Sophy of Kravonia Part 7

"Everybody in my house is a slave, I'm told, but you won't be more of a slave than the rest."

"Will you have me taught?"

Lady Meg looked hard at her. For the first time she smiled, rather grimly. "Yes, I'll have you taught, and I'll show you the Queen of England, and, if you behave yourself, the Emperor of the French--Lord help him!"

"Not unless she behaves herself!" murmured Mr. Pindar.

"Hold your tongue, Pindar! Now, then, what do you say? No, wait a minute; I want you to understand it properly." She became silent for a moment. Julia was thinking her a very rude woman; but, since Mr. Pindar did not mind, who need?

Lady Meg resumed. "I won't make an obligation of you--I mean, I won't be bound to you; and you sha'n't be bound to me. You'll stay with me as long as you like, or as long as I like, as the case may be. If you want to go, put your visiting-card--yes, you'll have one--in an envelope and send it to me. And if I want you to go, I'll put a hundred-pound note in an envelope and send it to you--upon which you'll go, and no reasons given! Is it agreed?"

"It sounds all right," said Sophy.

"Did you always have that mark on your cheek?"

"Yes, always. Father told me so."

"Well, will you come?"

Sophy was torn. The stage was very attractive, and the love she had for Julia Robins held her as though by a cord. But was the stage a poor thing? Was that mysterious "real thing" better? Though even of that this strange woman spoke scornfully. Already there must have been some underground channel of understanding between them; for Sophy knew that Lady Meg was more than interested in her--that she was actually excited about her; and Lady Meg, in her turn, knew that she played a good card when she dangled before Sophy's eyes the Queen of England and the Emperor of the French--though even then came that saving "Lord help him!" to damp an over-ardent expectation.

"Let me speak to Julia," said Sophy. Lady Meg nodded; the girls linked arms and walked apart. Pindar came to Lady Meg's elbow.

"Another whim!" said he, in a low voice. Pikes was looking round the view with a kind of vacant contentment.

"Yes," she said. His lips moved. "I know what you said. You said: 'You old fool!' Pindar."

"Never, on my life, my lady!" They seemed more friends now than patroness and client. Few saw them thus, but Pindar told Dunstanbury, and the old gentleman was no liar.

"Give me one more!" she whispered, plainly excited. "That mark must mean something. It may open a way."

"For her?" he asked, smiling.

"It must for her. It may for me."

"A way where?"

"To knowledge--knowledge of the unknown. They may speak through her!"

"Lady Meg! Lady Meg! And if they don't, the hundred-pound note! It's very cruel."

"Who knows?--who knows, Pindar? Fate has her ways."

He shrugged his shoulders and smiled. "Not half as amusing as your ladys.h.i.+p's!"

Sophy, twenty yards off, flung her arms round Julia. The embrace was long; it spoke farewell. Lady Meg's eyes brightened. "She's coming with me," she said. Pindar shrugged his shoulders again and fell back to heel. Sophy walked briskly up.

"I'll come, my lady," she said.

"Good. To-morrow afternoon--to London. Mrs. Brownlow has the address.

Good-bye." She turned abruptly on her heel and marched off, her retinue following.

Julia came to Sophy.

"We can write," she said. "And she's right. You must be for the real thing, Sophy!"

"My dear, my dear!" murmured Sophy, half in tears. "Yes, we must write."

She drew back and stood erect. "It's all very dark," she said. "But I like it. London--and Paris! On the Seine!" Old lessons came back with new import now.

"The Emperor of the French!" Julia mocked--with tears in her eyes.

A sudden thought occurred to Sophy. "What did she mean by 'Percival's young person'? Is his name Percival?"

Julia gave a little cry. "Lord Dunstanbury's? Yes. You've seen him again?"

She drew out the story. It made the sorrow of parting half forgotten.

"You owe this to him, then! How romantic!" was actress Julia's conclusion--in part a true one, no doubt. But Sophy, looking deeper, fingered the Red Star. She had tracked the magnet of Lady Meg's regard, the point of her interest, the pivot of decision for that mind of whims.

V

THE VISION OF "SOMETHING BRIGHT"

With that scene in the avenue of elm-trees at Morpingham there comes a falling of the veil. Letters pa.s.sed between Sophy and Julia Robins, but they have not been preserved. The diary was not yet begun. Basil Williamson did not move in the same world with Lady Meg and her entourage: Dunstanbury was in Ireland, where his regiment was then stationed. For the next twelve months there is only one glimpse of Sophy--that a pa.s.sing and accidental one, although not without its significance as throwing a light on Lady Meg's adoption of Sophy (while it lasted it amounted to that), and on the strange use to which she hoped to be able to turn her _protegee_. The reference is, however, tantalizingly vague just where explicitness would have been of curious interest, though hardly of any real importance to a sensible mind.

The reference occurs in a privately printed volume of reminiscences by the late Captain Hans Fleming, R.N., a sailor of some distinction, but better known as a naturalist. Writing in the winter of 1865-66 (he gives no precise date), he describes in a letter a meeting with Lady Meg--whom, it will be noticed, he calls "old Lady Meg," although at that time she was but forty-nine. She had so early in life taken up an att.i.tude of resolute spinsterhood that there was a tendency to exaggerate her years.

"To-day in the park I met old Lady Meg Duddington. It was piercing cold, but the carriage was drawn up under the trees. The poor spaniels on the opposite seat were s.h.i.+vering! She stopped me and was, for her, very gracious; she only 'Lord-helped-me' twice in the whole conversation. She was full of her ghosts and spirits, her seers and witches. She has got hold of an entirely new prophetess, a certain woman who calls herself Madame Mantis and knows all the secrets of the future, both this side the grave and the other. Beside Lady Meg sat a remarkably striking girl, to whom she introduced me, but I didn't catch the name. I gathered that this girl (who had an odd mark on one cheek, almost like a pale pink wafer) was, in old Meg's mad mind, anyhow, mixed up with the prophetess--as medium, or subject, or inspiration, or something of that kind--I don't understand that nonsense, and don't want to. But when I looked sceptical (and old Pindar chuckled--or it may have been his teeth chattering with the cold), Meg nodded her head at the girl and said: 'She'll tell you a different tale some day: if you meet her in five years' time, perhaps.' I don't know what the old lady meant; I suppose the girl did, but she looked absolutely indifferent, and, indeed, bored.

One can't help being amused, but, seriously, it's rather sad for a man who was brought up in the reverence of Lord Dunstanbury to see his only daughter--a clever woman, too, naturally--devoting herself to such childish stuff."

Such is the pa.s.sage; it is fair to add that most of the Captain's book is of more general interest. As he implies, he had had a long acquaintance with the Dunstanbury family, and took a particular interest in anything that related to it. Nevertheless, what he says has its place here; it fits in with and explains Lady Meg's excited and mystical exclamation to Mr. Pindar at Morpingham, "They may speak through her!"

Apparently "they" had spoken--to what effect we cannot even conjecture, unless an explanation be found in a letter of the Kravonian period in which Sophy says to Julia: "You remember that saying of Mantis's when we were in London--the one about how she saw something hanging in the air over my head--something bright." That is all she says--and "something bright" leaves the matter very vague. A sword--a crown--the nimbus of a saint: imagination might play untrammelled. Still some prophecy was made; Lady Meg built on it, and Sophy (for all her apparent indifference) remembered it, and in after-days thought it worthy of recall. That is as far as we can go; and with that pa.s.sing glimpse, Sophy Grouch (of course the mention of the wafer-like mark puts her ident.i.ty beyond question) pa.s.ses out of sight for the time; indeed, as Sophy Grouch, in the position in which we have seen her and in the name under which we have known her, she pa.s.ses out of sight forever.

PART II

PARIS

I