The Rustle of Silk Part 24

Anthony.

And she stood for a moment before going down to her children-her only children-and repeated to herself, with great excitement, her former thought. "A Great Romance, Love in High Places. How wonderful to be in, perhaps, on History."

III

If, during all their inarticulate talks, Fallaray had ever remembered to ask Lola about herself, she would have told him, with perfect truth, the little story of her life and love. She was now wholly without fear. She had found the gate in the wall and had entered to happiness. But Fallaray went through that week-end without thinking, accepting the union that she had brought about without question and with a joy and delight as youthful as her own. From the time that she had found him at four o'clock waiting for her, not caring where she came from so that she came, and saw that she had brushed the loneliness from his eyes and brought a smile to his mouth, all sense of being merely temporary lifted from her heart. In the eagerness of his welcome, in the hunger of his embrace, she saw that she belonged, was already as much a possession and a fact as the old house, hitherto his one treasure and refreshment.

They went hand in hand through those lovely days, like a boy and a girl.

He led her from one pet place to another and lay at her feet, watching her with wonder, or going close to kiss her eyes and hair, to prove again and yet again that she was not a dream. And every moment smoothed a line from his face and pointed the way to his need of her in all the days to come. But while he showed that he had lived his future and had begun to spend his past, she, even then, forgot her past and turned her eyes to the future. Those holiday days which bound them together must come to an end, of course. And while she reveled in them as he did and avoided any mention of the work to which he must return, she had found herself in finding him, and becoming woman at last, saw her great responsibility and developed the sense of protection that grows with woman's love.

And this new sense was strengthened and made all the more necessary because his desire to make holiday had come about through her. And while she lay in his arms in all the ecstasy of love, she knew that she would fall far short of her achievement if she should become of more importance in his life than the work that he seemed to have utterly forgotten. It was for her, she began to see, to send him back with renewed energy and fire, and then, installed in a secret nest, to fulfil the part marked out for her as she conceived it and give him the rustle of silk.

If she had been the common schemer, using her s.e.x magnetism to provide luxuries and security-the golden cage, as she had called it in her youth-the way was easy. But love and hero-wors.h.i.+p had placed her on another level. Her cage was Fallaray's heart, in which she was imprisoned for life. Looking into the future with the suddenly awakened practicality that she had inherited from her mother, she began to lay out careful plans. She must find a girl to take her place with Lady Feo.

Grat.i.tude demanded that. She would go home until such time as she could take a furnished flat to which Fallaray could come without attracting attention. What her parents were to be told required much thinking. All her ideas of a Salon, of meeting political chiefs, of going into a certain set of society were foolish, she could see. The second of the most important of her new duties, she told herself, was to s.h.i.+eld Fallaray from gossip which would be of use to his political enemies and so-called friends; the first to dedicate her life henceforward, by every gift that she possessed and could acquire, to the inspiration and the relaxation of the man who belonged more to his country than he did to her.

She knew from the observation of specific cases and from her study of the memoirs and the lives of famous courtesans that men were not held long by s.e.x attraction alone, although by that, rather than by beauty and by wit, they were captured. She must, therefore, she owned, with her peculiar frankness, apprentice herself anew, this time to the cultivation of intelligence. She must be able, eventually, to talk Fallaray's language, if possible, and add brain to what she called her gift.

All these things worked in her mind, suddenly set into action like one of her father's doctored watches, while she wandered through the sunny hours with Fallaray. All that was French and thrifty and practical in her nature awoke with all that was pa.s.sionate and love-giving. And when at night she had to leave him to return to the cottage of the sympathetic woman whose discretion deserved a monument, she lay awake for hours to think and plan. She was no longer the lady's maid, going with love and adoration and long-deferred hope from one failure to another, no longer the trembling girl egged forward to a forlorn hope.

She had found the gate in the wall, entered into a golden responsibility and blossomed into a woman.

IV

Feo's new man, Clive Arrowsmith, had driven her down to the races at Windsor. Two of his horses, carrying colors new to the betting public, were entered. No one knew anything about them, so that if they won, and they were out to win, the odds would be good. There was a chance of making some money, always useful.

"I rather like this meeting," she said. "It's a sort of picnic peopled with caricatures," and sailed into the enclosure, elastically, in more than usually characteristic clothes. She had discarded the inevitable tam-o'-shanter for once in favor of a panama hat, which looked very cool and light and threw a soft shadow over her face. She was in what she called a soft mood,-meaning that she was playing a feminine role and leading up to a serious affair. Arrowsmith was obviously pucca and his height and slightness, well-shaped, close-cropped head, small straw-colored moustache, straight nose, strong chin with a deep cleft, and gray eyes which had a way, most attractive to women, of disbelieving everything they said had affected Feo and "really rather rattled" her, as she had confessed to Georgie Malwood late one night. After her recent bad picks, which had left a nasty taste of humiliation behind, she was very much in the mood for an old-fas.h.i.+oned sweep into sentiment. She had great hopes of Arrowsmith and had seen him every day since Sunday. He was not easy. He erected mental bunkers. He was plus two at the game, which was good for hers. Altogether he was very satisfactory, and his horses added to the fun, on the side.

"It's rather a pet of mine," he said, looking round with a sort of affectionate recognition, "because when I was at Eton I broke bounds once or twice and had the time of my life here. Everything tastes better when there's a law against drinking. But I never thought I should come here with you."

"Have you ever thought about it then?"

"Yes," he said, leaning on the rail and looking under her hat with what was only the third of his un-ironical examinations. She had memorized the other two. Was she approaching the veteran cla.s.s? "The day you were married I happened to be pa.s.sing St. Margaret's and the crowd of fluttering women held me up. I saw you leave the church and I said to myself, 'My G.o.d, if I ever know that girl, I'll have a try to put a different smile on her face,'"

"You interest me, Cupid," she said, giving him a nickname on the spur of the moment. "What sort of smile, if you please?"

"One that wouldn't make me want to hit you," he answered, still looking.

"You'll never achieve your object on the way out of church."

"No, that's dead certain."

And she wondered whether he had scored or she had. She would like to feel that he was hard hit enough to go through this affair h.e.l.l for leather, into the Divorce Court and out into marriage. It came to her at that moment, for the first time, that she liked him,-more than liked him; that he appealed to her and did odd new things to her heart. She felt that she could make her exit from the gang with this man.

As for Arrowsmith, he was sufficiently hard hit to hate Feo for the record that she had made, sufficiently in love with her to resent her kite-tail of indiscriminations. He loved but didn't like her, and this meant that he would unmagnetize himself as soon as he could and bolt.

The bunkers that she had found in his nature were those of fastidiousness, not often belonging to men. But for being the son of Arrowsmith, the iron founder, whose wealth had been quadrupled by the War, he would have been a poet, although he might never have written poetry. As it was, he considered that women should be chaste, and was the object of derision for so early-Victorian an opinion. The usual hobby thus failing, he raced, liking thoroughbreds who played the game.

A queer fish, Arrowsmith.

Georgie Malwood came up. She was with her fourth mother-in-law, Mrs.

Claude Malwood, whose back view was seventeen, but whose face was older than the Pyramids. And Arrowsmith drifted off to the paddock.

But they lunched and spent the day together and one of the horses, "Mince Pie," won the fourth race at six to one, beating the favorite by a short head. And so Feo had a good day. They got away ahead of the crowd, except for the people of the theater, who had to dine early and steady down before entering upon the arduous duties of the night, especially those of the chorus who, in these days of Reviews, are called upon to make so many changes of clothes. Art demands many sacrifices.-It had been decided that the Ritz would do for dinner and one of the dancing clubs afterwards. But on the way out Gilbert Macquarie pranced up to Feo, utterly inextinguishable, with a hatband of one club and a tie of another and clothes that would have frightened a steam roller.

"Oh, h.e.l.lo, old thing," he cried, giving one of his choicest wriggles.

"How goes it?"

To which Feo replied, with her most courteous insolence, "Out, Mr.

Macquarie," touched Arrowsmith's arm and went.

But the nasty familiarity of that most poisonous bounder did something queer to Arrowsmith's physical sense, and he couldn't for the life of him play conversational ball with Feo on the road home. "To follow _that_," he thought, and was nauseated.

But Feo was in her softest, her most feminine mood. After dinner she was going to dance with this man and be held in his arms. It was a delightful surprise to discover that she possessed a heart. She had begun to doubt it. She had been an experimentalist hitherto. And so she didn't have much to say. And when they emerged from the squalor of Hammersmith and were pa.s.sing Queen's Road, Bayswater, the picture of Lola came suddenly into her mind, the girl in love, and she wondered sympathetically how she was getting on. "What shall I wear to-night? I hate those new frocks.-I hope the band plays Boheme at the Ritz.-No diamonds, just pearls. He's a pearl man, I think. And I'll brush Peau d'Espagne through my hair. What a profile he has,-Cupid."

And she shuddered. She had married a profile, the fool. To be set free was impossible. The British public did not allow its Cabinet Ministers to be divorced.

At Dover Street Arrowsmith sprang from the car. He handed Feo out and rang the doorbell.

"You look white," she said. "What's the matter?"

He was grateful for the chance. "That old wound," he said. "It goes back on me from time to time."

"That doesn't mean that you'll have to chuck tonight?" She was aghast.

"I'm awfully afraid so, if you don't mind. It means bed, instantly, and a doctor. Do forgive me. I can't help myself. I wish to G.o.d I could."

She swallowed an indescribable disappointment and said "Good night, then. So sorry. Ring me up in the morning and let me know how you feel."

But she knew that he wouldn't. It was written round his mouth. And as she went upstairs she whipped herself and cursed Macquarie and looked back at her kite-tail of indiscriminations with overwhelming regret.

Arrowsmith was a pucca man.

V

Ernest Treadwell watched the car come and go.

Lola had given out at home that she was to be away with Lady Feo, but that morning he had seen in the paper that her ladys.h.i.+p was in town. She had "been seen" dining at Hurlingham after the polo match with Major Clive Arrowsmith, D. S. O., late Grenadier Guards. Dying to see Lola, to break the wonderful news that his latest sonnet on Death had been printed by the _Westminster Gazette_, the first of his efforts to find acceptance in any publication, Treadwell had hurried to Dover Street, had ventured to present himself at the area door and had been told by Ellen that Lola was away on a holiday.

For half an hour he had been walking up and down the street, looking with puzzled and anxious eyes at the house which had always seemed to him to wear a sinister look. If she had not been going away with Lady Feo, why had she said that she was? A holiday,-alone, stolen from her people and from him to whom hitherto she had always told everything?

What was the meaning of it?-She, Lola, had not told the truth. The thought blew him into the air, like an explosion. Considering himself, with the egotism of all half-baked socialists, an intellectual from the fact that he read Ma.s.singham and quoted Sidney Webb, he boasted of being without faith in G.o.d and const.i.tution. He sneered at Patriotism now, and while he stood for Trades-Unionism remained, like all the rest of his kind, an individualist to the marrow. But he had believed in Lola because he loved her and she inspired him, and without her encouragement and praise he knew that he would let go and crash. Just as he had been printed in the _Westminster Gazette_!

And she had not told the truth, even to her people. Where was she? What was she doing? To whom could she go to spend a holiday? She had no other relation than her aunt and she also was in town. Ellen had told him so in answer to his question.-Back into a mind black with jealousy and suspicion-he was without the habit of faith-came the picture of Lola, dressed like a lady, getting out of a taxicab at the shady-looking house in Castleton Terrace. Had she lied to him then?

Dover Street was at the bottom of it all, and her leaving home to become a lady's maid to such a woman as Lady Feo. She must have caught some of the poison of that a.s.sociation, G.o.d knew what! In time of trouble it is always the atheist who is the first to call on G.o.d.