by Jane Arbor
She looked up to see Eliot Bradd in his dressing-gown at one of the windows of the big corner room which Mrs. Tempest had given to him because from the house it afforded the best view over the gardens.
“Hullo, Lysbet,” he challenged. “Where are you off to? No, don’t tell me! You’re going riding!”
Lysbet glanced down at the informality of her cord breeches and mustard-yellow jumper. “How did you guess?” she mocked.
“Don’t be so pert. May I come too?”
“Yes, of course, if you won’t be too long. How near are you to being dressed?”
“That,” retorted Eliot, “would be an improper thing to disclose. But I shan’t be two ticks. Wait for me—”
Lysbet nodded and turned about to stand astride and to flap idly at her riding crop with her gloves. She hadn’t particularly wanted Eliot along with her this morning, but the good manners due to a guest had successfully concealed that.
It was odd, really, how, during the last few weeks, he had become a semi-permanent guest instead of the casual visitor from South Africa which at first he had appeared to be.
Apparently, at his initial call he had not had the intention to accept an invitation to Falcons. It had been Aunt Alicia who had pressed him to stay for a few days, although he protested that he had taken a room for one night at the Royal Arms in Fallsbridge and had very little more than the proverbial toothbrush with him.
“But you must allow us to offer you some hospitality while you’re in England!” Mrs. Tempest had protested. “Does your business over here tie you up completely to Town?”
“Er—no, I can’t say that it will altogether,” Elliot had admitted. “For the moment, things are a little complicated, but when I get them straightened my time will be more or less at my own disposal. Although that is no reason why I should impose myself upon you—”
“But it wouldn’t be an imposition! Do understand that, Mr. Bradd. In fact—” and Mrs. Tempest had flashed him the brilliant smile with which she was often able to ensure her wishes, “I should be making rather shameless use of you, because you would be younger company than I am for Lysbet, and she needs that She has been getting just the slightest bit restless lately—haven’t you, darling?”
Lysbet had not replied, and her aunt had smiled indulgently at her. “Well, just a little distraite and odd perhaps? It’s probably no more than your enforced inactivity because of that wretched shoulder of yours. When it is better again we shall have to give a party for you—a dance or something—so that you can celebrate. But in the meanwhile we should love to have Mr. Bradd to stay at Falcons for as long as he is able, shouldn’t we, sweetheart?”
And so, after a brief return to London, ‘in order to clear the decks’ as he put it, Elliot Bradd had come back to Falcons and had remained ever since, except for an occasional absence when, he claimed, he could not stem the tide of business any longer.
As to the nature of the work which had brought him to England he had not been explicit. He explained only that his father had left him the sole rights of the diamond agency in which Lysbet’s own father had once had a partnership. On one occasion Lysbet had accused him mischievously of absenting himself in order to juggle with diamonds in secret. But Eliot had replied drily that his particular concern was far more a matter of arithmetic than of diamonds...
He had slipped quite companionably into the pleasant household at Falcons. He liked particularly to escort Mrs. Tempest and Lysbet to the summer race-meetings where, although he was patient and helpful over their modest ‘eachway’ bets of a few shillings, he never revealed the extent of his own stakes, gains or losses.
Once Lysbet, as excited as a child over a win of twenty-five shillings, had clutched impulsively at his arm when he returned to the stand. “I won, Eliot!” she declared. “Did you too?”
But Eliot had put his field glasses to his eyes in order to stare down an empty course at nothing. “My dear Lysbet,” he had said slowly, “the only frank bookmaker I ever met told me that all his wealth—and he’d got a lot—came from mugs like me. From which you may gather that—I didn’t win.” Then he lowered his glasses and touched her lightly under the chin with his finger. “But don’t worry, poppet! It’ll smooth itself out tomorrow.”
They had been ‘Eliot’ and ‘Lysbet’ to each other from the first few days of his stay.
But did she really like Eliot? Lysbet asked herself, without knowing why her answer was a reluctant ‘No’.
Sometimes she thought it was because she was piqued at the little he told of himself, of his home and his background in South Africa, or of the real reasons—since business seemed to occupy so small an amount of his attention—for his coming to England at all. And at other time she knew that she resented hotly the rather amused tolerance for her friendship with Richard which Eliot and Mrs. Tempest shared. For Eliot, Richard was always ‘that Sawbones pal of yours’, and Lysbet had never been able to find the nickname funny—only rather trite and cheap.
But he was coming now, dressed in riding clothes as informal as her own. As he fell into step beside her he put a’ hand lightly under her elbow. “Nice of you to have me along,” he said easily. “Though I realize that as a companion you regard me as a poor substitute for your Sawbones. Or doesn’t he ride, anyway?”
“He hasn’t horses of his own, if that’s what you mean,” replied Lysbet a little shortly. “And he can’t get out here for riding before breakfast and be back in Fallsbridge in time for morning surgery.”
“Too bad,” murmured Eliot. “But fortunate for me, in that I shan’t be in danger of cutting across your regrets for any earlier and happier rendezvous. Besides, I should hate to be in competition in the matter of my horsemanship, even if I’ve had to accept the unpalatable fact that Master Sawbones has far outpaced me in other directions!”
Lysbet was becoming used to obliquely gallant speeches of this sort from Eliot. She ignored it and went on smoothly: “But Doctor Guyse rides magnificently. The other morning, when you were away, I took the horses to the top of Enshaw Hill, just out of Fallsbridge, and we rode over the Common together. It was glorious.”
That was a pretty triumph over Eliot’s complacency, but she felt she had had to make it.
However, he appeared completely unabashed. “Then this morning let’s go in the opposite direction, shall we? Even if Sawbones and I must share the same mount?”
They did not say much more to each other until they pulled their mounts to a walk on one of the grassy rides of the woods beyond the Falcons’ boundaries.
Then Eliot said tentatively: “May I ask you something, Lysbet?”
She glanced across at him. “Yes, of course. Go ahead.” “You won’t go up in smoke? Or think me utterly impertinent?”
“It depends. But I shouldn’t think so.”
“Then—” Eliot paused, bending forward to give his horse an absent pat upon the neck. “Well, have you ever considered that you might be guilty of being rather unfair to the Sawbones?”
“Unfair? To Richard? I mean—Doctor Guyse of course “
Eliot’s gesture was one of impatience. “Cut out the Jane Austen stuff, my pet?” he urged. “We’re in the middle of the twentieth century! Don’t try to make me believe that you and your sawbones conduct your courtship on the terms of Doctor Guyse and Miss Marlowe!”
“Well, what if we don’t?” flared Lysbet. “I mean—it isn’t a courtship! But what did you mean—that I’m ‘unfair’ to Richard?”
She stopped, flushed and confused.
“All right, all right!” soothed Eliot. “But you see, you went up in smoke, after all! If it isn’t a courtship, that’s O.K. Just forget that I said anything, will you?”
“But what did you mean?” insisted Lysbet.
There was a pause. Then:
“If you must know, I’ve thought that you are encouraging the young man in ideas that are bound to be disappointed,” said Eliot.
“What sort of ideas?” Lysbet’s eyes were
stony.
“Well—,” Eliot cocked a quizzical look at her, “do I have to speak more plainly? In a word—does Miss Marlowe of Falcons intend to throw herself away on the local G.P.? Or is she merely—what’s the Victorian phrase?—‘trifling with his affections’?”
Had he noticed, he would have seen that the knuckles of the hand which had been holding loosely the reins upon the neck of his companion’s mount were suddenly taut and hard beneath the string of her glove. But his eyes were upon her face as Lysbet said slowly: “May I ask you a question? Do you think that—all this has anything to do with you, Eliot?”
He laughed airily. “No. Oh, no. Nothing in the world. It’s simply that as an onlooker I’ve enjoyed watching the game so far, and I confess I’d begun to get curious as to the rules by which it was being played.”
“It isn’t a game, so there aren’t any rules.”
“Then obviously you can’t have broken them. I take back my implication of unfairness to the Sawbones.” Eliot bowed slightly, mockingly, in his saddle. He seemed willing to regard the subject as closed.
But Lysbet was not satisfied. She had meant to snub Eliot; the last thing she wanted was to discuss Richard with him; but he had surely said some curious things, things she did not understand...
She answered him: I’m afraid you can’t take back the accusation entirely. What did you mean?”
Eliot laughed. “How feminine you are, Lysbet! You must worry an argument to its last rags!”
“You meant, I suppose,” pursued Lysbet relentlessly, “that in contrast to—to Aunt Alicia and to Falcons and to—to everything, Richard has only the standing of one of several doctors in Fallsbridge? That he isn’t rich, in fact?”
Eliot looked at her quickly and with swift appraisal of the situation. How far must he go in order to find out that which he wanted to know? Had he perhaps gone too far already?
“I haven’t an idea what his income may be,” he fenced skilfully. “And I wasn’t thinking particularly of him ‘in contrast to Aunt Alicia and Falcons and everything’.” His mimicry of herself made Lysbet wince slightly—”but I was contrasting him in my mind with the standing of, say, Miss Lysbet Marlowe!”
“My standing? But Eliot—!” Lysbet stopped, and they looked at each other, each with a gulf of unspoken things between them.
Her standing indeed! thought Lysbet. Why it was far, far below Richard’s even if Eliot, because of the things she could not tell him, thought it was the other way about.
But what was her position really? Ever since Eliot had come to Falcons she had been questioning it more and more. He apparently had plenty of money and all of it gained, she supposed, from the diamond business in which her own father had once been a partner. Then why?
It was an unspoken question which she had never asked until now, since Eliot had turned up to form a link, as it were, with her dead father.
As a child she had accepted all that her aunt and uncle had had to offer with the happy philosophy which enables children to regard the security or ‘home’ as their unalienable right and as the privilege of someone else to provide. ‘Home’ used to mean South Africa and Daddy. Then it meant England and Aunt Alicia and Uncle Everard. That was all. And if ever, once she had reached her teens, she had wondered how she was being kept, she had supposed that her father might have left enough money for the purpose and that if there were anything else to come to her she would have it when she came of age.
But her twenty-first birthday had come and gone and every attempt to discuss money with her aunt had brought her up against the blank wall of Mrs. Tempest’s wounded generosity. Was there some mystery about her father’s death? Or about his will if, indeed, he had ever made one? Eliot, she felt, might know all there was to be known about that end of her story. But somehow she could not bring herself to ask him to tell her the truth.
On his side Eliot was finding himself infinitely puzzled.
The girl had money. She must have—he knew it! But what had he found when he came to England?
That, except that she appeared to enjoy every luxury which Falcons had to offer, Lysbet was living the mouse-quiet life of an unpaid companion to her aunt, who was obviously a rich woman in her own right, since she could afford the upkeep and style of a place like Falcons. The woman dressed like a million dollars, too ... She’d clearly got the goods, even if Lysbet mysteriously hadn’t. Unless—
In his perplexity he frowned suddenly and was glad that Lysbet’s mare had pulled slightly, in front of his own mount. Take this slowly, young Eliot, had urged himself. What are the facts as you see them?
Here was Mrs. Tempest, clearly possessing a mint of money. She was guardian—sole guardian now—to Lysbet who, equally clearly, possessed nothing of the sort. Not even, to judge by her excitement over a betting-win of a shilling or so, a decent allowance of pin money. Well, wards, while they were still minors, didn’t necessarily have the handling of much of their own cash. But Lysbet wasn’t a minor! She was twenty-three—made no secret of it. Damn it, thought Eliot irritably, how long did they reckon to keep ’em in swaddling clothes in England? In Cape Town, Durban, Jo’burg, Lysbet, with her looks and her wealth, would have been the cynosure of the society she moved in. And that would have been the very cream too!
So here he was, back again at the beginning of the problem which, short of a plain question to either the girl herself or to her aunt, apparently had no answer. After all, you couldn’t, even with the effrontery of an Eliot Bradd, say in so many words: “Look here, have you got enough of the needful to make it worth my while to marry you?” And though the kid was a dream to look at and had the figure of a goddess, you couldn’t, for your pocket’s sake, launch yourself out on a proposal of marriage without knowing the other answers first.
There were oblique ways of finding out, of course.
He could test rumour and gossip in Fallsbridge, for instance. That was one way. And there was an answer—his pulse quickened a little at the thought—which might prove to be the answer of answers—the very best stroke of luck for which he could hope.
But that was only surmise. It needed consideration. And confirmation. And, most of all, it needed handling...
Eliot’s reins tautened slightly in his fingers and a heel in his horse’s side urged it to a trot to draw alongside Lysbet once more.
“Let’s turn about and canter the length of the ride,” he urged. “I need exercise. I haven’t had any yet.”
Lysbet agreed with a nod, turning Benita as she did so.
As their mounts gathered speed, Eliot drew out in front and she could not but admire his superb horsemanship and the skill with which he controlled a horse completely strange to him.
She did not realize wholly how, for Eliot, the unknown, the incalculable, the gamble, held the very breath of life. Or that, that morning in the crisp sunshine Eliot Bradd was handling more than a horse...
True to her earlier suggestion Mrs. Tempest organized a dance for Lysbet as soon as Richard pronounced the ‘wretched shoulder’ to be out of the convalescent stage.
Lysbet herself would have liked the affair to be an informal ‘hop’, but Mrs. Tempest protested that as she had done practically no entertaining all summer she had owed a party to ‘everyone’ for ages and that, in fact, she was giving it as much for Eliot as for Lysbet.
“We want him to meet people while he is over here, darling. I should hate him to go back to the Cape with the impression that, apart from mere bed and board, he had had from us no social hospitality to speak of,” she said.
Lysbet reflecting that Eliot had ‘met’ and had exercised his easy charm upon at least a score of wealthy and influential people during the course of his stay at Falcons, had asked idly: “When does he plan to go back, by the way?”
“I don’t know. I shouldn’t like to hurry him.” Mrs. Tempest looked at her niece shrewdly. “When he does go—will you mind, Lysbet?”
“Not particularly.” Lysbet’s eyes were frank. “Why shoul
d I?”
Mrs. Tempest shook her head. “No reason. Except that I’ve sometimes wondered whether he hasn’t been in any hurry to go—because of you, sweetheart. He—more than enjoys your company!”
The dark eyes were troubled then. “But Aunt Alicia, I—”
Mrs. Tempest went over to her niece and laid a reassuring arm about her shoulders.
“Darling, I didn’t mean a thing! But—I’ve told you this before—we middle-aged folks get half our enjoyment of living at second hand—arranging other people’s lives for them! It was simply that I’d wondered whether, supposing Eliot—You see, he appears to have plenty of money, a pleasant job which doesn’t tie him too much, and he’s going back to a country with a glorious climate in which I know you’d simply revel. You are too young to remember it, or I believe you would be thrilled at the prospect.”
Even in her dismay Lysbet had found the idea amusing. “But Aunt darling, I should be marrying Eliot—not the climate!”
“And you couldn’t marry Eliot?”
“Never in the world!” Utter conviction rang in the girl’s voice. “You couldn’t want me too!”
“Of course I couldn’t—if you don’t want to. And Eliot has said nothing to me. It was simply the idlest of speculations on my part. Let’s forget about it, shall we?” So, lightly and carelessly, Mrs. Tempest had dismissed the subject, but for her the nagging thrust of thought and questioning went on. She had wanted time, she had told herself. But what in effect, since Lysbet had met Richard Guyse and Eliot had come to Falcons, had she done with it? Nothing! So far, time had been upon her side. But if she abused it, to what extent might she not find that it had become an enemy? That was something about which it was not pleasant to think...
On the evening of the dance Lysbet dressed for it in a shiver of happy excitement. Tonight, as never before, she was dressing for Richard and for him alone.