Complete Works of F Marion Crawford

by F. Marion Crawford

  Margaret could not help laughing, and even Lushington smiled in his agony.

  ‘It was splendid,’ said the young girl, looking at him. ‘Did you really get a double first?’

  Lushington nodded.

  ‘One?’ screamed Madame Bonanni. ‘Twenty, I tell you! A hundred — —’

  ‘No, no, mother,’ interrupted Lushington. No one can get more than one.’

  ‘Ah, did I not tell you?’ cried the prima donna, triumphantly. ‘There is only one, and he got it! What did I tell you? How can you expect me not to be proud of him?’

  ‘You ought to be,’ answered Margaret, very much in earnest, and for the first time Lushington saw in her eyes the light of absolutely unreserved admiration.

  It was not for the double first at Oxford that she gave it. There had been a moment when it had hurt her to think that he probably accepted a good deal of luxury in his existence out of his mother’s abundant fortune, but it was gone now. Even as a schoolboy he had guessed whence at least a part of that wealth really came, and had refused to touch a penny of it. But Lushington felt as if he were being combed with red-hot needles from head to foot, and the perspiration stood on his forehead. It would have filled him with shame to mop it with his handkerchief and yet he felt that in another moment it would run down. The awful circumstances of his dream came vividly back to him, and he could positively hear Margaret telling him that he looked hot, so loud that the whole house could understand what she said. But at this point something almost worse happened.

  Madame Bonanni’s motherly but eagle eye detected the tiny beads on his brow. With a cry of distress she sprang to her feet and began to wipe them away with the corner of her napkin that was tied round her neck, talking all the time.

  ‘My darling!’ she cried. ‘I always forget that you feel hot when I feel cold! Angelo, open everything — the windows, the doors! Why do you stand there like a dressed-up doll in a tailor’s window? Don’t you see that he is going to have a fit?’

  ‘Mother, mother! Please don’t!’ protested the unfortunate Lushington, who was now as red as a beet.

  But Madame Bonanni took the lower end of her napkin by the corners, as if it had been an apron, and fanned him furiously, though he put up his hands and cried for mercy.

  ‘He is always too hot,’ she said, suddenly desisting and sitting down again. ‘He always was, even when he was a baby.’ She was now at work on a very complicated salad. ‘But then,’ she went on, speaking between mouthfuls, ‘I used to lay him down in the middle of my big bed, with nothing on but his little shirt, and he would kick and crow until he was quite cool.’

  Again Margaret bit her lip, but this time it was of no use, and after a conscientious effort to be quiet she broke into irrepressible laughter. In a moment Lushington laughed too, and presently he felt quite cool and comfortable again, feeling that after all he had been ridiculous only when he was a baby.

  ‘We used to call him Tommy,’ said Madame Bonanni, putting away her plate and laying her knife and fork upon it crosswise. ‘Poor little Tommy! How long ago that was! After his father died I changed his name, you know, and then it seemed as if little Tommy were dead too.’

  There was visible moisture in the big dark eyes for an instant. Margaret felt sorry for the strange, contradictory creature, half child, half genius, and all mother.

  ‘My husband’s name was Goodyear,’ continued the prima donna thoughtfully. ‘You will find it in all biographies of me.’

  ‘Goodyear,’ Margaret repeated, looking at Lushington. ‘What a nice name! I like it.’

  ‘You understand,’ Madame Bonanni went on, explaining. ‘“Goodyear,” “buon anno,” “bonanno,” “Bonanni”; that is how it is made up. It’s a good name for the stage, is it not?’

  ‘Yes. But why did you change it at all for your son?’

  Madame Bonanni shrugged her large shoulders, glanced furtively at Lushington, and then looked at Margaret.

  ‘It was better,’ she said. ‘Fruit, Angelo!’

  ‘Can I be of any use to you in getting off, mother?’ asked Lushington.

  Margaret felt that she had made another mistake, and looked at her plate.

  ‘No, my angel,’ said Madame Bonanni, answering her son’s question, and eating hothouse grapes; ‘you cannot help me in the least, my sweet. I know you would if you could, dear child! But you will come and dine with me quietly at the Carlton on Sunday at half-past eight, just you and I. I promise you that no one shall be there, not even Logotheti — though you do not mind him so much.’

  ‘Not in the least,’ Lushington answered, with a smile which Margaret thought a little contemptuous. ‘All the same, I would much rather be alone with you.’

  ‘Do you wonder that I love him?’ asked Madame Bonanni, turning to Margaret.

  ‘No, I don’t wonder in the least,’ answered the young girl, with such decision that Lushington looked up suddenly, as if to thank her.

  The ordeal was over at last, and the prima donna rose with a yawn of satisfaction.

  ‘I am going to turn you out,’ she said. ‘You know I cannot live without my nap.’

  She kissed Margaret first, and then her son, each on both cheeks, but it was clear that she could hardly keep her eyes open, and she left Margaret and Lushington standing together, exactly as she had left the young girl with Logotheti on the first occasion.

  Their eyes met for an instant and then Lushington got his hat and stick and opened the door for Margaret to go out.

  ‘Shall I call a cab for you?’ he asked.

  ‘No, thank you. I’ll walk a little way first, and then drive to the station.’

  When they were in the street, Lushington stood still.

  ‘You believe that it was an accident, don’t you?’ he asked. ‘I mean my coming to-day.’

  ‘Of course! Shall we walk on?’

  He could not refuse, and he felt that he was not standing by his resolution; yet the circumstances were changed, since she now knew his secret, and was warned.

  They had gone twenty steps before she spoke.

  ‘You might have trusted me,’ she said.

  ‘I should think you would understand why I did not tell you,’ he answered rather bitterly.

  She opened her parasol so impatiently that it made an ominous little noise as if it were cracking.

  ‘I do understand,’ she said, almost harshly, as she held it up against the sun.

  ‘And yet you complain because I did not tell you,’ said Lushington in a puzzled tone.

  ‘It’s you who don’t understand!’ Margaret retorted.

  ‘No. I don’t.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  They went on a little way in silence, walking rather slowly. She was angry with herself for being irritated by him, just when she admired him more than ever before, and perhaps loved him better; though love has nothing to do with admiration except to kindle it sometimes, just when it is least deserved. Now it takes generous people longer to recover from a fit of anger against themselves than against their neighbours, and in a few moments Margaret began to feel very unhappy, though all her original irritation against Lushington had subsided. She now wished, in her contrition, that he would say something disagreeable; but he did not. He merely changed the subject, speaking quite naturally.

  ‘So it is all decided,’ he said, ‘and you are to make your début.’

  ‘Yes,’ she answered, with a sort of eagerness to be friendly again. ‘I’m a professional from to-day, with a stage name, a prey to critics, reporters and photographers — just like your mother, except that she is a very great artist and I am a very little one.’

  It was not very skilfully done, but Lushington was grateful for what she meant by it, and for saying ‘your mother’ instead of ‘Madame Bonanni.’

  ‘I think you will be great, too,’ he said, ‘and before very long. There is no young soprano on the stage now, who has half your voice or half your talent.’

  Margaret coloured with pleas
ure, though she could not quite believe what he told her. But he glanced at her and felt sure that he was right. She had voice and talent, he knew, but even with both some singers fail; she had the splendid vitality, the boundless health and the look of irresistible success, which only the great ones have. She was not a classic beauty, but she would be magnificent on the stage.

  There was a short silence, before she spoke.

  ‘Two days ago,’ she said, ‘I did not think we would meet again so soon.’

  ‘Part again so soon, you ought to say,’ he answered. ‘It is nothing but that, after all.’

  She bit her lip.

  ‘Must we?’ she asked, almost unconsciously.

  ‘Yes. Don’t make it harder than it is. Let’s get it over. There’s a cab.’

  He held up his stick and signalled to the cabman, who touched his horse and moved towards them. Margaret stood still, with a half-frightened look, and spoke in a low voice.

  ‘Tom, if you leave me, I won’t answer for myself!’

  ‘I will. Good-bye — God bless you!’

  The cab stopped beside them, as he held out his hand. She took it silently and he made her get in. A moment later she was driving away at a smart pace, sitting bolt upright and looking straight before her, her lips pressed tight together, while Lushington walked briskly in the opposite direction. It had all happened in a moment, in a sort of despairing hurry.

  CHAPTER VII

  CONSTANTINE LOGOTHETI HAD at least two reasons for not going out to Versailles as soon as Mrs. Rushmore signified her desire to know him. In the first place he was ‘somebody,’ and an important part of being ‘somebody’ is to keep the fact well before the eyes of other people. He was altogether too great a personage to be at the beck and call of every one who wanted to know him. Secondly, he did not wish Margaret to think that he was running after her, for the very good reason that he meant to do so with the least possible delay.

  Lushington, who was really both sensitive and imaginative, used to tell Margaret that he was a realist. Logotheti, who was by nature, talent and education a thorough materialist, loved to believe that he possessed both a rich imagination and the gift of true sentiment.

  Margaret had delighted him at first sight, though he was hard to please, and though she was not a great beauty. She appealed directly to that love of life for its own sake which was always the strength, the genius and the snare of the Greek people, and which is not extinct in their modern descendants. Logotheti certainly had plenty of it, and his first impression, when he had met Margaret Donne, was that he had met his natural mate. There was nothing in the very least psychological about the sensation, and yet it was not the result of a purely physical attraction. It brought with it a satisfaction of artistic taste that was an unmarred pleasure in itself.

  True art has gone much further in deifying humanity than in humanising divinity. The Hermes of Olympia is a man made into a god; no Christian artist has ever done a tenth as well in presenting the image of God made Man. When imagination soars towards an invisible world it loses love of life as it flies higher, till it ends in glorifying death as the only means of reaching heaven; and in doing that it has often descended to a gross realism that would have revolted the Greeks — to the materialism of anatomical preparations that make one think of the dissecting-room, if one has ever been there.

  Love of genuine art is the best sort of love of life, and the really great artists have always been tremendously vital creatures. So-called artistic people who are sickly or merely under-vitalised generally go astray after strange gods; or, at the best, they admire works of art for the sake of certain pleasing, or sad, or even unhealthy associations which these call up.

  Logotheti came of a race which, through being temporarily isolated from modern progress, has not grown old with it. For it seems pretty sure that progress means, with many other things, the survival of the unfit and the transmission of unfitness to a generation of old babies; but where men are not disinfected, sterilised, fed on preserved carrion and treated with hypodermics from the cradle to the grave, the good old law of nature holds its own and the weak ones die young, while the strong fight for life and are very much alive while they live.

  Such people, when transplanted from what we call a half-barbarous state to live amongst us, never feel as we do, and when they are roused to action their deeds are not of the sort which our wives, our mothers-in-law and the clergy expect us to approve. It does not follow that they are villains, though they may occasionally kill some one in a fit of anger, or carry off by force the women they fall in love with; for such doings probably seem quite natural in their own country, and after all they cannot be expected to know more about right and wrong than their papas and mammas taught them when they were little things.

  The object of this long-winded digression is not to excite sympathy on behalf of Logotheti, but to forestall surprise at some of the things he did when he had convinced himself that of all the women he had ever met, Margaret Donne was the one that suited him best, and that she must be his at any cost and at any risk.

  The conviction was almost formed at the first meeting, and took full possession of him when he met her again, and she seemed glad to see him. By this time she had no reason for concealing from Mrs. Rushmore that she had seen him at Madame Bonanni’s, and she held out her hand with a frank smile. It was on a Sunday afternoon and there were a number of lions on the lawn, and half a dozen women of the world. Logotheti seemed to know more than half the people present, which is rather unusual in Paris, and most of them treated him with the rather fawning deference accorded by society to the superior claims of wealth over good blood.

  The Greek smiled pleasantly and reflected that the nobility of the Fanar, which goes back to the Byzantine Empire, is as good as any in France, and even less virtuous. He by no means despised his wealth, and he continually employed his excellent faculties in multiplying it; but in his semi-barbarous heart he was an aristocrat and was quietly amused when people whose real names seemed to have been selected from a list of Rhine wines took titles which emanated from the Vatican, or when plain Monsieur Dubois turned himself into ‘le comte du Bois de Vincennes’. Yet since few people seemed to know anything about Leo the Isaurian, under whom his direct ancestor had held office as treasurer and had eventually had his eyes put out for his pains, Logotheti was quite willing to be treated with deference for the sake of the more tangible advantages of present fortune. In Mrs. Rushmore’s garden of celebrities, he at once took his place as a rare bird.

  He crossed the lawn beside Margaret, indeed, with the air and assurance of a magnificent peacock. He was perhaps a shade less over-dressed than when she had seen him last, but there was an astonishing lustre about everything he wore, and even his almond-shaped eyes were bright almost to vulgarity; but though he tired the sight, as a peacock does in the sun, it was impossible not to watch him.

  ‘What a handsome man Logotheti is!’ exclaimed a Roumanian poetess, who was there.

  ‘What an awful cad!’ observed a fastidious young American to the English officer who was still on his way to India, and was very comfortable at Mrs. Rushmore’s.

  The Englishman looked at Logotheti attentively for nearly half a minute before he answered.

  ‘No,’ he said quietly. ‘That man is not a cad, he is simply a rich Oriental, dressed up in European clothes. I’ve met that sort before, and they are sometimes nasty customers. That fellow is as strong as a horse and as quick as a cat.’

  Meanwhile the Greek and Margaret reached a seat near the little pond and sat down. She did not know that he had watched every one of her movements with as much delight as if Psyche, made whole and alive, had been walking beside him. He had not seemed to look at her at all, and he did not begin the conversation by making her compliments.

  ‘I should have left a card on Mrs. Rushmore the day after I met you,’ he began in a rather apologetic tone, ‘but I was not quite sure that she knew about your visit to our friend, and she might ha
ve asked who I was and where you had met me. Besides, as she is an American, she would have thought I was trying to scrape acquaintance.’

  ‘Hardly that. But you did quite right,’ Margaret answered. ‘Thank you.’

  He was tactful. She leaned back a little in the corner of the seat and looked at him with an air of curiosity, wondering why everything he had said and done so far had pleased her so much better than his appearance. She was always expecting him to say something blatant or to do something vulgar, mainly because he wore such phenomenal ties and such gorgeous pins. To-day he displayed a ruby of astonishing size and startling colour. She was sure that it must be real, because he was so rich, but she had never known that rubies could be so big except in a fairy story. The tie was knitted of the palest mauve, shot with green and gold threads.

  ‘I have seen Schreiermeyer,’ he said. ‘Is there to be any secret about your début?’

  ‘None whatever! But I have said nothing about it, and none of the people here seem to have found it out yet.’

  ‘So much the better. In everything connected with the theatre I believe it is a mistake to try and excite interest before the event. What is said beforehand is rarely said afterwards. You can be sure that Schreiermeyer will say nothing till the time comes, and if Madame Bonanni talks about you to her friends in London, nobody will believe she is in earnest.’

  ‘But she is so outspoken,’ Margaret objected.

  ‘Yes, but no one could possibly understand that a prima donna just on the edge of decline could possibly wish to advertise a rising light. It is hardly human!’

  ‘I think she is the most good-natured woman I ever knew,’ said Margaret with conviction.

  ‘She has a heart of gold. Her only trouble in life is that she has too much of it! There is enough for everybody. She has always had far too much for one.’

  Logotheti smiled at his own expression.

  ‘Perhaps that is better than having no heart at all,’ Margaret answered, not quite realising how the words might have been misunderstood.