The Mating of Lydia Part 24

Faversham replied again that he had done nothing, and was as much puzzled as anybody.

"My mother was afraid you would be anything but comfortable," said Tatham. "She knows this gentleman of old. But she didn't know your powers of soothing the savage breast! However, you have only to say the word, and we shall be delighted to take you in for as long as you like."

"Oh, I must stay here now," said Faversham decidedly. "One couldn't be ungrateful for what has been done. But my best thanks to Lady Tatham all the same. I hope I may get over to see her some day."

"You must, of course. Dixon tells me there is a carriage coming--perhaps a motor; why not!"

A flush rose in Faversham's pale cheek.

"Mr. Melrose talked of hiring one yesterday," he said, unwillingly. "How far are you?"

They fell into talk about Duddon and the neighbourhood, avoiding any further discussion of Melrose. Then Faversham described his accident, and spoke warmly of Undershaw, an occupation in which Tatham heartily joined.

"I owe my life to him," said Faversham; adding with sudden sharpness, "I suppose I must count it an advantage!"

"That would be the common way of looking at it!" laughed Tatham. "What are you doing just now?"

"Nothing in particular. I am one of the large tribe of briefless barristers. I suppose I've never given enough of my mind to it. The fact is I don't like the law--never have. I've tried other things--fatal, of course!--but they haven't come off, or at least only very moderately.

But, as you may suppose--I'm not exactly penniless. I have a few resources--just enough to live on--without a wife."

Tatham felt a little awkward. Faversham's tone was already that of a man to some extent disappointed and embittered.

"You had always so much more brains than the rest of us," he said cordially. "You'll be all right."

"It's not brains that matter nowadays--it's money. What do you get by brains? A civil service appointment--and a pension of seven hundred a year. What's the good of slaving for that?"

Faversham turned to his companion with a smile, in which however there was no good-humour. It made Tatham disagreeably conscious of his own wealth.

"Well, of course, there are the prizes--"

"A few. So few that they don't count. A man may grind for years, and get pa.s.sed over or forgotten--just by a shave--at the end. I've seen that happen often. Or you get on swimmingly for a while, and everybody supposes you're going to romp in; and then something crops up you never thought of. Some boss takes a dislike to you--or you make a mistake, and cut your own throat. And there you are--pulled!"

Tatham was silent a moment, his blunt features expressing some bewilderment. Then he said--awkwardly:

"So you don't really know what you're going to take up?"

Faversham lit another cigarette.

"Oh, well, I have some friends--and some ideas. If I once get a foothold, a beginning--I daresay I could make money like other people. Every idiot one meets seems to be doing it."

"Do you want to go into politics--or something of that kind?"

"I want to remain my own master, and do the things I want to do--and not the things I must do," laughed Faversham. "That seems to me the dividing line in life--whether you are under another man's orders or your own. And broadly speaking it's the line between poverty and money. But you don't know much about it, old fellow!" He looked round with a laugh.

Tatham screwed up his blue eyes, not finding reply very easy, and not certain that he liked the "old fellow," though their college familiarity justified it. He changed the subject, and they fell into some gossip about Oxford acquaintances and recollections, which kept the conversation going.

But at the end of it the two men were each secretly conscious that the other jarred upon him; and in spite of the tacit appeal made by Faversham's physical weakness and evident depression to Tatham's boundless good-nature, there had arisen between them at the end an incipient antagonism which a touch might develop. Faversham appeared to the younger man as querulous, discontented, and rather sordidly ambitious; while the smiling optimism of a youth on whom Fortune had showered every conceivable gift--money, position, and influence--without the smallest effort on his own part, rang false or foolish in the ears of his companion. Tatham, cut off from the county, agricultural, or sporting subjects in which he was most at home, fumbled a good deal in his efforts to adjust himself; while Faversham found it no use to talk of travel, art, or music to one who, in spite of an artistic and literary mother and wonderful possessions, had himself neither literary nor artistic faculty, and in the prevailing manner of the English country gentleman, had always found the pleasures of England so many and superior that there was no need whatever to cross the Channel in pursuit of others. Both were soon bored; and Tatham would have hurried his departure, but for the hope of Lydia. With that to fortify him, however, he sat on.

And at last she came. Mrs. Penfold, it will easily be imagined, entered upon the scene, in a state of bewildered ravishment.

"She had never expected--she could not have believed--it was like a fairy-tale--a _real_ fairy-tale--wasn't the house _too_ beautiful--Mr.

Melrose's _taste_!--and such _things_!" In the wake of this soft, gesticulating whirlwind, followed Lydia, waiting patiently with her bright and humorous look till her mother should give her the chance of a word. Her gray dress, and white hat, her little white scarf, a trifle old-fas.h.i.+oned, and the pansies at her belt seemed to Tatham's eager eyes the very perfection of dress. He watched her keenly as she came in; the kind look at Faversham; then the start--was it, of pity?--for his altered aspect, the friendly greeting for himself; and all so sweet, so detached, so composed. His heart sank, he could not have told why.

"I ought to have warned you of that hill!" she said, standing beside Faversham, and looking down upon him.

"You couldn't know I was such a duffer!" laughed Faversham. "It wasn't me--it was the bike. At least, they tell me so. As for me, everything, from the moment I left you till I woke up here six weeks ago, is wiped out. Did you finish your sketch? Were the press notices good?"

She smiled. "Did you see what they were?"

"Certainly. I saw your name in one as I picked it out."

"I still sleep with it under my pillow--when I feel low," said Lydia. "It said the nicest things. And I sold my pictures."

"Magnificent!" said Faversham. "But of course you sold them."

"Oh, no, Mr. Faversham, not 'of course'!" cried Mrs. Penfold, turning round upon him. "You can't think how Lydia was envied! Hardly anybody sold. There were friends of hers exhibiting--and it was dreadful. The secretary said they had hardly ever had such a bad year--something to do with a bank breaking--or the influenza--or something. But Lydia, lucky girl, sold hers within the first week. And we don't know at all who bought them. The secretary said he was not to tell. There are many buyers, he told us, who won't give their names--for fear of being bothered afterward. As if Lydia would ever bother any one!"

The guilty Tatham sat with his cane between his knees twirling it, his eyes on the ground. No one noticed him.

"And the sketch you were making that day?" said Faversham.

"As you liked it, I brought it to show you," said Lydia shyly. And she produced a thin parcel she had been carrying under her arm.

Faversham praised the drawing warmly. It reminded him, he said, of some work he had seen in March, at one of the Bond Street galleries; a one-man show by a French water-colourist. He named him. Lydia flushed a little.

"Next to Mr. Delorme"--she glanced gratefully at Tatham--"he is the man of all the world I admire most! I am afraid I can't help imitating him."

"But you don't!" cried Faversham. "You are quite independent. I didn't mean that for a moment."

Lydia's eyes surveyed him with a look of amus.e.m.e.nt, which seemed to say that she was not at all duped by his compliment. He proceeded to justify it.

"I'll tell you who do imitate him--"

And forthwith he began to show a remarkable knowledge of certain advanced groups among the younger artists and their work. Lydia's face kindled.

She listened; she agreed; she interrupted; she gave her view; it was evident that the conversation both surprised and delighted her.

Tea came out, and, at Faversham's invitation, Lydia presided. The talk between her and Faversham flowed on, in spite of the girl's pretty efforts to make it general, to bring Tatham into it. He himself defeated her. He wanted to listen; so did Mrs. Penfold, who sat in open-mouthed wonder at Lydia's cleverness; while Tatham was presently conscious of a strong discomfort, a jealous discomfort, which spoilt for him this nearness to Lydia, and the thrill stirred in him by her movements and tones, her soft laugh, her white neck, her eyes....

Here, between these two people, Faversham and Lydia, who had only seen each other for some ten minutes in their lives before, there seemed to have arisen, at once, an understanding, a freemasonry, such as he himself had never reached in all his meetings with Lydia Penfold.

How had it come about? They talked of people, struggling people, to whom art was life, though also livelihood; of men and women, for whom nothing else counted, beside the fascination and the torment of their work; Lydia speaking from within, as a humble yet devout member of the band; Faversham, as the keen spectator and amateur--not an artist, but the frequenter of artists.

And all the time Lydia's face wore a happy animation which redoubled its charm. Faversham was clearly making a good impression upon her, was indeed set on doing so, helped always by the look of delicacy, the traces of suffering, which appealed to her pity. Tatham moved restlessly in his chair, and presently he got up, and proposed to Mrs. Penfold that they should examine the improvements in the garden.

When they returned, Lydia and Faversham were still talking and still absorbed.

"Lydia, my dear," cried her mother, "I am afraid we shall be tiring Mr.