Chapter VIII

1

George Tarlyon entered his wife’s bedroom fairly early the next morning. There was a door connecting their rooms, but he came in by the ordinary door; for when they had entered into occupation of the villa the servants had somehow forgotten to unbolt the door between their master’s and mistress’s rooms, and no one had thought of doing it since. Lord Tarlyon was no slacker, and could do with as little sleep as any man; for no matter at what hour he went to bed, he was generally up and about by ten: as now, entering his wife’s bedroom, gently, as fresh and clear of eye as though Casino smoke was balm to his health. Virginia lay very still, her golden head sideways and deep in the hollow of her pillow, and he was about to withdraw when she opened her eyes. She looked tired.

“I wasn’t asleep,” she said. And she stared at him as he smiled at her from the foot of the bed; and through the half-open door she heard the noisy filling of a bath. She wondered if it was Ivor’s or Hugo’s. Johnny believed in daylight sleeping.

“Will you draw the blinds, please, George?” she asked him.

He let the sun into the room with a mighty rattle of curtain rings; and the sunshine kissed Virginia’s hair--especially “Swan and Edgar,” so unruly in the early hours!--but her eyes would have none of it. She shaded them with her palm.

“I slept _so_ badly,” she complained softly: but not to him, to the space about her.

Tarlyon loitered at the foot of the bed, splendid in the light, his hands in his pockets, frankly admiring her.

“I hope you won’t mind, Virginia, but we brought Julie Gabriel back here with us last night.”

She looked at him absent-mindedly.

“Oh, dear!” she sighed.

“Couldn’t really help it, in a sort of way,” Tarlyon explained. “She had quarrelled with her young man, it seemed, and she really looked in rather a mess, so I asked her down here for a few days--until she gets over it, you know. Oh, come, Virginia,” he teased her, “have you no heart?”

Virginia imagined Julie Gabriel “getting over it!” What, on this earth, had ever “got over” Miss Gabriel?

“I’m sure you’ll quite like her,” Tarlyon assured her. “She’s quite a nice little thing, really....”

“Yes,” Virginia agreed softly, “at some one else’s table in a restaurant.” Virginia hated all restaurants--except, of course, the Mont Agel.

Miss Julie Gabriel had made her name as an actress in the year before the war, by showing her naked back to the audiences of a London theatre for ten minutes every night for six months. It was a charming back, people said. However, she had since retired from the stage, finding, no doubt, that she could make her fortune more swiftly and with less public exposure. She had a house in Curzon Street and a palace on the river, and young Royalty was supposed to have supped with her. People liked her--she’s common, but so full of life, they said. It was also said that George Tarlyon was the only man she had ever loved, and it was believed.

“George St. George,” a little voice said from the depths of a pillow to the ceiling, “you do know some low people, I do think....”

He was at once very considerate; he sat on the edge of the bed; he appealed to her as a friend.

“Virginia, you don’t really mind, do you? Because, of course, if you do we can have her thrown away at once....”

Virginia imagined Miss Gabriel being “thrown away” by milord’s orders.

“Oh, no! Now she’s here....”

“Besides,” she said, “haven’t I always said that you could ask any one you liked?”

And then Virginia had a grim thought about Mrs. Chester. Poor Ann! But she said:--

“Lois may mind, you know.”

Tarlyon threw back his head and laughed his laugh.

“Oh, our Lois! I’ll fix her all right--besides, it will come in handy for her Memoirs! _She_ won’t mind.” And he got up from the bed with a lazy swing.

“Before you go, you might give me the hairbrush and small mirror from the table,” Virginia asked him.

Virginia and her husband never talked of any subject for more than five minutes; and never referred to a subject again. That is called “getting on” with a person.

2

But Lois did mind. She had a reputation to keep up. But when Lois minded, she minded secretly. For when George Tarlyon, raiding her bedroom with little ceremony, told her of the addition to the party, she instantly cried, “Oh, splendid!” And that very moment decided that the Riviera was perhaps seen to best advantage from Cannes, to which she and Johnny would repair that very afternoon. Johnny was informed.

She mentioned their departure to Ivor, without, of course, giving the reason for it, as they walked about the garden before luncheon. Virginia had not yet come down. Lois said:--

“Well, Ivor Marlay, I’m glad to have seen you again, if only for a passing moment. Try not to be a beast, my dear, and come to see me in London----”

“Why, are you going to-day?” The surprise in his question seemed to her a little out of proportion to the fact. She glanced at him as they walked.

“Yes, but not to London direct. Johnny and I are moving to Cannes this afternoon.”

Ivor stopped in his walk, and looked seriously at her.

“I’m going to ask you such an impertinent question,” he said, “that I must first light a cigarette. If you will strike a match for me....” His one arm made striking safety-matches just a bit of business; he traded on it sometimes.

She struck one, laughing at him.

“You aren’t surely going to ask me not to go, Ivor Marlay! That wouldn’t come very well from a man who has simply refused to come near me for--how many years? Seven or eight, I think.”

“That’s exactly what I am going to ask you, Lois,” he said earnestly. “I’m hoping you will understand. Can’t I really tempt you to stay a few days longer?” The question was light, but the manner earnest enough. But that Lois appreciated its earnestness was evident only in her glance, for she laughed--the laugh with which she turned things away, a gay laugh, the Lois laugh. (All these people had each their own particular laugh; thus, it was fun to imitate each other’s.) She understood very well why the question was “impertinent.” She knew he was asking her what Virginia, however much she wanted her to stay on, would never ask her--he was asking her not to leave Virginia stranded. It was certainly “impertinent.”

As Lois had said she was going, Ivor had had a sudden vision of Virginia stranded in that _galère_, Virginia deserted by her friend rather shamefully. But, with these people, where did friendship begin and where end?

“No, really. I’m so afraid I can’t,” she said sincerely; and added: “Johnny would be ever so disappointed at putting it off now!”

“Virginia will be disappointed the other way,” Ivor just pointed out, bluntly.

They continued their leisurely walk in silence. Then Lois turned her head to him.

“Virginia, you know, makes everything all right by not noticing things. And she has no need of friends--I assure you, Ivor Marlay! She works things out for herself and by herself.”

Does she? Ivor grimly wondered to himself.

“And I don’t think,” Lois added secretly, “that she will be altogether sorry at our going. Not so sorry as all that, I mean....”

Then they talked of other things, and Lord and Lady Lamorna left for Cannes immediately after lunch, in Virginia’s car. They were great car-borrowers, Lois and Johnny.

Virginia and Ivor were not alone that day, but he didn’t gather from her expression that she was in the least put out by her friend’s sudden departure. She seemed to enjoy her guests that day, and Ivor not less and not more than the others. And the day and evening passed in a crowd, to which the voice and person of Miss Gabriel were certainly vivid additions. Virginia was charming to her, and gayer than Ivor had ever seen her, except perhaps during those first moments of their sudden meeting in the lane by Lady Hall. It was a little difficult to imagine this easy and social Virginia, inattentive to anything for more than a minute, as the faint and wistful figure of the dark terrace a few hours before. Not that she glittered in the Lois way, but she was gaily promiscuous of her attention, she was a woman without preferences....

Tarlyon and Miss Gabriel disappeared for the latter part of the afternoon in the other car; and Ivor and Virginia spent the hour or so between Lois’s and Johnny’s departure and tea in walking with Mrs. Chester, who was rather silent, and Hugo Cypress, who thank God wasn’t, about the winding lanes that lead about the crest of Cimiez--what part of that crest is left uncovered by the mammoth luxury of the Hotel Regina.

The “dicers” stayed at home that evening--Tarlyon and Cypress had both won a packet at _chemin de fer_ the night before, which was nice for them. Mrs. Chester did not dice, saying she had no unusual parlour-tricks. Dinner was therefore something of a festival. And later on they somehow fell to dancing to the gramophone in the wide drawing-room: which was apt for that purpose, for it had been fitted with a parquet floor by the luxurious forethought of Mr. James Michaelson of Lancaster Gate. A rather strange thing for Lady Tarlyon and her guests to do, thus to dance, for nowadays they only danced when they had to, considering that they had already danced enough to last them their lifetimes. (They adored Fancy Dress Balls, however--oh, let there be carnival, lovely carnival!) Tarlyon danced with Julie Gabriel, Major Cypress with Ann, Ivor with Virginia.

It was the first time Ivor had been alone with her that day; but when he looked down at her face while they danced it was masked by a smile. He noticed her mouth again, the taut mouth that looked as though it liked to be whipped by the wind.

“Well, Ivor?” she smiled at his look. They were dancing a very slow step--“Oh, very patrician,” cried, in passing, George Tarlyon, whose own dancing was not remarkable.

Ivor suddenly had a desire to force the smile from her face. He would have liked to take the smile from her face with a sweep of his hand, and put it in his breast-pocket, and suddenly give it back to her some other time. He liked her gravity, it was real, but he suddenly felt that this smile was unreal; she had worn it all day, with its variations, and he felt now that she had been unreal all day. Didn’t she know that she needn’t be unreal with him? She had seemed to know last night....

So he suddenly asked her:--

“Did you mind Lois going away--like that?”

She stared up at him, funnily, with lifted eyebrows. “Is this man mad?” they seemed to ask, those lifted eyebrows.

“Mind!” she echoed, under them. “Oh, no! Why would I?”

“Baby!” he thought. She added, as though they had been discussing the subject for hours and she was weary of it:--

“She did quite right, you know. Quite right....”

So she kept her smile. They danced a lot more that night.

Thus it was on the second night.

And on the third night it was more or less thus.

On the fourth night Ivor and Virginia were in Avignon.