They moved with becoming viceregal modesty along the platform, especially Lady Lippington. Dear Lord Lippington looked impressed and pleased and dignified; but it was she who really wore the honours of the occasion. One would say that while he was Governor-General elect, to her it had actually happened. The Colonial Secretary and Lord Selkirk accompanied them, and we all converged, in groups, upon them; but not with frisky rapidity. A kind of shyness settled upon us, and it was felt that the Bishop was quite within his province in making the first farewell. Bishops are never shy. This one looked at his watch, the kind of thing, as Graham says, that one envies anyone under such circumstances the capacity for doing. Then everybody crowded about with such warm handclasps and affectionate wishes that Lady Lippington broke down and had to retreat behind her handkerchief to the saloon carriage.
“I thought she would collapse,” said Mrs. Jerome Jarvis. “What can you expect? It’s frightfully trying, and she has wept for three solid days already at having to go. Poor dear Margot!”
“Oh, dear!” I said. “If only she had let it be known earlier! But I suppose nothing can save her now.”
My good-bye was negligible, but my roses were lovely, and I had to deliver them, so with one or two other friends I followed into the railway carriage. Our worst anticipations were confirmed; Lady Lippington was sobbing in a close circle of exquisitely-dressed and deeply sympathetic ladies, to whom, for obvious reasons, she could not relinquish both her hands.
“I don’t believe anybody loves England as I do!” cried the poor lady the King was sending away because somebody had to go. “If I could only take it with me!”
The engine whistled and Lord Lippington appeared smilingly in the door. There was a tumult of embraces and then it was our turn. Miss Pedlington rose to the occasion, leaning tenderly over Lady Lippington.
“Don’t cry,” she said nobly. “It’s for the Empire.”
I wished I had thought of that; but I could only thrust my roses into the unhappy exigency and say: “It is a shame!” Lady Lippington gave me a pathetic smile and a hurried damp kiss.
“Do I look too horrible,” she asked, “to present myself at the window as we go out?”
The train slid away amid a forest of black silk hats, and a dropping chorus of “Bon voyage!” “Good-bye!” and “Good luck!” to which Mrs. Jerome Jarvis added in a high key “My love to Canada!” which, from so complete a stranger, I thought kind. An instant later we had turned, from an Imperial occasion, into a mere dissolving platform; and I managed to attach myself to Graham.
“Well,” he said, “come along. Shall we go and get rid of lunch first, and where?”
“You are Anglicising,” I said bitterly. “If you don’t mind paying, I’ll take you to my club. I’ve only got sixpence ha’penny.”
“I don’t mind paying,” he replied, but he said it quite seriously. There was even, I fancied, a halftone in it that said with humble acceptance “What else am I here for?” It made me turn hurriedly to find Mrs. Jarvis and part with her for the day. I wanted to part with everybody, to get away from all those people.
“We won’t go to my club,” I said, remembering that it would be full of them, “I’d rather go somewhere with you, Graham. Any little old place—Lockhart’s or the British Tea-Table—the kind of place we went to when we first came and didn’t know anything, and enjoyed ourselves—don’t you remember?”
He did not reply as we elbowed our way out of the station. Most of the occasion disappeared into carriages, but we found ourselves presently in Euston Road and looking anxiously, as we did in the beginning, for a right ’bus.
“Would you rather have had a cab?” asked Graham, as we hurled ourselves into what he used to call the most entertaining spot in London, the front seat on the top, next to the driver. I said no indeed, and for a minute or two we lurched into the traffic of North London in silence.
“I’ve been considering motors for a week,” Graham said, and settled luxuriously into his corner. “Barbara would like one, I think, to play with while I’m away. There’s a lot of fun to be got out of them in the country. Which do you prefer, a brougham, or one of those big open things?”
“I hate them all!” I said. “Heard from father this week?”
“Oh, well, that’s foolish, you know!” returned Graham, but with a shade of depression. “Yes—I’ve brought the letter. Father’s just tickled to death,” he added a little more brightly.
“Mother is rather frightened, I think. How is Barbara?” I asked.
“Quite all right, thanks.”
“And Lady Doleford?”
Graham smiled. “Lady Doleford’s positively blooming!” he said. “It’s a pleasure to see her. We get on capitally.”
“Then you’re lucky,” I said.
“Lucky?”
“In your mother-in-law,” I explained.
“Oh! Yes, indeed; we have great talks. She’s fearfully interested in her village; and I’ve got her to see that it isn’t a live proposition as it stands—her village. All gone to thatch. As a matter of fact, it doesn’t do much more than keep the rain out, though, of course, I don’t tell her exactly that. But she goes down to the cottages and argues it one way, and I drop in at the pub and argue it another, and between us we’ve got about three-quarters of the able-bodied population tickled to death with the idea of Alberta. I’m transplanting three families myself. Lady Doleford picked out the men. I wanted to have them vetted; but there wasn’t any sort of necessity. She knew exactly how they were geared—how Crupp had broken his leg in two places when he was fifteen and Stobbs had had rheumatic fever the year before last, and the other Johnny never suffered from anything since he had the measles. You would think they belonged to her!”
“She has all the virtues of her class,” I said, “I’m sure.”
“That’s very much it. And it’s a lot to say, mind. We can’t care about people just because they are people, on our side, the way they do here. It isn’t in us—yet.”
“I suppose she’s very pleased with the—repairs and all that,” I said.
Graham’s face ever so slightly clouded. “She naturally likes to see things being done,” he said.
“Isn’t it a little unusual—beforehand?” I asked. “Things being done, I mean?”
“Possibly. But they just had to be. The poor dear old place couldn’t wait,” he went on,” another half-hour.”
He reflected for a moment. “They’re tremendously considerate, you know,” he added. “Lady Doleford, Scansby—all of them. They consult me at every point. More than they need, really. I sometimes wish they would just go ahead and have it as they want it. They are so much more likely,” he amended, “to get it right.”
“And Barbara,” I asked—“is she as deeply interested as the others?”
“I’m not sure,” said Graham candidly, “whether Barbara cares as much as she ought to care. She gives me the idea sometimes of a person taking great pains to do something that wasn’t really important to her.”
“Her heart isn’t in it?” I hazarded—and I could swear that the answer that jumped into Graham’s eyes was, “I’m afraid I don’t know where her heart is.” But what he said was as different as possible.
“You ought to try to get to know Barbara,” he replied. “Now that I’m engaged to her I find her very well worth knowing. If the Criterion will do as well as the British Tea-Table, here it is.”
“’Old tight!” said the conductor, as we approximately stopped the machine and got down.
CHAPTER XXV
ABOUT this time, the decorators having gone out of the house in Rutland Gate, Mrs. Jerome Jarvis returned there, and when the Pavis Court party left for Ponds, Graham came back to the flat, to Towse and to me. Towse had a critical eye on him when opportunity served, and confided to me in the kitchen that she didn’t find him as ’earty as he should be considering that he had been in the country. He reminded her, she said, of Bargus’s pore nephew who went off in a decline from having been treat
ed badly by a young lady. Fair ‘eart-broken he was when she forsook him, and never got over it. I couldn’t agree that Graham showed indications of a decline, but neither could I contradict Towse when she remarked that his spirits didn’t seem to be what they was; and we both noticed that the discovery that Billy had tilted a Heppelwhite arm-chair to its ruin brought hardly a groan from him. He seemed “off” Heppelwhite and Adam, even off the fifteenth century, implied that he had been living in so perfect an atmosphere of the Renaissance that fragments of it in a little modern flat had somehow lost their spell.
It seemed to me that he suffered, without knowing it, in this advantage, and that for us the true joy would always lie in fragments or approximations wherever they might be.. It depresssed me beyond words, this loss of interest in his own things, especially as I could not see that it was replaced by any special appreciation of treasures likely before very long, to come, in a manner of speaking, into his possession. I say “in a manner of speaking,” because any property in them was the last thing that seemed to occur to him. In the beginning—the early stages, I mean, of the transaction—he used to suggest to himself with the dearest modesty, a kind of wardship over them. He was going “to take care of” the beautiful old repository; but nearer to it than that he never seemed to see himself, and now he did not talk of it at all. On the other hand, he had far more to say about Barbara, Barbara’s ways and ideas and favourite authors, and Barbara’s character; above all, her character. He would explain her character to me for half-hours together, and I could see that he spent even more time in thinking about it. He seemed to have settled that Barbara at all events was going to be his, and he sought anxiously for his duties and privileges in her connection. He wrote to her every day, quite long letters, upon the subjects in the newspapers; his presents to her were truly charming; he seemed to expect her to be the central figure of his life. It was really as if, having lost his captivity to Pavis Court, he turned to Barbara to forge new chains for him.
With my ideas about the whole affair I suppose I ought to have found this an improvement. Upon all principles I had to prefer seeing Graham more anxious to be husband to Barbara than curator to Pavis Court. It was certainly a move in the right direction, if in such matters one could move. And no doubt Barbara would see it and respond. She had the sense of obligation—she would recognise a claim like this. She would say: “Poor Graham, has the old place come rattling down about your ears, like a house of cards, after you’ve bought it, too? Well, here am I—if I can be of the slightest use ”
At least that, I was convinced, was what Peter would say in her place. They were a good deal alike, Barbara and Peter, and both Pavisays. …
And all would yet be well. It was merely my imagination that would find the whole thing such a pathetic muddle. It is fatal to bring too much imagination to matters of sentiment—they are imaginative enough in themselves. At least it was so with Graham. How far imagination would influence a person like Lord Doleford was more difficult to say. Perhaps a good deal—though he was so like Barbara—since hadn’t we seen, didn’t we know for a fact, that he had refused to avail himself of the most valuable and charming advantages for no other reason that could be made out except that she—the advantages—had once laughed at the caricature of an old horse? It was absurd. People may have extremely good qualities, and yet be unable to see that an old horse is the most poignant and touching spectacle in all the animal creation—as Peter said—and that people who enjoy a caricature of him are not fit for decent society, as Peter hinted. And since this was the only fact he had ever been able to produce against her, his behaviour must have been based upon imagination, as it plainly was in connection with dull and insignificant people who seemed so curiously, now and then, to please him. Was it also imagination that kept him, in spite of this, so constantly resident in Ireland? It is impossible to decide about the value of such a gift, but one thing seems clear—that it should always be exercised with a great deal of common sense.
I spent a good deal of time in reflections like these, and I was thinking about nothing else when Barbara came. She was quite unexpected, and the first thing I remembered when I let her in—Towse had gone for an outing, to see a relation of Bargus’s in the hospital—was that she must have known Graham was not in town. I said at once how disappointed he would be, and Barbara explained in the passage, rather lamely, I thought, that she had taken the chance of motoring in.
“And I am lucky to find you alone,” she said with agitation—for Barbara. “I wanted to find you quite, absolutely alone.”
“Let me go first and put the kettle on the spiritlamp,” I interposed. “It’s almost tea-time.”
I spoke collectedly, but in the kitchen I had to strike three matches. Barbara was not herself, and if you knew her you would realise that to move Barbara from the normal a matter must be very serious indeed. Her eyes looked bigger than usual and all her colour had gone into a square of red in each cheek.
“Be as quick as you can,” she said as I went, with the forced composure of a person who can’t wait very long to get something over or out. I flew to the conclusion, as the matches went out one after the other, that Peter had broken his spine in the hunting-field. He was not killed; she would not be there if he were killed; but he had had a serious accident. Otherwise why should a person like Barbara behave in such a dreadfully emotional way?
I brought the spirit-lamp in and set it on the hearth. “There,” I said. “In here, if it boils over we shall know. Now will you please tell me at once whether he is likely to get over it?”
Barbara gave me a surprised glance. “I hoped you wouldn’t take it that way,” she said. “I am sure he’ll get over it. I am sure we shall both be much, much happier.”
“Barbara,” I said, “what can you mean?”
Barbara looked at the floor and then she looked at the wall, and then at Miss Game’s mantel ornaments, and by the time she got to the mantel ornaments two large tears had made their way to the edge of her lower eye-lids. She is a person who hates crying, so she took no notice of them, only stared at me rather fiercely through them.
“I mean Graham,” she said.
“Oh!” I said. “Graham!”
“You see,” she continued, “during this last month I’ve naturally got to know him much better. And—I don’t know what you’ll say, but I’ve irrevocably decided ”
“What?” I panted.
“That I can’t marry him.”
“Barbara!” I cried. “You darling angel! But why?”
“He’s such a dear,” she explained, and added firmly, “It’s impossible!”
“He is, isn’t he?” I said. “I see.” I did see, in a flash, but Barbara went on.
“I don’t mean that I ever thought him horrid, even when I said I would. But not nice enough to matter. I really didn’t know him at all,” she confessed. “But now I do, and I like him so much that unless I liked him awfully you know it seems to me that to marry him or anything like that would be perfectly abominable!”
“It’s curious,” I said, “but he has been talking so much lately about getting to know you better, and finding so much more ”
“In me than he expected?” asked Barbara modestly, and reddened. “That was nice of him. We have got, really, quite fond of one another.”
“Do you think so?” I asked doubtfully. “I don’t mean, you know, that one saw anything like that in it. Necessarily, that is. Nothing, I mean, that need change your point of view.”
“But I have two,” said Barbara with self-respect. “There’s another.”
“Do tell me.”
“In the beginning I did think—I really and truly did—that he liked me. He might have liked me, you know.”
“Of course he might.”
“And it seemed such a useful—that sounds too vile! But—everybody thought so. And it seemed to me that it was just the most fortunate thing that could happen—his liking me. On those terms I don’t know—it wouldn’t have
been right, but I don’t know that I couldn’t have gone on. You see if he liked me particularly and I only liked him—ordinarily,” said Barbara with consideration, “there would have been something on my side, wouldn’t there?”
“You mean,” I said luminously, “a quid pro quo.”
“Exactly—exactly! And imagine my feelings when I found I wasn’t even a quid! When I found I was being thrown in! How would you like to be thrown in?”
“Like a pound of tea,” I sympathised.
“Not even like a pound of tea,” Barbara insisted. “I thought of that. But the pound of tea is thrown in as an inducement. Now in my case, I’m not an inducement, am I, Mary?”
“Darling!” I murmured.
“I know I’m not clever,” Barbara went on, “but the most dull person can find a thing like that out, if she is at all anxious about it. “Mary,” she added tremendously, “Graham doesn’t care a bit more about me than he does about mother. I knew it in a fortnight. It puzzled me frightfully—not being clever, you know. I used to lie awake thinking about it. That being so—well, what was there?”
I listened attentively, but suppressed the reply, “That is what I always wondered,” which rose to my lips.
“I had to think it was the old place and—all that, you know. Don’t be furious—I am not clever. Well, then I said to myself, ‘That’s something, anyhow —if he likes it.’ I thought he wanted it for himself. It was quite natural to think that. Everybody is mad about it. And then, as I tell you, I began to find out that he is really nice and doesn’t, and of course one can’t let him, you know. So I’ve written him a letter—here it is. Would you mind giving it to him?”
“I think I would, a little,” I said. “Couldn’t you drop it in the letter-box?”
“Perhaps that would be better. But you will see that he gets it?”
“I won’t take it out of the letter-box,” I promised.
“I don’t write a very good letter,” said Barbara earnestly. “So I just tore out here to make it all perfectly clear to you, dear; and then, I thought, you could explain to Graham anything he doesn’t understand about it. And, of course, to ask your forgiveness and all that. I hope you forgive me, Mary?”
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