The Brightener Part 21

This time I didn't hide my light under a bushel of initials, nor in a box at a newspaper office. I announced that the "Princess di Miramare requires immediately the services of a gentlewoman (aged from twenty-one to thirty) for secretarial work four or five hours six days of the week.

Must be intelligent and experienced typist-stenographer. Salary, three guineas a week. Apply personally, between 9:30 and 11:30 A. M. No letters considered."

I gave the address of my own flat and awaited developments with high hope; for I conceitedly expected an "ad." under my own name to attract a good cla.s.s of applicants.

It appeared in several London dailies and succeeded like a July sale. I wouldn't have believed that there were such crowds of pretty typists on earth! Luckily, the lift boy was young, so he enjoyed the rush.

As for me, I felt like a spider that has got religion and pities its flies; there were so many flies--I mean girls--and each in one way or other was more desirable than the rest! I might have been reduced to tossing up a copper or having the applicants draw lots, if something very special hadn't happened.

The twenty-sixth girl brought a letter of introduction from Robert Lorillard.

_Robert Lorillard!_ Why, the very name is a thrill!

Of course I was in love with Robert Lorillard when I was seventeen, just before the war. Everybody was in love with him that year. It was the fas.h.i.+onable thing to be. Whenever Grandmother let me come up to town I went to the theatre to adore dear Robert. Women used to boast that they'd seen him fifty times in some favourite play. But never did he act on the stage so stirring a part as that thrust upon him in August, 1914!

I _must_ let the girl with the letter wait while I tell you the story, in case you've not heard the true version.

While she hung upon my decision, and I gazed at Lorillard's signature (worth guineas as an autograph), my mind raced back along the years.

Oh, that gorgeous spring before the war!

I wasn't "_out_"; but somehow I contrived to be "_in_." That is, in all the things that I'd have died rather than miss.

We were absurdly poor, but Grandmother knew everyone; and that April, while she was looking for a town house and arranging to present me, we stayed with the d.u.c.h.ess of Stane. Her daughter, Lady June, was _the_ girl in Society just then. She had been The Girl for several years. She was the prettiest, the most original, and the most daring one in her set. She wasn't twenty-three, but she'd picked up the most extraordinary reputation! I should think there could hardly have been more interest in the doings of "professional beauties" in old days than was taken in hers. No ill.u.s.trated weekly was complete without her newest portrait done by the photographer of the minute; no picture Daily existed that wouldn't pay well for a snapshot of Lady June Dana, even with a foot out of focus, or a hand as big as her head! And she _loved_ it all! She lived, lived every minute! It didn't seem as if there could be a world without June.

I was only a flapper, but I wors.h.i.+pped at the shrine, and the G.o.ddess didn't mind being wors.h.i.+pped. She used to let me perch on her bed when she took her morning tea, looking a dream in a rosebud-wreathed bit of tulle called a boudoir cap, and a nighty like the first outline sketch for a ballgown. She reeled off yards of stuff for my benefit about the men who loved her (their name was legion!), and among others was Robert Lorillard.

All the clever people who "did" things came to Stane House, provided they were good to look at and interesting in themselves. Lorillard was there nearly every Sunday for luncheon, and at other times, too. I couldn't help staring at him, though I knew it was rude, for he was so handsome, so--almost divine!

One laughs at writers who make their heroes "Greek statues," but really Lorillard _was_ like the Apollo Belvedere, in the Vatican: those perfect features, that high yet winning air (someone has said) "of the greatest statue that ever was a gentleman, the greatest gentleman that ever was a statue."

I think June met Lorillard away from home often: and once, when Grandmother and I had gone to live in our own house, and I'd been presented, June took me behind the scenes after a matinee at his theatre. He was charming to me, and I loved him more than ever, with that delicious, hopeless, agonizing love of seventeen.

People talked about June with Lorillard, but no more than with a dozen other men. n.o.body dreamed of their marrying, and none less than she herself. As for him, though he was madly in love, he must have known that as an eligible he'd have as much chance with a royal princess as with Lady June Dana.

It was in this way that matters stood when the war broke out. And among the first volunteers of note went Robert Lorillard. No doubt he would have gone sooner or later in any case. But being taken up, thrown down, smiled at, and frowned on by June was getting upon his nerves, as even I could see, so war--fighting, and dying perhaps--must have been a welcome counter-irritant.

The season was over, but Grandmother kept on the house she had taken, as an _ouvroir_, where she mobilized a regiment of women for war work. It was in the same square as Stane House, where the d.u.c.h.ess was mobilizing a rival regiment. June and I worked under our different taskmistresses; but I saw a good deal of her--and all that went on. The moment she heard that Lorillard had offered himself, and was furiously training for a commission, she was a changed girl. She was like a creature burning with fever; but I thought her more beautiful than she'd ever been, with that rose-flame in her cheeks and blue fire in her eyes.

One afternoon she got me off from work, asking me to shop with her. But instead of going to Bond Street, we made straight for Robert Lorillard's flat in St. James's Square. How he could have been there that day I don't know, for he was in some training camp or other I suppose; but she'd sent an urgent wire, no doubt, begging him to get a few hours'

leave.

Anyhow, there he _was_--waiting for us. I shall never forget his face--though he forgot my existence! June forgot it also. I'd been dragged at her chariot wheels (it was a taxi!) to play propriety; my first appearance as a chaperon. I might as well have been a fly on the wall for both of them!

Robert opened the door of the flat himself when we rang (servants were superfluous for that interview!) and they looked at each other, those two. Eyes drank eyes! Lorillard didn't seem to see me. I drifted vaguely in after June, and effaced myself superficially. The most rarefied sense of honour couldn't be expected, perhaps, in a flapper whose favourite stage hero was about to play _the_ part of his life--unrehea.r.s.ed--with the said flapper's most admired heroine.

Instead of shutting myself up in a cupboard or something, or at the least closing my eyes and stuffing my fingers into my ears, I hovered in a handy background. I saw June burst out crying and throw herself into Lorillard's arms. I heard her sob that she realized now she couldn't live without him; that he was the only person on earth who mattered--ever had, or ever would matter. I heard him gasp a few explosive "Darlings!" and "Angels!" And then I heard June coolly--no, hotly!--propose that they should be married at once--_at once_!

Even _I_ floated sympathetically on a rose-coloured wave of love, as I listened and looked; so where must Lorillard have floated--he who had adored, and never hoped?

In one of his own plays the n.o.ble hero would have put June from him in super-unselfishness, declaiming "No, beloved. I cannot accept this sacrifice, made on a mad impulse. I love you too much to take you for my own." But, thank G.o.d, real men aren't built on those stiff lines! As for this one, he simply _hugged_ his glorious, incredible luck (including the giver) as hard as he could.

It took the two about one hour to come to themselves, and remember that they had heads as well as hearts; while I, for my part, remembered mostly my right foot, which had gone to sleep during efforts of self-obliteration. I _had_ to stamp it at last, which drew surprised attention to me; so I was officially offered the role of confidante, and agreed with June that the wedding _must_ be secret. The d.u.c.h.ess and four _terrifically_ powerful uncles would make as much fuss as if June were Queen Elizabeth bent on marrying a commoner, and it would end in the lovers being parted.

Well, they were married by special license three days later, with me and a man friend of Lorillard's as witnesses. When the knot was safely tied, June and Robert went together and broke it to the d.u.c.h.ess--not the knot, but the news. The d.u.c.h.ess of Stane is supposed to know more bad words than any other peeress in England, and judging from June's account of the scene, she hurled them all at Lorillard, with a few spontaneous creations for her daughter. When the lady and her vocabulary were exhausted, however, common sense refilled the vacuum. The d.u.c.h.ess and the Family made the best of a bad bargain, hoping, no doubt, that Lorillard would soon be safely killed; and a delicious dish of romance was served up to the public.

_I_ was the only one beyond pardon, it seemed. According to the d.u.c.h.ess I was a wicked little treacherous cat not to have told her what was going on, so that it could have been stopped in time. A complaint was made to Grandmother. But that peppery old darling--after scolding me well--took my part, and quarrelled with the d.u.c.h.ess.

June was too busy being _The_ Bride of All War Brides to bother much with me, and Lorillard was training hard for France. So a kind of magic gla.s.s wall arose between the Affair and me. Months pa.s.sed (everyone knows the history of those months!) and then the air raids began: Zeppelins over London!

It was _smart_, you know, not to be frightened, but to run out and gape, or go up on the roof, when one of those great silver shapes was sighted in the night sky. June went on the roof. Oh poor, beautiful June! A fragment of shrapnel pierced her heart and killed her instantly, before she could have felt a pang.

The news almost "broke Lorillard up," so his pal who witnessed the marriage with me put the case. Robert hadn't even once been back in "Blighty" since he first went out. Ninety-six hours' leave was due just then. He spent it coming to June's funeral, and--returning to the Front.

Since that tragic time long ago he had seen a great deal of fighting, had been wounded twice, had received his Captaincy and a D. S. O. Four years and a half had been eaten by Hun locusts since he'd last appeared on the stage, and more than three since the death of June. Everyone thought that Lorillard would take up his old career where he had laid it down. But he refused several star parts, and announced that he never intended to act again. The reason was, he said, that he did not wish to do so; that he could hardly remember how he had felt at the time when acting made up the great interest of his life.

He bought a quaint old cottage near the river, not many miles from a house the d.u.c.h.ess owned--a happy house, where he had spent week-ends that wonderful summer of 1914. June had loved the place, and her body lay (buried in a gla.s.s coffin to preserve its beauty for ever) in the cedar-shaded graveyard of the country church near by. Once she had laughingly told Lorillard she would like to lie there if she died, and he had persuaded the d.u.c.h.ess to fulfil the wish. Instead of a gravestone there was a sundial, with the motto "All her days were happy days and all her hours were hours of sun."

Robert Lorillard's cottage was within walking distance of the churchyard, and I imagine he often went there. Anyhow, he went nowhere else. After some months an anonymous book of poems appeared--poems of such extreme beauty and pure pa.s.sion that all the critics talked about them. Bye and bye others began to talk, and it leaked out through the publisher that Lorillard was the author.

I loved those poems so much that I couldn't resist scribbling a few lines to Robert in my first flush of enthusiasm. He didn't answer. I'd hardly expected a reply; but now, long after, here was a letter from him introducing a girl who wanted to be my secretary!

He wrote:

DEAR PRINCESS DI MIRAMARE,

I don't ask if you remember me. I _know_ you do, because of one we have both greatly loved. I meant to thank you long ago for the kind things you took the trouble to say about my verses. The thoughts your name called up were very poignant. I put off acknowledging your note. But you will forgive me, because you are a real friend; and for that reason I venture to send you a strong personal recommendation with Miss Joyce Arnold, who will ask for a position as your secretary. I saw your advertis.e.m.e.nt in the _Times_, and showed it to Miss Arnold, offering to introduce her to you. She nursed me in France when she was a V. A. D. (she has a decoration, bye the bye, for her courage in hideous air raids), and she has been my secretary for some months. All I need say about her I can put into a few words. _She is absolutely perfect._ It will be a great wrench for me to lose her valuable help with the work I give my time to nowadays, but I am going abroad for a while, and shall not need a secretary.

You too have lived and suffered since we met! Do take from me remembrances and thoughts of a friends.h.i.+p which will never fade.

Yours sincerely always,

ROBERT LORILLARD.

I'd been too much excited when she said, "I have an introduction to you from Captain Lorillard," to do more than glance at the girl, and ask her to sit down. But as I finished the letter I looked up, to meet the gaze of a pair of gray eyes.

Caught staring, Miss Arnold blushed; and what with those eyes and that colour I thought her one of the most delightful girls I'd ever seen.

I don't mean that she was one of the prettiest. She was (and is) pretty.

But it wasn't entirely her _looks_ you thought of, in seeing her first.

It was something that shone out from her eyes, and seemed to make a sweet, happy brightness all around her. Eyes are windows, and something _must_ be on the other side, but, alas! it seldom s.h.i.+nes through. The windows are dim, or the blinds are down to cover dulness. Joyce Arnold had a living spirit behind those big, bright soul-windows that were her eyes!

As for the rest, she was tall and slim, and delicately long-limbed. She had milk-white skin with a soft touch of rose on the cheek bones; a few freckles which were like the dust from tiger-lily petals, and a charming, sensitive mouth, full and red.

"Why, of course I want you!" I said. "I'm lucky to secure you, too! How glad I am that you didn't come after I'd engaged someone else! But even if you had, I'd have managed to get rid of her one way or other."

Miss Arnold smiled. She had the most contagious smile!--though it struck me even then that it wasn't a _merry_ smile. Her face, with its piquant little nose, was meant to be gay and happy I thought; yet it wasn't either. It was more plucky and brave; and the eyes had known sadness, I felt sure. I guessed her age as twenty-three or twenty-four.

She said that she would love to work for me. The girls who were waiting to be interviewed were sent politely away in search of other engagements while I settled things with Miss Arnold. The more I looked at her, the more I talked with her, the more definite became an impression that I'd seen her before--a long time ago. At last I asked her the question: "Can it be that we've met somewhere?"