And so through the agreeable vacation life there twitched the grim vein of tension.
One day disturbed by her daughter’s persistent trilling of the latest coster song When I sees ’im I topple giddy, Lady Something gathered up her morning letters and stepped out upon the lawn.
Oh so formal, oh so slender towered the Cypress-trees against the rose-farded hills and diamantine waters of the lake. The first hint of Autumn was in the air; and over the gravel paths, and in the basins of the fountains, a few shed leaves lay hectically strewn already.
Besides an under-stamped missive, with a foreign postmark, from her Majesty the Queen of the Land of Dates beginning “My dear Gazel,” there was a line from the eloquent, and moderately-victorious, young barrister, engaged in the approaching suit with the Ritz: He had spared himself no pains he assured his client in preparing the defence, which was he said to be the respectability of Claridge’s.
“Why bring in Claridge’s?…?” the Ambassadress murmured, prodding with the tip of her shoe a decaying tortoiseshell leaf; “but anyway,” she reflected, “I’m glad the proceedings fall in winter, as I always look well in furs.”
And mentally she was wrapped in leopard skins and gazing round the crowded court saluting with a bunch of violets an acquaintance here and there, as her eyes fell on Mrs Chilleywater seated in the act of composition beneath a cedar-tree.
Mrs Chilleywater extended a painful smile of welcome which revealed her pointed teeth and pale-hued gums, repressing, simultaneously, an almost irresistible inclination to murder.
“What!… Another writ?” she suavely asked.
“No, dear; but these legal men will write…”
“I love your defender. He has an air of d’Alembert sympathetic soul.”
“He proposes pleading Claridge’s.”
“Claridge’s?”
“Its respectability.”
“Are hotels ever respectable,—I ask you. Though, possibly, the horridest are.”
“Aren’t they all horrid!”
“Natürlich; but do you know those cheap hotels where the guests are treated like naughty children?”
“No. I must confess I don’t,” the Ambassadress laughed.
“Ah, there you are…”
Lady Something considered a moment a distant gardener employed in tying Chrysanthemum blooms to little sticks.
“I’m bothered about a cook,” she said.
“And I, about a maid! I dismissed ffoliott this morning—well I simply had to—for a figure salient.”
“So awkward out here to replace anyone; I’m sure I don’t know…” the Ambassadress replied, her eyes hovering tragically over the pantaloons strained to splitting point, of the stooping gardener.
“It’s a pretty prospect…”
“Life is a compound!” Lady Something defined it at last.
Mrs Chilleywater turned surprised. “Not even Socrates,” she declared, “said anything truer than that.”
“A compound!” Lady Something twittered again.
“I should like to put that into the lips of Delitsiosa.”
“Who’s Delitsiosa?” the Ambassadress asked as a smothered laugh broke out beside her.
Mrs Chilleywater looked up.
“I’d forgotten you were there. Strange thing among the cedar-boughs,” she said.
The Hon. Lionel Limpness tossed a slippered foot flexibly from his hammock.
“You may well ask, ‘who’s Delitsiosa,!’” he exclaimed.
“She is my new heroine,” Mrs Chilleywater replied, after a few quick little clutches at her hair.
“I trust you won’t treat her, dear, quite so shamefully as your last.”
The Authoress tittered.
“Delitsiosa is the wife of Marsden Didcote,” she said, “the manager of a pawnshop in the district of Maida Vale, and in the novel he seduces an innocent seamstress, Iris Drummond, who comes in one day to redeem her petticoat (and really I don’t know how I did succeed in drawing the portrait of a little fool!)… and when Delitsiosa, her suspicions aroused, can no longer doubt or ignore her husband’s intimacy with Iris, already engaged to a lusty young farmer in Kent—(some boy)—she decides to yield herself to the entreaties of her brother-in-law Percy, a junior partner in the firm, which brings about the great tussle between the two brothers on the edge of the Kentish cliffs. Iris and Delitsiosa—Iris is anticipating a babelet soon—are watching them from a cornfield, where they’re boiling a kettle for afternoon tea; and oh, I’ve such a darling description of a cornfield. I make you feel England!”
“No really, my dear,” Lady Something exclaimed.
“Harold pretends it would be wonderful, arranged as an Opera… with duos and things and a Liebestod for Delitzi towards the close.”
“No, no,” Mr Limpness protested: “What would become of our modern fiction at all if Victoria Gellybore Frinton gave herself up to the stage?”
“That’s quite true, strange thing among the cedar-boughs,” Mrs Chilleywater returned fingering the floating strings of the bandelette at her brow: “It’s lamentable; yet who is there doing anything at present for English Letters…? Who among us to-day,” she went on peering up at him, “is carrying on the tradition of Fielding? Who really cares? I know I do what I can… and there’s Madam Adrian Bloater, of course. But I can think of no one else;—we two.”
Mr Limpness rocked, critically.
“I can’t bear Bloater’s books,” he demurred.
“To be frank, neither can I. I’m very fond of Lilian Bloater, I adore her welt-bürgerliche nature, but I feel like you about her books; I cannot read them. If only she would forget Adrian; but she will thrust him headlong into all her work.
“Have I ever drawn Harold? No. (Although many of the public seem to think so!) And please heaven, however great my provocation at times may be, I never shall!”
“And there I think you’re right,” the Ambassadress answered, frowning a little as the refrain that her daughter was singing caught her ear.
“And when I sees ’im
My heart goes BOOM!..
And I topple over;
I topple over, over, over,
All for Love!”
“I dreamt last night my child was on the Halls.”
“There’s no doubt, she’d dearly like to be.”
“Her Father would never hear of it!”
“And when she sees me
O, when she sees me—
(The voice slightly false was Harold’s)
Her heart goes BOOM!..
And she topples over;
She topples over, over, over,
All for Love!”
“There; they’ve routed Sir Somebody…”
“And when anything vexes him,” Lady Something murmured, appraising the Ambassador’s approaching form with a glassy eye, “he always, you know, blames me!” Shorn of the sombre, betailed attire, so indispensable for the town-duties of a functionary, Sir Somebody, while rusticating, usually wore a white-twill jacket, and black multi-pleated pantaloons; while for headgear, he would favour a Mexican sugar-loaf, or green-draped pugaree: “He looks half-Irish,” Lady Something would sometimes say.
“Infernal Bedlam,” he broke out: “the house is sheer pandemonium.”
“I found it so too, dear,” Lady Something agreed; “and so,” she added, removing a fallen tree-bug tranquilly from her hair, “I’ve been digesting my letters out here upon the lawn.”
“And no doubt,” Sir Somebody murmured, fixing the placid person of his wife, with a keen psychological glance: “you succeed, my dear, in digesting them?”
“Why shouldn’t I?”
“… ” the Ambassador displayed discretion.
“We’re asked to a Lion hunt in the Land of Dates; quite an entreating invitation from the dear Queen —; really most pressing and affectionate, but Princess Elsie’s nuptial negotiations and this pending Procès with the Ritz, may tie us here for some time.”
“Ah Rosa.�
��
“Why these constant moans?…? A clairvoyant once told me I’d ‘the bump of Litigation’ —a cause célèbre unmistakably defined; so it’s as well, on the whole, to have it over.”
“And quite probably; had your statement been correct—”
The Ambassadress gently glowed.
“I’m told it’s simply swarming!” she impenitently said.
“Oh Rosa, Rosa…”
“And if you doubt it at all, here is an account direct from the Ritz itself,” her Excellency replied, singling out a letter from among the rest: “It is from dear old General Sir Trotter-Stormer. He says: ‘I am the only guest here. I must say, however, the attendance is beyond all praise, more soigné and better than I’ve ever known it to be, but after what you told me, dear friend, I feel distinctly uncomfortable when the hour for bye-bye comes!”
“Pish; what evidence, pray, is that?”
“I regard it as of the very first importance! Sir Trotter admits—a distinguished soldier admits, his uneasiness; and who knows, he is so brave about concealing his woes—his two wives left him!—what he may not have patiently and stoically endured?”
“Less I am sure, my dear, than I of late in listening sometimes to you.”
“I will write I think and press him for a more detailed report…”
The Ambassador turned away.
“She should no more be trusted with ink than a child with firearms!” he declared, addressing himself with studious indirectness to a garden-snail.
Lady Something blinked.
“Life is a compound,” she murmured again.
“Particularly for women!” the Authoress agreed.
“Ah, well,” the Ambassadress majestically rose: “I must be off and issue household orders; although I derive hardly my usual amount of enjoyment at present, I regret to say, from my morning consultations with the cook…”
XI
IT had been once the whim, and was now the felicitous habit of the Countess of Tolga to present Count Cabinet annually with a bouquet of flowers. It was as if Venus-Anadyomene herself, standing [6] on a shell and wafted by all the piquant whispers of the town and court, would intrude upon the flattered exile (with her well-wired orchids, and malicious, soulless, laughter), to awaken delicate, pagan images, of a trecento, Tuscan Greece.
But upon this occasion desirous of introducing some new features, the Countess decided on presenting the fallen senator with a pannier of well-grown, early pears, a small “heath,” and the Erotic Poems bound in half calf with tasteful tooling of a Schoolboy Poet, cherishable chiefly, perhaps, for the vignette frontispiece of the author. Moreover, acting on an impulse she was never able afterwards to explain, she had invited Mademoiselle Olga Blumenghast to accompany her.
Never had summer shown a day more propitiously clement, than the afternoon in mid-Autumn they prepared to set out.
Fond of a compliment, when not too frankly racy, [7] and knowing how susceptible the exile was to clothes, the Countess had arrayed herself in a winter gown of kingfisher-tinted silk turning to turquoise, and stencilled in purple at the arms and neck with a crisp Greek-key design; while a voluminous violet veil, depending behind her to a point, half-concealed a tricorne turquoise toque from which arose a shaded lilac aigrette branching several ways.
“I shall probably die with heat, and of course it’s most unsuitable; but poor old man, he likes to recall the Capital!” the Countess panted, as, nursing heath, poems and pears, she followed Mademoiselle Olga Blumenghast blindly towards the shore.
Oars, and swaying drying nets, a skyline “lost in sun, a few moored craft beneath the little rickety wooden pier awaiting choice:—“The boatmen, to-day, darling, seem all so ugly; let’s take a sailing-boat and go alone!”
“I suppose there’s no danger, darling?” the Countess replied, and scarcely had she time to make any slight objection, than the owner of a steady wide-bottomed boat—the Calypso—was helping them to embark.
The Island of St Helena, situated towards the lake’s bourne, lay distant some two miles or more, and within a short way of the open sea.
With sails distended to a languid breeze the shore eventually was left behind; and the demoiselle cranes, in mid-lake, were able to observe there were two court dames among them.
“Although he’s dark, Vi,” Mademoiselle Olga Blumenghast presently exclaimed, dropping her cheek to a frail hand upon the tiller, “although he’s dark, it’s odd how he gives one the impression somehow of perfect fairness!”
“Who’s that, darling?” the Countess murmured, appraising with fine eyes, faintly weary, the orchid-like style of beauty of her friend.
“Ann-Jules, of course.”
“I begin to wish, do you know, I’d brought Pomegranates, and worn something else!”
“What are those big burley-worleys?”
“Pears…”
“Give me one.”
“Catch, then.”
“Not that I could bear to be married; especially like you, Vi!”
“A marriage like ours, dear, was so utterly unworthwhile…”
“I’m not sure, dear, that I comprehend altogether?”
“Seagulls’ wings as they fan one’s face…”
“It’s vile and wrong to shoot them: but oh! How I wish your happiness depended, even ever so little, on me.”
The Countess averted her eyes
Waterfowl, like sadness passing, hovered, and soared overhead, casting their dark, fleeting shadows to the white, drowned clouds, in the receptive waters of the lake.
“I begin to wish I’d brought grapes,” she breathed.
“Heavy stodgy pears. So do I.”
“Or a few special peaches,” the Countess murmured, taking up the volume of verse beside her, with a little, mirthless, half-hysterical laugh.
To a Faithless Friend.
To V.O.I. and S.C.P.
For Stephen.
When the Dormitory Lamp burns Low.
Her gaze travelled over the Index.
“Read something, dear,” Mademoiselle Blumenghast begged, toying with the red-shaded flower in her burnished curls.
“Gladly; but oh, Olga!” the Countess crooned.
“What!”
“Where’s the wind?”
It had gone.
“We must row.”
There was nothing for it.
To gain the long, white breakwater, with the immemorial willow-tree at its end, that was the most salient feature of the island’s approach, required, nevertheless, resolution.
“It’s so far, dear,” the Countess kept on saying. “I had no idea how far it was Had you any conception at all it was so far?”
“Let us await the wind, then. It’s bound to rally.”
But no air swelled the sun-bleached sails, or disturbed the pearly patine of the paralysed waters.
“I shall never get this peace, I only realise it exists…” the Countess murmured with dream-glazed eyes.
“It’s astonishing… the stillness,’” Mademoiselle Blumenghast murmured, with a faint tremor, peering round towards the shore.
On the banks young censia-trees raised their boughs like strong white whips towards the mountains, upon whose loftier heights lay, here and there, a little stray patch of snow.
“Come hither, ye winds, come hither!” she softly called.
“Oh, Olga! Do we really want it?” the Countess in agitation asked, discarding her hat and veil with a long, sighing breath.
“I don’t know, dear; no; not, not much.”
“Nor I—at all.”
“Let us be patient then.”
“It’s all so beautiful it makes one want to cry.”
“Yes; it makes one want to cry,” Mademoiselle Blumenghast murmured, with a laugh that in brilliance vied with the October sun.
“Olga!”
“So,” as the Calypso lurched: “lend me your hanky, dearest.”
“Olga—? —? Thou fragile, and exquisite thing!”
&n
bsp; *****
Meanwhile Count Cabinet was seated with rod-and-line at an open window, idly ogling a swan. Owing to the reluctance of tradespeople to call for orders, the banished statesman was often obliged to supplement the larder himself. But hardly had he been angling ten minutes to-day, when lo! a distinguished mauvish fish with vivid scarlet spots. Pondering on the mysteries of the deep, and of the subtle variety there is in Nature, the veteran ex-minister lit a cigar. Among the more orthodox types that stocked the lake, such as carp, cod, tench, eels, sprats, shrimps, etc., this exceptional fish must have known its trials and persecutions, its hours of superior difficulty… and the Count, with a stoic smile recalled his own. Musing on the advantages and disadvantages of personality, of “party” viewpoints, and of morals in general, the Count was soon too self-absorbed to observe the approach of his “useful” secretary and amanuensis, Peter Passer.
More valet perhaps than secretary, and more errand-boy than either, the former chorister of the Blue Jesus had followed the fallen statesman into exile at a moment when the Authorities of Pisuerga were making minute enquiries for sundry missing articles, [8] from the Trésor of the Cathedral, and since the strain of constant choir-practice is apt to be injurious for a youngster suffering from a delicate chest, the adolescent had been willing enough to accept, for a time, at least, a situation in the country.
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