A Young Man's Year

He fretted about money too – a thing pathetic to the eyes with which at present Arthur looked on the world. But he did; he might be found surrounded by account-books, rent-books, pass-books, puzzling over them with a forlorn air and a wrinkled brow. It was not long before he took Arthur into his confidence, in some degree at least, about this worry of his.

"We spend a terrible lot of money; I can't think where it all goes," he lamented.

"But isn't it pretty obvious?" laughed Arthur. "You do things in style – and you're always doing them!"

"There's this house – heavy! And Hilsey always sitting there, swallowing a lot!" Then he broke out in sudden peevishness: "Of course with anything like common prudence – " He stopped abruptly. "I'm not blaming anybody," he added lamely, after a pause. And then – "Do you keep within your income?"

"I don't just now – by a long chalk. But yours is a trifle larger than mine, you know."

"I can't do it. Well, I must raise some money, I suppose."

Arthur did not know what to say. The matter was intimate and delicate; for there could be no doubt who was responsible, if too much money were being spent.

"I'm sure if you – well, if you made it known how you feel – " he began.

"Yes, and be thought a miser!" His voice sank to a mutter just audible. "Besides all the rest!"

So he had grievances! Arthur smiled within himself. All husbands, he opined, had grievances, mostly unsubstantial ones. He could not believe that Godfrey was being forced into outrunning his means to any serious extent, or that he had any other grave cause for complaint. But, in truth, Godfrey's trouble – money apart – was an awkward one. He was aggrieved that he had not got what he did not want – his wife's affection. And he was aggrieved that she did not want what he had no desire to give her – namely, his. The state of things aggrieved him, yet he had no wish – at least no effective impulse – to alter it. He felt himself a failure in all ways save one – the provision of the fine things and the pleasures that Bernadette loved. Was he now to be a failure there too? He clung to the last rag of his tattered pride.

Yet often he was, in his shy awkward way, kindly, gracious, and anxious to make his kinsman feel sure of a constant welcome.

"Coming too often?" he said, in reply to a laughing apology of Arthur's. "You can't come too often, my dear boy! Besides you're a cousin of the house; it's open to you of right, both here and at Hilsey. Bernadette likes you to come too."

"Has she told you so?" Arthur asked eagerly.

"No, no, not in words, but anybody can see she does. We're too grave for her – Judith and I – and so's Oliver Wyse, I think. She likes him, of course, but with him she can't – er – "

"Play about?" Arthur suggested.

"Yes, yes, exactly – can't do that sort of thing, as she does with you. He's got too much on his shoulders; and he's an older man, of course." He was walking up and down his library as he talked. He stopped in passing and laid his hand on Arthur's shoulder for a moment. "It's good of you not to grudge me a talk either, sometimes."

"But I like talking to you. Why do you think I shouldn't?"

Godfrey was at the other end of the room by now, with his back turned, looking into a book.

"You've never seen Hilsey, have you? Would it bore you to come down for a bit later on? Very quiet there, of course, but not so bad. Not for longer than you like, of course! You could cut it short if you got bored, you know."

"Oh, you needn't be afraid of my being bored. I should love it of all things." Indeed the invitation filled him with delight and gratitude. "It's jolly good of you, Godfrey, jolly kind, I think."

Godfrey murmured something like, "See how you like it when you get there," sat down with his back still turned, and obliterated himself with a large book.

He was certainly difficult to know, to get to close quarters with. If he approached you at one moment, he shrank back the next; he seemed to live in equal fear of advances and of rebuffs. It was difficult to know how to take him, what idea to form of him. Plenty of negations suggested themselves readily in connection with him, but positive qualities were much harder to assign; it was easier to say what he was not than what he was, what he did not like than what he did, what he could not do than what he could. At all events what positive qualities he had did not help him much in his life, and were irrelevant to the problems it presented. By nature he was best made for a student, immured in books, free from the cares of position and property, and from the necessity of understanding and working with other people. Fate had misplaced him as a wealthy man, burdened with obligations, cumbered with responsibilities. He had misplaced himself as the husband of a brilliant and pleasure-loving wife. He ought to have been a bachelor – the liabilities of bachelors are limited – or the mate of an unpretending housewife who would have seen to his dinner and sewn on his buttons. In an unlucky hour of impulse he had elected to play Prince Charming to a penniless Beauty; Prince Charming appearing in a shower of gold. Of all the charms only the gold was left now, and the supply even of that was not inexhaustible, though the Beauty might behave as if it were. He had failed to live up to the promise of his first appearance, to meet the bill of exchange which he had accepted when he married Bernadette. He lacked the qualifications; ardour of emotion, power to understand and value a nature different from his own, an intelligent charity that could recognise the need in another for things of which he felt no need – these he had not, any more than he possessed the force of will and character which might have moulded the other nature to his own.

He met his failure with a certain dignity of bearing which all his awkwardness could not efface. He did not carp at his wife or quarrel with her; he treated her with consistent politeness and with a liberality even excessive. He showed no jealousy of her preferences; that she would ever give him cause for serious jealousy, fears for his honour, had never yet entered his head; such matters did not lie within the ordinary ambit of his thoughts. But the sense of failure had bitten deep into his heart; his pride chafed under it perpetually. His life was soured.

Arthur saw little of all this, and of what he did see he made light. It is always the easiest and most comfortable thing to assume that people are doing as they like and liking what they are doing. If Godfrey lived apart from the life of the house, doubtless it was by his own choice; and, if he had a grievance, it must just be about money. The paymaster always has a grievance about money; he is Ishmael, with every man's and every woman's hand against him – stretched out for more. A legitimate occasion for a grumble – but it would be absurd to make much of it.

Besides what serious trouble could there be when Bernadette was so radiant and serene, so gay and merry with himself and with Judith, so gentle and friendly with her husband? There seemed no question of two parties in the house – as there sometimes are in houses – with the one or the other of which it was necessary for him to range himself. His adoration for Bernadette in no way clashed with his growing affection for her husband; rather she encouraged and applauded every sign of greater intimacy between the men. It was with the sense of a triumph in which she would surely share that he carried to her the news that Godfrey – Godfrey himself, of his own accord – had invited him to Hilsey. Of her cordial endorsement of the invitation he had, of course, no doubt. Perhaps, after all, she had inspired it.

"Now don't say you put him up to it! That wouldn't be half such a score," he said, laughing.

She seemed surprised at the news; evidently she had not taken any part in the matter. She looked a little thoughtful, possibly even doubtful. Judith Arden, who was sitting by, smiled faintly.

"No, I had nothing to do with it," said Bernadette. "And it really is a triumph for you, Arthur." She was smiling again now, but there was a little pucker on her brow. "When's your best time to come?" she asked.

"In the early part of August, if I may. I shall have to run up and see mother afterwards, and I've got to be back in town in the middle of September – for our production, you know."

Bernadette by this time had been told all about the great farce and the great venture which had made it possible.

She appeared to consider something for a moment longer, so that Arthur added, "Of course if it's not convenient to have me then, if you're full up or anything – "

"Goodness no! There are twenty rooms, and there'll be nobody but ourselves – and Oliver Wyse perhaps."

"I thought Sir Oliver was coming earlier, directly we go down?" said Judith.

"He's coming about the seventeenth or eighteenth; but he may stay on, of course. On the other hand he may not come, or may come later, after all." She smiled again, this time as it were to herself. Sir Oliver's visit to Hilsey had been arranged before she lunched with him in Paris and might, therefore, be subject to reconsideration – by the guest, or the hostess, or both. She had neither seen him nor heard from him since that occasion; things stood between them just where they had been left when she turned away and went into the hat-shop with glowing cheeks. There they remained even to her own mind, in a state of suspense not unpleasurable but capable of becoming difficult. It was just that possibility in them which made her brow pucker at the thought of Sir Oliver and Arthur Lisle encountering one another as fellow-guests at Hilsey.

Arthur laughed. "Well, if he doesn't mind me, I don't mind him. In fact I like him very much – what I've seen of him; it isn't much."

It was not much. Before Oliver Wyse went to Paris, they had met at Hill Street only three or four times, and then at large dinner parties where they had been thrown very little in contact.

"Oh, of course you'll get on all right together," said Bernadette.

"You've a lot in common with him really, I believe," Judith remarked.

Bernadette's lips twisted in a smile and she gave Judith a glance of merry reproof. They were both amused to see how entirely the point of the observation was lost on Arthur.

"I daresay we shall find we have, when we come to know each other better," he agreed in innocent sincerity.

Bernadette was stirred to one of the impulses of affectionate tenderness which the absolute honesty and simplicity of his devotion now and then roused in her. His faith in her was as absolute as his adoration was unbounded. For him she was as far above frailty as she was beyond rivalry or competition. Without realising the immensity of either the faith or the adoration, she yet felt that, if temptation should come, it might help her to have somebody by her who believed in her thoroughly and as it were set her a standard to live up to. And she was unwillingly conscious that a great temptation might come – or perhaps it was better to say that she might be subjected to a severe pressure; for it was in this light rather that the danger presented itself to her mind when she was driven to think about it.

She looked at him now with no shadow on her face, with all her usual radiant friendliness.

"At any rate I shall be delighted to have you there, Cousin Arthur," she said. She had managed, somehow, from the first to make the formal "Cousin" into just the opposite of a formality – to turn it into a term of affection and appropriation. She used it now not habitually, but when she wanted to tell him that she was liking him very much, and he quite understood that it had that significance. He flushed in pleasure and gratitude.

"That's enough for me. Never mind Sir Oliver!" he exclaimed with a joyful laugh.

"If it isn't an anti-climax, may I observe that I too shall be very glad to see you?" said Judith Arden with affected primness.

Arthur went away in triumph, surer still of Bernadette's perfection, making lighter still of Godfrey's grievances, dismissing Oliver Wyse as totally unimportant; blind to all the somewhat complicated politics of the house. They rolled off his joyous spirit like water off a duck's back.

CHAPTER XII

LUNCH AT THE LANCASTER

On a day in July, when this wonderful London season was drawing near an end, and the five hundred pounds had reached about half-way towards exhaustion, Arthur Lisle gave himself and his friends a treat. He invited the Syndicate – as they laughingly styled themselves – to lunch at the Lancaster Hotel. There were some disappointing refusals. Mr. Sarradet would not come; he was sulky in these days, for Raymond was neglecting his father's perfumery and spending his father's money; the integrity of the dowry was threatened, and old Sarradet had a very cold fit about the prospects of the theatrical speculation. Sidney Barslow – he was invited thanks to his heroic re-entry – pleaded work. The author himself wrote that he would be unavoidably detained at "the office" – Mr. Beverley was never more definite than that about the occupation which filled the day-time for him. But Marie and Amabel came, escorted by Joe Halliday, and they made a merry party of four. The girls were excited at being asked to the Lancaster. Such sumptuous places, though not perhaps beyond the Sarradet means, were quite foreign to the thrifty Sarradet habits. Amabel was of the suburbs and patronised "popular price" restaurants on her visits to town. Joe lived in grill rooms. The balcony of the Lancaster seemed magnificent, and Emile, the maître d'hôtel, knew Arthur quite well, called him by his name, and told him what brand of champagne he liked – marks of intimacy which could not fail to make an impression on Arthur's guests, and which Emile had a tactful way of bestowing even on quite occasional patrons.

Joe Halliday made his report. Everything was in trim, and going on swimmingly. The theatre was taken, a producer engaged, the girl who was Joe's own discovery secured and, besides her, a famous comic actor who could carry anything – anything – on his back. Rehearsals were to begin in a month.

"By this time next year lunch at the Lancaster will be an every-day event. Just now it can't be – so I'll trouble you for a little more fizz, Arthur," said Joe, with his great jolly laugh.

"Don't count your chickens – !" said cautious Marie.

"A coward's proverb!" cried Arthur gaily. "Why, you lose half the fun if you don't!"

"Even if we do fail, we shall have had our fun," Joe remarked philosophically.

The others could hardly follow him to these serene heights. Amabel had persuaded gold out of her "governor." Marie felt decidedly responsible to old Sarradet; and the pledge that Arthur had given to fortune was very heavy.

"If it becomes necessary, we'll try to feel like that," said Arthur, "but I hope we shan't have to try."

"Of course we shan't," Amabel insisted eagerly. "How can it fail? Of course it mayn't be quite such an enormous success as Help Me– "

"It'll knock Help Me Out Quickly into a cocked hat," Joe pronounced decisively. "Just see if it don't!" He turned to Marie. "Then what sort of a smile shall we see on old Sidney's face?" He could not quite forgive Sidney Barslow (hero as he was!) for having refused to "come in."

"Sidney's a wise man about business and – and money. Wiser than we are perhaps!" Marie smiled as she ate her ice.

"Sidney's developing all the virtues at a great pace," laughed Amabel. "Under somebody's influence!"

Joe laughed too; so did Marie, but she also blushed a little. Arthur was suddenly conscious of a joke which was new to him – something which the other three understood but he did not. He looked at Joe in involuntary questioning. Joe winked. He saw Marie's blush; it caused him a vague displeasure.

"Yes," Joe nodded. "He is. Works like a horse and goes to bed at eleven o'clock! I shouldn't be surprised if he turned up one fine day with a blue ribbon in his coat!"

"Oh, don't be so silly, Joe," laughed Marie; but the laugh sounded a little vexed, and the blush was not quite gone yet.

"Why, what do you mean?" asked Arthur.

"Joking apart, he has put the brake on. Jolly good thing too! He's such a good chap – really."

Arthur was not ungenerous, but he could not help feeling that the apotheosis of Sidney Barslow might be carried too far. The vision of the scene in Oxford Street was still vivid in his mind; it would need a lot of heroism, a lot of reformation, altogether to obliterate that, however much he might agree to a gentler judgment of it.

"No, don't make a joke of it, Joe, anyhow not to Sidney himself," said Marie, looking a little embarrassed still, but speaking with her usual courage. "Because it's for our sake – well, mostly so, I think – that he's – he's doing what he is. I told him that in the beginning he had led Raymond into mischief, and that he ought to set him a better example now. And he's trying – without much success, I'm afraid, as far as Raymond is concerned." Her voice grew very troubled.

"I'm awfully sorry, Marie," Arthur murmured.

"Oh, I've no intention of rotting Sidney about it. If only because he'd probably hit me in the eye!"

"Yes, we know his fighting powers," laughed Amabel in admiring reminiscence. Her tone changed to one of regretful exasperation. "Raymond is a goose!"

"But we mustn't spoil Mr. Lisle's party with our troubles," said Marie, smiling again.

"Oh, come, I say, I'm not altogether an outsider!" Arthur protested with a sudden touch of vehemence.

"Oh, no, not that," Marie murmured, with a little shake of her head; her tone did not sound very convinced. Amabel giggled feebly. Joe covered a seeming embarrassment by gulping down his coffee and pretending to find it too hot. A constraint fell upon the party. Arthur wanted to make himself thoroughly one with them in anxiety and concern over Raymond's misdeeds – nay, even in admiration for Sidney Barslow's reformation; he wanted to, if he could. Yet somehow he found no words in which to convey his desire. Every phrase that came into his head he rejected; they all sounded cold and unreal, somehow aloof and even patronising. Silence, however awkward, was better than speeches like that.

It was one of Joe Halliday's chosen missions in life, and one of his greatest gifts, to relieve occasions of restraint and embarrassment by a dexterous use of humour. This social operation he now, perceiving it necessary, proceeded to perform. Clapping his hand to his forehead in a melodramatic manner, he exclaimed in low but intense tones, "Ask me who I want to be! Who I want to be in all the world! Ask me quickly!"

He won his smiles. "What's the matter now, Joe?" asked Arthur; his smile was tolerant.

"No, I'll tell you! Don't speak!" He pointed with his finger, past Arthur, towards the other end of the room. "There he sits! A murrain on him! That's the man! And how dare he lunch with that Entrancing Creature?"

"Which one, Joe? Which one?" asked Amabel, immediately full of interest.

"There – behind Arthur's back. He can't see her. Good thing too! He doesn't deserve to."

"I suppose I can turn round, if I want to – and if she's worth it. Is she, Marie?"

"Is it the one in blue, Joe? Yes, she is. Awfully pretty!"

"Never saw such a corker in my life!" Joe averred with solemnity.

"Then round – in a careless manner – goes my head!" said Arthur.

"He woos her, I swear he woos her, curses on his mother's grave!" Joe rode his jokes rather hard.

"We'd better not all stare at her, had we?" asked Marie.

"She's not looking; she's listening to the man," Amabel assured her.

Arthur turned round again – after a long look. He gave a little laugh. "It's my cousin, Bernadette Lisle. Joe, you are an ass."

It was Bernadette Lisle; she sat at a little table with Oliver Wyse. They had finished eating. Bernadette was putting on her gloves. Her eyes were fixed on Oliver's face, her lips were parted. The scene of the Café de Paris reproduced itself – and perhaps the topic. She had not seen Arthur when he came in, nor he her. She did not see him now. She listened to Sir Oliver.

"Your cousin! That! Introduce me – there may yet be time!" said the indomitable Joe.

"Oh, shut up!" groaned Arthur, half-flattered however, though half-peevish.

"She's very beautiful." Marie's eyes could not leave Bernadette. "And so – so – well, she looks like something very very precious in china."

Arthur looked round again; he could not help it. "Yes, that is rather it, Marie."

"Look – look at her hat, Marie!" came from Amabel in awed accents. Indeed the visit to the hat-shop in Paris had not been without its fruit.

"Now is it fair – is it reasonable – for a fellow to have a cousin like that? He might have a Queen like that, or a Dream like that, and I shouldn't care. But a cousin! He knows the Vision! He's talked to it! Heavens, he's probably lunched with it himself! And he kept it all dark from us – oh, so dark!"

"Is it Mr. Lisle with her?" asked Amabel, quite innocently.

Arthur smiled. "No, I don't think you'd find Godfrey lunching here. That's a man named Wyse. I've met him at their house."

"He's good-looking too," Amabel decided after a further survey.

A waiter brought Oliver Wyse his bill. When he turned to pay it, Bernadette rose. The spell which had held her attention so closely was broken. She looked round the room. Suddenly a bright smile came on her lips, she spoke a hurried word to her companion, and came straight across the room towards Arthur's table. She had recognised the back of his head.

"She's coming here!" whispered Amabel breathlessly.

Arthur turned round quickly, a bright gleam in his eyes. He rose from his chair; the next moment she was beside him, looking so joyful, so altogether happy.

"Oh, Arthur dear, I am glad!" She did not offer to shake hands; she laid her little hand on his coat-sleeve as she greeted him. "Did you see me – with Sir Oliver?" But she did not wait for an answer. "Do let me sit down with you for a minute. And mayn't I know your friends?" A waiter hurried up with a chair, and Bernadette sat down by Arthur. "Why, what fun this is! Cousin Arthur, I must have another ice." The gloves began to come off again, while Arthur made the necessary introductions.

"Oh, but I know you all quite well!" exclaimed Bernadette. "You're old friends of mine, though you may not know it."

Oliver Wyse, his bill paid, followed her with a leisurely step. He greeted Arthur cordially and included the rest of the table in a bow. "I gather you intend to stay a bit," he said to Bernadette, smiling. "I've got an appointment, so if you'll excuse me – ?"

"Oh yes, Arthur will look after me." She gave him her hand. "Thanks for your lunch, Sir Oliver."

"It was so good of you to come," he answered, with exactly the right amount of courteous gratitude.

As he went off, she watched him for just a moment, then turned joyously back to her new companions. A casual observer might well have concluded that she was glad to be rid of Oliver Wyse.

Joe was – to use his own subsequent expression – "corpsed"; he had not a joke to make! Perhaps that was as well. But he devoured her with his eyes, manifesting an open admiration whose simple sincerity robbed it of offence. Bernadette saw it, and laughed at it without disguise. Amabel's eyes were even more for frock and hat than for the wearer; this it was to be not merely clothed but dressed. Marie had paid her homage to beauty; she was watching and wondering now. Arthur tasted a new delight in showing off his wonderful cousin to his old friends, a new pride in the gracious kindness of her bearing towards them. And Bernadette herself was as charming as she could be for Arthur's sake, and in gratitude for his appearance – for the casual observer would have been quite right as to her present feeling about Oliver Wyse.

Marie Sarradet revised her notions. She forgave her father his meddling; even against Mrs. Veltheim she pressed the indictment less harshly. Here surely was the paramount cause of her defeat! Mrs. Lisle and what Mrs. Lisle stood for against herself and what she represented – candid-minded Marie could not for a moment doubt the issue. Her little, firmly repressed grievance against Arthur faded away; she must have a grievance against fate, if against anything. For it was fate or chance which had brought Mrs. Lisle on to the scene just when the issue hung in the balance. Yet with her quick woman's intuition, quickened again by her jealous interest, she saw clearly in ten minutes, in a quarter of an hour – while Bernadette chattered about the farce (valuable anyhow as a topic in common!) and wistfully breathed the hope that she would be able to come up from the country for the first night – that the brilliant beautiful cousin had for Arthur Lisle no more than a simple honest affection, flavoured pleasantly by his adoration, piquantly by amusement at him. He was her friend and her plaything, her protégé and her pet. There was not even a fancy for him, sentimental or romantic; at the idea of a passion she would laugh. See how easy and unconstrained she was, how open in her little familiar gestures of affection! This woman had nothing here to conceal, nothing to struggle against. It was well, no doubt. But it made Marie Sarradet angry, both for herself and for Arthur's sake. To take so lightly what had so nearly been another's – to think so lightly of all that she had taken!