The Education of Eric Lane Part 6

Eric took the cigarette and replaced it in its box.

"Bed-time," he said. "This meeting was not of my contriving, Lady Barbara, and, when you've learned the meaning of words, you'll find that it won't affect your _happiness_----"

His flow was arrested by a startling gasp.

"Oh, it's no good!" Barbara cried. "You're hopeless, hopeless."

To his amazement she had sprung to her feet, angry and disfigured, forgetting to break through his guard, tossing her weapon away; no longer teasing, imperious or purposely reckless; and without one of her disarming lapses into simplicity. It was the mingled pain and anger of a flesh-wound clumsily reopened. The next moment she had collapsed on the sofa, stiffly upright, staring at him with hot eyes. Then the set cheeks and compressed lips relaxed like the scattering petals of a blown rose; her mouth drooped, her eyes half-closed, and she began to cry.

Eric looked in consternation at her puckered, pathetic face, suddenly colourless save for dark rings round the big, hollow eyes. Then he sat down and drew her to him, patting her hand and talking to her half as if she were a child, half as though she were capable of understanding his weighty diagnosis.

"Lady Barbara! Lady Barbara! Are you listening to me? You mustn't cry--_really_. . . . It takes away _all_ your prettiness. Now, you were fairly hard on me at dinner, weren't you? But I do possess _some_ intelligence; I didn't need to have Lady Poynter shouting from the house-top that you were ill. You're worn out, you ought to be in bed and you ought to stay there, instead of exciting yourself. Lady Barbara, _please_ stop crying! I don't know what I said, but I'm very humbly sorry. Won't you stop?"

She stiffened herself with a jerk and smiled as abruptly.

"It was my fault. I've not been well and I've been very miserable. Give me a little kiss, Eric, to shew you're not angry with me."

She leaned forward and put her hands on his shoulders again.

"Why should I be angry with you?" he asked with a defensive laugh.

Her hands dropped into her lap.

"You won't kiss me?"

"What difference would it make?"

"I ask you to. What difference would it make to you?"

Eric fumbled industriously with a cigarette.

"It so happens that I've never kissed any one," he said, "except my mother and sister, of course." Then, as she sat hungrily reproachful, he repeated: "What _difference_ would it make?"

"You wouldn't understand . . ." she sighed. "And yet I thought you would. Where did you get that tray from, Eric? You've never been to India, have you?"

"It was given me by an uncle of mine. Lady Barbara--If it will give you any satisfaction. . . ."

He kissed her forehead with shame-faced timidity and became discursively explanatory.

"The candle-sticks were looted during the Commune," he began hurriedly.

"I was given them as a house-warming present. The clock . . ."

Barbara was wandering listlessly round the room and paying little attention to what he was saying. She explored the book-cases, ransacked the writing-table and looked curiously at the horse-shoe paper-weight.

"You can give this to me, Eric," she suggested over her shoulder.

"I'm afraid it was a present. Given me on my first night."

"It would still be a present, if you gave it to me. I had one, but I broke it. All my luck's left me since then. Are you superst.i.tious?"

"Not--in--the--_least_! I keep this for a.s.sociations and a toy. If I _could_ bring out a play on Friday the thirteenth----"

"If you're not superst.i.tious, there's no excuse for not giving it to me."

She tossed the horse-shoe into the air and caught it neatly with her right hand.

"I'll see if I can get you another one," he promised, "but I don't know whether they're made in England."

"It might make all the difference to me," she pleaded, catching the horse-shoe with her left hand. "It's only a toy to you--a child's toy."

Eric shook his head at her. Barbara pouted and threw the horse-shoe a third time into the air, bending forward to catch it behind her back as it dropped. Eric, watching apprehensively, saw a flash of apprehension reflected for an instant in her eyes; then there was a tinkle of broken gla.s.s.

"Oh, my _dear_! I wouldn't have done that for the world!" she cried, pressing her hands against her cheeks. "I've destroyed your luck now!

What a fool I was! Abject fool!"

"What _does_ it matter?" Eric laughed.

"I wouldn't have done that for the world," she repeated with a white face.

"And you're living in the year of grace nineteen-fifteen? It's only--What did we call it? A child's toy. And, between ourselves, it wasn't a very efficient paper-weight. I can a.s.sure you I shan't miss it."

"Perhaps you will some day. And then you'll lift up your hands and curse the hour when you first met me."

Eric looked complacently at the airy room, the crowded book-cases, the soft chairs, the bellying curtains and the neat pile of ma.n.u.script on his writing-table:

"Aren't you perhaps exaggerating your potential influence on my life?"

he suggested.

Barbara went back to her sofa and helped herself to a cigarette without hurry or fear that this time it would be taken from her; she smiled for a match--and smiled again when it was given her.

"Aren't you perhaps boasting too soon, my self-satisfied young friend?

Your education's only just beginning."

Eric lighted a cigarette and sat down beside her. He no longer insisted that, for health or propriety, she must go home at once; and in some forgotten moment he had involuntarily taken off his overcoat.

"I wonder what you think you can teach me," he mused. "I wonder what you know, to start with."

"I know life."

"A considerable subject."

"I've had considerable experience."

The clock on the mantel-piece chimed one. Neither seemed to notice it, for Barbara was becoming autobiographical. Her story was ill-arranged and discursive, with personal characteristics of Lord Crawleigh sandwiched between her life at Government House, Ottawa, and a thwarted romance between her brother and a designing American. She flitted from her four years in India to Viceregal Lodge, Dublin, with a procession of damaging encounters with her father as stepping-stones in the narrative.

(From her account it was Lord Crawleigh who sustained most of the damage.) He could never shake off a certain pro-consular manner in private life and had reduced his sons to blundering and untrustworthy _aides-de-camp_ and his wife to a dignified but trembling squaw. Barbara alone resisted him.

"What can he do?" she asked. "He whipped me till I was ten, but I'm too big for that now. He can't very well lock me in my room, because the servants would leave in a body. They adore me. If he'd tried to stop my allowance, I should have gone on the stage--we've settled _that_ point once and for all with Harry Manders, half-way through the stage-door of the Hilarity. Now I've got my own money. Mind you, I _adore_ father, and he adores me; most people adore me; but I must do what I like. _You_ see that now; but I had to shew you, I had to break my way in here by main force."