The Arbiter Part 28

"Don't you like these quarters?" he said. "We think they are perfectly delightful."

"So do I," Wentworth said, "so do I. They are so quiet."

"My wife wants to be quiet," said Rendel, half indicating Rachel, who was lying back in a garden chair, some knitting in her hands.

"How are you, Mrs. Rendel?" said Wentworth, and he hastened forward to greet her.

She put out her hand with a smile and shook hands with him, apparently not surprised at seeing him, or particularly interested.

"You are certainly most delightfully cool here in the shade," he said.

"It is awfully hot in that promenade."

"It must be," said Rachel.

"How long have you been here?" Wentworth went on, sitting down.

"How long is it?" said Rachel, with a slightly puzzled look, looking at Rendel. "Only a few days, isn't it?"

"Yes, not quite a week. My wife has not been well. We were recommended here that she might do the cure."

"I see," Wentworth said, somewhat relieved at finding himself on the way to an explanation. "Well, this is a splendid place, I believe, for the people that it cures," he added sapiently.

"No doubt," Rendel said.

There was another pause.

"Then that is why we have not seen you at the Casino," Wentworth said.

"One can't avoid running up against people one knows at every turn here."

"Is that so?" said Rendel, a note of anxiety in his voice. "We have not run up against any one yet."

"Oh! dear me, yes," said Wentworth, unconscious that each of the names he might enumerate would represent to Rendel a possible inexorable judge. "Half London is here: Lady Chaloner, Pateley--all sorts of people."

"Pateley?" said Rendel, the blood rus.h.i.+ng to his face at the a.s.sociation of ideas called up in his mind by that name.

"Of course," said Wentworth. "Pateley, flouris.h.i.+ng like the bay-tree.

They say he is making thousands, and he looks as if he were."

"Out of the _Arbiter_?" asked Rendel.

"The _Arbiter_, I suppose, or something else. But I have no doubt he would tell you if you asked him. He does not impress me as being one of the very reserved kind."

"I don't know," said Rendel. "I don't suppose Pateley ever says more than he means to say, with all his air of hearty communicativeness."

"Well, I daresay not," said Wentworth. "The man's very good company after all; and as long as none of our secrets are in his keeping, it doesn't matter particularly."

Rendel said nothing. He felt he could not meet Pateley face to face at this moment.

"What do you do, then, all day here," said Wentworth, "if you don't drink the waters, and don't go to the Casino, and don't play Bridge?"

"I don't know. I don't do very much," said Rendel, with an involuntary accent in the words that made Wentworth ponder over the undesirability of marrying a wife who is in mourning and depressed.

"You should go into the wood," said Wentworth, "as the Germans do. We found a lot of them the other day singing part-songs out of little books. There is a band of them here called the Society of the United Thrushes, composed of the most respectable and most middle-aged ladies of the district."

"That sounds charming," said Rendel.

"Look here," said Wentworth, "if you don't care to walk alone, do let's walk together. One can go up here and along the wood for miles. We'll have good long stretches as we used to at Oxford. What do you think, Mrs. Rendel? Don't you think it would be a good thing for him?"

"Very," said Rachel with a smile. "I think he ought to go and walk."

"That's capital," said Wentworth. "Let's do that to-morrow, shall we?"

"I should like it very much," said Rendel.

But the next day the weather broke, and was unsettled for three days. On the Tuesday morning, happily for the bazaar and the big tent in the grounds of the Casino, the sun shone out again, and everything was radiant as before. Wentworth turned up at the pavilion in the forenoon and persuaded Rendel to make a day of it. The two started off together through the wood, the scented air floating round them, and bringing to Rendel, as he strode along with a congenial companion, a sense of mental and physical relief as though the atmosphere of both kinds that he was breathing were as different from that which had weighed him down a fortnight ago as the scent of the aromatic pines was from the air of the London streets. Wentworth was full of talk, of a kind it must be confessed which left his hearer at the end without any very distinct impression of what it had been about, although it pa.s.sed the time agreeably and genially. He had his usual detached air, which Rendel had always been accustomed to find a relief as opposed to his own strenuous att.i.tude, of standing aloof as an amused spectator of human contingencies.

"I haven't seen you for ever so long," Wentworth was saying. "What became of you at the end of the season? You vanished somehow, didn't you?"

"We were in mourning, you know," Rendel replied.

"Ah, to be sure, yes, Sir William Gore died," said Wentworth, attuning his voice to what he considered a suitable key, on the a.s.sumption that Rendel would feel still more bound to be loyal to his father-in-law now than when, as he put it to himself, the "old humbug" was alive. "Poor Mrs. Rendel, she looks as if it had been a great blow to her."

"Yes," said Rendel, "it was; and she has been ill besides." And he told Wentworth briefly of what had happened to Rachel, and the condition she was in, and the rea.s.suring hopes held out by the doctors that she would almost certainly recover her normal state.

"I am very glad to hear that," said Wentworth cheerily. "Then you must come to London and start life again, Rendel, now you are free. Sir William Gore was rather a responsibility, I daresay."

"Yes," said Rendel, "he was."

"Let me see," said Wentworth, "it was just about when he died, I suppose, that Stamfordham published that sensational agreement with Germany?"

"Yes," said Rendel, "it was the day before he died."

"Ah," said Wentworth, "the day before? Then of course you didn't realise the excitement it was. By Jove! of course you know I'm not 'in' all that sort of thing myself, but I must say I never saw such a fuss and fizz as it was. The way it was sprung on people too! It was an awfully bold thing to do, you know; but it turned up trumps after all, that's the point. Stamfordham isn't like any body else, and that's the fact."

"What's that place we are coming to through the trees?" said Rendel.

"Why, that's it," said Wentworth. "That's where we shall get luncheon.

They always have something ready for people who drop in."

"It isn't crowded, is it?" said Rendel.

"My dear fellow," replied Wentworth, "there is never anybody. I have been there twice since I came; once there was a German doctor, and once there was n.o.body."

"All right," said Rendel.

"You are sure to get veal," Wentworth said. "In Germany, whatever else is wanting, you can always get a veal cutlet to slake your thirst with, after the longest and hottest walk."

"I shall be quite content," said Rendel.