The Green Carnation Part 11

"Esme is the bravest man I know," said Reggie, taking some marmalade. "I think sometimes that he sins even more perfectly than I do. He is so varied. And he escapes those absurd things, consequences. His sin always finds him out. He is never at home to it by any chance. Why do you look at me so strangely?"

"Do I look at you strangely?" she asked, with a sudden curious nervousness. "Perhaps it is because you are so strange, so unlike the men whom I have been accustomed to. Your aims are different from theirs."

"That is impossible, Lady Locke."

"Impossible! Why?"

"Because I have no aims; I have only emotions. If we live for aims we blunt our emotions. If we live for aims, we live for one minute, for one day, for one year, instead of for every minute, every day, every year.

The moods of one's life are life's beauties. To yield to all one's moods is to really live."

Mrs. Windsor's voice was heard outside at this moment, and Lady Locke put her napkin down upon the cloth and got up. In performing this action she left her hand on the table for an instant. Lord Reggie touched it with his. She immediately drew her hand away, and her face reddened slightly. But she said nothing, and went quietly out of the room.

Mrs. Windsor was outside speaking to one of the tall footmen. When she saw her cousin she jingled her keys languidly and smiled.

"Good morning, darling," she said. "I am arranging about the choir practice to-night. We are going to entertain all the dear little choir boys to supper afterwards, and they will sing catches, and so on, so delicious by moonlight. Mr. Amarinth has invented a new catch for them.

And on Monday the schoolchildren are coming to tea on the lawn, and games. Mr. Amarinth says that charity always begins abroad, but one couldn't have a school treat in Belgrave Square, could one? It would be quite sacrilege, or bad form, which is worse. We must try and invent some new games. You and Lord Reggie must put your heads together."

"Thank you, Betty," Lady Locke said, moving rather hastily on toward the garden. Mrs. Windsor looked after her with the sudden sly suspicion of a stupid woman who fancies she is being discerning and clever.

"Something has happened," she thought. "Can Reggie have said anything already?"

She walked into the breakfast-room, where she found Lord Reggie alone.

He was holding up a table-spoon filled with marmalade to catch the light from a stray sunbeam that filtered in through the drawn blinds, and wore a rapt look, a "caught up" look, as Mrs. Windsor would have expressed it.

"Good morning," he said softly. "Is not this marmalade G.o.dlike? This marvellous, clear, amber glow, amber with a touch of red in it, almost makes me believe in an after life. Surely, surely marmalade can never die!"

"I must have been mistaken," Mrs. Windsor thought, as she expressed her sense of the eternity of jams in general in suitable language.

Meanwhile Lady Locke had gone into the garden. The weather was quite perfect. England seemed to have made a special effort, and to have determined to show what she could do in the way of a summer. The sky had been well swept of clouds, and s.h.i.+mmered in the heat almost as if it had been varnished. The garden was revelling in the growing luxury of warmth. It never looked parched; Mrs. Windsor's gardeners were too agile with the hose for that. The hundreds of roses were letting out their perfume shyly, as pretty children let out their secrets. The carnations nodded to one another against the stone wall that was clothed with Espalier pear trees. The great cedar tree spread its arms out to catch the soft warm breeze in its embrace. Over the tree-tops the swallows were circling with their little characteristic air of discreet and graceful frivolity. Tennyson would doubtless have addressed them. Lady Locke did not even notice them. She was thinking, and too deeply to sit down.

She was in that strange condition of mind that is called being angry with one's self. A miniature civil war was raging within her, in which two mental voices abused one another, and asked one another the most strangely impertinent and inappropriate questions.

One said, "What on earth are you about?"

The other, "You have no right to ask. Mind your own business."

"You are letting yourself go in a way that is humiliating."

"Indeed, I am doing nothing of the kind."

"Why did you blush, then, when he merely touched your hand? He is simply a thoughtless, foolish boy."

"I shan't talk to you any more."

But still the urgent conversation went on within. Lady Locke was, in fact, very angry with herself, and considerably surprised at her own girlishness. For that was what she called it, for want of a better name.

She was half disgusted at finding herself so young. Had life done nothing more for her than this? Was she still liable to become an easy prey to emotions that were undignified and inappropriate? It seemed as if her heart were clouded while her mind remained clear, for she saw Lord Reggie quite as he was, and yet she began to like him quite absurdly. Why she was attracted by him she could not conceive. Was it the swing of a Nature's pendulum? She had loved a hard, brusque man, and had found a certain satisfaction in his blunt and not too considerate affection; now she found something interesting in a nature that seemed boyish to softness, that was no doubt full of absurdity, that was, so people said, and he himself boasted, given over to vice, to the tasting of emotions that is unfortunately so dangerous, often so inhuman in its humanity. Perhaps it was really Lord Reggie's personal beauty or prettiness that attracted her, for, say what one will, a pretty boy steps easily into the good graces of even a strong-natured woman.

Perhaps it was his fleeting air of weakness combined with daring that drew her to him. She could not tell. She only knew, as she walked among the shy roses, that the casual touch of his hand--a hand, too, that was very like a girl's--had communicated to her quite a startlingly strong emotion. Alas! the motherly feeling seemed to have had its little day, and to have been swept off the stage on which her mental drama was being acted. It had played a princ.i.p.al part, but now an understudy appeared, more full-blooded, stronger, wilder. Lady Locke was very angry with herself among the roses that morning.

She knew she was a fool, but she knew also that she had no intention of making a fool of herself. She had too much character, too much observation, both of others and of herself, to do that.

Madame Valtesi joined her presently, leaning on her cane and fanning herself rather languidly.

"Nature has gone into quite a vulgar extreme to-day," she said. "It is distinctly too hot for propriety. One wants to sit about in one's skeleton. I wonder what Mr. Amarinth's skeleton would be like--not quite nice, I fancy. I have had bad news by the post."

"Indeed! I am sorry."

"My dearest enemy has written to say that she is going to marry again. I did not wish her so much ill as that. It is really curious. If some people have been chastised with whips, they pine after scorpions. Women have such an unwholesome craving to experience the keenest edge of pain, that I believe many of them would cut themselves with knives, like the priests of Baal, if they could not get a husband to perform the operation for them."

"You speak rather bitterly of your s.e.x."

"Do I? A nineteenth-century cynic minus vitriol would be like a goose minus sage and onions. I prefer to be a goose with those alleviations of the goose nature. My enemy married for money the first time, now she is going in for celebrity. The chief drawback to celebrity is that it is generally dressed in mourning; a kind of half mourning when it is notoriety only, and absolute weeds when it is fame. Why should cleverness and c.r.a.pe go together? People are so frightfully solemn when they have made a name, that it is like doing a term of hard labour to be with them for five minutes. Stupidity gives you a ticket-of-leave, and sheer foolish ignorance is complete emanc.i.p.ation, without even police supervision."

"I suppose it is always difficult not to take oneself seriously."

"I do not find it so. My mental proceedings generally strike me as the best joke I know, a sort of Moore and Burgess' performance, with corner men always asking riddles that n.o.body can ever answer. Mr. Amarinth is taking himself seriously this morning. He is composing a catch for the choir-boys to sing to-night after supper. It is to be parody, or, as he calls it, an elevation of 'Three blind mice,' and is to be about youth and life. It ought to be amusing."

"Mr. Amarinth is generally amusing."

"Yes, he has got hold of a good recipe for making the world laugh and think him clever. The only mistake he makes is, that he sometimes serves up only the recipe, and omits the dish that ought to be the result of it altogether. One cannot dine off a recipe, however good and ingenious it may be. It is like reading a guide-book at home instead of travelling.

Dear me, it is too hot! I shall go and lie down and read Oscar Wilde's 'Decay of Lying.' That always sends me to sleep. It is like himself, all artfulness and no art."

She strolled languidly away, still fanning herself.

Esme Amarinth and Lord Reggie were busy at the piano, inventing and composing the elevation of "Three blind mice."

Lady Locke could hear an odd little primitive sort of tune, and then their voices singing, one after the other, some words. She could only catch a few.

"Rose--white--youth, Rose--white--youth, Rose--white--youth,"

sang Lord Reggie's clear, but rather thin voice. Then Amarinth broke in with a deeper note, and words were lost.

Lady Locke listened for a moment. Then she suddenly turned and went out of the garden. She made her way to the paddock, and spent the rest of the morning in playing cricket with her boy and the curate's children.

She caught three people out, made twenty-five runs, and began to feel quite healthy-minded and cheerful again.

X.

Choir-boys at a distance in their surplices are generally charming.

Choir-boys close by in mundane suits, bought at a cheap tailor's, or sewed together at home, are not always so attractive. The cherubs' wings with which imagination has endowed them drop off, and they subside into cheeky, and sometimes scrubby, little boys, with a tendency towards peppermints, and a strong bias in favour of slang and tricks. The choir-boys of Chenecote, however, had been well-trained under Mr.

Smith's ascetic eye; and though he had not drained the humanity entirely out of them, he had persuaded them to perfect cleanliness, if not to perfect G.o.dliness. They appeared at Mrs. Windsor's cottage that evening in an amazing condition of s.h.i.+ny rosiness, with round cheeks that seemed to focus the dying rays of the setting sun, and hair brushed perfectly flat to their little bullet-shaped heads, in which the brains worked with much excitement and antic.i.p.ation. Their eyes were mostly blue and innocent, and they were all afflicted with a sort of springy shyness which led them at one moment to jumps of joy, and at another to blushes and smiling speechlessness. They were altogether nave and invigorating, and even Madame Valtesi, peering at them through her tortoise sh.e.l.l eyegla.s.s, was moved to a dry approbation. She nodded her head at them two or three times, and remarked--

"Boys are much nicer than girls. They giggle less, and smile more. In surplices these would be quite fetching--quite."

Mrs. Windsor, too, was quite desolated by the fact that they had not come in what she persisted in calling their little nightgowns. She expressed her sorrow to the head boy, who occasionally sang "Oh! for the wings of a dove!" as a solo at even-song, and was consequently looked up to with deep respect by all the village.