The Rustle of Silk

by Cosmo Hamilton

IV

Something happened that afternoon which might have swung Lola’s life on to an entirely different set of rails and put Fallaray even farther out of her reach. The unrest which had followed the War had made the acquisition of servants very difficult. The young country girls who had been glad enough to go into service in the large houses now preferred to stick to their factories, because they were able to have free evenings. The housekeeper at Chilton Park was very short-handed and in consequence asked Lola and Mrs. Malwood’s maid if they would make themselves useful. Mrs. Malwood’s didn’t see it. She had been well bitten by the trades-union bug and, therefore, was not going to do anything of any sort except her specific duties, and those as carelessly as she could. The housekeeper could go and hang herself. Violet, the girl in question, intended to lie on her bed and read Scarlet Bits until she was needed by her mistress. Lola, whose blood was good, was very glad to lend a hand. With perfect willingness she committed an offence against lady’s maids which shocked Violet to the very roots of her system. She donned a little cap and apron and turned herself into a parlor maid, a creature, as all the world knows, many pegs of the ladder beneath her own position as a lady’s maid. When, therefore, tea was served on the terrace, Lola assisted the butler, looking daintier than ever, and so utterly free from coquetry, because there was no man in the world except Fallaray for her, that she might have been a little ghost.

But the trained eye of Gordon Macquarie looked her over immediately. He turned to Lady Feo, to whom he had not addressed a word for twenty minutes, and said with a sudden flash of enthusiasm, “Ye gods and little fishes, what a picture of a girl! Wouldn’t she look perfectly wonderful in the front line of the chorus on the O. P. side! An actress too, I bet you. Look at the way she’s pretending not to be alive. Of course she knows how perfectly sweet she looks in that saucy make-up.”

If Mr. Gordon Macquarie had deliberately gone out of his way to discover the most brilliant method of sentencing himself to the lethal chamber he could not have been more successful than by using that outpouring of gushing words. Feo had fully realized, from the moment that she had left the dining room, that in acquiring Gordon Macquarie she had committed the gravest faux pas of her life. Not only was he a bounder but he did not possess the imagination and the sense of proportion to know that in being invited down to Chilton Park by Lady Feo he had metaphorically been decorated with a much coverted order. His egotism and his whining fright had made him unable to maintain his fourth wall and at least imitate the ways of a gentleman. Never before in her history had Feo spent an afternoon so unpleasant and so humiliating, and now, to be obliged to listen to a pæan of praise about her maid, if you please, was the last straw. Any other woman would probably have risen from her place among her cushions, followed Lola into the house and either boxed her ears or ordered her back to town.

But Feo had humor, and although her pride was wounded and she would willingly have given orders for Macquarie to be shot through the head, she pursued a slightly different method. She rose, gave Macquarie a most curious smile, waited until Lola had retired from the terrace, followed her and called her back just as she was about to disappear into the servants’ quarters. “Lola,” she said, “run up at once and pack my things. We are going back to town. Say nothing to anybody. Be nippy,” the word was Simpkins’s, “and in the meantime I will telephone for a car. Do you understand?”

“Yes, my lady.” In Lola’s voice there must have been something of the tremendous disappointment that swept over her. But it was ignored or unnoticed by her mistress. To leave Chilton Park almost as soon as she had seen it,—not to be able to creep secretly into Fallaray’s room and stand there all alone and get from it the feeling of the man, the vibrations of his thoughts,—not to be able to steal out in the moonlight and wander among the Italian gardens made magic by the white light and picture to herself the tall ascetic lonely figure in front of whom some night she intended to move Heaven and earth to stand.

But she turned away quickly, obeyed orders without a single question and ran up the wide staircase blindly, because, for the moment, her eyes were filled with tears. But only for the moment. After all, there was nothing in this visit that could help her scheme along. She must keep her courage and her nerve, continue her course of study, watch her opportunities and be ready to seize the real chance when it presented itself. Lady Feo was bored,—which, of course, was a crime. Macquarie was a false coin. Lola could have told her that. How many exactly similar men had ogled her in the street and attempted to capture her attention. She had been amazed to see him join Lady Feo at Paddington station that morning. She instantly put him down as a counter jumper from a second-rate linen draper’s in the upper reaches of Oxford Street.—She was ready for Feo when she came up to put on her hat. Her deft fingers had worked quickly, and she was alert and bright, in spite of her huge disappointment.

It was characteristic of Feo to break up her houseparty with the most unscrupulous disregard for the convenience of the other members of it, and to care nothing for the fact that she would spoil the pleasure of her father. He and her brother, her little friend, Mrs. Malwood, and the two disappointing men must pay her bill. She never paid. It was characteristic of her, also, to turn her mind quickly, before leaving, upon some other way of obtaining amusement, as she dreaded to face a dull and barren Sunday in London. She remembered suddenly that Penelope Winchfield, one of the “gang,” had opened her house near Aylesbury, which was only a short drive from Princes Risborough. It was a brain wave. So she went to the telephone and rang up, invited herself for the week-end and went finally into the car and slipped away with Lola without saying good-by to a single person. “How I hate this place,” she said. “Something always goes wrong here.” And she turned and made a face at the old building like a naughty child.

Any other woman—at any rate, any other woman whose upbringing had been as harum-scarum as Feo’s—would have given Lola her notice and dropped her like an old shoe. But she had humor.