by E. F. Benson
Gertrude shrank from his somewhat familiar scrutiny of her face, and she answered him coldly —
“Oh no, thanks. I am never nervous, and my mother is not either. Are you, mother?” she asked, leaning back, and addressing her directly.
“Not when the Princess is driving,” said Mrs. Carston, graciously, smiling at the Prince.
“I was just telling Miss Carston there was no need to be when my wife is driving. I acknowledge it doesn’t look the safest form of amusement. Mimi, you’ll have a wheel off presently.”
“Then we’ll go like a fox terrier when it wants to show off,” remarked Mimi. “It would look rather nice, I think.”
“I saw you two nights ago at the Cercle,” continued the Prince to Gertrude. “I wanted my wife to introduce me, but she didn’t know you, she said. I suppose you haven’t been here very long.”
“No; only a week,” she said, again feeling a little uneasy.
“Then, of course, we may hope that you will still remain here a considerable time.”
“I shall be here about a fortnight or three weeks more.”
“Ah! you stop here about as long as we shall,” he said; “personally, I would stop longer, but we have to go back to Vienna for a time, and we go to England in November.”
“You hunt, I suppose,” said Gertrude, carelessly.
“My wife is very fond of it, and that is reason enough for our going. She is half English, you know,” said the Prince, making concessions to ingenuousness. “Here we are at the lake; let me help you down; the boats are waiting, I see. Let me give you my hand.”
“Thanks, I can manage for myself,” said Gertrude, preparing to dismount.
She turned round to catch hold of the rail, and in doing so, somehow, her foot slipped off the step. The Prince had already dismounted, and was standing below. He made a sudden, quick movement towards her, and just saved her a rather nasty fall, by catching her strongly round the waist and lowering her to the ground. Poor Gertrude was furious with herself, and flushed deeply.
“I hope you are not hurt,” he said, bending towards her. “I was very fortunate in being able to save you.”
Mrs. Carston saw what had happened from the top of the drag.
“Dear Gertrude,” she cried, “you are always so precipitous — why don’t you thank the Prince?”
“As long as Miss Carston was not precipitated, her precipitousness is harmless,” said the Prince. “I am afraid you are shaken,” he said to Gertrude.
“Villari, you must not try to make puns in English,” screamed Mimi; “go and hold the horses a minute till they’ve taken out the baskets. There’s no such word as precipitousness.”
Meanwhile Gertrude had recovered her equanimity, and confessed to herself that the Prince had merely chosen between letting herself be hurt or not hurt, and that it was hard to say why she was angry with him. She walked to where he was standing at the horses’ heads.
“I am so grateful to you,” she said; “you saved me a very bad fall.”
“Please don’t thank me for the privilege I have had. It is for me to thank you.”
Gertrude made a great effort to conquer her increasing aversion to him, which was quite inexplicable, even to herself, and smiled.
“You are very unselfish. Do you always find it a privilege to help other people?”
“Decidedly not,” said he, looking straight at her.
Gertrude turned away, and he followed her to join the others, who were standing at a little distance.
“There are the boats,” explained the Princess, “and as there are ten of us and three of them, we’ll divide ourselves between them. We’d better take a man each to do the rowing, and if any of us like we can take an oar. I love rowing, and I know you row, Miss Carston. Your mother was telling me you were out this morning. Shall you and I go in a little boat by ourselves, and row across? Let’s do that.”
The Prince remonstrated.
“Mimi, you mustn’t take Miss Carston off all by yourself like that. It isn’t fair on the rest of us.”
Mimi looked at him with malicious amusement in her eyes.
“Miss Carston shall decide for herself,” she said. “Will you offend me or offend the Prince?”
Poor Gertrude was not used to a world where chaff and seriousness seemed so muddled up together, and where nobody cared whether you were serious or not. She was accustomed to mean what she said, and not to say a good many things she meant, whereas these people seemed to say all they meant, and only half to mean a good many things they said.
“I’m very fond of rowing,” she said simply. “I should like to go with you.”
Princess Mimi looked mischievously at her husband, and Gertrude, not knowing exactly what to do with her eyes, glanced at him too. He was waiting for that, and as their eyes met he said, —
“You are very cruel; your thanks to me do not go beyond words.”
The Princess came to her rescue.
“Come, Miss Carston, you and I will set off. There’s a sweet little boat there, which will suit us beautifully.”
The Princess’s method of rowing was to dip her oar into the water like a spoon very rapidly, for spasms which lasted about half a minute. In the intervals she talked to Gertrude.
“I am so glad to be coming to England again,” she said. “Villari has had a lot of tiresome business which has kept him at Vienna during this last year, and we haven’t set foot in it for sixteen months. I am tremendously patriotic; nothing in the world gives me so much pleasure as the sight of those hop-fields of Kent, with the little sheds up for hop-pickers, and the red petticoats hanging out to dry. I think I shall go and live in one. Do you suppose it would be very full of fleas? I shall build it of Keating’s powder, solidified by the Mimi process, and then it will be all right. Do come and live with me, Miss Carston. Do you know, we’ve taken a tremendous fancy to you. May I call you Gertrude? Thanks, how sweet of you. Of course you must call me Mimi.”
It was quite true that she had taken a great fancy to Gertrude, and Gertrude, in turn, felt attracted by her. She, like others, began to discount the fact that she smoked and screamed and drove four-in-hand, in the presence of the vitality to which such things were natural and unpremeditated. There was certainly no affectation in them; she did not do them because she wished to be fast, or wished to be thought fast, but because she was fast. Between her and Mrs. Rivière, Gertrude could already see, there was a great gulf fixed.
Later on in the afternoon the two strolled up higher than the others on the green slopes that rise above the Monastery, and sat down by a spring that gushed out of a rock, making a shallow, sparkling channel for itself down to the lake. The Princess had what she called a “fit of rusticity,” which expressed itself at tea in a rapid, depreciatory sketch of all town life, in removing flies from the cream with consideration for their wings, and watching them clean themselves with sympathetic attention, and, more than all, in her taking a walk with Gertrude up the mountain side, instead of smoking cigarettes. Prince Villari had asked if he might come too, but Mimi gave him an emphatic “No.” Nobody had ever accused Prince Villari of having the least touch, much less a fit, of rusticity.
The Princess had the gift of prompting people so delicately, that it could hardly be called forcing, to confide in her, and so it came about that before very long she knew of the existence of our Reginald Davenport, and his relation to her companion.
Then Gertrude said suddenly, —
“Do you know Lady Hayes?”
Mimi was startled. The question had been very irrelevant. But she answered with a laugh, —
“No; but I am told I should not like her. They say she is too like me. But why do you ask?”
“Reggie wrote to me about her this morning. He says she is delightful.”
“Oh! I don’t say she isn’t,” said the other, “but you see there isn’t room or time for two people like me in one place. I never have time to say all I want, and if there was somebody else like
that, we shouldn’t get on at all.”
“Oh! but Lady Hayes is usually very silent, I believe,” said Gertrude.
“Yes; but you have to listen to the silence of some people, just as you have to listen to the talk of others. It takes just as much time. I expect she is one of those.”
The Princess looked at the figure beside her.
“How happy you must be,” she said with something like envy; “and I think you will continue to be happy. And Mr. Davenport is coming here, is he? You must introduce me at once, and I will give you both my blessing. That’s something to look forward to. Come, we must go down, the others will be waiting.”
Mimi was rather less noisy on the way home than usual. Prince Villari remarked it, and supposed that the fit of rusticity was not yet over. She bid a very affectionate good-night to Gertrude at the door of her hotel, and asked her to come and see her in the morning, and then altered the terms of the visit, and said she would come down to their hotel herself, and hoped to find Gertrude ready for a stroll before lunch.
She remained silent at dinner, and afterwards, when she and her husband were sitting in their room by the window, to let in the cool evening breeze, he felt enough curiosity to ask, —
“What is the matter with my charming wife that she is so silent?”
“I was thinking about Gertrude Carston,” said Mimi. “She is engaged to be married.”
Prince Villari puffed his cigar in silence for a few moments.
“Ah! that is interesting,” he said at length. “I shall come with you to-morrow to offer my felicitations. How very handsome she is.”
“I wish you would do nothing of the sort, Villari,” said his wife. “Flirt with somebody else, if you must flirt with somebody. Flirt with me, if you like.”
“That is a most original idea,” he said. “I never heard of a husband flirting with his wife before.”
“It’s no manner of use trying to flirt with Gertrude Carston, my dear boy; so I warn you solemnly. She is awfully in love with her intended, and, in any case, she wouldn’t flirt. She will only get angry with you.”
“She would look splendid when she was angry,” said the Prince meditatively.
Mimi got up from her seat.
“Look here, Villari,” she said, “I don’t often ask a favour of you, and I am not particular in general as to how you conduct yourself. I am never jealous, you know, and we have ceased to be lovers — we are excellent friends, which I think is better. As a friend, I ask you to leave her alone.”
“I never suspected you of jealousy,” he said; “but you ought to explain to me exactly why you wish this, if you want me to do as you ask.”
“Benevolent motives, pure and simple,” said Mimi at once. “You won’t get any amusement out of it.”
“Never mind me,” murmured he.
“Very good,” continued Mimi. “I cancel that — and she will hate it. Just leave her alone. Flirt with Mrs. Rivière. She would enjoy it. You were rude to her to-day; you never spoke a word to her — good, bad or indifferent.”
“Mimi, you are inimitable,” said the Prince, looking at her with satisfaction. “Really, you never disappoint one. I expected to find all sorts of surprises in you; but it seems I haven’t got to the end of them yet. To discover such a spring of benevolence in you now is charming. Do you know I feel like your lover still.”
“Then will you do what I ask?”
“Yes; I think I will,” said he. “After all, I shall flirt with my wife a little longer.”
He rose up from his chair, and took her hand in his, and raised it, lover-like, to his lips.
“You’re a very good old boy, Villari,” she said. “We’ve never yet come near the edge of a quarrel, and we’ve been married, oh! ever so long. How wise we are, aren’t we? Let me go, please. I want to write some letters. You told Mrs. Rivière you’d go to the Casino with her. It’s time you were off. Be awfully charming to her, will you?”
“I’ll let her show me to all her acquaintances, and be introduced to them all, if that will do,” said the Prince.
“That’s a dear,” remarked Mimi. “That’ll do beautifully. Trot along!”
CHAPTER II.
Gertrude’s pleasure at receiving the telegram announcing Reggie’s immediate arrival was not untouched by surprise. The vague thoughts, which for very loyalty she would not allow to take shape in her mind, in connection with Lady Hayes, formed themselves into a dark cloud on the horizon, distant but potentially formidable. But when she came downstairs on the morning of his arrival, and saw him standing in the hall, with the early morning sunlight falling on his tall, well-made form and towering, sunny head, there was no room in her mind for more than one feeling, and she was content. He had not seen her coming downstairs, and on the bottom step she paused, held out her hands, and said, —
“Reggie!”
That moment was one of pure and simple happiness to them both. He turned and saw her, the girl to whom he had given his heart and his young love, and for him, as for her, at that moment none but the other existed. Gertrude felt that the thoughts of that golden future, which had so filled her mind one morning, as she walked down to the lake, were now beginning to be fulfilled. As for him, the chief feeling in his mind was one of passionate, unutterable relief; the long nightmare was over, for the moment he felt that childish, pure happiness of waking from a bad dream and finding morning come, and the sun shining into a dear, familiar room.
He had not had a very pleasant journey. The anger which Mrs. Davenport had seen in his face, and from which she had taken comfort, burned itself out and left him face to face with blankness. His passionate desire to see Eva rekindled itself, but that was impossible, and the sight of Gertrude he felt, in another sense, was impossible too. Several times he had been on the point of turning back, but the essential weakness of his character forbade so determined a step. But certainly, at that first moment of meeting her, he felt, with that unquestioning irresponsibility, that in natures not so sweet creates egoism, that the solution was here, and the relief was great.
“Ah, it is good to see you, Gerty,” he said, when the first silent greeting was over. “I didn’t know how much I wanted to get to you, until I saw you standing there.”
“It was nice of you to come so soon,” she said, drawing her arm through his, and leading him out on to the verandah; “but why did you come so suddenly? Nothing is wrong, I hope?”
Reggie had foreseen and dreaded this question, and he had devoted some thought to it. But Gertrude had given it a form more easy of reply than that he had anticipated.
He looked at her affectionately.
“Nothing is wrong,” he said with emphasis, and, to do him justice, he believed at that moment with truth.
“Everything is as right as it can be now,” he went on; “now I am here with you, and oh, Gerty, nothing else matters.”
“No,” she said softly; “nothing else matters.”
They stood there looking at each other, silent, almost grave — for happiness is no laughing matter — until a waiter came out with a tray on which was Gertrude’s breakfast. Reggie went upstairs to his room to get rid of his travel stains, and Gertrude ordered breakfast for him to be served at the table on the verandah where she had her own. But it was not to be expected that the change in Reggie which Mrs. Davenport had noticed would escape her, and though, in the grave, silent joy of that first meeting, she had not consciously noticed it, she remembered it now, and it struck her exactly as it had struck Mrs. Davenport.
“He has become a man,” she said to herself, and the thought flooded her mind with a new joy. He had said that nothing was wrong; their meeting had been all and more than she had expected, for she felt he fulfilled his part of that union of soul which she had thought of as the germ which lurked in their first months of courtship, and which she felt she had become capable of by degrees only. But, lo! he had changed too. Truly, the golden future was dawning.
Such moments are rare. We cannot
live always at the full compass of our possibilities, any more than a horse can gallop at full speed for ever. That great characteristic of the human race, limitation, forbid us to walk for ever on the circumference of our circle. That most disappointing of phenomena called reaction will not be denied, and the hearts which are capable of the highest emotions in the highest degree, are not only capable, but necessarily liable to their corresponding depths. But at present, disconsolate reflections of this kind had no footing in Gertrude’s mind. She knew her emotions were expanded for the present sweet moment, even to the limits of her imagination, and room for further thought there was none.
All that day and all the next day the joy grew no less deep. On the afternoon of the third day an invitation came from Princess Villari for Mrs. and Miss Carston to come to tea, also to bring Mr. Davenport if he was there. Gertrude wanted to go, and so sans dire did her mother, and she soon convinced Reggie — who was of opinion that tea-parties were bores — that he wanted to go too. It is always flattering to the male mind to know that a lady particularly wants to see you, especially when that lady is described in so promising a way as that in which Gertrude alluded to the Princess.
The Princess had a genius for doing things in the best possible way. If she had given a soap-bubble party, the pipes would have been amber tipped, the soap, “Pears’ scented,” and even in an informal affair of this sort, her arrangements were indubitably perfect. Her sitting-room opened on to the verandah of the hotel, which in turn communicated with the garden. Tea and light refreshments were provided in all these three charming places, on a quantity of small tables, giving unlimited opportunities for any number of tête-à-têtes. The steps and the verandah were bright with sweet-smelling flowers, and in the room, where their fragrance would have been overpowering, were large, cool branches of laburnum and acacia. Needless to say, she had advertised the hotel-keeper that she would be using the verandah and hotel gardens that afternoon, and that, with her compliments, those places would be “interdite” to any one but her guests.
