Lady Connie Part 53

The two ladies drove silently on, and were soon among the movement and traffic of the Oxford streets. Connie's mind was steeped in pa.s.sionate feeling. Till now Falloden had touched first her senses, then her pity.

Now in these painful and despondent attempts of his, to adjust himself to Otto's weakness and irritability, he was stirring sympathies and enthusiasms in her which belonged to that deepest soul in Connie which was just becoming conscious of itself. And all the more, perhaps, because in Falloden's manner towards her there was nothing left of the lover. For the moment at any rate she preferred it so. Life was all doubt, expectation, thrill--its colour heightened, its meanings underlined. And in her complete uncertainty as to what turn it would take, and how the doubt would end, lay the spell--the potent tormenting charm--of the situation.

She was sorry, bitterly sorry for Radowitz--the victim. But she loved Falloden--the offender! It was the perennial injustice of pa.s.sion, the eternal injustice of human things.

When Falloden was half-way up the hill, he left the road, and took a short cut through fields, by a path which led him to the back of the cottage, where its sitting-room window opened on the garden and the view. As he approached the house, he saw that the sitting-room blinds had not been drawn, and some of the windows were still open. The whole room was brilliantly lit by fire and lamp. Otto was there alone, sitting at the piano, with his back to the approaching spectator and the moonlit night outside. He was playing something with his left hand; Falloden could see him plainly. Suddenly, he saw the boy's figure collapse. He was still sitting, but his face was buried in his arm which was lying on the piano; and through the open window, Falloden heard a sound which, m.u.f.fled as it was, produced upon him a strange and horrible impression.

It was a low cry, or groan--the voice of despair itself.

Falloden stood motionless. All he knew was that he would have given anything in the world to recall the past; to undo the events of that June evening in the Marmion quadrangle.

Then, before Otto could discover his presence, he went noiselessly round the corner of the house, and entered it by the front door. In the hall, he called loudly to the ex-scout, as he went upstairs, so that Radowitz might know he had come back. When he returned, Radowitz was sitting over the fire with sheets of scribbled music-paper on a small table before him. His eyes shone, his cheeks were feverishly bright. He turned with forced gaiety at the sight of Falloden--

"Well, did you meet them on the road?"

"Lady Constance, and her friend? Yes. I had a few words with them. How are you now? What did the doctor say to you?"

"What on earth does it matter!" said Radowitz impatiently. "He is just a fool--a young one--the worst sort--I can put up with the old ones. I know my own case a great deal better than he does."

"Does he want you to stop working?" Falloden stood on the hearth, looking down on the huddled figure in the chair; himself broad and tall and curly-haired, like the divine Odysseus, when Athene had breathed ambrosial youth upon him. But he was pale, and his eyes frowned perpetually under his splendid brows.

"Some nonsense of that sort!" said Radowitz. "Don't let's talk about it."

They went into dinner, and Radowitz sent for champagne.

"That's the only sensible thing the idiot said--that I might have that stuff whenever I liked."

His spirits rose with the wine; and presently Falloden could have thought what he had seen from the dark had been a mere illusion. A review in _The Times_ of a book of Polish memoirs served to let loose a flood of boastful talk, which jarred abominably on the Englishman. Under the Oxford code, to boast in plain language of your ancestors, or your own performances, meant simply that you were an outsider, not sure of your footing. If a man really had ancestors, or more brains than other people, his neighbours saved him the trouble of talking about them. Only the fools and the _parvenus_ trumpeted themselves; a process in any case not worth while, since it defeated its own ends. You might of course be as insolent or arrogant as you pleased; but only an idiot tried to explain why.

In Otto, however, there was the characteristic Slav mingling of quick wits with streaks of childish vanity. He wanted pa.s.sionately to make this tough Englishman feel what a great country Poland had been and would be again; what great people his ancestors had been; and what a leading part they had played in the national movements. And the more he hit against an answering stubbornness--or coolness--in Falloden, the more he held forth. So that it was an uncomfortable dinner. And again Falloden said to himself--"Why did I do it? I am only in his way. I shall bore and chill him; and I don't seem to be able to help it."

But after dinner, as the night frost grew sharper, and as Otto sat over the fire, piling on the coal, Falloden suddenly went and fetched a warm Scotch plaid of his own. When he offered it, Radowitz received it with surprise, and a little annoyance.

"I am not the least cold--thank you!"

But, presently, he had wrapped it round his knees; and some restraint had broken down in Falloden.

"Isn't there a splendid church in Cracow?" he asked casually, stretching himself, with his pipe, in a long chair on the opposite side of the fire.

"One!--five or six!" cried Otto indignantly. "But I expect you're thinking of Panna Marya. Panna means Lady. I tell you, you English haven't got anything to touch it!"

"What's it like?--what date?" said Falloden, laughing.

"I don't know--I don't know anything about architecture. But it's glorious. It's all colour and stained gla.s.s--and magnificent tombs--like the gate of heaven," said the boy with ardour. "It's the church that every Pole loves. Some of my ancestors are buried there. And it's the church where, instead of a clock striking, the hours are given out by a watchman who plays a horn. He plays an old air--ever so old--we call it the 'Heynal,' on the top of one of the towers. The only time I was ever in Cracow I heard a man at a concert--a magnificent player--improvise on it. And it comes into one of Chopin's sonatas."

He began to hum under his breath a sweet wandering melody. And suddenly he sprang up, and ran to the piano. He played the air with his left hand, embroidering it with delicate arabesques and variations, catching a ba.s.s here and there with a flying touch, suggesting marvellously what had once been a rich and complete whole. The injured hand, which had that day been very painful, lay helpless in its sling; the other flashed over the piano, while the boy's blue eyes shone beneath his vivid frieze of hair. Falloden, lying back in his chair, noticed the emaciation of the face, the hollow eyes, the contracted shoulders; and as he did so, he thought of the scene in the Magdalen ballroom--the slender girl, wreathed in pearls, and the brilliant foreign youth--dancing, dancing, with all the eyes of the room upon them.

Presently, with a sound of impatience, Radowitz left the piano. He could do nothing that he wanted to do. He stood at the window for some minutes looking out at the autumn moon, with his back to Falloden.

Falloden took up one of the books he was at work on for his fellowship exam. When Radowitz came back to the fire, however, white and shivering, he laid it down again, and once more made conversation. Radowitz was at first unwilling to respond. But he was by nature _bavard_, and Falloden played him with some skill.

Very soon he was talking fast and brilliantly again, about his artistic life in Paris, his friends at the Conservatoire or in the Quartier Latin; and so back to his childish days in Poland, and the uprising in which the family estates near Warsaw had been forfeited. Falloden found it all very strange. The seething, artistic, revolutionary world which had produced Otto was wholly foreign to him; and this patriotic pa.s.sion for a dead country seemed to his English common sense a waste of force.

But in Otto's eyes Poland was not dead; the White Eagle, torn and blood-stained though she was, would mount the heavens again; and in those dark skies the stars were already rising!

At eleven, Falloden got up--

"I must go and swat. It was awfully jolly, what you've been telling me.

I know a lot I didn't know before."

A gleam of pleasure showed in the boy's sunken eyes.

"I expect I'm a bore," he said, with a shrug; "and I'd better go to bed."

Falloden helped him carry up his books and papers. In Otto's room, the windows were wide open, but there was a bright fire, and Bateson, the ex-scout, was waiting to help him undress. Falloden asked some questions about the doctor's orders. Various things were wanted from Oxford. He undertook to get them in the morning.

When he came back to the sitting-room, he stood some time in a brown study. He wondered again whether he had any qualifications at all as a nurse. But he was inclined to think now that Radowitz might be worse off without him; what Constance had said seemed less unreal; and his effort of the evening, as he looked back on it, brought him a certain bitter satisfaction.

The following day, Radowitz came downstairs with the course of the second movement of his symphony clear before him. He worked feverishly all day, now writing, now walking up and down, humming and thinking, now getting but of his piano--a beautiful instrument hired for the winter--all that his maimed state allowed him to get; and pa.s.sing hour after hour, between an ecstasy of happy creation, and a state of impotent rage with his own helplessness. Towards sunset he was worn out, and with tea beside him which he had been greedily drinking, he was sitting huddled over the fire, when he heard some one ride up to the front door.

In another minute the sitting-room door opened, and a girl's figure in a riding habit appeared.

"May I come in?" said Connie, flushing rather pink.

Otto sprang up, and drew her in. His fatigue disappeared as though by magic. He seemed all gaiety and force.

"Come in! Sit down and have some tea! I was so depressed five minutes ago--I was fit to kill myself. And now you make the room shine--you do come in like a G.o.ddess!"

He busied himself excitedly in putting a chair for her, in relighting the spirit kettle, in blowing up the fire.

Constance meanwhile stood in some embarra.s.sment with one hand on the back of a chair--a charming vision in her close fitting habit, and the same black _tricorne_ that she had worn in the Lathom Woods, at Falloden's side.

"I came to bring you a book, Otto, the book we talked of yesterday." She held out a paper-covered volume. "But I mustn't stay."

"Oh, do stay!" he implored her. "Don't bother about Mrs. Grundy. I'm so tired and so bored. Anybody may visit an invalid. Think this is a nursing home, and you're my daily visitor. Falloden's miles away on a drag-hunt. Ah, that's right!" he cried delightedly, as he saw that she had seated herself. "Now you shall have some tea!"

She let him provide her, watching him the while with slightly frowning brows. How ill he looked--how ill! Her heart sank.

"Dear Otto, how are you? You don't seem so well to-day."

"I've been working myself to death. It won't come right--this beastly _andante_. It's too jerky--it wants _liaison_. And I can't hear it--I can't hear it!--that's the devilish part of it."

And taking his helpless hand out of the sling in which it had been resting, he struck it bitterly against the arm of his chair. The tears came to Connie's eyes.

"Don't!--you'll hurt yourself. It'll be all right--it'll be all right!

You'll hear it in your mind." And bending forward under a sudden impulse, she took the maimed hand in her two hands--so small and soft--and lifting it tenderly she put her lips to it.