The Rustle of Silk Part 8

"Lord 'a' mercy, what's the trouble?"

Lola had become herself again, a tragic, large-eyed self. "I can't go like this," she said. "I have no evening cloak." The whole framework of her adventure flapped like the sides of a tent in a high wind.

"My dear!" cried Mrs. Rumbold. "Well, there's a nice lookout. What in the world's to be done?"

Fallaray.-The Savoy--

"Wait a second. I've got an idea." The woman with tousled hair made a dart at a curtain which was stretched across one of the corners of her workroom. She emerged immediately with something thin and black which gleamed here and there with silver. "Put that on," she said. "I've just made it for Mrs. Wimpole in Inverness Terrace. She won't be calling for it until to-morrer. If you'll promise to bring it back safe--"

All Lola's confidence returned and a smile of triumph came into her face. "That will do nicely," she said, and placed herself to receive the borrowed garment. A quick glance in the mirror showed her that if it wasn't exactly the sort of thing that she would have chosen, it pa.s.sed.

"You're a brick, Mrs. Rumbold, a perfect brick. I can't tell you how grateful I am." And she bent forward and touched the withered cheek with her lips. One of these days she would do something for this hard-working woman whose eldest boy sat legless in the back parlor,-something which would relieve the great and persistent strain which followed her from one plucky day to another.

And then, pausing for a moment on the top of the steps in order to make sure that there was no one in the street who could recognize her-Queen's Road was only just round the corner-Lola ran down and put her hand on the door of the taxi cab.

"The Savoy," she said.

PART III

I

Sir Peter Chalfont's cork arm had become one of the inst.i.tutions of the town. Long ago the grimness had gone out of everybody's laughter at the tricks he played with it,-presenting it with the palm the wrong way, making it squeak suddenly and wagging it about from the wrist as a greeting to his friends. Every one had grown accustomed to his frequent changes of gloves and his habit of appearing at dinner with those dreadful stiff fingers in white buckskin. He had indeed trained the thing to perform as though it were an animal and he could do almost anything with it except tie a dress tie. That was beyond him.

At quarter to eight on the evening of Lola's first dip into life, he turned away from the telephone and presented himself to the man who had been his batman during the last year of the War. He had had three since the miracle of the Marne. He was rather bored because he had just been told by the girl who had promised to dine with him that she didn't feel like eating and he knew that meant that some one else had cropped up who was more amusing than himself. He had a great mind to give the Savoy a wide berth and walk round to Boodles and have dinner with the _Pall Mall Gazette_. But on second thoughts the idea of accompanying his cold salmon and cuc.u.mber with the acc.u.mulating ma.s.s of depressing evidence of the world's unrest, as set forth in the evening paper, appalled him.

Charles was trying to edge his way back into Hungary. The Russian Reds were emptying their poison all over the map. English miners had gone out on strike and with a callousness altogether criminal had left the pumps unmanned. Viviani had landed in the United States to endeavor to prove to the new President that if he did not jerk the Senate out of Main Street he would inevitably sentence Europe to death. And Lloyd George, even to the amazement of those who knew him best, was continuing his game of poker with Lenin and Trotsky.

It couldn't be done. And so, his tie duly tied by the clumsy-fingered man who had received lessons from a shop in the Burlington Arcade, the gallant Peter left his rooms in Park Place and stood on the curb in St.

James's Street. Should he walk or drive? Should he try to raise a friend equally at a loose end, or carry on alone? How he missed his dear old father, who, until the day of his peaceful death, was always ready to join him in a cheery dinner at the Marlborough or the Orleans or at one of the hotels where he could see the pretty girls. After all, dining at the Savoy was not such a lonely proceeding as it seemed. Among the profiteers and the new rich there might be a familiar face. And there was at any rate an orchestra. With a dump hat at an angle of forty-five and a light overcoat over his dinner jacket, he was a mark for all the prowling cabs which found business worse than usual. Two or three of them knew this tall wiry man and had served in his Division. One of the youngest of the Brigadier Generals in the British Army, he had worn his bra.s.s hat as though it were the cap of a man with one pip; they loved him for that and any day and any night would cheerfully have followed him to h.e.l.l. Many of them had called him "Beauty Chalfont," which had made him uncomfortable. It was better than "b.l.o.o.d.y" Chalfont or "Butcher" Chalfont,-adjectives that had been rather too freely applied to some of his brother Brigadiers. So far as the majority of pa.s.sers-by were concerned, this man to whom willing hands had gone up in salute and who had turned out to be a born soldier was, like so many demobilized officers all over the country, of no account, a n.o.body, his name and his services forgotten.

The pre-war cheeriness which had belonged to the Savoy was absent now.

Chorus ladies and Guards officers, baby-faced foreign office clerks and members of the Bachelors, famous artists and dramatists and the ubiquitous creatures who put together the musical potpourris of the town, beautiful ladies of doubtful reputation and highly respectable ones without quite so much beauty no longer jostled the traveling Americans, tennis-playing Greeks and Indian rajahs in the foyer.

Chalfont marched in to find the place filled with wrongly dressed men with plebeian legs and strange women who seemed to have been dug out of the residential end of factory cities. Their pearls and diamonds were almost enough to stir Bolshevism in the souls of curates.

Shedding his coat and hat and taking a ticket from a flunkey, on whose chest there was a line of ribbons, he looked across the long vista of intervening s.p.a.ce to the dining room. The band was playing "Avalon" and a buzz of conversation went up in the tobacco smoke. What was the name of that cheery little soul who had dined with him in March, 1914? March, 1914. He had been a happy-go-lucky Captain in the 21st Lancers in those days, drawing a generous allowance from the old man and squeezing every ounce of fun out of life. The years between had brought him up against the sort of realities that he did not care to think about when left without companionship and occupation. Two younger brothers dead and nearly all his pals.-Just as he was about to go down the stairs and be conducted to one of the small tables in the draught he saw a girl in a black cloak with touches of silver on it standing alone, large-eyed, her b.u.t.ter-colored hair gleaming in the light, and caught his breath.

"Jumping Joseph," he said to himself, "look at that," and was rooted to the floor.

It was Lola, as scared as a child in the middle of traffic, a rabbit among a pack of hounds, asking herself, cold and hot by turns, what she had done-oh, what-by coming to that place with no one to look after her, wishing and wishing that the floor would open up and let her into a tunnel which would lead her out to the back room of the nerve-wrung dressmaker. Every pa.s.sing man who looked her up and down and every woman who turned her head over her shoulder added stone after stone to the pile of her folly, so childish, so laughable, so stupendous. How could she have been such a fool,-the canary so far away from the safety of its cage.

Chalfont looked again. "She's been let down by somebody," he thought.

"What sort of blighter is it who wouldn't break his neck to be on the steps to meet such a-perfectly--All these cursed eyes, greedily signaling. What's to be done?"

And as he stood there, turning it all over, his chivalry stirred, Lola came slowly out of her panic. If only Mrs. Rumbold had asked her with whom she was going, if only she had had, somewhere in all the world, one sophisticated friend to tell her that such a step as this was false and might be fatal. The way out was to stand for one more moment and look as though her escort were late, or had been obliged to go to the telephone, and then face the fact that in her utter and appalling ignorance she had made a mistake, slip away, drive back to that dismal Terrace and change into her Cinderella clothes. Ecstasy approaching madness must have made her suppose that all she had to do was to sail in to this hotel in Lady Feo's frock and all the rest would follow,-that looking, as well as feeling "a lady" now and loving like a woman, something would go out from her soul-a little call-and Fallaray would rise and come to her. Mr.

Fallaray. The Savoy. They were far, far out of her reach. Her heart was in her borrowed shoes. And then she became aware of Chalfont, met his eyes and saw in them sympathy and concern and understanding. And what was more, she knew this man. Yes, she did. He was no stranger; she had seen him often,-that very day. It was a rescue! A friendly smile curled up her lips.

Chalfont maintained his balance. Training told. He gave it fifty seconds-fifty extraordinary seconds-during which he asked himself, "Is she-or not?" Deciding not by a unanimous vote, he went across to her and bowed. "I'm awfully afraid that something must have happened. Can I be of use to you?"

"I'm longing for asparagus," said Lola in the manner of an old friend.

"That's perfectly simple," said Chalfont, blinking just once. "I'm alone, you're alone, and asparagus ought to be good just now."

"Suppose we go in then," said Lola, buying the hotel, her blood dancing, her eyes all free from fright. She was perfectly happy in the presence of this man because she recognized in him immediately a modern version of the Chevalier who had so frequently brought her bonbons to her room at Versailles which overlooked the back yard of Queen's Road, Bayswater.

"My name's Chalfont, Peter Chalfont." A rigid conventionality sat on his shoulders.

"I know," she said, and added without a moment's hesitation, "I am Madame de Breze." And then she knew how she knew. How useful was the Tatler. Before the War, during the War, after the War, the eyes of this man had stared at her from its pages in the same spirit of protection.

That very afternoon she had paused at his photograph taken in hunting kit, sitting on his horse beside the Prince of Wales, underneath which was printed, "Sir Peter Chalfont, Bart. V. C. Late Brigadier General,"-and somewhere among that crowd was Fallaray.

II

As they went down the red-carpeted stairs and pa.s.sed through what Peter called "the monkey house," the people who had dined at a cheap restaurant and now at the cost of a cup of coffee were there to watch the menagerie followed Lola with eager eyes. Some of them recognized Chalfont. But who was she? A chorus girl? No. A sister? He was certainly not wearing a brotherly expression. A lady? Obviously, and one who could afford not to wear a single jewel. What a refreshing contrast to the wives of profiteers. And she was so young, so finished,-a Personality.

Even Grosvenor Bones, the man who made it his duty to know everybody and supplied the _Daily Looking Gla.s.s_ with illiterate little paragraphs, was puzzled and, like a dramatic critic who sees something really original and faultless, startled, disconcerted.

Feeling her own pulse as she pa.s.sed through the avenue of stares, Lola was amazed to find that her heart-beats were normal, that she was not in the least excited or frightened or uncertain of herself any longer. She felt, indeed-and commented inwardly on the fact-as though dinner at the Savoy were part of her usual routine, and that Peter Chalfont was merely Albert Simpkins or Ernest Treadwell in a better coat and cast in a rarer mold. How Chalfont would have laughed if she had told him this. She felt, as a matter of fact, like a girl who was playing a leading part on the London stage as a dark horse, but who had in reality gained enormous experience in a repertory company in the Provinces. She thanked her stars that she had indulged in her private game for so long a time.

The bandmaster, a glossy person with a roving and precocious eye, bent double, violin and all, and signaled congratulations to Chalfont with ears and eyes, eyebrows and mouth. He had the impertinence of a successful jockey. A head waiter came to the entrance of the dining room and washed his hands,-his face wearing his best bedside manner. "For two, Sir Peter?" he asked, as though he were not quite sure that some miracle might not break them into three. And Peter nodded. But Lola was not to be hurried off to the first of the disengaged tables. Fallaray was somewhere in the room and her scheme was, if possible, to sit at a table well within his line of vision. She laid the tips of her fingers on Chalfont's arm and inspected the room.-There was Fallaray, as noticeable in that heterogeneous crowd as a Rodin figure among the efforts of amateur sculptors. "That table," she said to the head waiter and indicated one placed against a pillar. One or two of Chalfont's friends S. O. S.'d to him as he followed the young, slim erect figure across the maze. Luck with her once more, Lola found herself face to face with Fallaray, only two tables intervening. She decided that the charming old lady was his mother. The other had no interest for her.

A thousand questions ran through Chalfont's head. Madame de Breze.-Widow of one of the gallant Frenchmen who had been killed in the War, or the wife, let down by her lover, of an elderly Parisian blood? He would bet his life against the latter conjecture, and the first did not seem to be possible because he had never seen any face so free from grief, pain or suffering. De Breze. The name conveyed nothing. He had never heard it before. It had a good ring about it. But how was it that this girl talked English as well as his sister? She looked French. She wore her dress like a Frenchwoman. There was something about the neatness of her hair which Frenchwomen alone achieve. Probably educated in England. He was delighted with her acceptance of the situation. That was decidedly French. An English girl, even in these days, would either have frozen him to his shoes or lent to the episode a forced note of irregularity which would have made it tiresome and tasteless.

It was not until after the asparagus had arrived that Lola succeeded in catching Fallaray's eyes. They looked at her for a moment as though she were merely a necessary piece of hotel decoration and wandered off. But to her intense and indescribable joy, they returned and remained and something came into them which showed her that he had focused them upon her as a human being and a woman. She saw that he wore the expression of a man who had suddenly heard the loud ringing of a bell, an alarm bell.

And then, having seen that his stare had been noticed, he never looked again.

The rustle of silk!-The rustle of silk!

And presently, Chalfont being silent, she leant forward and spoke in a low voice. Luckily the band was not playing a jazz tune but at the request of some old-fashioned person Ma.s.senet's "Elegy." She said, "Sir Peter, will you do something for me?" And he replied, "Anything under the sun." "Well, then, will you introduce me to Mr. Fallaray before he leaves the room? He's at a table just behind you. I admire him so much.

It would be a great-the greatest--"

Her voice broke and a flush ran up to her hair, and something came into her eyes that made them look like stars.

Luckily Chalfont was not looking at her face. Her request was a large order, and as usual when puzzled,-he was never disconcerted-he began twisting about his comic cork hand. "Fallaray?" he said, and raised his eyebrows. "Of course, I'd love to do it for you. I know him as well as anybody else does, I suppose-I mean ordinary people. But he doesn't remember me from Adam. He pa.s.sed me to-night in the foyer, for instance, and looked clean through my head. I had to put up my hand to see that I hadn't left it at home. He's the only man, except the sweep who used to come to our house when I was a kid, of whom I've ever been afraid.

However-you wish it and the thing must be done." And he gave her a little bow.

Lola could see that she had given her new friend a task from which he would do almost anything to escape. After all, there was not much in common between Fallaray, whose nose was at the grindstone, and Peter Chalfont, who had nothing to do but kill time. But she must meet Fallaray that night. It was written. Every man was a stepping-stone to this one man who needed her so, but did not know her yet. Therefore, with a touch of ruthlessness that came to her directly from her famous ancestress, she thanked him and added, "It can be managed near the place where you put your hat and coat."

Chalfont was amused and interested and even perhaps a little astonished at this pretty young thing who had the ways of a woman of the world. "I agree with you," he said, "but--" and looked at the menu.

Lola shook her head. "I hate buts. They are at the meat course and we've only just begun. Dinner doesn't really interest you and I'm a mere canary. The moment they rise from the table we can make a quick exit."

It was on the tip of her tongue to quote Simpkins and say "nick out."

Chalfont grinned, pounced upon his roll and started to eat. "After all,"