Chapter IV: Part I: Rainham Parva (3)

"Very well, Mr. Statue," she thought, compressing those irregular lips whose degree of prettiness he estimated so nicely. "I'm going to be pretty in a very few minutes, and you're going to tell me so."

"No, Roy," she said aloud; "just let's sit and talk--sensibly--I don't know what made you behave like this all of a sudden----"

And there was none to say "Provoking hussy!"

* * * * *

An hour later they rose. It was too late to go to the yacht now. They walked together back to the stile. Their shoulders overlapped. The kisses came easily now.

"Then we'll go aboard her to-morrow?" he said.

"Very well."

"'Once aboard the lugger'--ha, ha--but of course she's a cutter, not a lugger. That's just a saying, 'Once aboard the lugger.'"

"Really?"

"Yes, hadn't you heard it? 'Once aboard the lugger and the girl is mine,' it is. And I say, you'd better put some old clothes on if I'm to show you how the centre-board works."

"All right."

"What about Lovey?" he asked once more.

"Oh, we write down on a slate where we're going."

He held her a little away. "I--_say_!... You wouldn't tell her where, would you?"

"Why not?"

"What--cheek!"

"She put me 'on my honour'--impudence!" quoth Louie.

"But I say--what frightful cheek!"

"Good-bye----"

"Just a minute----"

"Well----"

Then, "'Bye----"

"Good-bye----"

He called her name after her. "Louie!"

"What?"

"Good-bye----"

"Good-bye, boy----" She waved her hand.

Anyway, she thought with satisfaction, she had made him say--swear--that she was pretty.

* * * * *

The next afternoon, as good as her word, Louie wrote on the hall-slate: "Gone to Mazzicombe: L. Causton." Then she walked, whistling, out of the house and up the hill.

VI

This time she fully expected to catch it, and did catch it. No time was lost. A note from Mrs. Lovenant-Smith just before supper ordered her to report herself immediately after that meal. At a quarter past nine she presented herself.

The French window stood wide open, but night was fast falling over the front lawn, and a clipped peacock of box showed against a brownish-green sky. Mrs. Lovenant-Smith stood by the window. It moved as she turned, and there swung slowly across the pane the reflection of the tall, yellow-shaded standard-lamp in one corner. Miss Harriet Chesson had followed Louie in. In her hand was a piece of paper--Louie's "conduct-report."

The beginning of the encounter was no skirmish; its end was positive slaughter. This is no place for a report of it, round by round; it must be summarised, even as the "Life and Battles" summarises the combat between Buck and the terrible Piker. Louie "led," so to speak, by asking whether she might sit down, giving as her reason that she had had a long walk that afternoon; permission was only refused her after she had put her hand on the back of a wheatear chair and said again: "I think you said Yes?" She then placed the chair for Miss Harriet to sit on, as near as possible to that of Mrs. Lovenant-Smith. She herself stood in the middle of the room.

Miss Harriet, evidently wishing she was somewhere else, read aloud the conduct-report. It was longish and detailed. It also, as Louie well knew, did not contain one of the real points at issue. She looked from one to the other of the two women. The Lady-in-Charge wore a discreetly-necked evening frock, with a fichu secured by a mourning brooch; and her fingers kept touching this brooch, and also kept leaving it again, as if Louie's eyes had been capable of a physical plucking of them away. She had had Miss Harriet in, Louie knew, for moral support. The principal's dress, too, was a give-and-take between her gardening costume and conventional evening attire. Her indictment read, she seemed more than ever anxious to depart. Louie, for her part, was rather glad that she had been called in. Buck had always fought better for the eyes upon him.

Mrs. Lovenant-Smith began correctly; her first trace of acerbity showed only when Louie, having listened to her arraignment with downcast eyes, lifted them for a moment to make a modest and quite immaterial correction.

"Have the goodness to cease this exaggerated deference, Miss Causton. It doesn't deceive me. It's only a form of veiled insolence."

Louie heard her indictment out in silence.

First blood was drawn when Louie mentioned the name of Roy Lovenant-Smith. She called him, with aggravating naturalness, "Roy." Mrs. Lovenant-Smith rose nearly an inch in height.

"'Roy!'" she echoed. "'Roy,' indeed!"

"I quite expected Priddy would tell you that first time. Of course he would. The gardeners here don't like outsiders intruding," said Louie.

The point told. There was no need to mention the name of Miss Hastings. Mrs. Lovenant-Smith's face deepened its ochre.

"Go on, Miss Causton," she said; while Miss Harriet timidly interposed: "I think that's all you wanted me for?"

Louie went on. "And anyway, you gave your nephew permission to come on the premises, which seems to me quite as much against the Rules as anything there." She pointed to the charge-sheet.

"Pray go on, Miss Causton," said Mrs. Lovenant-Smith, swallowing her wrath. Piker Betteridge, counting the moral advantage to be more than the pain endured, had formerly been wont to thrust out his undefended jaw in order to prove its invulnerability to attack; Mrs. Lovenant-Smith was doing something of the same kind now.

"Pray go on----" she said.

"And of course that's all bunkum," said Louie, warming, and pointing once more to the paper in Miss Harriet's hand. "That isn't in the least what you mean. What you really hate is my having told the girls what you've had in your mind ever since I came--I mean about my father."

"Pray go on!" The jaw was thrust out once more.

("Perhaps I'd better go?" Miss Harriet still fidgeted. Seedsmen's daughters are not at their ease at these Olympian conflicts.)

"All right, I will go on," said Louie, warming still more. "You would have preferred me to hold my tongue about it, and if you're thinking of asking me to resign I should like to say now that probably at least half-a-dozen others will go with me."

Here, however, Mrs. Lovenant-Smith scored a point.

"That may have been true a little while ago," she said, "but--go on." And Louie remembered certain little incidents and unbendings that had caused it to be indulgently rumoured that "Lovey wasn't such a bad old sort once you got to know her." Louie conceded the point.

"Anyway, that's what she does mean," she said, turning to Miss Harriet--"that she didn't want me to tell them that my father was a prizefighter and kept a public-house!"

"Address yourself to me, if you please," ordered Mrs. Lovenant-Smith.

"Certainly! You've been set against me from the first, for that very reason; and as for your nephew, I've known him for years and years, and you've no business at all to have him here, and it would sound rather well, wouldn't it, if the tale got about that you allowed----"

But at this Mrs. Lovenant-Smith's hardly held composure gave way with a snap. Well-born but necessitous Ladies-in-Charge of horticultural colleges do not submit to being told their duty by the daughters of pugilists. She stamped on the floor.

"Silence!" she cried, shaking. "I was a fool ever to have had you here! You make discipline impossible. You corrupt your fellow-students--you make a boast of your unfortunate parentage--you show no respect for the Rules--you think yourself at liberty to come and go as you please--you carry on a vulgar intrigue----"

"--not with a gardener----"

("Oh, I _really_ must go my rounds!" murmured Miss Harriet; but she lingered; the spectacle of Olympians forgetting themselves does not occur every day.)

"--disgracing yourself among younger and more innocent girls----"

"--with a Lovenant-Smith, anyway----"

Again the stamp. "I forbid you to mention his name!"

"Roy----"

"Leave the room!"

("Please, please!" besought Miss Harriet.)

"You will pack your boxes at once!"

"I shall consult Lord Moone's lawyer first. You accepted my fees--your college is an imposition from beginning to end, and I'll see that's known. That will be another scandal----"

"Ah!" choked Mrs. Lovenant-Smith, perhaps with some hazy recollection of the law of slander in her head. "You hear that, Miss Chesson? You hear that? You heard those words?"

"No, I didn't quite catch--ladies--please!"

"If you didn't catch it, I said the whole place was a shameless fraud," said Louie calmly.

"Very good. Ring the bell, Miss Chesson!"

But the servant appeared only in time to see Mrs. Lovenant-Smith's complete collapse. She sank, shaking, into a chair, and gazed unseeingly into a pigeon-hole of her desk, as if she might find some help against this devilish girl there. As she clung (as it were) to the ropes, Louie let her have it (so to speak) on the beezer.

"You oughtn't to be here at all, really, you know," she said. "You ought to be in one of those places--you know--in the Queen's gift, at Kensington or Hampton Court, with the dowagers and maids-of-honour. If you like I'll ask my uncle whether he can't do anything."

And without waiting for an answer she swept out, not by the door, but by the French window. The reflection of the yellow-shaded standard-lamp swung again as she did so.

She entered the courtyard by the side door, passed under the dark yew and the arch beneath the box-room, and made her way through the orchard. She had reached her pitch at the foot of the hill before she remembered that she had forgotten her mattress and blankets. She returned in search of them. Twenty minutes later she was in bed, her knees up, her hands clasped behind her head.

She was white with triumph. That woman! Well, Louie thought she had held her own. She had had the last word, at all events, and an optic-bunging one too. Now should she leave, or stay? It was entirely a question of balance between her desire to see the last of the place and her resolve to go at nobody's pleasure but her own. It might be that she would have to stay another week in order to avoid the suspicion that she was turning tail. The fraud of a place!

She lay, pale and victorious, thinking the matter over.

One thing was certain; she would not return to Trant. She supposed she was vindictive by nature, but that would merely mean at the most a week's gradually increasing strain on her temper and then another series of embroilings with her mother. A philosophic elf somewhere deep within her--it was hardly affection--bade her spare her mother what she had not spared Mrs. Lovenant-Smith. Why seek a known trouble at Trant? If she must take trouble with her wherever she went, she might as well take it to a fresh place.

Before she was aware they had done so, her thoughts had flown to the vouched-for but incredible things Richenda Earle had said about life and London.

Lord Moone had a house, and Captain Chaffinger chambers, in London, and she knew both. For the rest, her knowledge of the place was pretty much what Richenda had guessed it to be--shops, restaurants, theatres. Of her five visits two had been spent at Lord Moone's, two at Cynthia's friends, the Kayes, and one at an hotel--this not counting the night on which, having run away from the convent, she had occupied Chaff's room and had wondered at his large pincushion, his pictures, and ribboned haircurlers that he doubtless kept in memory of his departed youth.

Her father, too, lived in London, or thereby----

She fell to wondering about her father.

There was a full but late-rising moon that night; it had not yet cleared the tree-tops of the eastern end of the orchard below. She watched its silver through the topmost boughs. Already it filled the heavens with a mist of light, dimming the stars; the glister on near leaves was brighter than the Plough over her head. Scents of the distant gardens stole undispersed through the night; that of the night-flowering tobacco-plant was for some minutes almost sicklily oppressive; and behind her she heard the scurrying of the rabbits at play.

It was odd that she thought of her father rather than of Roy. Somehow only Roy's actual presence had the power to colour those now pale cheeks of hers. Certainly it had done so that afternoon. For an hour, aboard the yacht, the rose-peonies in the garden had been paler than she. But her father had her thoughts now, and the sum of them was that she would have given much to be able to think of him as not cruel, not faithless, not a man who had had to be thrust back into the ditch whence he had come. She might have sought him out then.

For she was going to London; that was settled. She had her allowance, more by a half than the income Richenda and her Mr. Weston would gladly have married on, and not one penny more of it would she waste at Chesson's. The next day or two would almost certainly provide her with a "good exit." Then nobody would be able to say she had slunk out.

Oh, if her father had but not been a brute!

The moon cleared the trees, and another too-sweet tract of the night-flowering tobacco enveloped her. A bird or two stirred. Some time before she had thought she had heard the sound of a curlew's whistle, low and not very near, but she had disregarded it. Now it came again. All the effect it had was to turn her thoughts, tardily and almost unnoticed by herself, to Roy.

She knew little about yachts; yachting was no pastime of Lord Moone's; but even her vaunting mood relaxed to a momentary smile as she remembered the yacht down under the hill there. Those two boys must be crazy to risk their lives like that. They had rounded Land's End in her, and in quite good faith evidently expected the miracle to be repeated. The only wonder was that the centre-board had gone before the rest of the crazy fabric. "I told you to put some old clothes on," Roy had apologised for his vessel, "--and I say--I don't think I'd sit on the table if I were you--I'm not _quite_ sure about it, you see--may have to send it to Mazzicombe after all--come on the locker." So they had sat on the locker----

She had felt safer when, half-an-hour later, she had clambered down into the little dinghy again. It would be Davy Jones's locker for Master Roy and his friend Mr. Izzard unless some fatherly fisherman took them and their boat in hand.

Then came the thoughts of her unknown father again.

* * * * *

"_Ee-oooo-eee!_"

She sat up. The whistle came from the stile up the hill. And suddenly she knew it was no curlew. It was Roy.

She listened.

"_Ee-oooo-eee!_"

It was Roy.

She knew he would not seek her farther than the stile. Had there not been other sleepers just below the orchard, it would still have been the extreme of his boldness that he had got so far. But--she remembered how from the first she had been the prime mover in their entirely wanton flirtation--was it necessarily the extreme of hers?

Then, as the devil would have it, something brought Mrs. Lovenant-Smith into her head again.

That woman!

All the blood left her cheeks and thronged to her heart again.

Roy would certainly not pass the stile----

She hesitated for a moment longer, and then suddenly got up from her bed.

Her clothes were wrapped in her waterproof; she took the waterproof and put it on. She thrust her feet into a pair of slippers. The waterproof was not so long as the garment beneath it; the moon was now well above the trees; it showed the hurrying white about her heels as she walked quickly up the hill. She drew the under-garment up a little. The waterproof was almost the colour of the scorched grass. The small shadow that preceded her was now the thing most plainly to be seen.

Over the stile she saw the shoulder of his white sweater. Again her caution awoke.

"You might have put a coat on," she said, a little out of breath. "You can be seen half-a-mile away on a night like this."

"I thought you were never going to hear me!" he said.

"Oh! You seem to have been sure I'd come if I did."

"Well, you have come, haven't you?" he answered. "I say, isn't your hair different?"

"Well, it isn't done for a call, if that's what you mean; I always do it like that at night, stupid. But I'm not going to stand here with you as white as a cottage wall."

Thereupon he paid her the only compliment he ever did pay her--and that was unintentional.

"It isn't any whiter than your feet, anyway," he said.

"Well, I'm not going to stop a minute."

"Oh, dash it all!" he protested. She did think him cool!

"Good gracious, how long do you think I _am_ going to stay?"

"Hardly worth coming for, I call it," he grumbled.

"_Thank_ you!"

"For you, I mean, of course--as if you didn't know I'd walk miles--how you take a fellow up!"

"Well, two minutes."

Two minutes can be a very short time; five minutes had passed when, making a movement to free herself, she said: "Let me go now, Roy--I think we're both as mad as we can be."

"There isn't anybody about," he muttered.

More minutes passed; then:

"Do you really think my feet are white?" she whispered. A slipper had come off.

Then, close against his breast, she made an inconsequential, halting little appeal. "Oh, Roy--don't go in that dreadful boat again! You'll be drowned--I know you will----"

"Should you care?" he whispered.

"Silly boy!"

"No, but should you care?"...

"Roy, let me go!" she ordered suddenly. The minutes were passing fatally quickly.

"No--no----"

"Oh--yes----"

"I won't let you go."

"Roy, let me go, I say!"

But it was not a command now. It was a supplication--perhaps not even that.

* * * * *

She did not love him; in her heart she knew she did not love him. He loved her--years afterwards; only years afterwards. The thought of her left him--but it returned to him, never to leave him again. The moon made the crest of the hill like day, but the shadows of the gorse-bushes lay dark on the short grass and stunted bents and the patches of wild thyme. The moon southed, then rode less high. In the short night a lamb called; and then the birds, reaching the shallows of their sleep, gave a drowsy twittering and went to sleep again. It was the false dawn. The stars grew a little brighter as a deeper darkness possessed the earth; then in the darkness a cock crowed.

* * * * *

They met again on the next night. On the night after that they met once more.

Only after that did she sit down, alone in the box-room, in the twilight, to think.

Her boxes were packed and strapped, and the cart was coming for them from Rainham Magna in the morning.

She wished Burnett Minor had been there. She would have liked to say good-bye to the child. There was nobody else it would break her heart to leave.

Yet Roy was still down there under the hill. The centre-board had gone wrong again. She was to see him at the stile, in the morning, before leaving. It seemed, somehow, superfluous.

But she did meet him. His face was set, and he had forgotten to shave.

"Don't look like that; it wasn't your fault," she said composedly.

"It was--it was----" he muttered, hands clenched.

"Rubbish!" She gave a short laugh. "You've nothing at all to blame yourself for."

"Oh, I have--I have."

Then he turned to her. "Louie, you've got to promise me one thing----"

But she stopped him. She knew what he was going to say.

"That's quite out of the question," she said.

"But look here!" He used the words he had used the second time they had met. "A fellow can't get a girl into a mess and then leave her in the lurch. You must marry me, Louie, if--if----"

At that she had found a touch of her old irony.

"Not unless, of course?"

"Oh yes--yes."

But she turned away. "No. Good-bye."

"Won't you even kiss me?"

"No."

But there was a gentleness in her refusal such as he had never had from her before. Kisses came hardly now.