Deadham Hard Part 27

"A distant cousin. He stayed with us in the autumn just before he went out to India. He pa.s.sed into the Indian Civil Service from Oxford at the top of the list."

"Praiseworthy young man."

"Oh! but you would like him, Henrietta," the girl declared. "He is very clever and very entertaining too when"--

"When?"

"Well, when he doesn't tease too much. He has an immense amount to talk about, and very good manners."

"Also, when he does not tease too much?--And you like him?"

"I don't quite know," Damaris slowly said. "He did not stay with us long enough for me to make up my mind. And then other things happened which rather put him out of my head. He was a little conceited, perhaps, I thought."

"Not unnaturally, being at the top of the pa.s.s list. But though other things put him out of your head, he writes to you?"

In the p.u.s.s.y-warmth within her m.u.f.f, Mrs. Frayling became sensible that Damaris' hand grew unresponsive, at once curiously stiff and curiously limp.

"He has written twice. Once on the voyage out, and again soon after he arrived. The--the second letter reached me this week."

Notwithstanding suns.h.i.+ne, the eager air, and lively b.u.mping of the descent, Henrietta observed the flush fade, leaving the girl white as milk. Her eyes looked positively enormous set in the pallor of her face.

They were veiled, telling nothing, and thereby--to Mrs. Frayling's thinking--betraying much. She scented a situation--some girlish attachment, budding affair of the heart.

"My father gave Tom Verity letters of introduction, and he wanted us to know how kindly he had been received in consequence."

"Most proper on his part," Mrs. Frayling said.

She debated discreet questioning, probing--the establishment of herself in the character of sympathetic confidante. But decided against that. It might be impolitic, dangerous even, to press the pace. Moreover the young man, whatever his attractions, might be held a negligible quant.i.ty in as far as any little schemes of her own were concerned at present, long leave and reappearance upon the home scene being almost certainly years distant.--And, just there, the hand within the m.u.f.f became responsive once more, even urgent in its seeking and pressure, as though appealing for attention and tenderness.

"Henrietta, I don't want to be selfish, but won't you go on telling me stories about your Thursday party people?--I interrupted you--but it's all new, you see, and it interests me so much," Damaris rather plaintively said.

Mrs. Frayling needed no further inducement to exercise her really considerable powers of verbal delineation. Charging her palette with lively colours, she sprang to the task--and that with a sprightly composure and deftness of touch which went far to cloak malice and rob flippancy of offence.

Listening, Damaris brightened--as the adroit performer intended she should--under the gay cascade of talk. Laughed at length, letting finer instincts of charity go by the wall, in her enjoyment of neatly turned mockeries and the sense of personal superiority they provoked. For Henrietta's dissection of the weaknesses of absent friends, inevitably amounted to indirect flattery of the friend for whose diversion that process of dissection was carried out.

She pa.s.sed the whole troop in review.--To begin with Miss Maud Callowgas, in permanent waiting upon her ex-semi-episcopal widowed mother--in age a real thirty-five though nominal twenty-eight, her muddy complexion, prominent teeth and all too long back.--Her designs, real or imagined, upon Marshall Wace. Designs foredoomed to failure, since whatever his intentions--Henrietta smiled wisely--they certainly did not include Maud Callowgas's matrimonial future in their purview.

Herbert Binning followed next--the chaplain who served the rather staring little Anglican church at Le Vandou, a suburb of St. Augustin much patronized by the English in the winter season, and a chapel somewhere in the Bernese Oberland during the summer months. Energetic, athletic, a great talker and squire of dames--in all honesty and correctness, this last, well understood, for there wasn't a word to be breathed against the good cleric's morals. But just a wee bit impressionable and flirtatious, as who might not very well be with such a whiney-piney wife as Mrs.

Binning, always ailing; what mind she might (by stretch of charity) be supposed to possess exclusively fixed upon the chronic irregularities of her internal organs? Rec.u.mbency was a mania with her and she had a disconcerting habit of wanting to lie down on the most inconveniently unsuitable occasions.--To mitigate his over-flowing energies, which cried aloud for work, Mr. Binning took pupils. He had two exceptionably nice boys with him this winter, in the interval between leaving Eton and going up to Oxford, namely, Peregrine Ditton, Lord Pamber's younger son, and Harry Ellice, a nephew of Lady Hermione Twells. They were very well-bred.

Their high spirits were highly infectious. They played tennis to perfection and Harry Ellice danced quite tidily into the bargain.--Damaris must make friends with them. They were her contemporaries, and delightfully fresh and ingenuous.

Lady Hermione herself--here Henrietta's tone conveyed restraint, even comparative reverence--who never for an instant forgot she once had reigned over some microscopic court out in the far Colonial wilderness, nor allowed you to forget it either. Her glance half demanded your curtsy. Still she was the "real thing" and, in that, eminently satisfactory--genuine _grande dame_ by right both of birth and of training.

"She won't condescend to tell me so, being resolved to keep me very much in my proper place," Henrietta continued; "but I learned yesterday from Mary Ellice--Harry's sister, who lives with her--that she is intensely desirous to meet Sir Charles. She wants to talk to him about Afghanistan and North-west Frontier policy. A brother of hers it appears was at one time in the Guides; and she is under the impression your father and Colonel Carteret would have known him.--By the way, dearest child, they do mean to honour me, those two, don't they, with their presence on Thursday?"

"Of course they will, since you asked them. Why, they love to come and see you."

"Do they?" Mrs. Frayling said--"Anyhow, let us hope so. I can trust Carteret's general benevolence, but I am afraid your father will be unutterably bored with my rubbis.h.i.+ng little a.s.sembly."

"But, of course, he'll be nice to everybody too--as tame and gentle as possible with them all to please you, don't you see, Henrietta."

"Ah! no doubt, all to please me!" she repeated. And fell to musing, while the carriage, quitting at last the rough forest track, rattled out on to the metalled high road, white in dust.

Here the late afternoon sun still lay hot. The booming plunge of the tideless sea, breaking upon the rocks below, quivered in the quiet air.

Henrietta Frayling withdrew her hands from her m.u.f.f, unfastened the collar of her sable cape. The change from the shadowed woods to this glaring sheltered stretch of road was oppressive. She felt strangely tired and spent. She trusted Damaris would not perceive her uncomfortable state and proffer sympathy. And Damaris, in fact, did nothing of the sort, being very fully occupied with her own concerns at present.

Half a mile ahead, pastel-tinted, green-shuttered houses--a village of a single straggling street--detached themselves in broken perspective from the purple of pine-crowned cliff and headland beyond. Behind them the western sky began to grow golden with the approach of sunset. The road lead straight towards that softly golden light--to St. Augustin. It led further, deeper into the gold, deeper, as one might fancy, into the heart of the coming sunset, namely to the world-famous seaport of Ma.r.s.eilles.

Damaris sought to stifle remembrance of this alluring fact, as soon as it occurred to her. She must not dally with it--no she mustn't. To in anywise encourage or dwell on it, was weak and unworthy, she having accepted the claims of clearly apprehended duty. She could not go back on her decision, her choice, since, in face of the everlasting hills, she had pledged herself.

So she let her eyes no longer rest on the high-road, but looked out to sea--where, as tormenting chance would have it, the black hull of a big cargo boat, steaming slowly westward, cut into the vast expanse of blue, long pennons of rusty grey smoke trailing away from its twin rusty-red painted funnels.

Hard-pressed, the girl turned to her companion, asking abruptly, inconsequently--"Is that every one whom you expect on Thursday, Henrietta?"

For some seconds Mrs. Frayling regarded her with a curious lack of intelligent interest or comprehension. Her thoughts, also, had run forward into the gold of the approaching sunset; and she had some difficulty in overtaking, or restraining them, although they went no further than the Grand Hotel; and--so to speak--sat down there all of a piece, on a buff-coloured iron chair, which commanded an uninterrupted view of four gentlemen standing talking before the front door.

"On Thursday?" she repeated--"Why Thursday?"--and her usually skilful hands fumbled with the fastening of her sable cape. Their helpless ineffectual movements served to bring her to her senses, bring her to herself.

"Really you possess an insatiable thirst for information regarding my probable guests, precious child," she exclaimed. "All--of course not. I have only portrayed the heads of tribes as yet for your delectation. We shall number many others--male and female--of the usual self-expatriated British rank and file.--Derelicts mostly."

Lightly and coldly, Henrietta laughed.

"Like, for example, the General and myself. Wanderers possessed of a singularly barren species of freedom, without ties, without any sheet-anchor of family or of profession to embarra.s.s our movements, without call to live in one place rather than another. All along this sun-blessed Riviera you will find them swarming, thick as flies, displaying the trumpery spites and rivalries through which, as I started by pointing out to you, they can alone maintain a degree of individuality and persuade themselves and others they still are actually alive."

Shocked at this sudden bitterness, touched to the quick by generous pity, regardless of possible onlookers--here in the village street, where the hoof-beats of the trotting horses echoed loud from the house-walls on either side--Damaris put her arms round Henrietta Frayling, clasping, kissing her.

"Ah! don't, Henrietta," she cried. "Don't dare to say such ugly, lying things about your dear self. They aren't true. They're absurdly, scandalously untrue.--You who are so brilliant, so greatly admired, who have everyone at your feet! You who are so kind too,--think of all the pleasure you have given me to-day, for instance--and then think how beautifully good you've been, and all the time are being, to poor Mr. Wace"--

Whether Mrs. Frayling's surprising lapse into sincerity and bald self-criticism were intentional, calculated, or not, she was undoubtedly quick to see and profit by the opening which Damaris' concluding words afforded her.

"How sweet you are, darling child! How very dear of you to scold me thus!" she murmured, gently disengaging herself and preening her feathers, somewhat disarranged by the said darling child's impetuous onset.

"I know it is wrong to grumble. Yet sometimes--as one grows older--one gets a dreadful sense that the delights of life are past; and that perhaps one has been overscrupulous, over-timid and so missed the best.--That is one reason why I find it so infinitely pleasing to have you with me--yet pathetic too perhaps.--Why? Well, I don't know that I am quite at liberty to explain exactly why."

Henrietta smiled at her long, wistfully and oh! so sagely.

"And, indirectly, that reminds me I am most anxious you should not exaggerate, or run off with any mistaken ideas about my dealings with poor Marshall Wace. I don't deny I did find his constantly being with us a trial at first. But I am reconciled to it. A trifle of discipline, though screamingly disagreeable, is no doubt sometimes useful--good for one's character, I mean. And I really have grown quite attached to him.

He has charming qualities. His want of self-confidence is really his worst fault--and what a trivial one if you've had experience of the horrid things men can do, gamble, for example, and drink."

Henrietta paused, sighed. The yellow facade of the Grand Hotel came into sight, a pale spot amid dark trees in the distance.

"And Marshall, poor fellow," she continued, "is more grateful to me, that I know, than words can say. So do like him and encourage him a little--it would be such a help and happiness to me as well as to him, dearest Damaris."

CHAPTER V

IN WHICH HENRIETTA PULLS THE STRINGS