Yours to Command

by Mary Burchell

  By the time Saturday came she felt so depressed that she almost wished she had not undertaken the expedition to town, for she hardly saw how she could enjoy herself in such a mood. But fortunately it was a lovely, bright January morning when she set out, and the journey was beautiful enough to raise her spirits. So that, by the time she arrived at Paddington, her thoughts were not so completely dominated by her tragedy that she was not able to anticipate, with some pleasurable curiosity, the experience of seeing Lucas Manning on the stage.

  She decided to go to the theatre and make sure of her ticket before she had lunch. And so she went along to the Olympic and, having passed through its impressive, pillared entrance, found herself in the luxurious, rather hushed elegance of a heavily carpeted foyer. No one else was there, perhaps because a notice outside said, “All Seats Sold for Today’s Performances.”

  Sydney approached the box office and, on enquiry, was presented with an envelope marked “Miss Dayne—One Stall.” Having thanked the entirely indifferent box office official, she then prepared to withdraw, but paused on her way out to look at some photographs of the play displayed near the main entrance.

  Lucas Manning was really very attractive, she thought, studying the photographs. Not so tall and immediately arresting as Hugh, perhaps, but provocative and with a curious mixture of gaiety and something like melancholy about him. She saw suddenly that there was a certain likeness to Edward in that thin, dark, clever face; though none at all to the angelic and uncomplicated Alistair.

  She turned to go at last and, as she did so, a door marked “Private” on the other side of the foyer opened and Lucas Manning himself came out. He spoke over his shoulder to someone inside the room, then the door swung to and he came across the thick carpet toward Sydney.

  He was almost up to her before he realised who she was. But then he smiled in obvious recognition. She thought pleased recognition.

  “Why, hello,” he said. “Is this the day you chose for your visit?”

  “Yes.” She smiled at him a little shyly. “I’ve just been collecting my ticket.”

  “Two tickets, I hope?” Evidently he had not seen the subsequent correspondence.

  “No. I don’t know many people in London, so there was no one I could ask.”

  “Then you’re going alone?”

  “Yes.”

  “I see. Then, in that case,” he glanced at his watch and spoke with the air of a man who was used to making the decisions, “You had better come out and have lunch with me. You can tell me the latest news about my nephews. And even,” that gay, provocative smile suddenly lit up his face amazingly, “something of how the new Head of Fernhurst took the pleasurable shock which your presence must have caused him.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  SYDNEY blushed with gratification and pleasure at the unexpected invitation. But almost immediately the realisation came to her that, if Lucas Manning chose to show such interest in her affairs there was no escape from telling him the mortifying truth about Hugh’s engagement to Marcia.

  While all this passed rapidly through her mind, he was apparently, as rapidly reviewing the question of lunch. For, taking her acceptance obviously as a foregone conclusion, he said, “Do you mind if it’s somewhere near? I ought to be back here in an hour and a quarter. I know where we can go, if you like Italian food.” Without knowing whether she did or not, Sydney assured him hastily that she did, adding, “Thank you very much for asking me. It really isn’t necessary, you know, if you—”

  “Few pleasant things are absolutely necessary in themselves,” he replied negligently. “That fact that they are pleasant is sufficient reason for doing them. Shall we go?”

  During the few minutes’ walk to the restaurant he had chosen, Sydney found her earlier depression retreating to the background of her mind. For it was extraordinarily difficult to go on feeling forlorn and rejected when one was actually going out to lunch with one of the most distinguished figures on the London stage.

  True, at first he talked to her very much as the matron at his nephews’ school, and asked stock questions about Edward and Alistair. But presently his mood changed. He gave Sydney that extraordinarily attractive, half-mocking smile and asked, “Well, how did the new Head react to your re-appearance in his life?” Sydney bit her lip.

  “Are you really interested to know?” she enquired.

  “But of course! No man of the theatre could be indifferent to such a perfect first-act ending,” he declared.

  She laughed then, half amused, half distressed.

  “Well,” she told him, “I suppose it was an even more piquant first-act ending than I had foreseen. He arrived with his fiancée.”

  “With his—? Hell, I’m sorry!” With one of those almost lightning changes of mood, he became completely serious. “I never thought of anything tragic like that, or I wouldn’t have been so light-hearted and outrageously curious.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” she assured him. And, somehow, it really did not. “If you want to know—it’s a relief to talk about it. If it isn’t boring or embarrassing—”

  “It is neither,” he assured her.

  “It seems so strange to be unburdening myself of my little affairs to a famous man like yourself,” she said diffidently.

  “But why? A measure of fame doesn’t put one out of touch with one’s fellows, unless one is a very small person indeed. I have my faults, and a certain amount of vanity is one of them,” Lucas Manning admitted, “but I hope I am not so foolish as to suppose that I am basically very different from anyone else.”

  “I suppose,” Sydney said earnestly, “it’s that touch of understanding humanity that makes, you a great actor.”

  He gave her that cynical, not unkindly glance.

  “I am not a great actor, my dear,” he said drily. “I am an extremely accomplished one, which is a different thing. And, incidentally, I am a good business man who knows what the public wants. But that is neither here nor there. Go on about your own affairs. What is this other girl, the fiancée, like?”

  “She’s charming,” Sydney said, trying to be objective. “She’s elegant, and she’ll make a good Headmaster’s wife.”

  “You discovered all that on first acquaintance?” he inquired, amused and a trifle admiring.

  “Oh, no. I already knew her. It was at her home that I first met Hugh.”

  “Then he has known her some considerable while? Longer than he has known you?”

  She nodded.

  “Not that it’s of immense importance,” he said, half to himself. “Tell me, if I’m not asking too much, was the final quarrel between you on a really vital matter?”

  “It was nothing very novel,” she admitted rather sadly. “Just the struggle between the rival claims of a family who needed me and his own claims.” And then, though she hardly knew how, she found herself telling him the whole sorry story.

  He listened with attention, not interrupting once. Only at the end he glanced at her curiously and said, “And weren’t you bitter about it at all?”

  “Bitter?” She considered the word surprisedly. “No, I don’t think so. Hateful things happen to everyone at some time or another, and one just has to make the best of it and go on. But I’m not going to pretend,” she conceded, “that I like the present situation.”

  “And what about him? How has he taken the new development?”

  “He took the first shock well,” Sydney said slowly, “But then he would. He is a fine, courageous person. In fact”—she added quickly—“I don’t want you to think he behaved badly at any time. Looking back, I think he was as reasonable and patient as most men would have been in the circumstances. It just was something which was bound to result in a break.”

  She looked at him to see if he accepted that, and a little amusedly, he said, “We will take the beauty of his disposition as read. After the first shock, what happened?”

  She bit her lip again, recalling the scene in the garden a trifle too vividly.


  “I saw him once more, alone, that very first evening. I was returning from visiting Alistair in the Prep, and he was walking back through the grounds after having seen Marcia to the car. We—spoke about the past. Not intimately, you know, but as people do when they meet unexpectedly after a long break. It was news to him that my father had married again. I think—I think it was a shock.”

  “You mean—the realisation that you were free now, while he was not?”

  She hesitated, for even to herself she had not admitted as much. “Perhaps,” she said slowly, “there were some—momentary regrets. I don’t know. You see, he had become engaged to Marcia only a week before he came to Fernhurst.”

  “A week?” His eyebrows shot up and it was plain that, in a less personal degree, he felt the same shock as Sydney at this news. “Then the whole arrangement is quite a new one; and could be related to his sudden appointment and the fact that it is desirable for the Headmaster of a public school to be a married man?”

  “It could be,” Sydney agreed. “But,” she added justly, “it could equally have nothing whatever to do with that.”

  “That’s anybody’s guess. Is she likeable, this other girl?”

  Sydney smiled wryly.

  “I’m not the best person to ask, for I find it hard to like her much at the moment. She—Oh, by the way,” suddenly Sydney recalled what young Mr. Corbin had said, “you probably know her at least by sight. She lives next door to you.”

  “Impossible. Next door to me lives an arch and inquisitive widow of uncertain age,” declared Lucas Manning. “Oh, but perhaps she lives on the other side. They are new people there, and I haven’t seen much of them. A middle-aged lady with an interesting nose goes in and out sometimes.”

  “That would be Mrs. Downing, Marcia’s mother, I suppose,” said Sydney.

  Then she decided the time had come to change the subject. “I do love your nephews,” she said. “They’re dear children and I don’t wonder you feel responsible for them. Mrs. Dingley told me of the tragedy of their parents. They were both killed in an air crash, weren’t they?”

  There was a second’s silence, and she rather wanted to kick herself for mentioning a subject which was perhaps still too painful to discuss.

  Then he said calmly, “Not both of them. Only my brother was killed.”

  “But I understood—I’m so sorry—was their mother very badly injured or something?”

  “No. Their mother was not there,” he said drily. “She had not been anywhere where my brother was for some years. They were divorced and he had the custody of the children.”

  “Oh—” The recollection of Edward’s grin and Alistair’s cherubic plumpness caught at her heart. “I know one can’t judge without knowledge of the facts, but—it must be terrible to have to part with one’s children.”

  “She didn’t think so.” He spoke rather carefully. “Anne hadn’t much time for children—her own or anyone else’s. She knew what she wanted and”—his voice took on a note of reminiscent dryness—”she had an extraordinary facility for riding over other people to her goal.”

  Sydney glanced at him with suddenly sharpened interest.

  “You sound as though you knew her very well too.”

  “I did,” he agreed, still in the same dry tone. “If, when I first met her, I had been half as famous and influential as I am now, she would have chosen me. As it was, my brother at that time was the better catch. I suppose,” he said without enthusiasm, “I had a lucky escape.”

  Though you would really almost rather have been caught, thought Sydney, with a flash of insight.

  He caught her eye just then and, as though he had read her thoughts, he said with that smile in which there was a hint of self-mockery, “A bog looks none the less green and lovely because one knows it is a bog.” And then, “We seem to have told each other a remarkable amount about ourselves in the space of an hour.”

  She glanced at her watch in surprise.

  “You will have to go soon, won’t you?”

  “In ten minutes. But you stay and take your time over your coffee. There’s no hurry for you.”

  “I’d like, if I may, to ask one thing more,” Sydney said. “Does Anne—does the mother of the boys ever come to see them?”

  “No. It was agreed that they should remain entirely their father’s affair. There was another man, of course. She went to America with him, I believe.”

  “But now that their father is dead, mightn’t she think—”

  “It makes no difference what she thinks,” he said coldly. “The boys are now my affair.”

  Sydney secretly thought this might sound very well on a stage, but was not entirely proof against the chances of real life.

  “In case she did choose to turn up at school,” she said, ignoring his rather impatient gesture of repudiation, “I should like to know, does she still use her married name? Would she announce herself as Mrs. Manning?”

  He hesitated, as though he were reluctant even to discuss so foolish a possibility. Then he said, “I think she reverted to her unmarried name, which was Carstairs.”

  “Why, that’s the name of our head boy,” Sydney exclaimed.

  “Is that so?” He was not specially interested, she saw. And then he paid the bill and, with a quick return to his easy, friendly manner, bade her a brief good-bye.

  “Come and see me in my dressing-room after the show, if you like,” he said, as though an invitation backstage were an everyday occurrence.

  “Thank you. I should love it,” she told him.

  Presently it was time for her to go. And the respect with which she was escorted to the door and bowed out gave her the amusing and pleasing impression that she was regarded as a friend of the famous actor-manager, and therefore trailing a little reflected glory. The rather ignoble, but entirely understandable thought crossed her mind, that she would have liked Marcia to see her thus.

  Back at the theatre she found the scene very much changed from when she had last been there. The vestibule was now crowded with people. Rather a smart crowd for a Saturday afternoon audience. The type of audience who came to sophisticated comedy or any play that was the talk of the town.

  From her excellent seat in the stalls Sydney surveyed the scene with interest. But, from the moment the curtain rose, her attention was completely absorbed.

  The play was good, without being in any way great, and the rather small cast were, without exception, brilliant. But even Sydney, who knew nothing of the technique of production, was aware throughout that some master-hand, some overriding authority behind it all, must be responsible for the presentation of the play.

  She had forgotten what Lucas Manning had said about his own entrance. But when it came, like everyone else, she gasped with delight over the dramatic impact of the moment. Except that he was so exactly like himself, she found it hard to believe that this was really the man with whom she had lunched. Without fuss or ostentation, he became naturally the centre of the stage, the focal point from which the drama flowed. If he was not, as he had assured her, a great actor, he was at least a supremely accomplished one and in that moment Sydney felt, quite simply, proud to know him.

  She enjoyed her afternoon inordinately, and after the show, somewhat diffidently, she presented herself at the stage door. When she said that Mr. Manning was expecting her, the slightly cavalier stage-door keeper emerged from his dingy cubby-hole and not only gave her directions, but actually pointed out the way for her so that she had no difficulty in finding the white-painted door labelled “Mr. Manning.”

  In answer to her knock, his voice bade her come in and on entering she found him sitting before the mirror in a gorgeous dressing-gown somewhat suggestive of the Regency period. He was alone in the room and was taking off the last of his make-up.

  He rose immediately and fetched her a chair but did not ask what she had thought of the performance. Sydney, however, was only too ready to launch into whole-hearted praise of it, and particularly of his part in i
t.

  “You liked it so much?” He smiled at her and seemed pleased. “It’s very good theatre, of course, and an admirable vehicle for acting.”

  They spoke for a few minutes about the play; he seeming to enjoy making her give reasons for her opinion. Then she said she must go to catch her train, and he got up to accompany her to the door. Beside her on the wall hung several photographed scenes from plays, and as she paused to look at them, he explained.

  “They are what I consider the highlights of my career,” he confessed with a smile. “I’m not sure whether I keep them there for sentiment or superstition. But they all have their significance for me. Here”—he indicated one where he was looking very handsome in Restoration costume—“is the first time I played a leading part. And this”—he touched another picture—“is a scene from the first production in my own theatre.”

  “And this one?” Sydney looked with interest at a scene in which he was obviously several years younger.

  “That was my first West End part. More than a dozen years ago,” he added with a slight grimace.

  “The girl with you is lovely. She seems vaguely familiar. Did she also become famous later?”

  “No.”

  “Then, if I haven’t seen her, she reminds me of someone.” Sydney wrinkled her forehead slightly.

  He paused for just a moment before replying. Then he said, “Perhaps she reminds you of Alistair. That is Anne.”

  “Of—Alistair?” She thought there was not much in plump, deep-voiced Alistair to remind one of this slender, elegant girl—unless it were the large, beautiful shaped eyes and small straight nose. But she was confused by what she felt was something of a gaffe on her part, and so she just said quickly, “She—she’s very beautiful there.”