Sir Paget insisted – certainly not to the displeasure of Mr. Stannard – on “wetting the signatures” with a bottle of his Pommery 1900. Nina just wetted her lips – even to that vintage she could condescend. Then we all strolled out into the garden, while tea was preparing. There was the old place – the high cliffs above it, one narrow wooded ledge fronting the sea; scant acres, but, as it were, with all our blood in them. I felt like a usurper (in spite of the honest money that I was paying), the younger branch ousting the elder, even through an abdication. But I was a usurper happy and content – as, I daresay, they often are, in spite of the poets and the dramatists. Sir Paget and Stannard paired off; Godfrey and Eunice; Waldo sat down on the bench by the door and lit his pipe; I found myself left with Nina Dundrannan. With the slightest motion of her hand she invited me to accompany her along the walk towards the shrubbery. At once I knew that she meant to say something to me, though I had not the least idea on what lines her speech might run. She could be very candid – had she not been once, long ago, she the “skeleton at the feast”? She could also put the truth very decisively in its proper place – a remote one. Fires burnt in her – I knew that; but who could tell when the flames would show?
There was a seat placed where a gap in the trees gave a view of the sea; here we sat down together. With her usual resoluteness she began at once with what she had made up her mind to say.
“Waldo didn’t show me Sir Paget’s note, but he told me a piece of news about you which it gave him; he gave me to understand that you and Sir Paget thought that I, as well as he himself, should know it. He told me that the arrangement was no longer repugnant to his own feelings, although it once would have been; he felt both able and willing to ignore the past, and start afresh on terms of friendship with Madame Valdez – with Lucinda. He asked me what my feelings were. I said that in my view that was hardly the question; I had married into the Rillington family; any lady whom Sir Paget and he, the heads of the family, were prepared to accept and welcome as a member of it, would, as a matter of course, be accepted by me; I should treat her, whenever we met, with courtesy, as I should no doubt be treated by her; a great degree of affection, I reminded Waldo, was not essential or invariable between relations-in-law.” Here Lady Dundrannan smiled for a moment. “Least of all should I desire that any supposed feelings of mine should interfere with the family arrangement about Cragsfoot which you all three felt to be desirable; the more so as it had in a way originated with myself, since, if I had wished to make this place our principal residence, the present plan would never have been thought of at all. So I told him to put me entirely out of the question; he would be quite safe in feeling sure that I should accept the situation with a good grace.”
She paused, and I took occasion to say: “I think we’re all much indebted to you – and myself most of all. Any other attitude on your part would have upset an arrangement which I have come to have very much at heart. I’m grateful to you, Nina.”
“You know a great deal – indeed, you probably know pretty well everything – that has happened between Lucinda and me. You wouldn’t defend all that she did; I don’t defend all I did. When I’m challenged, I fight, and I suppose Jonathan Frost’s daughter isn’t dainty as to her weapons – that’s your point of view about me, anyhow, isn’t it? You’ve always been in her camp. You’ve always been a critic of me.”
“Really I’ve regretted the whole – er – difficulty and – well, difference, very much.”
“You’ve laughed at it even more than you’ve regretted it, I think,” she remarked drily. “But I’ve liked you better than you’ve liked me – though you did laugh at me – and I’m not going to make things difficult or uncomfortable for you. When I accept a state of things, I accept it without reservation. I don’t want to go on digging pins in.”
“If I have ever smiled – as you accuse me of having done – as well as regretted, it was because I saw your qualities as well as hers. The battle was well joined. You’ve both had your defeats and your victories. I should like you to be friends now.”
“Yes, I believe you would; that’s why I’m talking like this to you. But” – her voice took on a sudden ring of strong feeling – “it’s impossible. There are such memories between us.”
I did not urge the point; it would be useless with her, very likely also with Lucinda. I let it go with a shrug.
She sat for a moment in the stately composed silence that so well became her.
“It’s probable that we shall divide our time mainly between London, Dundrannan, and Villa San Carlo in future. It’s even likely that if Godfrey settles matters with Eunice Unthank, as I think he will, he’ll take a lease of Briarmount. That would not be disagreeable to you, would it?”
“Not the least in the world,” I answered, smiling. “I like them both very much.”
She turned to me with a bland and simple sincerity of manner. “The doctor thinks that the air on this coast is too strong for baby.”
I seemed to be hearing an official bulletin – or communiqué, as for some occult reason – or pure love of jargon – they used to call it. There was no question of a reverse at the hands of the enemy; but climatic conditions rendered further operations undesirable; the withdrawal was being effected voluntarily, in perfect order, and without loss. That the enemy was taking possession of the evacuated territory was a circumstance of no military significance whatever – though, to be sure, it might make some little difference to the inhabitants.
“It won’t do to run any risks with that precious boy!” I observed, with an approving smile, and (as I flatter myself) with just the artistic shade of jocosity – as if I were gently chaffing her on a genuine but exaggerated maternal solicitude.
“Well, when the doctor says that, what can one do?” asked Lady Dundrannan.
“Oh, one must follow his advice, of course!” I murmured, with a nod of my head.
The bark of our conversation (another metaphor may well be employed to illustrate her skill) being thus piloted through the shoals of truth into the calm deep waters of humbug, its voyage ended prosperously. “I should never forgive myself, and Waldo would never forgive me, if I took the slightest risk,” Nina concluded, as she rose from the seat.
But as we stood there, facing one another – before we began to stroll back to the house – as we stood facing one another, all alone, we allowed ourselves one little relapse into reality.
“Do you think of being off soon?” I asked, with a smile.
She gave me one sharp glance and a contemptuous smile. “Before your wedding – whenever that may be, Julius!”
CHAPTER XXVII
IN FIVE YEARS
WINTER had set in again when Lucinda and I came together to Cragsfoot. The picture of her on her first evening there stands out vivid in my memory.
Sir Paget had received her with affectionate, but perhaps somewhat ceremonious, courtesy; there was a touch of ratifying a treaty of peace in his manner. She was minded to come closer in intimacy; for in these recent days – before and just after our wedding – a happy confidence seemed to possess her. Self-defense and the hardness it has to carry with it were necessary to her no longer; she reached out more freely for love and friendship, and broke the bounds of that thoughtful isolation which had so often served to keep the woman herself apart from all about her. She was not on guard now; that was the meaning of the change which had come over her; not on guard and not fighting.
After dinner she drew a low stool up beside the old man’s big armchair before the fire, and sat down beside him, laying one arm across his knees; I sat smoking on the other side of the hearth. Sir Paget laid his hand on hers for a moment, as though to welcome her bodily presence thus in touch with him.
“You’ll be wondering how it happened,” she began, “and Julius won’t have been able to tell you. Probably it never occurred to him to try, though I suppose he’s told you all the actual happenings – the outward things, I mean, you know. It was at Ste. Maxime that we – began to be ‘we’ to one another. I knew it in him then – perhaps sooner than he did – but I don’t know; he’s still rather secretive about himself, though intolerably inquisitive about other people. But I did know it in him; and I searched, and found it in myself – not love then, but a feeling of partnership, of alliance. I was very lonely then. Well, I can stand that. I was standing it; and I could have gone on – perhaps! I wonder if I could! No, not after I found out about Arsenio’s taking that money! That would have broken me – if it hadn’t been for Ste. Maxime.”
She paused for a moment; when she spoke again, she addressed me – on the other side of the fireplace.
“You went away for a long while; but you remembered and you wrote. I’m not a letter-writer, and that was really the reason I didn’t answer. I have to be with people – to feel them – if I’m to talk with them to any purpose – to ask then questions and get answers, even though they don’t say anything.” (I saw her fingers bend in a light pressure on old Sir Paget’s knee.) “I should have sounded stupid in my letters. Or said too much! Because the only thing was to say nothing about it, wasn’t it? You knew that as well as I did, didn’t you? If once we had talked – in letters or when you came back – ! I did nearly talk when you suddenly appeared there on the Piazza at Venice. It was pretty nearly as good as a declaration, wasn’t it, Julius?”
She gave a low merry laugh; but then her eyes wandered from my face to the blaze of the fire, and took on their self-questioning look.
“I think it’s rare to be able to see the humor of things all by yourself – I mean, of course, of close things, things very near to you, things that hurt, although they’re really funny. You want a sympathizer – somebody to laugh with. Oh, well, it goes deeper than that! You want to feel that there’s another world outside the miserable little one you’re living in – outside it, different from it – a place where you yourself can be different from the sort of creature which the life you’re leading forces you to be – at least, unless you’re a saint, I suppose; and I never was that! You want a City of Refuge for your heart, don’t you, Sir Paget? For your heart, and your feelings; yes, and your humor; for everything that you are or that you’ve got, and want to go on being or having. Because the worst thing that anybody or any state of things can do to you, or threaten you with, is the destruction of yourself – whether it’s done by assault or by starvation! In the world I lived in – the actual one as it had come to be for Arsenio and me – I was done for! There was hardly anything left of me!” She suddenly turned her face up to Sir Paget, with a murmur of laughter. “It was like the Cheshire cat! Nothing left but a grin and claws! A grin for his antics, claws to protect myself. That’s what I had come to in my own world – the little world of Arsenio and me! Claws and a grin – wasn’t I, Julius?”
“I would not hear your enemy say so, but – ”
“You know it’s true; I knew at the time that you felt it, but I couldn’t alter myself. Well, I told you something about it at Venice – trying to change, not succeeding! Even his love for me had become one more offense in him – and that was bad. The only thing that carried me through was the other world you gave me – outside my own; where you were, where he wasn’t – though we looked at him from it, and had to! – where I could take refuge!”
She went on slowly, reflectively, as though she were compelled reluctantly to render an account to herself. “I have escaped; I have gained my City of Refuge. But I bear the marks of my imprisonment – even as my hands here bear the marks of my work – of my sewing and washing and ironing. I’m marked and scarred!”
Sir Paget laid his hand on hers again. “We keep a salve for those wounds at Cragsfoot,” he said gently. “We’ve stored it up abundantly for you, Lucinda.”
She turned to him, now clasping his arms with her hands. “You! Yet I put you to shame; I betrayed you; I was false – Oh, and cruel to Waldo!” For the first time in all my knowledge of her I saw tears running down her cheeks. Sir Paget took her hands into his and kissed her upturned face.
“Waldo’s as happy as a king – or, at least, a Prince Consort,” he said, smiling, though I think that his voice shook a little. “And, since it’s an evening of penitence and confession, I’ll make my confession too. I’ve always been a bit of a traitor, or a rebel, myself. You know it well enough, Julius!” He smiled. “Sitting here, under the sway of Briarmount, I’m afraid that I have, before now, drunk a silent toast to the Queen over the Water. Because I remembered you in old days, my dear.”
The mention of Briarmount brought the smiles back to Lucinda’s face. She rose from her stool and stood on the hearthrug between us, looking from one to the other. She gave a defiant toss of her fair head. “Guilty, my lords! I can’t abide her. And I’m glad – yes, I am – that she’s not here at Cragsfoot!”
“Moreover, she has retreated even from Briarmount before you,” chuckled Sir Paget.
“When I advanced in strength, she always retreated,” said Lucinda with another toss. “The fact is – I had the least bit more effrontery. I could bluff her, whatever was in my heart. She couldn’t bluff me.”
“Reconciliation, I suppose, impossible?” hazarded the diplomatist en ratraite, not able to resist the temptation of plying his trade, of getting round the grand implacability; what a feather in his cap it would be!
“Looking down the vista of years,” said Lucinda, now gayly triumphant in her mastery over the pair of us, “a thing I used to do, Julius, oftener than I need now – I see two old ladies, basking somewhere in the sun – perchance at Villa San Carlo – which I have not, up to now, visited, though I know the surrounding district. From under their wigs, in old squeaky voices – ”
“I thank God for my mortality,” murmured old Sir Paget as he looked at her.
“They’re telling one another that they must both of them have been very wonderful, clever, attractive, beautiful! Or else they’d never have made so much trouble, and never squabbled so much. And I shouldn’t wonder if they said – both of them – that nothing in the whole business was their fault at all; it was only the men who were so silly. But then they made the men silly. What men wouldn’t they make silly, when they were young and beautiful so long ago?”
“How much of this is Lady Dundrannan – and how much more is you?”
“Mostly me, Julius. Because I have, as I told you, the least bit more effrontery. But her ladyship agrees, and the two old gossips sip their tea and mumble their toast, with all the harmony and happiness of superannuated sinners. I’m sure I needn’t explain that feeling to men – they knew all about it!”
“This picture, distant though it is, saps my conception of Lady Dundrannan,” I protested. “Perhaps of you too; do you mind if I call you a good hater?”
A smile hung about her lips; but her voice passed from the gay to the gentle, and the old inward-looking gaze took possession of her eyes. “No, I don’t mind, I like my hatreds; even for me there never failed to be something amusing in them. I wonder if I do myself too much credit in saying – something unreal? Did I play parts – like poor Arsenio? But still they seemed very real, and they kept my courage up. I suppose it’s funny to think that one behaves well – honorably – sometimes, just to spite somebody else. I’m afraid it is so, though – isn’t it, Sir Paget?”
“The Pharisee in the Temple comes somewhere near your notion.”
She came and sat herself down on the arm of my chair, and threw her arm round my neck. “Yes, hatreds serve their turn. But they ought to die; being of the earth earthy, they ought to, oughtn’t they? And they do. Do any of us here hate poor Arsenio now?” Suddenly she kissed me. “You never did, because you’re so ridiculously understanding – and I thank you for that now, because it helped me to try not to, to try to remember that he loved me, and that he couldn’t help being what he was. But where’s all my anger gone? Why, you and I often talk of him, and enjoy his tricks, don’t we? They can’t hurt us now; they’re just amusing, and we’re grateful to the poor man, and don’t feel hard to him any more, do we?” She fell silent for a moment, and then, with a broader smile, and with one hand uplifted in the air, she said, “And so, Sir Paget, very, very dear Sir Paget, I back myself to make friends with Nina in – well, say five years!”
The prudently calculated audacity of this undertaking made us laugh. “And with Waldo – how soon?” asked Sir Paget.
“Oh, to-morrow! But if I do that, I must take ten years, instead of five, for Nina!”
“You’d better arrange the time-table in your own way, my dear,” Sir Paget admitted discreetly. “Now I’ll go off to bed and leave you to have a talk together.”
He rose from his chair and advanced towards her, to give her his good-night greeting. Quicker than he was, she met him almost before he had taken a step. Catching his hands in hers, she fell on her knees before him. “Have you a blessing left for the sinner that repenteth – for your prodigal daughter?”
She was not in tears now, nor near them. She was just wonderfully and exultantly coaxing.
The old man disengaged his hands, clasped her face with them, turned it up to him, and gallantly kissed it. “Your sunshine warms my old bones,” he said. “I’m glad you’re back at Cragsfoot, Lucinda.” He turned away quickly and left us.
I went to her and raised her from her knees.
“That’s all right!” she said, with a tremulous but satisfied little laugh. “And I love him even more than I’ve tried to make him love me – and that’s saying a good deal to you, who’ve seen me practice my wiles! Are the tricks stale to you, Julius?”
“Yes. Try some new ones!”
“Ah, you’re cunning! The old ones are, I believe – I do believe – good enough for you.”
“The new ones had better be for Nina!”
“In five years, Julius, as sure as I live – and love you!”
“How do you propose to begin?” I asked skeptically. I knew my Nina! I knew Lucinda. It seemed, at the best, a very even bet whether she could bring it off.
Lucinda laughed in merry confidence and mockery. “Why, by giving her to understand that you make me thoroughly unhappy, of course. How else would you do it?”