Collected Works of E M Delafield

by E M Delafield

  Once or twice, too, he had looked at her.

  Looked at her as if he really saw her. Ivy, even at twenty, had never been looked at really hard by strange men. She wasn’t the type predestined to receive such attentions. Now, at thirty-eight, although actually she was better dressed than ever in her life before, men seldom gave her a second glance.

  Certainly, she had never expected to be singled out by Mick Lawson.

  She knew his name. Why not? It was to be heard, frequently enough, on board.

  “Where’s Mick Lawson?”

  “Isn’t Mick coming up for a drink?”

  “Oh, come on. Mick Lawson is making up a party to go ashore and have fun somewhere.” Now she was dancing with Mick Lawson.

  “I should guess you do a lot of dancing,” he said. “You’re not a pro by any chance?”

  “Oh no!” said Ivy. “I love it, but I’ve never had very much practice.”

  She knew that she was a naturally good dancer, but she had never supposed herself to be anything like as good as his words seemed to imply.

  For a moment she wondered whether he could be laughing at her, and glanced up at him. He was quite serious.

  He had really meant it!

  “Do you truly think I dance well?” she hazarded.

  “Marvellously. You’re as light as a feather, and your sense of rhythm is absolutely perfect.”

  “But I hardly know any steps.”

  “That doesn’t matter. You’d learn them in a minute. I’d like to show you one or two.”

  He tried her with one or two simple variations, and Ivy, under his expert guidance, found that she was following quite easily.

  At the end of each dance she thought that he would leave her — but he stayed.

  At first they talked about the ship, the places they had seen, and those that still lay ahead of them. Imperceptibly, the conversation grew more personal.

  He’s not at all what I imagined, thought Ivy.

  For she had vaguely supposed that Lawson was, like the people with whom his time was spent, loud and unrestrained, always ready to drink, and to treat women with familiarity.

  Instead, she found him gentle and respectful, and more ready to listen than to talk.

  In a little while, Ivy had told him a good deal about herself: of her life at the school in Yorkshire, then at the boarding-house, and of the change in her fortunes.

  “And I’ve always wanted to travel,” she admitted. “Whatever I settle down to later on, I shall have all this to remember.”

  “I’m certain you were dead right to take your opportunity now, while you’re young and can get the best out of it all,” he said.

  She thrilled with exquisite delight in his approval.

  That night, in the cabin, Vera Lord was inclined to be critical of Ivy’s new friendship.

  “Naturally,” she several times repeated, “it’s nothing to do with me, but I must say I’m rather surprised at the way he suddenly elects to monopolize you, after ignoring your existence, practically. I suppose he’s had some sort of quarrel with those noisy Bassett girls he’s always running about with, and this is his way of getting back at them.”

  Then she laughed a little.

  “That doesn’t sound too complimentary to you, my dear, but of course you know I don’t mean it like that.”

  Ivy neither knew, nor did she care, in what way Vera Lord had meant her officious remarks.

  She wasn’t thinking about Vera Lord.

  She was thinking that Mick Lawson, when he wasn’t talking and laughing, had a look of sadness in his dark eyes.

  Some day, perhaps, he would tell her about himself, and his life.

  3

  The day of Mick Lawson’s confidences to Ivy Vernon came far sooner than she had ever, in her secret dreams, thought possible.

  Twenty-four hours after they had danced together, they stood leaning over a low stone parapet, down which purple and rose-coloured flowers cascaded in a riot of beauty.

  It was a hotel terrace, and the other members of the party had scattered after luncheon to go and look at the shops, or sit on the beach below and fall asleep in the hot sun.

  Lawson had stayed beside Ivy all the morning, ignoring everybody else.

  At luncheon he took the place next hers. Ivy’s sedate friends, the Maitlands, exchanged glances as he did so.

  She felt that they would expect her to join them as she always did, and wondered with agitation what she ought to do.

  “What are you going to do this afternoon?” Lawson asked, his voice oddly chiming with her thoughts.

  “I’m not sure. I — I don’t know what the Maitlands have planned,” She hesitated, and then spoke in a little rush of courage. “Shall you go and look at the Museum? I believe that’s what most people are doing.”

  “I’m not frightfully keen on museums, I’m afraid,” he drawled. “But you know what I really want, don’t you?”

  “What?”

  “To stay with you, of course.”

  Ivy was so much startled, and confused, and pleased, that she was unable to make any answer at all.

  When the meal was over she carefully avoided the eyes of the Maitlands and slipped out onto the terrace, as though to admire the view.

  The view, which was indeed a magnificent one, deserved very much more attention than she gave it.

  She was conscious of nothing at all until Lawson, a second or two later, joined her.

  “That was very sweet of you,” he murmured. “Are you going to let me stay here with you?”

  “If you’re sure you don’t really want to go and explore the town,” murmured Ivy.

  His only reply was to take hold of her very gently by the elbow and lead her to the far end of the terrace, where a small group of ilex trees concealed a stone bench, and a little low stone parapet.

  It was dark and cool and Ivy, with eyes aching from the glare, drew a long breath of mingled relief and excitement.

  Lawson was looking at her.

  “I think that frock of yours is too marvellous,” he said boldly. “Blue’s my favourite colour.”

  It was, of course, one of her new dresses — a thin flowered silk, sleeveless, and square-necked. She had known a moment or two of doubt as to whether it was not really too young for her. But in her heart, she thought that she might still, easily enough, pass for twenty-nine or thirty.

  Certainly, it was true of her now. She seemed to have retraced her way into girlhood again as she and Mick Lawson sat together under the ilexes, all through the afternoon.

  Presently, in response to one or two timid questions, he began to tell her about himself.

  His mother — a beautiful Spanish dancer — had been deserted by her English husband within a year or two of their marriage. She had been left, with her baby, to struggle with fearful poverty alone in London. She was only seventeen.

  “Oh! poor, poor thing!” cried Ivy. “What did she do?”

  “She got engagements whenever she could, at music-halls. She wouldn’t part with her child —— that was me,” said Mick.

  “Couldn’t she have gone back to Spain? I suppose there wasn’t enough money.”

  “No, there wasn’t enough money. And you see — she was an orphan. She hadn’t got any relations.”

  How dreadful — how dreadful. What was her name?

  “Her name? Oh — Dolores,” he said hastily. “La belle Dolores, they called her. When I was six years old, she died.”

  “And what happened to you?”

  “I was sent to an orphanage. There was nowhere else I could go — nobody to look after me. It was a ghastly childhood, although the orphanage was a decent place enough, as institutions go. But you see, I could remember my mother, and I knew — she’d told me — that my father was an English officer. I knew that I was —— different — from the other kids.”

  “Yes, yes,” breathed Ivy, her eyes full of tears.

  He drew a deep breath, and then relaxed, slumping, in long,
slim grace, beside her on the stone bench.

  Then he told her a great deal more.

  How he had run away from the orphanage, and been brought back again and beaten, and then a job had been found for him, in a big commercial hotel, and he had worked very hard.

  “You know something about hotel life — only, of course, from the other end of the scales,” he said.

  Ivy nodded. She told him some of her experiences, and they were strangely paralleled by his own. Very soon, however, Ivy stopped talking. She wanted to hear more about Mick.

  At sixteen he had been taken up by a very rich old couple. He was, by this time, working as assistant-porter, and the old lady had taken a fancy to him, and wanted to have him trained as a chauffeur.

  “I agreed, of course,” he said, with a short laugh that seemed to Ivy full of bitterness. “It was a chance of getting into the world to which I really, by birth, belonged. Tour world,” he added deferentially.

  “But I’m not—” she began confusedly, not quite certain what she intended to say.

  He silenced her with a gesture, and a smile that showed his beautiful white teeth.

  Then he went on to tell her of the years between his sixteenth and his twentieth birthdays.

  The rich couple had been kind to him, and he had served them faithfully. On the death of the old gentleman, the widow had gone to live in the South of France taking with her the big car and the chauffeur. She became more and more dependent on him, and treated him as a friend rather than as a servant.

  “I got the chance of mixing with decent people from time to time,” he said simply. “I tried to improve myself — to speak properly, and to learn French.”

  How wonderful he was, thought Ivy, and the thought was reflected in the soft, faded face, with its incongruously naive expression, upturned to his.

  Eventually, Lawson’s employer had died, leaving him everything she possessed in the world.

  And the will had been disputed by her relations — nephews and nieces, for she had no children — on the grounds of undue influence, and the alleged senility of the testatrix.

  “How wicked — how wicked! Did you — did you lose?” cried Ivy — but already she knew the answer.

  He had lost. He had nothing, excepting presents of money that the old woman had given him in her lifetime.

  “What did you do?”

  He had gone to Nice, and made a desperate bid for fortune at Monte Carlo.

  Ivy’s eyes grew enormous.

  Gambling.

  “Of course, you didn’t win,” she murmured wisely. Was it not well-known that nobody can really win at Monte Carlo? If by some fluke they did, then they couldn’t ever resist going on playing, and the Bank got all their money in the end.

  Lawson shrugged his shoulders.

  “I won and I lost,” he declared. “But on the whole I won more than I lost. All the time, I was on the look-out for another job.”

  Eventually he had found another job. A French hotel-manager wanted a reception-clerk who could speak English. Lawson stayed with him seven months.

  The story went on: more and more romantic, in spite of the fact that it was sordid as well. For Lawson admitted frankly that he had often been without means, without work, almost without hope. He implied, rather than actually admitted, that he had spent money, when he had any, on women, and that from time to time he had gambled.

  “There seemed nothing to keep straight for,” he said wistfully. “Nobody really cared what became of me.”

  He gave her a curious, sidelong look as he spoke.

  “If I’d known—” he began softly, and then checked himself.

  Ivy looked down, and twisted her handkerchief between her fingers.

  She longed to know what he had been going to say. Instead of finishing that broken sentence Lawson went on to tell her that he had, two years ago, fallen in with a man and his wife with whom he had eventually gone to lodge. The wife was English, the man Italian.

  “He drank, and used to knock his wife about,” said Lawson. “I stood up for her as much as I could — many’s the row I’ve had with that Dago chap. I’ll tell you some day... but the long and the short of it was that one day he cleared out, leaving nothing in the house, and owing money all over the place.”

  “The wife?” gasped Ivy.

  “Oh, he left her. Stranded. She hadn’t a bean.”

  “What happened to her?” gravely said Ivy, feeling that she knew the answer already.

  “I paid her fare home to London,” said Lawson.

  She had known it!

  “It brought me luck, perhaps. I was down to my last forty francs, and then I picked up an old English newspaper outside a cafe. And the first thing I saw was an advertisement, asking me to get into touch with a firm of London solicitors. You know the kind of thing... ‘something to his advantage.’”

  “Yes, yes.” She’d often seen such notices, and sometimes wondered what story lay behind them.

  “I couldn’t afford to go to England, of course, but I wrote. I was the man they were looking for. My father had died, and left me everything.”

  “Oh! It’s like a book!” cried Ivy. “And — and is everything all right now?”

  “It will be. Of course, the moment they were satisfied of my identity, they made no difficulty about advancing me a sum of money. I went to London and saw them, and looked into everything. It’s a nice estate, a house in — in the country, and about twenty thousand pounds. There’s a good deal of business to be settled up, before I can actually get hold of it all, but the lawyers are seeing to it. And meanwhile, I came on this cruise.”

  He looked full into her eyes.

  “At first, I wished I hadn’t come. I didn’t care about it, or about the people. Now, I know it was the luckiest thing I ever did.”

  4

  It scarcely surprised Ivy that her new friend, at the end of their long afternoon together, should tell her that to nobody else had he ever related his life-story. It was for her alone.

  Ivy earnestly promised him that with her his confidence should be safe.

  She felt how well she could understand his wish for secrecy. The sole happening in her own life — the legacy that had proved so much larger than she had ever expected — she had not spoken of to anybody. The Maitlands knew: but nobody else did.

  Ivy had often wondered whether her fellow-travellers thought of her as a young woman who had always been well-off, and in a position to travel if she wanted to do so.

  If she hadn’t had the idea of going on a cruise... if the agency hadn’t recommended this particular trip... if she hadn’t said Yes the night that Mick had asked her to dance....

  These speculations sometimes crossed the mind of Ivy in the next day or two, but for the most part she lived and moved in a kind of rose-coloured haze that seemed not to admit of coherent thought.

  Then came a sudden jolt.

  Very kindly, and with obviously genuine regret, Mrs. Maitland spoke to her.

  Did Ivy realize, she said, that this Mr. Lawson was not really a very desirable young man? Mr. Maitland— “a most experienced judge of human nature, my dear” — was definitely of the opinion that he was a mere adventurer. It was he who had begged his wife to give Ivy a word of warning.

  “It’s very kind of you,” said Ivy, trembling a little. “I know you mean it for my good. But you’re quite, quite mistaken. You see, I know all about Mr. Lawson.”

  “How?”

  “He’s told me all about himself,” said Ivy.

  “But my dear, silly woman, that doesn’t mean anything at all. Of course he’s told you about himself — but what proof have you got that he’s told you the truth?”

  “What proof have you got that he hasn’t?” retorted Ivy with spirit.

  “Neither my husband nor I care for the look of him. And surely you remember that at first you didn’t either. When he was always drinking and flirting with those dreadful Bassett girls.”

  “I know all about t
hat. He’s explained it all to me. It was just that he — he hadn’t yet got to know any of the nice people on board.”

  “Ivy, I hate saying this, but my husband and I both feel you ought to know. Lawson didn’t come near you till that night he asked you to dance, did he?”

  “That was the first time he spoke to me,” Ivy admitted guardedly.

  “That afternoon, in the smoking-room, someone had mentioned your name. Don happened to be there. They said you’d just come into a fortune. You know how absurdly these things get exaggerated. Some ridiculous figure was mentioned. Lawson was there.”

  “What difference does it make?” Ivy asked defiantly.

  “Oh, my dear, how difficult you’re making it! Don’t you really understand that, to a man of the kind we believe Lawson to be, any unprotected woman with money is — is fair game?”

  “Then let me tell you,” said Ivy, “to show you how absolutely wrong you are, that he’s got a lot of money himself. A lot of money and a house in England.”

  “Who says so? Lawson himself. I thought so. Have you got any proof whatever that he’s telling you the truth?”

  “I don’t need it,” said Ivy, colouring deeply. “I can trust his word.”

  After that, she saw much less of the Maitlands. There was no quarrel, but Ivy avoided them. She spent all her time with Mick Lawson, who soon began to make love to her.

  Ivy could scarcely believe in her own happiness.

  He had not yet asked her to marry him, but she felt certain that he would, and knew that she was going to accept him.

  It was like a dream, she told herself, and she wanted the dream-voyage never to end. But one evening, as the ship was nearing Marseilles, the quality of the dream altered.

  Mick had been preoccupied all day.

  At last, Ivy asked what was the matter.

  With much reluctance, he told her.

  A radio message received that morning had informed him that there was a hitch in the settlement of his father’s affairs. Nothing at all serious — some temporary formality to be adjusted by the lawyers — but he would not be entering into his inheritance quite as soon as he had expected. That was all. It would make it a little bit awkward for a few months, perhaps, but that was all.