Scarlet and Hyssop Part 24

"I don't think you need mind much. People are disposed to take a favourable view of you. You must manage to keep it up. The time of pigs and shorthorns is here," she said with a sigh. "Look: there is Silly Billy talking to Marie! She appears completely unconscious of his presence."

"She probably is, for I don't think she ever poses."

"There is faint praise in your voice," said Mildred.

"Undesignedly. At least, I had no intention of doing the other thing. By the way, I disquieted myself in vain over the Silly Billy episode, I think. It has not caught on."

"n.o.body talked about anything else for three days," said Mildred, with a mother's protective instinct for her offspring. "You didn't suppose they would talk to you about it! But I am magnanimous enough to be glad it has dropped, Jack. It is very important--particularly important, I think--that you should have no joint in your harness just now. You will probably get into the Cabinet, upon which the searchlights will be turned on. I feel this strongly. I have meant to say it to you for--for some time."

He looked at her for a moment without replying.

"She caught it hot," he said to himself, not without satisfaction, for he saw vividly the truth of Lady Ardingly's estimate of her folly.

"I feel it, too," he said; and, though they agreed, a discordant note was definitely struck, and vibrated very audibly to the inward ear, with its own-widening harmonics.

"I am glad! As you implied to me not long ago, Caesar's wife must be above suspicion. It was not very convincing to me then. But it is now.

Also, Jack, it is best that Caesar should not inspire spicy paragraphs in the gutter press."

Jack felt unreasonably irritated. The cook spoke here.

"Have you some scandal to tell me about myself," he asked, "also invented by you?"

"No. But why show temper?"

"Because you irritate me when you speak like that."

Mildred felt suddenly a little uncomfortable; she had a sense of uncertain grip.

"Really, Jack, you are very ungrateful!" she said. "I am taking all the trouble of sitting with you in the corner, and thinking of a hundred things for your good, which would never have occurred to you, and you merely tell me that I irritate you!"

"Well, what is it?" he replied.

She rose, really annoyed.

"I will leave you to find out for yourself," she said.

"You are sufficiently lucid. You have stated what you mean quite clearly. You will leave me. I have found out for myself. So shall we discuss it?"

She had made a false move, and knew it. There was some indefinable change about Jack, which she recognised though she could not a.n.a.lyze it.

But the prospect of losing him, even temporarily, on his initiative, was quite another matter to doing it on her own.

"Yes, that is what I mean," she said, sitting down again. "I made a mess, or I might have made one, over that other affair, and I see now that it might have been very injurious to you, especially since Jim Spencer is standing as a Liberal for East Surrey. Did you know that, by the way?"

"Oh, yes. He talked to me about it. It was not wise of you."

"Well, luckily there is no harm done. The thing didn't catch on. But the point is to avoid other dangers. And for the present I am dangerous to you, Jack. People won't begin talking again unless they get fresh cause.

Do not let us give them fresh cause."

"I quite agree with you," said he.

Mildred liked this less and less. She had imagined that he would want a lot of talking round and reasoning with, and it did not flatter her at all to find him so placidly in accord with her. Yet she had no tangible ground of complaint.

"So that is all right," she said. "Ah, here is Marie. Marie, whenever I see you in that pink dress, I think it is morning."

"It is nearly," said she. "Jack, I am going home. Are you stopping to play?"

He rose.

"No, I will come with you," he said.

Marie looked a little surprised.

"Stop by all means if you feel inclined," she said. "I will send the carriage back for you."

Mildred laughed.

"Mutual confidence of the very first water," she observed.

Again the cook _motif_ sounded, setting his teeth on edge.

"No, I will come with you, Marie," he repeated.

CHAPTER XIII

Maud Brereton was lying in a hammock underneath a big chestnut-tree in the garden of the house at Windsor. She had been here a fortnight alone, having been sent from London in disgrace by her mother after her refusal, in consequence of her interview with Marie Alston, to accept the riches and devotion of Anthony Maxwell. This fortnight she had spent in sublime inaction, surrounded as she was by all those things which to her made life lovable. Her dogs were here, her pony was here, the meadows were tall with hay, the river br.i.m.m.i.n.g, and the garden-beds presented every day some new miracle of unfolding colour. Each morning she had got up early and ridden in the park, while the day was still cool and dewy; she had read, not much; she had played the piano diligently; she had been the centre of an adoring crowd of dogs and gardeners; and for some days--not all this fortnight, indeed, but the bigger and earlier half of it--she had been completely happy in her own mild ruminative manner. It had been a source of great satisfaction to compare the rival merits of the two systems: London on the one hand; on the other, being in disgrace. For the sight of the hot square garden, she had here this cool, green lawn; for the riband of dull wood pavement up Grosvenor Street, the silver line of the Thames; for the companions.h.i.+p of languid and heated mankind, the eager dogs; and for the hopeless tedium of a ball, the cool vast night pouring in through the open windows of the drawing-room.

This idyllic att.i.tude towards life in general had lasted ten days or so, but during the last four she no longer tried to conceal from herself her mind had changed. The weather, perhaps, became rather hotter, or she more languid; in any case, though she cared no less for the dogs and the riot of vegetable life, she missed something. And that something, she was beginning to be afraid, was people. Again and again she arrived at this same disheartening conclusion, and though, as many times, she went over in her mind the list of the people whom it was possible she might miss, and found none desirable, it was none the less true that she missed them _en ma.s.se_. Imagining them with her now, one by one, she would have wished each of them away, but with them all away there was something lacking. "Perhaps they are like a tonic," she said to herself.

"One doesn't want to take it, but one is the better for it."

She sat up in her hammock and surveyed her surroundings. The book she had brought out to read had fallen, crumple-edged, on the gra.s.s, and looking at the back, even the very t.i.tle came as new to her. Dogs in various stages of exhaustion were stretched round her, and at the sound of her movement tails thumped the gra.s.s, but otherwise none stirred.

Overhead, the chestnut with green five-fingered leaves drooped in the heat, and stars of wavering light fell through the inters.p.a.ces of foliage on to her dress. To the right the hay, already tall and ripe to die, stood motionless in the dead calm; and the scent of clover and flowering gra.s.s, which in the morning had been wafted in flow and ebb of varying scent, hung heavy and stagnant in the air. Southwards the river was a sheet of gla.s.s; a centreboard, hopelessly becalmed, lay with flapping sail in the middle, and a splashed line of broken water showed the paddling efforts of its master. To this side lay the lawn; the croquet hoops were up, and leaning against the stick was a mallet; four b.a.l.l.s in as uninteresting position lay immobilized here and there, the _debris_ of a game, red versus blue, which Maud had begun that morning, but had found her honesty or her interest unable to cope with. Beyond was the house, bandaged as to the windows with green sun-blinds, and empty but for Maud's maid, who was in love with the caretaker, who adored the kitchenmaid-cook, who adored n.o.body. There was also the caretaker's wife, and n.o.body adored her.

The path which led from the lawn to the river was concealed by a lilac-bush from Maud's hammock, and it was with a sudden quickening of the pulse that she heard a crisp step pa.s.sing along it. It was a man's tread, so much was certain; it was certain also that it did not belong to any of the gardeners, all of whose steps, Maud had noticed, were marked by a sort of drowsy c.u.mbersomeness, like people who are walking about a dark room. Soon the crisp step paused and began to retrace itself, left the gravel for the gra.s.s, and in another moment Anthony Maxwell came round the lilac-bush.

Maud did not feel in the least surprised; her unconscious self had probably guessed who it was. She rose from her sitting position on the hammock, but gave him no word or gesture of greeting.

"I came down on my motor-car," he said. "It was particularly hot. May I sit here a little while and get cool?"

"By all means," said Maud. Then, after a pause, "Do you think it was right of you to come?" she said.

"I don't think anything about it," he said; "I had to."

Maud hardened and retreated into herself.

"You mean, I suppose, that my mother insisted on it," she said, with a cold resentment in her voice.