by Guy McCrone
A faint puff of wind sent smoke across the open platform. A gardener was making a bonfire in a nearby garden. The air became blue and aromatic from burning eucalyptus leaves and pine-needles.
Now there was the rumble of a train in the distance. Phœbe turned, wishing Robin would come, and found herself face to face with a lady.
“I’m sorry, but I had to follow you up the platform! I think I know you! Do you know me?”
She was an elegant little woman, very well dressed in the blacks and greys that smart British women wore just then to show respect for their queen who was scarcely more than a week dead.
Phœbe was not particularly pleased to find herself thus addressed. Whoever this could be was, she felt, of little moment to her. But now memory was caught and she stood hesitating.
The other laughed gaily at her confusion. “Oh, Phœbe Moorhouse! Did you never hear tell of a farm at home that they caud the Greenheed?” Deliberately, in saying these words, the little lady allowed the accent of Ayrshire to blow across her speech.
Phœbe recognised her. “Lucy Rennie?” Now she remembered. There was a story attached to this woman. Phœbe’s father, old Mungo Moorhouse, had been the farmer of the Laigh Farm in Ayrshire. His neighbour, old Tom Rennie, had worked the neighbouring farm of Greenhead. There were two daughters, and this was one of them. Lucy had gone to London against the wishes of her father, it was said, to become a singer. Many years ago she had appeared in Glasgow and sung in Bel’s drawing-room.
“Yes! Lucy Rennie! That’s to say I was Lucy Rennie. Then I married a man who could never quite make up his mind whether he was a Belgian or what. So after he died two years ago, I decided to become British again. Is this your belonging?”
Robin was standing beside Phœbe now. The train, having passed beyond the station, was moving backwards to allow the Garavan carriages to be attached.
The little woman detected a look of understandable impatience in Phœbe’s face as she replied: “Yes, he is. He’s staying here. I’ve just brought him out, and I’m going home now, Mrs.—?”
“Mrs. Hamont.” Lucy Hamont held out her hand. “At least we caught a glimpse, didn’t we?” She laughed, adding: “I’m looking for some people coming through from Italy in the other part of the train. Goodbye!” and went off searching windows for her friends.
II
It was strange to feel alone. Strange, but not unpleasant. Robin had climbed a little way above the railway station.
His mother’s train had gone, tunnelling its way beneath the Sardinian town of old Mentone, which, standing brown-red and piled-up on its hill above the harbour, divides the closed bay of Garavan from the opener, more extended West Bay with its fashionable villas and gardens.
In his mind he followed her. During the next hours the train would thread its way through many such tunnels, circle many lovely bays, would stop at many scented stations, until at length, with its full load of the rich, the adventurous and the fashionable, it would leave the shining coastline, turn north, and rush, a real express train now, through the darkness of the winter night towards Paris.
He stood looking about him. Self-aware, probing his own impressions. Things seemed unreal. Unreal and strangely beautiful. It was impossible for him to imagine that anyone could belong to these olive-yards, these sun-drenched mountains, in the same way as he, Robin Hayburn, belonged to Glasgow. The wet streets, the boom of the ships on the foggy Clyde, the smoke-blue outlines of far-off hills were, all of them, part of himself.
Robin folded his arms and turned to lean against the wall built to contain this narrow, hillside street. There beneath was the bay of Garavan, and on one side the little harbour with a white yacht or two and the fishing-boats tied to rings on the long, projecting jetty, or dragged halfway up on the little beach of sand. Safe enough, thus, for a sea that has no tides. More than one was already preparing to move out of the harbour, hoisting those red lateen sails that belong to all Mediterranean waters. On the Quai Bonaparte, under the low plane-trees, young fishermen were tending their nets and teasing the passing girls. Behind them was the old town, a warren of Italianate houses, built one against the other, and rising up in streets that were partly stairways to the plaster cathedral of St. Michel and the chapel of the Conception. Behind him, the sloping hillside, dotted with little white and pink houses, rose to the high wall of rock that keeps Mentone from the north wind and the winter. Farther over, the Italian coastline and Bordighera.
Robin felt puzzled. Were his senses muted? Wrapped in cotton wool? Should not he feel this beauty more intensely? Should not he feel a more real regret, that his mother had just left him? “Your father needs me at home, Robin.”
For a moment Robin saw his father. “Sir Henry Hayburn,” he said, smiling to himself, though he could not have told why.
And presently indifference allowed the image of his father to drop from Robin’s mind.
He pulled a leaf from a geranium plant that had grown up from the little steep garden down there on the other side of the wall, crushed it between the palms of his hands and smelt it.
Yes. He supposed he was sorry to have his mother leave him. “Go straight back to the hotel, Robin. And don’t catch cold.”
And he had disobeyed her and come up here to look at the view, whenever the train was gone. Queer that he felt so detached. Would there be a reversal of this? Would he become unhappy, tense, desperately lonely?
He smiled mistily, and again looked about him. He didn’t know. But he had better take his mother’s advice and get back.
For another hour, perhaps, this unreal town would lie warm in the winter sunshine. But thereafter the sun would begin to dip towards the cliffs of the Tête de Chien above Monte Carlo, the coastline and the mountains would be flooded in operetta pinks and ambers; the sea, bright blue and silver now, would slowly change, through grey, through rose, through dove colour, through dying reds and purples, to a mere, murmuring blackness, reflecting the stars and the diamond lights, stringing the bays of the French and Italian Rivieras.
III
It was dinner-time on the same evening. Mrs. Hamont stood at the door of the hotel dining-room waiting to be escorted to a table. The head waiter saw her, hurried forward and bowed.
“Here I am again,” she said in excellent French, giving her hand unconventionally, as though to an old friend. Handshakes, she had found, and other judicious unbendings, could help.
“So Madame has just come?” The smiling waiter was asking the obvious as he led the rustling little lady across the crackling parquet to her place.
“Yes. I was in Cannes. But Cannes has become so dull with the Queen’s death. I thought I would come here to Mentone, where it’s always quiet anyway.”
The waiter understood utterly. Bowing once more, he conveyed to her the depth of his understanding. He was indeed sorry, he said, for the British people that they had lost their much-loved queen.
Mrs. Hamont raised her eyebrows, sighed, sat down, threw her furs from her shoulders, arranged the bunch of real, locally-grown violets on her corsage and looked at the menu.
The waiter, perfectly disguising his impatience to be gone and attend to others, strongly advised this and that. But Mrs. Hamont was a woman who knew her own mind. She saw what she wanted and, having requested that, allowed him to escape.
Now she could sit back and look about her. The room was familiar from one or two earlier visits. It was the typical dining-room of a good Riviera hotel, a hotel that was comfortable without foolish luxury. A polished parquet floor. Large windows of plate glass to catch the winter sunshine. Crystal chandeliers. Gilded cane chairs. A couple of palms in tubs. And too much steam heating for the taste of most Britons.
Waiters were hurrying here and there with the inevitable tureens of steaming bouillon. People were coming in. Those who, like herself, intended to go to the entertainment in the Casino tonight wore evening clothes. Others, some of them invalids, had taken little trouble with their dress.
N
ow, for a moment, Mrs. Hamont’s attention was taken by the wine waiter, who came to discuss her half-bottle of wine. When she was free to look about her once more, she found that the young man she had seen on the platform this afternoon had seated himself at the table next to her own.
He was handsome, this boy. Handsome, but strangely dark-eyed to be the son of Phœbe Moorhouse.
Here, among the elderly and delicate, Lucy Hamont was pleased to find herself within talking distance of anyone so attractive. “We met on the platform, didn’t we?”
“Yes.” His flushed smile of recognition was quick. It lit his face almost too brightly.
“Your mother said you were staying. Been ill?”
“Yes. Bad chest, I am afraid.”
He did not need to tell her. “You’ve come to the right place.” She seemed charmingly anxious to reassure him. “This place is wonderful for that sort of thing. Look. We’d better get our names right. My name is Mrs. Lucy Hamont, what’s yours?”
“Hayburn. Robin Hayburn.”
“How do you do, Robin?” She stretched across a hand. Robin stood up quickly to take it. “You see, I’m calling you Robin at once, because I knew your mother and all your mother’s family when I was a girl. We lived in the next farm in Ayrshire.” Then, answering a look of bewilderment in the boy’s face: “I left home very early. I went to London. Turned into something quite different from a farmer’s daughter, if you know what I mean.” Of course he knew what she meant. She could see he was not slow. “So your mother married a Mr. Hayburn, was it? And had you, Robin?” she went on, after a pause for plate-changing.
“My father’s name is Sir Henry Hayburn.” Robin, still unused to Henry’s honour, smiled to avoid seeming pompous.
“Oh! I didn’t know. I’m so out of touch with Scotland now. Then I should have called your mother Lady Hayburn. But, dear me, what does it matter? She’s only Phœbe Moorhouse to me!”
Robin liked this woman. He liked her easy brightness, her way of taking him on an adult level. It flattered his young manhood.
“How do you spend your evenings?” she asked presently. “Do you go to the Casino?”
“This is my first evening alone. Mother has been with me until now. I’ve brought books.”
“Study?”
“I suppose so.”
“You don’t happen to write, do you?” Then in a moment she laughed. But without mockery. His face was flooded with colour. “I see you do! Well, you’re in the right town for it! So many of them came here, you know. Our own Robert Louis Stevenson. Aubrey Beardsley is lying up in the cemetery above the town. And of course endless Frenchmen. Have you published anything?”
“Oh, good heavens, no! Well, in a newspaper only.”
“What? Articles?”
“No. A short poem.”
Now she felt a real sympathy for him. Had not she, too, been an artist? This was a nice boy; a boy she could present to her acquaintance. And as the son of her old friend, Lady Hayburn.
“You must show me your poetry sometime, Robin,” she said later, finishing her meal and preparing to go. “You see, I was—still am, a little—a singer. I know what it is to be—what shall I say?—on that side of the fence. Will you?”
Robin felt shy, but flattered. “If I ever have anything that I think—”
“Oh! Here’s an American friend of mine! Denise St. Roch!” Lucy Hamont half rose, holding out her hand to a young woman who had come into the dining-room and, having heard her name spoken, was coming to greet her.
“Why, Mrs. Hamont! You here! Isn’t that wonderful? I’ve just arrived this minute!”
The boy sitting by himself at the next table had never before seen anyone like the newcomer. He watched her with gaping admiration, as she stood talking with his neighbour. The effect she made upon his quick sensibility was immediate.
Miss St. Roch was unconventionally dressed in what appeared to be one long garment of grey stuff, full, girdled and falling to the ground, with a triangular hood hanging from the shoulders. It might have been a monk’s robe or an Arab’s burnous. Her head, proudly held, was covered with close-cut blonde curls, and her features had a classic straightness, giving her the look of a Greek boy. Her skin was warm, almost tawny, suggesting the Latin woman who happens, by exception, to be fair. She made Robin think of a young saint in a church window; except that young saints did not also have feminine elegance.
“Are you staying here?” Mrs. Hamont was asking.
“Only until I find somewhere. I’ve got a book to write. A man I met in Paris told me there were studios where I could work up in the old town. Old houses converted, I suppose. Anyway, somewhere I can get peace.” Her voice was slow, American and to Robin entirely charming; although he did not know it belonged to the Deep South. “Well, I suppose I must eat something.” She was turning away.
But Lucy Hamont detained her. “Oh, Denise. This young man is the son of Lady Hayburn, a very old friend of mine. Mr. Robin Hayburn—Miss St. Roch.”
The American now took notice of Robin for the first time. As she held out her hand, it seemed to him that a shadow passed across her face and was gone.
“Mr. Hayburn comes from Scotland, like myself,” Mrs. Hamont said.
“Oh.” It was almost, Robin could not think why, as though this information reassured her. “It’s nice to meet you, Mr. Hayburn.”
“Miss St. Roch writes, Robin. You had better get to know her.”
“Please, Mrs. Hamont! I’ve come down here to work, not to make friends. Look, he’s waiting for me.” She indicated a waiter who stood signing to her and, turning without ceremony, she went.
As she crossed to her allotted place, many eyes turned to follow the progress of this young woman with her strange elegance and her vivid looks.
IV
Whether Lucy Hamont’s life had been a success or a failure, depended entirely on how you liked to look at it.
If taking flight without sanction from her father’s farm—if spending several years of poverty and study and thereafter enjoying a good working career in music with all its anxieties and interests—if making a late marriage with a wealthy and elderly cosmopolitan banker, and soon thereafter experiencing a prosperous, but rather lonely widowhood lived mostly in continental pleasure resorts, spells success, then Lucy Hamont had been successful.
If cutting herself off from her own people and closing the door to all prospects of becoming a settled and diligent Ayrshire farmer’s wife, as her only sister had done—if becoming a rather rootless citizen of the world, comfort-loving and possessing few illusions, spells failure, then Lucy Hamont had failed.
She had few friends, although she had many acquaintances. Her first overbold escape to London had perhaps left its marks upon her spirit. And even now, at the age of fifty-three, rich, and with the struggle comfortably behind her, Lucy was still almost too fit to look after herself, almost too well able to appear what she chose to appear, almost too quick to discover motives in others.
She was not a passionate woman, and thus her life had not been a series of foolish, time-wasting mistakes. She was well aware of this, and was a little proud of it; failing to see that her art, which for so many years she had served faithfully and with diligence, might have been finer if she had possessed more fire and sensibility to give it.
This morning she was thinking of many things as she sat on her sunny balcony, a rug about her knees, taking coffee. The meeting with Phœbe Moorhouse—Lady Hayburn, she must now remember—and that attractive boy, had been stirring up all kinds of memories and self-examinations. No. She had not, on the whole, been plagued by strong feelings. She had liked her elderly husband well enough and respected him. Yet, strangely, it had been a Moorhouse, an uncle of that boy she supposed, who had come nearest to being—who most certainly could have been the love of her life.
This morning the strong February sunshine, streaming down on white villas and high protecting cliffs, was beating back the alpine winter from this hothouse
made by nature. Date-palms that had no right to be in Europe, stood basking just beyond her balcony in the morning stillness. A gardener in a green apron was watering pots of cactus and prickly pear set along the wall of the front garden.
Yes. She must ask Robin about his Uncle David Moorhouse. It had happened on one of the few visits she had paid to Scotland after it had ceased to be her home. But it had all come to nothing. David had already engaged himself to marry money and she, Lucy, had been determined not to force an elopement. She was not, after all, without a conscience. Besides it had been a test of David’s strength. And David had failed. He had played for safety. He was a Moorhouse.
She bent forward, put her elbows on the little table, held her cup in both hands and stared before her. The strong light made her frown, but there was, too, perhaps, another reason. Moorhouses. She ought never to have let herself be hurt by David Moorhouse. To Lucy Hamont the artist they were everything that was smug, self-important, provincial and philistine. Indeed, now that she thought of it, why on earth had she bothered to speak to Phœbe Moorhouse yesterday?
The sunshine was making a rim of diamonds on the absurdly blue sea. Over there, the long breakwater with its little beacon tower at the end stood back against the sun. A white steam yacht had just weighed anchor and, turning out of the harbour, was making in the direction of Monte Carlo. Sailors in white duck were polishing the deck brasses. Someone’s cook, coming from the market, was walking along the promenade there beyond the garden, borne down by a great basket containing early vegetables, yellow mimosa and a live hen.
Lucy set down her coffee-cup and smiled to herself. Why should she bother with these old memories? What had that more than twenty-year-old story to do with her now?
Chapter Six
ROBIN came downstairs that morning in high feather. He did not quite know why. There was no particular reason for it except that his age was twenty, that, unaccountably, he was feeling better than he had done for many weeks, that he had made two charming friends at dinner last night, and that here, in this beautiful place, he was free, with no one to say him nay, whatever he might choose to do.
