and sitting in the sun after bathing is about the nicest part of it all. I only wish I could take my bathing-dress off. Then it would not cling so closely."
Aunt Elizabeth gave a faint scream, then recovered her nerve.
"Lucia, the tent," she said, as if sternly introducing them to each other.
The girl made a rapid and sketchy toilet, and with her hair down her back was sitting again outside when Aunt Cathie returned
"Two for you, Lucia," she said.
"I hope you have not brought mine," said Elizabeth.
"Couldn't. There weren't any. There's the paper for you."
Elizabeth sighed.
"I suppose as we get old it is very natural that people should forget us," she said. "Only it seems strange that there should be two for Lucia and none for me. Let me look at them, Lucia, to see there is no mistake. I remember last year you opened a letter of mine, no doubt by accident, but such accidents are very annoying."
"Miss Lucia Grimson—Miss Lucia Grimson!" said Lucia.
Aunt Elizabeth took them and turned them over, as if expecting to find another address on the back. Then she looked at the postmarks, one of which was Brixham.
"One of your letters has come from Brixham," she said. "It will be pleasant to hear what news there is. Who is your correspondent?"
Elizabeth was notable for her intense curiosity about other people's letters. She would not go so far as to read letters that were left about, but she constantly, by means of questions, direct or indirect, tried to glean their contents. Though she never remembered arriving at any sensational disclosure, she pursued her passion with avidity.
Lucia opened her letter, saw there were four sides of writing, and that it was from Lord Brayton, and instantly put it into its envelope again.
"It is from Lord Brayton," she said; "he acknowledges the safe receipt of a book I sent to him."
But Elizabeth, too, had seen there were four sides of writing.
"He makes a somewhat voluble acknowledgment," she remarked bitterly.
Lucia smiled with perfect good-humour.
"Yes, doesn't he?" she said.
She read her other letter, which was from Maud, and communicated the contents. She proposed to come for her visit during the first week of September, if that suited. Then, without the slightest appearance of hurry, Lucia got up.
"I shall go up to the house and get tidy before lunch," she said.
Elizabeth waited till she was out of hearing.
"How long has this clandestine correspondence been going on?" she asked her sister. "There were four sides of writing. I saw them."
Aunt Cathie felt hotly about this.
"Then you've got no business to, Elizabeth," she said, "and I wonder at you. You demean yourself by looking over Lucia's letter."
"I consider it a providential circumstance that I did," said Elizabeth.
"Well, then, I'm not of your way of thinking," said Cathie. "If there's anything that we ought to know, Lucia will tell us. If she does not, it's not our business."
"I shall not rest till I find out the contents of that letter," said Elizabeth firmly. "You have no strength of character, Catherine; you leave everything to me."
"I certainly leave that sort of thing to you," said Cathie, "and I wish you'd leave it alone."
Elizabeth drew a vague diagram of curves and straight lines, signifying nothing, with the point of her sunshade in the sand.
"Lucia has no delicacy," she announced. "In our day, Catherine, if either of us had heard from a strange peer, we should instantly have taken the letter to our mother. At least I should, though I have my doubts about you in the light of this."
"But we never did hear from a strange peer," said Catherine.
"That is quite immaterial. I gather that you will make no efforts to find out what Lord Brayton writes to Lucia about?"
"Of course I will not. If Lucia thinks good, she will tell us."
"Catherine, you have neither strength of character nor sense of duty," said her sister. "Let us get back to lunch, though I am sure it is little appetite I bring to it. I have been much agitated. I should not wonder if this threw me back for a week."
What exactly Aunt Elizabeth was to be thrown back from was not completely clear, and Catherine forbore to ask. She herself was delightfully excited about Lucia's letter, and longed in a different spirit, but with even greater intensity than Elizabeth longed, to know more. Though she would not have dreamed of doing what Elizabeth had done and looked over the letter, she could not but be thrilled with the fact that there were four pages. "So it must be about something," she thought, knowing the difficulty of making letters that were about nothing extend to three. Perhaps Lucia would tell her; Lucia and she were so very friendly, and the girl often talked to her confidentially. Yet she had hardly ever said anything about Lord Brayton, and Cathie felt in her bones—like rheumatism—that there was something to tell. And it was partly because she wanted to know so much that she felt it utterly impossible to ask her.
Sea View was a house in a row of sounding titles. On one side of them was Blenheim, on the other Balmoral, while farther down was Engadine, Chatsworth, and the houses of Devonshire and Stafford. Six rather steep steps led up from a small clanging gate to the front door, which had panels of stained glass in it. On one side was the drawing-room, which Elizabeth had made quite homey with a quantity of woollen head-rests, here really necessary, since without them the person who reclined on the American-cloth sofa would have instantly slid off it on to the floor. The mantelpiece was of the type known as handsome, and had imitation malachite plaques opulently let into a smooth hard substance that might easily be mistaken for black marble. Tiles of bright floral design framed the grate, which was filed with ribbons of polychromatic paper. In the bow-window, rather obstructing the view out, but equally obstructing the view of those without who wished to look in, was a marine telescope on three brass legs, which Aunt Elizabeth vaguely felt should have its cap permanently put on to it because of the bathers. It was true that you need not look at the bathers, but if you did they would appear so unpleasantly near. A bookcase contained apparently centuries of the Monthly Packet, bound in shiny brown calico, and, indeed, the whole house seemed to be rather full of hard and slippery furniture, oilcloth taking the place of carpets on the stairs, and the wall-paper being an imitation of marble that was otherwise happily unknown. A barometer and an umbrella-stand naturally stood in the hall, the former of a pessimistic nature that silently stuck to the fact that it was "stormy." But the whole house was, except when the kitchen-door had been left open, redolent of the freshness of the sea, and Lucia, who had again secured a bedroom at the very top of the house, lived as in the deck-cabin of a ship.
All these details of the place had a certain relevance with regard to the letter that Lucia had received, and which she thought over as she made herself tidy. For Lord Brayton, it appeared, before going to Scotland was to spend a few days at a house near Littlestone, and he asked leave to come over some afternoon. He named the date when he would be in the neighbourhood, which was unfortunately during the week that Maud would be staying at Sea View. And in any case, whether Maud was there or not, she could with difficulty picture herself talking to him as he sat on the American-cloth sofa, facing the malachite of the mantelpiece.
But this latter consideration did not long occupy her. It was true that she would have chosen not to be found in these hopeless surroundings; but if he came, she could arrange that they should all have tea on the beach, or do something that should detach him from the house. Lucia was not yet quite sure that it was better that he should come. She did not exactly fear Maud as a rival, but she must either tell him that Maud would be here, and Maud that he was coming, or else—somehow or other—Maud must know nothing whatever about it. For though Lucia had never for a moment gone back on her original intention as to cutting Maud out, if possible, she felt that the moment for telling Maud about her growing friendship with this man would be a rather difficult one. Indeed, she had to decide at once whether to tell Maud about it, before things got further, or not to tell her till she herself had done her best, and succeeded or failed. Failure, however, she did not contemplate. Then it struck her that his request to come over was rather pointed, and that she could really invent no valid excuse why he should not. But if, so to speak, any "good" were to come of his visit, he must be given the opportunity of seeing her alone. That was practically impossible if her aunts and Maud were in the house.
Then she saw her whole plan illuminated and complete from end to end. It was rather a hazardous one, but she was prepared to take risks. She wrote a charming little note to him, suggesting that he should come over on one of the dates that he had mentioned, found a train in a local time-table that would bring him to Littlestone about four in the afternoon, and another one that would take him away about six. Then, since fine weather was essential to her plan, she almost prayed for fine weather, posted her note at the pillar-box outside the house, and joined her aunts at lunch. She told them many things Lord Brayton had said in his note, a few he had not, concerning the weather at Brixham, and somehow omitted to mention that he had asked leave to visit them the week after next, or that she had begged him to do so.
Maud arrived some ten days after this, and received the warmest of welcomes from Lucia.
"Ah! it's too, too splendid," she said; "and if you think, now that I've got you here, that I am going to let you go under a fortnight, you are quite, quite mistaken. Yes, the busman will take all your things to the house—won't you, William?—and you and I will go straight off to the beach till tea-time. It's the biggest, emptiest beach you ever saw; there's nothing there at all but the sea, lying like some great, kind animal. And the house is quite the most ridiculous you ever saw, and you slide off every chair if you are not careful, and Aunt Cathie wades. Isn't it heavenly of her? Oh, you've never seen her, have you? so you can't yet grasp how heavenly it is; and Aunt Elizabeth played patience on the beach yesterday, and a gust of wind came, and all the cards rose up like at the end of 'Alice in Wonderland.' Now you may talk for one minute, and then I shall begin again."
The arrears of general events were soon cleared off, and after a stroll along the beach, the two sat down on the hot, dry sand, and the talk became more intimate.
"Yes, I turned over a new leaf soon after I went down to Brixham," said Lucia, "and it all became so much pleasanter. But, you see, you do naturally what I had to make a great effort to do."
Maud's grey, grave eyes looked with admiring devotion at Lucia, as she sat with legs crossed, like some graceful boy, pouring the dry sand through her fingers in the fashion of an hourglass.
"And what's that?" she asked.
"You know. You are naturally unselfish, and you don't have to think about other people and their wants and desires. The thinking does itself with you, and you just go and do the things. Now, I have first of all to make myself think, and then make myself do the things. You are nice inside, as I told you before, and I am not. People can't help loving you; but I have to go through all my tricks before they love me. Even then they don't always."
Maud laughed.
"Oh, Lucia, what dreadful nonsense you talk!" she said. "You whom everybody has fought for, so to speak, and done their best to spoil! And they haven't succeeded one atom. Even I haven't succeeded in spoiling you."
Lucia let her hands go wide, dropping the sand that was in them.
"There was nothing to spoil," she said with a sudden earnestness. "You can't spoil anything unless it is good to begin with. I turned over a new leaf, as I said, but why did I do that? Simply and solely, Maud, that I might have a more comfortable time. I want people to love me, but why? Because then they will be nice to me, and give me what I want. That's me—not pleasant, but me."
"Ah! you are mixing up two words which haven't anything to do with each other," said Maud. "We all find it convenient to be liked, because that does make things pleasant. But love is quite a different matter."
Lucia sat quite silent a moment. The simplicity and certainty of what Maud said struck some chord within her of which she was but seldom conscious. Just for these few seconds she felt on a plain immeasurably low compared to her friend: it was as if some unquiet wind was conscious for a moment of the stillness of the stars. Then Maud spoke again in that cool, slow voice that so admirably expressed her.
"How wilful you are sometimes, dear Lucia!" she said, "as now, when for some reason you seem to want to make yourself out so mean and unfeeling. Is it not a good thing that I see through you? You know the difference quite well. If one just likes a person, and there is a piece of pleasure going about, why, I am afraid one grabs it very often, and doesn't mind much whether the other person has to go without it. But if you love anybody, you grab the pleasure in order to give it to the person you love. And the fact that you deprive yourself of it is just what makes the giving it away so delightful. I dare say that is selfish in its way, too; giving it, is to give yourself the highest possible enjoyment. You delight in the cost of it. Dear me, what very commonplace sentiments! I apologize."
Maud, always slow with her tongue, always reticent about what she felt keenly, stopped abruptly. She saw that something in what she said had affected Lucia—that her words, commonplace as they seemed to her, put something difficult before her friend. What it was she scarcely asked herself; far less did she dream of asking Lucia.
But poor Lucia—she saw the idea like a view of distant mountains, intolerably far and intolerably above her. And her next feeling was one of resentment and rebellion at the presentation of what was but barely intelligible to her. She felt impatient with it, as a man feels impatient at some sentence spoken to him in a foreign tongue, the meaning of which he but dimly conjectures. And this impatience quenched the momentary impulse she had felt to tell Maud, anyhow, what she had done, what she was doing, what she intended to do. And the impulse fainter than this—to abandon her design, or rather to think about abandoning it—went out like a candle in a high wind; a puff, and it was dark night again.
She scooped up the dry, hot sand, and once more let it trickle through her fingers.
"Oh, one way of love and another way of love, as Browning tells us," she said quickly, "and another, and yet another. We're all different, and all our ways of love are different, just as our manner of drinking our tea is different, which reminds me that it must be tea-time. Wouldn't it be dull if we were all alike? You want to love to slow music, you know, and I want to love to—to a cake-walk."
She paused just a moment, and became thoroughly content with herself; distant mountains were gone, and there was no far-off starlight any more.
"Oh, Maud!" she said, getting up, "and what of It—Him—Lord Brayton? I've seen him again, by the way. Somebody died, and he is Aunt Cathie's landlord, and I think he's delightful. He came to lunch one day, and we talked about Aims and Objects of Existence—all with enormous capital letters. Do you still want to grab pleasures, and give them him? What complications in your plan! If there's a pleasure lying about and you grab it, and he wants it rather, and I want it rather more, to which of us will you give it? If you say you will give it him, I shall never speak to you again."
Intimate as Maud was with Lucia, she felt she could not explain.
"You don't understand," she said quietly. "Things don't happen like that."
Again Lucia felt the degradation of her level, and again that made her impatient and incredulous of the reality of the other level. She spoke daringly, but with calculation.
"But I really want to know," she said. "Oh, Maud, look at that fishing-boat with the red sail against the grey of the sea. Suppose Lord Brayton liked me better than you, would you ever forgive me?"
The daring of this was justified. To Maud's transparent mind the case necessarily became a purely imaginary one, otherwise Lucia could never have spoken of it.
"But, of course, I should want both of you to get what you wanted most," she said. "And as for forgiving, you can't forgive or not forgive a thing as big as love. It is destiny, too. It must happen or not happen, independently of us. You might as well quarrel with the sun for rising in the morning."
Lucia laughed.
"Well, I do if it wakes me up," she said.
Maud had not yet met Lucia's aunts, but within a couple of days she was a dweller in the innermost places of Aunt Cathie's heart, partly by virtue of her devotion to Lucia, partly by the charm of her own simplicity and goodness. By virtue of that she at once pierced through Aunt Cathie's reticence and gruffness. She easily divined what tenderness and softness lay beneath that marvellously horny shell, knowing in herself how difficult it was to her to put into words anything that was deeply felt. And Aunt Cathie, she saw at once, had the same barrier in her speech that made words and feelings of kindness and sympathy rebound, so to speak, from it, and stun themselves. These limitations, in fact, of the two were a bond between them, even as was their essential kindness, and in each heart was the same presiding goddess, Lucia.
The presiding goddess had refused to come out this morning till she had written her letters to her three particular girl friends at Brixham; but in obedience to her suggestion, Aunt Cathie had taken Maud out to sit and stroll on the beach, till the bathing-hour of noon. Even in these two days there had been conferred on Cathie the degree of "aunt" to Maud also, and this fact was pathetically precious to her, for it had come naturally, involuntarily. Only yesterday Maud had begun a sentence, "Oh, Aunt Cathie!" by accident, apologizing immediately, and saying that Lucia had so often called her Aunt Cathie that the phrase had escaped without thought. Aunt Cathie had flushed a little, and killed a wasp on the window with extraordinary truculence before she replied. Then she said: "Well, you can't go back now. I'm your aunt, Maud."
So aunt and niece sat together on the shore, each more easily expansive to the other than to anyone else, though their friendship was of so short duration, if measured by the misleading scale of hours. The sea was very far out, for the tide was low, and the glory of the shining sand stretched at their feet. A few red sails struggled seaward, for the wind was northerly; a little way off, inside the bathing-tent, Elizabeth was busy with head-rests.
"That's Lucia all over," said Cathie suddenly. "She can't enjoy herself till she has remembered other people. Did I tell you about the tennis, Maud?"
"I don't think so."
"Well, she and I used to play lawn-tennis. I thought it would amuse her. You've never seen me play lawn-tennis. I throw the ball up and can't hit it, you know, heaps of times. So Lucia and I played. Then the other day I saw her playing at some garden-party. It was quite different: people hit the ball: it went backwards and forwards. She must have thought me mad. But she appeared to enjoy it, just because of that—because she thought I was liking it. She never let me see what a bore it must have been."
"Dear Aunt Cathie!" said Maud. "But it was just as nice of you to do it. It bored you just as much, you know."
"Didn't bore me at all; I loved it," said Aunt Cathie, "for I thought Lucia was enjoying it. Only now I know she can't have been."
Aunt Cathie took off her spectacles and wiped them. "There's a poem somewhere," she said, "about somebody being a sunbeam. I've often looked for it in six volumes of selections which I've got at home, but I can't find it. Lucia's that; she does it as easily as a sunbeam, too; she just shines. I wish I could put my hand on it. Longfellow, perhaps, or Mrs. Hemans. She—she confides in me, too," went on Aunt Cathie a little tremulously. "She tells me if she is in a hole; and once, Maud—once I managed to help her out of one. I did enjoy it. You see, when you get old like me and Elizabeth"—she glanced nervously round—"though, of course, I'm much older than Elizabeth, you seem to lose something. You are there, just the same, but people think it's only an old woman who is there. And so very naturally they don't take much notice. It's that that Lucia does: she takes notice of us—oh, it's more than that—she loves me, I think; she makes a girl of me. I—I can't tell you what that is to old people. We talk French, we sketch, though Lucia doesn't think much of the touches; we have little conspiracies. And now, dear, you've come, too. You let me talk to you like this, and make me able to talk."
Aunt Cathie blew her nose very violently.
"So bless you, dear," she said. "I'm a little cramped with sitting."
A voice came from the bathing-tent.
"The time, please, Catherine?" it said.
Aunt Cathie fished up the warming-pan watch.
"Just on twelve," she called back.
There was a short pause, and Elizabeth appeared at the tent-door.
"Then Lucia will be wanting the tent," she observed, "and I have just got into my stitch."
"Get into it again," said Cathie.
Aunt Elizabeth moved a little away.
"I had no intention of interrupting," she said. "If I sit in the shadow of the tent at the far side, I trust I shall disturb nobody."
There was a short pause in the conversation of the others.
"What hole did you help her out of?" asked Maud at length. "Lucia hasn't told me, I think."
"Well then, dear, I mustn't," said Cathie. "It's Lucia's secret. I can only tell you she left cards, mine and Elizabeth's, too, on somebody one shouldn't have thought of calling on."
"Do you mean the person wasn't respectable?" asked Maud.
"Good gracious, no! We weren't, so to speak. So I said I had done it, because he came to call on us, without our having called, so far as Elizabeth knew. Don't ask me more. Change the subject. It's Lucia's and my secret. You're not in it this time. Ha! We're rivals. I've won."
Aunt Cathie gave vent to an extraordinary sort of crow, of which the intention was humorous, but which had a serious foundation. She rejoiced that Lucia had not told Maud their secret, and could not help crowing. Lucia had told her what she had not told to her best friend. It was true that she had told Aunt Cathie about it (and had made no secret of that) because Aunt Cathie could help her. But in this hour of triumph that was forgotten. Then the dear old soul, still pining for love and affection, laid a hand on Maud's arm.
"Old folks are greedy," she said. "Can't you tell me something you haven't told Lucia? I should chuckle over Lucia, too, then!"
Maud sat up and devoted a few moments to honest reflection.
"I can't think of anything," she said. "I think I have told Lucia all I have to tell. I'm so sorry."
That concession was something. Aunt Cathie felt another year or two younger.
Two days after this Lucia announced a plan, or, in other words, a picnic. To-morrow was going to be the second Thursday in September, when there was to be an old English autumn fair at Trew. Trew was ten miles off, but one carriage would hold them all, and the plan was a surprise. She had engaged a carriage to be at Sea View by eleven next day—this was her "treat"—and they would all go over and lunch at Trew, see the old English fair, and drive back in the evening. In fact, it was no use anybody saying she wouldn't go: she had set her heart on this, and Aunt Elizabeth needn't look bankrupt, because she hadn't understood, for the carriage was Lucia's, and she was going to take them for a nice drive. She had read the account of the projected fair to them all two days before; it was a sort of pagan harvest festival, full of folk-lore, and was tremendously picturesque. At eleven to-morrow then, please, and she and Maud would bathe before breakfast.
Aunt Cathie was intensely discouraging, but simply because she was so touched.
"Frightful extravagance," she said. "Go by train and walk at the other end."
"And who gave me a set of tennis balls?" said Lucia gently. "And who lengthened the lawn? And who got me out of an awful hole? And who is Aunt Cathie?"
This passed under cover of somewhat louder objections from Elizabeth. She supposed they would have to take cold lunch with them, and where were they to have tea? Cathie, as was her nature, found no reply to Lucia's whispers, and answered Elizabeth instead.
"It's cold lunch anyhow," she remarked, "so we take it. Tea, too. Such things as tea-baskets. I've got one. Great fun; thanks, Lucia. I wanted to see it. So does Elizabeth."
"I had meant to work to-morrow," said Elizabeth, "but I can do more the day after and make up for lost time. I hope you beat the man down, Lucia, and said you would only give him half of what he asked. I never heard of taking a carriage for the day!"
Lucia clapped her hands.
"No questions allowed," she cried. "You get into my carriage at eleven. You get out again about eight in the evening. Dear Aunt Elizabeth, I hope it will be amusing. You shall take your wool-work with you, if you like, and I will hold skeins from the seat opposite."
With this the subject was dismissed. Aunt Cathie, bursting with tenderness, gave Lucia an enormous helping of cold lamb, and piled salad on her plate.
But Lucia hardly tasted these things.