The Halo Part 21

Madame Joyselle came in, splendid in a new brown silk dress that fitted her as its skin fits a ripe grape, her face beaming with joy in her son's joy. She gazed in amazement at Brigit before the younger woman bent and kissed her, and then sat down and folded her hands, as was her way.

"You look like a beautiful dragon--doesn't she, Theo?" she asked, "doesn't she, Victor?"

Joyselle had returned with a look of having just brushed his hair. He looked smoothed down in some way and was a little pale.

"My faith, she does, _ma vieille_," he returned. "When she opened the door I was so startled that I--guess what I did, children? Dropped the Amati!" When they had stopped exclaiming he went on, gradually, but with a perceptible effort getting back his usual tone, "and stood and gasped like a young prince in a fairy-tale, didn't I, Most Beautiful?"

She smiled, but she was not pleased. "You did--Beau-papa," she answered.

"I didn't know I was so beautiful. I have been dining out, hence the dragon's skin. It is a nice frock, isn't it?" she ended, artistically casual.

And then there were questions to be asked, stories to be told, and an hour and a half pa.s.sed like five minutes.

No more was said about the length of her untimely visit to Italy, but much about the days in the near future. Would she go to see "Peter Pan"

the next night? And would she dine first at a little restaurant, where the cooking was a thing to dream of?

And would she do several other things?

She would. She would do all these things. But--she would not go to a certain little restaurant near Leicester Square, of which she had heard.

Joyselle blushed scarlet and for a moment looked as though he intended to thunder out a severe reproof at her. Then she smiled at him with narrowed eyes, and he said nothing.

At about half-past eleven an idea occurred to her. She wanted an omelet.

Like the first time. And she must borrow an ap.r.o.n and help make the omelet; and it must be full of little savoury green things, and be flopped in the long-handled frying-pan.

"But your dress!" cried Madame Joyselle, in horror.

"An ap.r.o.n, and I will twist up the tail of the dragon and pin it at the waist, and--oh, come, come, come, it will be such fun!"

Down the stairs they ran, the three, leaving Madame Joyselle to turn out all but one light, and to put another log on the dying fire.

Filled by the relentless spirit of coquetry that had suddenly awakened in her, Brigit Mead danced about the great white kitchen, teasing Joyselle, making love to his wife, laughing openly at Theo's admiration.

She, always so silent, chattered like a magpie; she, the uninterested, flushed with intoxicating nonsense; the three people before her were her audience, and she played to them individually, a different _role_ for each; they were her slaves, and she piped her magic music to them until they were literally dazed. Then, suddenly, she whisked off her blue ap.r.o.n and unpinned the dragon's tail.

"The omelet was good," she said, "but it is eaten. And it is to-morrow morning and the motor will be frozen. Come, _mon maitre_, play one beautiful thing to me before I fly away from you--something very beautiful that I may dream of it."

And he played to her as she had never heard him. If the omelet had been a magic wine, he could not have been more inspired!

His face took on the look it usually wore while he played, and solemnly and reverently he stood, his eyes half shut, him mouth set in n.o.ble lines. He had forgotten Brigit, but sub-consciously he was playing for her, and she knew it, and appreciated the tribute, which was all the greater because offered without intent.

She watched him unceasingly, and gradually, as the music went on, her heart sank, and she realised that she had done a most unworthy thing.

The feeling she had had that last evening at home came back to her, the feeling that he was a child in horrible danger. Only this time it was she who had deliberately led him into the danger. And his unconsciousness of his peril hurt her so, that as he stopped playing she could have cried to him to go away, to run to the ends of the earth, where she could not reach him.

"You liked it?" he asked gently, and the question seemed so pathetically inadequate, and so plainly emphasised the innocence of his mind, that tears came to her eyes.

"Yes," she said in a very quiet voice, "thank you, dear papa." But this time there was no malice in the term, and when she said good-night to him at the motor door, it was simply and filially. Then she turned to Theo, and he, looking hastily up and down the quiet street, put his head in at the window and kissed her.

CHAPTER FIVE

And that was the beginning of a most extraordinary phase of Brigit Mead's life.

For the next four months she saw Joyselle almost daily. She never broached the subject of her engagement being broken, its permanence was taken for granted by everyone, and Tommy's indefinitely prolonged visit to Golden Square would, if anything more than the fact of her engagement had been necessary, have explained her constant presence there.

Once Theo had urged her to set their wedding-day, but she had put him off and he had never again opened the question. That the young man was not, could not possibly be, perfectly satisfied with the state of affairs, she knew very well, but that, she told herself, she could not help.

She lived on from day to day, more simply and with less self-a.n.a.lysis, in spite of her curious position, than ever before in her life, for the inevitable day of reckoning seemed to be the affair of the Brigit of the future, whereas the Brigit of each day was concerned only with those particular twenty-four hours. It was enough to live in close companions.h.i.+p with the man she loved, and when, as occasionally she tried to do, she reasoned to herself about it, her mind seemed paralysed and utterly refused to make plans of any kind. So, twisting to her own purposes, as people do, the saying about the evil of the day being unto itself sufficient, she let time slip away unremarked and spring came.

It was a cold rainy season that year, with chill dark mornings and flickerings of pale suns.h.i.+ne later on.

People talked much about the weather, and pretty women s.h.i.+vered in their light finery. Tommy, who went home for a fortnight in April, reported that things in the country were deplorable.

"Everyone has colds, and Mr. Smith says there is diphtheria at Spinny Major. Green is disgusted, and from what I can gather from his cheery reports, everyone is going to be ruined by agricultural depression. The Mother of Hundreds has nine new pups--rather good ones."

This was at the end of April, and Lord Kingsmead was coiled in a big chair in his sister's room in Pont Street. Mr. Babington, his tutor, had just gone for a walk, poor man. Tommy's att.i.tude to him had from the first been one of polite tolerance, and Mr. Babington's b.u.mp of humour being imperfectly developed, he in return regarded his charge with something like horror.

A boy of twelve, who knew only the very first principles of Latin (Mr.

Babington was number three, the other two having proved unsatisfactory to their employer-pupil), and knew the multiplication table only up to "eight-times," disturbed his tidy little mind. There was, moreover, a youth in Sydenham who clamoured for Mr. Babington, and who was after that much-tried young Oxonian's heart. But Mr. Babington stayed on, for--there was Brigit, and in the evenings the tutor locked his door, smoked asthma cigarettes, and wrote sonnets by the yard to the Enchantress.

Tommy, of course, had at once perceived the first shoots of the hapless young man's baby pa.s.sion as it sprang up in his heart--which did not make it easier to bear, but still Mr. Babington stayed on.

"He'll never go, Bick," complained Tommy that afternoon, after his remarks on Kingsmead. "I even tried smoking the other day, but he had a handkerchief of yours that you left on the hall table, and was so bucked that he barely noticed my iniquity. He _is_ a poisonous person!"

"Yes, I certainly preferred Mr. Catt--but you didn't like him either."

"How could anyone like a fellow named Catt? I nearly choked every time I had to speak to him, and so did the Master." It was thus that the boy designated and addressed Joyselle. "He used to call him Minet. I have learned that rotten old multiplication-table, however, and Latin is easy. I do wish," he went on, gnawing at an ancient bit of almond-rock that he had acquired at the village sweetstuff shop at home, "that mother had had me well whacked when I was a kid. It would have saved me no end of trouble now."

Brigit laughed as she dabbed some cherry-coloured grease on her pointed nails. "Poor old Tommy!"

The almond-rock was an impediment to fluency of conversation, but after a moment Tommy mastered it and went on. "I say, Bicky, what's gone wrong with Carron?"

She started. "I--why do you ask?"

"Because I think he looks very ill. Saw him yesterday as I went out, and hardly knew him."

"Perhaps he's had influenza," she suggested.

She had not seen the man for weeks. He had been away several times, and when he had come to the house had not asked for her. The last time they had met they had, of course, quarrelled, and then she had forgotten him, as she forgot everybody and everything not brought directly under her notice.

In March he had gone to Monte Carlo to see her mother, who was visiting there, and Lady Kingsmead had told her afterwards that he had been wretched all during his stay. Brigit said she was sorry, but it is to be doubted if the afflictions of anyone, if not directly affecting herself, would at that time have given her any pain, and of all people poor Carron was probably the last with whom she could feel any real sympathy.

Tommy had a bad throat and was not to go back to Golden Square that night, but Brigit was dining somewhere with the two Joyselle men, and was to spend the night in the now so-familiar spare-room, with the coloured religious pictures on the walls.

Lady Kingsmead had returned to town that morning, but the perfect freedom she gained by Tommy's long stay with, and her daughter's daily visits to, the Joyselles, had long since overcome her first scruples about "those sort of people being after all quite the a.s.sociates for Kingsmead," and had accepted Brigit's announcement for her intention with an absent nod.

"Very well, dear, and remind him not to forget that he is dining here on Tuesday. He really is _most_ obliging, about playing, I must say."