Winding Paths Part 15

"Oh yes, yes," wearily; "but it isn't enough by itself. There is something I have missed, and to-night I feel that it might outweight all the rest - something to do with being young, and careless, and fresh, and just n.o.body."

Still looking at her with slightly puzzled, very kindly eyes, he answered simply, "I'm so sorry."

She seemed to shrink away suddenly into her corner. The very simplicity of his sympathy, and the quiet, natural friendliness in his face, stirred some strange chord in her heart with a swift, unaccountable ache. He looked so big and strong and splendid there in the shadow, with his freshness and his charm; and she felt very brain-f.a.gged and world-weary; and without in the least knowing why, or what led up to the desire, she wanted to feel his arms about her, and his freshness soothing her spirit.

And instead he was not even attempting to make love to her, not even flirting with her. Would any other man she knew have ridden beside her thus after the gentleness she had shown? Was that perhaps the very secret of his attraction? Or was it a physical allurement - the irresistible charm of bigness and strength, independent of anything else, drawing with its time-old sway?

She had no time to probe further, as the brougham stopped at her door.

He handed her out with the deference so often met with in big men, remarking width an old-fashioned air that suited him to perfection:

"I'm afraid we have all tired you very much. It was good of you to come with us. I can't tell you how much we appreciate it."

"Oh, indeed no; you refreshed me. Good-night. Stevens will run you home. Don't forget Sunday", and she moved away.

"It must be his bigness," was her last thought as her head touched the pillow. "When I am used to it, no doubt the novelty will pa.s.s, and I shall find him merely boyish, and be rather bored."

"I wonder if it is her dainty smallness," Dudley was musing, away in his Bloomsbury lodging, feeling still, with a pleasant thrill, the touch of Doris's small hand on his arm, and seeing again the upward, confiding expression in her wide blue eyes. "Odd that Hal should be so far astray in her judgment, when she is usually so clever; but if she knew her better she would change her mind."

As for Hal herself, she hastily tumbled into bed, still chuckling in huge enjoyment over her evening.

"Those boys are just dears," was her thought, "and I wouldn't have missed Lady Bounce for the world. What a good thing Dudley was taken with paternal affection for that little fool Doris, and I had to have a chaperone. Heigh-ho! what a scene there will be if he hears about it; but what's the odds so long as you're happy? And oh dear! what will Lady Phyllis Fenton say when she finds out"; and once more the even teeth flashed an irresistible smile into the darkness.

CHAPTER X

It was force of habit chiefly that caused Lorraine, as a rule, to sleep long and late on Sunday mornings; and it was greatly to her advantage that for so many months, and even years, no mental anxiety had robbed her of a splendid capacity to rest. She seemed to have a faculty for limiting her worrying hours to the daylight, and being able to lay them aside, like her correspondence, at night.

Yet on the following Sunday morning she found herself early awake, with a brain only too ready to begin probing restlessly, and having little of the calm friendliness she intended it should have towards her guest of the evening.

To add to her unrest, her mother paid her an early visit, of a sort that had been growing too frequent of late. It was not enough that Lorraine paid her rent, and gave her a handsome allowance; when there chanced to be no one else to pay her debts, these came upon Lorraine's shoulders also.

T-day it was a long, rambling tale of a hard-hearted dressmaker who, having had a new frock back for alteration, had taken upon herself to return the skirt, without the bodice, with an intimation that she was retaining the delayed portion until her long account was settled.

Hence Mrs. Vivian found herself with what she called a most important engagement, without the equally important new frock to go in.

Lorraine lay under the bedclothes, with only her head showing, and watched her a little coldly, as she moved restlessly about the room airing her woes. She had promised Madame Luce, over and over again, to settle in a week or two; and who would have believed the odious woman would serve her such a trick?

Never again, if she had to go naked, would she order a garment from her of any description whatever. And the friends she had sent to her as customers! Why, half the woman's trade was owing to her introduction.

"Perhaps the friends don't pay their bills," Lorraine suggested in a tired voice.

Mrs. Vivian drew herself up a little haughtily.

"I do not think there is any occasion to cast reflections on my friends, even if you do not choose to be sociable to them," which remark was intended as a dignified hit at Lorraine's invincible determination to maintain friendly relations with her mother, without having anything whatever to do with her mother's friends.

As many previous. .h.i.ts, it fell quite harmlessly; it was doubtful if Lorraine even heard it, half hidden there in the bedclothes with her tired eyes.

"I suppose it isn't any use reminding you that your personal expenditure exceeds mine?" she hinted, "and that you have already far overstepped the allowance we stipulated?"

"You do not have time to go about as much as I do, and it makes a great difference not having hosts of friends."

"You don't seem to get much pleasure out of them," Lorraine could not resist saying, knowing as she did how much of her salary went into the pockets of these so-called friends, in order to buy their adherence.

"Do I get much pleasure out of anything?" irritably. "My only child is one of the first actresses in London, and what is it to me? Do I have the pleasure of going abouth with her? or living with her? or taking any part in her success?"

"I suppose it isn't such a small thing to live by her. If I were not successful, we could certainly not live here. It might have been Islington and omnibuses," and she smiled.

"As if that were all. Probably, as real companions we might have been even happier in Islington."

Lorraine stiffened. "Companions!... Ah, I, with whom else ever dancing attendance, and changing in ident.i.ty every few months?"

But she made no comment, for the days of her hot-headed, deep-hearted judging were over; and from behind inscrutable eyes she looked upon the things that one sees without seeming to see them, and accepted facts that hurt her very soul, with a callous, cynical air that defied the keenest shafts of probing.

It was her armour in an envious, merciless world, that would have rejoiced before her eyes if it could have driven in a barbed arrow even through her mother.

More than once a jealous enemy had tried and failed, routed utterly by Lorraine's cynical, cool treatment of a fact that she knew no persuasion nor arguing could have helped her to refute. She did not even weep about it now in secret.

It was as though she had shed all the tears she had to shed during that year of utter revulsion spent in the Italian Riviera, companied by the pa.s.sionless solitudes of snowtopped mountains. Something of a great patience and a great gentleness had come to her then, helping her to hide the loathing she could not crush, and place the fact of motherhood first of all.

As her mother, she had taken Mrs. Vivian back into her heart, and given her generously of what worldly possessions she had. And she had done it with a wondrous quiet and absence of all ostentation either outwardly or inwardly. It had never occured to Lorraine that, whether it was a duty or not, after what had pa.s.sed it was certainly a fine act upon her part.

She had not questioned about it at all. To her mother's apologetic gush she had merely turned calm eyes and a strong face.

"It isn't worth while to remember the past at all," she had said; "we will just begin again on rather different lines. I'll always let you have as much money as I can spare."

Mrs. Vivian had been a little taken aback by the new Lorraine who returned from Italy; and not a little afraid before the calm, inscrutable eyes; so that she had secretly rejoiced at the arrangement which gave her a separate establishment of her own; but none the less, in bursts of righteous indignation supposed to emanate from her outraged feelings as a mother, she usually chose to make it her pet grievance.

And still Lorraine only smiled the tired smile, and glanced carelessly aside with the inscrutable eyes until the tirade was over, the coveted cheque made out, and her own little sanctum once again in peaceful possession.

Only just occasionally, if the interview had been specially trying, she might have been seen afterwards to glance whimsically across to the picture, recently enlarged from an old photograph, of a fine-looking man in full hunting-rig standing beside a favourite hunter.

"Poor old dad," she murmured once; "I don't wonder you couldn't keep up the old place. I don't know how you got along at all without my salary."

Once when she was feeling the drag of it all a little keenly she told the man in the picture: "Mother is splendidly handsome, and I daresay I owe her a good deal; but thank G.o.d you were there with your fine old name and family to give me the things that matter most. It sometimes seems as if we had got each other still, dad, and, for the rest, some are frail in one way and some another, and fretting doesn't help any one." The fine eyes had grown more whimsically wistful looking into the face of the huntsman as she finished: "Anyhow, the last favourite is second cousin to a duke, and she pointed out to me, he might have been only a butcher."

How much Hal knew of her mother's life Lorraine had never been able to gauge, but she had reason to think she knew something and was sporting enough to pretend otherwise. If so, she blessed her for it, feeling that by that generous non-acknowledgment she rendered a service both to her and her dead father.

Yet it seemed strange that any one so young and fresh as Hal should be able to act thus, instead of suffering a violent repulsion. Was it the depth of her splendid friendship; or was it a naturally adaptable, common-sense nature; or was it non-comprehension?

As time pa.s.sed and she grew to know Hal yet better, she felt instinctively it was the first of these, coupled with that true sportsman-spirit which was one of her strongest attributes.

Lorraine was not the only one who felt that whether Hal had any religion or not, or any faith, through good and ill, by easy paths and difficult, one might be absolutely sure that she would "play the game."

It made her feel herself richer with her one friend than with her mother's admitted hosts, and though she seemed to hesitate and reason on that Sunday morning, both knew the cheque would finally be written, and the coveted garment rescued in time for the important lunch.

Only, afterwards, a shadow seemed to linger to-day that heretofore would have vanished with the departing figure. The sunshine crept through the drawn curtains, lying like a shaft of hope across the gloom, but it brought no answering gleam into the beautiful eyes, with their tired, far-off gaze.