A Lost Cause Part 6

The others followed her. The two elder men were left alone, and for a minute or two neither spoke.

Then Saltus said: "They are all young, they have made no contact with real life yet. G.o.d does not always call in early life. To some people, the cross that is set so high over the world is like a great star,--it is not seen until the surrounding sky is darkened and the sun grows dim."

"I am going into the chapel," Lord Huddersfield said, "to be alone for an hour. There must be many prayers going up to-day to G.o.d for the wrong these poor ignorant men have done."

"Pray that they may be forgiven. And then, my dear Lord," he continued, "suppose we have a talk over the situation that has been created--if any situation beyond the purely local one _has_ been created." A fighting look came into his face. "We shall be wise to be prepared, to have our guns loaded."

"Yes, Father," Lord Huddersfield said rather grimly, "we are not without power and influence, I am happy to think."

CHAPTER IV

LUCY BLANTYRE AT THE CLERGY-HOUSE

Lucy Blantyre left Scarning Court on Thursday morning. James Poyntz travelled up to town with her. She was to go home to Park Lane for an hour or two, make one of the guests at a lunch party with Lady Linquest, and then, in the afternoon, drive down to Hornham.

She was alone in a first-cla.s.s carriage with James during the whole of the journey to London. The last three days had marked a stage in their intercourse. Both of them were perfectly aware of that. Intimacy between a young man and a girl is very rarely a stationary thing. It progresses in one direction or another. James began to talk much of his ambitions.

He told her how he meant to carve his way in the world, the place he meant to take. The Poyntz family was a long-lived one; Lord Huddersfield himself was only middle-aged, and might live another thirty years. James hoped that it would be so.

"I want to win my own way by myself," he said. "I hope the t.i.tle will not come for many years. It would mean extinction if it came now. You sympathise with that, don't you?"

She was very kind to him. Her answers showed a real interest in his confidences, but more than that. There was ac.u.men and shrewdness in them.

"You know," he said, "I do hate and detest the way the ordinary young man in my position lives. It is so futile and silly. I recognised it even at Oxford. Because of one's father, one was expected to be a silly fool and do no work. Of course, there were some decent fellows,--Dover, the Duke of Dover, was quiet and thought about things. But all my friends were drawn from the social cla.s.s which people suppose to be just below our own, the upper middle cla.s.s. It's the backbone of England. Men in it take life seriously."

He stopped after a time, and gazed out of the window at the flying landscape. Suddenly he turned to her. "I'm so glad you are my sister's great friend, Lucy," he said.

It was the first time that he had spoken her first name to her. His tone was charged with meaning.

She looked up quickly, and saw that his eyes were fixed upon her.

"You are all very kind to me," she said.

"Every one would be kind to you. I have been very happy since you have let me be your friend. Do you know that my work and my hopes seem dearer than ever to me now that I have told you so much of them. We have got to know each other very well, haven't we?"

"Very well."

"We shall know each other better. It is my hope. I wonder if I might write to you now and then, and tell you some of my thoughts and how things are with me? Would such letters bore you?"

"I should value them, and think them a privilege. A woman is always gratified when a man confides his thoughts to her. So many men never allow a woman friend to see below the surface, and so many men--at any rate, men that I am in the way of meeting--have no thoughts to tell one even if they would."

The train began to go more slowly as it rumbled through the dingy environs, and shook over the myriad points of Waterloo Station. Neither of them spoke again. There was no doubt in the mind of either as to the meaning of the situation.

The girl had gathered all his thoughts from his tone. It was very pleasant to be with him, this sane and brilliant young man with a great name and such powers. It made her happy to know how he regarded her--that out of all the girls he knew he had chosen her for a friend.

He would some day ask her to be something more; that also she knew, and knew that he was conveying it to her. She did not love him, love was a word not very real to her as yet. Her mental eyes had never visualised it, it was an abstraction. But she liked and admired him more than any other man of her set: he was a _man_. Well, there was time enough yet to think of all that. Meanwhile his deference was sweet; her heart warmed to him as his, she knew, was warm to her at that moment.

He saw her to the door of the waiting victoria, and stood chatting for a moment in the hurry of the station, making the footman mount his box again.

Then he gave the signal to start, and stood upon the platform by his hansom as she was driven rapidly away. Once she turned and waved a hand to him.

Lucy lay back in the carriage, pleased with herself and all the world.

She had come on to Victoria, instead of getting out at Vauxhall, specially to enjoy the longer drive. It was a brilliant day, and as the carriage came upon Waterloo Bridge, the wonderful panorama of riverside London was uplifting. Away to her right, the purple dome of St. Paul's shone white-grey in the sun. The great river glittered in the morning air, and busy craft moved up and down the tide. The mammoth buildings of the embankment, Somerset House with its n.o.ble facade, the Savoy, the monster Cecil, the tiled roofs of Scotland Yard all came to the eye in one majestic sweep of form and colour. And far away to the left, dim in a haze of light, the towers of Westminster rose like a fairy palace, tipped with flame as the sun caught the gold upon the vanes and spires.

London! yes! it was, after all, the most beautiful city in the world, seen thus, at this hour, from this place. How the heart quickened and warmed to it.

Suddenly the thought of Hornham came to her. She made a little involuntary movement of disgust. For a whole fortnight she would be there. It would be intolerable. Why could not Bernard come to Park Lane for a fortnight? How much more sensible that would be.

Well, it was no good thinking of it. The thing must be done. Yet, from one point of view how curious it was. How strange that a drive of two hours would plunge her into a world entirely foreign and alien in every way to her world.

She was driving up Grosvenor Place now, by the long walls of the King's Palace Garden, over which the trees showed fresh and green. The stately street, with the Park gates at the end of its vista, only accentuated the contrast. She utterly failed to understand how any one could do what her brother did. There was not the slightest reason for the endurance of these horrors. His personal income was large, his family connections were influential. He could obtain a fashionable West End living without any trouble. She was still scornfully wondering as the carriage stopped at Lady Linquest's house in Park Lane.

Lucy found her aunt in a little room of china-blue and canary-yellow which looked out over the Park.

She was a tall woman, of full figure. The face was bright and animated, though somewhat sensual, inasmuch as it showed that its owner appreciated the good material things that life has to offer. At sixty-two, when dames of the middle cla.s.ses have silver hair and are beginning to a.s.sume the gentle manners of age, Lady Linquest wore the high curled fringe of the fashion, a ma.s.s of dark red hair that had started life upon the head of a Breton peasant girl. Art had been at work upon her face and she was pleasant to look on, an artificial product indeed, but with all the charm that a perfect work of art has.

She made no secret of it to her intimate friends, and no one thought any the worse of her in a society where nearly every one who has need of aids to good looks buys them in Bond Street. Indeed, she was quite unable to understand what she called "the middle cla.s.s horror of paint."

"Why on earth," she would say, "any one can possibly object to an old woman making herself look as pleasant as possible for the last few years of her life, I can't make out. It's a duty one owes to one's friends. It sweetens life. At any rate, _I_ don't intend to go about like old Mother Hubbard or the witch in whatshername."

"Lucy, my dear," said this vivacious dame as her niece entered, "you're looking your best this morning. And when you look your best my experience generally tells me that you've been up to some wickedness or other! How's Agatha, and has James Poyntz been at Scarning, and how's that poor dear man, Huddersfield, who always reminds me of a churchwarden? He is the king of all the churchwardens in England, I think."

Lucy sat down and endeavoured to answer the flood of questions as satisfactorily as might be, while Lady Linquest took her mid-morning pick-me-up of Liebig and cognac.

The good lady gave her niece a rapid _precis_ of the news of their set during the few days she had been away. "So that you'll know," she said, "what to talk about at General Pompe's lunch--your last decent meal, by the way, for a fortnight! I shall give orders to the cook to put a hamper in the carriage for you to take with you to Bernard's. All those poor young men starve themselves."

She rattled away thus while Lucy went to her own room to dress. For some reason or other, why she could not exactly divine, she was dissatisfied and ill at ease. The exhilaration of the railway journey, of the wonderful drive through sunlit London, had gone. Her aunt, kind creature as she was, jarred upon her this morning. How terribly shallow the good lady seemed, after all! She was like some gaudy fly dancing over a sunlit brook--or even circling round malodorous farmyard stuff--brilliant, useless, and with nothing inside but the mere muscles of its activity. James Poyntz's words recurred to her, his deep scorn of a purely frivolous, pleasure-loving life was present in her brain.

Lucy was genuinely fond of Lady Linquest, but somehow on this bright morning to hear a woman with one foot in the grave talking nothing but scandal and empty catchwords of Vanity Fair, struck with a certain chill to her heart.

To see her sitting there, curled, painted, scented, sipping her tonic drink, ready for a smart party of people as empty and useless as herself, was to see a thing that hurt, after the experiences of the morning.

Lucy had not taken her maid to Scarning. She had wanted to live as simply as possible there, to live the outdoors riverside life. And she was not going to take Angelique to Hornham either--where the girl would be miserable and a nuisance to the grave little community there. She felt very glad, as the chattering little French woman helped her to dress, that she was not coming with her. The maid's voluble boulevard French got on her nerves; the powder on her face, which showed violet in the sunlight, the strong scent of verbena she wore, the expression of being abnormally "aware"--all these were foreign to Lucy's mood, and she noticed them with an almost physical sense of disapproval that she had never before felt so strongly.

The drive to the smart hotel near Piccadilly only took five or six minutes, and the two ladies were soon shaking hands with old General Pompe, their host. General the Hon. Reginald Pompe was an old creature who was only kept from senile decay by his stays. He was unmarried, extremely wealthy, and the fashion. In his younger days, his life had been abominable; now, his age allowed him to do nothing but lick the chops of vicious memories and p.r.i.c.k his ears for scandals in which he could not share. People said, "Old General Pompe is really _too_ bad, but where one sees the Duke of ---- and the Prince of ---- we may be sure that people like ourselves cannot be far wrong."

The other guests comprised Lord Rollington, of whom there was nothing to be said save that he was twenty-four and a fool; Gerald Duveen, who was a fat man of good family, and more or less of a success upon the stage; and his beautiful, bold-looking wife, a judge's daughter, who played under the name of Miss Mary Horne, and of whom much scandal was whispered.

After a moment or two in the palm room, waiting for the Duveens, who were a minute or two late, the six people went in to lunch. The special table General Pompe always used was reserved for them, decorated with a triumphant scheme of orchids and violets. Lumps of ice were hidden among the ma.s.ses of flowers, diffusing an admirable coolness round the table.

The host drew attention to the menu, which he had composed. He mumbled over it, and as he bent his head Lucy saw that his ears were quite pointed, and that the skin upon his neck lay in pachydermatous folds, dry and yellowish.

"Baked red snapper, red wine sauce," said Mr. Duveen, with the purring and very distinct voice of high comedy. "Hm--turtle steaks _miroton_--sweetbreads--_Tadema_, quite the best way to do sweetbreads."

Mrs. Duveen was talking in a low, rapid voice to Lady Linquest. Her eyes were very bright, and malice lurked in the curves of a lovely mouth as she retailed some story of iniquity in high places, one of these private and intimate scandals in which the half-life of the stage is so rich--actors and actresses more than most people being able to see humanity with the mask off. How greedy the three men looked, Lucy thought, as they devoured the lunch in prospect. "Pigs!" she said to herself with a little inward shudder.

Why was this? She had been at dozens of these functions before now and had thought none of these thoughts. To-day a veil seemed removed from her eyes: she saw things as they really were. And as they really were, these people were abominable.