Lucinda

“Oh, it’s no business of mine. Only – I’m sorry for Waldo, and dear Miss Fleming.” A gesture of her neatly gloved and shapely hands seemed to dismiss the topic with a sigh. “Have you seen anything of Don Arsenio lately?” she asked the next moment. “Is he in England?”

“Yes. He was at the wedding – well, at the church, I mean.”

She came to a stop, turning her face full round to me; her lips were parted in surprise, her white teeth just showing; her eyes seemed full of questions. If she had “scored off” me, at least I had startled her that time. “Was he?” she murmured.

At the point to which our walk had now brought us, the cliffs take a great bulge outwards, forming a bold rounded bluff. Here, seeming to dominate, to domineer over, a submissive Bristol Channel, Mr. Jonathan Frost (as he then was – that is, I think, the formula) had built his country seat; and “Briarmount” he had called it.

“Good Heavens,” said I, “what’s happened to the place? It’s grown! It’s grown as much as you have!”

“We’ve built on a bit – a few more bedrooms, and bathrooms. And garages, you know. Oh, and a ballroom!”

“No more than that?”

“Not at present. Come in and have a look – and some tea. Or are you in too deep mourning?”

I found myself not exactly liking the girl, but interested in her, in her composure – and her impudence. I accepted her invitation.

Since he could very well afford it, no blame need rest on Mr. Frost for building himself a large house and equipping it sumptuously. The only thing was that, when he had got it, he did not seem to care a bit about it. Probably he built it to please Nina – or to enshrine Nina; no doubt he found in his daughter a partial and agreeable solution of the difficulty of how to spend the money which he could not help making. He himself was a man of the simplest ways and tastes – almost of no tastes at all. He did not even drink tea; while we took ours, he consumed a small bowlful of one of those stuffs which, I believe, they call cereals – this is a large domed hall of glass – conservatory, winter-garden, whatever it should be called – full of exotic plants and opening on a haughty terrace with a view of the sea. He was small, slight, shabby, simple, and rather nervous. Still I gazed on him with some awe; he was portentously rich; Mother Earth labored, and her children sweated, at his bidding; he waved wands, and wildernesses became – no, not quite paradises perhaps, but at all events garden-cities; he moved mountains and where the ocean had been he made dry land. Surely it beseems us to look with some awe on a man like that? I, at least, being more or less in the same line of business, recognized in him a master.

He greeted me very kindly, though I think that it had cost him an effort to “place” me, to remember who I was. He spoke warmly of the kindness which my uncle and Miss Fleming had shown to his motherless girl. “They’ve made you quite at home at Cragsfoot, haven’t they, Nina? And your cousin Waldo – Mr. Waldo taught you billiards, didn’t he?” (There was no billiard room at Cragsfoot; these lessons presumably took place at Briarmount.) “And he made company for your rides, too! I hope he’s very well, Mr. Rillington? Oh, but didn’t you tell me that he was engaged to be married, my dear?”

One must allow for preoccupation with important affairs. Still, this was Saturday; as recently as the preceding Tuesday week, Mr. Frost would have attended Waldo’s wedding, but for his own indisposition. I stole a glance at Nina; she was just a little red again. I was not far from embarrassment myself – on Waldo’s account; I gave a weak laugh and said: “I’m afraid it’s not quite certain that the event will come off.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he murmured apologetically. “It was the pretty girl who came here with him once or twice – Miss – Miss – yes, Miss Knyvett?”

“Yes, it was, Mr. Frost. But the – well, the arrangement is sort of – of suspended.” With that distinctly lame explanation I rose to take my leave.

I rather thought that Nina, being by now pretty plainly convicted of fibbing, would stay where she was, and thus avoid being left alone with me. However, she escorted me back through Briarmount’s spacious hall – furnished as a sitting-room and very comfortable. She even came out into the drive with me and, as she gave me her hand in farewell, she said, with a little jerk of her head back towards the scene of my talk with her father, “After that, I suppose you’re wondering what was the real reason for my not coming to the wedding?”

“Perhaps I am. Because you seem to have kept up the old friendship since I’ve been away.”

“Sometimes people don’t go to functions because they’re not invited.”

“What, you mean to say – ”

“I should have been the skeleton at the feast!” She looked me in the face, smiling, but in a rather set, forced fashion. Then, as she turned away, she added with a laugh, “Only, as it turned out, there was no feast, was there, Mr. Rillington?”

When I got back to Cragsfoot, I met Waldo in the garden, walking up and down in a moody fashion and smoking his pipe. “Been for a walk?” he asked.

“I started on one, but I met Nina Frost and she took me in to tea.”

He stood still, smoking and staring out to sea. “Did she say anything about me?” he asked.

“Hardly about you yourself. She referred to – the affair. The servants have been chattering, it seems. Well, they would, of course!”

He gave a nod of assent. Then he suddenly burst out in a vehement exclamation: “She wasn’t there to see it, anyhow, thank God!” With that he walked quickly away from me and was soon hidden in the shrubbery at the end of the walk.

How did he know that she had not come to the church? He had not been in the body of the church himself – only in the vestry. Many people had actually gone in – early arrivals; Sir Paget had told me so. Many more had been turned away from the doors. Waldo could not have known from his own observation that Nina Frost was not there. Possibly somebody had told him. More probably he had known beforehand that she would not be there, because she had not been invited. But why should he thank God that she was not at the church?

So there was the coil – unexplained, nay, further complicated by the intrusion of a fourth party, Miss Nina Frost. Unexplained I had to leave it. The next morning – Sunday though it was – Sir Paget carried me off to town, by motor and rail, to interview some bigwig to whom he had mentioned me and who commanded my attendance. I had not even a chance of a private talk with Aunt Bertha, whose silence about Nina now struck me as rather odd.

The war was upon us. It had many results for many people. One result of it was that, instead of the start of hours for which they had schemed, our runaway couple secured a start of years. That made a great difference.

CHAPTER V

CATCH WHO CATCH CAN!

I DO not want to say more about the war or my doings during it than is strictly necessary to my purpose. The great man to whom I have referred took a note of my qualifications. Nothing came of this for a good many months, during which I obtained a commission, went through my training, and was for three months fighting in France. Then I was called back, and assigned to non-combatant service (it was not always strictly that, as a nasty scar on my forehead, the result of a midnight “scrap” in a South American seaport where I happened to be on business, remains to testify). My knowledge of various parts of the world and my command of languages made me of value for the quasi-diplomatic, quasi-detective job with which I was entrusted, and I continued to be employed on it throughout the war. It entailed a great deal of traveling by sea and land, and a lot of roughing it; it was interesting and sometimes amusing; there was, of course, no glory in it. I was a mole, working underground; there were a lot of us. For the best part of a year I was out of Europe; I was often out of reach of letters, though now and then I got one from Aunt Bertha, giving me such home news as there was, and copying out extracts from what she described as “Waldo’s miserable letters” from France – meaning thereby not unhappy – he wrote very cheerfully – but few, short, and scrappy. Sir Paget, it appeared, had found some sort of advisory job – a committee of some kind – in connection with the Foreign Office.

It was when I came back to Europe, in the spring of 1916, and was staying for a few days at a small town in the South of France – I was at the time covering my tracks, pending the receipt of certain instructions for which I was waiting, but there is no harm in saying now that the town was Ste. Maxime – that I ran into Lucinda Knyvett. That is almost literal. I came round a sharp corner of the street from one direction, she from another. A collision was so narrowly avoided that I exclaimed, “Pardon!” as I came to an abrupt stop and raised my hat. She stopped short too; the next moment she flung out both her hands to me, crying, “You, Julius!” Then she tried to draw her hands back, murmuring, “Perhaps you won’t – !” But I had caught her hands in mine and was pressing them. “Yes! And it’s you, Lucinda!”

It was about midday, and she readily accepted my suggestion that we should lunch together. I took her to a pleasant little restaurant on the sea-front. It was bright, warm, calm weather; we ate our meal out of doors, in the sunshine. In reply to her inquiries – made without any embarrassment, – I told her what Cragsfoot news I had. She, in return, told me that Arsenio – he also was mentioned without embarrassment – had gone to Italy when that country entered the war, and was at this moment on the staff of some General of Division; he wrote very seldom, she added, and, with that, fell into silence, as she sipped a glass of wine.

She had changed from a girl into a woman; yet I did not divine in her anything like the development I had marked in Nina Frost. In appearance, air, and manner she was the Lucinda whom I had known at Cragsfoot; her eyes still remotely pondering, looking inwards as well as outwards, the contour of her face unchanged, her skin with all its soft beauty. But she was thinner, and looked rather tired.

“Arsenio told me that you saw me in the taxi that day,” she said suddenly.

“He must have been very much amused, wasn’t he? He certainly made a pretty fool of me! And put the cap on it by coming to the – to the church, didn’t he?”

“I suppose, when once he’d met you, he was bound to go there, or you’d have suspected.”

“He could have made some excuse to leave me, and not turned up again.”

She did not pursue her little effort to defend Valdez; she let it go with a curious smile, half-amused, half-apologetic. I smiled back. “Monkey Valdez, I think!” said I. She would not answer that, but her smile persisted. “You were looking very happy and bonny,” I added.

“I was happy that day. I had at last done right.”

“The deuce you had!” That was to myself. To her I said, rather dryly, “It certainly was at the last, Lucinda.”

“It was as soon as I knew – as soon as I really knew.”

The waiter brought coffee. She took a cigarette from me, and we both began to smoke.

“And it’s true that I didn’t dare to face Waldo. I was physically afraid. He’d have struck me.”

“Never!” I exclaimed, indignant at the aspersion on my kinsman.

“Oh, but yes! – I thought that he would fight Arsenio that night at Cragsfoot – the night Arsenio first kissed me.” She let her cigarette drop to the ground, and leant back in her chair. Her eyes were on mine, but the shadow of the veil was thick. “It all began then – at least, I realized the beginning of it. It all began then, and it never stopped till that day when I ran away. Shall I tell you about it?”

“We were all very fond of you – all of us. I wish you would.”

She laid her hand on my arm for a moment. “I couldn’t have told then – perhaps I can now. But, dear Julius, perhaps not quite plainly. There’s shame in it. Some, I think, for all of us – most, I suppose, for me.”

At this point a vision of Aunt Bertha’s “nice woman” flitted before my mind’s eye; it was a moment for her ministrations – or ought to have been, perhaps. Lucinda was rather ruminative than distressed.

“We were very happy that summer. I had never had anything quite like it. Mother and I went to lunches and teas – and I’d just begun to go to a few dances. But people didn’t ask us to stay in country houses. Three days’ visit to Mrs. Wiseman at Oxford was an event – till Cragsfoot came! I love that old house – and I shall never see it again! – Oh, well – ! The boys were great friends; all three of us were. If anything, Waldo and I took sides against Arsenio, chaffing him about his little foreign ways, and so on, you know. Waldo called him Monkey; I called him ‘Don’ – sometimes ‘Don Arsenio.’ I called Waldo just ‘Waldo’ – and I should have called Arsenio just by his name, only that once, when we were alone, he asked me to, rather sentimentally – something about how his name would sound on my lips! So I wouldn’t – to tease him. I thought him rather ridiculous. I’ve always thought him ridiculous at times. Well, then, Nina Frost took to coming a good deal; Miss Fleming had pity on her, as she told me – her mother wasn’t long dead, you know, and she was all alone at Briarmount with a governess. Do you remember Fräulein Borasch? No? I believe you hardly remember Nina? You hardly ever came on excursions, and so on, with us. The boys told me all that sort of thing bored ‘old Julius.’ Nina rather broke up our trio; we fell into couples – you know how that happens? The path’s too narrow, or the boat’s too small, or you take sides at tennis. And so on. For the first time then the boys squabbled a little – for me. I enjoyed that – even though I didn’t think victory over little Nina anything to boast about. Well, then came that day.”

Lucinda leant forward towards me, resting her arms on the table between us; she was more animated now; she spoke faster; a slight flush came on her cheeks; I likened it to an afterglow.