The Story Of Louie Part 31

"Little girl?"

"You'll be good to poor old Chaff? He's fond of me too."

Buck promised that he would. Had there been none other, the tantrums of the Honourable Emily were no doubt bond enough between them.

The next morning Buck had to be told that eight o'clock was too early for a visit, and so, on the next morning again, he did not turn up until eleven. After that eleven became his accustomed hour. Wet or fine was the same to him, and he cancelled all afternoon orders for the trap; his little girl must have the trap at her disposal for a daily drive. And because his fidelity to the Social Order and their own professional tolerances amounted in Louie's case to pretty much the same thing, the nurses one and all fell in love with Buck.

And here, once for all, or at any rate for a long time, a cogent matter may be dismissed, even as those pagan nurses dismissed it. It is Louie's conviction of moral guilt as apart from her persuasion of the practical inconveniences of it. Louie Causton would have been poor stuff for the hot gospeller to practise upon. There were things she would have had undone, and that not merely because the consequences pressed upon her; as they could not be undone, she had begun the tune and intended to fiddle it out. What she saw fit to hide her historian hides also. Louie seized what happiness she could, and it served. She was sorrier for Chaff than she was for herself. She would have been less happy had she taken Uncle Augustus's way out.

And whether the days were happy or not, at any rate they were peacefully alike. Breakfast with the nurses, a morning or afternoon drive with Buck or a walk along the river bank or on Putney Heath, tea (if they drove) perhaps at Kingston, supper with the nurses again, and bed--that was the tale of them. She kept her promise to Chaff; several times he came to see her. Twice he met Buck. At these meetings the shade of the Honourable Emily almost visibly presided.... Chaff tried to talk of "Lives and Battles," Buck of the same--it was not for him to choose topics before his betters. And once, but once only, Buck brought Mrs. Buck, formerly Susan Emmidge, the chemist's servant at Mallard Bois. He hooked her up behind himself before they left Kingston, and Louie did her the same service at the end of the visit.

For the rest, if Louie wanted to see her father's second wife she had to go to the Molyneux Arms to do so.

II

As the singer of "The Pilgrim of Love" Buck was known far and abroad up the Thames. It will be believed that he contrived to get an infinite personal pathos into the song; he also made of it, by means of those gratuitous aspirates, an affective athletic exercise in breathing.

"No re-(_h_)est--but the gra-(_h_)ave For the Pi-(_h_)ilgrim of Love!----"

As he closed his eyes at each soaring, the effect was as if he inwardly looked back on that remarkable pilgrimage of his own. Bidden to marry, he had married; bidden to unmarry and to marry again, he had done so; and at a word from Louie he would have taken up the pilgrimage once more.

But while Buck exalted the Scarisbricks high above himself, so also he exalted himself high above all beneath him. He ruled the Molyneux Arms with a rod of iron. Only mediately and through him would the two barmaids have dared to address Louie; and his wife's position was altogether anomalous. It was only because Louie would have it so that she sat down to tea with them; and, what with her hooks and eyes and Buck's perpetual admonitions, there was little rest but the grave for her either. Buck subscribed to the _Almanack de Gotha_ and _Modern Society_; these were always to hand; but _The Licensed Victuallers'

Gazette_, which he took in the way of business, was kept out of Louie's way. Mr. Mackie he would have torn from limb to limb. Far more royalist than the king was Buck; Radicalism was chaos, which word he p.r.o.nounced "tchayoss." Of pugilism, save to Chaff, he never spoke.

"G.o.d bless the Squire and his relations."

And (Louie thought) G.o.d bless this simple-hearted father of hers also.

Buck in the ring had been a better man than Uncle Augustus in the House of Lords, and Henson would not have looked twice at Chaff.

Granted he was pompous; with a little more pompousness her mother would have come more creditably out of that old affair. So much for the Scarisbricks. Already, in January, Louie loved her father; by March his daily visit was a necessity of her life. She had been right; her destiny was quite as likely to be bound up with Buck and his beer-pumps as with anything in that dingy old Business School.

Of the Business School she still thought a good deal, however. She could not forget the interesting little drama of which she had seen, as it were, the first act. Somehow, time and distance had simplified some of its details without diminis.h.i.+ng her interest in it, and, as she walked along the Putney towpath by day, or lay awake in her white-painted room at night, she wondered that this should be so. By the brutal logic of events, Rainham Parva should have been nearer to her than Holborn; but Rainham Parva seemed now disproportionately remote. Why?

Had the conclusion which persisted in presenting itself not been impossible, perhaps she would not have faced it so frankly. It was impossible--manifestly absurd--that Mr. Jeffries should have any hold on her imagination. Therefore she allowed herself to consider it. No doubt the fancies which filled her head would pa.s.s and be forgotten.

Give them a month, then--two months.

She gave them that, and more. They did not pa.s.s. But that, no doubt, was due to the curious interrupted story. She felt as if she was reading an interesting serial tale, for the next instalment of which she was suddenly required to wait another month. She wanted to know what was going to happen among the fair, perky boy, the girl who resembled Polly Ross, the lionlike Mr. Jeffries, and that apocryphal fourth actor in the piece. When she had learned that she would close the book. In the meantime she occupied herself, as serial readers do, with guessing.

The spring was advancing towards May when there happened something that suddenly precipitated her guessings. Buck still came daily, but she walked more in the back garden of the nursing home now and less on the heath and on the towpath, and drove, when she did drive, more slowly. Sometimes on her drives a nurse accompanied her. Her doctor found her health excellent.

The thing that happened began with Richenda Earle. Some weeks before, Louie had had a letter from Richenda forwarded from Sutherland Place, which she had neglected to answer; and Richenda had apparently written again, this time to her sister. Louie now gathered that Mrs. Leggat had kept the reason for her disappearance from Mr. Weston, but not from Richenda. By way of Richenda and Mr. Weston it had now reached the Business School. A hastily scrawled letter from Kitty Windus informed Louie of this. Kitty wanted to come and see her.

Well, there was no reason why Kitty should not come. Louie wrote and told her so.

She came on a Sat.u.r.day afternoon. It was not urgently necessary that Louie should have received her in bed, but the recollection of the spinster's peering eyes held some obscure prompting. Moreover, to receive Kitty in bed would be an intimation that the call must not be a long one, and she had arranged its duration with Miss Dot Mayville.

"Miss Windus," Miss Dot announced, and Kitty entered.

She had brought Louie a bunch of violets; that was the first of several new amenities Louie noticed in her manner. Louie discouraged the second amenity, which was a shy motion as if to embrace her. And the third showed when, after a few minutes in which Kitty's fluttered spirits had become a little calmer (_she_ was not the one to turn her back on people in trouble, she had said, let others hold up their heads as they pleased), she wistfully took Louie's hand on the coverlet. She had cried over Louie a little. Her eyes were still wet.

"Of course--but I don't know whether you've heard--I might have been just like everybody else, only something else has made an awful difference too," she said, her eyes downcast.

"Oh? What else?" Louie asked a little offhandedly. She had not wanted to be wept over.

"Oh, then you haven't heard.... I'm engaged. I've been engaged nearly two months."

"Really? Then I must congratulate you. Is it a secret who to?"

"No," said Kitty. "It's to Mr. Jeffries."

Slowly Louie sat up. She turned, as if, like Buck, she had been deaf on one side. "_Who?_" she asked.

"Yes. To Mr. Jeffries. Since early in March. You remember he told Archie there was somebody?--and," Kitty became suddenly voluble, "I couldn't believe my ears at first. I'd never dreamed--never dreamed.

And after I'd been such a beast--I don't mean a beast exactly, but getting at him, you know. I was just as bad as the others--about his baths and all that. Oh, I did feel ashamed--as mean as mean--oh!" She choked a little. "I don't mind saying it now, but I'd--I'd begun to be afraid I should _never_ get off!"

"Yes--no, I mean," Louie murmured, dazed.

"Just fancy, it's being me! That night, when he asked me, I thought I should have gone clean off it. Sometimes I can hardly believe it yet.

I hadn't a notion--not a notion! And it makes everything perfectly wonderful, knowing a man's so struck on you, though he _is_ quiet and don't say much about it. Of course they mean all the more, that sort.

We walk along the streets, but he won't let me stop out late for fear of tiring me, and he always takes me right to the door, and I'm trying hard not to be selfish, but it makes me so sorry for other girls who haven't got off--and perhaps if I sell some of my shares to start us with we can get married next year--if he gets a permanency, that is."

Louie was still thunderstruck. Mr. Jeffries engaged to--Kitty Windus!

That unnamed personage was--Kitty Windus! She, Louie, was asked to believe _that_, in the face of all she had seen!

"I am glad," she found herself murmuring again.

"Did _you_ guess?" Kitty asked eagerly. She would have given her ears to be told that somebody else had guessed.

"No," Louie replied, and added, seeing Kitty's fallen face: "I should have thought Mr. Merridew. You seemed such great friends."

At that Kitty broke in: "Poor Archie! I said it made one selfish....

His father's very ill. We were going on Putney Heath to-day, all four of us, Archie and Evie and Jeff and me; but Archie had a wire to go home this morning, poor Archie, and so I'm going to meet the others by-and-by. But anyway, if anything does happen, he'll be able to get married as soon as he likes--he's an only son."

At this Louie was even more startled. Mr. Jeffries and the Soames girl together at that moment! She remembered those irrevocable looks.

"So Mr. Merridew and Miss Soames are engaged, then?" she said.

"Well," Kitty admitted, "it comes to the same thing. They're as good as. I wish Jeff was coming into a bit, like Archie."

"You say they're here, at Putney, this afternoon?"

"Jeff and Evie? Yes. I'm meeting them at five."

Even as Louie was inwardly predicting that Kitty would not see her Mr.

Jeffries at five, Miss Dot Mayville entered. But Louie did not want Kitty to go just yet. She wanted to know more of this extraordinary development of her drama. "May we have some tea?" she asked, and Miss Dot went out again. Louie lay back on her pillow and frowned at the foot of her white-painted bed.

"It's very kind of you to give up your afternoon to me," she said by-and-by.

"Oh, my dear, as if I wouldn't!" Kitty broke out almost reproachfully.

"I keep telling myself I mustn't be selfish, when Jeff and I have years before us--I'm just beginning to realise it--years--and, oh dear, here I am, selfish again, talking all about myself and never a word about you."