The Halo Part 16

The arrival of Lady Brinsley's poor dear Mr. Smith, the vicar, was the next mild event of the day, and as his head too was filled with coals and blankets, the story of the abominable coal-dealer had again to be listened to and lamented over.

"The very worst coals I ever saw in my life, positively, are they not, Lady Brinsley?"

"Eh, yes, Mr. Smith, quite too shocking. Nothing but dust, d.u.c.h.ess, positively."

"We are all dust," returned the d.u.c.h.ess, who was whispering to Joyselle about the Grand d.u.c.h.ess Anastasia-Katherine, _dans le temps_. "Oh, no, we are all worms, aren't we?"

"Positively, I _never_ saw such very inferior coals," went on the Vicar, wondering what on earth she was talking about.

Brigit looked at him as he babbled on. He was a very thin man, who always reminded her of a plucked bird. Soon he would ask her why he had not had the pleasure of seeing her in church for so long. He would hope that she had not had a cold.

He did both these things, poor man, for it was his _role_ in life always to say and do the perniciously obvious.

It was a very trying hour, but at last, under the dutiful pretext of going to look after her mother, Brigit escaped and flew to Tommy's room.

It was a strange apartment for a little boy, for it had been a.s.signed to him once when he was ill, as being sunny, and beyond his bra.s.s bedstead and small boy h.o.a.rds, contained nothing whatever that looked as if it belonged to one of few years.

For it was hung in faded plum-coloured satin, the eighteenth-century furniture was quaint and beautiful, and the narrow oval mirrors, set in tarnished gilded frames like a frieze about its walls, presented to Brigit's eye as she opened the door an infinite and bewildering number of Tommies, bending studiously over a large sheet of writing-paper, that he held on a book on his knees.

"h.e.l.lo, Tommy, what are you up to?"

The boy looked up, his face full of ecstasy. "I say, Bick, he _will_!

He will help me learn to be a violinist! He's going to find a good teacher for me, and then, when I have got over the first grind, you know, he's going--oh, Bicky, darling--he's going to teach me himself, at the same time. Isn't he an angel!"

She sat down. "Yes, Tommy. But what on earth are you writing?"

"Well, you see, he--he says I must be educated. I had to promise him to go in for Latin and all that rot. It's--a bore, but he says a musician must be educated----"

She started. And he himself, was he educated? Did he know the ordinary things known, colloquially speaking, by everybody? She did not know. It had never occurred to her before.

"Yes, dear, but--what is that paper?"

Tommy blushed.

"Well, he's so keen on it, you know, I thought I'd advertise for a--a tutor."

"Advertise for a tutor!"

"Yes. There is no good in wasting time, is there? And _she_ would potter about asking people their advice, etc., so I--I have just drawn up this.

You won't tell?"

She shook her head with much gravity and then read what he had written:

"Wanted, by the Earl of Kingsmead, a tutor. Oxford man preferred.

Must be fond of sport, particularly ratting and cricket."

"Do you think it's all right?" he asked, as he read it.

"Y--yes--only there isn't any 'k' in 'particularly.' But I think we'd better--ask someone, little brother. I don't imagine that children usually advertise for their own tutors."

"But there isn't any 'usually' about me, Bick. And certainly _mother_ isn't 'usual,' nor you. And if she got a man I'd be sure to loathe him.

Think of that chap Baker that she thought such a lot of. Why, he read poetry!"

"Poetry isn't any worse than music, is it?"

Tommy's mouth, as he smiled, was its most fawn-like. "_Music!_ Rather different, my dear Brigit. Well--can you lend me some money for my ad?"

She was silent for a moment, and then answered in a kind of desperate impatience, "Oh, dear! Suppose you go and ask _him_ what to do."

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The d.u.c.h.ess, that evening, watched Brigit with dismayed surprise. What had happened to the girl? Where were her happy expression and youthful spirits?

Theo had not changed; that they had not quarrelled was quite evident, for when she spoke to him there was something of the gentleness of the day before in her manner; but this exception excepted, the girl had reverted to her old air of silent, resentful indifference, and her strange beauty was to the watchful old woman as repellent as she had ever seen it.

Once, when Carron spoke to her, Brigit answered without turning her head, and with her narrowed eyes and slow-moving lips looked almost venomous.

If she had produced a knife and plunged it into him, the d.u.c.h.ess told herself she would not have been surprised.

"An uncommonly unpleasant young person," thought the old lady, "with the temper of a fiend. I wonder where she got it; poor Henry had no temper at all, and her mother is at worst a spitfire."

Yelverton, too, noticed the disquieting change that had come over Lady Brigit, and observed with some amus.e.m.e.nt that she had noticed his observation and did not care about it, one way or the other.

Theo, seeing his love with the rosiest of spectacles, asked her gently what was the matter, and was told in a quiet voice that she was cross.

"I have an abominable temper, poor boy," she said.

And possibly because it was the simple truth, it never occurred to him to believe her, and he set this remark down as an example of her divine humility.

Her mother, glaring at her toward the end of dinner, shrugged her shoulders.

"Cross again," she thought; "what an infernal temper she has. I'm glad I haven't, it makes so many wrinkles."

But Brigit had some reason for looking tragic, for she had made up her mind, while dressing, to break her engagement. Perhaps, after all, Joyselle would prove large-minded enough to continue to see Tommy, and even if he did not, she must end matters.

Regarding herself, the girl had a curious prescience, and the vague foreboding she had felt ever since her realisation of her love for Joyselle had, as she sat before her gla.s.s while her maid dressed her hair, suddenly developed into a definite terror. She knew that something dreadful would happen if she continued to see Joyselle, and the fact that he was quite innocent, and unsuspecting of the threatened danger, gave her the sensation of one who sees a child playing with a poisonous snake. _He_ was in danger as well as she, and not only they two, but his son and his wife. Her beauty was so great, and she was so accustomed to see its effect on men, that there was no vanity at all in her suddenly awakened solicitude for him. At any moment he might see her with the eyes of a man, instead of, as he had hitherto done, with those of a father.

"And if he fell in love with _me_," she told herself as the maid clasped her pearls round her neck, "there would be no hope for any of us."

It is remarkable that the possibility of Joyselle's loving her only added to her misery, for most women in like cases would have clutched at the bare chance of such a contingency in rapturous disregard of all consequences.

She, however, who had been the object of more strong pa.s.sions than many women ever even hear of, knew although, or possibly because, she had never before cared a jot for any man, that her time had come, and that for her love must be a perilous thing. She had once been called a stormy petrel, and now as, racked with the agony of her resolve, she sat through the interminable dinner, she recalled the name, and smiled bitterly to herself. Yes, she was a stormy petrel, and she had no right to ruin Victor Joyselle and his family. She would break her engagement and go to Italy for the winter. The Lenskys were going, and she would go with them.

Joyselle was in high spirits that evening. He had had a letter from La-bas, as he always called Normandy, and his mother was better, and greatly looking forward to his visit. "She is old, my mother," he told the party, "eighty years old, but her cheeks are still rosy! They live in Falaise, in a small little house near the parish church, and in her garden she grows vegetables--ah, such vegetables!"