“Very well,” said Clarissa briskly, “that’ll be too delightful. I’ll ring up Mrs. Parkinson and see if we can lunch there to-morrow. You and I, Leila, and your husband, and — let me see, Lucien would make another man — I never can bear to go anywhere as a tribe of women, can you? Sophie, get me Mrs. Parkinson on the telephone, will you, darling, at once. So — phie!”
Clarissa’s sudden scream at the end of the word made everybody laugh.
“For Christ’s sake, darling, hold yourself properly. Aren’t girls too awful?”
When Sophie had obtained the necessary connection, Clarissa whisked off to the telephone, and shortly returned with the announcement that all was arranged.
It was not until next day that Lucien informed his mother that he could not possibly accompany her to the Abbey. He had, he said, suggested that Bat Clutterthorpe should take his place, and Bat would be delighted to do so.
That Clarissa was not delighted was evident. Her face hardened from self-satisfaction to a strong irritation.
“What on earth is the matter with you, Lucien? When I’ve made arrangements I’m not in the habit of having them upset by a boy of your age. Have you gone mad or what?”
“King has made an appointment for me to meet the local builder and go over Bradley’s farm with him,” Lucien replied imperturbably. “I’ve told King he must come back to lunch here. You don’t particularly want him with the Delmars and Bat, I imagine.”
“They naturally wouldn’t notice whether he was here or not. Why should they? Anyhow, that’s nothing to do with it. Another time, you’ll be good enough to do as I tell you. Good heavens, I sometimes wonder if you so much as realize that you’re in my house, living on me. When I told you that you’d better get to know something about estate business, it wasn’t with a view to your hobnobbing with King and his friends all day and every day. I expect you to help entertain my friends when they’re here, and make Sophie do the same.”
“Sophie is. She is at this moment changing records on the gramophone while Bat shows her a new dance step.”
Lucien’s face was rather white, and he eyed his mother steadily.
Clarissa took out her lip-stick and carefully traced an outline — that described curves independent of those already decreed by Nature — above her upper lip. The sound of satisfaction latent in the ejaculation with which she replaced the lipstick in her bag again might have been attributable either to the effect that she had just produced, or to the information that Lucien had just given her.
“As a matter of fact,” she summed up her intentions, “it won’t do Bat any harm to see that I’m leaving Sophie at home, and taking him to the Abbey. He mustn’t think I’m throwing her at his head.”
“Why are you, by the by, if it isn’t indiscreet to inquire?” said Lucien, intent upon the lighting of a cigarette.
Clarissa, already at the door, turned round upon him sharply.
“Don’t take that tone, Lucien, please. You’ll find I shan’t stand for it for one moment. Sophie’s future is a great deal more important than you realize, and it isn’t going to be any too easy for her to find a husband, with everybody knowing her mother’s story.”
“Does she have to have a husband like Bat?”
“Bat’s charming. Don’t be a fool, Lucien. She’ll be too terribly lucky if she gets him; and what’s more, she thinks so herself. Sophie may not be in love with him now, but directly he starts making love to her — if he does — she will be. Girls are like that, especially girls like Sophie, who don’t get spoilt by finding young men want to kiss them at every dance they go to.”
“I shouldn’t imagine Sophie found that,” Lucien agreed, his voice at its most expressionless.
“No brother is a good judge of his sister in that way, ever,” returned Clarissa crisply as she left him.
Fitzmaurice’s relief when he found that his wife did not expect him to take part in the expedition to the Abbey was exuberant.
“I never know what the hell to say when I’m shown a table that somebody sat at to sign a treaty or something,” he admitted. “Anyway, I’ve been over there so many times that there isn’t anything left to say.”
“Well, they’re not expecting you, and you must take my place here,” his wife told him. “I can’t trust Lucien, who’s in a vile temper for no reason that I can see — and, besides, it’s bad for the boy to let him feel he’s master of the house, even for the time being.”
“Don’t worry about that, old girl,” said Fitzmaurice with a grin. “We’re none of us likely to feel that as long as you’re anywhere about.”
In actual fact, lunch without Clarissa’s dominant personality imposing itself from the head of the table, became a very much more cheerful and unconstrained affair than it had been since the house-party first assembled.
Delphine Wingate, an inarticulate, heavily built debutante of the year before, for the first time overcame her inherent shyness and originated an occasional remark.
The agent, Harry King, sat next to Sophie, and they talked about his children with a freedom that Sophie at least would never have permitted herself in her stepmother’s presence.
Lucien, silent as he always was in the noisy society of Fitzmaurice, was none the less conscious that a strain had been suddenly relaxed.
They dawdled over lunch, played desultory tennis, and tea was brought to them, at Sophie’s suggestion, under the shade of one of the cedars on the lawn. They were in full view of the avenue, King pointed out.
“But they’ll be told mummie’s not at home, if anyone does call,” said Sophie.
“There’s someone calling now.”
“Delphine, there isn’t. There couldn’t be.”
“Well, there’s a man coming up the avenue.”
“The laundry,” suggested Fitzmaurice facetiously.
“Or a telegram.”
“Or my tailor, wanting to be paid,” murmured Lucien.
The approaching figure turned, appeared to descry them from a distance, and left the avenue to advance across the terrace.
“Someone who’s lost his way, probably. There is a kind of right-of-way at the end of the park. At least, I’m afraid it’s a good deal used when you’re not here,” King observed. “I’ll tell him.”
He went to meet the stranger.
As though actuated by some common impulse of curiosity, the others remained under the cedar, with heads turned, to watch the encounter.
“I think,” said Lucien, “I’m not sure, but I think that our distinguished visitor is under the influence of drink. He has an extraordinarily unsteady gait.”
“Poor blighter,” Fitzmaurice commented in a tone of fellow-feeling. “By Jove, look at that!”
The stranger had swayed, sagged at the middle, and been deftly caught and deposited upon the grass by Harry King.
“Doing his Swedish exercises,” commented Fitzmaurice, his facetious intention modified by increasing doubtfulness.
He rose to his feet as he spoke.
In another instant they were all hurrying across the grass in spite of a half-hearted “Stay where you are, you girls,” from Fitzmaurice.
Harry King was kneeling down beside the extended form of a slim, tall man, whose long, dank, black plumes of hair had fallen about in every direction; who had a sallow face, long nose and immense, heavy-lidded black eyes, now upturned in unconsciousness. His blue suit was shabby, and he wore a pair of extraordinarily pointed brown buttoned-boots. These alone, taken in conjunction with his large bow-tie, would have confirmed the dismayed diagnosis of Reggie Fitzmaurice.
“A foreigner.”
“Oh dear,” said Delphine Wingate — meaning, That makes it even worse. “Has he fainted?”
“Yes,” Harry King answered. “He came towards me looking very unsteady on his feet, so that I wondered if he were drunk. I went up to him, as you probably saw, and said the grounds were private, and could I direct him anywhere, and he looked round and groaned, and immediately crumpled u
p. Evidently a foreigner.”
The foreigner emitted a sudden groan, and they all looked down at him.
“I’ll get some brandy,” exclaimed Fitzmaurice, and hastened towards the house.
“He’s coming round,” said King, kneeling down beside the prostrate form. And after a moment’s hesitation, he added, in a loud, clear, encouraging voice:
“It’s all right, you know. Perfectly all right.”
And after a pause, he added once more:
“Quite all right.”
The others, feeling obliged to contribute something, made murmurs to the same effect.
The stranger, now completely conscious, raised his head, groaned much more loudly than before, and exclaiming forcibly, “Ah, mon doux Jesus!” dropped back on to the grass again.
“What did he say?” inquired Delphine anxiously.
Sophie, who alone had heard and recognised the ejaculation beyond any possibility of misunderstanding, did not translate.
Harry King hoped that he had heard wrongly.
Fitzmaurice returned with a decanter of brandy and a glass, followed at a distance by the butler.
“What about a spot of this?”
The brandy was administered.
“What about a doctor?” Fitzmaurice added, encouraged by the success of his first-aid.
“Non, non,” said the stranger.
He lay and smiled up at them feebly. It was seen that he had remarkably white and beautiful teeth.
“He’s better,” declared Fitzmaurice. “Speak to him in French, Sophia.”
“I understand English,” observed the young man, and even in the sound of those three words it became evident that, besides being a foreigner, he had acquired such English as he might possess in the United States of America.
“You turned queer, you know,” King informed him, speaking with a certain brusqueness. “In these grounds, you know. This is Mardale. I was just coming along to tell you that you were on private property, don’t you know, and then you turned queer.”
“You fainted,” Lucien added, more kindly.
“Yeh. Sometimes I faint,” observed the foreigner meditatively.
He made no effort to move, but continued to lie upon the grass with his legs, ending in those so conspicuously un-English brown boots, straight out in front of him.
Nobody quite knew what to do next.
“Drink some more brandy,” suggested Fitzmaurice at last. “Then you might be able to stand up, you know.”
“No more brandy, thanks,” replied the young man. “It deranges my stomach.”
Still he did not move.
Delphine Wingate giggled nervously.
“Come, come,” said Harry King bracingly.
“Sometimes I faint. My mother is all the same, like me. Yeh. She faint often. The doctor say it is temperamental. He can do nothing.”
The stranger’s tone was fatalistic in the extreme.
“Try to stand up,” Lucien suggested, and he also spoke bracingly.
The foreigner shook his head obstinately.
“Better I stay still a little,” he replied.
“I should think you and Delphine had better slip back into the house,” Lucien murmured to Sophie.
“Can’t we be of any use?”
“I don’t think so.”
The two girls reluctantly moved away.
“Now, then. What’s your name?” Lucien demanded of the stranger.
“It is Raoul Radow,” replied the foreigner, and he looked up at Lucien, standing above him, with a kind of wistful gleam in his enormous eyes, as though hoping that his name might be recognized.
“Radow,” repeated Lucien, as sympathetically as he could, and with a definite conviction forming in his mind that he had heard the name before.
There was a smothered ejaculation from Fitzmaurice: “Radow!”
“Franco-Roumanian,” said monsieur Radow. “My mama is Roumanian.”
“The one that faints,” observed Lucien.
“Yeh. She has had a hard life. And so have I had a hard life.”
The foreigner had become animated, with all the excess of animation displayed by foreigners, and it was very easy to perceive that in another moment his audience could, if they chose, or perhaps, indeed, whether they chose or not, be in full possession of the life history of monsieur Raoul Radow.
“Radow?” Fitzmaurice said for the second time. “Are you the chap that plays the fiddle?”
“The violinist. Yeh.”
“Good God. Do you realize where you are, my dear chap?” rhetorically inquired Lucien’s stepfather. “Or who you’re with?”
The stranger signified that both these points were obscure.
“I’m Reg Fitzmaurice — and, God knows, I don’t blame you for not recognizing me,” Fitzmaurice said gloomily, “but it was on your account that I was made to divorce my first wife. Not that I owe you any grudge for that.”
Fitzmaurice and the stranger stared at one another.
Then Radow said gently:
“Is that so?” and shut his eyes again.
“Better get rid of him before Clarissa gets home,” Fitzmaurice observed, lowering his voice but slightly as he moved away.
Harry King and Lucien looked at one another. “I knew I’d heard his name somewhere, but he must be years and years older than he looks.”
“Yeh,” remarked monsieur Radow, still without opening his eyes, and producing rather the effect of a voice from the tomb.
“Where are you going, if I may ask?” Harry King inquired, although it really did not look at the moment as though monsieur Radow had the slightest intention of going anywhere at all.
“To see my mother-in-law. I mistake the train, and get out at a wrong station, feeling ill. I look for a taxi. Nothing.”
“Naturally, at a country station. And where does your mother-in-law live?” coldly demanded King.
Radow produced a folded piece of paper, and handed it upwards with an expression of resigned patience.
Lucien and the agent read it simultaneously.
“I thought so,” said Lucien. “The Princesse de Candi-Laquerriere.”
“Yeh,” monsieur Radow confirmed placidly.
“Her son-in-law? But I thought... And Fitzmaurice said...”
Harry King fell into a maze of confused and disturbing thoughts.
The bees droned placidly about them, and the violinist continued to lie motionless on the lawn.
Suddenly the quiet of the afternoon was interrupted by the sound of a motor-horn.
“Good Heavens — my mother!” ejaculated Lucien.
He and Harry King exchanged a look of dismay in which lurked a little humour.
The car, moving swiftly up the avenue, was already drawn up before the steps.
“Up you get,” the agent informed monsieur Radow, and bent down to assist him with a vigorous arm.
The foreigner remained alarmingly limp.
“Too late,” muttered Lucien.
The butler had spoken to Clarissa as she stepped out of the car, and she was coming rapidly across the grass towards them.
Lucien went to meet her.
Harry King, at the cost of considerable exertion, succeeded in hauling monsieur Radow to his feet and holding him there.
“You must pull yourself together,” he explained urgently. “This is Mrs. Fitzmaurice, and you can see for yourself that — that — that your being here like this won’t do at all. It simply won’t do.”
But monsieur Radow seemed unable to see this, self-evident although it was. He continued to sway and to blink his large eyes. Harry King noted with disgust that they were trimmed with enormous black eyelashes that curled, and when Clarissa — after listening impatiently to an explanation from Lucien — swept up to them, Radow seized her hand, bowed over it, and imprinted a kiss on the back of her suede glove. Then he flung the hand away and straightened himself.
Clarissa, to Harry King’s infinite relief — for crude insolence,
such as she indulged in often, always disconcerted him — was smiling.
“I hear you are the famous musician. How too wonderful to find you here on my front lawn when I come home! I’m too sorry about your being ill. Is it heart, or tummy, or what?”
“Monsieur Radow fainted. I think he’s better now,” explained King, turning a compelling gaze on the intruder. “He’s on his way—”
“I know, I know,” interrupted Clarissa. “Lucien’s just told me. But we’re not Victorians here, thank the Lord. He’s coming in to have a drink and talk to me about music. I adore music, and I’ve often heard you play.”
A false move, thought Lucien, watching Radow’s far too expressive face assume a perfectly blank expression on the instant. Surprising how often Clarissa made mistakes of that kind. It was stupid. A musician of Radow’s calibre would think it an impertinence to be spoken to about music at all by an amateur. So it was — and from Clarissa, who scarcely knew one note from another, but she didn’t seem to realize that he was on the verge of being offended.
“Come on,” she urged, and put her hand through Radow’s arm. “The house-party will be utterly thrilled. We can telephone to the Princesse. Are you really her son-in-law? If so, what relation are you to my Sophie? This is really the funniest thing that has ever happened.”
“Mother!”
“Mind your own business, Lucien. This has nothing to do with you.”
Clarissa turned on her heel and went towards the house, her hand apparently galvanizing the still dazed and pallid Radow into accompanying her.
“Well, I’m damned,” said Lucien, staring at Harry King.
“What’s going to happen?”
“I expect my mother means to keep him to dinner to-night or something. Is he frightfully well known?”
“I haven’t any idea. He might easily be, without my knowing anything about it. My sister Olivia could tell us — or Elinor Fish. They know some of those people, I believe. I’ll find out to-night. I think I’ll clear off now.”
“I don’t blame you,” said Lucien.
“But if there’s anything—”
Collected Works of E M Delafield Page 331