The Halo Part 17

"It is a great age," observed someone, and he laughed aloud. "Yes--for here. La-bas with us, she is not so old as she would be here. I am an old man here, but there, I am still _jeune_ Joyselle! And my big boy, my betrothed boy, is still _le pet.i.t du jeune_ Joyselle."

It was not particularly interesting, but nevertheless everyone at the table listened with delight. The man's vividness, his simple certainty of their sympathy, were irresistible.

"Next September," he went on, draining his champagne gla.s.s and wiping his moustache upward, in a martial way, "is their golden wedding, _mes vieux_! It will be very fine. Very fine indeed, for all the children and grandchildren," he glanced slily at Brigit, who clasped her hands lightly on her lap, "will be there, and we shall eat until we can eat no more, and tell each other old tales, and boast about our successes in life--ah, it will be very pleasant!"

"You will come too, my Brigit," whispered Theo under his breath. "I can show them my wonderful--wife?"

She could not answer, and he took her distress for girlish confusion, and, manlike, rejoiced in it.

After dinner Joyselle came straight to her. "May I talk to you about Tommy?" he began, "I love Tommy very much."

"He--adores you."

"Yes. Let us go into the library, Most Beautiful, where we can talk quietly." Before she could protest he had turned to her mother and announced his intention. "I leave to-morrow, before she will be up," he declared, "and there are things I must say. You allow me, Lady Kingsmead?"

Then he put his arm round the girl's waist and marched her down the hall and up the stairs leading to the library.

"Isn't he quaint?" giggled Lady Kingsmead to the d.u.c.h.ess, and the old woman a.s.sented with a laugh. "He is an amazing mixture of the boyish and the paternal. I thoroughly like him."

Meantime Brigit had sat down in a tall-backed carved chair, and, her hands on its arms, waited for Joyselle to speak. He walked about the room for a few moments, looking up at the book-covered walls, opening one of the windows, examining an ivory dragon that grinned on the chimney-piece. Then he burst out, "_Eh, bien_, my dearest, and when is it to be?"

"When is what to be?"

"The wedding."

A hot blush crept over her, leaving her cold.

"Theo wants his wife, and I want my daughter," he continued, sitting down by her and taking her hand affectionately, "why waste time!"

She looked at him in hopeless dismay. He was so big, so strong, so overpowering, she felt that her strength to resist his will was as nothing.

"You think I ask too soon?" He looked at her, an anxious pucker in his eyelids, "But no. There is never too much time in which to be happy, ma Brigitte----"

For the first time in her recollection she was glad to see Gerald Carron, as he came up the stairs, and approached them slowly.

"Does mother want me?" she asked, rising.

"No. I--just wondered what you were doing."

"I brought Lady Brigit here because I wanted to talk to her," explained Joyselle, mildly. Carron laughed.

"So do I want to talk to her!"

Brigit gave a nervous laugh. "Let's all go downstairs and talk there. My conversation isn't usually so appreciated."

The two men followed her in silence, and to her immense relief were both promptly accosted by someone of the party, and she could escape to her window seat.

What would have happened if Carron had not come, she asked herself with a shudder. Would her strength have come back, and would she have been able to tell Joyselle that he must make no plans for her wedding?

Until she had known his father, Theo had never seemed to her to lack personality; he was young, but his very boyishness was individual. Yet now with Joyselle clamouring for her to fix her wedding-day, Theo seemed to fade into insignificance, and her task to become that of breaking the news of her intended rupture with the son, to the father.

And as she sat there in the background watching the members of the little party as they smoked and chatted to each other, she gave up and resolved on flight. "If I told Theo he would rush to his father," she thought, "and then Joyselle would come to me. And we'd quarrel, and then anything might happen." His utter unconsciousness was at once a safeguard and a menace.

"I'll say nothing until he is safe in Normandy," she decided.

PART II

CHAPTER ONE

There is on an olive-covered slope near the Mediterranean a certain shabby pink villa which is remarkable for one thing. In it, years ago, dwelt for a long time a man and a woman who, having no legal right to love, yet not only loved, but were perfectly happy. They lived almost alone, they had little money, the house was shabby even then, they had few servants and but indifferent Italian food, and nothing but old-fas.h.i.+oned tin baths to wash in. Yet they were English, and they were happy because they loved each other so much that nothing else mattered.

Now this phrase about nothing else mattering is as common in love affairs as the pathetic abuse of the poor old word eternity; but in the case I instance, it fitted. Nothing else did matter. Not even, to any extent, the presence of the one child that had come to them. Contrary to all ethical and reasonable law, these two sinners were happy in their pink house by the sea, and years after they had left it there seemed to hang about the old place a kind of atmosphere of romance, as if the sun and the moon, that have seen so much changeableness, loved still to look down at the place where two human beings had been faithful to each other.

These two people were Pamela Lensky's father and mother, and hither came, early in the November that followed her meeting with Victor Joyselle, Lady Brigit Mead as the guest of the Lenskys. And here she stayed, while the mild, sunny winter days drifted by unmarked, a silent, ungenial guest.

The Lenskys were happy people and enjoyed life as it came. He, a slim, blond, exceedingly well-dressed little man, was attached to the Russian Emba.s.sy in London, in some more or less permanent quality, having given up his secretarys.h.i.+p after a miserable sojourn in a Continental city that he and his wife both hated.

They had money enough to live comfortably, in the quiet way they both liked, in England, and a year before that November his mother had died, leaving them the richer by a few hundred pounds a year. So they were well-off in the sense that they had plenty of money to spend, and the certainty that their children would one day be in still better circ.u.mstances.

One day in January Mrs. de Lensky was sitting on the floor in the brick-floored nursery, building a Moorish palace for her son, aged eighteen months.

She was a thin woman of thirty-six or seven, with large dark eyes, somewhat hollow now, and a brown vivid face on which life had put several deep lines--all of which, though unbeautiful in themselves, were good lines, and made for character.

"And here's the tower in which the little boy lived," she said to the baby, who, very fat and peculiarly blond, regarded her rapturously, "and here's the dungeon where they put him when he was naughty. If Thaddeus bites Elvira again," she added gravely, "what will happen to him?"

But Thaddeus, who was possessed of the courage incidental to a sound digestion and dormant nerves, only laughed and showed the wicked fangs that had bitten the nurse.

It was a pleasant, bare, sunny room, the rug covered with shabby toys, the walls nearly hidden by pictures from ill.u.s.trated papers. Through an open door one saw a table at which sat a little girl of six, bending over a book with the unmistakable air of a child learning something uninteresting.

"Eliza!"

"Yes, mother?" Eliza looked up. She too was blonde, but her eyes were dark.

"Where is Pammy, dear?"

"I don't know, mother. Perhaps she's eating plaster again," suggested Eliza, with the alertness that even charming children sometimes show when face to face with the crime of some contemporary.

Pam did not laugh. Plaster-eating may be funny in other people's children, but seven-year-old Pammy, her adopted daughter, was too old to persist in the habit, and punishment seemed to have no effect on it. The house was old, and the walls defective in many places, and Pammy's joy was to dig out bits of ancient plaster and consume it on the sly. It was presumably bad for her stomach and indubitably bad for her character, as the child persisted in it with a quiet effrontery that baulked discipline. So Mrs. de Lensky rose, and bidding Eliza look after the baby, started in search of the wicked one.

January was spring at the Villa Arcadie, and as she went downstairs a strong scent of heliotrope and narcissi was wafted towards her. A boy stood in the hall carrying a basket.

"_Buon giorno_, Beppino. Oh, what lovely flowers! Tell Giovanni to bring them to me in the _salone_, will you?" Crossing the hall she went into the dining-room, and there, as she had expected, sat Pammy.