Lucinda

“I’ve spent the greater part of the waking hours of three days with you, Julius. I’ve walked, lunched, and dined with you. I’ve talked to you interminably. You must have looked at me sometimes, haven’t you?”

“I’ve looked at you, to tell the truth, a great deal.”

“And you’ve noticed nothing peculiar?”

“I shouldn’t use the word ‘peculiar’ to describe what I’ve noticed.”

“Not, for instance, that I’ve always worn the same frock?” She was leaning her elbows on the table now, her chin resting between her hands. “And what that means to a charming woman – oh, we agreed on that! – invited out by a fine figure of a man – ! And yet you ask if things are flourishing!”

“By Jove, I believe you have! It’s a very pretty frock, Lucinda. No, but really it is!”

“It’s an old friend – and my only one. So let’s speak no evil of it.” Yet she did speak evil of the poor frock; she whispered, “Oh, how I hate it, hate it, this old frock!” She gave a little laugh. “If it came my way, I wonder whether I could resist splendor! Guilty splendor!”

“Didn’t poor old Waldo present himself to you – oddly, I must say – rather in that light? And you resisted!”

“I’ve changed. You’re talking to a different woman – different from the girl I’ve been boring you about. The girl I’ve been boring you about wouldn’t – couldn’t – marry Waldo with Arsenio there; I – the I that am – could and, I think, would.”

“Because of your old friend here?” I touched lightly the sleeve of her gown.

“For what it has meant, and does mean – oh, and for itself too! I’m no heroine. Primitive women love finery too.”

Her face was untouched by time, or struggle, or disillusion. Her eyes were as they always had been, clear, calm, introspective. Only her figure was more womanly, though still slim; she had not Nina’s statuesque quality. But the soul within was changed, it seemed. This train of thought brought me to an abrupt question: “No child, Lucinda?”

“There was to have been. I fell ill, and – It was one of the times when our luck was out. Arsenio made nothing for months. We soon spent what Number 21 brought us.”

“You don’t mean to say that you were – in want? At that time!”

“Yes. Well, I can’t learn all lessons, but I can learn some. I’ve a trade of my own now.”

I confess that I yielded for a moment to a horrible suspicion – an idea that seemed to make my blood stop. I did not touch her arm this time; I clasped it roughly. I did not speak.

“Oh, no,” she said with a little laugh. “But thank you, dear old Julius. I see that you’d have cared, that you’d have cared very much. Because I shall have a bruise there – and for your sake I’ll kiss it. I’ve neglected my work for your sake – or my pleasure – these last three days. But I work for Madame – well, shall we say Madame Chose? – because I don’t want you to go and criticize my handiwork in the window. I embroider lingerie, Julius – chemises and pants. There’s a demand for such things – yes, even now, on this coast. I was always a good needlewoman. I used to mend all my things. Do you remember that on one occasion I was mending my gloves?”

“But Arsenio?”

“Arsenio pursues Dame Fortune. Sometimes he catches her for a moment, and she pays ransom. She buys herself off – she will not be permanently his. She’s very elusive. A light-o’-love! Like me? No, but I’m not.” She leant forward to me, with a sudden amused gurgle of laughter. “But, you know, he’s as brave as a lion. He was dying to fight from the beginning. Only he didn’t know whom to fight for, poor boy! He wanted to fight for Germany because she’s monarchical, and against her because she’s heavy and stupid and rigid and cruel – and mainly Protestant! – and against France because she’s republican and atheistical – oh, no less! – but for her because she’s chivalrous, and dashing, and – well, the panache, you know! He was in a very difficult position, poor dear Arsenio, till Italy came in; and even then he had his doubts, because Austria’s clerical! However, Italy it is!”

“Didn’t England appeal to him?”

“For England, monsieur, Don Arsenio has now an illimitable scorn.”

“The devil he has!” said I softly.

She laughed again at that, and something of her gayety still illuminated her face as she gave me a warning. “I’ve told you nearly all my secrets – all I’m going to tell! If any of them get to that deplorable England, to that damp, dripping and doleful Devonshire (the epithets are Arsenio’s!) I’ll cut you dead. And if they get to – Briarmount – I’ll kill you!”

“I’ll say that you live in a palace, with seven attendant princes, and seventy-seven handmaids!”

“Yes!” she agreed gleefully. “Who’s that woman looking for?”

The woman in question was a stout person in a sort of official uniform. Her eyes traveled over the few guests at the little restaurant; in her hand she held a blue envelope. “She’s looking for me. She’s been sent on from my hotel, depend upon it,” I said, with a queer sense of annoyance. I, who had been fuming because my instructions did not come!

I was right. The woman gave me the envelope and took my receipt. I made a rapid examination of my package. “I must be off early to-morrow morning,” I said to Lucinda.

She did say, “I’m sorry,” but without any sign of emotion. And the next moment she added, “Because you’ll just miss Arsenio. He arrives to-morrow evening – to pay me a visit.”

“I think I’m rather glad to miss Arsenio,” I remarked frankly. “Oh, not because he ran away with you, and made fools of us all that day, but because of what you’ve been telling me just now.”

“If you liked him before, you’d like him still. He hasn’t changed a bit, he’s just as he always was – very attractive in his good and gay moods, very naughty and perverse in his bad ones. Yes, just the same. And that’s what makes it so unfair in me to – to feel as I do about him now. That’s one of the difficult things about love, isn’t it? And marriage. The other person may go on being just what he was – what you knew he was; but you may change yourself, and so not like him any more – at least, not be content; because there’s a lot about Arsenio that I still like.” Her eyes now wore their most self-examining, introspective look.

She pushed her chair back from the table. “It’s late, and you’ve got to start early. And I must be early and long at work, to make up for lost time – if it’s not rude to call it that.”

I raised my glass. “Then – to our next meeting!”

“When will that be, I wonder!”

“Heaven knows! I roam up and down the earth, like the Enemy of Mankind. But, after all, in these days to be on the earth and not under it, is something. And you, Lucinda?”

“I suppose I shall stay here – with Madame – Chose. War or no war, ladies must have lingerie, mustn’t they?”

“It seems a – well, a drab sort of life!”

“Well – yes,” said Lucinda. “But one of us must earn some money, you see. Even if I were that sort of person – and I don’t think I am – I couldn’t afford to do anything useful or heroic. The pay for that isn’t high enough.”

I walked to her house with her, according to our custom – now of three days’ standing. As we went, I was summoning up courage for a venture. When we reached the door I said, “May I let you know from time to time – whenever it’s possible – where I am? So that, if you were in – if real occasion arose, you could write to me and – ?”

“Yes, I shall like to hear from you. But I probably shan’t answer – unless I’ve something different to tell you – different from Madame Chose – and better.”

“But if it were – worse?”

“I couldn’t take money from you, if that’s what you mean. Oh, it’s not your fault, it’s nothing in you yourself. But you’re a Rillington.”

“Isn’t that, again, rather fanciful?”

“You seem to call all my deepest instincts fanciful!” she protested, smiling. “But that one’s very deep. Goodness, I could almost as soon conceive of myself accepting Nina Frost’s cast-off frocks!”

We smiled together over that monstrous freak of the imagination. And so, still smiling, we parted – she to go back to Madame Chose and her lingerie, I to my wanderings and nosing about. I did from time to time send her an address that would probably find me; but, as her words had foreshadowed, I got no answers. So it was still Madame Chose – or worse? I had to suppose that; and I was sorrowful. She had been much to blame, but somewhat to be pitied; the root feeling under which she had in the end acted – fidelity to the man to whom she had first belonged – might be primitive, as she herself suggested; it did not seem to me ignoble. At all events, she had not in the end been worldly; she had not sold herself. No, not yet.

For a while I thought a good deal about her; she had made a vivid impression on me in those three days; her face haunted my eyes sometimes. But – well, we were all very busy; there was a lot to think about – plenty of food both for thought and for emotion, immediate interests too strong for memories and speculations to fight against. The echo of her voice was drowned by the clamor of war. The vision of her face faded.

CHAPTER IX

LIKE TO LIKE

IT was in May, 1916, that Waldo got a severe wound in the right shoulder, which put him out of action for the rest of the war and sent him, after two or three months in a hospital, back to Cragsfoot. He had done very well, indeed distinguished himself rather notably; had fortune been kinder, he might have expected to rise to high rank. The letters which I received – I was far away, and was not at the time able to get leave, even had I felt justified in asking for it – reflected the mingled disappointment, anxiety, and relief, which the end of his military career, the severity of his wound, and his return home – alive, at all events! – naturally produced at Cragsfoot.

Sir Paget wrote seldom and briefly, but with a quiet humor and an incisive touch. Aunt Bertha’s letters – especially now that she had only me to write to, and no longer spent the larger part of her epistolary energy on Waldo – were frequent, full, vivid, and chatty. But she was also very discursive; she would sandwich in the Kaiser between the cook and the cabbages, Waldo’s wound between Bethmann-Hollweg and Mr. Winston Churchill. It was, however, possible to gather from her, aided by Sir Paget, a pretty complete picture of what was going on both at Cragsfoot and at Briarmount.

For at Briarmount too anxiety reigned, and the times were critical. As might be expected of him, Mr. Jonathan Frost had wrought marvels during the war. The whole of his vast establishments had been placed at the disposal of the Ministry of Munitions; he had effected wonders of rapid adaptation and transformation, wonders of organization and output; he “speeded up” a dozen Boards and infused his own restless energy into somnolent offices. But two years of these exertions, on the top of a life of gigantic labor, proved too much even for him. He won a peerage, but he gave his life. In the September of that same year he came back to Briarmount, the victim of a stroke, a dying man. His mind was still clear and active, but he had considerable difficulty in speaking, and was unable to move without assistance. His daughter, who had sedulously nursed him through his labors, was now nursing him through the last stage of his earthly course.

But there was also a newcomer at Briarmount, a frequent visitor there during the last months of its master’s life, one in whom both Aunt Bertha and Sir Paget took considerable interest. This was Captain Godfrey Frost. Lord Dundrannan (he took his title from a place he had in Scotland) was old-fashioned enough not to approve of confiding to women the exclusive command of great interests; they lacked the broad view and the balance of mind, however penetrating their intuitions might on occasion be! And too much power was not good for them; he even seemed to have hinted to Sir Paget that they were quite masterful enough already! That he meant to leave his daughter handsomely, indeed splendidly, endowed, was certain; but he was minded to provide himself with an heir male in the person of this young man. It would have been natural, perhaps, to suspect him of planning a match between the cousins, but this did not seem to be in his head – perhaps because such personal matters as marriages held a small place in his mind; perhaps because he suspected that his daughter’s ideas on that subject were already settled; perhaps because his nephew was somewhat too young and – from a social point of view – unformed to be a good mate for his accomplished daughter.

Captain Frost was, in fact, inexperienced and backward, shy and rather silent, in society; but unquestionably he had a full share of the family business ability – so much so that, when Lord Dundrannan “cracked up,” he was brought back from the front (against his protests, it is only fair to add), and put in charge, actual if not always nominal, of a great part of the important activities on which his uncle had been engaged. His disposition appeared to be simple, amiable, and unassuming. He was pleasantly deferential to Sir Paget, rather afraid of Aunt Bertha’s acute eyes, cordial and attentive to Waldo. Towards Nina he was content to accept the position of pupil and protégé; he let her put him through his social paces; he regarded her with evident respect and admiration, and thought her worthy to be her father’s daughter – more than that he could not do! There was no trace of any sentiment beyond this, or different in kind from it. There was, in fact, to be detected in Aunt Bertha’s letters an underlying note of satisfaction; it might be described in the words, “He’s quite nice, but there’s nothing to fear!”

But if such a note as that were really to be heard in Aunt Bertha’s letters, it could mean only one thing; and it marked a great change in her attitude towards Nina. It meant that she was looking forward with contentment, apparently with actual pleasure, to a match between Nina and Waldo. Other signs pointed in the same direction – her mention of Nina’s frequent calls at Cragsfoot, of her kindness to Waldo, of her devotion to her father, of her praiseworthy calm and level-headedness during this trying time. The change had perhaps started from a reaction against Lucinda; after the first impulse of sympathy with the distracted fugitive (a very real one at the time) had died down, Lucinda’s waywardness, her “unaccountability,” presented themselves in a less excusable light. But the main cause lay, no doubt, in Waldo himself. Aunt Bertha was – passing impulses apart – for Waldo and on his side. Any shifting of her views and feelings in a matter like this would be certain to reflect a similar alteration in his attitude.

In November a letter from Sir Paget told me of Lord Dundrannan’s death, at which, by chance, he was himself present; evidently moved by the scene, he recounted it with more detail than he was wont to indulge in. Hearing that his neighbor was worse, he went to inquire; as he stood at the door, Nina drove up in her car – she had been out for an airing – and took him into the library where her father was, sitting in a chair by the fire. It was very rarely that he would consent to keep his bed, and he had insisted on getting up that day. “Godfrey Frost was there” (my uncle wrote) “and Dr. Napier, standing and whispering together in the window. By the sick man sat an old white-haired Wesleyan minister, whom he had sent for all the way from Bradford, where he himself was born: he had ‘sat under’ this old gentleman as a boy, and a few days before had expressed a great longing to see him. The minister was reading the Bible to him now. It looked as though he had foreseen that the end was coming. He had had a sort of valedictory talk with Nina and young Frost a week before – about the money and the businesses, what they were to do, what rules they were to be guided by, and so on. That done, he appeared to dismiss worldly affairs, this world itself, from his thoughts, and ‘took up’ the next. I am not mocking; yet I can hardly help smiling. He seemed to have ‘taken it up’ in the same way that he would have inquired into a new, important and interesting speculation; and he got his expert – the old minister from Bradford – to advise him. He was not afraid, or agitated, or remorseful; his feelings seemed, so far as his impaired speech enabled him to describe them to his family, those of a curious and earnest interest in his prospects of survival – he eagerly desired to survive – and in what awaited him if he did survive. The fact that he had neglected religion for a great many years back did not trouble him; nor did ‘How hardly shall a rich man – ’ He seemed confident that, if immortality were a fact, some place and some work would be found for Jonathan Frost. Whether it was a fact was what he wanted to know; he hated the idea of nothingness, of inactivity, of stopping!

“The old minister shut his book when I came in. Nina led me up to her father. He recognized me and smiled. I said a few words, but I doubt if he listened. He pointed towards the book on the minister’s knee – he could move his left hand – and tried to say something: I think that he was trying to pursue the subject that engrossed him, perhaps to get my opinion on it. But the next moment he gave a smothered sort of cry – not loud at all – and moved his hand towards his heart. Napier darted across the room to him; Nina put her arm round his neck and kissed him. He gave a sigh, and his head fell back on her arm. He was gone – all in a minute – gone to get the answer to his question. Then there was a ringing of bells, of course, and they came in and took him way. Nina put her hands in mine for a second before she followed them out of the room: ‘My dear father!’ she said. Then she put her arm in young Frost’s, and he led her out of the room, very gently, in a very gentleman-like way, I must say. I was left alone with the old minister. ‘The end of a remarkable life!’ I said, or something of that sort. ‘I’m glad it came so easily at the end.’ He bowed his white head. ‘He did great things for his country,’ he answered. ‘God’s ways are not our ways, Sir Paget.’ I said good-by, and left him with his book.”

A month after Lord Dundrannan’s death I got Christmas leave, came to England, and went down to Cragsfoot on the Friday before Christmas Day; it fell on a Monday that year. It was jolly to be there again, and to find old Waldo out of danger and getting on really famously.

But how he was changed! I will not go into the physical changes – they proved, thank God, in the main temporary, though it was a long time before he got back nearly all his old vigor – but I can’t help speculating on how much they, and the suffering they brought, had to do with the change in the nature of the man. Perhaps nothing; it is, I suppose, rather an obscure subject, a medical question; but I cannot help thinking that they worked together with his other experiences. At least, they must have made him in a way older in body, just as the other experiences made him older in mind. I never realized till then – though I ought to have – how very little I had really been through, in what had seemed two tolerably exciting and exhausting years, compared to him who had “stuck it through” all the time at the front. I said something of this sort to him as we gossiped together, and it set him talking.

“Well, old chap,” he said, laughing, “I don’t know how you found it – you were, of course, a grown man, a man of the world, before it all began – but I just had to change. It’s no credit to me – I had to! I was a cub, a puppy – I had to become a trained animal. As it was, that infernal temper of mine nearly cost me my commission in the first three months. It would have, by Jove, if Tom Winter – my Company Commander – hadn’t been the best fellow in the world; he was killed six months later, poor chap, but he’d got a muzzle on me before that. You will find me a bit better there; I haven’t had a real old break-out ever since.”

“Oh, I daresay you will, when you get fit!” said I consolingly.

“Thank you,” he laughed again. “But I don’t want to, you know. They were a bit upsetting to everybody concerned.” He smiled as though in a gentle amusement at his old self. “Only father could manage me – and he couldn’t always. Lord, I was impossible! I might have committed a murder one fine day!”

I recollected a certain fine day on which murder, or something very like it, was certainly his purpose. Oh, with a good deal of excuse, no doubt!

Perhaps his thoughts had moved in the same direction; seeing me again might well have that effect on him.

“I don’t want to exaggerate things. I daresay I’ve a bit of the devil left in me. And I don’t know whether men in general have been affected much by the business. Some have, some haven’t, I expect. Perhaps I’m a special case. The war came at what was for me a very critical moment. For me personally it was a lucky thing, in spite of this old shoulder; and it was lucky that my father was so clear about its coming. I was saved from myself, by Jove, I was!”

The “self” of whom he spoke came back to my memory as strangely different and apart from the languid, tranquil man who was talking to me on the long invalid’s chair. He reclined there, smiling thoughtfully.

“I bear no malice against the girl,” he went on. “It was my mistake. She went to her own in the end; it was inevitable that she should; and better before marriage – even just before! – than after. Like to like – she and Monkey Valdez!”

Though I had my own views as to that, I held my tongue. If once I let out that I had seen Lucinda, one question – if not from Waldo, at any rate from Aunt Bertha – would lead to another, and I should be in danger of betraying the needlewoman’s secret. I had made up my mind to lie if need be, but if I kept silence, it was a hundred to one that it would not occur to any one at Cragsfoot to ask whether I had seen Lucinda. Why should I have seen her? It never did occur to any of the three of them; I was asked no questions.

“The best thing to be hoped is that we never run up against one another again. I might still be tempted to give the Monkey a thrashing! Oh, I forgot – I don’t suppose I shall ever be able to give anybody a thrashing! Sad thought, Julius! Well, there it is – let’s forget ‘em!” A gesture of his sound arm waved Lucinda and her Monkey into oblivion.

So be it. I changed the subject. “Very sad about poor old Frost. Dundrannan, I mean.”

“Yes, poor old boy! For a week or two it was about even betting between him and me – which of us would win out, I mean. Well, I have; and he’s gone. We didn’t half do him justice in the old days. Really a grand man, don’t you think?”

I agreed. Lord Dundrannan – Jonathan Frost – had always filled me with the sort of admiration that a non-stop express inspires; and Sir Paget’s letter had added a pathetic touch to the recollection of him – made him more of a human being, brought him into relation with Something that he did not create; that, in fact, I suppose, created him. Really quite a new aspect of Lord Dundrannan!

“She’s come through it splendidly,” said Waldo.

“What, Miss Nina?”

Waldo laughed. “Look here, old chap, you don’t seem to be up to date. Been in Paraguay or Patagonia, or somewhere, have you? She’s not ‘Miss Nina’ – she’s my Lady Dundrannan.”

“Nobody told me that there was a special remainder to her!”

“Well, he’d done wonders. He was old and ill. No son! They could hardly refuse it him, could they? The peerage would have been an empty gift without it.”

“Lady Dundrannan! Lady Dundrannan!”

“You’ve got it right now, Julius. Of Dundrannan in the county of Perth, and of Briarmount in the county of Devon – to give it its full dignity.”

“I expect she’s pleased with it?”

“We’re all human. I think she is. Besides, she was very fond and proud of her father, and likes to have her share in carrying on his fame.”

“And she has wherewithal to gild the title!”

“Gilt and to spare! But only about a third of what he had. A third to her, a third to public objects, a third to Godfrey Frost. That’s about it – roughly. But business control to Godfrey, I understand.”

“Does she like that?” I asked.

He laughed again – just a little reluctantly, I thought. “Not altogether, perhaps. But she accepts it gracefully, and takes it out of the young man by ordering him about! He’s a surprisingly decent young chap; she’ll lick him into shape in no time.”

“From what Aunt Bertha said, you and she have made great friends?”