At The Relton Arms Part 9

"Because you said the eggs at the Stores were just as good, dear, and they are cheaper; don't you remember?" said his wife, gently. Digby wished, not for the first time, that her memory were less reliable.

"Well, at any rate, the milk is a different thing; just look at the cream on it. Baby ought to thrive on stuff like that, oughtn't she?"

"That is just what I am anxious about; It has only upset her so far.

Hark! is that baby crying? Precious thing! Do you mind managing Sonny's egg and pouring out the coffee, Digby, while I run upstairs?"

"I am inclined to agree with Plato," began the musician, earnestly; but his wife was gone, and Sonny was clamoring for food. He took up an egg, and then almost dropped it again as the wooden door was pushed open from without, with the same creak as of yore.

"Auntie Joan, Auntie Joan," shrieked Sonny, tumbling off his high-chair with a clatter, and dragging the tablecloth with a medley of spoons and knives after him. The musician was thankful for the diversion at that moment, and forebore to swear as he set his son on his feet again, and held out his hand with a smile to Lady Joan. She was in her riding-habit, and he told himself that she looked like Diana, or any other G.o.ddess that represents the woman a man admires.

"Well?" she said, with her fresh, breezy laugh, "how soon will you be tired of picknicking and ready to come to terms? And where's Norah?"

"Upstairs. There's a draught under the bedroom door, and Mrs. Haxtell has quarrelled violently with nurse. Baby cries perpetually--teeth. And I can't get any breakfast. That's all so far, I think;" and he laughed as heartily as she, and they b.u.mped their heads together under the table in picking up the fallen utensils, and came up again with red faces just as Norah returned with the baby in her arms.

"Oh, is it you, Joan? So glad to see you, dear; sit down and have some breakfast. Why haven't you poured out the coffee, Digby? How helpless men are! Take baby a minute, will you? There, you have set her off again, just when I had quieted her. She has taken cold in the night, that's what it is. Hush, hush! There then, it sha'n't, that it sha'n't!"

"After all," began the musician in a momentary lull, "I do think Plato--"

"Will you give Digby something to eat, Joan, dear?" interposed Norah gently; and peace presently pervaded the breakfast-table.

"The lambs _is_ fat, isn't they, daddy?" asked Sonny, from the window-seat. "How does the lambs know, daddy, which sheep is their right mother?"

"Confound his precocity," grumbled the musician; "what is one to do with a son like that? Besides, I can't tell him myself; how _do_ they know?"

"They don't," said Lady Joan, promptly; "it's a fact I used to dispute with my governess in my youth. It is only we who take it upon ourselves to say that they do; we have no means of proving it. The sheep takes them as they come, and looks equally bored with them all."

Digby laughed loudly, and Norah murmured something in a pained voice about maternal instinct.

"All nonsense, my dear," persisted Lady Joan, gayly; "no amount of maternal instinct could help a sheep to tell her own lamb from any other sheep's lamb. Besides, why should she want to? As it is, she can have a change without being called fickle. Happy sheep!"

Sonny was standing with his legs very wide apart and his blue eyes fixed on her face, as she said this.

"Auntie Joan's pertending," he said solemnly. The others laughed, which awoke the slumbering baby again; and Norah, after complaining between its wails that the draught under the bedroom door was answerable for everything, carried it upstairs again by way of curing it.

"Well, what is it?" said the musician, in the peace that ensued on his wife's departure; and he lighted his cigarette and looked across at Lady Joan.

"How did you know there was anything?" she asked.

"I always know," he said, in a superior tone; "we haven't been chums all these years for nothing. Tell me what's up, dear. Hasn't Jack been writing to you, the scamp?"

"Oh, yes. He always writes. He is quite good. _I_ am the naughty one; I always have been, I think. I am not fit to be engaged; it is true what I told you--that day."

They were very fond of making allusions to _that day_; they told themselves it was one of the privileges of their friendship, now that _she_ was safely engaged and _he_ was securely married, to mention subjects which were not always even respectable; it did not occur to them that this constant renewal of back chapters in their lives had more to do with their egoism than their friendship.

"And what dreadful thing have you been doing now, please?" asked Digby.

She flung back her head and laughed mockingly, as she used to do.

"Do you remember telling me that marriage was the only way out of it? I am half inclined to agree with you now, though I wrote to Jack yesterday to break off our engagement. That is all."

Sonny hummed his baby ditty on the window-seat, without interruption, for a few seconds.

Then the musician laid down his cigarette.

"You--did--that?" he said, drawing a long breath; "what a wonderful creature you are, Joan!"

"Only wonderful?" she said lightly; "are you sure you don't mean heartless?"

"Why did you do it? Do stop laughing," he urged her. Her eyes flashed angrily.

"What do you mean?" she cried; "do you think I _am_ heartless?"

"Surely not," said the musician, looking along his cigarette, and avoiding her direct glance across the breakfast-table.

"Then why do you say I am?"

"I--I didn't say so, if you remember, Joan. The word entirely originated with--"

"Oh, I know," she interrupted impatiently; "but why don't you think so?

You ought to--everybody does--Norah would."

"Norah isn't--Norah can't understand--that is, Norah does not know you so well as I do, and she is a little prejudiced sometimes--" stumbled the musician.

"Just so, yes," said Lady Joan, gravely, and there was a pause.

"Then you agree with me that I have done the best thing under the circ.u.mstances, the miserable circ.u.mstances?" she began again in a few moments.

"I always agree with you," said the musician; "but you must own that--not knowing the circ.u.mstances which--which led to your course of action, it--it becomes difficult--"

He yielded to a nervous desire to laugh instead of finishing his sentence; and Lady Joan, after a desperate effort to lose her temper, weakly followed his example.

"Tell me why you did it," he said more naturally when they were grave again, and he walked round the table and leaned over the back of her chair. She fell into the role of the penitent child.

"I couldn't help it, it came over me yesterday that I couldn't stand it any longer. I've always said perpetual engagements would not answer, because people could never stand the awful monotony of them. It is only the monotony of Jack's love for me that has exhausted my patience now.

If he had really been at all wild after we were engaged, which every one was so fond of prophesying to me, I think I might have got to love him too much to give him up. But--oh! it is the badness in me I think, Digby. Why don't you scold me instead of looking at me like that?"

He stroked her hair idly without speaking, and she had to laugh again to hide the tremor in her lips.

"I always told you I wanted our engagement kept secret; it would have been much better. It was an experiment, rather a disastrous one for Jack--"

"And for you?"

"--and it should never have been made public. Engagements never ought to be made public, and if they were what they claim to be they never would be. It is because they are such miserable, heartless arrangements that we have to take refuge in the approbation of society to make them a success at all; if it were not for the connivance of their friends I don't believe people would ever get to the marriage service at all. No wonder men say such hard things about women; we simply destroy all the sentiment that is in them by our eagerness to cash it at once, and then we go in for a cheap cynicism and call them heartless brutes. If I were a man I would never ask a woman to be my wife, never, never, never! At least, not if I were in love with her."

She spoke rapidly and vehemently, and the musician framed her face in his hands and coughed a little to steady his voice.

"Poor Jack!" he said almost inaudibly.