Mary Gray Part 13

"Ah, yes, that is it." Lady Agatha's face flushed and lit up. "I've made it healthy for them. Highercombe is a painted lie--a pest-house, a charnel-house, full of unwholesome miasmas from its pretty green, its pond covered with water-lilies. Death lurks in that pond. There is bad drainage and bad water; the damp oozes through the old brick floors of the houses. The whole place is as deadly in its way as those West African jungles of which Mr. Jardine told us."

They were to see Mr. Jardine later. At present he was on a round of visiting at the houses of the great. The names of the people who had elected to do honour to Paul Jardine would have been a list of pretty well the most ill.u.s.trious persons in the kingdom. When Lady Agatha had suggested to him that he might give a week to Hazels before the summer was done, he had been eager about it, had even suggested dropping some of his other engagements. But that she would not hear of. She seemed to take an odd pride and pleasure in the way he had conquered the world best worth conquering.

"What!" she had said. "Drop Sir Richard Greville and Lord Overbury! Not for worlds! You may find it dull. Sir Richard lives the life of a hermit, and you won't get anything fit to eat at Lord Overbury's. He never knows what he's eating, and his cook has long given up trying to do credit to herself. I believe that only for his dining-out he'd be starved. Even as it is, he's been known to take mustard with his soup and red-currant jelly with his cheese. Still--he's Lord Overbury!"

They led a very quiet life at Hazels, seeing hardly anyone. Lady Agatha had declared that she was going to make up for her rackety life in town, as well as to prepare for the winter. She had looked as fresh as a rose through all the racketing, and when she talked about the need for rest she had smiled.

As a matter of fact, her energy was too overflowing to permit of her resting as other folk rested. A change of occupation was about as much as one could hope for. And now she was restless as she had not been before, for, energetic as she had always been, she had never driven others. Indeed, many people had found absolute restfulness in her Ladyship's big, wholesome presence.

"The life in town has only stimulated me, Mary," she confessed; "just stimulated me and excited my brain. I must work it off somehow. Let us begin at the novel to-morrow."

They began at the novel. Lady Agatha dictated it, and Mary took it down in short-hand. They worked out of doors. Mary had her seat under the boughs of a splendid chestnut tree on a little green lawn. The lawn was at the side of the house, not over-looked, enclosed on three sides by a splendid yew hedge. The dogs would lie at Mary's feet. There were Roy the St. Bernard, and Brian the bull-dog, a toy Pomeranian, and a little Chow. The dogs always stayed at Hazels. "If I took them up to town,"

Lady Agatha said, "they would see more of me, to be sure, but then they would always be losing me, for, of course, I couldn't take them out in town. And they always know I'll come back--they're so wise. The parting is dreadful, but they know I'll come back."

Mary sometimes wondered how her Ladyship had found time to think out her novel. For it seemed all ready and prepared in her mind. She would sweep up and down the gra.s.s while she dictated. Mary used to say that it meant a ten-mile walk of a morning. The train of her white morning-dress lopped the daisies in their places; the incessant pa.s.sage of her feet made a track in the gra.s.s. Sometimes she would pa.s.s out of her secretary's hearing and have to be recalled by Mary's laughing voice of remonstrance.

"Am I afflicting you, Mary?" she asked on one of these occasions. "Am I overwhelming you? It's a horrible flood, isn't it?"

"You are very fluent," Mary answered, looking down at the queer little dots and spirals on her paper. "I daresay we'll have to prune it before it's printed. But it is a good fluency, a rich fluency. To me it is irresistible--like a spring freshet, like the sap rushing madly through all the veins of spring."

"Ah, you feel it?--you feel it like that, Mary? I feel it so myself; I riot in it."

"It will have no sense of effort--it is vital. I hope we shall be able to keep it up."

"Why not, O Ca.s.sandra?"

She stood with one hand on the back of Mary's chair, and looked up into the tree.

"The book should have been written in spring," she went on. "I feel the spring in my blood. Why should I, Mary, now when it is full summer, and the trees are dark?"

"I don't know, unless that you were so busy in spring that you had not time to enjoy it. Come, let us get on; perhaps presently you will flag.

We must get the book done before anyone comes to interrupt us."

"Never was there such a willing co-worker. You mustn't overdo it, Mary.

How many words did I dictate to you yesterday?"

"Six thousand."

"And you gave them to me typewritten this morning."

"I wanted to see how they looked in type. It is all right, Agatha. Even you cannot go on for long, dictating six thousand words a day. We must take the tide at the flow."

"Afterwards I shall do a play--after I have given you a rest."

"More kingdoms to conquer," Mary laughed. "There is only one person like you--the Kaiser."

"I have an immense admiration for him."

Mrs. Morres meanwhile sat and smiled to herself. She had given up the crochet for point-lace, which, as it had more intricate st.i.tches, necessitated the more care. Sometimes she knitted and read with a book in her lap. But when she was not reading, she smiled quietly to herself.

It was a curious smile, half-satisfied as one whose prognostications have come true, half-dissatisfied as though there was no great cause for congratulation.

Once Mary was curious enough to ask her why she smiled. Lady Agatha at the piano was playing Wagner like a professional musician. Mrs. Morres's smile grew more inscrutable.

"It amuses me," she said, talking loudly, so that her words might reach Mary through the storm of the music, "to find that Agatha is just a woman, after all. It amuses me--and yet--it had been happier for you and me if she had contented herself with the unrealities of life a little longer."

Mary did not understand at the moment. She began to understand a little later when Mr. Jardine came. The novel, after all, had not been finished. For the last week or so before the visitor arrived her Ladyship had apparently lost interest in it.

"My brain has dried up, Mary," she said. "I should only spoil it if I went on. Put it away in a drawer, and when I feel like it we can go on again. You want a rest. I've over-tired you."

"I felt I couldn't rest till it was done," Mary said, with a little sigh. "I wanted to know what became of them all. And it is such an interesting point. Tell me, does Clotilde marry Mark, after all?"

"How should I know? I have nothing to do with what she does. Clotilde knows her own mind. I do not. Wait till we get back to it."

"Ah! you should finish it--you should finish it. You'll never get that young green world in it again. It was an inspiration. We should have held on to it like Jacob to the angel's robe."

But for the time Lady Agatha's literary energy was exhausted.

"I daresay there's a deal of fustian in it. There's sure to be," she said. "I don't think anything could be really good that was produced with so little pain. I daresay I'll be for tearing it up, so you'd better lock it away. Do you feel equal to walking ten miles? If not, get your bicycle and I'll walk beside you. I've been cramped up too long."

This time it was a mood of physical restlessness. She walked and rode and went out golfing, and played tennis, and rowed on the river, and did a thousand things, while Mrs. Morres made her delicate wheels and trefoils, and smiled a more Sibylline smile than ever.

At last he came. When the sound of his footstep and of his voice reached them where they stood in the drawing-room awaiting him, her Ladyship turned to Mary, and her face was full of an immense relief.

"I didn't really believe he'd come," she said. "I've been feeling quite sure that something would occur to prevent his coming."

"The weeks have been endless," Paul Jardine said, coming in and taking her Ladyship's two hands. "How could you put me off till September? I've had a heavy time. I don't like being made much of by other folk, so I am going out again after Christmas."

Then, to be sure, Mary knew. The pair leaped to each other as though they had been two halves of one whole separated long ago, and now drawn together in a magnetic rush. Mary had always known that when Lady Agatha attracted she attracted irresistibly; there was no half-way, no haltings, no looking back possible.

"We are out of it, Mary, we two," Mrs. Morres said, and the smile had become a trifle weak and wavering. "What do you suppose is going to become of us? Hazels is a pleasant place, and there has always been something of a.s.surance and comfort about Agatha. I had a hard life, my dear, before I came here. Yet what would she do with us? She can't very well take us out to Africa. I, at least, should not know what to do in those places."

It was a wooing that was not long a-doing. Her Ladyship and Mr. Jardine came in one evening in time for afternoon tea. The days were closing in by this time, and a fire was welcome. There had been rain, and the fire sparkled on her Ladyship's black curls and her eyelashes as she stood by the fire, taking off the long cloak in which she wrapped herself when she went out walking in bad weather. Her eyes were at once bright and shy.

"Congratulate me," she said. "He has consented to take me with him. He held out for a long time, but I was determined to go. As though I should take the chances!"

"It is I who am to be congratulated," said Paul Jardine, and the happiness in his voice thrilled his listeners. "Of course, I wouldn't have listened to her if she wasn't so splendidly strong. It will be an odd place for a honeymoon. Do you think I ought not to have consented to take her, Mrs. Morres?"

"For how long?"

Mrs. Morres's voice shook. All the Sibylline quality was gone from it now.

"For a year. I must fulfil my engagements. Afterwards I must do my best for them over here. I never thought that I could do as I would as a married man. Do you think I ought not to have consented?"

"She would have gone without your consent."

Lady Agatha came over and put a hand on her shoulder, a kind, caressing hand.

"You are quite right," she said. "Oh, he has wriggled, but it had to be.

It had to be, from the first minute we met."