Lalage's Lovers Part 38

"Thormanby," I said, "has been employed all morning in writing letters and appealing telegrams to Miss Petti-grew; but even if she comes it will be too late."

"I hope Miss Battersby hasn't been told."

"Not by Lalage. She felt that there would be a certain want of delicacy about mentioning the subject to her before the Archdeacon had spoken."

My mother sighed.

"I'm very fond of Lalage," she said, "but I sometimes wish she was----"

"That's just what Miss Battersby was saying this morning. I quite agree with you both that life would be simpler if she was, but of course she isn't."

"What Lalage wants is some steadying influence."

"Miss Pettigrew," I said, "suggested marriage and babies. I don't think she mentioned the number of babies, but several would be required."

My mother looked at me in much the same curious way that Miss Pettigrew did on the afternoon when she and Canon Beresford visited me in Ballygore. I felt the same unpleasant sense of embarra.s.sment. I finished my gla.s.s of claret hurriedly, and without waiting for coffee, which would probably have been cold, left the room.

I went about the house and made a collection of the articles I was likely to want during the afternoon. I got a hammock chair with a leg rest, four cus.h.i.+ons, a pipe, a tin of tobacco, three boxes of matches, and a novel called "Sword Play." With these in my arms I staggered across the garden and made for the nook to which I had been looking forward all day. A greenhouse which is not sacrificed to flowers is a very pleasant place at certain seasons of the year. In Spring, for instance, when the sun is s.h.i.+ning, I am tempted to go out of doors. But in Spring there are cold winds which drive me in again. In a greenhouse the sun is available and the winds are excluded. If the heating apparatus is out of order, as it fortunately was in the case of my greenhouse, the temperature is warm without stuffiness. I shut the door, pulled a tree fern in a heavy pot out of my way, and then found out by experiment which of the angles of all at which a hammock chair can be set is the most comfortable. Then I placed my four cus.h.i.+ons just where I like them, one under my head, one to give support to the small of my back, one under my knees, and one beside my left elbow. I lit my pipe and put the three boxes of matches in different places, so that when I lost one I should, while searching for it, be pretty sure of coming on another.

I opened my novel. It was about a gentleman of t.i.tle who in his day was the best swordsman in Europe. He loved a scornful lady with great devotion. I read a hundred pages with dwindling attention and at last found that I had failed to be excited by the story of a prolonged duel fought on the brink of a precipice under the shadow of an ancient castle from the battlements of which the scornful lady was looking down. I was vexed with myself, for I ought to have enjoyed the scene. I turned back and read the whole chapter through a second time. Again I somehow missed the emotion of it. My mind kept wandering from the lunging figures on the edge of the cliff to a vision of Lalage in a dark green dress speeding along the road on her bicycle.

I laid down the novel and set myself the pleasant task of constructing imaginary interviews between Lalage and the Archdeacon. As a rule I enjoy the meanderings of my own imagination, and in this particular case I had provided it with material to work on much more likely to be entertaining than the gambols of the expert swordsman or the scorn of the lady above him. But my imagination failed me. It pictured Lalage well enough. But the Archdeacon, for some reason, would not take shape. I tried again and again with no better success. The image of the Archdeacon got fainter and fainter, until I could no longer visualize even his ap.r.o.n.

At some time, perhaps an hour after I had settled down, I went to sleep.

I cannot fix, or make any attempt at fixing, the exact moment at which the conscious effort of my imagination pa.s.sed into the unconscious romance building of dream. But I know that the Archdeacon totally disappeared, while Lalage, a pleasantly stimulating personality, haunted me. I may have slept for an hour, perhaps for an hour and a half.

Looking back on the afternoon, and arranging its chronology to fit between two fixed points of time, I am certain that I did not sleep for more than an hour and a half. It was a few minutes after two o'clock when I sat down to luncheon. I am sure of this, because my mother's eyes sought the clock on the chimney piece when we entered the dining-room together and mine followed them. It was half-past five when I saw her again in the drawing-room. I am equally sure of this because she kissed me three times rather effusively and I was obliged to look at my watch to hide my embarra.s.sment. Between two o'clock and half-past five I lunched, smoked, read, slept, and played a part in certain other events.

This makes it tolerably certain that I did not sleep for more than an hour and a half.

I was wakened by a most violent opening of the greenhouse door and a tempestuous rustling of the fronds of the tree fern which I had moved.

Then Lalage burst upon me. My first impulse was to struggle out of my chair and offer it to her. She made a motion of excited refusal and I sank back again. I noticed, while she stood before me, that her face was unusually flushed. It seemed to me that she was pa.s.sing through what McMeekin used to describe as a nerve storm. I leaped to the conclusion that the Archdeacon had not taken kindly to the idea of a marriage with Miss Battersby.

"How did it go off?" I asked.

"Where's your mother?" said Lalage.

"She's not here. You ought to know better than to expect her to be here. Is she the sort of person who'd waste an afternoon in a disused greenhouse? She's probably doing something useful. Did you ask if she was covering pots of marmalade?"

"I've searched everywhere."

"Never mind. She's certain to turn up for tea."

Lalage stamped her foot.

"I want her at once," she said. "I want to talk to her."

"I'm a very poor subst.i.tute for my mother, of course; but if you can't find her----"

"I've something to tell her," said Lalage; "something that I simply must tell to somebody."

"I shall be delighted to listen."

Lalage hesitated. She was drumming with her fingers on the edge of an empty flower pot as if she were playing a very rapid fantasia on the piano. This seemed to me a further symptom of nerve storm. I encouraged her to speak, as tactfully as I could.

"Has Miss Battersby," I asked, "rebelled against her destiny?"

Lalage's face suddenly puckered up in a very curious way. I should have supposed that she was on the verge of tears if there existed any record of her ever having shed tears. But no one, not even her most intimate friend ever heard of her crying; so I came to the conclusion that she wanted to laugh. I felt uneasy, for Lalage usually laughs without any preliminary puckerings of her face.

"Perhaps," I said, "you're thinking of the Archdeacon."

"I am," said Lalage.

She spoke with a kind of gulp which in the case of Hilda would certainly have been a premonitory symptom of tears.

"Did he make himself particularly disagreeable?"

Greatly to my relief Lalage laughed. It was an excited, unnatural laugh; and it was not very far from crying. Still it was a laugh.

"No," she said. "He made himself particularly agreeable, too agreeable; at least he tried to."

Then she laughed again and this time the laughing did her good. She became calmer and sat down on the edge of an iron water tank which stood in the corner of the greenhouse. I warned her of the danger of falling in backward. I also offered her one of my cus.h.i.+ons to put on the edge of the tank, which looked to me hard. She laughed in reply. My cigarette case was, very fortunately, in my pocket. I fished it out and asked her if she would like to smoke. She took a cigarette and lit it. I could see that it helped to calm her still further.

"Go on with your story," I said.

"Where was I?"

She spoke quite naturally. The laughter and the cigarette, between them, had saved her from the attack which for some time was threatening.

"You hadn't actually begun," I said. "You had only mentioned that the Archdeacon was, or tried to be, unusually, even excessively, agreeable."

"He was writing letters in his study," said Lalage, "when I knocked at the door and walked in on him. I apologized at once for interrupting him."

"You were quite right to do that."

"He said he didn't mind a bit; in fact, liked it. Then he looked like a sheep. You know the sort of way a sheep looks?"

"Woolly?"

"Yes, frightfully, and worse. If I'd had a single grain of sense I should have bolted at once. Anybody might have known what was coming."

"I shouldn't. In fact, even now that I know something came, I can't guess what it was."

"Instead of bolting I brought out that text of Selby-Harrison's. He took it like a lamb."

"Woolly again, only a softer kind of wool."

"No," said Lalage, "just meekly; though of course he went on being woolly."

"There are several authorized interpretations of that text. My mother told me so this afternoon. I suppose the Archdeacon trotted them all out one by one?"