by Guy McCrone
“I don’t know yet. I must talk it over with Denise.”
“My dear Robkin! How do you even know she’s in love with you?”
“If there’s one thing I do know, Uncle Stephen, I think I know that!”
“Why?”
Robin did not answer. He merely bent, his dark hair falling forward, looking down once more into the sea.
“Robkin, I want to help you. And I don’t see how I can without knowing how things stand. Are you in the middle of—well—an affair?”
“In the middle?”
“Robkin, has it happened?”
“Yes. Last night.”
“I see.” Stephen’s eyes looked away from Robin this way and that. They saw the sea moving in the sunshine. They saw, in the distance, a four-horse brake going slowly up the hill towards the frontier customs post. They looked up to the grey, broken edges of the surrounding mountains. Presently they came back to earth. “But you’ve discussed nothing so far?”
“No. But I did a lot of thinking on my own during the night. I don’t see why I can’t just marry Denise, and stay on here without any fuss.”
“Marry!”
“Yes. After that letter, I’m certain to get my work sold.”
“Certain?”
“Well? Why not? So, you see, I—You’re not angry, are you, Uncle Stephen? You see, if two people really love each other—”
Stephen Hayburn was struggling to his feet. “No, Robkin. I’m not angry. But you must give me time to think.”
“Strict confidence, Uncle Stephen?”
“What do you take me for? We’ll talk about this later.”
He followed Robin silently back along the wall. Married? Had the boy’s wits left him?
III
As Lucy crossed the gardens in front of the Casino, she became aware of Stephen Hayburn sitting by himself on a park seat. It would have been easy to pass him by, for he was leaning forward, idly tracing circles with his stick in the freshly sanded walk, deep, it appeared, in thought.
Silently she stood before him for a time, waiting, amused, to see how long it would be until he noticed her. Something must indeed have taken hold of him, for he continued to be quite unconscious of her, scraping with his stick and staring at the ground in front of him.
Now, as she stood over him, Lucy felt a subtle change in her feelings towards Stephen. She had always liked him, recognised in him a bird of her own feather. But she had taken it for granted that, as a friend of David Moorhouse, he must be—if not rich—at least settled and prosperous. Now she knew that Stephen, for all his airs, was nothing of the kind. And this knowledge did nothing to decrease her liking for him; rather the reverse. Although, unreasonably, she still disliked David’s indelicacy at having told her.
But she could not yet define this different feeling for Stephen. A new right to intimacy? A quickening of emotion? A rich woman’s urge to befriend a poor man who attracts her? But Lucy was too much of a bohemian, too well aware of life’s chances to feel patronising. The spin of the wheel had favoured this man less than herself; that was all.
At last, tired of waiting, she allowed the shadow of her parasol to fall across his scribblings in the sand.
“Mrs. Hamont!” He stood up, taking off his hat.
Lucy laughed. “Shall I tell you how long I’ve been standing here?”
He looked bewildered. “Standing here? Why?”
“You’ve been thinking about something very hard. Are we walking or sitting?”
They began to move slowly down the gardens in the direction of the sea, Lucy catching up her tussore skirts from the sanded walk, her head and shoulders glowing in the shadow cast by her red parasol; Stephen a model of immaculate middle-age.
“Do you ever wish,” he began presently, “that you knew absolutely nothing about anybody, and never had to mix in other people’s business?”
Again Lucy laughed. “Often! And what is more, I usually manage to do it. I learned the art when I was earning my living in music!” But now, remembering Stephen’s preoccupation of a moment ago, she regretted this bright reply. Did he want to tell her something? Had she hindered some confidence? “You were looking worried as I came into the gardens,” she said earnestly. “Nothing serious, I hope?”
“I don’t know what to think. Or rather I do know what to think, but I don’t know how to act. Or if I ought to act at all!”
“Robin?”
As he said nothing more, she judged it best to allow him to continue beside her in silence. But, indeed, she would have been less than a woman had she not been filled with curiosity. At the lower end of the gardens she turned to him. “Would you think it very—what shall I say?—forward of me if I invited you to lunch, Mr. Hayburn? We could drive along the shore to Cap Martin. We still have time. It’s only twelve.”
For an instant he looked doubtful, then he reset his eye-glass. “I say! That’s awfully kind!”
Yesterday she might not have given this invitation; but now, having given it, she was glad he looked so pleased.
And thus, presently, they were making a leisurely progress round the west bay, sitting side by side on the linen-covered seats of an old fiacre. Up in front the driver drowsily flicked his whip at the flies that hung above the straw hats on the heads of the horses. The sun shone. The sea sparkled. And Lucy was content to leave it at that. Stephen, she hoped, would presently feed her curiosity.
The dining-room of the Cap Martin Hotel was filled with lunch-time brilliance. Foreign royalty, it was known, was having its august meal in a private suite upstairs. Aware of this hidden consequence, hangers-on and those who hoped to hang thronged the great room where Lucy and Stephen found themselves. Flowers. Pails of ice. Cohorts of waiters. Baskets of fruit. Perfumes. Furs. Jewels. Polyglot chatter. It was better here, Stephen told himself, than drawing squares and triangles on his blotting-paper in his little room in Dermott Ships.
At a table nearby, Lucy recognised a Parisian actress, pointing her out to Stephen. He thought the actress ugly. But ether her wit or her influence must be prodigious. For her table hung upon her talk. They caught snatches of her broken English through gusts of laughter. Although she had the agelessness of the painted and bedizened, her guests were young, lively, and, as Lucy guessed, American. Among them was the son of a railway Crœsus come to study painting in France. She had met this boy in Paris. As she watched, the woman beside him raised her hand in greeting. “Good gracious! There’s Denise! I’ve only just seen her!”
And Denise it was. Her colour, her shining head, her flashing teeth and her warm skin found a perfect foil in the dye and artifice of her hostess. Denise was listening now, smiling her well-known smile and turning her handsome eyes upon those about her. Happy, if looks meant anything, happy in her own world.
They turned back to their table.
“What a lovely creature Denise St. Roch is!” Lucy could not help exclaiming.
“Oh, yes.”
“You said that doubtfully.”
“No.”
“Well, then?”
“Can you see her marrying my nephew, Robin?”
“See what, Mr. Hayburn?”
IV
Lucy Hamont lay long awake that night.
The sight of Denise St. Roch in Cap Martin had opened up the way to an earnest talk with Stephen about his nephew. Determinedly, she had created the right climate of intimacy, and he had told her of Robin’s confession this morning.
It was strange, Lucy reflected, as she lay wide-eyed in her darkened bedroom, watching the breeze gently blowing the net curtains back and forth before her window, watching the pattern made by the rays of a street lamp on her ceiling—strange that she had for so long suspected something between Robin and Denise; or told herself she suspected it. Yet now that she was sure, the certainty somehow shocked her.
Lucy was not a child. Here in France, as indeed everywhere, people fell into and out of such intimacies, and appeared, if they knew the rules, to emerge none the
worse.
“The trouble is,” she had said, “Robin’s background is so—what shall I say?—uncontinental.”
Stephen had pondered for a moment. “I know what you mean,” he had said. “Robin’s, indeed our own Scotch background, can be so innocent.”
“He’s probably head over heels in love with her.”
“Of course! It’s not only ‘honour’ that makes him talk about marriage.”
“It’s very sweet, don’t you think?”
“I’m not sure if ‘sweet’ is the word. What do you think Miss St. Roch will do?”
Lucy had merely shrugged.
A late party was returning; probably from Monte Carlo. She heard the hooves of the horses, the noise of wheels, laughter, talk, the banging of a carriage door, then the sounds of the cab receding. Now the night wind made a rustling sound outside in the palm-trees.
And then, when they had come back, David had told them of a letter just received from Lady Hayburn, hoping, since David and Stephen would be leaving for home soon, that the doctor under whose care Robin was would allow them to bring the boy, too.
Propping herself high on her pillows, Lucy put her hands behind her head and, abandoning every attempt to sleep, stared into the shadows of her room.
Presently then—in a week or two, perhaps—they would all of them be gone from here. Denise wherever and whenever the mood suggested. David and Stephen back to Scotland. Robin would most likely have gone with them, or perhaps—who knew?—with Denise.
And herself? It was too early for Homburg or Aix-les-Bains. To Paris or London. The sister of her dead husband lived in Brussels, but she was an old woman, a grandmother, and the cherished matriarch of a large family of solid, self-important Flemings; a family for whom she, Lucy, scarcely existed. But for whom, indeed, did she exist? Where did she belong? Lucy sighed. She had described herself to David Moorhouse as a Riviera hack. It was painfully near to the truth.
Now, as she lay thinking, she saw the rolling green fields of Ayrshire, the white farmsteads with their high trees, the brown-and-white cows, their udders heavy, coming in for the summer’s evening milking. The sturdy figure of her sister as she drove them. The wheeling, barking collies. That, Lucy supposed, was her real background. But she had cut herself off from it years ago. And now Greenhead Farm had a new tenant, her father was dead, and her sister’s children must almost be grown men and women. What would she, their aunt, have for these young country people? Or they for her?
And yet—? Was she going to be a lonely old woman? A demanding harridan with a bullied paid companion? There were plenty of them to serve as warnings here on the Riviera.
Lucy lay considering. Her thoughts turned to David Moorhouse, If, after all, she had married David? Well, she hadn’t. But his friend? The man who was with her today?
She pulled up her coverlet, rearranged her pillow, and, not for the first time, gave herself up to the assessment of Stephen Hayburn. David had told her this morning of Stephen’s lack of money. But she had money enough for two, she imagined. Stephen was amusing, genial, kindly; he dressed with a pleasant eccentricity, hated rough edges, and his judgments were easy and uncensorious like her own. In his heart Stephen, too, must be lonely.
She was beginning to see the way before her. Almost at once, it seemed, she would have to come to a decision. But first she must quickly and finally search her own feelings.
Lucy found this search so engrossing, that it was well into the early morning before sleep could drag her from it.
Chapter Sixteen
I
IT was not often that Stephen Hayburn found himself at a loss. For so long it had pleased him to make a picture of cheerful poise before the world, that practice had made perfect, or very nearly so. Against the troubles of his not particularly difficult existence, Stephen had found this adequate defence.
But in the days that followed his visit with Lucy Hamont to Cap Martin, Stephen felt disturbed and uncertain. Robin’s confession bothered him. If Robin’s doings had been told him by someone else, it is probable that Stephen would merely have shrugged his shoulders, told himself it was none of his business and let things be. But the boy himself had told him; speaking, too, of marriage and of earning his own living; hopes which, Stephen knew, were as likely to be realised as that his nephew should, one day, be voted president of the French Republic.
Now Robin seemed determined to say nothing more meantime. Stephen, therefore, after much thought, decided not to seek him out; decided to force neither talk nor advice upon him until he felt sure he had the right advice to give. Heaven knew, he had been no plaster saint himself. But he was man enough to be troubled by Robin’s predicament, by Robin’s health, by Robin’s foolishness.
There was yet another more personal reason for Stephen’s uneasiness. He was becoming aware that he was drifting into closer intimacy with Lucy Hamont. In these days he seemed to be forever finding himself alone in her company. He did not quite know how this came about. There was, of course, Robin to talk about; and Lucy was, so far, the only person he could talk to. But however it happened, they were always meeting at odd moments in the hotel, or running into each other in the little town.
Stephen did not dislike this closer intimacy. His dispeace came from liking it too much. Mrs. Hamont’s company was, he found, very agreeable. But he felt that his hands were tied. Had he been rich, he now told himself, he would have pushed the friendship farther; to the point, indeed, of a proposal of marriage. But it was one thing to cultivate a façade of opulent bachelorhood, and another to deceive a wealthy widow into marrying you as a result of that deception. Old Robert Hayburn’s elder son was not, when all was said, an unscrupulous rascal.
It seemed to him at times as though Mrs. Hamont were almost inviting a declaration. And this distressed him. He liked her too much, appreciated her qualities, valued her sympathy for himself too much to be indifferent to any embarrassment or pain he might cause her.
One evening after dinner Stephen found himself sitting alone, thinking of these problems and cupping in his hands a second globe of fine brandy. He had had the first with David before David had disappeared to write a letter.
Presently, he saw Mrs. Hamont, who had dined late, come from the dining-room. His eye took in her charming and expensive aspect, her plump elegance, and his eye approved.
She saw he was alone, and came towards him. He stood up.
“No. Don’t disturb yourself.” He was placing a chair for her. “No. I mustn’t interrupt. David will be coming back.”
“Not for a long time. He’s gone to write a letter to his wife. He writes every day, you know.”
He had expected Lucy to comment frivolously on David’s sense of duty. But she merely said: “Then perhaps you will allow me to have coffee with you.”
“Of course.”
Lucy sat down and signed to the waiter. “Where’s Robin?” she asked presently.
“I don’t know. I wish I knew what to do about him, Mrs. Hamont.”
He had hoped by these words to reopen, yet again, this difficult topic. But as he turned to her, he found her looking at him, earnest and abstracted. At once her gaze left him and her eyes took to following a party that was new to her. “Now, wouldn’t you say these people were South Americans?” she asked. “Argentines, perhaps? Look at these diamonds! They probably have miles and miles of pampas or whatever you have there, with thousands and thousands of cattle ranging about on it!” She turned back to him, smiling. She was not disposed, it appeared, to discuss Robin tonight.
Coffee was set before her. “You know,” she went on, as she poured it out for herself, “I think it’s nice of David to write to his wife every day. Does she write every day to him?”
“I think so.”
“They must be devoted.”
“I think so.”
“Think? Isn’t that proof enough?”
“Oh yes. I daresay.” Why was she talking like this? Why did she seem determined to remain in earnest?<
br />
“I was fond of my husband, but I didn’t write to him every day,” Lucy said.
“You’ve never told me about your husband.”
“I shall some day. He was a fine man in his way. A clever banker, people said.” She stopped for a moment, then continued: “We were married too late, and for too short a time. If he had left me with children, then I should have them now to belong to; have them to make life worth going on with.”
Stephen found nothing to say to this. He had never heard her speak thus before. He could only look at her sympathetically, dangle his glass on its ribbon and wait.
“Don’t you ever feel terribly alone?”
“Wish I were married?” The words sounded crude as he said them.
She coloured. “Well, yes. That’s what I do mean, I suppose.” She looked away from him, as he sat deciding what next to say.
“I’ve never been able to marry a woman of my own kind,” he said at length. “I was brought up rich, and then, when I was a young man, all the family money went. I was too stupid or too lazy to make it again for myself. David keeps me going, if you want to know the truth. I’m surprised that David, being David, hasn’t told you. Well, now you know what kind of a person I am!” That had been an effort! What had forced him to this honesty?
Mrs. Hamont looked embarrassed. But at the same time she seemed oddly pleased. “It was nice of you to tell me.” Her voice was low.
He tried to answer lightly. “I may not be worth much. But to you, at least, I won’t be an impostor.”
“No. You’re not an impostor.”
Lucy swallowed down her coffee and got up, held out her hand, and said: “Good-night.” Now she was gone, leaving him quite bewildered.
Why had she left him thus abruptly, and with what looked like emotion? He sat down again, drew out one of the cigars with which David’s hospitality kept him supplied, lit it and gave himself up to a series of long, meditative puffs.
II
