Poppy Part 43

"Mrs. Portal! I didn't know you knew her."

"Yes; she and I met when I was in Durban, and became friends. She happened to be lunching here yesterday when I arrived, and she came up and spoke to me. You can imagine what it meant to have someone welcoming me as she did, after long exile from my own land--but, if you know her at all, you know how kind and lovely her ways are."

"Yes, indeed," Bramham heartily agreed. "She is altogether charming."

All the same, he was astonished. Mrs. Portal was charming, but she stood for orthodoxy, and the girl before him was mysteriously unorthodox--to say the least of it.

"I am dining with her to-night to meet her great friend, Mrs. Cap.r.o.n,"

continued Poppy, eyeing him gravely.

"Then you ought to be careful," he blurted out; "for you are dining with the two most precise and conventional women in the place"--here he perceived himself to be blundering--"but I may also say the most delightful," he added hastily.

"Ah! and why shouldn't I?" she queried softly, but her tone brought a slight flush to Bramham's cheek.

"Oh, I don't know," he stammered. "No reason at all, I imagine."

"On the contrary," she said quietly, "you imagine every reason."

Bramham scrambled out of his tight corner as best he might.

"At any rate," he made haste to say, "I am delighted that you have a woman friend who has it in her power to make things as pleasant and interesting as they can be in a place like this."

"Thank you," she said; "and, dear friend--you need not be anxious for me. I only confess where I am sure of absolution and the secrecy of the confessional--never to women."

Bramham, first pleased, then annoyed, then sulky over this piece of information, made no immediate response, and a waiter appearing at the moment to inquire whether they would take lunch, the matter dropped. He followed in the wake of her charming lilac gown, through tessellated squares and palm-gardens, with the glow of personal satisfaction every right-minded man feels in accompanying the prettiest and best turned-out woman in the place.

When they were seated at the pleasantest corner of the room, and she had ordered without fuss an excellently dainty lunch, Bramham's desire being to sit with his elbows on the table and dip into the depths of lilac eyes lashed with black above two faintly-tinted cheek-bones, he reverted to his sulky demeanour. But a scarlet mouth was smiling at him whimsically.

"Don't let us be cross! Everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds, you know; and you are the best of all possible confessors. There is nothing I can hide from you. I am even going to tell you where I got my pretty clothes from, and the money to be careering about the world and staying at the Royal--I know you are consumed with apprehension on these two points."

She smiled at him with such comradeship that he could not sulk any longer.

"Well, you know the last time I saw you, you were in hard-luck street, at a guinea a week, and too proud to use a friend's purse. I suppose you have been getting on?"

"You suppose rightly: I have _got_ on. I have three plays running at London theatres, two novels selling well, and a book of poems in its tenth edition--not bad for poems, you know."

It was a day of surprises for Bramham, and it should be excused in him that he sat for three minutes with his mouth open.

"You!... You!... why, I've never even heard of you!" he cried, mortified, astonished, and it must be confessed, slightly unbelieving.

"But perhaps you have heard of _Eve Destiny_? Here are a pile of letters and things from my managers and publishers. I want you to look over them, and advise me, will you, about money and things ... I'm most frightfully unpractical and extravagant.... I can see that I shall very soon be poor again unless someone advises me and puts me on the right road. And I don't want to be poor again, Charlie. Poverty hurts ... it is like the sun, it shows up all the dark corners--in one's nature. If I can only arrange my affairs so as to have about a hundred a year to live on, I shall be satisfied."

"A hundred a year!" Bramham had been skimming through her papers with his business eye, which fortunately for his feminine acquaintances was a very different organ to his pleasure eye. All his instincts were outraged at this careless view of what was evidently a splendid working concern.

"A hundred a year! Why, if you go on like this you'll be more likely to haul in ten thousand a year."

"Ah! but I'm not going on," she interpolated calmly. "I don't mean to work any more."

"Not work any more? Why? Are you panned?... dried up ... fizzled out?"

"Not at all," she laughed. "I have as much fizzle as ever ... I don't want to work any more--that's all. I'm tired ... and there is nothing to work for."

"But since when did you begin to feel like that?"

"Oh, since a long time ... I haven't worked for ages ... I've been buying frocks in Paris, and sitting in the sunshine at Cannes, and looking over the side of a yacht at the blue Mediterranean, and just spending, spending ... but there is not much in _that_, Charlie ...

there's not much in anything if your world is empty." Her voice broke off strangely, but when he looked at her the tragic smile was back on her mouth again. He knew now why she did it--it was to keep herself from wailing like a banshee! An interval here occurred, monopolised entirely by the waiter--a coolie, slim, snowily-draped, and regretful as are all coolie-waiters.

It was Bramham who again broached the subject of Carson. He could not help himself--these two people were dear to him; and, besides, he was eaten up with curiosity.

"If you go to the Portals you will meet Eve Carson. He is _persona grata_ there."

"I know; Mrs. Portal said to me, amongst other things, 'You must meet our great friend, Sir Evelyn Carson.' She did not mention his wife, however."

"His wife----?"

"It will be interesting to meet his wife," she said tranquilly. Bramham gazed at her. She was carefully dissecting the pink part of a Neapolitan ice from its white foundation.

"Yes, I should think it would be--when he gets one. I was asking him only last night why he didn't marry, and he said----"

"He would be sure to say something arresting," said Poppy, but she had grown pale as death. Her eyes waited upon Bramham's lips.

"He said, first, that he was not wealthy enough--a paltry reason.

Secondly, well, I can't quite repeat it, but something to the effect that the girl of his dreams wouldn't materialise."

There was a long silence. She sat with her hands in her lap and her eyes veiled. The colour of life came slowly back to her face, but she was racked and shadowy-looking. Compa.s.sion filled Charles Bramham.

"I suppose you heard that May Mappin tale? All rot. She's a foolish little Durban girl, left with a large fortune. He has never thought twice about her, but she has always persisted in making a fool of herself. It is a common story here that she cabled home reports of their engagement and marriage. Poor devil! I suppose she can't help herself ... but never mind her.... You, Rosalind! I can't pretend to understand you ... the mystery is too deep for me to probe. But I believe, that if last night I could have broken my promise to you----"

"Never! Never!" she cried fiercely. "I should curse you for ever ...

I.... And so he is not married?" she said in an ordinary voice.

"No, nor ever will be, till he finds the woman of his dreams, according to his own tale."

Suddenly she rose from her chair.

"Good-bye ... I must go now ... I want to be alone ... I want rest ... I must think. Forgive me for leaving you like this--" She went away, down the long, well-filled room, and every feminine eye raked her from stem to stern, and every man strained the ligaments of his throat to breaking-point to catch the last flick of her lilac-coloured draperies.

Afterwards, every eye severely considered Bramham. He found himself staring at two coffee-cups. A waiter at his elbow rudely inquired whether the lady took sugar.

"Yes, two--all ladies do," he answered aggressively. To conceal his discomfort he fell to perusal of the packet of papers she had put into his hands. They were from managers, agents, and publishers, and concerned themselves with contracts, royalties, and demands for the first refusal of the next work of Miss Rosalind Chard, otherwise _Eve Destiny_. Bramham became so engrossed at last that he forgot all the staring people in the room and the two coffee-cups and his discomfort.

"She's a genius, by Jove!" he said grimly. "One must get used to being made uncomfortable."

CHAPTER XXII