Chapter III

"I find, under the bows of love and hate,
In all poor foolish things that live a day,
Eternal beauty wandering on her way."
W. B. YEATS.

With engaging docility Lilamani swallowed her quinine, accepting it, without conviction, as an article of Audrey's faith, that must shortly be her own also. But on the suggestion that to-night she should make a fresh advance by dining downstairs, docility vanished. Her small decisive chin asserted itself, the chin that had defied Mataji and _dastur_.

"Eat my food in a crowd of noisy strangers? Audrey, I cannot. At least--not yet."

She spoke quite gently; but Audrey Hammond knew by this time how delusive was that gentleness.

"Quaint child! I thought you enjoyed seeing new kinds of people and things," was all she said.

"Oh, I do! They are so astonishing. I love to see them all. But I think--not too close. And not at food-time."

That last made Audrey smile and shrug her shoulders. It is difficult for the West to understand the Eastern sanctification of such prosaic essentials as bathing and feeding; though in their own Book of Books it is written, "whether ye eat or drink, ye shall do it unto the Lord." But that Book came from the East, and even after two thousand years the essentially Eastern spirit of it still remains a stumbling-block to the practical, self-assertive soul of the West. Even Sir Lakshman Singh, whose civilization was more than skin deep, still disliked hotel meals. Hence his reluctance to force them on his daughter. Audrey admired him greatly, though innate self-assurance convinced her that she would have managed her rebel better alone.

"Well, my dear, if you won't, you won't!" she said with a touch of good-humoured irritation, unfastening brooches and buttons as she spoke. "We might try going down after dinner one evening. You must make a start some day--now you're here."

"Yes, oh, yes--some day," the girl answered, catching at the soothing vagueness of the word. "But you, Audrey, you need not miss what pleases you because--I am shy."

"No. Of course not," Audrey agreed; then paused, considering the matter while she tidied her soft, fair hair. Till to-day she had felt no particular wish to join the after-dinner gathering in the central hall, where a local band played twice a week, and people danced, when the spirit moved them. But her meeting with Nevil Sinclair had set the clock back. After years of arduous service to find him just where she had left him--attractive, leisured, and irresponsible--made her feel unaccountably young again. Though full eight-and-twenty, and mature of her age, her pulses had never quickened for any man, nor, in her belief, ever would. But, from the first, this thwarted artist and good comrade had secured a corner of her heart; and on meeting him again, she found that the same corner, not an inch more, belonged to him still. It is even possible that his arrival may have strengthened her conviction that Lilamani's nascent home-sickness should be combated by a fresh step in advance. She would have denied it upon oath, in all sincerity. But that is neither here nor there.

Catching sight of Lilamani's face in the glass, she nodded and smiled. "Your looks belie your name-stone, child, and your father seems worried since the mail came in; so I won't 'dine out' to-night. I may run down afterwards; and I may insist on taking you with me. Now--run along."

So Nevil Sinclair looked in vain for the possible descent of his Peri into the crowded room, where the truly civilized discussed their dinner--in both senses--under conditions that might well seem barbarous to minds not hypnotized by habit. Through an intermittent roar of human tongues and clattering plates, preoccupied waiters scurried to and fro balancing a silver dish on either hand; and one only of the glass doors into the verandah stood open to the cool and quiet of the night.

In the neighbourhood of this friendly door, Sinclair shared a table with another Antibes _habitué_. Cuthbert Broome, novelist and essayist of no small repute; a big, bearded man, nearing fifty, with a thatch of tawny hair, and sailor-blue eyes, that missed no detail of men or things. And there is a sufficiency of both for the born observer at a continental hotel. Behind them two Hebraic Germans, napkins tucked under ponderous chins, fought their business battles over again, with variations, in the intervals of damning cold soup and the monotony of the menus. On one side, a party of Londoners, correct to the last hook and button, had a politely inquiring gaze for Sinclair's well-bred profile. The two girls, in unimpeachable "restaurant frocks," had evidently been to Nice studying the momentous hat question, over which they argued like a pair of theologians over a point of evidence. On the other side a French couple, not long married, drank champagne and made love surreptitiously when they imagined no one heeded them. But Cuthbert Broome, listening to Nevil with scrupulous attention, was quite aware of it all. The third chair at their own table remained empty; and when a fresh ebullition of waiters skidded past armed with _noisettes de veau_, Nevil commented on the fact.

"Little Martino's late. Anything wrong?"

"Yes; poor chap. Temperature, with a slight touch of hæmorrhage," the big man answered, and the voice that matched his frame had a sympathetic note in its depths. "Sat out too late the other night over an after-glow effect. The result's magnificent--on canvas. Quite the reverse on his luckless carcase. But he wouldn't go to bed; though I prevailed on him to dine upstairs. He deserves immortality, does Martino, if ever man did. A born fighter, though his weapons are only a paint-brush and a mahl-stick; and all the odds against him."

Nevil nodded thoughtfully. Here it was again, the primal quality that makes for achievement.

"'Life but a coin, to be staked in the pastime, whose playing is more than the transfer of being,'" he quoted. "That's Martino's creed."

Said Broome: "A plucky one. And he lives up to it. He'll die for it years before he need. But he will leave his mark. He was alternately choking and holding forth on a new colour-theory all this afternoon. I could only keep him quiet by dosing him with extracts from a purple epic, which my editor friend of the 'Book World' is bound over to pat on the back; and I am the chosen instrument, for my sins."

"A chance to air your gift of subtle irony," suggested Nevil by way of consolation.

"In which case the great Wigmore would come down on me like a ton of best Wallsend; and I might snap a connection I don't want to lose. There's a side-light for you on the ethics of reviewing! But the book has some good stuff in it, once you're through with the Epic, which you shall read, my Nevil, if only that you may learn what not to write----"

And, having fallen upon a subject of mutual interest, they clave to it till the doors into the hall were flung wide to admit the spirited strains of "Semiramide." For it was band night; and frivolity would be the order of the evening. Frivolity of the mildest, and most innocuous; since Antibes lies a little off the beaten track of the Riviera as it is understanded of Society, and the budding millionaire. Cannes, Nice, and Monte Carlo entangle, in their jewelled meshes, the gambler, the devotee of bridge, restaurant and promenade; the well-bred idler with a taste for forbidden fruit; and restless young America, with a taste for all things costly and effervescent. To the grey, rocky headland of the Cap, with its pinewoods and aromatic cushions of myrtle and lentisk, come rather invalids in search of health, over-worked professional men and women in search of rest or renewed inspiration; a fair sprinkling also of those travellers who have enough of resource within to ask no more than large draughts of peace, and light, and colour from the twin goblets of sea and sky; a passing respite from the complex machinery of modern life and work. Folk of this kind do not always look promising at first sight. Such riches as they may possess are not to be vaunted in terms of silk and precious stones, and the last thing in motor-cars. But a little delving under the surface will often reveal an unexpected streak of ore; and those gifted ones, swift to detect the God in the clay, have even been known to dig up diamonds.

Of such was Cuthbert Broome, most sane and human of novelists. The fact that half a dozen critics of note had hailed him as a creative genius--word too lavishly used in this our age of spurious masterpieces--had neither upset his equilibrium, nor engendered the disease of acute self-consciousness that is the bane of modern talent. His bodily strength and power of work were phenomenal; no less so, perhaps, his sympathy for those lacking in both. He turned up at the Cap Hotel every few years; and more often than not lighted on a friend or two worth keeping. In one visit he had discovered Andrea Martino, the consumptive Italian artist with the body of a grasshopper and the soul of a hero. In another he had chanced upon Nevil Sinclair, beneath whose modesty and seeming lightness he discovered a measure of talent and strength as yet unsuspected by the young man himself. There be natures that come late to fruition, and Nevil was one of these; the more so because of the smooth ground under his feet and the curse of the ready-made income.

Cuthbert Broome, kindly yet critical, grieved over him as a victim of the sorrows of happiness, the vital poverty that may result from wealth. But he did not grieve as one without hope. The finer qualities were there; and he awaited with interest the pointed pain or pleasure that should stab them broad awake. For himself, Necessity had belaboured him generously ever since he could remember, with excellent result.

Now, as he passed along with the crowd, that surged out into the great square lounge, his tawny beard wagged and his sailor eyes twinkled in one direction and another. There was the small convex widow, Mrs. Heath, yclept the Hen Sparrow, by reason of a propensity for twittering in and out of season. Beside her sauntered the pretty niece with the "pompadour coiffeur" and secret hankerings after Mentone and Monte Carlo. Then there was the handsome French woman with lips a little drawn, and a hunted look in her eyes, because the five-year-old son, her light of life, was smitten with the curse of asthma, and her husband, smitten with the curse of a "system," was flinging away with both hands the money needed to keep his child alive.

Broome had an almost tender twinkle for her; as also for the eager-faced maiden lady, Miss Swithin, in freckles and spectacles and her best summer dress of the year before last. On the sandy-grey knot of hair half-way up her head sat an irrelevant blue bow, dropped, as it were, by her youth in its passing, though gleams of it still lingered in her inquiring eyes. A lone soul, one of the thousand and one oddments of earth, squandering the savings of years on a lone peep into Paradise. Shy of speaking to strangers without introduction, she played Patience zealously every evening at a lone small table in a corner; and nearly fainted between delight and trepidation, when the big, bearded "sailor-man" had boldly introduced himself, and talked to her all the evening. She had sat up late that night, in her third-floor bedroom, adding a rather incoherent entry to her neatly-written "Journal of a Golden Month," bound in vellum and tied with white strings.

After that, he often joined her when she looked specially forlorn and the blue bow more irrelevant than usual. Sometimes they played double patience; and when she won, enjoyment could scarce go farther. Now when a known writer goes out of his way to make friends with stray humans, there are those who are sure to believe him--not quite without reason--merely in search of "copy." But, in the case of Cuthbert Broome, such belief were libel. The man's creative impulse was too spontaneous and exuberant, and he himself too great-hearted to be so tempted, even did he not strongly disapprove.

"If ever I caught myself taking deliberate notes of a fellow-creature," he had said once to a simpering admirer, who rather hoped he might be taking notes of her, "I should burn all my skeletons of projected novels, and devote the rest of my life to picking holes in other people's!" But like many of us when we take pains to speak truth, he was not believed.

Be that as it might, he saw in the wearer of the blue bow simply a woman starved of legitimate hopes and emotions; and out of his own superabundance he gave what he could. But Miss Swithin did not figure in his occasional letters to Mrs. Cuthbert Broome, who was too practically occupied with committee meetings and demonstrations of the organized woman's movement, to find time for "loafing at Antibes." She would not have understood. Even after twenty years of marriage there were whole tracts in her husband's expansive nature that were entirely outside her comprehension. Yet their marriage was not tragic, nor even a complete failure. Possibly it was a mistake. But marriage is a mystery seemingly outside human volition; and it were rash to dogmatise even so far.

To-night, when the folding-doors were closed, and the crowd broken up into accustomed groups, mainly racial, Broome lit his pipe and strolled over to the cane table that Miss Swithin had fairly made her own. The blue bow, having been fixed on hurriedly, seemed almost to beckon him as its wearer's head nodded in sympathy with Madame de Lisle's account of her boy. Broome had introduced them to each other and was glad to see them making friends. Miss Swithin enjoyed airing her French, and Madame de Lisle her broken English; so it was a capital arrangement, and he went over to enjoy it, sure of a welcome from both.

Sinclair gravitated toward the "pompadour coiffeur," for whom he was an oasis in a desert of boredom; young men being scarce at Antibes. He found her pleasant enough in spite of her "pretty woman" tricks of manner; but caught himself wishing it were Audrey and surreptitiously glancing at the door. Besides, she could talk of the Peri; and he was curious to hear more. It did not occur to him that others could talk of her, too, till "Semiramide" had hurried to its crashing finale, and the Hen Sparrow leaned eagerly across her niece.

"Have _you_ seen our Indian curio yet, Mr. Sinclair? The pretty little purdah lady who won't defile herself by dining downstairs?"

Mr. Sinclair, who had been looking politely bored, was all attention. Yes, he had seen her, afar off. Did she ever come down, and had Mrs. Heath spoken to her?

"_Of course_ I have," Mrs. Heath twittered triumphantly. "I made a _point_ of it on the first opportunity. Odd specimens. They make up half the fun of hotel life. But this Lilamani girl" (she pronounced it Lillamanny) "is really quite a sweet creature. She isn't strong. Nerves, I believe. Even India is catching the modern epidemic. Still ... I _do_ think it would be better for her to come down on an evening like this, than to stay moping upstairs. Those three people are going to sing soon. The man with the tambourine is killingly funny--quite a character----"

Then Nevil had an inspiration. "Couldn't you send up word to Miss Hammond and suggest it?" said he.

"Why, of course. How clever of you! I might write a little note."

"And I might take it. I know Miss Hammond quite well. We met here before."

"It _is_ a pity she's so self-satisfied," murmured Miss Blakeney, leaning a sequined and bangled arm over the cane table between them and considering it with interest.

"Is she?" asked Nevil indifferently, and carried off his note.