CHAPTER ONE
There is on an olive-covered slope near the Mediterranean a certain shabby pink villa which is remarkable for one thing. In it, years ago, dwelt for a long time a man and a woman who, having no legal right to love, yet not only loved, but were perfectly happy. They lived almost alone, they had little money, the house was shabby even then, they had few servants and but indifferent Italian food, and nothing but old-fashioned tin baths to wash in. Yet they were English, and they were happy because they loved each other so much that nothing else mattered. Now this phrase about nothing else mattering is as common in love affairs as the pathetic abuse of the poor old word eternity; but in the case I instance, it fitted. Nothing else did matter. Not even, to any extent, the presence of the one child that had come to them. Contrary to all ethical and reasonable law, these two sinners were happy in their pink house by the sea, and years after they had left it there seemed to hang about the old place a kind of atmosphere of romance, as if the sun and the moon, that have seen so much changeableness, loved still to look down at the place where two human beings had been faithful to each other.
These two people were Pamela Lensky's father and mother, and hither came, early in the November that followed her meeting with Victor Joyselle, Lady Brigit Mead as the guest of the Lenskys. And here she stayed, while the mild, sunny winter days drifted by unmarked, a silent, ungenial guest.
The Lenskys were happy people and enjoyed life as it came. He, a slim, blond, exceedingly well-dressed little man, was attached to the Russian Embassy in London, in some more or less permanent quality, having given up his secretaryship after a miserable sojourn in a Continental city that he and his wife both hated.
They had money enough to live comfortably, in the quiet way they both liked, in England, and a year before that November his mother had died, leaving them the richer by a few hundred pounds a year. So they were well-off in the sense that they had plenty of money to spend, and the certainty that their children would one day be in still better circumstances.
One day in January Mrs. de Lensky was sitting on the floor in the brick-floored nursery, building a Moorish palace for her son, aged eighteen months.
She was a thin woman of thirty-six or seven, with large dark eyes, somewhat hollow now, and a brown vivid face on which life had put several deep lines—all of which, though unbeautiful in themselves, were good lines, and made for character.
"And here's the tower in which the little boy lived," she said to the baby, who, very fat and peculiarly blond, regarded her rapturously, "and here's the dungeon where they put him when he was naughty. If Thaddeus bites Elvira again," she added gravely, "what will happen to him?"
But Thaddeus, who was possessed of the courage incidental to a sound digestion and dormant nerves, only laughed and showed the wicked fangs that had bitten the nurse.
It was a pleasant, bare, sunny room, the rug covered with shabby toys, the walls nearly hidden by pictures from illustrated papers. Through an open door one saw a table at which sat a little girl of six, bending over a book with the unmistakable air of a child learning something uninteresting.
"Eliza!"
"Yes, mother?" Eliza looked up. She too was blonde, but her eyes were dark.
"Where is Pammy, dear?"
"I don't know, mother. Perhaps she's eating plaster again," suggested Eliza, with the alertness that even charming children sometimes show when face to face with the crime of some contemporary.
Pam did not laugh. Plaster-eating may be funny in other people's children, but seven-year-old Pammy, her adopted daughter, was too old to persist in the habit, and punishment seemed to have no effect on it. The house was old, and the walls defective in many places, and Pammy's joy was to dig out bits of ancient plaster and consume it on the sly. It was presumably bad for her stomach and indubitably bad for her character, as the child persisted in it with a quiet effrontery that baulked discipline. So Mrs. de Lensky rose, and bidding Eliza look after the baby, started in search of the wicked one.
January was spring at the Villa Arcadie, and as she went downstairs a strong scent of heliotrope and narcissi was wafted towards her. A boy stood in the hall carrying a basket.
"Buon giorno, Beppino. Oh, what lovely flowers! Tell Giovanni to bring them to me in the salone, will you?" Crossing the hall she went into the dining-room, and there, as she had expected, sat Pammy.
Years before, when she had, half out of kindness, half out of loneliness, adopted the little new-born girl, she had never meant to marry. And when she did marry, neither she nor her husband wished to get rid of the child. But the result had not been particularly satisfactory, for Pammy had grown to be a very fat, very stolid person, with no nose to speak of and no sense of humour at all, and every day that passed seemed to leave her a little more unattractive than she had been the day before.
Now, at seven, she was as tall as most children of ten, immensely fat, with pendulous red cheeks that in spite of cold cream and soft water always looked as though they had just been rubbed with a grater. Her hair, long and fair, was dank, hanging in two emaciated pig-tails nearly to her waist, and her nails—another ineradicable trick—bitten to the deepest depths possible.
"Pammy, dear, what have you been doing?" inquired Pam, gently.
"Looking out the window—and I ate some more plaster." Stolidly, with lack-lustre eyes, the culprit gazed at her benefactor.
Pam sighed, but her mouth twitched. "I asked you not to."
"I know. I didn't mean to, but—it looked so good."
"'Tous les gouts sont dans la nature,' my dear," quoted Lensky, coming in at the open window, "there are even people who like German bands!" Looking down at Pammy through his eyeglass, the sun fell full on his head, betraying an incipient bald patch. Otherwise Lensky had aged not at all since his marriage.
"I saw Lady Brigit just now," he said, suddenly, "down in the olive grove. I think something has happened. She looked—queer."
Pam started. "Poor dear—I'll go and speak to her—only, you know, she never says a word to me about her trouble, whatever it is. I wonder——"
"Love story, of course," returned Lensky, briefly. "When a woman looks like that it always is a love story."
"Yes, but—Théo is such a dear! And I know he writes to her."
"Then it isn't Théo. He's not the only man she knows."
Pam frowned thoughtfully. "That's true, but—she is so beautiful."
Lensky smiled at her, and on his strangely white, shrewd, worldly-wise face the smile looked like a sudden flash of sunlight. "Yes, she is without a doubt very beautiful, but——"
"'But'?"
"I think she is taking her trouble the wrong way. She is bearing it without grinning, and the grinning is to my mind the greater half."
"But remember what her surroundings at home are, Jack. She had had no discipline whatever; her mother is horrid——"
Lensky did not answer. Somehow he never cared to hold forth on the subject of mothers to his wife.
And then, thin, erect, light-footed, Pam went out from the house in which her strange childhood had been lived, and turning to her left passed down the dangerously mossy marble steps, and into the olive grove.