Chapter III: Part I: Rainham Parva (2)

"Elle a vingt-quatr'ans--elle est perdue!"

"Uppe petite chose, avec voter Francay," commented Burnett Minor.

"Cau-ston coiffe deja Sainte Catherine," said the ruthless Pigou: "a vingt-quatr'ans on est deja--pff!"

"Non elle isn't pff--rude chose! But she'll tell me when we sleep out, because I'm going to have my mattress next to hers, sha'n't I, Causton?"

"Mais elle vient d'promettre----"

"--and we shall talk about all those things you always say 'Hush' when I come in--sha'n't we, Causton?"

"Prrridd-ee!" taunted the French child: and B. Major spoke.

"But I say, Causton, when do you take your vac.--June or September?"

"And where shall you go?" somebody else demanded.

"I'm going to Ireland--father's taken a house," cried a third.

"Nobody cares where you're going! Causton, will you come home with us?"

"No; come to Ireland with us!"

"Well, can I come home with you? I loved that man who brought you here!" (Burnett Minor was the young woman who had loved Chaff.)

"It wasn't Lord Moone, was it?" Macfarlane asked.

"Or was it your father?"

"Your cocoa, Causton," said B. Major.

Louie had never been so run after before. She curled up among the slippered feet at the foot of the bed (there were four girls stretched upon it), and alternately stroked the hair and tweaked the ears of Burnett Minor, who had defeated Pigou in the scramble to put her head into Louie's lap. "I _can_ have the pitch next to yours, can't I?" the child demanded, her eyes turned up and her face (to Louie) upside down. "There, you see, Pig, she says I can--so voo juste pouvez sechey-up, la."

This sleeping out was a summer custom at Chesson's. It began with the warm weather, sometimes in June, sometimes in July. On account of the morning and evening carrying of bedding and mattresses, the "pitches" nearest the house were deemed the most desirable, and weeks ahead there was bickering about the "bagging" of them. They bickered now, and then turned to the vacations again.

Louie listened, saying little. For her, vacations in this sense hardly existed. Vacations lose their value when you study as slackly as Louie did. It might be amusing to go home with one or other of the girls for a week or two, but on the other hand she hardly thought she would. These were the things she was both "in at" and "out of." B. Major was talking about them now. Soon she would be taking her presentation lessons; she was coming out; she had an unofficial admirer; yes, Louie saw quite plainly what B. Major's future would be. What was her own going to be? She had not the least idea.... No, she did not really want a vacation. More or fewer, there would be girls at Chesson's throughout the summer. Chesson's still amused her; she could leave once for all when it ceased to amuse her. She was learning nothing. She neither wished to start a lavender farm, as Elwell, the daughter of Sir James Elwell of the Treasury, did, nor to grow peaches, as did Macfarlane, nor to add to her pocket-money by selling pot-pourri at extravagant prices to her friends, which was Burnett Major's idea--until she should marry. She could hardly sell pot-pourri to her prize-fighting father. She might (she smiled) sell him hops--she seemed to remember that beer was made of hops....

And she certainly did not intend to mug at theory for the sake of a medal, as Earle was doing at this very moment....

The party was still discussing this life which was hers and yet not hers when Miss Harriet, going her rounds, tapped at the door and entered.

"Bedtime, young ladies, please," she said. "Mrs. Lovenant-Smith's compliments, and she hopes you have enjoyed yourselves."

Her tone was that of one who might say: "You see, young ladies, what liberty you have _within_ the Rules; isn't it much pleasanter all round?"

The party broke up.

The weeks passed. In June a number of the girls went home, Earle among them. Permission to sleep out was given, a little earlier than usual on account of the heavy mildness of the nights; and Louie lay in the orchard, between Burnett Minor and little Pigou. The convolvulus came out, great white trumpets in the hedges; the sea over the hill became of a milky blue; and there floated out to it dense tracts of odours, lilies, and syringa, jasmine and roses and hay. You wearied of the smell of meadow-sweet; in the houses you could hardly take breath. The sun was reflected piercingly from their glass roofs, and the girls spent the afternoons in deck-chairs under the shadow of the courtyard yew.

* * * * *

The thing that (Louie sometimes told herself afterwards) made all the difference and yet (as she also sometimes told herself) made no difference at all, began very trivially. It was just such another accident as that which, nine or ten years before, had sent her to her mother with a demand to be told "who the Honourable Mrs. Causton was."

Ordinarily, the girls at Chesson's were a little careless about the dressing of their hair. You cannot move constantly among banks of plants, and pick fruit, and net cherry-trees, and be for ever stooping over beds and frames, and keep your hair fit to be seen. Therefore, once a month or so, the girls might, if they wished, go in parties of four or five to a hairdresser's at Rainham, there to be professionally--whatever the word may be. These parties were made up more with a view to the enjoyment of the half-holiday than to the business strictly in hand; and Louie, had she cared, might have been a member of each detachment that went. On this particular day Louie had had much ado to free herself from Burnett Minor's affectionate clutch.

"Oh, do come with our lot, Causton!" B. Minor had begged. "Oh, you are rotten! You know you went with Elwell before, and with Major before that, and I do want mine properly done like yours, not just punched up the way we do it!"

"What, like Saint Catherine?" Louie laughed.

"Do come."

But Louie had shaken her off.

"He'll remember how mine's done; I was there a week ago. No, I won't come. I'm going to do some theory this afternoon."

"Oh, what a fib! You never do theory!"

"Well, I ought to. No, I won't come."

"Then will you lend me your bicycle?"

"Yes, if you like; but the others are walking, aren't they?"

"Well, I'll wobble with them."

And Louie had watched the party set out, Burnett Minor on the bicycle, "wobbling" and leaving behind her a complicated track in the dust of the drive.

She did not know why she had said she would do theory that afternoon. She supposed it was because she felt slack and bored. Nor did she do very much theory. She went into the classroom, languidly turned over the pages of an old "Balfour," wondered what it mattered to anybody at Chesson's (except perhaps to Earle) that "movements had been observed in the pollen-grains of Cereus Speciosissimus," or that "changes took place in the stamens by suppression and degenerations of various kinds." Then she glanced at a preparation on the stage of the microscope opposite Richenda Earle's empty chair, and yawned. She looked out into the courtyard. Three or four girls dozed in deck-chairs under the dark yew. There was an empty chair--but no; a clatter of washing up was going on in the kitchen under the box-room; she would go up to her cubicle.

She did so, and, pushing off her slippers, lay down on her bed.

Her window was open as far as it would go, but the yew seemed to shut out even what little air there was. All that entered was the faint acrid smell of consuming rubbish; they were slow-burning somewhere at the back. The sounds of the washing up were fainter now; a pigeon alighted on her sill. She had been an idiot, she told herself, to fag herself that morning listening to Hall's demonstration in the forcing-house. She wished there was a pond about the place, with a boat or a punt. She would have bagged the boat to sleep in. It would be jolly to be rocked to sleep in a boat or a punt.

She closed her eyes. The last thing she saw before she did so was the little black-framed miniature of the fourth Lord Moone, the last but three, in his tied wig and ensign's uniform. Louie had tacked it up by her mirror merely because it had been in her room at Trant as long as she could remember and, if one might judge from the youthful face, he was less of an opinionated fool than the other Moones--much less so than Uncle Augustus....

She turned over. Then she slept.

Sleep also was deep, too deep, at Rainham Parva. It weighed on the girl like a mulch. At five o'clock Louie could hardly drag herself out of it. She fumbled at her loosened belt and pulled out her watch. Five! The tea-gong must have gone.

Well, perhaps tea would rouse her.

She felt by the side of the bed for her slippers, rose, touched her hair as she passed the glass, and went drowsily downstairs.

As Mrs. Lovenant-Smith and Miss Harriet always took tea in their own or one another's rooms--which, for that matter, the students also were permitted to do if they chose--the meal was a noisier one than either lunch or supper. Louie heard one of Burnett Minor's several voices as she pushed at the door. The child saw Louie's face in the opening and sprang up.

"Here she is--give it to me--I'm going to read it myself----" she cried.

Burnett Minor always wanted to read it herself--"it" usually being one of the sublimer passages from the current number of the "Pansy Library" or an especially choice one from an office-boys' periodical. Louie smiled languidly now as the girl snatched a booklet from Elwell's hand and gave tongue.

"I've punctured your back tyre, Causton, but Mac has some solution and we'll mend it after tea--and I'm always to do my hair like this, Harris says--do look at it, isn't it stunning?--and now--aha!" (somebody had made a grab for her book). "Thought you'd got it, didn't you, Elwell? Now I'll read it first and then show her the picture, and that reminds me, Mac, you've never given me my 'Jack Sheppard' back that I lent you----"

Louie reached for a chair. She yawned again.

"Do give me a cup of tea, somebody. I hope the watering's all done, for I'm not going to do any. What's the child got now? If it's 'Maria Martin' or 'Irene Iddesleigh,' I think I know them by heart."

The child herself answered her question. She jumped on a chair and extended an arm for silence.

"Ready?" she cried. "Now!"

"'THE LIFE AND BATTLES OF BUCK CAUSTON,'"

she declaimed in her most ringing voice,

"'_Being the Full Story and Only Authorised Life of this Famous
Pugilist_'--

("Causton's uncle, don't forget, girls)--

"'_Revised by Himself and now Published for the First
Time--including his Historic Encounter with the Great Piker
Betteridge_'--

("Piker Betteridge--'Piker'--isn't it lovely?)

"'_Entered at Stationers' Hall and All Rights Reserved_

"'PRICE ONE PENNY'"

B. Minor drew out every syllable of the linked sweetness, and concluded;

"And lo and behold--on the cover--Buck himself--Uncle Buck, Causton--you needn't say he isn't--as large as life and twice as beautiful--there!"

She held up the booklet in triumph.

But she drew it back again, bubbling with enjoyment. "Wait till I find _the_ gem--the one about Piker," she cried.

Her fingers fluttered rapidly through the precious pennyworth in search of the "gem."

Louie's cup of tea had been at her lips, but not a drop spilt as she put it down again. If her colour changed at all it was only as that other pale fighter's had done whose story, Price One Penny, the unconscious Burnett Minor was rapturously searching.

"Here it is!" cried B. Minor, peremptorily extending her hand again. "Listen, everybody!--

"'_But the redoubtable Buck refused to allow the wiper to be
skied. He recked nothing of his bunged optic and the claret that
flowed from his beezer. Game as a buck-ant he advanced for the
twenty-eighth round. The Piker, whose bellows were touched_----'"

But Louie had risen and walked to the child. She held out her hand.

"Let me look," she said.

B. Minor gave her a suspicious look, as if she feared she might be reft of her treasure. "You will give it me back?"

"Oh yes."

Louie took the book.

She supposed she was awake now, but somehow a curious air of unreality enveiled whatever it was that was happening. She looked at the cover of the "Life" in her hand. The most execrable of woodcuts could hardly disguise what she saw. Traditionally posed, nude above the waist, and clad below only in tights and fighting-shoes--formidably watchful, lightly poised for the blow--in appearance at any rate he was a man and superb. But really he had been cruel, faithless, divorced.

As if she had passed merely from one state of half-wakefulness to another, she did not think of the bomb she was about to drop among the girls. She only wanted to look, and to look, and to look again at this man, who was her father.

"Isn't it just Causton's mouth and chin?" she barely heard Burnett Minor bubbling. "But I can't say she has Uncle Buck's beezer----"

Slowly Louie handed the "Life and Battles" back. At any rate she had now seen him, if only in a wretched woodcut. She looked quietly about her.

"That's my father," she said, perhaps a shade distinctly and loudly.

Then she looked about her again.

Burnett Minor jumped down from her chair. Her eyes shone flattery on Louie. The very audacity of such a lie compelled her admiration.

"O-o-oh--_what_ a whopper!" she cried. Louie turned her eyes to Burnett Minor.

"You said uncle. You weren't quite right. That's my father," she said again.

Burnett Minor's life was full of miracles. A miracle more or less made no difference. Her eyes sparkled. She alone of the girls believed.

"Not really?" she gasped.

Louie nodded.

"Qu'est c'qu'elle dit?" Pigou cried excitedly, somewhere at the back.

"Pooh, she didn't--she only nodded--nodding isn't a lie," a casuist scoffed.

"Stupid, don't you see she's joking?"

But Burnett Minor was watching Louie--only to be quite sure.

"Honour?" she cried. "Spit your death?"

"Honour."

"How splen-_diferous_! And you never told us!"

But Burnett Major had already looked at her sister. She was shocked into using her Christian name. "_Genista!_" she reproved her.

"Let me look again," said Louie.

She looked again at the man who had been cruel, faithless, divorced. Again she handed the "Life" back.

"He keeps a public-house up the river," she said.

At that the tension was suddenly relieved. That, of course, was too much. They breathed freely again. The derisive clamour broke out.

"Oh, don't you see? They've made it up between them--frauds!"

"Of course they have! Come and finish tea."

"She'll be saying that was the man who brought her down next!"

"Causton, I'll never, never believe another word you say!"

"Come on--the housekeeper will be here in a minute."

"Pig, you've stolen my piece of cake that I was saving!"

"Hurl the bread and butter, Mac."

And the crowd which had gathered about Louie dispersed to the tables again.

Not until ten minutes later, when she had gone up to her own room again, did Louie begin to wonder what had impelled her to make her surprising declaration. But in an instant her ten-years'-old habit of thought asserted itself again. Why have made it? Rather, why not have made it? She would have made it sooner had occasion offered. Elwell and the Burnetts did not drag their fathers in; she had not dragged her father in either. She had not told them that her mother was Lord Moone's sister--it was known, but she had not told them; why should she have paraded the fact that her father was this redoubtable Buck, from whose beezer the claret had flowed as he had advanced for the twenty-eighth round? They could have known it any time they had wanted! Conceal it? Why, had she not all her life been glorying in that very pride of the cobbler's dog?

And still, deep down in her, she wondered whether it had been even that sort of pride, and not rather that secret hunger of the heart that, while she was "in at" everything, she was also "out of" everything. Had it been that that had caused her to say quietly: "That's my father"?

Or perhaps it was even something deeper still. Perhaps, in a word, it had been her blind groping towards that crude and strong and cruel and joyous life Richenda Earle had said she knew nothing about.

She wondered whether the girls downstairs were talking about her now.

Her eyes fell on the black-framed miniature of the fourth Lord Moone. Then, as if her brain had received a number of disordered impressions all heaped one on the top of the other, she sat down on the edge of her bed, not so much to think as to remember again exactly what had happened.

Gradually the disorder cleared. Phrases and the tones in which they had been uttered began to stand forth more distinctly. Presently she was able to allocate each to its speaker. It was her first attempt to estimate differences in the future her declaration might have made.

Burnett Minor, of course, she could dismiss summarily. To her it had been a high lark, that but endeared Louie to her the more. But Burnett Major? What about her? "_Genista!_" she had exclaimed, shocked at her young sister's apparent belief in the socially impossible. Yes, it would be interesting to see what difference, if any, was to be seen in Burnett Major's attitude now. And Elwell's "_Oh!_" What about that? And Macfarlane's blank look? And what did Richenda Earle think?

Louie did not know yet.

And what about Mrs. Lovenant-Smith? Undoubtedly Mrs. Lovenant-Smith, knowing about it herself, would have preferred Louie to keep silence.

The thought of Mrs. Lovenant-Smith, however, always braced Louie. That curious pleased coldness came into her eyes again. She would see about Mrs. Lovenant-Smith by-and-by. In the meantime, the last thing she intended to do was to absent herself from them all. She would go down to supper.

She took a clean blouse from a drawer, laid it out on her bed, and then, reaching for a towel, started for the bathroom.

Before she reached the bathroom, however, one of her conjectures was already answered. Richenda Earle's cubicle was on the same corridor as hers, four doors lower down, and she met Richenda herself, who had come back from her vacation a week before, by the embrasure of one of the latticed courtyard windows. It was almost dark; in the recess the little reflectored oil lamp had been lighted, and it shone on the Scholarship girl's copper hair and angular shoulders. Louie stopped. She did so deliberately. Let Earle allude if she dared.

"You washed?" she said, on a rising note.

"No, not yet. I--I came up for a book," said Richenda.

"You're not studying to-night, are you?"

"Ye-es--oh yes, I must."

"Classification?"

"Ye-es--yes."

"How far have you got now?"

Louie's mood was on her. It was overdue, but it had come now, and she was challenging Earle. Nevertheless, she was ignorant of what she really challenged when she challenged Earle. Hard knowledge of the true weight of Life will tell, and Earle's knowledge of that weight told now. The girl's head was downhung, so that the nodule of bone at the back of her neck caught the light sharply. Suddenly she looked up.

"But you are Lord Moone's niece, aren't you?" she said, without preface.

Since her vacation, this daughter of a struggling Westbourne Grove bookseller had seemed less assertive than before, and was, somehow, none the worse for it. Louie didn't know what had made the difference, but she momentarily dropped her point.

"Yes," she said. "Why?"

"Then----?" Richenda halted.

"Then what? The other that I told them downstairs is just as true, if that's what you want to know."

"But--but----"

"Well, what?"

Earle evidently mitigated what she had been about to say.

"I only mean that--that you must have thought it queer, my talking as I did--that morning, you know?"

Louie saw the approach of the first attitude for her garner.

"What morning?" she demanded.

"When they punished me--when I was washing the fruit trees."

"I remember. Well, why should I think anything queer?"

Earle's head dropped again. Again the sharp nodule of bone showed.

"Do you mean," Louie said, "that if my father's what I said, no doubt I know as much about what you were saying as you do?"

"Oh no!" Earle said, the more quickly that that probably had been what she had meant.

"Then what do you mean?"

"Only that it's--so odd----"

But suddenly Louie gave her towel a twitch and turned away. She spoke with her chin over her shoulder.

"I don't love my mother," she said, "but for all that she is Lord Moone's sister--Augustus Evelyn Francis Scarisbrick, Lord Moone. And the other's my father. I wouldn't study too hard about it if I were you. You have your medal to get."

She walked abruptly to the bathroom.

That night, as usual, she sat at supper between Burnett Minor and Richenda Earle. The ordinarily irrepressible child on her left was silent; but others, two or three places removed from Louie, leaned back or forward from time to time to speak to her. She fancied Burnett Minor had been crying; she was sure of this when, giving the child's hand a pat under the table, she felt her own hand impulsively caught and squeezed. Then, in proportion as Burnett Minor cheered up (which she usually did very quickly), the others ceased to talk across to Louie. It was as if, whoever did it, some normal level of chatter must be maintained. Soon supper was as desultorily talkative as it always was. Louie, glancing at the top table, saw that Mrs. Lovenant-Smith knew nothing of what had happened at tea-time. She was, however, quite ready for her the moment she should find out something.

V

One afternoon about three weeks later Louie Causton had occasion to go into the carpenter's shed. This shed lay between the dairies and the boiler-house that was the centre of the hot-water-pipe system, and Priddy had a frame making there. Half this frame, protected by a board with "Wet Paint" chalked upon it, leaned against the outside wall, and, with his back to the sunlit doorway, a young man, whom at first Louie took to be Priddy, was doing something at a bench. Hearing her, he turned. It was not Priddy. Louie did not know him.

There is in the British Museum a small helmeted head very like the young man Louie saw. It is on the upper floor, among the Tanagras, in a case on the left as you walk from the stairs. This young man, of course, was not helmeted. His face was handsome and slightly vacuous; his eyes in particular had something of the blankness of the little terra-cotta head; and his mouth was full and classically curved, and had the slightest of smudges of dark moustache along the deeply indented upper lip. A pair of rolling muscular shoulders showed through his white sweater; his old trousers were tucked into a pair of wooden-looking boots; and he was filing something. Louie wondered what business he had there.

He told her. He spoke in a slow voice, as if he had got his explanation by rote. He was there by Mrs. Lovenant-Smith's permission, he said.

"We had a smash with the centre-board, you see," he explained. "Crash--just at tea-time. Izzard wanted to send it to Mazzicombe, but I told him they'd charge nearly as much as we gave for the beastly boat. So I'm doing it myself."

Then, as if his presence within the precincts of a horticultural college for young women was quite explained, he bent over his filing again. Louie, who had come for a couple of boards that had been put aside for her, took them and went out. She was twenty yards away when she heard the young man call slowly after her: "I say--I ought to carry those for you, you know----"

The boards were for her bed. This she had removed from the orchard. The new place lay quite beyond the orchard, at the foot of the hill between Chesson's and the sea. There, for the first time on the previous night, she had had the best of what breeze there was.

It had been the attitude of her fellow-students during the past month--or, more fairly, what she had conceived to be their attitude--that had caused her thus to remove herself.

It might be too much to say that she was still not as popular as ever. These things are not demonstrable. Popular she had been; now--well, it depended a little more than it had done. Burnett Minor, of course, would have eaten from the same plate with her by day and shared her bed at night had she been permitted--also had she not left for her vacation a fortnight before; but Burnett Major--Louie was not so sure about Burnett Major. Her attitude had been more than correct; it had been so correct that Louie had been put altogether in the wrong. The words, of course, had never been said, but Louie had imagined Burnett Major's private opinion to be as follows:--

"But why didn't she tell us sooner? What earthly difference does she suppose it would have made? Who cares about things like that? I dare say her father's just as good as anybody else's father; for that matter, mother's grandfather was only a farmer--mother told us so herself; but nobody likes being treated as if they were snobs. It showed a lack of confidence, that's what it showed; and I don't know--now--I mean no girl, unless she _wasn't_ quite a lady, would----" Louie could supply that part too.

"I don't care--I _love_ Causton!" she had also imagined B. Minor as having sobbed, bold and unconvinced. "He didn't sky the wiper when his beezer was bleeding, anyway!"

Yes: for Burnett Major, presentation and all the rest of it lay ahead.

Matters would probably have stopped at that had Louie herself allowed them to do so; but that would not have been like Louie. Allow them to stop there? Good gracious, no! Her cynicism had become bright indeed. _She_ was not the girl to contaminate the innocent Burnett Minor; neither--for she was a Scarisbrick when all was said and done--was she going to be driven willy-nilly into the society of Richenda Earle as company good enough for her. She could look after herself, thank you. Coventry is no unpleasant place provided you have the putting of yourself there, and at any rate her Coventry at the foot of the hill was cooler at night than the other one. It meant carrying her mattress and bedding a little farther, but she had a prizefighter's physique to carry them with, which was more than her nearest neighbour, Elwell, the daughter of the Treasury mandarin, could say.

It is true that she did sometimes wonder (with Burnett Major, perhaps) whether she had not inherited also from the prizefighter something less desirable than his physique--a discontented and ill-conditioned nature. But that did not mend matters. It merely made her, if it did anything at all, distrustful of herself. And as this is the story of Louie, virtues and vices and all, her moods must go down with the rest.

At any rate, rolled in her blanket at the foot of the hill, she could feel the night wind on her face, and see the stars, and in her fancy deride or boast of her parentage to her heart's content.

On the afternoon following that on which she had fetched the boards from the carpenter's shed she went to the shed again, this time for a couple of tent-pegs and a piece of cord for the better securing of her blankets. The vacant young Tanagra was still there. But this time he was not quite so vacant. He had had leisure to think of quite a number of words.

"I say," he said, lifting slow and bashful eyes of the colour of blue porcelain to Louie, "I've been thinking. Haven't I seen you before?"

"Yes. Yesterday," said Louie shortly. He had had the bad luck to catch her at her brooding. But he did not seem to notice her curtness.

"No, but I mean--before----"

"When?"

"Isn't--isn't your name Chaffinger?" He almost blushed.

"No."

"Oh!"

Then she relented a little.

"I was called Chaffinger for a time. My name's Causton. I suppose yours is Chesson, or you'd hardly be here?"

"Chesson? Why Chesson? No. Mine's Lovenant-Smith--Roy Lovenant-Smith."

"Oh!" said Louie. "Then you're right. We have met before, at Mallard Bois."

Roy Lovenant-Smith appeared to be so relieved at being rid of a perplexity that he didn't much care if they never met again.

"I thought we had," he said mildly. "You were Louie Chaffinger then. I knew you were."

"But what," Louie asked, "are you doing here?"

He radiated simplicity.

"That centre-board, didn't I tell you? Izzard would make me go halves in the rotten old thing; just look at her; hardly a shroud on the port side, and the centre-board was hitched up with a piece of old rope instead of a chain and down it came the other tea-time. It's the cabin table as well as the centre-board, you see, and the whole thing shut up-just like that----"

He set the inner edges of his hands together and then closed his palms with a slap.

"All the tea--jam and all the lot," he said.

He amused Louie. "That was a pity," she said demurely.

"Wasn't it? But I say, I shall be catching it. I might use the shed, aunt said, but she told me it was a fixed Rule about men, unless you're a gardener, of course----"

("An obedient nephew," Louie thought.) "Then I must go at once," she added.

"Well, I shouldn't like to get you into a row too," said Roy Lovenant-Smith ingenuously.

"No," Louie agreed, more demurely still. "They have to be strict, you know."

"Rather!" said Roy Lovenant-Smith heartily.

And Louie left him.

She was hardly out of sight before her laughter broke forth. "'All the tea--jam and all the lot!'" she repeated softly, and laughed again. She scarcely remembered this delightful young man. When, as a child of eleven, she had played leapfrog, he could hardly have been more than seven, and she felt herself to be far more than four years his senior now. He was the adjutant's son, she supposed. Well, he would hardly need Chaff's usual extenuation about his being a bad fellow at all: Louie would be very much surprised if he had wit enough to be very bad, or, for the matter of that, very anything else either. Once more she laughed. At any rate she had to thank him for dispelling her megrims for the time being. Still laughing softly, she passed through the orchards, ascended the hill, and sought her favourite place by the stile at the top.

She had not thought very much about young men. She had observed them as so many phenomena, obviously superior to the animals, yet not quite identifiable as beings with inner experiences akin to her own. They looked at her irregular mouth and elongated chin, said the things young men did say, and departed again, taking their various moustaches and their unvarying smell of tobacco to some girl of the kind she knew they accounted "pretty." They were quite different beings from the fairy prince of her childhood; and since her childhood's days she had grown gradually, she did not know how, to a fairly accurate estimate in retrospect of the "little party" to which Chaff had once taken her, pigtails and all. Her views of marriage too were coloured by that mixed parentage that made her, she supposed, not "common" and not "a lady." She would not marry unless this was clearly understood. What else there might be in marriage was shadowy, to be considered after this redoubtable magnanimity was safely out of the way.

With no young man had she ever had "a lark."

She was, however, more in the mood for a lark now--not necessarily with a young man--than she had ever been in her life before. "Cau-ston a vingt-quatr'ans--elle coiffe deja Sainte Catherine," the remorseless Pigou had said: oh, had she? Did she? Moreover, you cannot put yourself gloomily into Coventry; others must be made to see that you consider your sequestration the most desirable of conditions. Indeed, she had said as much to Richenda Earle only the night before.

Richenda was the only one of the girls who slept indoors, and Louie, carrying her bed-trappings out from the house, had come upon Richenda by the little green door of the espaliered wall that led to the orchards. Richenda had made an advance, willing, apparently, to forget the snub Louie had administered after the "Life and Battles" revelation, and had offered to carry her pillow for her.

"Why do you go so far?" she had asked, as they had left the orchard behind.

"Oh, I hate being disturbed," Louie had replied. "I'd go right down to the shore if it wasn't for the climb up again."

"But suppose you wanted anything during the night?"

"What should I want?"

"Of course, I forgot. You don't have headaches. I have--frightful ones."

"Then why don't you come out too? There's quite a jolly place here. I'd help you to carry your things."

"Oh, I've got to read," Richenda had shaken her head.

"You'd be heaps better for it----"

Louie had not much in common with Richenda--save perhaps (she loved little cuts like this at herself) that both of their fathers were literary. But she had had that rather brutal snub on her conscience. That had come out next.

"You do study too hard," she had said, "and--I say, Earle--I'm sorry for what I said that night--you know--when I snapped at you and said you'd your medal to get. Will you forget that?"

The next moment she had almost wished she hadn't said it, Earle's hungry gratitude had shown so.

"It wasn't your fault a bit," the red-haired girl had broken out impulsively. "It was all mine. I ought to have minded my own business. But I was so--so----"

"Well, try sleeping up here," Louie had cut her short. "It's jolly."

But Richenda had gone on. "I was stupid," she had murmured.

"I don't know that you were. You see how it is."

"Oh, I was, I was----"

"Well, as I tell you, I don't think much of my mother's lot."

"Ah, _you_ can say so," Richenda had replied, shaking her head. Then, as Louie had thrown down her mattress, "You don't mean to say you undress here?" she had asked.

"Well, I don't sleep in my clothes."

"But don't your things get wet?"

"I wrap 'em in my waterproof.... You won't come up, then, and run down to the shore for a bathe before breakfast?"

"Causton, they'll be dropping on you yet!" Earle had said, almost frightened.

"Well, without the bathe?"

"Oh, I should die!"

And Richenda had gone back to sleep where she might find remedies for her headaches within reach of her hand during the night.

Louie sat on the stile. The sea had a soft bloom, and the sky was of the colour of the whites of a baby's eyes. Bees hummed among the scabious, and blue and sulphur butterflies hovered over the patches of wild thyme. A tramp, sullying the air behind her, crept slowly up to Bristol; a single nodding grass-head near at hand shut her out almost completely. Mazzicombe, down under the hill, was hidden. Louie watched it all, thinking of nothing, or, if of anything, of how sweet it was to relax all her muscles to the point of not stumbling off the stile, and all her mind save that she might still be just conscious that she existed and was Louie Causton....

"Hallo," said a slow, imperturbable voice behind her; "here we are again."

She started a little. Roy Lovenant-Smith was returning with a baulk of old wood over his shoulder.

"Oh, it's you," she said. She did not know whether she was glad or annoyed to be interrupted.

"Yes, it's me," he replied placidly.

She was silent for a moment; then: "I thought you hadn't to hang about here?" she said.

"Well," he put it to her candidly, "how can I get over the stile when you're sitting on it? How can I, now?"

She laughed. "Well, I must get off on my proper side." She did so. "There," she said.

He climbed over with great deliberateness, walked a few yards with his piece of timber, and then turned again.

"No, you can't see her from here," he said. "She's down under the hill there. I don't think she's worth bothering about, but Izzard says she'll be quite all right with a new stay or two. I suppose I shall have to get 'em."

Louie felt a return of her amusement.

"Who's Izzard?" she asked.

"Izzard?" He looked at her as if she ought to know that. "Izzard's the other chap. Always painting, you know. Painting and mooning about and leaving me to do all the work. He's away there somewhere now." He pointed vaguely across the Channel. "I suppose he'll come back when he's ready. She _is_ an old egg-box!--I say, how's your cousin Eric? And that girl--what's her name--Cynthia, wasn't it?"

She didn't know, and told him so; she did not tell him that she didn't care either. He cogitated for a moment, and then said:

"But I say--what do you _do_ at this place? Seems funny to me.... Mind yourself--somebody wants to get over----"

She had not heard anybody approach. It was Priddy, going down to Mazzicombe. Louie stood aside from the stile. Priddy climbed over it and began to descend the hill. Lovenant-Smith looked at Louie in surprise.

"I say," he said, "that's cool! Don't those fellows take their hats off to you?"

"No," said Louie. Then she turned her clear grey eyes on him. She had been fairly caught.

"Don't they? By Jove!... What are you looking at me like that for?"

The rippling laugh with which Louie replied dropped a note. "Guess!" she said.

"How can I guess?" he asked, with his innocent and statue-like stare.

For answer, Louie glanced to where Priddy's brown bowler hat was disappearing over the edge of the hill. Roy Lovenant-Smith saw--he really saw----

"What?" he exclaimed. "You don't mean to say that that chap will----?"

She nodded. He stared.

"What, get you into a row for talking to me?"

"He may not."

"No, but really, joking apart?" he said incredulously.

"Perhaps he won't."

"Oh, come, I say!... Look here, shall I go back with you and explain?"

The innocent! "I don't think I would," said Louie, smothering her laughter.

"But--hang it all! I say, I _am_ sorry!"

"Oh?"

"I mean sorry I've got you into a row, of course," he amended.

"Oh, I thought you meant sorry you stopped and talked to me."

"Of course not. That is, if it doesn't get you into a row."

"And if it did----?"

"Well, a chap doesn't like getting people into rows. Look here--that beggar wants talking to!"

Louie dropped her eyes. "I've been in rows before," she said.

Instantly he cheered up. "Oh, I see! You mean it wouldn't be much?"

"Well, your aunt can't exactly skin me." At the recollection of Mrs. Lovenant-Smith she glanced with satisfaction at her hands.

"Oh, I'll make that all right with her," said Roy Lovenant-Smith hopefully.

She looked at him. He _was_ an innocent! "You know what that would mean?" she said.

"What?"

"Well, merely that you wouldn't see me again."

His look too rested on her hands. "Why?" he asked.

She straightened herself. "Oh, never mind about it. I'm going now."

He coloured a little. "But I say--Louie--you don't mind my calling you Louie, do you? I used to, you know.--I should like to see you again."

"Perhaps you'd better not," she said, with great demureness.

"Oh, rot!" he expostulated. "A fellow can't get a girl into a mess and then leave her in the lurch!"

"You'd like to see me just once again, to see whether I'd got into a row or not?"

"That's what I mean."

It wasn't what Louie had meant him to mean, but "Well, once, if you like," she conceded.

"All right. What about here, at this time to-morrow?"

"I'll see if I can get away from my studies."

"Right. And if I see that chap in Mazzicombe, may I say anything to him?"

"Please don't."

"Not about not taking his hat off?"

"Oh, they don't trouble about that sort of thing here."

"Well, they jolly well ought. All right, I won't. Good-bye----"

"Good-bye."

He took his board and followed Priddy; she turned back to the college. She laughed again. At any rate, a lark with a pleasant image was better than a hole-in-corner, Miss Hastings affair with a gardener. She would _not_ "coiffe Sainte Catherine."

She duly got her wigging. She was put "on her honour" by Mrs. Lovenant-Smith not to see the young man again who had betrayed the confidence put in him. This struck her as quite richly arrogant. To be put "on your honour" by somebody before whom you stand mute as a fish, and to have it assumed that you accept the bond, was the _largior ether_ indeed. Louie did not even feel called upon to say that she declined to consider herself bound. Mrs. Lovenant-Smith might take her "off her honour" again. She met Roy scarcely three hours later. The interview he himself had had with his aunt in the meantime affected the situation but little; his centre-board was now patched up, and the withdrawing of the privilege of the carpenter's shed made no difference.

They met again on the afternoon following that, and again on the one after that. Louie found herself hoping that Izzard, whoever he was, would not return from "over there" just yet. Let somebody else attend to the hair-combing of the Saint.

* * * * *

A score of different things contributed to her enjoyment of that affair of atmosphere--her "lark." First, the initiative was hers--for her empty-eyed statue accepted everything with as much candour as if he had been born into a virgin world on the eighth day of its creation. Next, the mere disregarding of Mrs. Lovenant-Smith was a pleasure she felt it incumbent upon herself not to forgo. Next, there was the instinctive courage with which she translated her sulks into carelessness and gaiety. Next--but allow what you will for the rest: pique, vanity, her derivation, her upbringing. When, the third time she met Roy by the stile, the half-French girl, Pigou, came upon them, and instantly flew to spread the news among such girls as still remained at Chesson's, Louie's Coventry was the coveted thing she had all along intended it should be.

For she was more than merely popular now; she was romantic, apart, a being to be looked up to with something like awe. Meet a young man! She felt herself to be the channel by which every girl in the place might have access to her own dreams. They gave her longing glances, that mutely implored her to tell them all, all about it; she talked about everything else, but not about that, and hearts and mouths watered. They offered to do things for her--to carry her mattress, to do her Sunday watering, even to clean her bicycle; and Louie let them--but told them nothing. Nay, she even drew Richenda Earle to herself. Richenda actually carried her mattress to the foot of the hill one night and slept out. The two mattresses were placed not six feet apart, and, as the birds settled on the boughs and the stars came out, Richenda set herself wistfully to pump Louie.

Then it appeared why Richenda had seemed changed since her vacation. Speaking in a low voice, she too admitted that there was now--Somebody. Weston, his name was, Louie learned, and he was some sort of a commercial schoolmaster at the same place in Holborn where Richenda herself had studied. So instead of Richenda pumping Louie, Louie pumped Richenda. What was her Mr. Weston like? Well (Richenda said), some might think him an oddity--the Secretary Bird, his nickname was--but he was, oh, a soul so sensitive, so gentle! Was there any prospect of their marrying soon? Richenda sighed; it would be a long time; if she got her post at Chesson's he might apply for a country schoolmastership somewhere near, and then she would get a bicycle; or if he got a "rise" in London she might relinquish her appointment--when she got it. But in any case it could hardly be for years. Louie asked flatly what Weston got, and was told one hundred pounds a year. She looked up in surprise. Her own dress allowance was treble that amount.

"And you'd get a hundred here too?" she asked.

"If I get the place--which means if I get my medal," said Richenda.

Then, Louie thought, that would be two hundred between them--two-thirds of her dress allowance.

"But--but----," she said, "I thought people got paid more than that!"

"I told you you didn't know," said Richenda softly.

"But--but--why, my aunt paid Miss Skrine one hundred and fifty pounds, just to go through her engagements, opening bazaars and charities and so on--just to write down on a slate what she had to do each day!"

"Your aunt's Lady Moone," came from Richenda's couch.

"I _know_ she got one hundred and fifty pounds, _and_ lived with them. One hundred pounds seems absurd."

"That's what father said when he apologised to me."

"But surely, all--all the people one sees aren't paid at that rate! Why, some cooks get a thousand--I've heard that for a fact----"

"Some don't," came from the other pillow.

"Well, some do, and if you strike an average, or whatever it's called----"

But Richenda interrupted, softly and wearily:

"Oh, you don't, don't, don't know."

Louie asked further questions. She frowned, puzzled, at the answers. Of course Richenda herself wasn't a very effective sort of girl; if anybody had to be downtrodden it would very likely be she; but the things she was telling her now (Richenda had begun to talk again, resignedly rather than bitterly) were preposterous. There must be something wrong with Richenda, probably with her Weston too; she did not look quite right; she was very different from the rosy housemaids at Trant, for example. One hundred pounds a year!... She had forgotten all about Roy. When, presently, Richenda came as near to putting a question about him as she dared, she forgot about him again. One hundred pounds a year!... She lay on her back, her knees up, her hands behind her head, her sleeves fallen from her wonderful arms, the brows above the grey eyes knitted. She was sure that _she_ could do better than that! She even went so far as to say so. Richenda showed no resentment.

"You've got Lord Moone behind you," she said.

"I've got a prizefighter and a public-house behind me," Louie replied.

"Yes--I know you think you know----"

Louie lay awake, still pondering it all, long after Richenda had fallen into an uneasy sleep.

On the following afternoon she met Roy by the stile again. She was restless, unsettled, she knew not what. She spoke almost sharply to him.

"I'm not going to stand here with you," she said; "that's twice I've been seen. Come down the hill."

Roy no longer urged the Rules. They walked together a hundred yards down the hill, and sat down under a gorse-bush. He made her move quite behind it, and even then tucked her skirt a little farther out of the gaze of a possible passer-by.

"Now we're all right," he said. "How's Lovey this morning?"

"I don't know. I haven't seen her."

"Well, don't bite a fellow's head off, Louie."

"Then don't bother me to-day.--No, I don't want my hand held."

"What's the matter with you?"

"If you don't leave me alone I shall go. I didn't sleep till nearly daylight."

"I didn't sleep for quite an hour, either," he said sympathetically. "I say, isn't it funny, Louie, when you come to think of it, that till a week ago I hadn't thought of you for years?"

"Oh, I wasn't lying awake thinking of you," she said bluntly.

"I was of you." He put out his hand again.

His approach only made her impatient. "Oh, don't!" she snapped. "Really I shall get up and go if you worry me."

He was, as he would have put it, "keen": keen enough to begin to sulk. She let him sulk, and watched the sea, always of a milky bloom, and the sky, still of the hue of an infant's eyeball. After some minutes she turned to him again.

"What _do_ people get paid?" she asked abruptly.

"What people?" He spoke over his shoulder.

"Oh, people--you know what I mean!"

"We get dashed little, I know that." (He was going into the army.) "What sort of people? Servants and those?"

"And those--yes."

Roy expounded.

"Jolly good pay, _I_ call it; lot of lazy beggars! Why, the fellow down there wanted to charge me two pounds for patching up that centre-board, that I did in about a day. I shouldn't mind getting two pounds a day!... Why?"

"I want to know."

"Some of your gardeners been grizzling to you?"

"No."

"A wonder--rotten grousing lot! They ought to have uniforms to buy, and mess-bills and clubs and things; they'd know all about it then! Two pounds for filing a piece of iron and putting a patch on a piece of wood!--I think it will hold all right," he continued naively; "we shall make a deuce of a lot of leeway if it doesn't. We're flat-bottomed, you see, with only bilge-keels, and that reminds me; Izzard's coming back on Wednesday; I'd a note from him this morning. But he won't be in the way, dear, if you'll only be friends----"

She could not help laughing. After all, Richenda's "grousing" was a little spoiling her fun. She turned to him again.

"I haven't seen her yet," she said. "Let's go down to her now."

He chuckled mildly. "You do play the dickens with the Rules, Louie."

"Bother the Rules!"

"Well, you don't want to go just this minute; it's jolly here----"

This time she did not withdraw her hand.

But he was very slow, she thought, in kissing her. He had never kissed her yet. What was the good of being caught at--nothing?

Well, statues (she reflected), especially young ones, are slow----

Even as she was thinking it he did that very thing. Perhaps it was to summon up resolution to do so that he had lain awake the previous night. He kissed her cheek.

The result was curious. It was the law of her physique that most moments of perturbation only turned her paler; but at this particular form of perturbation she turned suddenly pink.

In a few moments she was as before. The first sign that she was Louie again was that she forbade him to repeat the offence. He sulked again.

"All right," he said resentfully; "then we may as well go and see the yacht."

"I don't want to see the yacht."

"Well, you needn't be stuffy about it----"

Statues _were_ distractingly slow!

Then she looked at him with a faintly mocking smile.

"Aren't you going to say you're sorry?" she challenged him (but she had for a moment a faint return of the unhabitual colour for all that).

He seemed to suspect that he was being mocked; nevertheless it was with a rather tremulous boldness that he answered "No."

"Oh!"

"You see," he explained, "you did let me hold your hand."

She caught her breath. Good gracious! Why, he would be saying presently that she had asked him to kiss her! "You see, you did let me hold your hand!" What next?

"You know you did," he argued simply.

Even so it is written, "Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings----"

Suddenly she laughed. O admirable innocence, that alone can defeat guile! After all, it was too unpardonable not to be pardoned. She turned her face away again.

"You _are_ stupid!" she murmured, her face, even her neck, pink once more.

At that quite a new gleam seemed to irradiate his good-looking clay.

"I say," he said slowly, as he struggled with the newness of the idea, "you mean--do you mean?--about my not kissing you--properly?"

Oh, the heaviness! But he should kiss her "properly," as he called it, now!

"Oh," she said briskly, "it's too late now. You can't very well after that, can you?"

But he beamed. "Of course I can!"

"No, Roy!"

"I will----"

This was outrageous. She made as if to rise.

"No, Roy--no--you know very well you don't think I'm pretty----"

"Well, you aren't ugly," said he.

(Great heavens! She "wasn't ugly"!)