The Story Of Louie Part 12

She was hardly out of sight before her laughter broke forth. "'All the tea--jam and all the lot!'" she repeated softly, and laughed again.

She scarcely remembered this delightful young man. When, as a child of eleven, she had played leapfrog, he could hardly have been more than seven, and she felt herself to be far more than four years his senior now. He was the adjutant's son, she supposed. Well, he would hardly need Chaff's usual extenuation about his being a bad fellow at all: Louie would be very much surprised if he had wit enough to be very bad, or, for the matter of that, very anything else either. Once more she laughed. At any rate she had to thank him for dispelling her megrims for the time being. Still laughing softly, she pa.s.sed through the orchards, ascended the hill, and sought her favourite place by the stile at the top.

She had not thought very much about young men. She had observed them as so many phenomena, obviously superior to the animals, yet not quite identifiable as beings with inner experiences akin to her own. They looked at her irregular mouth and elongated chin, said the things young men did say, and departed again, taking their various moustaches and their unvarying smell of tobacco to some girl of the kind she knew they accounted "pretty." They were quite different beings from the fairy prince of her childhood; and since her childhood's days she had grown gradually, she did not know how, to a fairly accurate estimate in retrospect of the "little party" to which Chaff had once taken her, pigtails and all. Her views of marriage too were coloured by that mixed parentage that made her, she supposed, not "common" and not "a lady." She would not marry unless this was clearly understood. What else there might be in marriage was shadowy, to be considered after this redoubtable magnanimity was safely out of the way.

With no young man had she ever had "a lark."

She was, however, more in the mood for a lark now--not necessarily with a young man--than she had ever been in her life before. "Cau-ston a vingt-quatr'ans--elle coiffe deja Sainte Catherine," the remorseless Pigou had said: oh, had she? Did she? Moreover, you cannot put yourself gloomily into Coventry; others must be made to see that you consider your sequestration the most desirable of conditions. Indeed, she had said as much to Richenda Earle only the night before.

Richenda was the only one of the girls who slept indoors, and Louie, carrying her bed-trappings out from the house, had come upon Richenda by the little green door of the espaliered wall that led to the orchards. Richenda had made an advance, willing, apparently, to forget the snub Louie had administered after the "Life and Battles"

revelation, and had offered to carry her pillow for her.

"Why do you go so far?" she had asked, as they had left the orchard behind.

"Oh, I hate being disturbed," Louie had replied. "I'd go right down to the sh.o.r.e if it wasn't for the climb up again."

"But suppose you wanted anything during the night?"

"What should I want?"

"Of course, I forgot. You don't have headaches. I have--frightful ones."

"Then why don't you come out too? There's quite a jolly place here.

I'd help you to carry your things."

"Oh, I've got to read," Richenda had shaken her head.

"You'd be heaps better for it----"

Louie had not much in common with Richenda--save perhaps (she loved little cuts like this at herself) that both of their fathers were literary. But she had had that rather brutal snub on her conscience.

That had come out next.

"You do study too hard," she had said, "and--I say, Earle--I'm sorry for what I said that night--you know--when I snapped at you and said you'd your medal to get. Will you forget that?"

The next moment she had almost wished she hadn't said it, Earle's hungry grat.i.tude had shown so.

"It wasn't your fault a bit," the red-haired girl had broken out impulsively. "It was all mine. I ought to have minded my own business.

But I was so--so----"

"Well, try sleeping up here," Louie had cut her short. "It's jolly."

But Richenda had gone on. "I was stupid," she had murmured.

"I don't know that you were. You see how it is."

"Oh, I was, I was----"

"Well, as I tell you, I don't think much of my mother's lot."

"Ah, _you_ can say so," Richenda had replied, shaking her head. Then, as Louie had thrown down her mattress, "You don't mean to say you undress here?" she had asked.

"Well, I don't sleep in my clothes."

"But don't your things get wet?"

"I wrap 'em in my waterproof.... You won't come up, then, and run down to the sh.o.r.e for a bathe before breakfast?"

"Causton, they'll be dropping on you yet!" Earle had said, almost frightened.

"Well, without the bathe?"

"Oh, I should die!"

And Richenda had gone back to sleep where she might find remedies for her headaches within reach of her hand during the night.

Louie sat on the stile. The sea had a soft bloom, and the sky was of the colour of the whites of a baby's eyes. Bees hummed among the scabious, and blue and sulphur b.u.t.terflies hovered over the patches of wild thyme. A tramp, sullying the air behind her, crept slowly up to Bristol; a single nodding gra.s.s-head near at hand shut her out almost completely. Mazzicombe, down under the hill, was hidden. Louie watched it all, thinking of nothing, or, if of anything, of how sweet it was to relax all her muscles to the point of not stumbling off the stile, and all her mind save that she might still be just conscious that she existed and was Louie Causton....

"Hallo," said a slow, imperturbable voice behind her; "here we are again."

She started a little. Roy Lovenant-Smith was returning with a baulk of old wood over his shoulder.

"Oh, it's you," she said. She did not know whether she was glad or annoyed to be interrupted.

"Yes, it's me," he replied placidly.

She was silent for a moment; then: "I thought you hadn't to hang about here?" she said.

"Well," he put it to her candidly, "how can I get over the stile when you're sitting on it? How can I, now?"

She laughed. "Well, I must get off on my proper side." She did so.

"There," she said.

He climbed over with great deliberateness, walked a few yards with his piece of timber, and then turned again.

"No, you can't see her from here," he said. "She's down under the hill there. I don't think she's worth bothering about, but Izzard says she'll be quite all right with a new stay or two. I suppose I shall have to get 'em."

Louie felt a return of her amus.e.m.e.nt.

"Who's Izzard?" she asked.

"Izzard?" He looked at her as if she ought to know that. "Izzard's the other chap. Always painting, you know. Painting and mooning about and leaving me to do all the work. He's away there somewhere now." He pointed vaguely across the Channel. "I suppose he'll come back when he's ready. She _is_ an old egg-box!--I say, how's your cousin Eric?

And that girl--what's her name--Cynthia, wasn't it?"

She didn't know, and told him so; she did not tell him that she didn't care either. He cogitated for a moment, and then said:

"But I say--what do you _do_ at this place? Seems funny to me.... Mind yourself--somebody wants to get over----"

She had not heard anybody approach. It was Priddy, going down to Mazzicombe. Louie stood aside from the stile. Priddy climbed over it and began to descend the hill. Lovenant-Smith looked at Louie in surprise.

"I say," he said, "that's cool! Don't those fellows take their hats off to you?"