The Rustle of Silk Part 4

"And for the love of heaven, why not? Breezy, why the deuce haven't you told me about this girl? I would like to have her about me. She's decorative. I wouldn't mind being touched by her and I'm sure she'd look after my things. Look how neat she is. She might have come out of a bandbox."

Miss Breezy bit her lip. She was bitterly annoyed. She was unaware of the expression but she felt that Lola had double-crossed her,-as indeed she had. "Well, my lady," she said, "to tell you the truth, I didn't think that you would care to have two people of the same family in your house. It always leads to trouble."

"Oh, rot," said Lady Feo, "I loathe those old shibboleths. They're so silly." She turned to Lola. "Look here, do you really mean to say that you'd rather be a lady's maid than kick your heels about in the chorus?"

"If you please, my lady," said Lola.

"Well, I think you'll miss a lot of fun, but as far as I'm concerned, you're an absolute G.o.dsend. The girl I've had for two years is going to be married. Of course, I can't stop that, as much as I shall miss her.

The earth needs repeopling, so I must let her go. The question has been where to get another. With all the unemployment no one seems very keen on doing anything but work in factories. I'd love to have you. Come by all means. Breezy, engage her. I hope we shall rub along very nicely together."

As much to hide the gleam in her eyes from her aunt as to show deference to her new mistress, Lola bowed. "I thank you, my lady," she said.

"Fine," said Lady Feo, "fine. That's great. Saves me a world of trouble.

Pretty lucky thing that I looked in here, wasn't it?" She went to the door and turned. "When can you come, Lola?"

"To-morrow.-To-night."

"To-night. I will let Emily off at once. She'll be glad enough. I'll send you home in the car. You can pack your things and get back in time to brush my hair. I suppose you know something about your job?"

Miss Breezy broke in hurriedly. Even now perhaps it might not be too late to beat this girl at her own game. "That's it, my lady," she said, tumbling over her words. "She doesn't know anything about it. I'm afraid I ought to say--"

"Oh, well, Breezy, that's nothing new. They none of 'em know anything.

I'll teach her. I don't want a sham expert with her nose in the air. All I need is a girl with quick fingers, nippy on her feet, good to look at, who will laugh at my jokes. You promise to do that, Lola?"

A most delicious smile curled all about Lola's mouth. "I promise, my lady," she said.

Lady Feo nodded at her. "She'll make a sensation," she thought. "How jealous they'll all be.-Righto, then. Seven o'clock. Don't be late. So long." And off she went, slamming the door behind her.

"You little devil," said Miss Breezy, her dignity in great slabs at her feet.

But Lola had won. And the amazing part of it was that the door of the house in Dover Street had been opened to her by Fallaray's wife.

PART II

I

Mrs. Malwood was hipped. She had been losing heavily at bridge, her Pomeranian had been run over in Berkeley Square and taken to the dog's hospital, her most recent flame had just been married to his colonel's daughter, and her fourth husband was still alive. Poor little soul, she had lots to grumble about. So she had come round to be cheered up by Feo Fallaray who always managed to laugh through deaths and epidemics to find her friend in the first stages of being dressed for dinner. She had explained her mental att.i.tude, received a hearty kiss and been told to lie down and make herself comfortable. There she was, at the moment, in one of the peculiar frocks which had become almost like the uniform of Feo's "gang." She was not old, except in experience. In fact, she was not more than twenty-three. But as she lay on the sofa with her eyes closed and her lashes like black fans on her cheeks, a little pout on her pretty mouth and her bobbed head resting upon a brilliant cushion, she looked, in those clothes of hers, like a school girl whose headmistress was a woman of an aesthetic turn of mind but with a curious penchant for athleticism. Underneath her smock of duvetyn, the color of a ripe horse-chestnut, she wore bloomers and stockings rolled down under her knees,-as everybody could see. She might have been a rather swagger girl scout who never scouted, and there was just a touch of masculinity about her without anything muscular. She was, otherwise, so tiny a thing that any sort of a man could have taken her up in one hand and held her above his head. Very different from Lady Feo, whose shoulders were broad, whose bones were large, who stood five foot ten without her shoes, who could hand back anything that was given to her and swing a golf club like a man.

"I've just been dipping into Margot's Diary, Georgie. Topping stuff. I wish to G.o.d she were young again,-one of us. She'd make things hum. I can't understand why the critics have all thrown so many vitriolic fits about her book and called her the master egotist. Don't they know the meaning of words and isn't this an autobiography? Good Lord, if any woman has a right to be egotistical it's Margot. She did everything well and to my way of thinking she writes better than all the novelists alive. She can sum up a character as well in ten lines as all our verbose young men in ten chapters. In her next book I hope to heaven she'll get her second wind and put a searchlight into Downing Street.

Her poor old bird utterly lost his tail but the public ought to know to what depths of trickery and meanness politics can be carried.-You can make that iron a bit hotter if you like, Lola. Don't be afraid of it."

Lola gave her a glint of smile and laid the iron back on its stand.

During the process of being dressed, Lady Feo reclined in a sort of barber's chair-not covered with a _peignoir_ or a filmy dressing jacket but in what is called in America a union suit-a one-piece thing of silk with no sleeves and cut like rowing shorts. It became her tremendously well,-cool and calm and perfectly satisfied with herself. She glanced at Lola, who stood quiet and efficient in a neat frock of black alpaca, with her golden hair done closely to her small head, and then winked at Georgie and gave a hitch to her elbow to call attention to the new maid whom she had already broken in and regarded as the latest actor in her private theatricals. Her whole life was a sort of play in which she took the leading part.

There was something in that large and airy bedroom which always did Mrs.

Malwood good. She liked its Spartan simplicity, its white walls, white furniture, white carpet and the curtains and cushions which were of delicate water-color tones suggestive of sweet peas. It had once been wholly black as a background for Lady Feo's dead-white skin. But her friend had grown out of that, as she grew out of almost everything sooner or later.

"New, isn't she?" asked Mrs. Malwood without lowering her voice.

"A month old," replied Lady Feo, "and becoming more and more useful every moment. Aren't you, Lola?"

Lola bowed and smiled and once more put the hot tongs to the thick wiry hair which eventually would stand out around her mistress's head like that of some Hawaiian girl.

"Where did you pick her up?" asked Georgie.

"She fell into my lap like a ripe plum. She's a niece of my Breezy, the housekeeper. You'd never think it, would you? I'm more and more inclined to believe, as a matter of fact, that she escaped from a china cabinet from a collection of Dresden pieces."

Mrs. Malwood perched herself upon an elbow and examined Lola languidly,-who was quite used to this sort of thing, having already been discussed openly before innumerable people as though she were a freak.

They little knew how closely Lola was studying them in turn,-their manner, their accent, their tricks of phrase and for what purpose she was undergoing this apprenticeship. Out for sensation, they would certainly have attained a thrilling one could they have seen into the mind of this discreet and industrious girl who performed her duties with the deftest fingers and went about like a disembodied spirit.

"Where are you dining?"

"Here," said Lady Feo. "I've got half a dozen of Arthur's friendly enemies coming. It will be a sort of Cabinet meeting. They're all in a frightful stew about his att.i.tude on the Irish question. They know that he and I are not what the papers call 'in sympathy,' so why the d.i.c.kens they've invited themselves I don't know,-in the hope, I suppose, of my being able to work on his feelings and get him to climb down from his high horse. The little Welshman is the last man to cod himself that his position is anything but extremely rocky and he knows that he can't afford to lose the support of a man like Arthur, whose honesty is sworn to by every Tom, d.i.c.k and Harry in the land; this is in the way of a _dernier ressort_, I suppose. I shall be the only woman present. Pity me among this set of indecisive second-raters who are all in a dead funk and utterly unable to cope with the situation, either in Germany, France, Ireland, India or anywhere else and have messed up the whole show. If I had Margot's pen, just think what a ripping chapter I could write in my diary if I kept one, eh, Georgie?" She threw back her head and laughed.

As far as Fallaray's hard-and-fast stand against reprisals was concerned she cared nothing. In fact, Ireland was a word with which she was completely fed up. She had erased it from her dictionary. It meant nothing to her that British officers were being murdered in their beds and thrown at the feet of their wives or that the sc.u.m of the army had blacked and tanned their way through a country burning with pa.s.sion and completely mad. The evening was just one of a series of stunts to her out of which she would derive great amus.e.m.e.nt and be provided with enough chitchat to give her friends gusts of mirth for weeks.

"I saw Fallaray to-day," said Georgie. "He was walking in the Park. He only needs a suit of armor to look like Richard Cur de Lion. Is he really and honestly sincere, Feo, or is this a political trick to get the Welshman out of Downing Street? I ask because I don't believe that any man can have been in the House as long as he has and remain clean."

"Don't you know," said Lady Feo, with only the merest glint of smile, "that Arthur has been divinely appointed to save civilization from chaos? Don't you know that?"

"Yes, but I know a good many of the others who have-when any one's looking. You really can't make me believe in these people, especially since the War. Such duds, my dear."

"All the same, you can believe in Arthur." She spoke seriously. "He has no veneer, no dishonesty, no power of escape from his own standards of life. That's why he and I are like oil and water. We don't speak the same language. He reminds me always of an Evangelist at a fancy-dress ball, or Cromwell at a varsity binge. He's a wonderful dull dog, is Arthur, absolutely out of place in English politics and it's perfectly ridiculous that he should be married to me. G.o.d knows why I did it. His profile fascinated me, probably, and the way he played tennis. I was dippy about both those things at the time. I'm awfully sorry for him, too. He needs a wife,-a nice cowlike creature with no sense of humor who would lick his boots, put eau de cologne on his high forehead, run to meet him with a little cry of adoration and spring out of bed to turn on his bath when he came home in the middle of the night. All Cromwells do and don't they love the smell of powder!-Good for you, Lola. Don't you get frightfully fed up with this thick wiry hair of mine?"

Lola smiled and shook her head. It was only when she was alone with her mistress that she permitted herself to answer questions. But as she listened and with a burning heart heard her hero discussed and dismissed and knew, better and more certainly than ever, the things that he needed, one phrase ran like a recurring motif through her brain,-the rustle of silk, the rustle of silk.

II

Lola and Miss Breezy were not on speaking terms.

The elderly spinster considered that she had been used and flouted, treated as though she were in her dotage and had lost her authority to engage and dismiss the members of the Fallaray menage. She had nursed, therefore, a feeling of bitter antagonism against Lola during her three weeks under the same roof. She had not treated her niece to anything in the nature of an outburst on her return from Queen's Road to take up her duties. "Dignity, dignity," she repeated again and again and steeled herself with two other wonderful words that have helped so many similar women in the great crisis of wounded vanity,-"my position." She had simply cut her dead. Since then they had, of course, met frequently and had even been obliged to speak to each other. They did so as though they were totally unrelated and had never met before.

All this led to a certain amount of comedy below stairs, it being perfectly well known to every one that Lola was the housekeeper's niece.

What Lola did when Miss Breezy entered the servants' sitting room the night of her arrival filled the maids with astonishment, resentment and admiration,-astonishment because of her extraordinary capacity of holding in her laughter, resentment because she treated Miss Breezy with the sort of respect which that good lady never got from them, and admiration because of the innate breeding which seemed to ooze from that child's finger tips. She had risen to her feet. And ever since she had continued to do so-a thing, the possibility of which the others had never conceived-and when spoken to had replied, "Yes, Miss Breezy," with a perfectly straight face and not one glint of humor in her eye. It was wonderful. It was like something in a book,-an old book by a man who wrote of times that were as dead as mutton. It was gorgeous. It gave the girls the st.i.tch from laughing. It became one of their standard jokes.

"Up for Miss Breezy," the word went after that and there was a scramble out of chairs. All this made the elderly spinster angrier than ever. Not only had she been done by this girl but, my word, the child was rubbing it in.

It was curious to see the effect that Lola had upon the other servants.