Regiment Of Women Part 49

"Cousin Alice, I can't. I mean--I'd rather--I don't want to go much, if you don't mind."

Alicia blessed herself.

"But, my dear! Why not? I thought you'd be looking forward----Oh, I suppose you've watched it so often, already."

"No--I haven't seen it; I'm afraid rehearsals bore me----" Alwynne broke off with an attempt at a light laugh.

"But you've been up to Compton so much," Alicia's tone was reproachful.

"I should have thought you would have been sufficiently interested----"

"Oh, I am! Only--you see I've got letters to write--to Elsbeth----"

"Well, you've got all the week to write in! Are you so afraid of being bored? Compton wouldn't be flattered. We rather pride ourselves on our acting, you know! My dear, we're expected to go--must give the performers some sort of an audience to get them into training for the night. You ought to understand, of all people! Don't you ever give plays at your school?"

Alwynne was silent, but prompted by an instinct she could not have explained, she turned to Roger, stolid behind his eggs and bacon. She said nothing, but she looked at him desperately. He gave an imperceptible nod. He had been watching her intently.

"But, dear Alwynne----" Jean was chirruping her version of Alicia's remarks when Roger's calm voice interrupted--

"I say, Alicia! I thought you and Jean were coming with me! I can't go on the night itself. Of course you must come. Go to your lunch on Sunday--I'll look after Alwynne. But I'm not going up to Compton without you. Spoil all the fun."

"Of course, if Roger wants us----" began Jean quickly.

"Oh, I didn't want to miss it," retreated Alicia hastily. "I only thought the Swains----But of course Sunday would do."

"I met old Swain yesterday," said Roger, "travelled up to town with him.

He was very full of his daughter's engagement."

"Engagement!" Alicia and Jean swooped to the news, like gulls to a falling crust. It kept them busy till breakfast was over.

And Roger returned to his eggs and bacon with never a glance at Alwynne.

Alwynne, half an hour later in her own room, fighting certain memories, arguing herself fiercely out of her weakness, had yet time to puzzle her head over Roger Lumsden. How quick he had been--and how kind.... Or had he noticed nothing? Had that adroit change of subject been accidental?

That was much more likely.

She dismissed him from her mind. She wished she could dismiss all the thoughts that filled her mind as easily.

Alwynne was grateful enough to Roger, however, when Tuesday came and he set out for Compton, an aunt on either arm: but on Sunday she had to pay for her non-attendance. Hurrying down, a little late, to lunch, she was half-way through her usual apologies before she realised that neither Jean nor Alicia were in their places. Of course--they were going to the Swain's.... Their nephew, however, waiting gravely behind his chair, admitted her excuses with a little air of acknowledging them to be necessary that ruffled her at once, though she had promised herself to be pleasant. After all, she was staying, as she had told herself several times already, with Jean and Alicia. Once more she applied herself, quite unsuccessfully, to snubbing his air of host. Roger listened to her in some amus.e.m.e.nt; her ungracious ways disturbed him no more than the rufflings and peckings of an angry bird, and her charming manner to his aunts and occasional whim of friendliness to himself, had prevented him from pigeon-holing her definitely as a pretty young shrew. He was inclined to like her, for Jean and Alicia had confessed themselves absurdly taken with the girl, and he was accustomed to be influenced by their judgment; but the touch of hostility that usually showed itself in her manner to him puzzled as much as it amused him.

He enjoyed baiting her, yet he thought, carelessly, that it was a pity she should have inaugurated guerilla warfare. She looked as if she could have been pleasant company for his spare time if she had chosen.

However, he would have little enough spare time, for the next few weeks, anyhow ... he had promised Jean to set to work seriously at the renovation of her garden.... He should be thankful for a visitor requiring neither escort nor attention.

Yet, naturally, her independence piqued him. He eyed her swiftly, as she sat at his right hand. She was a curious girl, he thought, to be so pretty and well-dressed, and yet so self-sufficing. Girls, apparently of her type, (he thought of his American cousins) usually needed a good deal of admiration to keep them contented.

She did not look altogether contented, though ... there were lines and puckers at the corners of her large eyes, that were surely out of place ... nineteen, wasn't she? She had had a breakdown, of course ...

rather absurd, for such a child.... Jean had hinted a guess at some trouble.... A love affair, he supposed. That would account for her thorniness, her occasional air of absence and depression, that contrasted with her usual cheerfulness.... Yet that curious whim the other day--what had it meant? More than a whim, he imagined--her very lips had grown white.... He was quite sure that he had helped her out of a hole.... She might at least show a certain decent grat.i.tude.... He wondered what she was thinking about, sitting there so silently ... she was generally talkative enough ... pretty quarrelsome, too. He supposed she was having a fit of the blues.... He had better talk to her, perhaps....

Alwynne, eating her wing of chicken, was merely and sheerly shy. She was garrulous enough with women, but she did not in the least know how to talk to men. Therefore and naturally she was full of theories. She had vague ideas that they had to be amused as babies have to be amused, but confronted with the prospect of a prolonged _tete-a-tete_, without Alicia or Jean to retire upon, she had nothing whatever to say. Yet she had been taught by Elsbeth to consider a lack of table-talk as a lack of manners, and was irritated with herself for her silence, and still more irritated with Roger for his.

She met his belated attempts at a conversation none too graciously--was bored by the boat-race, and would have nothing to say to the weather; though she thawed to his catalogue of copses and plantations in the neighbourhood, where certain wild flowers she had not yet discovered might be found.

But it was impossible for Alwynne to be silent long, and by the time they had adjourned to the drawing-room, the pair were talking easily enough. Roger did not find himself bored. He had, from the beginning, recognised that she was no fool, that her remarks owed their comicality to her phrasing of them, and that essentially they were shrewd, her acrobatic intellect swinging easily across the gaps in her education.

The gaps were certainly there. He would marvel at her amazing ignorance, only to be tripped up by her unexpected display of authoritative knowledge. Gradually he began to a.n.a.lyse and discriminate, to see that she was naturally observant. Her remarks on life as she knew it, were as illuminating as original. She had humour and a nice sense of caricature.

But when she, as it were, hoisted herself on the shoulders of the women about her, and from that level peered curiously at an outer, alien world, her insight failed her, her views grew distorted and merely grotesque. He thought he guessed the reason. She was no longer gazing, critical and clear-eyed, at known surroundings, but, still supported by the opinions of the women of her circle, was seeing what she had expected to see, what she had been told by them that she would see.

For all her air of modern girl, her independence, her store of book experience, she was comically conventual in her curiosities and intolerances, in her prim company manners and uncontrollable lapses into unconventionality. She had an air of not being at her ease; yet he guessed that it was merely the unaccustomed environment that disturbed her poise. He could see her handling surely enough a crowd of schoolgirls. He was equally certain that she ruled through sheer, easy popularity. She had dignity in spite of her whimsies, but he could not imagine her intimidating even a schoolgirl.

But most of all her att.i.tude to himself amused him. She had a certain veiled antagonism of manner, that was allied to the antagonism of the small child to any innovation. She talked to him readily enough (and he, for that matter, to her) yet she was always on the defensive, inquisitive yet wary. He felt that if she had been ten years younger, she would have circled about him and poked.

A stray phrase explained her to him.

They had discussed the latest raid. At Alwynne's age and period all conversational roads led to the suffrage question, and he had found her re-hash of Mona Hamilton's arguments sufficiently entertaining. He guessed a plagiarism of the matter, but the manner was obviously her own. She was full of second-hand indignation over the conduct of a certain Cabinet Minister.

"He won't even see them!" she explained grievously. "Not even a deputation from the const.i.tutional section! Just because some women are fools--and burn things----" The pause was eloquent. "It's so utterly unreasonable," declaimed Alwynne. "But of course men are unreasonable,"

said Alwynne, pensively reflective.

"Are they?"

"All I know are, anyhow."

He considered her ingenuous countenance--

"If it's not a delicate question--how many do you know?" said Roger softly.

She looked at him, mildly surprised.

"Hundreds! In books, that is."

"Oh--books! I meant real life."

"Surely a page of Shakespeare is more real than dozens of real people's lives."

"Side issue! I'm not to be deflected. How many men do you know, in real life, well enough to discuss the suffrage with?"

"I'm always kept at school the day the vicar comes to tea," she said suggestively.

"Who else?"

She saw his drift, but defended herself, smiling.

"The a.s.sistants are most intelligent at the circulating library."

"Who else?"

"There were music masters at school. I didn't mean _you_ were unreasonable," she deprecated.

He began to laugh, openly, mischievously, delighting in her discomfiture.

"Anyhow, I know a lot about women," said Alwynne heatedly.