Secret History Revealed By Lady Peggy O'Malley Part 6

He came before any of the others, so I had time to make a quick black-and-white study of him in my brain. I say black and white, because you would always think of Sidney Vand.y.k.e in black and white. An artist sketching him on the cover of a magazine would need no other colour to express the man, except--if he had it handy--a dash of red for the full lips under the black moustache.

"Major Vand.y.k.e!" the soft, drawling voice of Kitty's negro butler proclaimed him; and that was when my heart knocked its alarm. Kitty Main generally described people in superlatives, so I hadn't been excited when she remarked that Major Vand.y.k.e was the "best-looking man in the army." But this time, she seemed not to have exaggerated. There couldn't be a handsomer man in any army or out of it, and a horrid, sly little voice whispered to me: "What a splendid-looking couple he and Di would make!"

I was standing far in the background, at a window opposite the door, while the others were grouped together more in the foreground; and what I saw was a very tall man (so tall that he could dwarf Eagle March's five foot ten almost to insignificance), six foot two, perhaps, and--not stout yet, but showing signs that one day he might become so. I noticed that he held himself magnificently, his broad shoulders thrown back, his head up; and that he walked with a slight swagger, more like a cavalryman than an officer in the artillery. Perhaps it was the electric light which made his skin look as white as Diana's, without a touch of the tan that darkened Eagle March's fairer complexion; but the white was of a different quality, somehow, from Diana's. Hers is pearl white; his had the thick, untranslucent look which pale Jewish faces have. I didn't know then that Sidney Vand.y.k.e was of Hebrew blood, but afterward I heard that his mother had Spanish Jews for ancestors on one side, and that with her came most of the family money. He was in full dress uniform, which became him splendidly; and I had a glimpse of a rather large face, drawn with square, straight lines that gave it a relentless look; square white forehead; straight black brows; straight, short nose; large, squarely opened dark eyes, brilliant and self-confident; straight black moustache; thick, square red lips; square chin, and a full neck set on square shoulders. After that first glimpse I saw only the profile, for in meeting Kitty Main and being introduced to Di and Father, Major Vand.y.k.e had to turn half away from me. Even a profile, however, tells something; and when Major Vand.y.k.e began to talk to Di, bending down a little, I could see that he admired her very much, or else wanted to convey this impression to her mind.

Next came Eagle March, very slim and boyish in shape and size compared to Major Vand.y.k.e, though he can't be more than six years younger; and hardly had he time to greet his hostess and look wistfully at Di, when the Dalziels arrived, a party of four. I thought that the father and mother (a dear little, merry, round-faced couple, curiously like each other and like Billiken) looked too young and irresponsible to be parents of anything grown up; but perhaps they had married when they were almost children, for Lieutenant Dalziel, who was inches taller than his father, had the happy air of being twenty two or three, and Mrs.

Main had said that the girl was "just out." Young Tony--nut-brown eyes, skin, and hair, clean shaven, smiling, with teeth white and even as kernels of American corn--was a glorified edition of his Billiken father. Miss Dalziel--Milly--was not a bit like any of the others, who had all been cut from the same pattern and painted with the same paint.

She was even slimmer and smaller than I am; very fair, with a few freckles, and lots of blue veins at her temples. She had an obstinate pink b.u.t.ton of a mouth; dimples, which she made come and go every minute by working the muscles of her cheeks; bright, fluffy red hair done high on her head, floating eyes of gray green, and blackened brows and lashes which, I suppose, had started life in red. She gave an effect of prettiness and of thinking herself prettier than she was, an opinion in which her dress-maker had backed her up.

Tony Dalziel was jolly, and said so many quaint things in priceless slang that he kept me laughing; but I had eyes if not ears only for Di and Major Vand.y.k.e. "Say, he's rus.h.i.+ng your sister, isn't he? Making a direct frontal attack--what?" remarked my neighbour, so it must have been conspicuous. One could see Major Vand.y.k.e consciously absorbing Diana, throwing over her head a veil of his own magnetism, as if to hide her in it from other men, and make her forget their existence.

As for Di, she behaved perfectly, if she wished to fascinate and tantalize a flirt, such as Sidney Vand.y.k.e was said to be. She let herself seem to fall under his spell, and then suddenly slipped gently away, turning to Captain March who sat at her other side. She would talk to him in a friendly, intimate way, in a low voice, with little happy outbursts of laughter over their reminiscences of a year ago; then, half apologetically, she would turn back to Vand.y.k.e again, raising and letting fall her eyelashes in a way entirely her own, which, somehow, gives the effect of a blush. It was Victorian, or Edwardian at latest, but much more useful than any subst.i.tute girls have invented since. That night began the battle which was to have so strange a finish.

I don't know if Major Vand.y.k.e was serious at first. Perhaps he wanted no more than a good flirtation with a pretty girl, one of the prettiest he had ever seen, and desperately loved by a brother officer. You see, he had probably heard already from Kitty Main, who told everything she knew and a great deal she didn't know, that Captain March was in love with Di, just as we heard from the same source that Major Vand.y.k.e was jealous of his junior because of flying exploits and honours. I think, though, that from the moment they met, Di never meant to let the man go free.

She saw that he was flirting, and was angry that he should dare. This put her on her mettle; and Diana on her mettle was and ever will be formidable, because of her cleverness, which never lets the mettle show.

She determined that Sidney Vand.y.k.e should fall in love--over ears and eyes in love--and he did. But she wasn't satisfied even with that. She couldn't bear to have Eagle March escape, and perhaps be snapped up by Milly Dalziel, who was sitting on the bank of the fishpond with her hook baited. Oh, it must have been an amusing little comedy for outsiders to watch; and I was an outsider in a way; but it didn't amuse me. I was sick at heart, and cross with Tony Dalziel, who wouldn't leave me alone or give me time to think things over.

This sort of maneuvering lasted for three weeks; then a bombsh.e.l.l fell in our midst. Two batteries of the --th Artillery were ordered immediately to El Paso, on the Mexican border, where a raid was apparently threatened. Major Vand.y.k.e and Captain March and Lieutenant Dalziel were all to go.

CHAPTER VI

There was desolation at Alvarado Springs, in the hotel, and in the super-cottages. People--when I say people, I mean women--didn't come to Alvarado to drink the celebrated waters, or to admire the wonderful scenery. They came to play with the officers, and now the bravest and best (looking) were to be s.n.a.t.c.hed from them. What had happened, or what might happen, was a mystery to mere civilians; but it was whispered about that possibly there might be real fighting at El Paso. There must have been, everybody said, something serious under the rumours of a threatened attack from across the Rio Grande, otherwise government would not be sending troops to reinforce the large garrison at Fort Bliss, or be offering to take women and children away from the river towns, in armoured trains if desired. Cavalry and infantry were moving south from other army posts, we heard, to guard the concentration camp of Mexican refugee prisoners at El Paso, and to beat back a rabble of invaders if need came.

The order reached Alvarado late in the afternoon, and the batteries were to leave by train at four o'clock the next morning. As it happened, Kitty Main, Father, Di, and I were all invited to a dance that evening at the house of an officer and his wife, Captain and Mrs. Kilburn; but when the news about the batteries going away began to flash from cottage to cottage we expected the party to be given up. Di looked rather blank when Mrs. Main flung the tidings at her, for Sidney Vand.y.k.e hadn't proposed yet. If the dance were abandoned, he might be too busy getting his men ready to see her before he left; and heaven alone knew when the batteries would come back. There might be fighting; there might at worst even be war with Mexico; and whatever happened, we couldn't stay on indefinitely at Alvarado. Kitty Main had taken the cottage and asked us to visit her only for six weeks. Besides, Alvarado would be desolate without our best friends and possible lovers.

I could see these thoughts developing and following on one another's heels in Diana's mind. But in my head there was nothing concrete enough to call a "thought." Feelings seemed to have raced upstairs from heart to brain, and driven ideas out of the house. They ran wildly round and round, saying to each other, "What if I never see him again? What if he should be killed?" But while we were in this state, Mrs. Kilburn telephoned to Kitty Main that she had decided to have her dance in spite of all. Her husband was not among those ordered away, and the officers who were going had arranged to spare time to look in for three or four dances in any case. Some of them might be very early, some very late, but there would be plenty of other men to go round; and Mrs. Kilburn suggested that we might "keep things up" long enough to see the soldiers off at dawn, before motoring back to the Springs, if that would interest Lady Diana and Lady Peggy O'Malley.

There was only one answer to this, and when we went over to Fort Alvarado for the dance we put on warmer cloaks than we should have worn ordinarily.

Mrs. Kilburn had brought her husband money; and as she loved gayety she had somehow got permission to build on to the captain's quarters a ballroom surrounded on three sides by a wide veranda. Consequently, a dance at the Kilburns' was worth going to always, and particularly on this moonlight night of April when the whole fort was humming with excitement. The officers who were ordered away had their hands full of work, yet the young ones managed to get off duty if only for a few minutes, long enough to s.n.a.t.c.h a dance or two with the girls they liked best, or to "sit out" with them on the veranda, where there were colonies of chairs, and garden seats, and hammocks.

Tony Dalziel was one of those who came early to the Kilburns'. He had asked me beforehand for six dances, and I had given him three. When he appeared it was just in time for the first, a two-step. The second would follow directly after, and the third I knew already, from a note sent me in haste, he would have to miss.

"Do you care for this?" he asked, out of breath with his hurry to dress and sprint over from the far-off line of bachelors' quarters. "If you don't, will you come outside and see the moon rise? It's going to be a great sight."

There is no poetry in a two-step, and if there were it would have been lost in hopping up and down with Tony, so I chose the moon. I thought the moon a perfectly safe object to gaze at with such a jolly young man, who made jokes at everything in the heavens or upon the earth; and unsuspectingly I went with him to a nook on the veranda screened off with tall plants from an adjacent hammock. It was a nook intended for two and no more. There were a great many nooks of that sort on Mrs.

Kilburn's veranda. She specialized in flirtation architecture.

"Tell me about everything, please," I cheerfully began. "We haven't very long, have we?"

"That's the worst of it," said Tony, "and that's why I must be careful to tell you only the important things. There's just one that really interests me."

"What's that?" I asked eagerly. "I hope not that you expect fighting?"

"No such luck, I'm afraid. But I'm not worrying about that now. What I want to tell you is this." And to my stupefaction he shot a proposal at my head as if it came out of a field gun. I knew he liked me, and liked to be with me, but I couldn't a.s.sociate the idea of anything so serious as marriage with Tony Dalziel. I gasped and said he couldn't mean it, but he a.s.sured me that he did, and a dictionary full of other a.s.surances besides.

Perhaps, if I had not seen Eagle March and fallen in love with him once and forever, I might have thought twice before saying "No" to Tony, if only for the pride of being engaged sooner than Di, and when I wasn't yet eighteen. Tony Dalziel was what all women call "such a dear!" and, besides, he had--or would have--plenty of money, a consideration in our family. I could imagine what a rage Father would be in with me if he knew what I was doing at that moment, calmly refusing a heaven-sent opportunity. But Eagle March, though he was not for me, made all the difference, and put my heart into a convent where it was now undergoing its novitiate. I let the opportunity slip, and told Tony how sorry I was to hurt him. But he wasn't inclined to take that for an answer. He wanted to know if I wouldn't "leave it open," in case anything happened to make me change my mind. I warned him that, so far as I could see, I would never change it; but if an "optimist will op"--as Tony remarked--what can you do? You can't prevent his opping, and rather than hear an irrevocable word he bade me good-bye while I protested. This was in the midst of what should have been his second dance, and I didn't feel equal to going indoors again directly after that scene, even to tango. I asked Tony to leave me where I was, to gather up my wits, and when he had darted away I sat quite still for a few minutes. I had no engagement until the time for my one dance with Eagle March should come; and as Tony hadn't given me much chance for gazing at the "great sight"

he had brought me out to see, I tried to cool my brain with moonlight.

But I had forgotten all about the hammock on the other side of the flower screen. I remembered it only when I heard footsteps, and a creaking of chairs as some one--or rather some two--sat down.

"Good gracious!" I said to myself. "_Now_ what shall I do?" For as the pair came to a halt they went on with their conversation, which had evidently reached a critical point. I recognized the man's voice, and as it was that of Eagle March, I knew as well as if I had already seen her that the girl must be Diana. I knew also that she would never forgive me if I popped out at this moment, like the wrong figure on a barometer.

Nothing on earth would make her believe that I hadn't been "spying"; for though Di didn't realize how much and in what way I cared for Eagle, she often teased me about being jealous because my great "chum" had forsaken me for her. If at any time she could call him away from me by a glance or a smile, it amused her to do so; and she would believe I was "revenging" myself, in the best way I could, on this their last night.

I had half jumped up from the low seat which Tony had shared with me; but on second thoughts I sat down again.

"She won't let him say much," I thought, "so there'll be nothing to overhear. Anyhow, I can stop my ears, if worst comes to worst." But before I had time to resolve on this precaution, I heard Eagle say, "If it wasn't for the money, I shouldn't feel I had the right----"

The rest was silence, for I kept my resolution and refused to catch another syllable; yet those words had set me thinking hard. If Eagle were telling Di that he was now certain to come in for his aunt's fortune, she might look upon him as a bird in the hand, whereas a notorious flirt like Major Vand.y.k.e might be worth no more than two in the bush with the saltcellar empty.

I struggled to find consolation by reminding myself that, if Di did marry Eagle, she might make him happy, provided there were enough money for everything she wanted, and if he were willing to cut the army for her sake and live mostly in England. She wasn't an ill-natured or sharp-tongued girl when things went as she wished, I reflected, and if he were content to sacrifice his career for love of her, they might get on very well together. But--what _desolating_ words to use in connection with Eagle March--"get on well together!" He wasn't one to be satisfied with mere contentment, where he had hoped for rapture.

I sat with my ears stopped, until suddenly the two began speaking in a much louder tone; and a third voice, that of a man, joined the conversation. Then I decided that I might come back to life again; and as I let my tired arms drop, I became aware that the newcomer was Sidney Vand.y.k.e. He was telling Di that this was his dance, and that he had been looking for her everywhere.

"I heard Kilburn mention that the Old Man had sent for you, March, and I know they're on your scent," he announced.

"In that case, I may not see you again, Lady Diana," Eagle said.

"Peggy and I are going with Mrs. Kilburn and a lot of others to wave to you for good luck, when you start," answered Di, rather nervously, I thought.

"I'm glad. We shall have a last glimpse of you all," replied Eagle. "But I'm afraid I shan't get a word with you then. So I'll bid you good-bye now!"

He spoke in quite a matter-of-fact way; but I, who knew every tone of his voice, guessed what it covered; and I could almost feel the pressure of his hand as it clasped Di's, with Major Vand.y.k.e mercilessly looking on. I wondered whether she had been cruel or kind.

In a moment he was gone; and with a stab of pain I realized that, if the colonel had sent for him, he must miss out his dance with me. Would he even remember it? Would he scribble me a line of farewell? I longed to run out and catch him before he went, if only for a word, but I dared not dash past Di, and give her the shock of learning that I had been within three yards of her all the time. Again I was trapped, unless Di and Major Vand.y.k.e should go indoors to dance; but no sooner was Eagle March out of earshot than Vand.y.k.e asked Di to stay.

"Of course we've known all along that we might get marching orders," he said, and there was no harm in my hearing that. "It's a surprise only to those outside. The adjutant has been fussing over stores and ammunition, and target practice has been a confounded bore. All the same, at the end the move's been sprung on us, just when we'd forgotten to expect it. I feel as if I'd wasted a lot of precious time one way or another, but it isn't too late yet, Lady Di, if you----"

I stopped up my ears again so effectively that I heard no more, and a few minutes later was flabbergasted when Diana and he suddenly broke upon me from behind the screen of plants.

My first thought was that Di had suspected my presence there, and had wanted to pounce; but she gave a jump and a cry of surprise as she saw me sitting bolt upright on the bench, with my fingers stuffed into my ears.

"Good _gracious_, Peg!" she gasped. "How long have you been here?"

"Ever since before _you_ came," I answered. I might have put it differently by telling tales, and so serving Eagle March's cause, perhaps; but no matter how thoroughly I disapproved of her, I couldn't give my own sister away. "I didn't like to come out, you see, for fear you mightn't like it; but I haven't heard anything you've said, if _that_ interests you to know."

"I don't care whether you've heard or not," said Di, trying to speak playfully, but unable to keep sharpness out of her tone. "Major Vand.y.k.e thought this was a nicer seat than the hammock to rest in, so he brought me to it. Of course, we'd no idea any one was--was _hiding_ here!"

"Well, there won't be any one, now I'm free to move," I snapped. "I'm only too thankful to have a chance to get back to the ballroom. You've made me miss a dance."

"_We've_ made you? I like that!" gurgled Di. But I waited for no more. I skipped away toward the nearest long window without looking round, and was just in time to meet my partner in search of me, the partner after Eagle March, and a brother officer of his. "Our dance," said he, "and here's something March asked me to hand you. He's been called away."

The "something" was a leaf torn out of a notebook and neatly folded into a c.o.c.ked hat. It was rather appropriate that Eagle's good-bye to me should come in this form, because I had given him the notebook for a birthday present only the week before. I'd saved up my pennies to get a good one, and have his initials in silver fastened on to the khaki-coloured morocco cover. The paper of the book itself and the refills were also khaki coloured to match the cover, with lines in very faint blue. I had wanted my little gift to be as distinctive as possible, and had taken a great deal of pains to choose a notebook different from all others, little dreaming what was fated to hang on the difference.

Quietly but carefully I undid the paper c.o.c.ked hat and read the few pencilled words: "So disappointed, dear little friend, not to have my dance with you, but I'm called back to work. Congratulate me. _I've got almost the promise I wanted._ The next best thing, anyhow. Farewell for a while. Write to me to El Paso like the good girl you are. I shall look for you at the train to-morrow morning early, though we may not have a chance to speak. Yours ever, E. M."