The Rustle of Silk Part 20

And that was too much for Feo. She threw the clothes back and kicked up her heels like a schoolgirl. But before she could congratulate her lady's maid on a delightful bit of acting and an egregious piece of impertinence that was worth all the Sundays in London to watch, the telephone bell rang and brought her back to facts.

"Just see who that is, will you? And before you say I'm here, find out who it is."

"Yes, my lady," said Lola. The little game was over. It hadn't lasted long. But if it had put her ladys.h.i.+p into a generous mood--

It was Mrs. Winchfield, calling up from Aylesbury.

"Oh, well," said Feo, with the remembrance of great dullness. "Give me the 'phone and get my bath ready. And tell them to let me have lots of breakfast in half an hour, here. I could eat a horse."

"Very good, my lady."

And when Lola returned, having carried out her orders and still tingling with the triumph of having proved her courage and her wit, she found Lady Feo lying in the middle of the room, on her back, doing exercises.

"All the dullards have left the Winchfields'," she said. "There's to be a pucca man there this afternoon, one I've had my eye on for weeks.

Quick's the word, Lola. Get me dressed and into the car. This is Sunday and I'm in London. It's perfectly absurd. I shall stay the night, of course, and I shan't want you till to-morrow at six. What'll you do?

Lunch at the Carlton?"

"I shall go home, my lady." But the twinkle returned.

"Oh, yes, of course. I spoilt your holiday, didn't I? By the way, does your mother know that you're in society now?"

And Lola replied, "The bath is ready, my lady."

And once more Feo laughed, lit a cigarette and went towards the bathroom. Here she turned and looked at the now mouse-like Lola with a peculiarly mischievous glint in her eyes. "Wouldn't it be a frightful spree if I went after Peter Chalfont and told him all I know about you?"

Two minutes later she was singing in the bath.

Tell Peter Chalfont!-But Lola knew that this was an empty threat. Mr.

Fallaray's wife was a sportsman. _Mr. Fallaray's wife_.

For the first time in all this business, these words stood out in ghastly clearness, with all that they meant to Lady Feo and her, who was "after" Mr. Fallaray. Was she, Lola, a sportsman too? The question came suddenly, like a bomb dropped from a Zeppelin, and drew the girl up short. But the answer followed quickly and it was Yes, yes, because this woman was _not_ Fallaray's wife and never had been.

But there was more than a little irony in the fact that she liked Lady Feo, was grateful to her, had seen many of her best points and so far as the Carlton episode went, recognized in her a most unusual creature, imbued with a spirit of mischief which was almost like that of a child.

And yet for all that, she _was_ Fallaray's wife.-It was more than conceivable, as Lola could guess, that if the whole story were confided in detail, with the de Breze background all brought out, Lady Feo would first of all laugh and then probably help her little lady's maid for the fun of the thing, and to be able, impishly, one night when she met Fallaray coming back from the House worn and round-shouldered, to stand in front of him, jumping to conclusions, and say, "Ha, ha! Sooner or later you _all_ come off your pedestal, don't you? But look out, Master Messiah. If the world spots you in the first of your human games, pop goes the weasel, and you may as well take to growing roses."

Still singing, and back again in the highest spirits, Feo breakfasted in her room and Lola dressed her for the country. Not once but many times during the hour that followed she endeavored to pump Lola about Chalfont and as to the number of times that she had gone out into "life." But Lola was a match for her and evaded all questions; sometimes with a perfectly straight face, sometimes with an answering twinkle in her eye.

Although she was piqued by the girl's continued elusiveness, Feo was filled with admiration at her extraordinary self-control,-a thing that she respected, being without it herself. And then Lola, with a little sigh, and as though drawn at last, got to _her_ point in this strange and intimate talk. "I'm afraid I shall never be able to see Sir Peter again," she said sadly. "I have only one evening frock and he has seen it twice."

At which Feo went to her wardrobe, flung open the doors, took down dress after dress, threw them on her bed and said, "Take your choice. Of course, you can't always wear the same old frock. Sir Galahad has a quick eye. Take what stockings you need also and help yourself to my shoes. There are plenty more where these came from,-you little devil. If you catch that man, and I shan't be a bit surprised if you do, you will have done something that nearly every girl in society has taken a shot at during the last five years. I make one bargain with you, Lola, in return for these things. Spend your honeymoon at Chilton Park and let me present you at Court."

An icy hand had touched her heart again. A honeymoon at Chilton Park,-with Chalfont.

IV

And so Lola was free to go home again and spend the remainder of Sunday with her people, after all. But when, having tidied up and dressed herself, she ran downstairs into the servants' sitting room on her way to the area steps, there sat Simpkins, a crestfallen and tragic figure, looking at a horizon which no longer contained the outline of his dream upon the banks of the Thames. He got up as Lola entered,-done for, but in the spirit of a protector, a Cromwellian spirit. "Where 'ad you bin last night?" he asked, "in them clothes?" He had not slept for thinking of it. His Lola, dressed like a lady, coming in with a tear-stained face, late at night, alone, from a devouring world. All his early chapel stuff had been revived at the sight. Disappointment had stirred it up.

Another cross-examination! Wasn't the world large enough for so small a little figure to escape notice?

"Dear old Simpky," she said, with that wide-eyed candor of hers, "I'm in such a hurry. With any luck I shall just be able to catch the bus that will take me home to lunch."

But Simpkins put his back against the door. "No," he said. "Not like that. Even if I've lost yer, I love yer, and it's my job to see you don't come to no 'arm. You've got to tell me what you're doing."

There was something in the man's eyes and in the whiteness of his face that warned Lola immediately of the need to be careful. Her mother had said that Simpkins was a good man with something of ecstasy in his nature, and she guessed intuitively that the latter might take the form eventually, in his ignorance and his love, of a dangerous watchfulness.

So she was very patient and quiet and commonplace, remembering a similar scene which had taken place with Treadwell outside Mrs. Rumbold's battered house.

"I went to a concert with a married friend of mine. Lady Feo gave me the frock. It's very kind of you to worry, Simpky. And now, please--"

And after a moment's hesitation Simpkins opened the door and with a curious dignity gave the girl her freedom. He loved her and believed in her. She was Lola and she was good, and but for some catastrophic accident she might be engaged to be married to him.

But Lola didn't go immediately. She turned round and put her hand on the valet's arm. "What are you going to do?" she asked, affectionately concerned.

"There isn't anything for me to do," he said, "now."

"Come home with me."

But he shook his head. "I couldn't," he said. "Your father is a friend of mine and might slap me on the back and tell me to go on 'oping-and there isn't any-_is_ there?"

And she said, "No, Simpky dear. I'm sorry to say there isn't. But you can't sit here looking at the carpet with the sun s.h.i.+ning and so much to see. Why not come on the bus as far as Queen's Road and then go for a walk. It would do you good."

And he said, "Nothing can do me good."

And she could see that he had begun to revel in his pain, and nurse it, and elevate it to a great tragedy. And for the first time she recognized in this man a menace to her scheme. He loved her too well and she had made him a fanatic.

This scheme of hers, so like one of the Grimm's fairy tales in which the woodcutter's daughter dared to love the prince,-was it to get all over the town? Miss Breezy had a friend in Scotland Yard, a detective. Lady Feo was on the watch, and here was Simpkins turned into a protector. And all the while Prince Fallaray lived in the same house and did nothing more than just remember her name, thinking that she was a friend of the woman who called herself his wife.

Never mind; the sun was s.h.i.+ning, tears had dried, courage had returned, frocks and shoes and stockings had come and the impossible was one of the things that nearly always happened.

An hour later the door of the watchmaker's shop opened in answer to her knock. There stood the fat man with his beaming smile of welcome and surprise, and out of the little parlor came an enticing aroma of roast lamb and mint sauce.

V

That evening, controlling her excitement and anxious to make her people happy, Lola went to the family chapel with them,-the watchmaker in a gargantuan tail coat, a pair of pepper and salt trousers, and a bowler hat in which he might have been mistaken for the mayor of Caudebac-sur-Seine or a deputy representing one of the smaller manufacturing towns of France. Beside him his little wife stood bluntly for England. Everything that she wore told the story not only of her birth and tradition but of that of several grandmothers. There must have been at that moment hundreds of thousands of just such women, dressed in a precisely similar manner, on their way to answer the summons of a bell which was not very optimistic,-the Church having fallen rather low in popular favor. It had so many rivals and some of them were, it must be confessed, more in the mood of the times.

It was a sight worth seeing to watch these Breezys ambling up Queen's Road, proudly, with their little girl. And it was because Lola knew that she was conferring a great treat upon her parents that she submitted herself to an hour and a half of something worse to her than boredom.

Only a little while ago she had looked forward to the evening service on Sundays and had been gently moved by the hymns, by the reading from the Scripture and even by the illiterate impromptus of the minister; and she had found, in moments that were dull, the usual feminine pleasure in casting surrept.i.tious glances about the small, plain unbeautiful building to see what Mrs. This wore or Mrs. That. But now she found herself going through it all like a fish out of water. As Ellingham had outgrown Lady Feo, so had she outgrown that flat, uninspired, and rather cruel service, in which the name of G.o.d was always mentioned as a monster of vengeance, without love and without forgiveness, and with a suspicious eye to the keyhole of every house. With a sort of shame she found herself finding fault with the rhymes of the hymns, which every now and then were dreadful, and were, oh, so badly sung; and when a smug-faced, uneducated man came forward, shut his eyes, placed himself in an att.i.tude of elaborate piety and let himself go with terrible unction, treating G.o.d and death and life and joy and humanity as though they were b.u.t.ter, or worse still, margarine, goose flesh broke out upon her and a curious self-consciousness as though she were intruding upon a scene at which she had no right to be present. Away and away back, church had not been like this to her. Out of a dream she seemed to hear the deep reverberation of a great organ, the high sweet voices of unseen boys and the soft murmur of an old scholar retelling the simple story of Christ's pathetic struggle, and of G.o.d's mercy.-Oh, the commonplace, the misinterpretation, the hypocrisy, the ignorance. No wonder the busses were filled, she thought, the commons crowded on the outskirts of the city. To her there was more religion in one shaft of evening sun than in all those chapels put together.

It was with thankfulness and relief that Lola went back with her parents to the street and turned into Queen's Road again, which wore a Sunday expression. Gone for a brief time were the itinerant musicians, the innumerable perambulators, the ogling flappers with their cheap silk stockings and misshapen legs, the retired colonels eking out a grumbling living on infinitesimal pensions.

"Let's take a little walk," said Mrs. Breezy. "It's nice now. The Gardens look more like the country in the twilight."

"Of course," said Breezy, "walk. Best exercise in the world. Oils a man up." But all the same he didn't intend to go far. Athleticism was a pose with him. He had grown so fat sitting on that backless chair behind the gla.s.s screen, looking into the works of sick watches like a poor man's doctor who treated a long line of ailing people. If it wasn't the mainspring, then it was over-winding. Very simple.

But Lola steered them away from Kensington Gardens because soldiers were there under canvas, and Chalfont was in command of the London district, and it might happen easily that all of a sudden that purring car would draw up at the curb and her name be called by the man with the cork arm.

"Let's go the other way," she said, "for a change. I love to look at all the houses that are just the same and wonder what the people are like who live in them, and whether they're just the same."