The Education of Eric Lane Part 20

"I shall get up for dinner after all," she said. "I mean, I shan't. . . .

I don't know what I'm talking about. What--I mean--is: I shall get out of _bed_ for dinner, but I shan't go down. _That's_ clear, isn't it?

What's the time?"

"Eight o'clock, my lady."

Then her dream had lasted less than five minutes. . . .

"I'm going to sleep. I shan't want any dinner. Will you bring the telephone in here?"

The maid left the room in bewilderment at the conflicting orders and sought counsel of the housekeeper. Ten minutes later Lady Crawleigh came in to find Barbara in bed with the telephone tucked under one arm and the receiver to her ear. She finished some request for an address, nodded as the answer was given and lifted the instrument to a table by her side.

"Well, my dear, you seem to have given poor Merton a fright," said Lady Crawleigh. "Is anything the matter?"

"I never felt better in my life," answered Barbara.

"Are you coming down to dinner?"

"I don't think I'm well enough for that. . . . You can get on without me. If things seem to hang fire, get Gerry Deganway to give imitations of His Excellency."

Lady Crawleigh bridled at the suggestion.

"That's not at all a respectful way to speak of your father," she observed reprovingly.

"Well, His ex-Excellency, then. That no better? Sorry. He's very amusing--Gerry, I mean. Why not get father to give imitations of Gerry?

In its way, that ought to be just as funny."

Her mother advanced reproachfully to the bed and laid her hand upon the rail.

"_If_ you're not feeling well," she said with incontrovertible logic, "you ought to go to sleep instead of telephoning to people and writing to people. If you're all right, you ought to help with these tiresome creatures. They're _your_ guests."

Barbara felt her own pulse and sighed.

"I'm well enough to write one letter," she said, "and perhaps to get up in time for lunch to-morrow."

Then she hunted among the pillows for a pencil and addressed an envelope to "_Eric Lane Esq^{re}, Lashmar Mill-House, Lashmar, Near Winchester, Hants_."

She was already tired; perhaps, if she could fix her thoughts on Eric until she fell asleep, she would be spared a second vision of judgement.

A dressing-gong sounded in the distance, and she debated whether to abandon her letter to Eric and go down. Gerald Deganway would be simperingly sympathetic. "Your mother tells me you're not feeling very grand" (odious phrase). "Poor you!" (d.a.m.nable phrase, d.a.m.nable creature--with his insecure eye-gla.s.s and plastered flaxen hair!) Johnny Carstairs would be pontifical and pretentious--"The unhappy Foreign Office comes in for all the kicks. There's a body of three-pound-a-week gentlemen in Fleet Street who'd enforce a _real_ blockade, 'leave it to the Navy,' don't you know, all that sort of thing. I'm aware of them; I sometimes wish I could have a heart-to-heart talk with them. . . ." By staying in bed she was at least keeping the promise that she had given to Eric; the sense of surrender was a novel experiment in emotion.

She finished the letter and switched off the light. Darkness was not going to usher in faces to-night. Her soul felt healed.

"You absurd darling child!"

She whispered the words aloud and felt warm tears over-br.i.m.m.i.n.g her eyes. She loved him for his extraordinary callow youth--which had carried the chaste chivalry of sixteen to the age of twice sixteen; she loved his little occasional tender gleams of womanliness. . . . And he was so easy to mystify and tease. She felt the warmth and the taut muscles of his arm round her body as he led her home across St. James'

Park, her head on his shoulder, sleeping, secure and forgetful.

"Dear Eric, I wish you were here now!" she murmured.

Lord Crawleigh, indignant that Barbara should desert her own party the first night, but vaguely disquieted that she was ill enough to go to bed of her own volition, peeped into her room on his way down to dinner.

There was no answer to his jerky, sharp call of "Barbara" and he turned on the light. Her eyes were closed, but she was smiling; he walked to the bed to make certain that she was not trying any of her tricks on him.

"Barbara!"

"Yes, darling?"

She opened her eyes, and their drowsy contentment faded away.

"I only came to see if you were asleep."

"I'm not--now," she answered wistfully.

"Well, why don't you _get_ some decent sleep? You racket about and overtax your strength and excite yourself. . . . And this is the result!"

"I'll do my best, father."

As he creaked out of the room, she shut her eyes tight and tried in despair to woo herself back to the moment of half-consciousness when Eric drew her cloak across her chest and she roused to ask him sleepily "Am I coming undressed?"

2

Barbara rang for tea at noon and came down to luncheon in a house which was gratifyingly demoralized by her absence. Her father had spent Sunday morning in his study, writing letters; her mother had carried the more devout members of the party to ma.s.s and from ma.s.s to a vague, bored exploration of the garden, where they could be seen scattered on the lowest terrace, trying to make friends with an unresponsive peac.o.c.k; the men, headed by Pentyre, were warmly entrenched round the smoking-room fire in a blue tobacco-haze and a litter of Sunday papers. George Oakleigh, in naval uniform, was unashamedly sleeping in a deep window-embrasure, his mouth open and his eyegla.s.ses on his knees.

Deganway and Carstairs were arguing in subdued tones and seemed as vacantly uninterested as Pentyre, who had exhausted the _feuilleton_ of his paper and was studying the advertis.e.m.e.nts.

She was pleased by the stir with which her entrance galvanized them into alertness, by Oakleigh's sympathetic enquiries, even by Deganway's critical examination of her dress.

"Well, make the most of me, everybody," she said. "I'm going back to bed immediately after lunch. What's everybody doing?"

"I've been asleep," Oakleigh answered contentedly.

Barbara looked round her and wrinkled her nose.

"What are you _going_ to do?" she pursued.

"I should like to go _on_ sleeping. . . ."

"Come for a walk, Babs," interrupted Pentyre. "It's my last leave----"

"Then you'd better rest instead of working on my emotions. George, on the other hand, never gets any exercise at the Admiralty, and, as he's never been here before, I think I shall take him round the house.

Besides, he hasn't _asked_ me to do anything. Come on, George!"

Oakleigh rose with sufficient alacrity and accompanied her for an hour through the ruins of the Abbey, the Elizabethan reconstruction and the Georgian incrustation. Knowing Barbara, he had secured what he wanted by pretended indifference, though he was less interested in hall and refectory, Prior's house and dormitory than in her knowledge of architecture and early English furniture.

"Another of my accomplishments," she laughed. "George, what sort of reputation _have_ I got? A man was so surprised the other day to find that I could play the piano and sing. . . ."

"I know what _I_ think of you," he answered. "Possibly you know it too."

Barbara looked away abstractedly, as though she had not heard him. Ever since her illness, George had shewn her a tender devotion; and, when Sonia Dainton and her other friends had succ.u.mbed to the war-epidemic of marriage, she had fancied that it would be very restful to marry him.

The mood lasted for a week, and it was in this time that she had invited him to the Abbey. Then a dream, of which she could remember few details, had shattered the lazy romance which she was weaving; there was a shadow which she knew would take form as Jack Waring, there was a hint of the wild oath which she had taken when she was mad; and she had decided that G.o.d was punishing her by opening her eyes to happiness and then throwing a bar of shadow across her path as she struggled to reach it. Those were the days when she heard that Jack was missing, the nights when she prayed to hear that he was dead. Now that George was at hand, she did not want him; she might find peace by marrying him, but she would find nothing more. . . .