The Duchess of Wrexe Part 26

"Well! Oh! animals and bein' out in the open and shootin' and ridin' and fis.h.i.+n'--any old exercise--and comin' up to town for a buck every now and again, and then goin' back and seein' no one, and my old place and--oh! I don't know," he ended.

"You wouldn't tell anyone a lie, would you, about things you liked and didn't like?"

"It wouldn't be much use if I did," he said, laughing. "They'd find me out in a minute----"

"No, but would you? If you were with a number of people who thought art the thing to care about and knew nothing about dogs and horses, would you say you cared about art more than anything?"

"No," he said slowly. "No--but sometimes, you see, pictures and music and such do please me--like anything--I can't put into words, but I might suddenly be in any old mood--for pictures, or your uncle's fans, or dogs or the Empire or these jolly old stars--Why, there, you see I just let it go on--the mood, I mean, till it's over----" Then he added with a great sigh, "But I am a dash fool at explainin'----"

"But I know you wouldn't be like Mr. Garden or Mr. Carfax--just pretending not to like the thing because it's the thing not to. Or like Aunt Adela, who picks up a phrase about a book or picture from some clever man and then uses it everywhere."

"I should never remember it--a phrase or anythin'--I never can remember what a feller says----"

"Oh! I know you'd always be honest about these things. I feel you would--about everything. It's all these lies that are so impossible: I think I've come to feel now after this first season that the only thing that matters is being straight. It is the only thing--if a person just gives you what they've got--what _they've_ got, not what someone else is supposed to have. May Eversley used to say that people's minds are like soup--thick or clear--but they're only thick because they let them get thick with other people's opinions--you don't mind all this?" she said, suddenly pausing, afraid lest he should be bored.

"It's most awfully interestin'," he said from the bottom of his heart.

"There are some men and women--I've met one or two--who're just made up of Truth. You know it the minute you're with them. And they'll have pluck too, of course--Courage goes with it. Our family," she ended, "are of course the most terrible liars that have ever been--ever----"

"Oh! I say----" he began, protesting.

"Oh! but yes--they run everything on it. My uncle Richard ran through Parliament beautifully because he never said what he meant. And Aunt Adela--_and_ Uncle John, although he's a dear. But then my grandmother brought them up to it. My grandmother would have about three clever people and then muddle all the rest so that the three clever ones can have everything in their hands----"

"Look here," he broke in, "I'm most awfully fond of your grandmother--we're tremendous pals----"

"You may be--I hate her. Oh! I don't hate her with melodrama, I don't want to strangle her or beat her face or burn her, but I'm frightened of her and she's always making me do things I'm ashamed of. That's the best reason for hating anyone there is."

"But she's such a sportsman. One of the old kind. One----."

"Oh! I know all that you can say. I've heard it so many times. But she's all wrong. There isn't any good in her. She's just remorseless and selfish and stubborn. She thinks she ran the world once and she wants to do it still."

"That's all rather fine, _I_ think," said Roddy. "I agree with her a bit. I think most people have _got_ to be run--they just can't run themselves, so you have to put things into them."

"Well, that's just where we differ," she said sharply. "It isn't so.

That's where all the muddle comes in. If everyone were just himself without anything _borrowed_--Oh! the brave world it'd be----"

Then she laughed. "But I'm all wrong myself, you know. I'm as muddled as anyone. I've got all the true, real me there, but all the Beaminster part has slurred it over. But I've got a horrid fear that Truth gets tired of waiting too long. One day, when you're not expecting it, it comes up and says--'Now you choose--your only chance. _Are_ you going to use me or not? If not, I'm going'--How awful if one didn't realize the moment was there, and missed it."

She was laughing, but in her heart that other woman in her was stirring.

For a startled, trembling second the wood seemed to flame, the gardens to blaze with the challenge:

"Are you, for the sake of the comfort and safety of life, playing false?

Which way are you going?"

She burst into laughter, she caught Roddy by the arm. "Oh! I've talked such nonsense--It's getting cold--we've got to go in. Don't think I talk like that generally, Sir Roderick, because I don't--I----"

She was nervous, frightened. The stars were so many and it was so dark and Roddy no longer seemed a protection.

"I know it's late--Look here, I'm going to run--Race me----"

She tore for her very life out of the little wood, felt him pounding behind her, seized, with a gasp of relief, the lights and the voices--

She knew, with joy, that Roddy was closing the door behind her and that the garden and the stars and the wood were shut into silence.

For a little while, in the drawing-room, she talked excitedly, laughed a great deal, even at Monty Carfax's jokes.

She knew that they were all thinking that she was pleased because she had been with Roddy. She did not care what their thoughts were.

At last in her room she cried to Lucy--"Pull the curtains tight--Tighter--Tighter--Those stars--they'll get through anything."

When at last Lucy was gone she lit her candle and lay there, hearing the clocks strike the hours, wondering when the day would come.

CHAPTER XIII

DEFIANCE OF THE TIGER--II

I

Roddy, dozing after a night of glorious sleep, lay on his back and swung happily to and fro.

The footman who was valeting him had pulled up the blind and drawn aside the curtains, and the garden came to him, not as on last evening, weighed with its canopy of stars, but now a.s.serting its own happiness and colour and freshness.

The man said: "The bathroom is the last door down the pa.s.sage on your right, sir. Breakfast is at half-past nine. It has just gone eight. What clothes, sir?"

Roddy stared at him and smiled. After a little time, the man enquired again: "Which suit will you wear this morning, sir?"

"Dark blue." Roddy, still happily floating somewhere near the ceiling--floating with delicious lightness--"Dark blue--Dark blue--Dark blue----"

For a little while the man, a strange vague shape, pulled out drawers and closed them and walked about the floor, like Agag, delicately.

Roddy, from the ceiling watched him and resented the fact that every sharp click of a drawer pulled him nearer to the carpet.

The man's final shutting of the bedroom door plumped Roddy into his bed, wide awake.

"d.a.m.n him! What a wonderful day!"

He lay back and watched how waves of light danced on the walls. A fountain splashed in the gardens and the long mirror on the right of the bed had in it the corner of the green lawn and the cool grey stones of an old wall.

Roddy lay on his back and allowed his sensations to run up and down his body. It was for moments such as this that his life was intended. He lived, deliberately and without any selfishness in the matter, for the emotions that the good old G.o.d Pan might choose to provide for him.

He did not know Pan by name except as a silly fancy dress that Monty Carfax had once worn at a fancy-dress dance and as Someone alluded to every now and again, vaguely, in the papers, but even though he did not call him by name he, nevertheless, paid, without question, his daily homage.

When, as on this beautiful morning, one had only to lie down and be instantly conscious of a thousand things--sheep moving slowly across hills, cattle browing in deep pools, those Downs that he loved rising, slowly, like aged men, to greet a new day--then one questioned nothing, one argued nothing, one needed no words, one was happy from the crown of one's head to the toes of one's feet.

On this especial morning these delights were connected with the fact that, during the day, he intended to propose marriage to Rachel Beaminster. He thought of her, now, as she had looked last night, sitting in that wood, in a pale blue dress, with the stars behind her, staring, so seriously, down into the garden. She had been very beautiful last night, and it had been a splendid moment--not more splendid than other moments that he had had, but splendid enough to remember.