← catalogue

Lady Lilith

by Stephen McKenna · English · Gutenberg #44982 · 578,372 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Lady Lilith
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: Lady Lilith

Author: Stephen McKenna


        
Release date: February 22, 2014 [eBook #44982]
                Most recently updated: October 24, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/44982

Credits: E-text prepared by David Edwards, Martin Pettit, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net) from page images generously made available by Internet Archive (https://archive.org)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LADY LILITH ***

Note: Images of the original pages are available through
      Internet Archive. See
      https://archive.org/details/ladylilith00mckeiala





The Sensationalists: I

LADY LILITH

by

STEPHEN McKENNA


      *      *      *      *      *      *

BY STEPHEN McKENNA

THE SENSATIONALISTS
PART ONE: LADY LILITH
PARTS TWO AND THREE: _In preparation_

SONIA MARRIED

SONIA

MIDAS AND SON

NINETY-SIX HOURS' LEAVE

THE SIXTH SENSE

SHEILA INTERVENES


NEW YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

      *      *      *      *      *      *


LADY LILITH

by

STEPHEN McKENNA

Author of "Sheila Intervenes," "Midas and Son," "Sonia," "Sonia
Married," "Ninety-Six Hours' Leave," etc.







[Illustration: Logo]

New York
George H. Doran Company

Copyright, 1920,
By George H. Doran Company

Printed in the United States of America




TO MY MOTHER
AND
THE MEMORY OF MY FATHER




CONTENTS


CHAPTER                           PAGE
   I THE DEATH OF THE PHOENIX        9

  II THE COMING OF LILITH           34

 III THE SPIRIT OF PAN              58

  IV APHRODITE DEMI-MONDAINE        79

   V NOBODY'S FAULT                107

  VI THE SHADOW LINE               124

 VII A MATTER OF DUTY              141

VIII A MATTER OF PLEASURE          161

  IX THE JUDGEMENT OF SOLOMON      177

   X VINDICATION                   198

  XI THE LAUREL AND THE ROSE       217

 XII AN ERROR OF JUDGEMENT         230

XIII A NOTE OF INTERROGATION       257

 XIV THE ANSWER OF THE ORACLE      277

  XV PRELUDE TO ROMANCE            294




LADY LILITH


"I became the spendthrift of my own genius, and to waste an eternal
youth gave me a curious joy. Tired of being on the heights, I
deliberately went to the depths in the search for new sensation ... I
grew careless of the lives of others. I took pleasure where it pleased
me, and passed on. I forgot that every little action of the common day
makes or unmakes character...."

OSCAR WILDE: _De Profundis_.




LADY LILITH




CHAPTER ONE

THE DEATH OF THE PHOENIX

     "Conceive of your life as an unfinished biography, and try to
     discover the next chapter and the end."

     J. A. SPENDER: "THE COMMENTS OF BAGSHOT."


"Within ten years five of us will be married and five will be dead,"
cried O'Rane, writing rapidly. "(Every one of us will have made such a
fool of himself that it's _wishing_ himself dead he'll be.) One will
have had to cut the country. One will have lost all his money. As you
seem to like jam with your powder, I've said that one--and not
more--will achieve fame--by the mercy of God; one--and not more--will
make great money."

The prophecy, delivered with apparent sincerity in the mellow atmosphere
of dinner to a score of men between the optimistic ages of twenty and
twenty-five, was, on the face of it, discouraging. He who achieved fame
and he who amassed a fortune were condemned, with the rest, to pass
through the contemplation of suicide or, at least, the prayerful
expectation of death. And the moment for the forecast was undoubtedly
ill-chosen. Seventeen of the twenty members of the Phoenix had spent the
last week wrestling with examiners in their final schools; O'Rane spoke
with the subconscious triumph of one who was not bidding farewell to
Oxford for another year; and, if a vote had been taken, nine-tenths of
his friends would have accorded him the scant portion of worldly
success with which Providence in his grudging prophecy would crown their
ambitions.

"Dry up, Raney," growled Jack Waring. "It's all very well for you----"

"It's a twenty-to-one chance I'm giving you," O'Rane pointed out. "You
might bring off the double event. And get a wife thrown in. It would be
no fun, if we all leaped to the top. 'When everybody's somebody, then no
one's anybody.'"

Waring jumped up and turned to the president.

"I have to report Mr. O'Rane for singing at dinner, sir. A good,
thumping fine, Sinks," he added.

Jack Summertown intercepted the ruling.

"On a point of order, sir; was that singing? If it was--oh, my Lord!"

Sinclair rose majestically from the presidential chair and turned his
eyes from one disputant to the other.

"The accused is acquitted, but he's not to do it again," he ruled
diplomatically. "I have to censure Lord Summertown for addressing the
Chair without rising."

Ten suspended conversations were resumed, as he sat down; and Waring
reverted to his own gloomy thoughts. Unaccustomed to look more than a
day ahead, he was only beginning to recognize that in twenty-four hours
he would have gone down from Oxford for the last time and that within
four months he would have to begin reading for the bar. He had
interrupted his dressing an hour before to stare out of the window,
sprawling on the sill and dangling a collar and tie with idle hand.

Outside, the setting sun of a late June day filled the Broad with sleepy
warmth and dyed the crumbling stone of the Sheldonian rose-red. In the
middle of the road two cabmen slumbered on their boxes, pillowing their
heads on their arms and leaving their horses to munch contentedly from
frayed nosebags and to twitch an ear or flick a tail at too persistent
flies. Rare groups of sight-seers approached the deserted gates of
Trinity and Balliol, sought inspiration from guide-books and vanished
diffidently from view. Oxford belonged to the ages; and for the first
twenty-fifth part of the twentieth century Waring had fancied that it
belonged to him. A hansom, overfilled by an American and her two
daughters, jingled lazily from Holywell; the driver exhibited a contempt
for Oxford no less profound than for America and waved his whip from
side to side in rough time with the scornful scraps of information which
he drawled through the trap.

"Ol' Clar'nd'n Buildin'. Bodleian be'ind it. Trin'ty. Balliol."

Three heads nodded and turned mechanically from right to left. The
driver paused for new instructions, and an anxious voice from inside
exclaimed:

"Gracious! it's a quarter of seven! Say, how many blocks are we from the
depot?"

The high nasal intonation seemed to shiver the warm repose of the
afternoon, and in another moment the Broad was echoing with life. A
stream of bicycles poured down Parks Road; blazers of every colour
flashed into sight and disappeared; men bareheaded and men in panamas,
men with tennis racquets and men with dogs, men in flannels and men in
tweeds, a few, even, still in white ties and coats of subfusc hue,
parading the bondage of the Examination Schools, all hurried back to
make ready for Hall. Oxford still belonged to them. At the gates of the
colleges, deserted a moment since, the heirs of all the undergraduate
ages assembled in careless disregard of their heritage; the last
bicycles were tumbled into place; the last rainbow blazers and
hat-ribbons vanished from sight; pipes were replaced in pockets, and
necks bared from the dingy embrace of tattered gowns.

With a glance at the watch on his dressing-table, Jack Waring twisted
himself to catch the reflection of his bottle-green dress-coat. It was
the envied livery of the Phoenix Club, which--consistently with its
name--died and came to life again once a year. At the end of every
summer term not more than one survivor remained; the following
Michaelmas the new president proposed and elected his own friends,
choosing one junior to carry on the life and traditions of the club at
the year's end. The institution had ensured for nearly two university
generations and was the one constructive effort of Lord Loring's life at
Oxford. With the grave self-absorption of nineteen he had demanded a
club to which none but his own friends had access and of which he could
nominate himself president and ordain the rules as he went on. He had
long wanted a pretext, he explained in his inaugural address, for
wearing a bottle-green dress-coat with brass buttons and white silk
facings; and his position as founder of the club would give him an
excuse for revisiting Oxford at the end of his lawful term.

A faint frown of regret and perplexity hovered over Jack Waring's plump
and cheerful face, as he resumed his dressing. He had no fault to find
with Oxford, where he had done more than most men and all that could be
expected of any man. A case full of silver cups testified to his success
in college and university Grinds; he had been Master of the Drag and a
member of the Bullingdon; less than three days before he had shewn his
versatility by proceeding, without the ostentation of an Honour School,
to the degree of Bachelor of Arts. Colonel Waring had urged him to enjoy
himself, and the four years had passed very satisfactorily.

"Eric!"

"Hullo! Are you ready?"

The door was kicked open, and Eric Lane sauntered in and inspected his
own clothes by the revealing light of the afternoon sun. He also was
frowning, for the sense of departure was heavy upon him too, and the
papers that day had not been to his liking.

"Our final dissipation!" cried Jack, seizing him by the arm and
clattering down the narrow staircase into the Turl. "I say, Eric, I
don't half like the idea of not coming up next term; I was just
beginning to find my way about this place. There you see Lincoln. Here
we have Jaggers. I've never been inside Jaggers. Shall we make up a
party and go to-morrow?"

A knot of Jesus men glared with the dumb fury which the small nations of
the world feel towards the Great Powers. A sing-song Welsh voice
commented devastatingly on the vanity of bottle-green dress-coats and
their wearers.

"I can't go after _that_," murmured Jack with dignity. "Never imagined
they understood English. Ought I to go back and apologize?" He stopped
short in front of a haberdasher's shop and nodded gravely at the
seductive window. Club colours and college colours contended and clashed
with giant brown and yellow silk handkerchiefs adorned with white
bulldogs. "We might buy them a peace-offering."

"I always wonder why you're not more disliked than you are," mused Eric.

"People only dislike me until I've given them time to see that I'm right
and they're wrong," explained Jack complacently. "I was very unpopular
at New College my first term. They wanted me to row--just because I'd
rowed at Eton. You can't row _and_ hunt. I never did any of the things
they wanted; the people here are such sheep. Did I ever tell you that
the rowing push came to rag my rooms just because I chose to dress for
Hall? They said it was 'side.' Unfortunately, their spokesman was drunk,
so I had to ask him to leave. It's such bad form to drink more than you
can carry. Now any number of men dress for Hall. Sheep, just sheep. I
think the reason you and I get on so well together is that you don't try
to lead my life for me."

"Oh, I'm used to you," Eric interrupted. "Ever since I can remember,
you've sat still and let every one else revolve round you. Your people,
Agnes, me----"

Jack smiled at his reflection in the window. Though his
self-satisfaction annoyed women and older men, no one could remain
impatient with him for long. He was always too good-tempered to provide
sport and too sure of himself to mind criticism. The man who is content
to do nothing starts, too, with an advantage over the man who not only
wants something done but would like it done in his own way. In childhood
the threat that he would not be taken to a party unless he behaved
himself well had only once been used against Jack; his mother found
afterwards that he had genuinely enjoyed himself more at home; and ever
since he had won his own way by studied inertia.

"You're so efficient!" he explained. "I should never have got through my
schools but for you. And you pack so well. By the way, you've looked out
the trains for to-morrow, haven't you? And arranged with Agnes for a
cart to meet me? I hate writing letters.... Shall we dig together in
London? If you'll find some decent rooms and a man to look after
us--Agnes will help you choose the furniture--and if you'll make
everything shipshape and comfortable, I'm hanged if I don't come and
live with you! There!"

Eric held out his hand with affected emotion.

"That's uncommon good of you! I thought you'd want me to choose some one
to live with me in your place."

"I wish you'd find somebody to go to the bar in my place," murmured Jack
with a momentary return of his earlier gloom. "Can't _you_? The exams
are quite easy for a man of your powerful intellect, and you only have
to eat a few dinners and get called. _I_ should live at Lashmar as the
simple, old English country gentleman.... Hullo! we're late! You'll see
about paying the fine, won't you?"

They crossed the High to a chorus of welcome flung at them from a
first-floor window over a pastry-cook's shop. Two sleek heads protruded
over the cushions in one tier, with three more, less lovingly cemented,
in the background.

"Hurry up, Spurs," shouted the president.

The name, applied jointly and severally to the two men, had passed
through ingenious refinements before reaching its present brief clarity.
If Waring's Christian name was Jack, his inseparable companion Lane must
be Jill; if Jack's surname was Waring, Eric's must be Gillow; the home
of the furnishing trade, if not of Waring and Gillow, was Tottenham
Court Road, which readily suggested Tottenham Hotspurs. An unexplained
intellectual craving was at length satisfied when the pair were renamed
"the Spurs."

After their first term no one shewed the psychological curiosity to
wonder why so incongruous a couple lived together. Though neighbours in
Hampshire, they were from different schools and of different colleges;
the shrewd but consummately indolent Master of the Drag was the arbiter
of taste for sporting, ultra-conservative Oxford--already a personality
and almost a tradition; the fine-drawn scholar of Trinity was a recluse,
a dreamer and a rebel, with ambition corroding the fabric of a too frail
constitution. Outside the Phoenix they had few friends in common, for
Eric's disputatious poets grew silent under the breezy onslaught of a
more robust generation; Jack's intellectual hunger was satisfied by
Surtees, the text-books for his schools, the _Sportsman_ and _Morning
Post_; while Eric, who had divided the first ten years of his life
between his father's library at Lashmar Mill-House and a verandah at
Broadstairs, had read quickly, brooded deeply and taken up an attitude,
sometimes precocious but always clearly defined, towards problems which
as yet did not exist for Jack. On one side, the friendship was founded
on a worship of opposites; Eric never forgot that he had gone friendless
through six years at school because he was forbidden by his doctor to
play games. On the other, Jack found devotion a convenience; he
respected Eric's brains and needed some one to relieve him of minor
exertions and to make up his mind for him. Accordingly, though all the
fourth-year men in the University would have been honoured to live with
him, it was to Eric that he drawled, "By the way, have you arranged to
dig with any one next term? Well, do go and find some decent quarters,
there's a good fellow."

"Hullo! No fine to pay after all!" cried Jack, as he burst into the club
dining-room and compared the number of covers with the members of the
Phoenix already assembled. "Who's coming, Mr. President?"

"O'Rane and Deganway haven't turned up yet," answered Sinclair. "I've
just had a wire from Loring to say that he's motoring down with Oakleigh
and they'll probably be late. Summertown and Pentyre you can hear. It's
their idea of music," he added, as a free fight broke out over the piano
in the adjoining room.

Jack studied the _menu_, inspected the wine on the side-board and
elbowed himself a place in the kneeling row at the open window. An
interrupted conversation struggled back to plans for the Long Vacation
and discussion of the schools. Sinclair, a stocky, simple-minded
sportsman, now pitifully embarrassed by his presidential duties, had
been chosen to play at Lord's for the University and for the Gentlemen;
after that he would tour with the Authentics till the end of the season;
and, until the following season, he would interest himself in the
management of his father's mines in Yorkshire. Knightrider and
Framlingham were destined for the army; Deganway and Pentyre were due to
cram for the Foreign Office; Draycott proposed to study art in Paris;
and Mayhew had forced his way into Fleet Street and the offices of the
"Wicked World." It was a wide dispersal; and all felt that they were
changing a life of proved comfort for something unknown and presumably
less easy.

"What are you doing, Spurs?" Sinclair asked Eric.

"I'm not quite sure. My people want me to try for the Civil Service. I
want to have a shot at journalism. You can't _do_ anything in the Civil
Service."

"Who _wants_ to do anything?" retorted Waring from his window-seat.
"Late as usual, Raney.... I only want money and decent holidays....
Sounds of a car, furiously driven. You'll have to fine 'em double, Mr.
President, if it's Jim and George; once for being late and once for not
coming in club dress. It is! Two dozen of fizz from each!"

He withdrew his head from the window as the car came to a standstill. A
moment later Loring entered apologetically in morning dress, fingering
his moustache and smiling with pleasure at the volley of welcome; George
Oakleigh followed, peering with approval at the familiar beams and dingy
panels of the low-ceilinged room; while O'Rane strode across the passage
and brought the free fight to an end by putting the heads of the
disputants into chancery, the president rapped the table and tried to
allot the places.

"Gentlemen! The toast of the Phoenix will be drunk in silence," he
proclaimed, as every one obstinately seated himself next to his greatest
friend.

Sinclair waited until the sherry was served and then rose to his feet.
Of the twenty members present only O'Rane was staying up another year:
in obedience to ritual he remained seated in the vice-president's chair.

"The Phoenix is dead," announced the president.

"The Phoenix will rise again," answered the vice-president with awful
gravity. Then, as the others sat down, he added reflectively, "'Wonder
where we shall all be in ten years' time? 'Wonder what we shall be
doing? 'Wonder how many of us will be dead?"

"You can always depend on Raney for an irresistible little note of
cheerfulness," commented Loring, as he pulled in his chair and looked
round to see who was present.

It was then that O'Rane flung his prophecy at the head of the club.

"Bah! You know as much about life as a Sunday School teacher!" he
retorted contemptuously, banging his hand on a bell. "Where's the
betting-book? And give me a pen, somebody. Let you mark my words. 'Mr.
David O'Rane bets the Marquess Loring ten sovereigns that within ten
years of this date five out of the twenty members present to-night will
be married. A further ten sovereigns that five will be dead----'"

"Always the optimist," murmured Oakleigh from Loring's side.

"I'll bet that every one of us will have made such a fool of himself
that it's _wishing_ himself dead he'll be.... A further ten sovereigns
that one at least will have had to cut the country. A further ten that
one at least will have lost all his money.... I'm only dealing in
averages. Ten years, I said; that's not much for any positive
achievement, but I'll bet a further ten pounds that one--and not more
than one--will have achieved what an independent tribunal considers
fame. A further ten pounds that one of us will make great money----"

"That's sixty pounds," interposed Sinclair warningly.

"But I shan't have to pay it," answered O'Rane, writing rapidly. He read
out a summary of the wager and passed the book for Loring to sign.
"Besides, I'm going to be the one who makes all the money. I hope you
won't be one of the five who die, Jim; or I shall have to claim against
your estate and all. Which of us will achieve fame in ten years?
Draycott as an Academician? I don't see it. Spurs as a judge? 'Don't
see it either. The Gander as an ambassador? The other Spurs?" He looked
round the table and went on quickly; half-unconsciously he had decided
that Eric Lane would be the first of the five to die. "I should mark
down Sinks as the first to marry; there's an appealing domesticity about
him. And we shall _all_ make colossal fools of ourselves; don't forget
that! Folly's the great leveller. Jim, I think you'd better give a
dinner once a year to the survivors just to see how we're getting on."

"If I don't die or cut the country," Loring assented.

O'Rane snapped the clasp of the betting-book and tossed it on a chair
behind him.

"You're far too healthy and respectable," he grunted, concentrating his
attention on the cooling soup. "Besides, I'm reserving that for
Summertown. You know he's been sent down for good and all?"

"A man cuts the country because of the disreputability of others,"
answered Loring. "By the way, I'm not going to be fined for being late,
Mr. President, because I had a good reason. Also, the founder of a club
is never fined."

"Let's hear the reason," suggested the president.

"I've been taking the chair at a family council." Loring looked round
the table until he located his cousin Knightrider. "You ought to have
been there, Victor. I don't want to wash my dirty linen in public, but
Victor and I have a young cousin of twelve," he explained, "who's driven
her father out of one continent and is on the point of driving him out
of another. Crawleigh's a most dignified and worthy viceroy, and he's my
own uncle, and I wouldn't say a word against him; but a fellow on his
staff told me that he'd no more control over that child than over the
man in the moon. She does whatever she pleases; Government House is
turned upside down, and, if any one tries to coerce her, she just runs
away. They've pursued her across Canada and they've pursued her across
India. Now she's been sent home. The family council was convened to
decide what was to be done with her. All the uncles and aunts and
cousins met together; and I need hardly tell you that we got stuck with
her. So, if I disappear suddenly, you'll know that my young cousin has
been too much for me. If that isn't a good reason for being late, I
don't know what is."

The president adroitly reserved judgement on a fine which he knew would
never be paid, and the conversation reverted to the former grim
discussion of the schools and vague plans for the future. Eric Lane felt
out of sympathy with his surroundings, for he alone lacked money and
influence and a ready-made niche. In ten years' time Deganway would be
progressing gently and comfortably in the Diplomatic; Summertown and
Pentyre, who were avowedly waiting for their fathers to die, would
either still be waiting or would have already succeeded; Framlingham and
Knightrider would be swallowed by the army, even Jack Waring would make
a career for himself at the bar or elsewhere, because men with his
backing were not allowed to fail. George Oakleigh would be in the House,
probably an under-secretary; Loring, with his position and an income
which fluctuated between a hundred thousand and a hundred and fifty
thousand a year in accordance with the yield of certain mines, might be
anywhere.

"What are _you_ going to do, when you go down?" Eric asked O'Rane.

"I haven't the least idea. That's where the fun comes in," O'Rane
answered buoyantly.

"Starting behind scratch?"

"Yes, that gives you an incentive. I wonder which of us will get to the
top first."

"I wonder how one starts."

"Oh, you'll write. I've never had any doubt of that. That rot I was
talking about averages wasn't _all_ rot; we ought to turn out one
genius, and you're going to do something very big. I declare to my soul
I'm not ragging! I've seen the things you wrote for _Cap and Bells_,
I've heard you talk and I can see you're on a different plane from the
rest of us. I could probably beat you at pure scholarship, but you've a
literary sense which I should never attain in a life-time. Do _you_ care
for a bet with me?"

Eric shook his head; but he felt the need of encouragement, and O'Rane
was more serious than he usually condescended to be.

"I won't rob you, Raney."

"Robbery be blowed! You won't bet against your destiny. In ten years'
time you'll have beaten the whole of our generation, starting behind
scratch. And, God's my witness, I'd sooner have that than be born with a
title and a million pounds a minute like Jim. Hullo, they're off! Jim,
may I take wine with you?"

He raised his glass and was quickly followed by Oakleigh and Summertown.
Loring flushed a little at the compliment of being chosen first. In
order of popularity O'Rane followed as a close second, with Waring
third. Pentyre, Summertown and Deganway toasted one another; Oakleigh
was honoured as an afterthought by half the table. There was a moment's
silence, as the glasses were recharged, and Jack Waring leaned forward
with a smile.

"Eric? Best of luck."

"Best of luck, Jack."

Their eyes met, and both smiled. Then the interrupted dinner went on.
Oakleigh was detected, reported and fined for smoking without
permission; Pentyre was deprived of port wine for allowing the decanter
to stand at his elbow. A vote was taken, and Draycott was censured for
wearing a pleated shirt. Less constitutionally, Deganway was stretched
on the floor and deprived of his eye-glass amid falsetto protests. Then
the loving-cup went round, and all stood to drink the health of the king
and of fox-hunting, the president and vice-president, absent members
and "our glorious founder." Sinclair presented a seven-branch
candlestick to the collection of club plate; and Loring proposed and
carried a unanimous vote of thanks.

"And now a little Gilbert and Sullivan from Raney," ordained the
president, as the last speech came to an end and he led the way into the
next room.

Prising open a box of cigars, he sniffed it with the suspicion of
inexperience and proffered it diffidently to Oakleigh. O'Rane slid on to
the music-stool, while Deganway and Waring, Summertown and Eric sprawled
over the top of the piano with pipes doggedly gripped between their
teeth and with their chins resting on their arms, demanding of the
musician that he should give them "something with a chorus." Pentyre
withdrew to an armchair and fell asleep; the others formed themselves
into a circle round Loring and tried to talk against the music.


     "_Long years ago, fourteen, may be,
       When but a tiny babe of four,
     Another babe played with me,
       My elder by a year or more.
     A little child of beauty rare,
     With marvellous eyes and wondrous hair,
     Who, in my child-eyes, seemed to me
     All that a little child should be.
       Ah, how we loved, that child and I,
         How pure our baby joy!
       How true our love--and, by-the-by_,
         HE _was a little boy_!"


Waring, as "Angela" struck in with a deep, reproachful bass:


     "_Ah, old, old tale of Cupid's touch!
     I thought as much--I thought as much!_
       _He_ WAS _a little boy_"


"Patience" justified herself shyly.


     "_Pray don't misconstrue what I say--
     Remember, pray--remember, pray,
      He was a_ LITTLE _boy_"


O'Rane gave the "Wandering Minstrel" as a solo, followed by "A Pair of
Sparkling Eyes" and "Is Life a Boon?"

Loring turned approvingly to George Oakleigh.

"Raney's got a ripping voice," he said. "And he's in good form to-night.
All the same, we must be getting back, George, if you want to be in
London early to-morrow morning. It's very pleasant to see all these boys
again. Sad, too, very sad; the young lions with all their troubles
before them."

"I suppose this _is_ absolutely the end," sighed Sinclair. "Shall I see
you at Lord's, Jim?"

As the party began to break up, a chill of collective wistfulness
descended upon it, too strong for even O'Rane to dispel.

"Yes, if you don't want me to watch the play. But I'll _look_
intelligent."

It was still so early when the straggling escort convoyed Oakleigh and
Loring into the safety of their hotel that an hour was agreeably spent
by each in accompanying every one else home. Jack and Eric reached the
Broad, only to turn back and take Deganway to Grove Street, and from
Grove Street they all proceeded by Boar Lane to St. Aldates. Here O'Rane
protested that he could not go to bed until he had disposed of Sinclair
in comfort. At a quarter to twelve the whole party, intact and a little
bored, found itself on Magdalen Bridge; Jack and Eric broke away at a
run up Long Wall, and the others, led by O'Rane, traversed the High for
the fourth time that night.

The familiar rooms at the corner of the Turl were bare and disordered
with the signs of coming departure. The undulating floor of the
sitting-room was littered with paper and straw, with cases of books and
half-filled crates of pictures; on a dusting-sheet in one corner was
gathered a miscellany of broken pipes and perished pouches, tattered
note-books and sprung rackets, torn photographs, old shoes and a
policeman's helmet. Overflowing trunks and yawning Gladstone bags
projected from the bedrooms on to the narrow, gas-lit landing.

"Nice, comfortable quarters," observed Jack, as he looked for somewhere
to sit. "It was quite a good evening, you know. The part I liked best
was when it was all over. Oxford looks quite decent at night."

Eric had been trained to economy of enthusiasm in talking to Jack, who
would not have understood him if he had said that the Meadows on a May
morning or the Bodleian from All Souls, or the Trinity limes in leaf or
a pack of low, grey clouds racing across the sky behind Magdalen Tower
made him drunk with the consciousness of physical beauty. And he
wondered what he could ever have said to betray to O'Rane his secret
yearning for self-expression.

"Our last night in Oxford," he murmured.

"Oh, I think I shall come up occasionally and dine with the lads."

Eric said nothing; but the sense of incongruity with his surroundings
still oppressed him, and he privately resolved that he would not revisit
Oxford until he had done something to put himself at least on the level
of his friends, perhaps above them. That night he lulled himself to
sleep with a vision in which he burst on the world as a new Byron and
took London by storm in a night. Comely heads turned and whispered his
name, as he strode down Bond Street; the windows were full of his
photograph; when he entered a room there was a hush of reverence for the
new novelist, the rising playwright, the last wit and latest fashion.
All his day-dreams led him to the stage. There, after twisting the house
to laughter and tears, he would nonchalantly allow himself to be called
before the curtain; after three gossamer epigrams, he would retire with
a perfunctory bow. And there would follow supper on the stage for George
Oakleigh, who was only a subordinate minister, and Loring, who was only
governor of a colony, and Jack, who was only a successful barrister, and
Knightrider, who was only a subaltern in the Guards, and Summertown, who
was only a third secretary on leave from a distant legation, and
Pentyre, who had been born with a silver spoon in his mouth and had
_done_ nothing.... The vision was so stimulating that he resolved to
conjure it up again whenever he felt depressed.

They were roused in the morning by the cheerful and insistent voices of
a cavalcade which reined in under Jack's windows for the last
opportunity of wishing him good-bye.... Unembarrassed by spectators, he
made a leisurely toilet and refused to be intimidated by Eric's
prophecies that they would lose their train. "There is sure to be
another," he pointed out, as he finished brushing his short,
mouse-coloured hair and satisfied himself that he was smoothly shaved.
Undergraduate Oxford was all too careless of its appearance, and Jack
secretly believed that slovenliness in clothes was the visible sign of
depravity in morals. Colonel Waring had said so, basing himself on his
experience in the army. Jack respected his father's judgement, because
it so often coincided with his own.

He appeared in time to see Eric distributing the last tips and counting
the luggage as it was piled on top of the cabs. Waving good-bye to their
landlord and surrounded by their escort, they drove with self-conscious
solemnity to the station, cut a passage through the jungle of dogs and
cricket bags on the platform and bribed a porter to find an empty
first-class carriage and to lock the door after them. While Jack
possessed himself of the papers, Eric watched the familiar landmarks
fading one by one from view as the train steamed out of Oxford: Tom
Tower and the Cathedral spire, the reservoir and gasworks, the Abingdon
Road and Boar's Hill. The whistle of the engine as it entered Culham
sounded like the last chord in an operatic score. Oxford was over. He
remembered his shyness in first approaching it four years earlier and
wondered whether he would as quickly overcome the sense of loneliness
which filled his mind at the thought of working in London.

"When do your bar lectures start?" he asked with a drawl which attempted
to emulate his companion's easy carelessness.

Jack tossed aside the _Sportsman_ and yawned with lazy contentment.

"I haven't the least idea," he answered.

"I was thinking about rooms. I'm going up almost at once for a month on
trial with the _London News_. You've got no preferences?"

"I'd trust your taste and judgement anywhere."

Eric laughed a little impatiently.

"You--are--the--laziest--brute--I've ever come across. Are you going to
behave like this at the bar?"

Jack put up his feet and closed his eyes.

"It's not half a bad idea," he mused. "I believe, if I let it be known
that I didn't want briefs, the solicitors would form up at the early
door out of sheer perversity. Everything comes to him who doesn't much
care whether it comes or not. You see, as soon as you want anything, you
increase the demand and raise the price against yourself; it's a great
thing to have studied political economy. If I ever marry it will be some
one who's madly in love with me and whom I can just tolerate. If you're
fool enough to try it the other way round, you're simply selling
yourself into slavery.... As a matter of fact, I'm not lazy at all, but
I refuse to fuss about unimportant things. I had all this business out
with the guv'nor two years ago; I'd got to do something for a living,
and he had all sorts of gold-lace jobs in contemplation--clerk in the
House of Lords, agent to my uncle at Penley, private secretary to this
man and that. I said it wasn't good enough. If I couldn't go into the
army like him, I'd go somewhere where I could make money. We haven't any
particular influence in the city, so I chose the bar; and I've every
intention of making money there. _That's_ important. But I can't wear
myself out looking for digs when I've a kind friend to do it for me. And
I never try to do more than one thing at a time. During the next few
weeks I shall stay with several very pleasant people. Lady Knightrider's
invited me to Raglan as usual; and I'm going to Croxton with the
Pentyres; and to House of Steynes with Jim Loring; and to Ireland with
George Oakleigh. I wish you'd come, too; I've got such a good
country-house manor, I should like you to see it."

"I've got to work."

"So have I--every bit as much as you," Jack answered aggressively. "But
I never believe in meeting trouble half-way." His voice became drowsy,
and he composed himself for sleep. "Wake me, when we get to Reading."

Such philosophic detachment was a birthright, not to be bought or
borrowed; and Eric looked with a mixture of amusement and envy at his
slumbering friend. Some time in the autumn the bar term would begin,
there would be lectures and examinations, Jack would be called; later he
would pay a hundred pounds to an overworked junior for the privilege of
sitting in a pupil-room and confusing his head with such papers as he
was allowed to see; he would find chambers of his own and choose a
circuit and open it. And get together a practice--or fail. In the
meantime he slept with the sun shining on his face, trimly brushed and
shaved, smiling, rosy and round-cheeked as a plough-boy.

Eric could not so casually leave the future to look after itself; and he
was preparing, with a highly-strung man's dread of altercation, for a
conflict with his family. Dr. Lane's suggestions were purely
scholastic--a fellowship, if possible; failing that, a position on the
staff of one of the great public schools. Either would give him security
and a chance of earning money at once. There must be other things, of
course, but a philologist lived too much out of the world to give
practical advice.... Mrs. Lane favoured the Civil Service; but Eric,
from the editorial chair of _Cap and Bells_, had lately made journalism
the fabric of his day-dreams. During his last term the editor of the
_London News_ came to Oxford as guest of honour at a dinner of the
Sherbrooke Club; with eye professionally skinned for rising talent, he
had been first amused and then impressed by his young host; there
followed a vague proposal of an article, and Eric had been careful to
thrust his foot into the yielding doorway of the paper until a month's
trial was suggested.

A red-brick wilderness of villas warned him that they were running into
Reading. He prodded Jack awake, collected his luggage from the rack and
changed into the Basingstoke train. At Winchester a dog-cart, driven by
a stiff, military groom, and a pony trap, with an eight-year-old child
and her governess, awaited them. The luggage appeared unhurriedly and
was separated and stowed out of sight. Jack edged away after a shy
greeting to Sybil Lane, and a moment later they were heading through the
town for the Melton and Lashmar road.

"Roll round some time and discuss those digs," Eric shouted, as the
pony-trap turned from the high-crowned Melton road and jolted into the
twilight of unreclaimed woodland whose youngest trees were old and
firm-rooted before the New Forest had begun to show the first green of
its leaves.

"No, you come to me," Jack called back. "It's shorter for you, because
you walk so much faster."

As the low lines of the Mill-House came in sight, Mrs. Lane rose from
her chair by the studded front door, closed her book and waved a
handkerchief in welcome. For the first time in his life Eric felt that
this was no longer his home. Lashmar and Oxford belonged to a youth
wherein he was not required to look for a career or to trouble about
money and ambition. Within a week he would be occupying chambers of his
own and earning his own living.

"Well, dear Eric, I'm very glad to see you again. You're looking thin,"
said his mother.

"I'm all right, thanks. How are you, mother? Is the guv'nor working?"
asked Eric.

The need for action was strong upon him, and he had to explain once and
for all that he aimed at something more than security and a chance of
earning money at once.

"He's indoors."

Eric ducked his head and entered the long, low house. It was dark after
the glowing June sunlight outside, chillingly cold, too; from the back
of the house came the gentle murmur of the Bort with an unchanging drone
of falling water and a regular double creak from the mill-wheel, like
the slow cadence of a grandfather's clock. Through the open French
windows of the dining-room he sniffed the stream's familiar scent of
decay, half-smothered by the coarse reek of a blazing patch of
marigolds. Lashmar Mill-House was, for Eric, a place where ambition was
brought to die.

Without waiting to be disturbed, Dr. Lane rattled open the door of the
library and appeared in his shirt-sleeves, fleshless, tall and stooping,
with the gentle, brown eyes, black hair and aquiline nose which he had
handed down to Eric. An unkempt brown moustache drooped drearily on
either side of a long corncob pipe-stem, and his bony hands fidgetted
with an untanned strap round his waist.

"I want to have a talk with you," said Eric to his parents. "I'm
starting work next week with the _London News_. Jack and I are going to
live together."

Mrs. Lane nursed a well-founded suspicion that Jack preyed on her son's
scant vitality, but she shrank from confessing jealousy of his friend.

"Let's have a day or two to think things over," she proposed.
"Journalism is very wearing."

"But everything's arranged," Eric answered.

And next morning he rose from breakfast and started through the Forest
to Red Roofs and the task of pinning Jack down to the joint
establishment in London. Every step on the familiar road was a gesture
of farewell. There was a recognized point in the two-mile walk where
even the smoke of the Mill-House chimneys was invisible; another point
where he had to jump from stone to stone across a furlong of marsh; and
another where the forest thinned imperceptibly and vanished. Over the
tops of the last trees appeared a row of small-bricked Tudor chimneys,
dusty-grey in the sunshine; then the deep red tiles of the gabled roofs;
then the house itself, three-quarters covered in creeper that swung in
the breeze and veiled the narrow windows with a curtain of tangled
green. It was the perfect frame, Eric thought, for a perfect picture of
country toryism; a social analyst could not look at the house without
peopling it in imagination with the cadet branch of a rankly
conservative family--conventional, godly, sporting, military and, by a
freak, unexpectedly evangelical--in a word, with such a family as the
Warings. The colonel was returning home from an early gallop; he reined
in his horse and walked beside Eric to the gate of the stable-yard,
erect and dapper, with a dictatorial voice and a hint of ill-temper in
his bearing, his face weather-beaten and the white of his eyes faintly
tinged with yellow.

"Hullo! How are you? How's your father? How's the _magnum opus_?" he
asked, as he dismounted and walked towards the house. The three
questions never varied, and the colonel derived immense private
amusement from the thought that Dr. Lane had given thirty years of his
life to an Anglo-Saxon dictionary. "Jack tells me you're going to be a
journalist. Dog's life, I've always heard."

"I hope it won't be only journalism," said Eric, who was sensitive
enough to be daunted by the misgiving which his proposed career excited
first in his parents and now in an unbiased outsider. "I hope to do some
rather more original work as well."

"Original? That's bad! Seven-act tragedies and five-volume novels."
Colonel Waring had evolved the belief that young men could be coaxed out
of their natural shyness by well-timed jocosity. "You must excuse me,
I'm going to have my bath. You'll find every one in the smoking-room, I
expect."

Eric escaped with relief and ran Jack to earth in the faded dining-room,
where he was finishing a late breakfast. His sister ministered to his
wants, keeping the food warm in a chafing-dish, plying him with coffee
and fetching him clean plates. Mrs. Waring, plump, idle and
self-indulgent, was fondly overhauling her son's wardrobe when Eric
entered the room.

"Dear Jack, you can't go to Lady Knightrider's until you've ordered
yourself some new shirts. These are a disgrace," she protested.

Jack nodded without looking up from his paper.

"I know. I was waiting till I got home so that Agnes could write to my
man. I always forget his name. Hullo, Eric! You're bursting with energy
this morning. Have some capital kidneys and bacon?"

"I came to talk about where we are going to live," Eric explained,
shaking hands with Mrs. Waring.

"But I thought I'd left that to you? Why don't you and Agnes arrange
something?" Jack filled a pipe and strolled towards the open window.
"The guv'nor seems to have got me elected to the County Club; he rather
favours my trying to get a bedroom there."

Eric felt a twinge of dismay. It was only natural that a club should
have been found for Jack, as everything else was found; but Eric could
not afford to let him slip away. Perhaps the suggestion was only a
diplomatic hint that, if he were troubled further, he would follow the
line of least resistance.

"Oh, no! You're coming with me. If you've no preferences, Agnes and I
will go straight ahead."

He motioned to the girl, and they went out into the garden together.
Agnes Waring, in company with her mother, had been brought up to believe
that Jack was the one person in the house who mattered; though
intellectually head and shoulder his superior, she had been kept at home
from the day when Colonel Waring demonstrated incontrovertibly that he
could not afford to send her to Newnham if Jack was to be given an
adequate allowance at Oxford. Once isolated at home, she had nothing to
do but to run errands for her father and brother. At her suggestion it
was now arranged that Eric should look for rooms in the Temple.

Two days later he wrote that he had discovered an ideal set of chambers
in Pump Court, and for a week they worked to get it in order for Jack's
arrival in October. On the last afternoon Agnes looked on her completed
handiwork and sighed with satisfaction and envy.

"If you're not comfortable, you ought to be," she declared. "Men are
lucky creatures. I wish I could change places with you, Eric."

"So that you could wait on Jack?"

"I should like that, of course.... I hope Jack does well at the bar. You
will make him work, won't you?"

Eric shrugged his shoulders and looked into the silent little court.

"Can any one make him do anything he doesn't want to? I wonder whether
he was wise to choose the bar. I wonder whether I was wise to choose
journalism, whether any of us.... We had a very cheerful dinner on our
last night at Oxford. There were about twenty of us, and one man bet
that in ten years' time five of us would be dead and a certain number
bankrupt. A certain number more would have to cut the country. So far as
I remember only one was to make anything of a success. Not an
encouraging forecast."

"A very cynical forecast," Agnes distinguished.

"Will he win his bet?"

"Oh, a man of character can make anything of his life," she answered
with a glance of fleeting interest and affection which he did not see.

Eric recalled the extraordinarily young faces at the last dinner of the
Phoenix. Their outlook was frivolous and their talk trivial. He was
already feeling older in ten days.

"Do you get more than one man of character in twenty?" he asked.




CHAPTER TWO

THE COMING OF LILITH

     "What private man in England is worse off than the constitutional
     monarch?... I don't believe he may even eat or drink what he likes
     best: a taste for tripe and onions on his part would provoke a
     remonstrance from the Privy Council."

     BERNARD SHAW: "AN UNSOCIAL SOCIALIST."


The partnership in Pump Court lasted for more than four years. After
nicely judging the minimum of work which would carry him through his bar
examinations, Jack surprised his friends by closing the former life of
indolence with a snap. When assizes were on, he made an undiscriminating
round of the North Eastern circuit, conducting a dock defence as though
it were a state trial; in London he attended suburban county courts with
as much zeal as if he had been sent special. During the Long Vacation he
remained at the end of a wire; the Bar Point-to-Point was sacrificed
without a murmur, and invitations during his working day seldom
penetrated farther than the telephone in his clerk's room.

Once a year, indeed, he consented to meet his friends at dinner with
Loring, but they were contracting new ties and professing enthusiasms
which he did not share. Framlingham and Knightrider had been drilled
into the professional rigidity and limited outlook of junior subalterns
in crack regiments: Oakleigh was a politician, Pentyre a man of leisure;
Summertown had abandoned diplomacy for the army--the life of a public
danger for that of a private nuisance, as Valentine Arden, the novelist,
complained in a moment of exasperation. Deganway, on the same
authority, rested in the Foreign Office by day and spent tireless
nights adding to the number of those who addressed him by his Christian
name. O'Rane and Mayhew were abroad.

Had he ever felt the inclination, Jack professed to be without the time
or energy to take part in a social life of dinners and dances.
Exchanging one pose for another, he had ceased to be the arbiter of
"good form," as that is understood at Eton and New College, and was
aping the manners of an older generation; the new aloofness, like the
old, dispensed him from doing anything that he did not like and
gratified his faint but ineradicable sense of superiority. At night he
now chose the society of his own profession at the County Club and
steeped himself in forensic retorts discourteous and the aroma of
judicial wit; by day he chopped leading cases at luncheon in Hall and
smoked one cigarette in the Gardens, striding up and down with his chin
deep on his white slips and his hands locked beneath the tails of his
coat. He was too busy for week-end parties, too old to take his sister
to dances.

"It doesn't do to be seen lunching at your club too much," he explained
to Eric, when at the end of four years he had decided that the
inconvenience of moving was less than that of continuing to live in the
Temple. "People think you've no work. Trouble is, I'm getting no
exercise. I think I shall have to move away so that I can get a walk in
the morning."

Eric received the news with little surprise and hardly more regret. Jack
was in chambers before he himself got up in the morning and in bed
before the _London News_ began to print off. The dissolution would only
cost them an occasional half-hour's talk in the early evening and a rare
Sunday walk when Jack was not staying at Red Roofs.

"Nineteen nine, nineteen five," Eric calculated. "We're twenty-six and
we've had four years here. By the way, are you dining with Jim
to-night? Give him my love and say I wish I could come too. It's no
good, if I have to run away after the fish. I remember your father
telling me that journalism was a dog's life. He never spoke a truer
word."

"But you've done extraordinarily well," Jack insisted, rousing
reluctantly from the contemplation of his own career. "What are you?
Dramatic critic and assistant literary editor? And you're making a dam'
sight more than I am. I've decided to give up this twopenny ha'penny
criminal work. Otherwise I shall get left in a rut."

Eric was thinking less of his routine work than of four dog's-eared
plays which he had sent the round of the London managers; a critic was
ever one who could not create.

"The right people have died at the right time," he explained. "It's not
quite what I hoped, though."

Jack knocked out his pipe and left Eric to finish his early dinner by
himself. It was the anniversary of their last Phoenix Club gathering at
Oxford; and for the last four years a dozen or more of them had
contrived to meet at the end of every June. So far, O'Rane's pessimistic
forecast had halted short of fulfilment; none was dead, none was
bankrupt, though Draycott was living at Boulogne with a warrant in
readiness for him, if he ever returned to England. Sinclair was married,
but the others had not yet found time for triumph or disaster. If Eric
enjoyed a good salary and a responsible position, they had been bought
with hard work, unsleeping contrivance and two severe illnesses; the
instant spectacular effect of Lord Byron's descent upon London remained
a day dream.

"You'll be able to find some one to take on my room, won't you?" asked
Jack, with fleeting compunction, as he reappeared from his bedroom in
shirt and trousers.

"I shan't try," answered Eric. "My books are overflowing into every
room.... And I loathe strangers as much as you do."

Like Jack, he had soon found that it was impossible to play on equal
terms with men who did not pretend to work for a living; and Eric's rare
excursions from the Temple led him only to the supper-table of the
Thespian Club and occasional luncheons in Chelsea. In the days of his
apprenticeship to the _London News_, he had won the friendship of Martin
Shelley by attending first nights when, as happened three times out of
five, the dramatic critic was indisposed. For ultimate reward he
succeeded to a coveted position; in payment by instalments he received a
careless regard and full-blooded advice on drama and life. When
Shelley's ill-used brain and nerves had been flogged to activity and not
yet drowned, he would talk of theatrical art as a master. "Don't forget
what I'm telling you, Lane," he would say through a cloud of smoke and
whiskey fumes. "I've taught you what construction is--and dialogue--and
technique--and characterization. You could write a _successful_ play
to-morrow, but you must wait until you've filled a sketch-book or two.
You don't know live men and women yet; you're too much the maiden of
bashful fifteen. The public isn't ready for naturalism; so, if you want
to kill theatricality--which is what I've tried to do all my life--you
must do it with a play that's overwhelming. I could teach you a hell of
a lot, if I had time.... When I'm gone, fire in your application for my
berth so that no one else gets in before you and yet leave just enough
margin to keep the old man from thinking you pushed me under the wheels.
Not that I'd blame you, we've all got to make our way. But the old man
finds me rather an asset. My poor wife runs teetotal salons in Chelsea
on the strength of my name. I'll take you to one. You'll fill a
sketch-book with society smatterers alone."

Eric went from courtesy and stayed from compassion. Mrs. Shelley, the
faded, pretty daughter of a Cambridge tutor who had left her a few
hundreds a year, threw herself tacitly on his mercy, as though he had
come to blackmail her with sordid tales of her husband's degradation.
They had no children; and she had set herself to make a life of her own.
So long as she could fill her house with the North Street school of
poets, the Fitzroy Square impressionists--and all who came humbly to her
for a chance of meeting them--she shut her eyes to her husband's
excesses and infidelities. He was required to act as decoy for new
literary and artistic lions, to appear at one party out of five freshly
shaved and decently habited, to lend her a hand when she could climb no
longer unaided and to accept a rare invitation in return to lunch with
Lady Poynter or the Duchess of Ross, when "the society smatterers"
wanted him to write up a charity _matinée_ or the amateur performance of
a Restoration comedy.

Before and after her husband's unheroic death under a newspaper van,
Mrs. Shelley was Eric's single link with the world outside Fleet Street
and the Thespian Club. Jack's white waist-coat and button-hole were
occasionally a galling remainder of his own bondage.

"God! this is a life!" he broke out, as he looked at the clock and
brought his dinner to an untimely end. "I never dine anywhere; I don't
speak to a woman from one year's end to another----"

"Nor do I. It only encourages them," Jack returned, as he filled his
case with cigarettes and gave a final polish to his hat.

"It would bring a little colour into one's life," said Eric, looking
with disfavour at the grimly celibate sitting-room.

"Some people don't know when they're well off. I _can't_ dance and I've
nothing to say to the modern girl. Why they won't take 'no' for an
answer I can never make out. I suppose you _like_ women, Eric. Every
time you go to a theatre, you come back raving about somebody's dress or
pearls or eyes--honestly, you do! It's like a fashion article. I'm
beyond all that. I don't mind 'em when they're as old as Lady
Knightrider; they've ceased to be exacting then, and you can count on
them to see that you're comfortable and that you have plenty of
bath-salts. But the vulgar little atrocities of nineteen! I'm not
ragging; if you compare a girl like my sister Agnes, who's twenty-two,
with the hoydens who think they constitute London Society! Brains of
spidgers and manners of factory hands! In my day.... However, they're
all pure young girlhood to you. The Lord preserve you in your innocence
and keep you from marrying one of them! I must fly!"

He ran down the stairs and hailed a taxi at the top of Middle Temple
Lane. Since the downfall of Draycott, the Phoenix Club dinners had lost
their old strict form and were no longer confined to members of the
club. As Jack entered the hall, Valentine Arden, a satirical
consumptive, was divesting himself of a violet-lined cloak, smoothing
his long straight hair back from his forehead, patting the tie that
wound twice round his collar and adjusting the straps of his trousers
under his insteps. There were other friends of a younger generation whom
Loring had acquired in his easy-going progress, but the older members
were meagrely represented.

The first arrivals were already in the library, exchanging fragmentary
news of the absentees, when their host appeared with a preoccupied frown
and a jejune apology for his lateness.

"Where's Pentyre?" he asked, as he looked round the room. "Here, my
friend, you'll get yourself into hot water, if you give any more parties
like your last one."

"What's the row?" asked Pentyre in surprise.

"Well, I won't mention names," Loring answered, "but one of your guests
has come to grief as the result of your last little gathering at
Croxton. I don't say that it's _your_ fault," he added, "except that you
ought to exercise more general control in your own house. There was a
certain amount of gambling, wasn't there? Some fairly big sums of money
changed hands? One man lost who couldn't afford to lose, I believe. It
may have been absence of mind or it may have been the only way out of
the difficulty, but the man in question signed his father's name on a
cheque instead of his own. The son is now on his way to one of those
'thoughtful islands where warrants never come.' D'you mean this is all
news to you?"

Pentyre tugged at his moustache and shook his head in wide-eyed wonder.
The only sign of discord that he could remember had occurred between his
mother and Loring's own cousin, Barbara Neave. On the first night she
had stayed up after Lady Pentyre had shepherded the women of the party
to bed. In the morning there had been a gentle reprimand, but Lady
Barbara ignored it and persisted in staying up as long as any one would
stay up with her. She or one of the men--Pentyre could not remember--had
started poker, which they played until two or three o'clock in the
morning.

"I've never heard a word of it," he said. Less than a year had passed
since he succeeded to his father's title and the ownership of Croxton
Hall. The social life of the county had been brightened; but there had
been one or two regrettable mishaps, and Loring always seemed to hear of
them. "How did you get hold of the story?" he asked with a touch of
bluster.

"From the man's father in the first place; then from my cousin Barbara.
We're supposed to be responsible for her, and I tackled her about it.
She won nearly five hundred pounds from this wretched boy. Of course, I
made her disgorge it; but the fellow may be ruined for life. I told her
so pretty plainly, and she seemed to take it as an enormous compliment."

"Who was the man?" asked Pentyre.

"Well, it wasn't your fat friend Webster, and it wasn't John Gaymer;
they played poker before they could walk. I think you can guess now.
Really, Pentyre, if you admit people of that kind to your house.... That
girl will be the death of my poor mother. Thank goodness, Crawleigh's on
his way home! D'you know, in the four years we've been nominally in
charge of her we've been asked to have her removed from three different
schools? Once it was for holding a table-turning _séance_ in her bedroom
after lights-out, and twice simply because they didn't know what to do
with her. She's a holy terror. But I've got rid of her now, so let's
have some dinner and forget all about her."

The three-hour discussion, which had been brought to an end by the
dressing-gong, was only the latest of a long succession of family
councils; but hitherto Lady Barbara had split the court of enquiry into
factions and escaped between the feet of the disputants. On this, as on
earlier occasions, she had won over her two aunts, but Loring proved
himself to be of sterner stuff. "It's no use her saying that it's just
as if she hadn't a father and mother of her own! She has,--and they'll
discover it to their cost," he said. "The immediate point is that, if
Barbara stays in this house, I go out of it. She's not in the least
sorry. You think she's crying, but she isn't. I've seen her do that a
dozen times when she wants to get round the servants. It's time some one
else had a turn of her. If you believe in her repentance, Aunt Kathleen,
you're welcome to her." While he dressed for dinner, the girl's clothes
were packed and disposed in Lady Knightrider's car. She herself came to
his door with a woebegone face, begging him to forgive her, for life
with Lady Knightrider involved discipline, religious exercises and
banishment for most of the year to Scotland or Monmouthshire. He refused
and felt so small-minded at using his authority against a child that it
was a relief to vent his ill-humour on a man.

"This is all very well," said Pentyre stolidly, as they sat down to
dinner, "but I refuse to be bully-ragged because you can't keep your own
cousin in order."

"I can't make out how you can be seen in the same street as Webster and
Gaymer," answered Loring. "To me they're everything that's wrong in the
life of the present day. Webster, Pennington, Lady Maitland,
Erckmann----"

"You're so infernally narrow-minded."

"If it's narrow-minded to dislike a noisy little clique of rich cads who
try to dominate society by being one degree more outrageous than anybody
else."

A murmur of dissent made itself heard; but Loring warmed to his work,
and the party divided into two camps and joined battle over the bodies
of their friends. It was a stimulating encounter and afforded
unrestricted opportunity for personal attack. For several years there
had been raging a secret warfare which Valentine Arden compared with a
tournament in a dark room between blindfolded combatants who did not
know why they were fighting. On the one side was a group of influential
and highly respected families led by the Lorings, the Knightriders and
the Pebbleridges, on the other the cosmopolitans. They were an
ill-defined host without leader or tenets. In every other capital of the
world they had found their place as a wealthy and cultured class,
excluded from the houses of the historic aristocracy but forming an
artistic aristocracy of their own. In Paris, Vienna and New York Sir
Adolf Erckmann was a social power; he would not, indeed, be found with
the Princesse de Brise or Mrs. Irwin T. Churton, but he was known and
reverenced in a world of music and pictures which did not know Mrs.
Irwin T. Churton or the Princesse de Brise by name.

In England there were no such recognizable lines of demarcation.
Erckmann was received by the Duchess of Ross, because she wanted him to
subsidise a French theatre for London and hoped that he might be induced
to take Herrig on a long lease; he was blackballed for the County Club,
because the committee disliked his race, his accent, his friends and his
too frequent appearance in the Divorce Court. With one foot in a
Promised Land, from which the society of Paris, Vienna and New York had
excluded him, Sir Adolf lifted the second; it was at this point that the
battle was joined, and both sides fought blindly. The cosmopolitans were
not always fortunate in their manners or their allies; and to Loring
their very toleration meant the invasion of society by "a noisy clique
of rich cads." Their antagonists were no less unfortunate in a few of
their prejudices; and the cosmopolitans claimed with some reason to be
fighting against a Philistine oligarchy. As there was not even a common
ground of dispute, the warfare degenerated into indecisive skirmishes,
and the discussion of it into embittered personalities.

"They're a bit hairy about the heel," said Summertown, "but they _are_
alive, and some of their shows are great fun. Val can bear me out."

Arden assumed non-moral detachment and explained that the novelist, like
the sanitary inspector, entered all houses with professional
impartiality.

"They've no sense of responsibility and not much feeling for decency. I
don't want to make too much of this business," said Loring, as acrimony
slipped out of control and threatened the peace of the dinner. "But I
was thoroughly stirred up over that wretched boy and I felt it was time
to make a stand."

"What are you going to do?" demanded Pentyre.

"Well, I've been knocking about in London for half a dozen years,
watching these gentry, and I can see that _we're_ not assimilating
_them_. The egregious Pennington, that young swine Webster----"

"Both of whom I've met in this house," interposed Pentyre.

"I know. One gets roped in. Some one dragged me along to their parties,
so I had to invite them back. But I don't go any more. The danger _now_
is that they'll assimilate us. I went through my mother's book a short
time ago and put a mark against certain names; and in future those
people will not be invited or admitted to the house. No doubt they'll
get on very happily without me, but so much mud is thrown at us in the
ordinary way of business that I can't afford to put up gratuitous
targets for the amusement of the gutter-press. Honestly, Pentyre, you'd
feel rather small, if the _Sunday Budget_ or _Morton's Weekly_ came out
with a 'Society Gambling Scandal.' Wouldn't you?"

Pentyre adroitly evaded the question and continued his own bombardment.

"Is your cousin's name in the condemned list?" he asked.

"It will be, if I have any trouble from her again. What I can't get
people to see is that we're hanging on by our eyelids to such position
as we've got. A hundred years ago we were a class apart and above
criticism; nobody thought the worse of us, if we appeared at the theatre
with a notorious cocotte or drank ourselves gently under the table. Our
present accursed democracy was unborn. But, when once that came into
existence, we could only keep ourselves from proscription by saying very
loudly that we were still a class apart and were setting a standard.
Democracy's too lazy and snob-ridden to be very exacting, but it's had
its eye on us. George and his friends are conspiring to hamstring the
poor, decent House of Lords; and, if they succeed, the rot won't stop
there. I find life very pleasant, and it isn't worth a tremendous
upheaval simply for the amusement of behaving like a Bank Holiday
crowd.... Let's go and smoke in the library."

Under the tranquilling influence of tobacco, Loring recovered his
good-humour and the controversy flickered to extinction. There was a
short attempt to revive and explore the scandal of Croxton Hall, but
Pentyre was secretly frightened by the possibility of seeing his name in
the papers; and he knew from long experience that there was no surer way
of achieving notoriety than that of telling anything in confidence to
those of his friends whose social importance was measured by their range
and freshness of gossip.

"You're _too_ provoking!" Deganway protested shrilly, pinning him in an
embrasure and flapping irritably with his eye-glass. "You know it's not
fair to tell a story without giving all the names."

"I didn't tell the story," Pentyre pointed out.

"But I've asked Jim, and he won't say. Val! Do make him tell! He's being
so tiresome."

Arden shrugged his shoulders and, with the outward frozen detachment
which had become second nature to him, retired to a table by himself
where he called for China tea and produced a pack of patience cards.
There were other means of investigating the poker episode, and he had
decided that it was more than time for the social satirist to make
Barbara Neave's acquaintance. For the merits of the controversy he cared
nothing, but his sense of humour was maliciously stirred in
contemplation of a self-consciously decorous clan stung into undignified
curvettings by a gadfly girl of sixteen. Though he ostentatiously
refused to be drawn into partisanship, the stiff blamelessness of the
interlocked Catholic families occasionally oppressed him; and the
material outcome of Loring's tirade was to stimulate his desire to
explore the domestic dissension at first hand.

"One feels that Lady Barbara would repay study," he observed to Jack, as
they left the house together. "She is a new element in our worn-out
social system."

"You must study her for me," answered Jack. "I agree with every word Jim
said. I'm too busy to go out much, but _some_ of the people I meet....
My father says that twenty years ago they wouldn't have been tolerated.
But since the South African diamond boom and all the new money.... Of
course, the girl just wants slapping."

"You have met her? No? One hoped that you would have effected the
introduction."

"I avoid the present-day girl like the plague," said Jack.

The following afternoon Arden called in South Street with a book which,
he assured Lady Knightrider, he had promised to lend her. Lady Barbara
was at Hurlingham with Webster; but, as she was expected back to tea, he
planted himself immovably in a chair and awaited her return. When at
last she came, he found her utterly unlike the rebellious school-girl of
his imagination. A childhood spent in public had matured her beyond her
years so that she had the looks of twenty-two and the self-possession of
forty. Instead of studying her, he found himself being studied; slender
and lithe as a boy, she was tall enough to look down on him. He found
her haggard with restlessness and a life of nervous excitement; her
tired eyes, ever changing in size and colour, brightened as she took in
his affectations of dress and mannerisms of speech; he felt that she was
harmonizing her pose with his and that her vitality and quickness had
already given her an advantage.

"I've read all your books. Witty, but very artificial," she said, as
they were introduced. "The French do that sort of thing more easily, but
you've not read much French, have you? There are several things I want
to discuss with you. A play I've written." She drew off her gloves
jerkily, splitting the thumb of one. "Did you come to see me or Aunt
Kathleen? And you know Jim, of course. I want your opinion of him."

"_He_ knows _me_," Arden distinguished, as he watched her carelessly
calculated movements. Within sixty seconds she had shewn herself
full-face and in profile, with a hat and again with two tapering hands
smoothing a mass of wayward hair. He had seen her wistful and tired, as
she came into the room, and again alert and galvanised at finding him
there. Yet she had certainly noticed his hat in the hall; probably she
had read the name and thought out her attack as she came upstairs. He
was charmed by her conscientious artifice.

"You talk just like Fatty Webster's imitations of you! That's so clever
of you! But why do you do it? You've arrived. There's no need to be
eccentric now. But perhaps you've grown into your own pose? In that case
you're right to express yourself in your own medium. Life is simply
self-expression, isn't it? The discovery of the Ego, the refinement of
the Ego, the presentation of the Ego." She nodded quickly at a portrait
of her father in Garter robes. "It would never do to be submerged by
that kind of thing. I'm always so sorry for Royalty."

As he hesitated for an answer, she put her hands to her throat,
unclasped her necklace and threw it out of the window. Arden sprang
across the room and looked down into the street to make sure that he had
seen aright. A District Messenger-boy approached, whistling; he explored
the necklace with his foot and finally picked it up.

"My dear, what _are_ you doing?" cried Lady Knightrider in amazement.

"I went flying to-day," Lady Barbara answered, as she poured herself out
a cup of tea.

"Flying!"

"Yes, I didn't tell you beforehand, because I was afraid of a scene.
Besides, I should have done it, whatever you said. Johnnie Gaymer
promised to take me up. I haven't been near Hurlingham. Don't bother,
Mr. Arden."

"But why----?" Valentine began, startled out of his invertebrate
placidity by a sensationalist more original than himself.

"Because I wasn't killed. I love that necklace more than anything in
the world. It was given me when I was recovering from typhoid and every
one thought I _must_ die.... The engine stopped in mid-air, and I made
sure I was going to be killed. Johnnie thought so, too. I felt I owed
something to Nemesis.... I've known you by sight all this season, Mr.
Arden. You weren't at the Poynters last night, by any chance? I couldn't
go, because I was in disgrace. And Lord Poynter sent his car this
morning with a wreath of lilies, because he was afraid I must be dead."

The short, disjointed sentences, flung out rapidly as she helped herself
to cake, demanded all Arden's attention and left her aunt far behind.
Lady Knightrider hurried belatedly to the window and then stretched her
hand to the bell. Lady Barbara took her arm soothingly and led her back
to her chair.

"Your disgrace was our diversion," said Arden.

"Did Jim tell you about it," asked Lady Barbara. "How like him! I'm
beginning to think he's naturally cruel. Or unnaturally. Conscious
cruelty is what divides men from animals.... Aunt Kathleen, if you fuss,
I shall scream; I've been badly frightened and I hated throwing it
away.... I'd sooner die than hurt any one.... Have you ever flown? I've
wanted to for years; I felt it would be a new sensation. Won't it be
awful when we've done so much that there are no sensations left? Aunt
Kathleen's quite irrepressible, isn't she?"

After an interval of indecision Lady Knightrider had hurried out of the
room and downstairs. Arden looked at his watch and prepared to follow
her.

"One always lies down before dinner," he explained.

"You're going--just when we've been left a moment together?" she asked
with a smile that had less of amusement than of artistic sympathy.
"That's a brilliant effect. Not one man in a million would have thought
of it. We must meet again. Why did you come at all? What had you heard
about me? I don't recommend Aunt Kathleen's cigarettes."

She offered him her case, and Arden lighted one.

"A poker party was mentioned at dinner last night," he told her. "One
casually wondered who the man was."

"Claude Arkwright. Jim says I've got his soul on my conscience. Any more
questions?"

Arden laughed and for a moment shed all his mannerisms.

"Yes. What's behind all this?" he asked.

"All this what? All this me? What I do?" Lady Barbara met him
unreservedly on his own chosen ground of sincerity, and her voice and
smile changed. "_I'm_ behind it. Come, you're quite clever enough to
understand. I want to enjoy life and know life and meet people and read
books and do things.... I won't be treated like a minor Royalty. The
world's full of Jim Lorings. Wherever I go, some one says 'Not there,
not there, my child.' And then! _Then_ I go quite mad! You'll like me, I
think. Good-bye."

"Good-bye, Lady Lilith."

"Lilith? Who was she? Wasn't she Adam's first wife?"

"She existed before Man tasted of the tree of knowledge; before good and
evil came into the world," said Arden impressively.

"_I_ remember. I hope you won't become sententious. That went out with
the last of the Wilde plays."

Lady Knightrider was standing in the hall, plump, white-haired and
perplexed, peering through her lorgnettes into the street. The
messenger-boy had disappeared, and the necklace with him.

"He will take it to Scotland Yard," predicted Arden reassuringly. "And
then Lady Barbara will throw it away again for fear of cheating Nemesis.
One despaired of meeting honest superstition in these degenerate latter
days."

"I've never heard----," began Lady Knightrider. One crime jostled
another and confused her mind. "Crawleigh will be furious if he finds
out she's been flying."

Arden walked back to the Ritz, wondering whether the fuller study of
Barbara Neave justified him in giving away points by betraying interest
in her. His preliminary diagnosis discovered energy with no outlet,
premature experience with unsated curiosity; public life held no mystery
or attraction for the only daughter of a viceroy; unless Lord Crawleigh
set himself to gain a dukedom, there were no social heights to scale;
the family was too rich for her to be troubled about money; and so
energy sought its outlet in making and receiving new sensations. This
was well enough at sixteen or seventeen, but after another five years
emotion-hunting...? He was still undecided when he encountered her a
week later at Covent Garden, sitting with Summertown and Webster on a
sofa outside Lady Maitland's box and having her fortune told by Sonia
Dainton. Her setting was of more interest than her occupation, for
Summertown and Miss Dainton were leaders of the younger cavalry in the
cosmopolitan army; they echoed the noise and reflected the insistent
glare of Sir Adolf Erckmann without sharing his solid prestige as a
critic and patron of art. Webster was a sodden, characterless youth, who
bought his way into toleration which he mistook for popularity. Arden
wondered what Loring would say if he found his cousin in such company.

"The discovery of the Ego?" he enquired.

"Hullo! We're having such fun!" said Lady Barbara. "Miss Dainton's
wonderful! I've had two bad illnesses, and something is going to happen
soon which will change the whole of my life. I'm going to have an
enormous success of some kind. And then an enormous tragedy. I'm very
artistic and full of intuition. I've got a strong will and a great
influence over people. Go on, Sonia."

"The line of heart--give me your other hand a minute," said Sonia
Dainton. "Yes, the line of heart hasn't begun yet. When it _does_!"

Lady Barbara withdrew her hand abruptly.

"I don't believe you know anything about it, Sonia. Are there any good
palmists in London, Mr. Arden? I collect fortune-tellers. Let's go
somewhere to-morrow. Father will be back in England next month, and then
I shan't be able to do anything."

"You believe in all this?" Arden asked, remembering her action with the
necklace and wondering how far she was trying to beat him at his own
game of extravagant effects.

"Oh, implicitly. Don't you? And I do want to find out all about the
future. Let's devote a week to it and try _every one_."

"I might spare you two days," he answered, as he passed on to his box.

At the end of the first Arden's curiosity was satisfied. Lady Barbara
was a study in crude contrasts. While she pained her family by sceptical
indifference to religion, there seemed nothing that she would not
believe, provided only that it did not come to her from the lips of a
priest. As they drove from one clairvoyant to another, she revealed a
curious knowledge of necromancy; she had read every book that she could
find on Satanism and the Black Mass and would talk of astrology and the
significance of dreams with grave conviction. But the cult of the
fortune-tellers was inspired primarily by a desire to discuss herself
and to be discussed. A single morning exhausted the possibilities of
amusement from such a source, and her companions were less diverting
than herself; Sonia Dainton dropped out when she found herself accorded
second place, Summertown played a thin stream of monotonous jocosity
over the survivors, and Webster fell asleep with an air of duty well
done when he had provided luncheon for every one, discovered a new
clairvoyant and driven the party to her at breakneck speed in the latest
of the racing cars whose purchase constituted the overt business of his
life.

They were to have met again with Lady Knightrider at the end of the
season; but, when Arden and Jack Waring entered the train for Raglan,
Loring awaited them with a grave face and pointed to a column notice in
his paper, headed "Serious Flying Accident."

"Thank Heaven, it happened when she was with her people and not with
me," he began. "That's my silly little fool of a cousin again! She got
that fellow Gaymer down to Crawleigh Abbey; and, when her parents' backs
were turned, they went off for a jaunt to Salisbury Plain. The
manoeuvres were on, so they brightened them up by flying so low that the
inspecting general bolted and the troops scattered in panic. There'll be
the deuce to pay for that alone. Then, on the way back, they came down
in the New Forest and got hung up on a tree. Gaymer's broken a
collar-bone and two ribs; and Barbara's badly shaken and bruised. Here's
an opportunity for your literary genius, Valentine; help me to draft a
telegram of sympathy which will shew at the same time that I think she
richly deserved all she got."

The accident was Lady Barbara's formal introduction to England.
Throughout 1909 there was an official pretence that she was not yet out;
she would still be no more than seventeen when her parents returned, and
both Lady Loring and Lady Knightrider refused to present her before
that. The baptism of blood in the New Forest made her name and face
known to every reader of every illustrated paper. "The ideal _début_ for
her," exclaimed Loring in disgust. "I can see her spending the rest of
her life trying to live up to it."

Four days later he came into Arden's room with a letter which he threw
onto the bed with a grim smile.

_"Dearest Jim,_

_"It was sweet of you to send me that wire. I've strained my back and
covered myself with bruises, but it was worth it. Fear is a wonderful
sensation; I believe it's the strongest of all the emotions. I certainly
feel that I shall never again get that sublimated degree of fear. I got
Death. (D'you spell Death with a capital D? I always do--from respect;
Death will outlast God.) You heard I had concussion? I knew I was dying
and that one step would carry me over the dividing-line. There was a
black curtain, like a drop-scene; and I knew that, as soon as that
lifted, I should be dead and on the other side. I said to myself I
wouldn't die. When I came to, the doctor was frowning terribly, and I
heard him mutter, 'Just about time, too, young lady.' I wonder whether
you'd be sorry, if I died, Jim. When I had appendicitis at Simla, you
couldn't get through the streets for the people who were waiting to hear
how the operation had gone off. The wires were blocked for three days
with enquiries._

_"I'm to be allowed out at the end of the week and hope to be well
enough to come to you at House of Steynes with father and mother._

_Your loving Barbara."_

Arden smiled as he handed back the letter.

"Characteristic," he commented.

"Oh, very! Not a word about Gaymer. Or the feelings of her parents.
She's had two new sensations and she can't be sure whether she'd get as
good a press for her death here as in India. Crawleigh will have his
hands full. You've not met him? Well, it's one thing to govern India and
another to keep a little devil like that in order."

A month later, still in the detached spirit of the social satirist,
Arden allowed himself to be introduced to Lady Barbara's parents in
Scotland. He was anxious to study her family setting, for Lord Crawleigh
was already beginning to be regarded primarily as the father of his own
daughter and only in afterthought as a distinguished public servant.
Fifteen years earlier he had first shewn the administrative brilliance
and incapacity to work with colleagues which impel a man to a
viceroyalty or the leadership of a disgruntled party of one on the
cross-benches. In Canada, in Ireland and in India he had been publicly
admired and privately abhorred. Without the backing of long established
authority, however, he was thrown on his own resources; and paper-work
genius proved itself powerless without palpable force of character.
Over-sensitive to his personal dignity, he treated his wife and children
with the pomp and despotism of Government House; according to Loring's
description, councils were convened to decide what train should bear
them from London to Crawleigh Abbey; the cook's shortcomings were
minuted to Lady Crawleigh for observations and appropriate action; the
servants were pinned to the straight path of their duties by
proclamation, and the household books were scrutinized with an
exhaustive particularity not vouchsafed to the preparation of an Indian
budget.

It was the self-protective assertion of a man sensitive to his physical
inadequacy. Lord Crawleigh's domed head, ascetic face and rimless
spectacles were impressively intellectual, but he degenerated as he went
lower. The bottom half of his face was confused with a straggling blonde
moustache intended for an operatic viking; his body was too short, his
legs too long; and, when he became excited, his voice rose querulous and
shrill. But the viceregal manner carried him far. Lord Neave and his two
younger brothers had been taught obedience at Eton; Lady Crawleigh, as
her passivity and plumpness hinted, suffered from a family streak of
laziness, which she shared with Lady Loring and Lady Knightrider, and
from twenty-five years' experience of her husband, which she could share
with no one. It required Barbara's temperamental irreverence and gipsy
craving for liberty to break down the imposing forms and spirit of her
father's rule. The boys, who could be caned while she remained immune,
sheltered themselves behind their younger sister; and, with a woman's
genius for tactical alliances and strategical choice of ground, she
explored and profited by the weak places in the enemy's system of
defences. Her father's public position and private dignity were her
strongest accessories. "She can always blackmail him by threatening a
scandal," as Loring explained.

So long as she had her own way, Arden discovered a rule of peace and
mutual affection. Lady Barbara hated to be on bad terms with any one;
and her parents were humanly, if reluctantly, proud of her. Throughout
his visit to House of Steynes, she dominated the party by her vitality
and versatile charm. Loring was in the early stages of devotion to Sonia
Dainton and disappeared as long and often as possible to escape his
mother and sister, who were trying to avert an engagement, and Lady
Dainton, who was forcing it to a head; and in his absence Arden watched
Lady Barbara posing herself in the middle of the stage, methodically
sharing herself among the guests and holding her own with all. It was
the fruit of early years, during which she had lived consistently in
public, meeting men of every profession and country, listening,
remembering, learning and giving her best in return. She shewed a nice
appreciation of personality and varied her attitude with her audience.
In talking to Arden himself she still gravely met pose with pose and
extravagance with extravagance.

"D'you feel you know me adequately now?" she asked him on the last
night. "Mr. Deganway told me you were going to write a book about me."

"And you replied, 'Only one?' It is unfortunate that Meredith has
already taken 'The Egoist' as a title."

Lady Barbara turned slowly, as though he were a mirror, and gave him
time to appreciate her slender height and lithe figure. One hand
directed attention to her hair, as she brushed away a curl from her
forehead; and she looked at him sideways with her fingers pressed
against one cheek so that he should see the size and deep colour of her
eyes.

"D'you think I'm unduly vain?" she asked.

"Genius demands vanity. But one comes back to the old question: what is
behind it? One thinks of you in six years' time and asks oneself what
will be left. You have been everywhere, Lady Lilith, and met every one
whom the world considers worth meeting--they were not too numerous?
No?--and you have read so much.... In six years' time you will be the
best known woman in London, but there will be nothing left for you to
do."

"There are always new experiences. When I had that accident in the New
Forest, a man came from the other end of England, because he'd fallen in
love with my photograph. He said he couldn't marry any one else after
seeing me."

"It is surfeiting to be easily loved," Arden sighed. "One does not shoot
sitting birds. Some day, perhaps, Lady Lilith will meet a man who goes
to the other end of England to avoid her. That will be a new experience.
She will follow him, of course. To find a heart will be the greatest
experience of all. One will watch your career with interest."

"And describe it? Or are you afraid to risk my friendship?"

"The only book that could offend Lady Lilith is one in which she does
not appear."

For the next six months Arden was compelled to study her through the
press. Loring went abroad for the winter in his yacht, Lady Knightrider
withdrew to Scotland, and Lord Crawleigh moved his seat of government
from Berkeley Square to Hampshire. Despite the rival claims of a general
election, however, she secured creditable space in the daily and weekly
papers. A ball at Crawleigh Abbey was followed by an abortive rumour of
her engagement to her cousin Lord John Carstairs. A prompt and
unambiguous disclaimer was issued, but the findings of the commission,
which Lord Crawleigh appointed under his own chairmanship to investigate
his daughter's conduct, were such that he deemed it prudent to transfer
his seat of government from Hampshire to Cap Martin. A series of
photographs from the Riviera correspondent of the 'Catch' shewed her
walking demurely with her father, playing tennis and participating less
demurely in a battle of flowers and a fancy-dress carnival.

In the spring of 1910 public interest was deflected to another branch of
the family, for Loring's engagement to Sonia Dainton was announced. But
by that time, as Arden pointed out, a man had only himself to blame if
he did not know all that was to be known of Lady Barbara Neave.

"How poor Jim must loathe all this self-advertising," said Jack Waring,
when he met Arden at the County Club to discuss the engagement. "I've
never even seen her, but I've had _her_ and her _hats_ and her _clothes_
thrust under my eyes by these infernal papers till I'm sick of them.
She's talented, she's charming. I know all the things she said to all
the big pots in India. When she is twenty-one she comes in for all her
godfather's money on condition that she marries a Catholic.... I suppose
there must be a public for this kind of stuff, or the papers wouldn't
print it; but she's on the level of a musical-comedy star. Arden, my
lad, I'm an old man, but I swear people had a little more dignity and
restraint in my young days. The one good thing about the court mourning
is that she doesn't get so much opportunity for her antics."

"She'll emerge again, when it's over," Arden predicted. "Meanwhile,
London is becoming very tiresome. Has life lost its savour? Are we
growing old? One would give much for the tonic of a good scandal."

"There'll be no lack of that," Jack prophesied, "judging from the people
I see in London nowadays."




CHAPTER THREE

THE SPIRIT OF PAN

     "A maid too easily
     Conceits herself to be
         Those things
       Her lover sings;
     And being straitly wooed,
     Believes herself the Good
         And Fair
       He seeks in her."

     FRANCIS THOMPSON: "ANY SAINT."


"D'you remember once saying that you wanted the tonic of a good
scandal?" asked Jack Waring one night three years later. "It was soon
after King Edward's death."

"And we were all very respectable and dull." Valentine Arden roused from
sleep, blinked at the clock and rang for a whiskey and soda. "One
recalls it. There is a difference between court mourning and the second
coming of Christ, but the English are the last people in the world to
recognize it. And there is a difference between taking a tonic and being
pelted to death with medicine bottles. Since those days one scans the
paper each morning to see what new reputations have been lost. Who has
made the latest Roman holiday?"

"Oh, it's this old business about your friend Barbara Neave."

Jack threw the paper to Arden and took up another in which he could
read, with insignificant verbal changes, a second and equally gratifying
account of his own prowess in the Court of Appeal that day. Three years
earlier he had talked to Eric Lane of abandoning his unproductive
criminal work on circuit; he now wondered whether he dared abandon
circuit work altogether and concentrate on his London practice. After,
perhaps, six years more he would be wondering whether to risk his whole
practice by applying for silk. Success was none the less gratifying
because he had backed his own determination against the disparaging
anticipations of his friends. Jack knew as well as any one that he was
not a great lawyer; but natural shrewdness gained him a reputation for
sound judgement; slowness passed for caution; and the inelasticity which
saved him from seeing all round a case was reinforced by an obstinate
refusal to let go the single point which he had grasped. More than one
over-astute witness in those three years had entered the box with
assurance and left it in dismay.

Only those who had known him longest wondered occasionally whether his
practice had not been bought at the price of his soul. The plea of work
and a ponderous affectation of age excused him from any effort to widen
his interests. As old a friend as Eric Lane was allowed to drop out of
his life; he refused to enter a new house and on one pretext or another
reduced the number of the old, until any time that he could spare from
work was divided between his club and his home in the country. At the
first his friends were at liberty to visit him, if they chose; but he
was obviously happier with the two Chancery silks and the one Indian
judge, all of them twice his age, in whose company he dined nightly. And
the influence of Red Roofs was even more lamentable on a man who was
born self-centred and opinionated; Mrs. Warning and Agnes idolized and
spoiled him, the colonel crystallized an intolerant conservatism of
ideas which was better justified as the mature experience of a
middle-aged soldier and country gentleman than as the untried prejudice
of a thirty-year-old barrister. "A man may be a prig or a bore or both,"
said Pentyre at a time of temporary estrangement, "but he needn't be so
infernally pleased with himself about it." The school of sport and
fashion which Jack had once led at Oxford entertained the same feeling,
if it expressed it with more disappointment and less candour.

"The coroner would seem to have spoken with visible emotion," commented
Arden, trying to disguise his relish as he read the paper which Jack had
thrown to him. "One wishes one had stayed to the end."

"I've no doubt she'll try to use it as another advertisement," Jack
grunted. "What her unfortunate people must think.... _And_ what the
younger generation is coming to. It's a good thing for Jim that he's
being spared all this."

"Yet he also has unselfishly contributed to the general diversion," said
Arden.

Three years had passed since Sonia Dainton delighted her friends by
becoming engaged to Loring, and two since she astonished them by
breaking off the engagement. He had at once gone abroad and was reported
to be still cruising aimlessly in the East. The social ghouls had hardly
sated themselves with gossip, when Webster entangled himself with the
proprietress of a dancing academy and was constrained to pay damages for
breach of promise; and, while this case was still being discussed, Jack
Summertown proceeded to occupy the press for three days with an enquiry
into a series of minor outrages inflicted on an unpopular brother
officer. Valentine Arden sat through the whole variety programme,
unamused and detached, watching his friends succumbing one after another
to epidemic madness. "The spirit of Pan is abroad," he explained
gravely.

Lady Barbara Neave had flitted on the outskirts of each new scandal;
but, since her flying accident, she had contributed no scandal of her
own.

For the first year of the three she opened her social circuit as
comprehensively as an unfledged barrister. Lady Crawleigh carried her
from Milford to Kenworth, from Warmslow to Lenge and from Cheniston to
Granlake. Lady Barbara's interest in social analysis was roused and fed
by her tour of the great houses; they required a technique different
from the absolutism of Government House and the unaided personal
ascendancy of London; and, if she remained unabsorbed into the new
atmosphere, at least she returned to Crawleigh Abbey with a mature
country-house philosophy and clear-cut ideas of what to avoid and
extrude from her own parties. The second year was devoted to romantic
exploration. At the end of the court mourning she met a pleasant
undistinguished soldier on furlough and chose, for no better reason--so
far as her parents could see--than that he was already married, to fancy
herself in love with him. Their few meetings--and still more their
emotional parting--convinced at least the theatrical side of her
temperament that she had broken her heart in a hopeless passion. Always
thin, she artistically allowed herself to waste. For twelve teeming
months she passively accepted the worship of all who were intrigued by
her attitude of mystery and unresponsiveness; then native impatience
broke through the unconvincing crust of cynicism, and she returned to
London in a dangerous state of expectancy and unsatisfied excitement. In
the absence of an overt scandal, her father hoped that she was sobered
from the tomboy who had spread devastation through his three viceregal
terms of office; the lesser optimists opined that she was only awaiting
adequate opportunity.

Disaster overtook her in the summer of 1913; and, whatever other
criticism was made, no one could deny that she won notoriety in the
grand manner. The facts, as disclosed in court, revealed that Sir Adolf
Erckmann had given a ball at his house in Westbourne Terrace. Lady
Barbara decided within a few minutes of her arrival that the party was
over-crowded and tiresome. Finding her slave Webster unoccupied, she
suggested that he should drive her to another dance in the country and
return to Westbourne Terrace when the congestion had been relieved. As
his own car was gone home, they explored the line until the unknown
chauffeur of some one else's car was persuaded to take them to
Rickmansworth, wait half an hour and bring them back. Lady Barbara
promised that there should be no awkward consequences, if they were
discovered; Webster substantiated her guarantee with a five-pound note;
and, by the time that they had further cajoled him with a stimulating
supper of champagne and cutlets, the driver's last reluctance was
overcome.

The story was liberally punctuated with questions on the general
propriety of a girl's bribing a strange chauffeur and stealing an
unknown car, with comments, too, on the dignity of their carrying a
bottle of champagne and a plate of cutlets into the middle of Westbourne
Terrace. There followed a digression to discover how much had been
consumed; Lady Barbara and Webster asserted unshakably that the
chauffeur was sober and that, if his driving became erratic at any
point, this was due to his admitted ignorance of the route.

While the question of sobriety was left in suspense, the expedition was
reconstructed to the moment when the car reached a fork in the road and
the chauffeur turned to Webster and asked "Right or left, sir?" Examined
on the question of speed, Lady Barbara was sure that they were not going
more than fifteen or twenty miles an hour; twenty-five at the outside,
Webster conceded unwillingly; they could not see the speedometer. It was
suggested, however, that they must have calculated how long the double
journey would take; they had even noticed when the car started and when
it stopped; a damaging calculation shewed that their average pace was
thirty-seven miles an hour and that, if they drove slowly out of London,
they must have reached forty-five or fifty miles an hour in the
country. And they had not told the man to moderate his pace; it even
seemed that they had encouraged him to drive faster.

At the fork in the road Webster called out, "To the right, I think";
then he saw that he was mistaken and shouted, "No! the left." In trying
to change direction, the chauffeur drove into a wedge-shaped brick wall
and was instantly killed. Lady Barbara and her companion escaped with a
severe shaking and a few scratches from the broken glass of the
wind-screen; the front of the car was smashed beyond repair.

The accident took place in open country without a house in sight. As
soon as they saw that the driver was dead, Lady Barbara spread her cloak
over the crushed head and broken face; Webster's nerve was gone, and she
left him, whimpering, to guard the body, while she went in search of
help. An early market-cart came to their rescue, and they rumbled slowly
back to London, shivering in their thin clothes and glancing over their
shoulders at a pair of twisted legs in black gaiters, which protruded
stiffly from beneath a blood-stained cloak.

The news swept through London in the evening papers, and Lady Barbara
was inundated next day with enquiries and messages of sympathy. So
grudging a critic as Jack Waring contended warmly at the County Club
that, apart from her silliness in rushing away to the country in the
middle of the night and borrowing a car without leave, she was really
not to blame; and it was a dreadful experience for any girl. By
comparison with Webster she had kept her head and behaved very properly,
taking the body straight to a hospital, communicating with the widow,
making herself personally responsible for a liberal pension and
undertaking to replace the shattered car. Before night two papers had
published sympathetic interviews with her, reproducing in her own not
undramatic words the abrupt transition from a careless drive to violent
death, the slow passage of a funeral procession between barren grey
fields, the silence and desolation of the night, the early-morning chill
which beat on her unprotected arms and shoulders and the haunting sense
of helplessness which dominated every other feeling. Inset was one
photograph of her in evening dress and another with hollow cheeks and
big ghostly eyes, in the subdued black frock which she had worn to
receive her interviewers; for these Jack blamed the notorious vulgarity
of the Press.

Admiration changed again to pity when the inquest opened. Sonia Dainton,
who attended as an act of friendship, reported that the coroner was
underbred and ill-tempered; Lady Maitland, who felt no curiosity but did
not want Barbara to think that her friends were deserting her, added
that he was a natural bully; and the Duchess of Ross, who hated any
unpleasantness and only went--with Lord Poynter, Mrs. Shelley and Val
Arden--to give the girl confidence, brought back word that, to the best
of his ability and the utmost of his despotic functions, he was resolved
to humiliate Lady Barbara, to discredit her associates and, without
respect of persons, to put such a brand on her family and herself that
they would never again dare to shew themselves among decent men and
women. The witness learned on the first day that she was a pampered and
spoiled child; _blasée_ and restless, she would do anything for a new
excitement; with that absence of rudimentary decorum which some people
appeared to think "smart," she had lawlessly appropriated a car--the
coroner wondered what she would think if any one took one of her
father's cars "just for a joke"--she had helped to make the driver
intoxicated, thereby shewing characteristic disregard for the safety of
mere ordinary people who might also want to use the road; she or her
companion--was it usual for a girl to ride about at night unattended in
this way?--had incited the chauffeur to drive at a reckless rate of
speed. And the price of this prank--the momentary diversion of the Lady
Barbara Neave, daughter of the Marquis of Crawleigh, one time
Governor-General of Canada, Viceroy of India and Lord Lieutenant of
Ireland--was the hideous death of a man who left behind him a widow and
four small children. Lady Barbara, who naturally thought that money paid
for everything, was graciously and of her abundance trying to compute
the dead man's cash value to his wife. The hearing was adjourned for a
week, as Mr. Webster was indisposed by the shock of the accident.

Had the coroner been inspired by malice, he could not have waged a
deadlier warfare than by taking three days for the inquest and allowing
intervals of a week for the case to be discussed. The stream of sympathy
ran dry; and, if no one criticized Lady Barbara to her face, every one
chattered about the enquiry and took his time from the coroner.
Repenting his precipitate tolerance, Jack Waring told the two Chancery
silks and the Indian judge that it was absurd for Crawleigh to say that
the man was abusing his position and stirring up class prejudice; when
one looked back over the last few years, one remembered a dozen things
which Lady Barbara had been allowed to do for no better reason than that
she was Lady Barbara Neave; but a line had really to be drawn somewhere.
If Crawleigh disliked having mud thrown at him in public, he should
exercise his authority with the girl; her friends were wholly
impossible....

By the time that Webster was well enough to give evidence, the tide was
in flood against him. The breach of promise case was fresh in the public
mind; and, if it could not relevantly be brought up against him, it had
at least familiarised his appearance and history and made a dark
background to his examination. Mr. Webster was a young man; he did not
work for his living, as he had considerable private means; in fact, he
had nothing to do except to spend money and amuse himself. Pressed to
state what good he was effecting for himself or the world at large, he
could only say that he was interested in the theatre and fond of
motoring--another instance of this small, rich, insistent class whose
social importance varied in inverse ratio as its public usefulness. Put
shortly, his object in life was to kill time, to avoid boredom.

The story of the night drive was rehearsed a second time, as the coroner
wished to know who had proposed it; and the suspended question of the
driver's sobriety was brought up for retrial. A bottle of champagne had
been mentioned; had Mr. Webster and Lady Barbara partaken of it in their
idyllically democratic picnic? Mr. Webster had dined at his club; could
he remember what he had drunk with his dinner? His bill would no doubt
shew that.

On the second adjournment a sordid note had been introduced, alienating
the last sympathisers and sinking a tragedy in a drunken frolic. No one
acquainted with Webster would associate him with a temperate life; those
who saw him for the first time in court with twitching hands, a puffy
face and flickering eyelids drew their own conclusions. If it was a
shock to look at Lady Barbara and to hear it suggested that she, too,
had been hardly accountable for her actions, the shock was not wholly
displeasing to those who believed in the rottenness of so-called
"society."

"They say I've murdered the man," she whispered to her father, as she
left the court. "They've made the foulest insinuations about Fatty
Webster and me. Now they say I drink. There's not much left, is there? I
shouldn't be surprised if the people in the street hooted me."

Lord Crawleigh chewed his blonde, viking moustache and hurried her
across the pavement into a closed car. He had never been present at an
inquest before; and a voice had murmured that the coroner was working
for a verdict of manslaughter. A nondescript crowd, dotted with cameras,
waited in a half-circle outside the court; it was curious, but at
present it was silent. Valentine Arden paused at the door and
ostentatiously raised his hat. He, too, would not have been surprised to
hear hooting; and he was disappointed to have no vivid contrast for his
gesture of chivalry. He wondered whether Lady Barbara was missing the
hostile demonstration; it would have been a new sensation....

On the third day she appeared once more in a black hat and dress and sat
with her veil up, waiting for the verdict and the coroner's comments.
Arden decided that she was modelling herself on Marie Antoinette and
hoped that she would be given an opportunity of speaking. At the end,
the jury found that death was due to misadventure; the reporters closed
their note-books, and Lord Crawleigh reached for his hat. Arden left at
once for fear of spoiling his earlier effect by repetition, but the
evening papers reported the invective of the coroner in full.

_"I suggest to the representatives of the press that it is their duty to
give the widest publicity to this case. In an experience which goes back
for a good many years now, I have never regretted so bitterly that I
have no power to punish those who by wanton carelessness or evil
disposition contribute to the death of a man or woman as surely as if
they had killed him with their own hands. We have had an illuminating
picture of the life and habits of some of those who traditionally expect
us to look up to them for an example. If these people are too idle or
vicious or brainless to live a life which shall be of use to the
community, there should at least be power to restrain them from becoming
a source of public danger. The proper treatment for such incipient
hooligans and reformatory children is the birch-rod: I wish I had
authority to order it. Rank and wealth can only be defended if they
impose obligations: to these bright ornaments of the leisured classes
they only afford opportunities. There has been far too much of this kind
of thing lately, and I hope I shall never again be required to deal with
so disgraceful a case. These young hobbledehoys, unchecked by any
domestic discipline, unrestrained by common decency, owing no
obligation to any one, a law unto themselves, are a new and poisonous
growth in our social life. They fulfil no useful purpose, there is no
room for them."_

"There _was_ a hostile demonstration in the street," Arden announced, as
he came to the end of the report.

"How she must have enjoyed it!" grunted Jack.

"One wishes one had stayed to the end. The court was not unlike a gala
night at Covent Garden. You have read the descriptions of the dresses?
No?"

"All this only encourages her," Jack pointed out. "I'm about the one man
in London who's succeeded in not meeting her, but, if there's ever a
revolution, that young woman will have done more than any one else to
bring it about. And she'll be photographed getting into the tumbril; and
some one will interview her on the scaffold. On my honour, I can't see
what amusement she gets out of it."

"Emotion, drama, limelight, romance," Arden suggested. "Lady Barbara may
be sure that every one in London is talking about her at this moment;
London is her stage."

"Well, she'll have to retire from it after this," said Jack.

"She will re-emerge," Arden prophesied.

Both predictions were fulfilled before the end of the summer. Lord
Crawleigh held his hand until the inquest was over, because he could not
trust himself to deal even justice while the offence was fresh. For
three weeks he was equally indifferent to Lady Barbara's tragic
attitude, the sympathy of friends and the infamies of a hostile press:
more than one anonymous letter reached him, to be read with a frown and
silently filed with the documents in the case; and it was reported that
a reference to his family had crept into the patter of a music-hall
comedian. In the rich silence of a choleric and expressive man the
nerves of family and retainers stretched to breaking-point.

On the morrow of the verdict he assembled his wife and children in the
library, rehearsed the charges against Lady Barbara and made known his
will. Henceforward she was to go nowhere unless attended by her mother,
one of her brothers or her maid. The family would proceed to Crawleigh
Abbey that day and would remain there until further notice. The ball
which Lady Crawleigh was giving would be cancelled; his daughter was to
refuse all invitations already accepted and to accept no more. At the
end of the season she would stay in no house unless one at least of her
parents accompanied her.

As he ended, Lady Barbara stole a glance round the hushed library. Her
three brothers were silent and submissive; her mother helpless and
pained, like an "honest broker" who saw the nations of the world flying
at one another's throats, when she had exhausted herself to keep the
peace; her father's eyes were burning, and he dragged at one side of his
moustache as though he were trying to tear it out by the roots. In every
altercation, great and small, Lady Barbara had to fight single-handed.

"But, father, you seem to think this was my _fault_!" she cried in
bewilderment.

Lord Crawleigh handed his wife a paper with fingers that trembled.

"Here are the dates and trains," he said. "You will go to the Abbey by
the 4.10 from Waterloo. I shall join you at the end of the session." He
turned to his daughter without trusting himself to face her dark,
reproachful eyes. "I contemplate taking you to Raglan in August and
House of Steynes in September, if your aunts see fit not to withdraw
your invitation----"

"But how long is this going on?" Lady Barbara interrupted.

"I cannot permit any discussion," he answered in something that was half
a whisper and half a sigh.

Lady Barbara looked at him reflectively and went to her room. When she
came of age, in little more than a year's time, he would have no means
of coercing her. Without waiting a year she could go to Harry Manders
and demand to be given a part; he had offered her one in her own
duologue. But the tension of the last three weeks and the dazing
examination and attack at the inquest had left her uncertain of herself.
A day or two at the Abbey, even though she were snatched away in the
middle of the season, would give her time to find her bearings and
discover what people really thought of her.

The more she pondered, the deeper grew her bewilderment. If all had gone
well, the dash to Rickmansworth and back would have been regarded as a
wholly innocent diversion in the course of a tiresome evening; on her
return every one else would have regretted that he had not come too;
even the borrowing of the car was venial, for the owner refused to
accept any compensation, though the insurance company might well make
difficulties; even he regarded the expedition as a joke, which had
unhappily turned to tragedy, and was far sorrier that Lady Barbara
should have been upset than that the chauffeur should have been killed.

If the facts, then, were innocent, she was being persecuted by the
coroner and threatened with persecution by society at large for an
accident to which she had contributed nothing. The chauffeur was sober
enough to drive through dense traffic on the Harrow Road; Webster--she
remembered his words--had looked at his watch and said through the
speaking-tube, "You can let her out a bit now, I should think. We don't
want to keep you out too long." The charge that any one of them was
drunk would have been more insulting if it had been less grotesque. And
for this the coroner had suggested that she should be ostracized. And
her simple-minded father imagined that there were other simple-minded
souls who would take such a Jack-in-office at his own pontifical
valuation.

She almost hoped that they would, so that she might force them in
triumph to acknowledge her innocence. To start as an outcast and win her
way back was a dramatic dream which almost made her wish that she was
guilty. To become an outcast might be as dramatic as to rise from
obscurity to a pinnacle of fame.... Napoleon owed half his place in
history to St. Helena.

An undistracted fortnight at the Abbey cooled Lady Barbara's resentment
and checked the more romantic flights of her imagination. Her father's
judgement was clearly at fault; to run away was to admit herself in the
wrong. By the time that she had got herself into perspective, the season
was so near its end that she did not think it worth while to make a
demonstration and to occupy her room in Berkeley Square by force. But
the late summer and autumn lay before her, and, when her father came to
the Abbey for a week-end in July, she informed him that she had not yet
cancelled any of her arrangements for staying with friends.

"You will remain here till we go to the Riviera in February," he
answered.

"But, father, I'm not going to. This is quite serious. I've been here a
month without seeing a soul; I should go mad, if I had to vegetate for
another seven months. If you won't let me go, I'm afraid I must go
without your leave."

"That may not be as easy as you think."

"What d'you mean?"

Lord Crawleigh unlocked a red leather despatch-box, turned over his
files and produced a sheet of paper which he spread before her.

"This is a copy of a cable which your cousin has sent to his mother from
Surinam. I had intended taking you to House of Steynes, but that is out
of the question now."

_"Please arrange that Barbara and her friend are not admitted to my
house. This applies to Monmouthshire and Scotland as well as London."_

Lady Barbara handed back the paper and tried to laugh, but she knew
that her expression was out of control. If the news had reached Surinam,
it had reached every cable-station on the way; and the operators had
hardly done feasting themselves on the inquest before a message, signed
"Loring" and mentioning her by name, added a dainty titbit to the
savoury repast. Sooner or later it would be common property that her own
cousin had slammed his door in her face for fear of contamination; the
family would be divided into those who knew her and those who publicly
refused to know her; she would become a test-case for disreputability.

"Jim has his own standards of loyalty, hasn't he?" she commented and was
infuriated to find her voice trembling. "He's usually so keen on the
family that I shouldn't have thought he'd have wanted to take the whole
world into his confidence. One good thing, he can't call _me_
self-advertising after this. Have you seen the darling boy's mother? Is
she--_proud_ of him over this?"

"She was as much shocked as I was that you should have made it
necessary."

"I? Father, you can't make me responsible for _this_. But is she proud
of his chivalry? And I suppose _you_ didn't make a fight for me? I must
see her. I want to tell her about the accident." She pressed her hands
to cheeks which were still hollow from the anxiety of the last two
months and looked at her father over her finger-tips. "I'd never seen
any one killed before, I'd never seen a dead body; and I couldn't sleep
at night, because of it. I kept seeing that unhappy woman's face, too,
when I had to tell her that her husband was dead. I didn't ask for
sympathy, but I thought perhaps my own father and mother might have seen
that I wasn't exactly--enjoying myself, that I was ill, worried out of
my mind. If _I_ had a daughter, I should have felt for her, I think,
when a foul-mouthed little reptile hinted that she was _drunk_ and that
her _lover_ had helped her kill an innocent man for her own amusement.
Never a word! Do you know that for three weeks you only said
'Good-morning' to me, father? Even if I was guilty a hundred times over,
it wouldn't have compromised you to be sorry that I was suffering. I
don't complain. You at least left me alone. But Jim waits till I'm
beaten to my knees, waits till I'm bleeding--and then hits wherever he
can see a bruise or wound. That _wasn't_ necessary, father."

Lord Crawleigh rearranged his papers without answering. He was himself
so much humiliated by his nephew's cable that he had hardly thought how
it might affect Barbara. She was always most formidable when she stood,
as now, with drooping head, composed and subdued, speaking in an
undertone and rejecting in advance any sympathy that he might belatedly
offer her. She had learned in childhood to fight men with their own
weapons and to fall back on her sex when the battle was going against
her. He had seen her trading on pathos a hundred times with her mother
and aunts, using to full advantage a pose of tired frailty, a wistful
mouth and big eyes which filled with tears at will or flashed black with
indignation; she could droop her head and body until she looked like a
tortured martyr, or cough until she looked consumptive. Almost certainly
she was acting now, but her passion for romance and a dramatic impact
led her to act without knowing it.

"If you had behaved properly, this would not have happened," he threw
out with weak, inconsequent irritability.

"It's too late now. Are you going to House of Steynes? Do you allow
people to say that they'll be glad to see you on condition you don't
bring your daughter with you? And will you invite Amy and Aunt Eleanor
here to meet somebody who can't be admitted to their house?"

Lord Crawleigh had enough imagination to see the more obvious
consequences of his nephew's ultimatum; but he could not devise an
effective reply, and it was merely exasperating to have his own
disadvantage explored and stated by Barbara.

"I talked to your aunt. She says she daren't go against Jim's wishes.
After all, they're his houses. She's writing to him----"

"To intercede for me?" Lady Barbara interrupted scornfully. "When next I
enter House of Steynes, it will be on his invitation. And, before I
allow him to invite me, he will apologize."

"It's no use taking _that_ line," cried her father testily. Her last two
sentences had exceeded the probable limits of sincerity, and he swooped
before she could escape into a convincing pathos. "If _any one_ ought to
apologize----"

Lady Barbara caught sight of her reflection, full-length, in a mirror,
with her father fidgetting at her side. He looked insignificant, almost
ridiculous, with his domed forehead and straggling blonde moustache, his
short body and long legs. She wanted to make him see himself and to play
up to their two reflections like Metternich and L'Aiglon in the mirror
scene.

"I can only apologize for the fact of my existence," she sighed. "I was
_not_ responsible, father, and you know it. And, instead of standing up
for your own daughter, you let her be insulted. I can't do anything with
people who stab in the back, but I'm ready to meet every one! I _will_
meet them. If they want to insult me, they can insult me to my face."

The embargo on Lady Barbara's presence only extended to the houses
controlled by her cousin. In August she went to stay with Lady
Knightrider in Raglan and was received with demonstrative affection. A
gentle reaction had set in, inspired directly by Lord Crawleigh and
aided by all who felt that Jim Loring's precipitous cable had placed the
family in an intolerable position. Working in a sympathetic atmosphere,
Lady Barbara enlisted her aunt's support in a campaign which was to
rehabilitate her or at least to shew whether she stood in need of
rehabilitation. As soon as they returned to London for the autumn, Lady
Knightrider undertook to give a dance and to insist that Lady Loring
and Amy should come; if Jim were home by then, she would make him come,
too, and the whole ridiculous quarrel would be forgotten. Lady Barbara
intended to go farther than the settlement of a family difference. The
party should be a challenge to all who felt disposed to criticise her;
she was determined to appear side by side with Webster and to give them
their opportunity; and any one who declined to come would have to shew
convincing justification for his refusal.

The invitations were sent out six weeks in advance; Lady Knightrider
reasoned with those who made excuses, sent reminders to those who had
accepted and surrounded herself with a staff of energetic lieutenants.

"_You're_ coming on, Val, aren't you?" asked George Oakleigh
distractedly on the night of the ball, as he prowled hungrily through
the County Club with a list in his hand. He had undertaken to bring six
men and was bribing them beforehand with dinner.

"A doubt has crept in," Arden replied uncertainly. "One invitation may
be attributed to hospitality; four suggest panic."

"Well, if there are too few men, you'll be all the more popular; if
there are too many, you can go home early. Gerry, I'm counting on you."

Deganway paused for an instant on his way to the cloak-room.

"My dear, I wouldn't miss it for anything."

Oakleigh added a tick to his list and hurried after Jack Waring. They
were still disputing, when Eric Lane was announced.

"I don't dance, I can't talk and I want to go to bed," said Jack firmly.

"You can go after half an hour," Oakleigh promised.

"Well, I'll come for one cigar, if Eric comes too. I'm an old man,
George; I haven't been to a ball for ten years."

At eleven o'clock Oakleigh convoyed them securely into the drawing-room
of Lady Knightrider's house in South Street. By the test of numbers the
dance promised well, for the house was already crowded and Lady
Barbara's relations were in full attendance. Her triumph was left
incomplete by the absence of Webster, but he had been snubbed more than
once in the last few months and was waiting for time to heal his
reputation. She had spent the afternoon arguing with him until she felt
her dignity compromised, and the embers of her ill-humour smouldered
through the night.

By prearrangement Jack escaped to the smoking-room for a cigar, while
Eric unbosomed himself of news which had been choking him for three
days; Harry Manders had accepted a play, which was to be produced in the
following autumn; after eight years of disappointment the daydream was
being realized. They were still bandying congratulations and thanks,
when the smoking-room was invaded by Deganway and a girl.

"Isn't that the famous Lady Barbara Neave?" Eric whispered.

Jack half turned and shook his head.

"Don't ask me. I'm shortly starring at the Halls as the one man in the
world who doesn't know her and doesn't want to. I think it must be, all
the same. Gerry seems to be getting called over the coals for
something."

Lady Barbara's annoyance with Webster was spending itself on Deganway.
There were long silences, broken by deferential squeaks of small-talk
from him and restored by petulant rejoinders from her. She treated her
companion with a contempt that was almost insolent and jumped restlessly
to her feet, as the band began to tune up. Deganway hurried after her to
the door, and the calm of the smoking room was only disturbed by
half-heard music and the sound of high, rapid voices on the stairs. As
his second cigar burnt low, Jack looked at his watch and beckoned Eric
from his chair.

"Come and say good-bye; then you can drop me at the club," he
suggested.

They steered a tortuous and apologetic course through the couples seated
on the stairs and looked hopelessly for Lady Knightrider. In their
absence the drawing-room had filled to overflowing, and the landings and
balconies were packed to the limit of their capacity. As the next dance
started, Deganway entered, blinking in the light, from one of the open
French windows; Lady Barbara was still with him, but, as the music
began, she was claimed and taken away.

"First time I've ever seen you indulging in frivolities like this,
Jack," he said, letting fall his eye-glass and hunting for his
cigarette-case.

"Well, I don't dance, and the conventional alternative is to talk to
young women," answered Jack. "I confess that I can imagine less dreary
pastimes--for both."

"That depends on the woman. I've spent most of the evening with Babs
Neave. My dear, there's plenty of excitement in talking to _her_! Care
to meet her?"

"I'm going home as soon as I've found Lady Knightrider," Jack answered.

"It'd pay you to talk to her for a bit. Let me introduce you! She's
awful good fun--doesn't care a damn what she says or does----"

"That's her general reputation," interrupted Jack.

"Oh, you mustn't believe everything you hear about her. She's quite all
right _really_; awful nice girl. Let me introduce you!"

Jack shook his head and took Eric by the arm.

"My dear Deganway, I've no doubt she's everything you say, but I don't
care a great lot for the Websters and Penningtons and Welmans and
Erckmanns and all that gang that she goes about with. They're such
devilish bad style. Good-night."

Deganway grinned maliciously.

"I've a good mind to tell her what you said. Do her no end of good. And
I should get a bit of my own back after the way she's been ragging me."

They stood talking by the door until the music stopped. Then Jack and
Eric turned and went downstairs, while Deganway sidled up to Lady
Barbara.

"No, you're tiresome to-night," she told him, when he asked for another
dance. "Who are those two going out? I don't know them."

"The fair one's Jack Waring----"

"Well, I should like to know him," Lady Barbara interrupted. "I'm tired
of everybody."

Deganway hurried obediently out of the room and returned a moment later
with a smirk of satisfaction.

"Try again, Babs," he suggested. "Waring's not taking any."

"Do talk intelligibly, Gerry!"

"Well, I told him _before_ that he ought to meet you. I said what good
fun you were and what he was missing and all that sort of thing----"

Lady Barbara shivered at the blunt catalogue of her charms.

"What did he say?"

By natural compensation Deganway atoned for certain defects of
intelligence by an excellent power of mimicry. He gave not only Jack's
lilt and phraseology, but his facial changes and rather prim,
tight-lipped smile.

"I tried him again," he added, "but he said he _must_ go to bed. I don't
believe he wanted to meet you."

Lady Barbara smiled composedly, but the brusque rebuff, brusquely
quoted, wounded her pride as nothing had done since Jim's cable. Some
one had taken up the challenge, as she had feared--or hoped.

"Sorry he's so hard to please," she answered lightly. "You can give me
some supper, if you like. Who and what is he? A candid critic is so rare
that I should quite like to meet him."




CHAPTER FOUR

APHRODITE DEMI-MONDAINE

     "What rage for fame attends both great and small!
     Better be d----d than mentioned not at all!"

     JOHN WOLCOTT: "TO THE ROYAL ACADEMICIANS."


"_The Princess Juanita dawned upon respectability like Aphrodite rising
from the gutters._"

According to Mrs. Shelley, as quoted by Eric to George Oakleigh and the
author, this was the opening sentence of Valentine Arden's "New
Jerusalem," and she had given a luncheon party on the strength of it.
Since her husband's death, Eric had edged gently away from her
self-conscious artistic menagerie; he had been recaptured for a moment
after the Coronation, when his father was knighted for "eminent services
to the study of Anglo-Saxon" and he could himself be introduced as "the
son of Sir Francis Lane, you know"; and it was no sooner hinted that a
play of his had been accepted by Harry Manders than she dragged him back
into his cage with a tacit order to stay there until his public interest
was exhausted.

It was Mrs. Shelley's practice to read every book of importance on the
day of publication; it was her ambition to know all about it before it
was written. The new satire, she informed her guests, had engaged
Arden's energies for two years and presented a picture of London society
under the empire of Sir Adolf Erckmann and the cosmopolitans; the forces
of respectability had not escaped the impartial lash of his ridicule,
and almost every character was a portrait. Mrs. Welman waltzed
unmistakably over the glittering pages with Sir Deryk Lancing; Lord
Pennington, Jack Summertown and the Baroness Kohnstadt flitted from
place to place like the chorus of a musical comedy, and every scandal of
the last ten years was described or mentioned. If the book were ever
published, Mrs. Shelley was convinced that the heavens would rain writs
for libel; certainly no one would continue to know the author. She had
reasoned with him, but he was apparently tired of London and
contemplated impressing his personality on New York.

While no one was secure, Eric gathered that the greatest speculation
surrounded the identity of "Princess Juanita." Mrs. Shelley maintained
that the character must be intended for Sonia Dainton, who had joined
the Erckmann faction when she broke off her engagement with Loring; Lady
Maitland, who was still smarting in the belief that Arden had sketched
her for his earlier "Madame Chasseresse-de-Lions," had no doubt that he
was now squirting his poison at Lady Barbara Neave. "A man like that,"
she told Mrs. Shelley, "would never waste time on a commoner like Sonia
Dainton when he could besmirch the daughter of a marquess and tickle his
wretched provincial audience by calling her a princess." Her bitter
words were repeated to the author, who announced that he was giving his
book the sub-title "Commoner and Commoner," and dedicating it to Lady
Maitland. Only when he was tired of his friends' good advice did he
admit that the satire existed but in his imagination.

"One is taken altogether too literally," he complained to his friends in
the smoking-room of the Thespian Club. "A grim, cultured hostess,
spectacled young poets having their own poems explained to them by Lady
Poynter, a dinner which one ate and tried to forget, furtive confidences
on the wine from Lord Poynter, a succession of _longueurs_--you see the
scene? Chelsea.... Earnestness.... Ill-assortment.... Without any wish
to _épater le bourgeois_, one played with an idea, developed it,
invented characters, let fall a phrase.... Perhaps one has allowed good
Sir Adolf to obsess one's mind.... It was not a remarkable phrase; but
one could hardly have caused a greater stir if one had telegraphed
anonymously to one's friends--"_Fly. All is known._" Lady Knightrider
almost offered one a blank cheque to stop publication. A _jeu d'esprit_
must be labelled before it is offered to the English."

"Well, I'm glad the book's not going to be published," said Oakleigh.
"That little gang's had quite enough advertisement without any help from
you."

"One hates to disappoint Lady Barbara," answered Arden reflectively.
"Undeniably she compels a reluctant admiration. She has lived in three
continents--in regal state; she has met every one and done everything;
in her leisure she has written plays, selected poetry, exhibited
caricatures--not altogether contemptible--of her family and friends,
patronized new schools of decoration, invented new fashions of dress
and, as all the world knows, worn them. What remained? One met her first
some years ago and asked oneself that question. It is still unanswered!"

"At present she's bolstering up two or three dozen people who are only
received on the strength of her name," Oakleigh replied. "And she's
going to find that her name isn't strong enough to carry them."

"These people go to her head," Arden replied with disgust. "One credited
her with more detachment."

The campaign of rehabilitation had not been an unqualified success. Lady
Knightrider aimed at reconciling Barbara with her relations rather than
at reconciling her relations with her friends. There was an implied
threat that she must choose one or the other; and a prevalent feeling
was crystallized by Jack Waring, when he said that she was not worth
knowing at the price of having to know her disorderly retinue. While she
welcomed the concordat, Lady Barbara could not explain to Sir Adolf
Erckmann that he was her fit companion one day and unfit the next; she
might gently repel a cosmopolitan here and there, but she could not
refuse all their invitations always; loyalty imposed its obligations,
and stronger than loyalty was an impatient desire to tell other people
to mind their own business. Yet the concordat might have endured, if the
discussion of Arden's hypothetical book had not impelled Lady
Knightrider hot-foot from Mrs. Shelley's house to his rooms at the Ritz.
Not content with her legitimate relief at finding that "Princess
Juanita" was no less a myth than "The New Jerusalem," she confided to
Arden that dear Barbara _did_ go about with "really rather dreadful
people"; some one at her party had said that the girl's friends were
such that he preferred not to know her. So long as she associated with
them, it was only too probable that there would be another
unpleasantness of some kind.

"I really think it my duty," she said on leaving, "to drop a little hint
to my sister."

The nods and winks of verbal warning are apt to take on an exaggerated
significance when defined in black and white. On receipt of the letter
Lord Crawleigh motored to London and opened a new commission of enquiry
to investigate the personal desirability of his daughter's associates.
If Lady Barbara was at first bewildered, she was in no way daunted, for
in the endless intermingling of groups throughout London she could
usually find a sponsor for the most draggled of her friends. Sir Adolf
Erckmann's private life might lead him into the Divorce Court, he might
even be the "vulgar, common fellow" that her father described, but he
had dined in Berkeley Square as a member of Lord Crawleigh's
Departmental Committee on Indian Currency Reform. Lady Crawleigh always
went to the vulgar, common fellow's famous musical parties in Westbourne
Terrace. Lady Barbara had originally met Mrs. Welman at a performance of
"The School for Scandal," organized by Lady Maitland for charity, and
had naturally accepted the implied guarantee; it was not against civil,
canon or moral law for a woman to have been on the stage. Those who,
like Webster, could not so easily be defended were pushed into the
background. The battle of wits ceased to be amusing when Lord Crawleigh
repeated his threat that Barbara would not be allowed to go anywhere
unless she were suitably chaperoned. The dreary banishment at the Abbey
lingered in her memory as a summer stolen out of her life. As her
patience ebbed, she decided that there must be an end of these
inquisitions.

It was easy to trace her present plight through Lady Knightrider to Val
Arden; but there was some one behind Arden, for her father claimed to
have chapter and verse for saying that people were refusing to know her
so long as she associated with her present friends. With a shock of
surprise she recalled a self-satisfied young man who had in fact met her
invitation to be introduced with a drawling, "Thanks very much. She may
be all you say, but...."

It was incredible that one bumptious boy could do so much harm.... Even
when the commission adjourned without arriving at an agreed report, Lady
Barbara felt that a vendetta was being forced upon her....

She had no plan of campaign and knew nothing of her adversary but his
name. Apart from Gerry Deganway she did not know of any one who was
acquainted with him; and Deganway had done enough harm already without
being given new opportunities. But, if the vendetta required resource,
resource should be forthcoming. She called on Sonia Dainton the day
after her father's inquisition and proposed that they should go for a
drive. As the car entered the Park by Albert Gate, she pretended to
recognize a face and said:

"Wasn't that Jack Waring?"

"I didn't see," Sonia answered.

"It was like him--though I don't know him to speak to."

"You'll find him very sticky. He's a great friend of your cousin Jim.
When we were engaged, I used to see a certain amount of him. He's a
heavy, Stone-Age creature; when he and Jim and George Oakleigh put their
wise old heads together, there was nothing they wouldn't disapprove of!"

"I hear he's been good enough to criticize _me_," said Lady Barbara
carelessly.

"When he doesn't even know you? What did he say?" asked Sonia.

"Oh, what does it matter? Some one started a story the other day that I
took drugs. Li Webster heard a woman say, 'I was told by a friend who'd
been to the same dressmaker; her arm was all red and pulpy; I believe
she's been doing it for years and that's why she always wears long
sleeves at night.' Have you _ever_ seen me in long sleeves, Sonia. I've
got much too good arms! And, if I wanted to take the beastly stuff,
shouldn't I have it injected where it wouldn't shew? I _did_ want to
meet that woman--just to tell her to use her brains. And, if I ever meet
your friend Mr. Waring----"

"My dear, he's not _my_ friend! I was asked down to Croxton for the hunt
ball at the end of this month; I made Bobby Pentyre tell me who was
going to be there and, when I saw Jack Waring's name, I said 'nothin'
doin'.' I know those hunt balls! Vermilion men in pink coats.... Jack
will be just in his element; he'll support a wall and tell everybody
that he doesn't know any of 'these modern dances,' as though it were
something to be proud of."

Lady Barbara laughed mechanically and sorted the new information into
its appropriate pigeon-hole. She was dining and going to a play that
night with Summertown and his sister; Sally Farwell's passion for
Pentyre had become a habit, and, if he did not reciprocate her passion,
he could hardly refuse her friend an invitation for the ball. Once
within the same house as Jack Waring, she had decided nothing save that
he could not be allowed to walk through the world with his nose in the
air, saying that she or her friends were "bad style."

A week later she arrived at Croxton Hall and explored the terrain for
the engagement. Waring, she learned, came once a year into
Buckinghamshire from old habit, because he had hunted with the Croxton
from Oxford; he was returning to chambers by the breakfast-car train
next day. She had few hours for making her effect; and they were further
reduced when Jack drove up three-quarters of an hour late to find that
the house-party was already dressed and busily adjusting its
relationships. Lady Pentyre scrambled through half a dozen introductions
in as many seconds and hurried her guests into the dining-room, without
giving him time to dress or even to see who was there; Barbara, standing
a little behind the others, escaped notice; and, when she found herself
seated by prearrangement at his side, she had to introduce herself.

"I believe you're a great friend of Jim's," she began. "He's a cousin of
mine, and I've often heard him speak of you."

Jack was already disconcerted by having to dine unwashed and in a tweed
suit; and his embarrassment increased as he guessed at her identity. For
a while he would only talk disjointedly of Jim Loring, varying his
conversation with apologies for his tweed suit; he had been kept late
with a consultation, and, when he began to change in the train, two
women got in at Bletchley. Barbara fastened on the consultation and with
deft questions encouraged him to talk about his work. She had sat next
to so many shy young men at official dinners that she could put any one
at his ease. At her prompting and wholly unconscious of it, Jack
discoursed of the bar in general and his own practice in particular for
three-quarters of the dinner and was agreeably surprised to find her so
intelligent a listener.

"I oughtn't to be here, really," he confided. "I haven't the time or
energy for this kind of thing, but the Croxton's an old love of mine,
I've not missed a Croxton ball since I was at Oxford." He was tempted to
describe his first Croxton ball; but it was a long story, and he
discovered that he had been monopolizing the conversation. "You're a
great dancer, I expect?" he said with the indulgence of early middle
age. "I look forward to watching you to-night."

Lady Barbara began to shake her head and then stopped with closed eyes
and a bitten lip.

"I'm not going," she answered. "I've had such an awful headache all
day."

"I'm so sorry! I don't dance myself, but I hoped you might spare me one
or two for sitting out. If you're _interested_ in law--the bar's by no
means the dry-as-dust life some people think."

Talking to her was so easy that Jack had half determined to ask if he
might have supper with her. Of the rest of the evening he could dispose
comfortably enough by gossiping with old Gervaise, who had been in his
father's regiment, and the other veterans of the hunt. Lady Pentyre
never regarded him as a dancing man in making up her numbers. It would
not be half so easy to find common ground with Sally Farwell or Grace
Pentyre; without meaning to be unsympathetic, he felt that Lady Barbara
might have chosen any other night of the year for her headache.

"It'll be better, when you get there," he prophesied encouragingly and
wondered whether she would mistake his convenience for her own triumph.
So far he had not looked at her, but he now stole a glance out of the
corner of his eye and saw a straight, thin nose, haggard cheeks that had
a pathetic fascination for him and a mouth which drooped wistfully; the
lips were red, her eyes a velvet black, fringed with long black lashes
and shaded with dark rings, changing colour and size like a cat's. The
white, hollow cheeks combined with the dark eyes and red lips to
suggest ravaging dissipation or ill-health; he would never be surprised
to be told that she was consumptive. And he could not understand how any
one so thin could be so attractive.

She caught him watching her and forced a smile.

"I've only been doing rather too much lately, I expect," she said.

"That I can well believe. But after dinner--I say, have you had
_anything_ to eat?"

"I had some melon.... But I'm not very hungry. If I _don't_ go, don't
tell Aunt Kathleen--Lady Knightrider, you know--will you? She gave me
this dress specially and she'd be so awfully disappointed."

"Jolly dress," Jack answered, looking unanalytically at something which
he could only remember afterwards as being generally black--with bits of
silver here and there--and little transparent triangular pendants
hanging down from shoulder to elbow. "I hope you'll be able to come."

"I shan't be able to dance," she sighed. "Every time I turn my head--Oo!
I did it then! It's like a red-hot needle at the back of the eyes...."
She picked up her gloves and held out a hand, as the butler announced
that the cars were at the door. "I'll say good-night and good-bye. I
hope you'll enjoy yourself. And I hope I've not been too unutterably
boring."

Jack felt her hand pulling gently against his.

"When I'm trying to persuade you to come on with us?" he asked.

Lady Barbara shut her eyes in a second spasm of pain.

"Do you really want me to?"

"If you're up to it."

"I will, if you want me to," she promised.

For many years longer than Jack could remember, the Croxton Ball had
taken place in the vast and half-derelict "King's Arms," once famous,
with its long coffee-room and unlimited stabling, as the best
posting-house in the county and the beginning of the last stage for
coaches running from the east and northeast coast through Oxford to
South Wales and the west. Once a year the dingy grey-stone hotel,
filling one side of the market-place, blazed with unaccustomed light;
and the barrack of stables behind awoke to welcome the procession of
tightly-packed cars that explored their way with long white fingers down
the broad, uneven village street.

Jack changed his clothes and joined a shivering group by the fire in the
Commercial Room. Lady Barbara was sitting apart, sniffing a bottle of
salts and gently repelling those who tried to engage her for a dance.

"She oughtn't to have come," murmured Lady Pentyre, who neither
understood nor forgave her son for this eleventh-hour addition. After
the disgraceful episode of the poker-party, she had vowed never to have
the girl in her house again; and these later scandals were no
recommendation to leniency. But, before she could hint at her
objections, she was told that the invitation had already been issued.
"If she's beginning a chill or anything----"

Jack crossed to the distant chair and was welcomed with a smile.

"How nice you look in that coat!" Lady Barbara cried. "Are those the
Croxton buttons?"

"Yes.... May I sit and talk, if you didn't have too much of me at
dinner? I feel responsible for bringing you here, you know."

"But I love doing what people ask me! It's my greatest self-indulgence.
When are they going to begin, and what's all the fuss about in the
hall?"

A babble of angry voices floated through the open door--criticism,
suggestions and conflicting orders. The Secretary came in frowning and
snatched at all members of the Committee within reach.

"I'll never go to those people again!" he thundered. "After all these
years, too. Band hung up on the road. Wrong train. They won't be here
for half an hour!"

A murmur of disappointment swelled through the room, eddying round the
hall and rising from group to group on the stairs and in the ball-room.

Lady Barbara sat up alert, without any trace of headache or fatigue. The
red lips were parted expectantly, with a gleam of small white teeth.

"I'll play!"

She darted from her chair, humming to herself and only pausing to
crumple her scarf into a ball and to toss it with her gloves to Jack. He
caught it mechanically, wonderingly. In a moment the grave-voiced girl
with the tragic eyes and hint of consumption had transformed herself
into something untamed, with shining eyes and irresponsible
restlessness. He listened to her voice growing fainter on the stairs,
then looked with some embarrassment at the crumpled scarf and gloves.


     "Sometime, somehow, somewhere--
     How should I know or care?--
       It is written above
       That fortune and love
     Are waiting for me somewhere..."


The strict waltz rhythm was slightly modified to give scope to the
voice; but no one had began to dance when Jack went upstairs, and Lady
Barbara had to break off and say:

"Do begin, some one!"

"We want to hear you sing," murmured a diffident voice.

"Rubbish! What d'you like? Ragtime? A waltz?"


     "When you are in love,
     All the world is fair;
     Hearts are light with laughter gay;
     Roses,--roses all the way..."


Bobby Pentyre and Sally Farwell edged through the door; Summertown and
his partner followed, and within two minutes the room was
three-quarters full. Jack squeezed his way forward for a better view.
Lady Barbara played tirelessly, modulating from waltz to waltz, humming
a line here, whistling two bars there, until the Master panted up to the
piano and cried "time." She laughed and sat back on the music-stool,
softly fingering the keys and looking round the ball-room to see who was
there. Jack stood self-consciously stranded by the door, assuring
himself of the line of his tie, pulling down his waistcoat and glancing
at the hang of his knee-breeches. Her eyes met his, and she smiled.

"Say when you want me to begin again," she called out.

"Give us just a moment," begged the Secretary.

She struck a chord and threw "Lord Rendel" at them with such tragic
intensity that, at the end, Summertown raised a husky view-holloa of
applause and the decorous group at the door clapped noiselessly. Jack
always freely confessed that he knew nothing of music, but he felt
bathed in delightful irresponsibility, as Lady Barbara mingled old
English ballads with plantation songs and jolting ragtime with waltzes
which seemed to draw his heart out of his body. She was gloriously free
from self-consciousness. After two false starts, which were not lost on
her, he crossed the room in the wake of a little party which went to beg
for its favourite tunes.

"Awfully good of you to play like this," he said, as the others edged
away. "I hope you're not making the headache worse?"

"I love making people happy." She stretched out her foot and pulled a
chair beside her stool. "Tell me what you'd like me to play. D'you know
"Deirdre of the Sorrows"? Not the play, but the waltz. Little O'Rane
wrote it. You know him, I expect, he's a great friend of my cousin Jim."
At the first chords of the waltz, couples from all round the room rose
and began to dance. Jack threw one leg over the other and pushed his
chair a short way back, faintly and belatedly embarrassed to find
himself marooned on the dais by her side. "Mr. Waring----"

"Yes?"

"I want to ask you one question. You needn't answer it, unless you
like.... And then we'll leave it alone. I'm not as bad as you expected?"

Though he had warned himself at the beginning of dinner to be untiringly
on his guard, Jack looked up with a start. She was absorbed in the
music; her head was bowed, and she only raised it to glance with
half-closed eyes at the dancers, occasionally concentrating on one
couple and regulating her time by theirs.

"You've answered your own question. Rather inadequately," he added.

"Thank you ... I wish you danced! You're missing such a lot!"

"Am I? Lady Barbara, why on earth did you ask me that?"

Her head drooped lower over the keys.

"Because it hurt so!" she whispered tremulously. "Am I so vulgar?"

"Do you imagine you're quoting me?"

"Oh, Mr. Waring, be honest! You despised me before you met me. Do you
now?"

"It's the last thing I should dream of doing."

"Well, wasn't it rather unfair--before you even knew me? It's done me a
lot of harm ... and it hurt so terribly. If you were just to say you
were sorry----?"

Her humility was so unexpected as to be bewildering.

"My dear Lady Barbara, I've only seen you once before!" he exclaimed. "I
_did_ say something about you then; I criticized the people you went
about with, if you're referring to that."

"Then you don't despise _me_?"

"You're the greatest revelation I've ever had."

As the waltz quickened to the coda, a stout, flamboyant figure appeared
in the doorway, attended by a sallow escort armed with music-cases and
instruments. The Secretary ended a warm exchange of invective to cross
the room and thank Lady Barbara. Refusing to give an encore to the
waltz, she bowed to Jack and hurried out of the room.

Half-way down the stairs he overtook her and asked to be allowed to sit
out the next dance with her.

"We can hardly leave it like this, can we?" he urged.

"Like what? I must get some air! My head will burst, if I don't!"

She ran across the hall, rattled at the door-handle and hurried into the
Market Square. The December night air lashed him like a jet of icy water
and cut through his clothes; thirty yards ahead, Lady Barbara was
running with arms outstretched and jumping from side to side over the
grey-black puddles of dull, frozen water. A group of chauffeurs by the
village pound removed their pipes and watched her; then replaced them;
then removed them a second time as a second figure, in pink coat and
knee-breeches, pounded along the echoing street. Once she glanced back
on hearing the sound of footsteps; then ran on without changing her
pace. They had overshot the last house and were facing an unhedged
expanse of roots and crisp furrows before he overtook her.

"I say, what _are_ you doing?" he panted, angry at being made
conspicuous by her aimless freak.

Lady Barbara pressed a hand to her side, breathing quickly. Her hair had
blown into disorder, her bosom was rising and falling; and once she
kicked off a shoe to caress a bruised foot, balancing herself with her
other hand on his shoulder.

"Impulse," she answered.

By moonlight her eyes were black; and, as she panted gently, her parted
lips and rounded cheeks made a child of her. It was at least her third
incarnation since eight o'clock, but Jack had lost strict count. As she
squeezed the pebble out of her shoe, he noticed the provocative
whiteness of her shoulders and the softness of her hair. His own pink
coat and knee-breeches added the last touch to his discomfiture; and he
knew that he could never equal her in creating the unconventional in
order to master it.

"I was afraid your head might have made you faint," he murmured,
consciously fatuous.

"It was only partly my head. Sometimes.... Did you see "_Justice_"? You
remember the man in solitary confinement? He _knew_ he mustn't pound on
the door; he _knew_ he'd be punished, if he did. He pounded all the
same.... I've got too much vitality; I seem sometimes as if I'm in
prison...." She shivered and gave a slight cough. "Is it very cold?"

"Not more than ten degrees of frost. I thought of bringing you a cloak,
but I was afraid of losing you. If you don't come back at once, impulse
will land you in double pneumonia."

She slipped her arm through his and began to walk, with a slight limp,
back to the hotel.

"We had a gipsy in the family, though no one's ever allowed to mention
her," she announced abruptly. "D'you call me pretty? I think you would,
rather. Val Arden says I'm the 'haggard Venus.' Well, any looks we've
got come from her."

"With a dash of temperament thrown in. Suppose we go a _bit_ faster and
then look for a fire? You're quite well enough to dance now."

"But I'd sooner talk to you. A girl told me the other day that you
were--what was the word? 'sticky'; you never had anything to say, you
were prim and old maidish----"

"I'm no good at ordinary social patter," he interrupted. "But you'd
hardly apply that term to our conversation to-night."

They strode incongruously down the broad village street, past the group
of expectant chauffeurs and into an ill-ventilated box described as the
"reading-room." Both were emotionally out of breath, and the lights of
the hotel made Jack self-conscious; he stole a sidelong glance at her
and waited for the next change. Wistful appeal passed into effervescent
irresponsibility; the self-possession of a woman of the world alternated
with the radiant joyousness of a child.... And six months earlier she
had left a German Jew's ornate carnival to drive with a sodden debauchee
in a stolen car and had impaled an unknown chauffeur on the grey angle
of a jutting wall in Hertfordshire. And there was the aeroplane
accident; and the poker-party; and a dozen other things.... His glance
held admiration as well as curiosity, and she smiled with glowing
friendliness.

"Aren't you going to dance at all?" he asked.

"I didn't come here for that.... Now I'm going to pay you a compliment.
I got myself invited because I heard you were coming; I wanted to give
you a chance of judging me at first hand. There's an opportunity for
returning the compliment, if you care to take it."

Jack looked at her with a surprise which he tried to veil, as he
reminded himself again that he must be on his guard.

"I only hinted that your friends weren't good enough for you," he
answered. "Knowing who you were and the positions your father had
held----"

"Dear Jack, don't drag in father! Isn't that what I have to fight
against? Having my personality submerged by his dead pomp and glory?"

Her use of his Christian name startled him; and she watched with
amusement his stiff attempt not to seem startled.

"I'd sooner think of you as Lord Crawleigh's daughter than as Sir Adolf
Erckmann's friend."

Her eyes half closed, and she looked at him through the long black
lashes.

"I believe you're falling in love with me."

Jack lazily threw away the end of his cigarette, dusted imaginary specks
of ash from his breeches and rose slowly to his feet.

"I was only thinking what I should feel about you, if you were my
sister," he said. "Ought we to be going upstairs? Lady Pentyre's rather
concerned about you."

"I'll reassure her," said Lady Barbara. "Don't bother to come up; you
won't be dancing."

Though she had a reserve of self-control for scenic emergencies, he had
snubbed her so wantonly that she darted like a black and silver moth out
of the room before he could mark a change of expression. Jack followed
in time to see her locate Lady Pentyre and take the chair by her side.
The warm, scented air of the ball-room struck and flushed his cheeks
like the heavy breath of a hot-house. Summertown, waltzing by,
disengaged one hand and whistled shrilly on his fingers above the boom
and wail of the band.

"Missing two, Babs?" he called out.

Lady Barbara pressed her hand against her eyes, then drew it away and
shook her head.

"I'm not dancing to-night," she answered.

Lady Pentyre turned to her with mingled anxiety and impatience.

"Aren't you feeling any better?" she asked.

"I can't say that I am. When I stand, the floor goes up and down; and,
when I sit down, the room goes gently round me."

Jack was leaning aimlessly against the door, and Lady Pentyre beckoned
to him. She had no intention of leaving her son to make a fool of
himself with Sally Farwell; and, if she told him or young Summertown to
take Lady Barbara home, she would next hear that all three had fallen
down a shaft in Durham.

"Mr. Waring, you're not dancing! _Do_ you think you could find one of
the cars and take this child back to bed? I hardly like to send her
alone, you know, and every one here has a party of her own to look
after."

Jack bowed with adequate graciousness, but Lady Barbara intervened with
a vigorous refusal.

"I couldn't think of dragging him away," she exclaimed. "This is the
only ball he ever comes to; and he's been looking after me so much that
he hasn't had time to see any of his friends."

"But he can be back within an hour," Lady Pentyre urged. "It's still
quite early."

Lady Barbara looked uncertainly at Jack, waiting for him to become more
inviting. His face expressed no concern, and he was patiently gaining
time by consulting his watch and looking from one to the other of them,
as though he had no personal interest in the decision.

"Would that be agreeable to you?" he asked her at length.

"I don't feel that I have any right to spoil your evening."

"_Illness_ is hardly within your control, is it?"

She walked downstairs with a novel sense of failure and a misgiving that
she had overestimated his stupidity; yet a man must be more than
ordinarily stupid not to appreciate her after the trouble that she had
taken. Insisting on an open car, she settled herself in one corner and
looked thoughtfully at her companion's reflection in the jolting mirror
of the wind-screen. Valentine Arden, who allowed disparagement to become
a disease, told her to her face that she had genius; George Oakleigh had
said that she had "the clearest-cut personality of her time." And these
things were industriously repeated to her.

_Rather Lord Crawleigh's daughter than Sir Adolf Erckmann's friend_....
But Lord Crawleigh's world had no place for any woman who was above the
average. In Canada, in Ireland and in India she had tasted greater
personal success before she was sixteen than London could offer her in
a life-time. She had seen the government of India at very close
quarters; and, after that, it was impossible to feel Sonia Dainton's
elation at bobbing to Royalty at the Bodmin Lodge ball in Ascot week. At
other times and in other places, dusty, long streets, dazzling white and
quivering with heat, had been cleared for her and lined with picked
native troops; in an Empire crowded with immemorial soveranties she had
been the only daughter of a man who was vicegerent of the Emperor-King.

"You spoke too soon in saying you didn't despise me," she murmured.

They had covered but two of the ten miles, and Jack instinctively
avoided altercation. He was no longer interested in a girl who
deliberately invited herself to the same house, singled him out and
detached him, in an open car and a north-east wind, to pick a quarrel or
justify herself.

"If you're feeling ill, why don't you try to go to sleep instead of
making conversation?" he suggested.

"I'm not _making_ conversation!" she answered impatiently. "You attacked
me on such slender evidence that I was wondering whether you'd any
better excuse for attacking people like Sir Adolf, who's a very fine
musician----"

"And an impossible bounder," Jack interrupted. "My father pilled him at
his club ten years ago; if he put up again, _I'd_ pill him; if he got
in, I'd _resign_."

"And I suppose you'd 'pill' Villon and Benvenuto Cellini and
Verlaine----"

"I would, if they were friends of Erckmann," Jack answered cheerfully.

She shivered and lapsed into silence. Talking to Jack was like
explaining colour to a blind man. She had never sought out the Erckmann
circle; it was one of innumerable circles which a connoisseur in life
patronized and sampled for its distinctive atmosphere. Her god-father,
Dick Freyton, had kept a string of race-horses at Oxford and taken a
double first; he had dined with the Queen one day and entertained a
party of comedians and jockeys the next; he had been a gentleman-rider
and an ambassador, a soldier and a collector of early printed Bibles, a
competent sportsman and a more than competent poet. Touching life at
every angle, there was an Elizabethan spaciousness about him;--Loring's
father did not forbid him the house because Bessie Galton took her
company to Liverpool and he invited them all to stay with him at
Poolcup. Freyton was too big to be compromised. And the world had
developed so fast that nowadays a woman could touch life at as many
angles; for some it was the only thing to do. The queens of the salon
were dead, the political hostesses were dying. There was room for one
universalist.

They drove to the lodge of Croxton Hall in silence. It was only when she
saw him dropping asleep that she fanned the discussion to life.

"It's men like you who kill art in this country," she sighed.

"I can never see why there should be a special code of morals for a
fellow because he grows his hair long and plays the fiddle," Jack
answered, as he helped her out of the car and rang the bell.

While he explained their return to the butler, Lady Barbara let fall her
cloak into a chair and walked to a glowing fire at the end of the hall.
In the fender stood a tureen of soup and an urn of cocoa; behind her a
big table was invitingly set with sandwiches, cake, fruit, syphons and
decanters. Jack watched her for a moment and then explored the table
critically.

"Is there anything you'd like me to bring you?" he asked as he chose a
cigar and poured himself a brandy and soda. "Don't forget you've had no
supper."

She looked at him over one shoulder and sighed contemptuously.

"_How_ characteristic! The indecent irregularity of missing a meal! I
eat because I love nice things; one gets a new emotion sometimes. When
we were at Ottawa, father took me down to Washington, and one of the
secretaries at our embassy fell in love with me. We met at twelve and he
was in love with me by a quarter past. I suppose he was a man of method,
like you, and never declared his passion under half an hour, so for five
minutes we talked about food, and he asked me if I'd ever tasted
Baltimore crab-flake. I hadn't. His car was at the door of the chancery,
we both got in without a word; at 12:23 we were flying down Connecticut
Avenue. We drove to Baltimore without a stop, had our crab-flake and
returned to Washington in time for me to have a good rest before dinner.
When father began looking for me, some one explained that I'd been taken
to see the Congressional Library, and everything was all right till the
papers next day came out with great head-lines--'Breakneck Race for a
Crab-Flake.' 'Just Bully, Says British Governor-General's Daughter' Then
there was the usual unpleasantness.... But the crab-flake _was_ a new
emotion." She turned from the fire and joined him at the table. "If I
start eating caviar, I never stop."

The butler returned to announce that her maid had gone to bed and to ask
whether she should be called.

"Oh, it's all right, thanks," she answered. "I'm feeling much better."
She had talked herself into good-humour and, when they were alone again,
she looked at Jack with a smile. "Are you enjoying yourself? You look so
bored. What shall I do to amuse you?"

She pulled a chair to the fire and beckoned him to her side.

"I'm sorry to seem ungracious," said Jack, as he put down his empty
glass, "but I've been commissioned to send you to bed."

"But the others won't be back for hours!"

"Exactly. Barring the servants, we're alone in the house, and it
wouldn't look well for us to bolt away from the ball and then sit here
talking all night."

Lady Barbara sprang from the chair and faced him with amazement in her
eyes.

"My dear creature, do you imagine you're compromising me?"

"That's a strong word. I'm some years older than you, Lady Barbara," he
added meaningly.

"But if you _knew_----"

Jack interrupted her with a shake of the head.

"If you're trying to tell me some of the things you _have_ done, you may
spare yourself the trouble. I used to think you were being swept off
your feet by the people you went about with. The more stories you tell
me, the more I'm tempted to wonder whether you don't set the fashion.
Some one's frightfully to blame for not pulling you up, though I know
Jim did his best. Does it make no difference to you when a man like that
refuses to have you inside his house?"

Lady Barbara walked slowly to the table.

"You must apologize for that, Mr. Waring."

She imagined that she was contending with one man over a single hasty
sentence; but behind Jack stood his father, his father's regiment and
his father's club, all honestly conservative and gently self-approving.
Behind the sentence there lay in support a social philosophy framed in
days before England was corrupted by the uncertain morals of the east
and the uncouth manners of the west.

"Isn't it true?" demanded Jack, unabashed. "He cabled to his mother from
Surinam after the motor smash and that inquest. I wasn't told the exact
words, but you _haven't_ been to the house very lately, have you?"

He was so certain of himself--he was always so certain of himself--that
the question rang out like a taunt. Lady Barbara felt her self-control
weakening.

"And your informant?" she asked, still trying not to yield ground.

"I've really forgotten. Obviously no one in the family. So, you see,
there must be several people who know. For what it's worth, I have _not_
handed the story on."

"How chivalrous!--And to a girl that you'd never met!"

"I didn't want Jim to be mixed up in a fresh scandal. And you've driven
this country near enough to revolution as it is."

He picked up his hat and was starting towards the stairs, when an
unexpected sound stopped him, and he turned to see her burying her face
in her hands. It was a surprising collapse in one who seemed to be made
of steel, though he wondered whether the tears were an artifice or a
novel indulgence of emotion.

"You _didn't_ mean what you said!" she sobbed. "Please say you were only
punishing me for taking you away from the ball!"

"I've not the least desire to punish you. You've got great qualities;
you were charming at dinner, you're kind and good-natured, you can be
fascinating when you like. And then you spoil all you are, all you might
be and do, by tricks unworthy of a chorus-girl. Arranging this meeting
at all to smooth one ruffled feather of your vanity. The sham headache.
Calling me by my Christian name the first time we meet. Things of that
kind. That's not the _grande dame_, Lady Barbara."

She began to collect her gloves and cloak.

"I'm sorry," she said with trembling lips. "You won't be troubled
again."

"If you were sorry, you wouldn't try to be dramatic. Your 'curtain,'
like your repentance, is only the latest form of the Baltimore
crab-flake--a new emotion, a new indulgence.... Look here, I shall be
gone before you're up to-morrow; won't you part friends?"

He crossed the hall with a smile and held out his hand without fear of
a rebuff. She looked at him and had to confess herself at fault. His
heavy overcoat was hanging open, and in his knee-breeches and pink coat
he looked slim and boyish; he was a booby at dinner and a clod at the
ball; outside his own profession he had no more knowledge or ideas than
a schoolboy. Yet she submitted to his criticism almost in silence.

"Won't you part friends?" he repeated.

Lady Barbara could not let him ride off so complacently. She pressed one
hand to her side and groped her way to the table; as she leaned against
it, the friendliness died out of his smile.

"I shouldn't do that again, if I were you," he counselled, reverting to
his slightly nasal drawl; and this time she could have cried without
feigning, for she was tired and humiliated by her consistent failure.

"I _am_ ill," she protested. "Needless to say, you don't believe----"

"My dear Lady Barbara, the worst of taking people in by lies is that
afterwards they refuse to be taken in by the truth. That always means a
dreadful muddle for everybody."

There was no trace of anger in the indolent voice; a lazy, superficial
smile played still over the composed face, but she felt that she had
touched his vanity, which was so petty that he could allow no one even
to chaff him.

"I say, you _are_ revengeful," she cried. "Just because, in the most
harmless way----"

"I don't mind any one making the most complete fool of me--once," he
interrupted. "A very moderate sense of humour carries that off. One
doesn't want to make a habit of it, that's all. And I always think it's
a perilous thing to begin playing with the truth."

"So you'll never believe anything I say?"

"We're so very unlikely to meet that it hardly matters. Won't you shake
hands?"

She held out the tips of her fingers and, as he released them, caught
him by the sleeve of his coat. He noticed that she was biting her lip
and had either improved her acting or lapsed into sincerity.

"Are you like Jim?" she asked. "D'you despise me so much that you refuse
to meet me?"

He looked carelessly at his sleeve, but she refused to understand the
movement of his eyes.

"I should be honoured to meet you. Only I never go anywhere. Lady
Pentyre and Lady Knightrider are about our only two links."

"And I suppose Jim will have me turned out of _their_ houses, when he
comes back. If you knew how I hated having people angry with me.... Will
you meet me, if I don't have any of my objectionable friends, if I'm on
my best behaviour----"

"I don't think that your experience of my society can be so alluring as
all that," he laughed.

"I've never allowed any other man to lecture me as you've done!"

"Ah, but you invited it. You don't want me to come merely for a
continuation of the lecture."

"Perhaps it won't be necessary."

Her voice and eyes softened appealingly--and then became charged with
perplexity, as Jack gently removed her fingers from his sleeve.

"Another new emotion, Lady Barbara?" he laughed. "You won't easily
convince me that I've changed your character in a night."

"You interest me," she murmured, with a puzzled frown.

"Ah, that rang true! But I'm no good at the modern business of
discussing people with themselves. A man like Val Arden does that so
much better.... Lady Barbara, are you _ever_ going to say good-night to
me?"

"In a minute. Will you come to Connie Maitland's Consumptive Hospital
_matinée_ after Christmas? It's at the Olympic, and I'm dancing there. I
_do_ want you to appreciate me!"

Jack reflected for a moment and then smiled lazily.

"I'll come to the _matinée_, if you'll promise _not_ to perform," he
answered. "If I'm not in court.... I know I'm old-fashioned, but I call
it intolerable for you to blacken your eyes and rouge your face and make
sport for any one who cares to spend a guinea or two for the chance of
gaping at you. It cheapens you. I'd as soon put on tights and tie myself
in knots on a strip of carpet outside a public-house."

Barbara leant against the table in helpless amazement.

"You're more of a Philistine than my own father!" she cried.

Jack smiled imperturbably.

"And what would you think if Lord Crawleigh came to that same _matinée_
and gave a display of juggling with billiard-balls?"

"I should die happy," Barbara answered with a gurgle of laughter; then
more seriously, "But why on earth shouldn't he? If he can do it, if the
thing's all right in itself, why should the professionals have the
monopoly? I'm very good."

"No doubt. But, if you had no more idea of dancing than I have, people
would still flock to see Lady Barbara Neave. Now do you understand why I
loathe the whole life you lead?"

When, late that night, she thought over the long succession of snubs and
insults, Barbara chose this as the most wounding. She had recited and
danced, acted and sung on occasions innumerable, always hearing and
feeling that she was meeting the professionals on their own ground;
they themselves hurried to congratulate her, and she fancied vaguely
that she was paying the stage a delicate compliment.

"I've never been told that I hawked my father's position about for
advertisement," she answered quietly.

"It's the result."

He picked up his hat again and again held out his hand.

Lady Barbara locked her fingers behind her back and turned away.

"I don't like the feeling that you'll ring for carbolic as soon as I'm
out of the room!" she said.

"D'you think I should?"

"You wouldn't wait!" she cried, springing round as though she were going
to strike him.

Jack's growing surprise merged in a novel sense of helplessness. The
girl had wholly lost control of herself. Her pupils were dilated, her
cheeks white with anger and fatigue; one hand gripped the back of her
chair, and the other rolled her handkerchief into a tight ball. Not for
the first time that night he felt that a man had only himself to blame
for getting on to such terms with a woman. A lion's cage could be
entered or avoided at will....

Yet he could not escape the feeling that even at the white-heat of
passion she was enjoying her scene.

"Do part friends," he begged. "I shouldn't presume to criticize you, if
I didn't think you worth it. I ask you--as a favour--to come to that
_matinée_ with me. Will you?"

Lady Barbara could not decide whether to try once again to punish him;
she dared not admit that she was daunted, but she was certainly puzzled.
At one moment he insulted her, at another he hoisted her on to a
pinnacle and mounted guard below.

"Would you like me to come?" she asked.

"I should love you to."

"I'll come, if you want me to.... Now I think I _shall_ go to bed. It
would be a tragedy if we had _another_ scene. Good-night, Mr. Waring."

"Good-night, Lady Barbara."

She looked at him steadily before turning to the stairs, still undecided
whether to be angry or intrigued. Jack went into the library, chose
himself a book, undressed slowly, read for ten minutes and dropped
instantly asleep. Lady Barbara stood for many minutes in front of a long
mirror, admiring the black and silver dress and watching the gleam of
her arms and shoulders as she moved. Then with careless impatience she
loosened the dress, leaving it to fall and lie in a tumbled heap by the
fire; shoe followed shoe, stocking followed stocking; her maid would
repair the havoc in the morning, and it was a relief to lapse into
untidiness after so many hours of Jack Waring's orderly influence.
Pulling an armchair to the fire she began to brush her hair. Six hours
before, as her maid had brushed it for her, she had rehearsed the
meeting with Jack up to the point when he apologized for his presumption
in criticizing her. If only she had stopped then! But he was wholly
different from her preconception of him; fully as 'superior'--and with
as little reason--but disappointing as an intellectual antagonist; he
was commonplace in mind and yet had a certain blunt stubbornness of
character, a refusal to be stampeded--together with an indifference
which still piqued her.

And the indifference was broken by a solicitude which he expressed in
terms to earn himself a horse-whipping. Her eyes were blinded by a hot
rush of shame when she remembered her gentle words and appealing voice
at the piano. "_I'm not as bad as you expected?_" Humility was a
pleasant emotion, but a losing card. At their next encounter....

She laid aside the brush and sat staring into the fire. The room grew
gradually colder, but she did not notice it. Only when her ears caught
the sound of subdued voices on the stairs did she rouse with a shiver
and jump into bed.




CHAPTER FIVE

NOBODY'S FAULT

     "Cock the gun that is not loaded, cook the frozen dynamite...."

     RUDYARD KIPLING: "ET DONA FERENTES."


As a matter of form and to wash her hands of personal responsibility,
Lady Pentyre sent next morning for the local doctor. His advice--to take
things quietly for a few days--enabled Lady Barbara to keep her promise
to Jack with a good conscience. "_They say that I have been doing too
much_," she told Sir Adolf Erckmann, "_so I'm afraid I shan't be able to
come to your party on Thursday...._" On the same plea she wrote to Lady
Maitland, promising to attend the _matinée_ but regretting her inability
to play an active part. When she had taught Jack to appreciate her, it
would be time enough to shew him that her friendship was adequate
guarantee for her friends.

On returning to London she angled without success for a first-hand
report on him. To her earlier half-dozen words of disparagement Sonia
Dainton added a break-up price for the family. The Surinam cable
precluded consultation of Amy Loring, and Phyllis Knightrider could only
affirm that Jack went every year to Raglan for a few days' fishing--when
she was away and there was none but men present.

"I believe he's hopeless with a mixed party," she went on. "If you were
told to bring a man anywhere, you'd never dream of asking _him_."

"Well, I think that's better than being the first man that everybody
thinks of," Barbara answered. "God created Gerry Deganway to be the
eternal fourteenth at dinner."

"Val Arden once said that God invented bridge so that Jack Waring might
say he didn't play it," Phyllis went on. "That sums him up."

Lady Barbara was wondering whether the unintelligent appreciation of
such a man was worth having, when Jack once more wantonly put himself in
the wrong. After writing to remind her of the day and time of the
_matinée_, he had gone about his business. She mislaid the letter and
telephoned to his chambers to find out where she was to meet him. An
unwelcoming Cockney voice answered that Mr. Waring was engaged and
invited her to leave a message.

"I won't keep him a moment," answered Lady Barbara.

"Mr. Waring doesn't like being called to the 'phone when he's got a
consultation on."

She hardly knew whether to be angrier with Jack for his hide-bound likes
and dislikes or with the officious clerk for his interference.

"Will you be good enough to say that Lady Barbara Neave wants to speak
to him?" she said in a voice of authority.

"I'll see," the clerk mumbled reluctantly. "Hold on, please."

She was not accustomed to being kept waiting, and Jack or the clerk kept
her waiting so long that the Exchange enquired once whether she had
finished and then cut short the call. She hung up the receiver and
waited for the connection to be re-established. There was no sound for
five minutes; they did not think it worth while to remember her
existence or to recall that she had expressed a wish to speak to Mr.
Waring, that she had been ordered to wait.... Taking down the receiver,
she repeated the number. The same unwelcoming Cockney voice greeted her.

"I was trying to speak to Mr. Waring," she explained, "but I was cut
off."

"Mr. Waring's ingiged--Oh, were you the lidy who just rang up? Mr.
Waring says, Would you be kind enough to leave a message?"

Half an hour earlier Lady Barbara had been undecided whether to
telephone herself or to arrange the meeting through her maid. Now she
felt that, whatever it might cost her, she must speak to Jack without
intermediaries. And, if he were engaged in a consultation (or whatever
the absurd thing was called), so much the better.

"No, I don't want to leave a message," she answered. "I want to speak to
him privately."

The new attack seemed only to consolidate the hateful clerk's already
strong position.

"Oh, I thought it might be business. Mr. Waring never speaks to any one
privately on the 'phone."

"Will you kindly ask him to make an exception, then?"

"I'm afride it's no good," answered the clerk with undisguised boredom.
"And Mr. Waring won't be best pleased, if I go in agine."

While Jack should pay for his pleasure to the uttermost farthing, it was
undignified to prolong an altercation with a Cockney voice, especially
as she was gaining nothing.

"Mr. Waring asked me to go to the theatre with him. Will he kindly let
me know when and where I'm to meet him?"

The words were repeated slowly, as the message was written down.

"When-and-where-you're to meet him. Very good. If you'll give me your
number, I'll find out and 'phone you as soon as the consultation's
over."

"But I want to know now! I've got arrangements of my own to make!"

It was no longer the deliberate high voice of authority. Grievance was
merging in anger.

"I don't like to go in agine.... But he can't be long now. If you'll
give me your number...."

The Cockney voice suggested a mean, back-bent creature with bitten nails
and cunning eyes, a Uriah Heep, cringing but sinister. She did not care
for him to know that she had lost her temper; only this and the need to
punish Jack for his latest indignity kept her from refusing to accompany
him to the theatre.

"Oh, ask him to write," she answered with attempted carelessness.

As she ceased speaking, her maid came in to say that Mr. Webster had
called. They had not met since their quarrel on the afternoon of Lady
Knightrider's dance; and she was secretly relieved at the hardiness of
his ill-humour, for of all men he least repaid the discredit which she
earned by being seen in his company. At best he was a good-natured,
plastic slave with a ubiquitous car and a knack of securing seats in
theatres and tables in restaurants when others failed; at worst he was
an enigmatic sensualist, who attracted her because he privately
frightened her. They met first on the common ground of an interest in
spiritualism, later as companions in misfortune; Sonia Dainton alleged
that he was always inviting chorus-girls to his rooms and giving them
too much to drink for the amusement of hearing what they would say; some
one else added that he smoked opium, and an agreeable air of mystery
surrounded an otherwise disagreeable young man. After their last quarrel
Lady Barbara had decided to give him up; and she only wavered now
because she wanted a whipping-boy and felt that she was in some way
scoring a point against Jack by receiving him.

"I'll see him--up here," she told her maid.

Her face was still flushed from the telephone altercation, and she
posed herself carefully, backing the window, but with the curtains
thrown to their widest extent, so that Webster's oedematous eyelids
blinked as he crossed the room and held out a plump white hand.

"New car d'livered t'day," he wheezed. The habit, induced by
intemperance, of slurring the major parts of speech and omitting the
minor survived even in his sober diction. "'Wondered if you'd care come
spin."

"Oh? _I_ was wondering whether you'd been ill."

"Ill?" He shook his head and coughed. "No. Only too many cigarettes.
Care come?"

"Not till you've apologized for your behaviour to me, Mr. Webster."

"Haven't least idea what mean, but I'll apologize. Always ready
apologize."

As a whipping-boy he was too spiritless to be satisfying, and Lady
Barbara addressed herself to the invitation. Since the accident and the
inquest she had not embarked on any expeditions with him. Indeed, on the
evening before she went into court, she had deliberately broken a prized
Venetian vase and whispered to herself--or any one who was
listening--that, if she emerged without discredit, she would never go
with him again. Nemesis had accepted the vase and played false on the
bargain. But, while she might fairly feel herself released from her
promise, she was oppressed by premonition that disaster would overtake
her if she risked her luck again with Webster.

"Where are you going to? I'm waiting for a telephone message," she
answered.

At that moment the bell rang; and, as she picked up the receiver, she
felt guilty towards Jack Waring; in part she had undertaken to drop her
"objectionable friends," in part she felt that, if he were with her, he
would stop her going.... But his clerk had been unpardonable....

Gaymer's voice invited her to dine and go to a theatre with him. She
accepted and impatiently replaced the receiver.

"I'll come for a short time," she answered and felt that she was defying
Jack. "I must be back for tea, though."

"Have tea my place. Madame Hilary coming. Know who mean? Perfect wonder
that woman. Doesn't use medium; makes you, me, any one medium; throws
you in trance, and _you_ do talking."

The _séance_ was more alluring than the drive, for Madame Hilary had
been famous in necromantic society for more than a month. Lady Barbara
had been generally forbidden by her parents to dabble in black magic,
and a special warning had been issued against Madame Hilary, whose
methods had made her notorious, if not as a new witch of Endor, at least
as an accomplished blackmailer.

"Is she good about the future?" Lady Barbara asked. "I don't want to be
told that I've lived in distant lands, sometimes among the palms,
sometimes in sight of the snows. I know that better than she does."

"_She_ don't tell you anything," Webster explained. "_You_ do all the
talking, and we listen. Better hear some one else first; people
sometimes more candid than they like--afterwards."

He chuckled maliciously and followed her downstairs. For an hour they
drove round Richmond Park, and, as the light began to fail, he turned
back to London and brought her to his flat by the Savoy in time for tea.
The drowsy joy of rapid movement through the air had calmed her nerves
and blown away her ill-humour; she was too tranquil to quarrel even with
Jack Waring.

As she entered the smoking-room of the flat, the early premonition of
disaster returned. It was an unwholesome place after Richmond Park on a
December day.... Webster himself, white-faced and orientally impassive,
in a frame of yellow down cushions and a heavy atmosphere of burning
cedar-wood, was a sinister mystery-monger and purveyor of forbidden
fruit. She came to him for excitements and experiences which the world
conspired to keep her from obtaining elsewhere. An unwholesome man....
If anything happened, she had only herself to blame.... Yet nothing
could happen, unless the new clairvoyant told her something horrid about
the future.... She was not going to run away from a clairvoyant....

The warm rooms, thickly curtained and heavy with scented smoke, were
already half-full. Sonia Dainton and Jack Summertown were on either side
of the club fender with cigarettes in their mouths; the Baroness
Kohnstadt, with something of her brother Sir Adolf Erckmann's build and
colouring and with all of his guttural intonation, was impressively
describing Madame Hilary's powers; Lord Pennington, with a tumbler of
brown brandy and soda in one hand, swayed insecurely on one arm of a
chair and discharged amorous darts at a weak-mouthed girl with big eyes
and a high colour, who giggled in apprehensive appreciation; on the
other sat Sir Adolf, bald, bearded and fleshly, competing with
Pennington for her attention. Involuntarily Lady Barbara paused in the
door-way. If Jack Waring heard that she had been to Webster's rooms on
such an errand in such company.... They were not worth it....

"Hullo, Babs!" "Babs darling!" "Liddle Barbara!" "How ripping!"

The usual chorus of welcome greeted her and mounted to her head. Sonia
Dainton was kissing her extravagantly. Sir Adolf lurched forward to
praise her looks and dress, Lord Pennington to repeat and laugh at any
phrase that she let fall. Doing nothing, saying little, simply by being
herself, she dominated them until the door opened a second time and a
gaunt woman in a clinging black dress and hat like an embossed shield
rustled into the room. Her great height and noiseless movements
diverted attention from Lady Barbara; she threw up her veil with a
clockwork gesture as though she were ripping it from her face. Webster
advanced with a bow and was preparing to introduce her, when she stopped
him with a second mechanical fling of the hand.

"Ah, no! You tell me who they are and then you say, 'Madame Hilary is an
impostor; she knew a little before--and she make up the rest.' Is it not
so? For an exhibition I like better to know nothing." Her eyes flashed,
as she looked round on one face after another. "You, Mr. Webster, I
know--your name, at least--but these others I know not at all. It is
well. And I like better for you not to tell me. But you are all waiting!
While I drink this tea, you shall decide who first is to make trial."

She sat down, unembarrassed by the stealthy examination to which she was
being subjected on all sides, and, unpinning her veil, shewed a narrow,
lined face with sunken cheeks, an aquiline nose and eyes that were
lack-lustre after their initial flash. Too well-bred to seem bored, she
displayed at least a want of interest which chilled the spirits of the
party and left her ascendant. Webster was flustered at having to
stage-manage the _séance_; for Sir Adolf was so diffident and Sonia so
unsympathetic that he had difficulty in finding volunteers. Lady Barbara
at once offered herself, but seemed impressed by his whispered warning
that she had better first see what surprising exhibitions people
sometimes made of themselves.

"Here, I'll start the bidding," cried Jack Summertown, jumping up from
the fender. "Don't pinch my simulation-gold watch, any one. Only fair to
warn you, ma'am," he went on to Madame Hilary, "that I think all this
jolly old spiritualism is a fake. What do I have to do? And may I finish
my goodish cork-tipped Turkish Regie?"

Madame Hilary, suddenly appreciating that she was being addressed,
seemed to awake and assume new vitality. Shewing neither offence nor
amusement at his scepticism, she motioned Summertown to a chair and drew
her own opposite to it.

"Yes, go on smoking. It does not matter." She looked round the room with
another clockwork movement, switched on a reading-lamp, so that the
light shone straight into her own face, and then plunged the rest of the
room in darkness. "All that is needed is for you to look at me, into my
eyes. Never take your eyes off mine. I like better for you not to try,
not to will yourself. I shall ask you questions, and you will answer
them. Questions about the past. I like better for you not to be
sympathetic. Try _not_ to answer my questions. And, when I have
persuaded you to answer them, I shall ask you more questions--about the
future. And you will answer them, too. And afterwards I will tell you
what you have said. So you will come to know the future."

She paused to draw breath, and Summertown, obediently looking into her
eyes, finished his cigarette and tossed the end into the fire-place. He
was still smiling a little; but the room was grown silent, and every one
was looking at him; the gaunt, narrow face before him, grimly serious,
discouraged levity, though it sharpened his desire to expose her as soon
as she began her tricks. And for that the easiest thing was obstinately
to answer none of her questions.

"You would that I explain?" The deliberate affectation of broken English
was the accepted convention of an English actress playing the part of a
Frenchwoman; every one in the room was conscious of the artificiality.
The voice was unmodulated and monotonous. "In all ages men have tried to
read the future. By the stars and by crystal balls and cards and numbers
and pools of ink.... What can a pool of ink tell you? The future lies in
yourselves. Within your bodies are seeds of new life--innumerable; and
each seed holds innumerable other seeds of new life--generation after
generation, seed within seed. He who put them there ordained that the
Future should lie buried in the Present, as the Present lay buried in
the Past--and as the Past lies buried in the Present! It is hard for Man
to unbury the Future. Man has not been ready to face the light, and I--I
who help you to see that light have never seen it myself. Even I do not
know how glaring is that light.... But, as the seeds of the Future lie
in you, so the knowledge of the Future lies there also. Man _knows_ all
the Future, as Man _holds_ all the Future within himself, but he has
forgotten. It is within his unconscious. _I_ do not know it, but I can
help you to remember. I can tell you nothing, not even your name, but
you can tell me everything about yourself, Past, Present and Future.
What is your name?"

Lady Barbara started with surprise when the abrupt question cut through
the sleepy drone of mock-mystic jargon. Summertown was trapped into
seriousness, for he answered promptly:

"John Antony Merivale-Farwell. I'm usually called Jack Summertown."

"Why are you called Jack Summertown?"

"Well, you see, Summertown's the guv'nor's second title. Thirty per
cent. on your bills, and not a dam' thing else."

He looked obediently into the unwavering eyes, but Lady Barbara felt
that his familiar colloquialism was a deliberate effort to break up the
atmosphere of pretentious mystery.

"And your father?"

"Well, he's rather at a loose end at present. He was Councillor of
Embassy at Paris, and they offered him Madrid, I believe; but he'd been
ill for some time and so he chucked in his hand. Oh, _who_ is he?
Marling. Earl of."

"You are married?"

"God, no!"

"You have been in love?"

Summertown hesitated and then answered quietly:

"Oh, well, yes, I suppose so."

"Tell me about it."

Lady Barbara, watching his face as he gazed into Madame Hilary's eyes,
became conscious of a change in expression; Summertown might have been
drunk. His eyes were glazed, his features set and his forehead moist; he
spoke cautiously, too, as though fearful of a trip in articulation.

"It sounds rather sordid," he began diffidently. "She was an awful
pretty girl--in a shop. Flower-shop. I palled up with her.... I expect
you'll think me an awful cad; I never meant to marry her. It would have
meant such a hell of a row at home.... To do myself justice, I told her
that. She knew who I was; she said that didn't matter.... The thing
lasted for a year--nearly. And most of the time I went through the agony
of the damned. Ask any one who thinks he knows me; you'll be told I
haven't a soul to save and I'm the village idiot and all that sort

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/44982