by E. F. Benson
He ate his lunch, and unable to go further, turned his bicycle homewards. Anyhow he would show Wentworth how gallant gentlemen behave in heartbreaking situations.
CHAPTER X
In spite of this manly resolution, Mrs. Bertram’s gloomy forebodings were fulfilled, and the evening was ghastly in the extreme. Colonel Chase was rather late for dinner (unlike him) but his soup was being kept warm, and he marched into the dining-room with the evening paper under his arm and a fund of unnaturally cheerful observations. He could not notice Miss Howard, for that would have rendered magnanimity ridiculous, but never had he been otherwise so affable.
“Ha, Mrs. Holders,” he said. “I crave your partnership at the bridge table after dinner. Mrs. Oxney and Mrs. Bertram? Yes? How you spoil me! I shall hope to wipe off the memory of the adverse fate—”
From that moment everything went wrong. The news of his ‘adverse fate’ with Miss Howard that morning instantly occurred to everybody and there was a general exchange of stealthy glances, and a feeling of great unease before the Colonel could indicate that he only alluded to the adverse fate which lost him one and ninepence last night.
“And there looks to be a tough cross-word puzzle this evening,” he said to Mrs. Oxney. “I took a glance at it, and I think we shall find a worse crux than crofters.”
This time he paused: he felt he must really take care of such pitfalls. Mrs. Oxney gallantly plunged into the silence.
“And you had a good ride I hope, Colonel,” she said, skilfully changing the subject. “Where did you go?”
“Out beyond Denton: a considerable way beyond Denton.”
“Well, I do call that wonderful! And you starting so much later than usual.”
Mrs. Bertram trod heavily on her sister’s foot under the table, to remind her what was the cause of the late start, and Mrs. Oxney’s voice ceased as if the Telephone Exchange had cut her off. She gave a thin faint cry of dismay at what she had said, and of pain at what her sister had done, and Mrs. Bertram tried her hand at tactful conversation.
“It grows a little chilly,” she said, “and we’d better have our game of bridge in the smoking-room. There’s a beautiful fire of logs there: that trunk of the tree in the golf field had some sound wood in it—”
So Mrs. Oxney trod on her foot, and again there was silence. It was broken by Florence giving a sudden shriek of laughter for no apparent reason. So Miss Howard tried to account for that by implying that she had said something very droll.
“I thought that would amuse you, dear,” she said loudly. “I saved that up to tell you. I was wondering, do you know, as I sketched this morning . . .”
Everybody joined in to cover up that. Mrs. Oxney called across to Mrs. Holders to know if she liked sea-kale cooked like this, and Florence put some eager questions to Mrs. Bertram on the subject of Pekinese dogs. Then it was seen that such pairings of conversationalists would never do, for they left Colonel Chase and Miss Howard sitting as dumb as sphinxes. In this diminished company all the occupied tables had been moved up near the fire for warmth and intimacy and Mrs. Oxney wished she had scattered them to the remotest corners of the room instead. Nervousness gripped them all for it seemed as if every topic of normal conversation had a live bomb entangled in its innocent meshes and no one knew exactly in what trivial subject it might not hide. Even the parlour-maids were becoming jumpy and losing their deft precision, and presently the hapless Mabel who served the Colonel let a perfect avalanche of walnuts fall on to his lap and the table-cloth and his plate and into his finger-bowl. The appalling explosion that followed drowned the rattlings and splashings of the nuts.
Mrs. Oxney hoped that when they settled down to bridge, the awful effort to behave naturally would be less of a strain. But Colonel Chase’s resolve to conduct himself like a gallant gentleman produced the most embarrassing effect, for instead of hectoring and instructing and swanking as usual, he was polite and courtly and altogether unreal. Decorous silence reigned since conversation was so dangerous, interspersed with little compliments between partners on each other’s sound declarations and skilful play and bad luck. Mrs. Oxney made a few attempts to be natural. She told her sister that she ought to have taken out trumps, and appealed to Colonel Chase to know whether that should not have been the correct course, but instead of lecturing about it, and repeating that he was famous throughout India for the observance of this excellent principle, he only said “I have no doubt you are right,” which made Mrs. Holders look more surprised than she had ever been. They all knew that Miss Howard and Miss Kemp were together in the drawing-room, from which there proceeded occasional bursts of laughter, which sounded very merry, and it was impossible not to conjecture what caused them. It could only be one subject, and who could pretend to be interested in bridge, while the exact details of what had occurred that morning were probably being humorously discussed? Certainly Mrs. Oxney could not. At half-past ten precisely, Colonel Chase revoked and, instead of blaming Mrs. Holders for not having asked him if he had any more clubs, had apologised. This finished the rubber: he paid, said good night to the stupefied company and went upstairs.
Tongues were loosed, for the strain was over. All three ladies talked simultaneously, and when the first torrent was spent, they agreed that they had never seen a man so changed.
“Greatly improved,” said Mrs. Holders severely. “It would do him good to be refused every day.”
“Oh, Mrs. Holders, how unkind!” said Mrs. Oxney. “Just think how affable he’d have been if Miss Howard had accepted him.”
“Affable? Intolerable!” said Mrs. Holders. “But I doubt if the improvement’s real. Did you hear him when the nuts were spilt?”
“Yes, he seemed more natural then,” said Mrs. Bertram. “But what a difficult thing it’s been to avoid dangerous ground. I shall go to bed, for it’s tired me out.”
They were all tired out.
Florence was the first to come down next morning. Papers and letters had arrived, and by her place was the Morning Standard, which Colonel Chase also took in, a chatty sheet with many pictures and thrilling stories of how a Marchioness had swallowed a thimble, and a child had rescued a Newfoundland dog from a watery grave, and a golfer had taken a hole of prodigious length in one stroke which was an Eagle or a Dodo, or some picturesque fowl. Alice took in The Times, so also did Mrs. Oxney, though she never read it, and Mrs. Holders had no paper at all.
Just as Florence sat down she saw a telegraph boy ride past the window on a red bicycle. She wondered if the telegram was for her, but when a couple of minutes had passed without its being brought her, she came to the very shrewd conclusion that it must be for somebody else. With a pleased anticipation of attractive little tit-bits she opened her paper. And then she opened her eyes and her mouth as well in horrified amazement. Though the letters seemed to dance before her eyes, she read:
FIRE AT TUNBRIDGE WELLS.
“A fire happily unattended with loss of life broke out about midnight at a semi-detached villa called ‘The Croft’, in the Station Road at Tunbridge Wells. The house was tenanted by Mr. Algernon Gradge and his sister who with the two servants had a narrow escape. The flames mounted so quickly that they could not descend the only staircase but had to get through a trap door in the roof, and thus made their way into the adjoining house. ‘The Croft’ itself was entirely burned out with all its contents and a mere shell of the outer walls remains.”
For a moment, so wildly dissimilar was ‘The Croft’ of the paragraph from the ancestral home of the Howards, Florence thought how odd it was that there should be two Crofts at Tunbridge Wells tenanted by four Gradges, but instantly she swept the notion aside as puerile. Then all that was finest and most loyal in her nature rallied from the shock, and thanking God that she was the earliest breakfaster and alone in the dining-room, she scudded across to Colonel Chase’s table, plucked from it his copy of the Morning Standard, folded it up and sat on it. Hardly had she effected this noble larceny, when the door opened an
d he came in. Florence felt faint at the thought of what would have happened if he had been half a minute earlier, or if she had not pulled her wits together so quickly. That he should know that ‘The Croft’ was a semi-detached villa was so appalling a thought that she felt as if her hair had turned grey. Even as it was, she might not have averted the catastrophe, for there might be some mention of the fire in The Times. She opened Alice’s copy and skimmed the pages: to her unutterable relief there was no record of it.
“Mabel,” said Colonel Chase in an awful voice. “The papers have come in, haven’t they? Why isn’t my Morning Standard here?”
Mabel couldn’t say. It was not her job to distribute the papers.
“Then get me another copy,” said the Colonel.
Florence’s heart sank like lead in an unplumbed sea. It rose again like a balloon when Mabel came back to say that the paper boy had gone. All might yet be saved.
“Pshaw!” said Colonel Chase, whose gallantry seemed to have evaporated during the night. “Boiled egg and bacon, not cut in cubes, but in slices.”
“Beg your pardon, sir?” said Mabel.
“Thin,” said Colonel Chase.
Mabel hurried out and Alice hurried in. She held a telegram in her hand and spread it before Florence.
“The most terrible shock,” she began. “All my beautiful—”
“Hush,” said Florence in a low voice. “I know all about it. There was a paragraph in the Morning Standard. Station Road, semi-detached villa.”
She sank her voice lower yet.
“He doesn’t know,” she said. “I was down first. As soon as I saw it I stole his Morning Standard. A narrow squeak. I’m sitting on it.”
The immense relief of that took precedence of everything else in Alice’s mind.
“You angel!” she said.
“I know. It was smart of me. Now we can’t talk here, so finish your breakfast quickly and join me.”
By a marvellous piece of legerdemain Florence managed with much rustling to fold the stolen copy of the Morning Standard inside Alice’s Times, and having appointed her own bedroom as a rendezvous where they would be certainly safe from Colonel Chase, she left Alice to follow her. Alice had acknowledged the identity of the ancestral home with a semi-detached villa in the Station Road, and Florence felt rather puzzled.
Alice lingered rather than hurried over her breakfast, for a little quiet meditation would not be amiss before she talked things over with Florence. The more she considered her loss, the less shocking did it appear, for the family seat was an odious little house when shorn of the trailing clouds of glory with which she had decked it, and it was fully insured. She had been anxious also about the disclosure she would have to make to Florence before her projected pilgrimage to visit the shrine; it would have been an unpleasant job, but this convenient conflagration had removed the necessity of telling Florence, for now Florence knew. It was as if she had been dreading the extraction of a tooth, and now awoke (as from an anæsthetic) to find that the agony was over without her having perceived it: the family seat, which had been causing her pangs was gone. Exactly how Florence would take the loss was another question, but she had no very grave apprehensions about that, for Florence had herself suggested that she should tell the Colonel all sorts of lies about the little place, and after that these greater splendours which she knew to be false would eclipse such lesser glories as she might believe to be true. There was therefore not more than a shade of nervousness about her tripping step or her warblings as she went upstairs to Florence’s bedroom. The moment she opened the door her friend began to speak: she had been thinking things over too.
“The evening paper is the next danger,” she said, “but I daresay there’ll be nothing about it. Only a semi-detached villa, you see, and no lives lost, and even if there had been, it would only have been Gradges. Oh, darling, I am so glad that ‘The Croft’ wasn’t what I thought it.”
Alice did not much like that last remark: Florence was not as muddled up as she hoped. She pressed her hand to her forehead.
“I feel so confused,” she said. “It was only two days ago that you insisted on punishing Colonel Chase — that was what you called it — by making me tell all sorts of fibs about ‘The Croft’. But you knew they were fibs.”
“Oh, but what I meant was before that,” said Florence. “What makes me so glad was that it wasn’t a big place as — as I thought it, with rose-garden and a Park and peaches.”
“But, I don’t understand,” said Alice. “I never mentioned a Park or peaches till you insisted on my doing so, in order to encourage Colonel Chase and then make him writhe over what he had lost.” Florence did not understand either.
“But the lawn,” she said, “and your gardeners, and all those other beautiful things.”
“There was a lawn,” said Alice, “not large, I never said large, but a lawn.”
“And the greenhouses—” said Florence.
“You made me invent the greenhouses,” said Alice, “and the box hedge. That was two nights ago.”
“But the general sense,” said Florence. “Ask Mrs. Oxney what she thought ‘The Croft’ was like. And you said it would hurt you to go down there with me. A semi-detached villa wouldn’t hurt anybody.”
There was a dreadful truth in that which it was impossible to combat. But all the wise men in the world in consultation with all the wise women in the world could not have suggested a sounder manœuvre than that which Alice instantly executed. She burst into tears.
“You are very cruel,” she sobbed. “To please you I invented a lot of lies, and now you tell me I’m a liar. Whose fault is it that I am?”
“No, but before that, before that,” repeated Florence.
“Before or after makes little difference,” said Alice, continuing to sob, “if that’s what you think of me. If you feel like that, I can’t imagine why you took away Colonel Chase’s Morning Standard. I can’t think why you didn’t shew it him and laugh over it together. If you believe I’ve been telling you lies it’s your duty to expose me. Tell Mrs. Oxney, tell Mrs. Holders, and particularly tell Colonel Chase.”
Reason and affection battled together in Florence’s rather male mind. She knew she was right and she knew that Alice knew she was right. It was not just that she should have to give up her point. Meantime the friend of her heart, the brilliant, the accomplished Alice was sobbing.
“Darling, don’t suggest such absurd things,” she said. “Don’t you see that my whole object is to keep this secret? I should hate anybody to know what ‘The Croft’ was really like. But how — oh, what is there to cry about? — how could I have got the idea that it was an old country-house with lovely gardens except from you? Nobody else ever told me about it or — or I should have known what it really was. And I daresay it was a very nice little house.”
Alice took not the smallest notice of this admirable logic. She continued sobbing and sticking to her point. “And now just because you’ve got a wrong idea about it,” she wailed, “owing to what you yourself insisted I should tell Colonel Chase you say I’ve been deceiving you. First my house is burnt down and all my things, and on the top of that the only person in the world whom I thought trusted and loved me turns against me.”
This was heart-breaking.
“But I don’t turn against you,” said the agonised Florence. “And I do love you.”
Alice held out the copy of the Morning Standard in the hand that was not engaged with her handkerchief.
“Please take it to Colonel Chase,” she said. “I think it’s your duty.”
“It isn’t my duty, and if it was I shouldn’t do it,” cried Florence.
Alice made a master-stroke. Quite improvised.
“Then I shall,” she said. “I shall say my best friend tells me I have been deceiving everybody. I shall not dream of saying that you suggested it. I shall take the whole blame.”
“But you can’t,” said Florence bouncing to the door, and standing in front of it
. “Besides I am responsible for all the worst things. Telling anybody is the one thing out of the question. I couldn’t bear anybody knowing. You shan’t go! Oh, do sit down, darling, and let me think a minute.”
Alice sat down again and with tear-dimmed eyes, gazed out of the window over the golf field, while Florence’s heart made furious attacks on her brain. She thought over the larger splendours of ‘The Croft’, the shrubbery of flowering rarities, the sweet rose-garden, the fountain where naughty Alice had bathed, the greenhouses of Muscat grapes, the stables, the pheasant-shooting (no, not the pheasant-shooting; Alice had distinctly stated that there was no pheasant-shooting) and all these, it was true, had been inventions made at her instigation. Indoors there was the library and the cedar-wood parquet, and the gallery-room, and at the bank the Chelsea figures and the Queen Anne silver and all these too, had sprung into being at her behest. She began to wonder on what her earlier impressions (though still distinct) of ‘The Croft’ were based: she tried to recollect a single definite statement of Alice’s made previously, she began to grow confused and vague. Had all the splendours which she knew to be inventions stained her previous memories and rendered them more highly-coloured? She knew that it was not so, but now her heart had got a strangle-hold on her mind, and was forcing it to make admissions under torture, for there was Alice, whom she adored, blowing her nose and wiping her eyes and being miserable. Every now and then reason gasped out to her. ‘But Alice did lie about ‘The Croft.’ Ask Mrs. Oxney,’ but these rational gaspings were growing fainter as her pain at Alice’s distress grew stronger, and the need for her affection more insistent. Florence believed that Alice, too, was fond of her, and it was wretched for her to lose her house and her friend before lunch-time. And she herself could not face the loss of Alice.