The Rustle of Silk

by Cosmo Hamilton

V

Having now no incentive to go either to her room or anywhere else, her new plan dying at its birth, Feo remained in the corridor, standing with her back against one of the pieces of Flemish tapestry which Simpkins had pointed out to Lola. She folded her arms, crossed one foot over the other, and dipped her chin, not frowning, not with any sort of self-pity, but with elevated eyebrows and her mouth half open, incredulous.

“Of course I’m not surprised at Edmund’s being smashed on a girl,” she told herself. “How the Dickens he’s gone on so long is beyond belief. I hope she’s a nice child,—she must be young; he’s forty; I hope he’s not been bird-limed by one of the afterwar virgins who are prowling the earth for prey. I’m very ready to make way gracefully and have a dash at something else, probably hospital work, sitting on charity boards with the dowagers who wish to goodness they had dared to be as loose as I’ve been. But—but what I want to know is, who’s shuffling the cards? Why the devil am I getting this long run of Yarboroughs? I can’t hold anything,—anything at all, except an occasional knave like Macquarie. Why this run of bad luck now? Why not last year, next year, next week? Why should Edmund deliberately choose to-day, of all days, to come back, with no warning, and put a heavy foot bang in the middle of my scheme of retribution? Is it—meant? I mean it’s too beautifully neat to be an accident. Is it the good old upper cut one always gets for playing the giddy ox, I wonder?—Mf! Interesting. Very. More to come, too, probably, seeing that I’m still on my feet. I’ve got to get it in the solar plexus and slide under the ropes, I suppose, now they’re after me. ‘Every guilty deed holds in itself the seed of retribution and undying pain.’ Well, I’m a little nervous, like some poor creature on the way to the operating table; and—and I’ll tell you what else I am, by George! I’m eaten up with curiosity to know who the girl is, and how she managed to get into the line of vision of this girl-blind man,—and I don’t quite know how I shall be able to contain myself until I satisfy this longing.—Oh, hullo, Lola. This is good. I didn’t expect you till the morning. But I don’t mind saying that I’ve never been so pleased to see anybody as you, my dear. Had a good time?”

She went to the top of the stairs and waited for Lola to come up, smiling and very friendly. She was fond of this girl. She had missed her beyond words,—not only for her services, which were so deft, so sure-fingered, but also for her smile, her admiration. Good little Lola; clever little Lola too, by George. That Carlton episode,—most amusing. And this recent business, which, she remembered, was touched with a sort of—what? Was ecstasy the word? Good fun to know what had happened. Thank the Lord there was going to be a pause between knock-outs, after all.

Dressed in her perfectly plain ready-made walking frock, her own shoes and a neat little hat that she had bought in Queen’s Road, Bayswater, Lola came upstairs quickly with her eyes on Feo’s face. She seemed hardly to be able to hold back the words that were trembling on her lips. It was obvious that she had been crying; her lids were red and swollen. But she didn’t look unhappy or miserable, as a girl might if everything had gone wrong; nor in the least self-conscious. She wore neither her expression as lady’s maid, nor that of the young widow to whom some one had given London; but of a mother whose boy was in trouble and must be got out of it, at once, please, and helped back to his place among other good boys.

“Will you come down to your room, Lady Feo?” she asked. “Mr. Lytham will be here in a few minutes and I want you to see him.”

Lytham—young Lochinvar! How priceless if he were the man for whom she had dressed this child up.

“Why, of course. But what’s the matter, Lola? You’ve been crying. You look fey.”

Lola put her hand on Feo’s arm, urgently. “Please come down,” she said. “I want to tell you something before Mr. Lytham comes.”

Well, this seemed to be her favor-granting day, as well as one of those during which Fate had recognized her as being on his book. First Edmund and then Lola,—there was not much to choose between their undisguised egotism. And the lady’s maid business,—that was all over, plainly. George Lytham,—who’d have thought it? If Lola were in trouble, she had a friend in that house.

And so, without any more questions, she went back to her futuristic den which, after her brief talk with Fallaray, seemed to belong to a very distant past. But before Lola could begin to tell her story, a footman made his appearance and said that Mr. Lytham was in the hall.

“Show him in here,” said Feo and turned to watch the door.

She wondered if she would be able to tell from his expression what was the meaning of her being brought into this,—a disinclination on his part to take the blame, or an earnest desire to do what was right under the circumstances? She never imagined the possibility of his not knowing that Lola was a lady’s maid dressed in the feathers of the jay. Unlike Peter Chalfont, who accepted without question, Lytham held things up to the light and examined their marks.

There was, however, nothing uncomfortable in his eyes. On the contrary, he looked more than ever like the captain, Feo thought, of a County Cricket Club, healthy, confident and fully alive to his enormous responsibility. He wore a suit of thin blue flannels, the M. C. C. tie under a soft low collar, and brown shoes that had become almost red from long and expert treatment. He didn’t shake hands like a German, with a stiff deference contradicted by a mackerel eye, or with the tender effusion of an actor who imagines that women have only to come under his magnetism to offer themselves in sacrifice. Bolt upright, with his head thrown back, he shook hands with an honest grip, without deference and without familiarity, like a good cricketer.

“How do you do, Lady Feo,” he said, in his most masculine voice. “It’s kind of you to see us.” Then he turned to Lola with a friendly smile. “Your telephone message caught me just as I was going to dash off for a game of tennis after a hard day, Madame de Brézé,” he added.

Oh, so this was another of the de Brézé episodes, was it, like the one with Beauty Chalfont. Curiosity came hugely to Feo’s rescue. Here, at any rate, was a break in her run of bad luck, very welcome. What on earth could be the meaning of this quaint meeting,—George Lytham, the earnest worker pledged to reconstruction, and this enigmatic child, who might have stood for Joan of Arc? If Lola had caught Lytham and brought him to Dover Street to receive substantiation, Feo was quite prepared to lie on her behalf. What a joke to palm off the daughter of a Queen’s Road jeweler on the early-Victorian mother of the worthy George!

“Well?” she said, looking from one to the other with a return of her impish delight in human experimentation.

“Mr. Lytham can explain this better than I can,” said Lola quietly.

“I’m not so sure about that, but I’ll do my best.”

He drew a chair forward and sat down. Under ordinary circumstances, where there was the normal amount of happiness, or even the mutual agreement to give and take that goes with the average marriage, his task would have been a difficult one. But in the case of Feo and his chief he felt able to deal with the matter entirely without self-consciousness, or delicacy in the choice of words.

“I needn’t worry you with any of the details of the new political situation, Lady Feo. You know them, probably, as well as I do. But what you don’t know, because the moment isn’t yet ripe for the publication of our plans, is that Mr. Fallaray has been chosen to lead the Anti-waste Party, which is concentrating its forces to rout the old gang out of politics at the next General Election, give Parliament back its lost prestige, and do away with the pernicious influence of the Press Lords. A big job, by Jove, which Fallaray alone can achieve.”

“Well?” repeated Feo, wondering what in the world this preamble had to do with the case in question.

“Well, at the end of the meeting of my party yesterday, I was sent down to Chilton Park to tell Mr. Fallaray our plans. I was stultified to be told that he had decided to chuck politics.”

“And go in for love. Yes, I know. But what has this got to do with Lola,—with Madame de Brézé?”

That was the point that beat Feo, the thing that filled her with a sort of impatient astonishment. Was this uncommunicative girl, who seemed to her to be so essentially feminine, whose métier in life was obviously to purr under the touch of a masculine hand, who had been given a holiday to go on a love chase with Chalfont, presumably, somehow connected with politics? It was incredible.

“Oh, you’ve seen Fallaray.”

“Yes, my dear man, yes! He broke the news to me the moment he came in,”

“Did he ask you to give him a divorce?”

“He did, without a single stutter.”

“And you said——”

“But—my dear young Lochinvar, may I make so bold as to ask why this perfectly personal matter has to be discussed in the open, so to speak?” She made her meaning unmistakably clear. This girl was not so close a friend as he might have been led to suppose.

“What did you say to Mr. Fallaray?” asked Lola, leaning forward eagerly.

And Lytham waited with equal anxiety for an answer.

It did not come for an extraordinary moment and only then in the form of a tangent. Feo turned slowly round to the girl who was in the habit of dressing her and putting her to bed. With raised eyebrows and an air of amused amazement, she ran her eyes over every inch of her, as though trying very hard to find something to palliate the insufferable cheek that she was apparently expected to swallow.

“My good Lola,” she said finally, “what the devil has this got to do with you?”

“Madame de Brézé is the dea ex machina,” said Lytham, evenly.

It didn’t seem to him to be necessary to lead up to this announcement like a cat on hot bricks, considering that Lady Feo had openly flouted his chief from the first. She had no feelings to respect.

“What did you say?”

He repeated his remark, a little surprised at the gaping astonishment which was caused by it.

“Madame de Brézé—Lola—the woman for whom I am to be asked to step aside?—Is this a joke?”

“No,” he said. “Far from a joke.”

“Ye Gods!” said Feo. And she sat for a moment, holding her breath, with her large intelligent mouth open, her dark Italian eyes fixed on Lytham’s face, and one of her long thin capable hands suspended in mid-air. She might have been struck by lightning, or turned into salt like Lot’s inquisitive wife.

It was plain enough to Lola that her mistress was reviewing in her mind all the small points of their connection,—the engagement in the housekeeper’s room, the knowledge of her parentage, the generous presents of those clothes for her beautification, the half-jealous, half-sympathetic interest that had been shown in her love affair with Chalfont, as she had allowed Lady Feo to imagine. She had come to Dover Street, not to take this woman’s husband away, but to give him back, to beg that he should be retained by all the hollow ties of Church and law; bound, held, controlled, rendered completely unable to break away,—not for Feo’s sake, and not for his, but for his country’s. And so, having committed no theft because Fallaray was morally free, and being unashamed of her scheme which had been merely to give a lonely man the rustle of silk, she hung upon an answer to her question.

Once more Feo turned to look at Lola, leaning forward, and for a moment something flooded her eyes that was like blood, and a rush of unformed words of blasphemous anger crowded to her lips. With distended nostrils and widening fingers, she took on the appearance, briefly, of a figure, half man, half woman, stirred to its vitals with a desire to kill in punishment of treachery, suffering under the sort of humiliation that makes pride collapse like a toy balloon. And then a sense of humor came to the rescue. She sprang to her feet and burst into peal after peal of laughter so loud and irresistible and prolonged, that it brought on physical weakness and streaming tears. Finally, standing in her favorite place with her back to the fireplace, dabbing her eyes and steadying her voice, she began to talk huskily, with anger, and sarcasm, and looseness, puncturing her sometimes pedantic choice of words with one that was appropriate to a cab driver.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” she said, “Lola—purring little Lola, and in those clothes, too! I don’t mind confessing that I would never have believed it possible. I mean for you to have had the courage to aim so high. It’s easy to understand his end of it. The greater the ascetic, the smaller the distance to fall. Ha!—And you, you busy patriot, you earnest, self-confident young Lochinvar, if only I could make clear to you the whole ludicrous aspect of this bitter farce, this mordant slice of satire. You wouldn’t enjoy it, because you’re a hero-worshipper, with one foot in the Albert period. And in any case I can’t let you into it because my inherited instinct of sportsmanship is with me still, even in this. And so you’ll miss the point of the orgy of laughter that gave me the stitch. But I don’t mind telling you that it’s a scream, and would make a lovely chapter in the history of statesmen’s love affairs.”

That Fallaray should have turned from her to pick up this bourgeois little person, a servant in his house,—that was what rankled, in spite of her saying that she understood his end of it. Good God!

But to Lytham, who knew Lola as Madame de Brézé, and had found her to be willing to make a great sacrifice for love, the inner meaning of Feo’s outburst was lost. He told himself, as he had often done before, that Feo was an extraordinary creature, queer and erotic, and came back to the main road bluntly.

“May I ask you to be so kind as to tell me,” he said, “what answer you gave to Mr. Fallaray when he asked you to give him a divorce? A great deal depends upon that.”

“You mean because of his career and the success of your political plans?”

“Yes.”

“And why do you want to know, pray?” Feo shot the question at Lola.

“Because of Mr. Fallaray’s career,” Lola replied simply, “and the success of these political plans.”

But this was something much too large to be swallowed, much too good to be true. Regarding Lola as a deceitful minx, a most cunning little schemer, Feo took the liberty to disbelieve this statement utterly, although on the face of it Lola appeared to have thrown in her lot with Lytham. Why?—What was she up to now?—An impish desire to keep these two on tenterhooks and get a little fun out of all this—it was the only thing that she could get—suddenly seized Feo strongly. Here was a gorgeous chance for drama. Here was an epoch-making opportunity unexpectedly to force Lytham and the young vamp, as she called her, to ask Fallaray himself for an answer to this question, and watch the scene. It was probably the only opportunity to satisfy an avid curiosity to see how Fallaray would behave when faced with his “affinity,” and find out what game the girl who had been her servant was playing. This high-faluting attitude of Lola’s was all nonsense, of course. She had caught Fallaray with her extraordinary sexiness and meant to cling to him like a limpet. To become the second Mrs. Fallaray was naturally the acme of her ambition, even although she succeeded to a man who must place himself on the shelf in order to indulge in an amorous adventure. A great idea! But it would have to be carried out carefully, so that no inkling of it might escape.

“Excuse me for a moment,” said Feo, and marched out of the room with a perfectly expressionless face.

Shutting the door behind her, she caught the eye of a man servant who was on duty in the hall. He came smartly forward.

“Go up to Mr. Fallaray and say that I shall be greatly obliged if he will come to my den at once on an important matter.” And then, having taken two or three excited turns up and down the hall, she controlled her face and went back into the room.

“Saint Anthony, Young Lochinvar, the lady’s maid,” she said to herself, “and the ex-leader of the erotics. A heterogeneous company, if ever there was one.”

Once more, standing with her back to the fireplace, her elbows on the low mantel board, Feo looked down at Lola, whose eyes were very large and like those of a child who had cried herself out of tears.

“Where have you been?” she asked.

“At Whitecross, with Lady Cheyne,” replied Lola.

“Oh!—The little fat woman who has the house near the gate in the wall? I see. And you came back this afternoon?”

“Yes,” said Lola.

“With my husband?”

“No,” said Lola.

“Does he know that you intended to give me the pleasure of seeing you here with our mutual friend?”

“No,” said Lola.

Was that a lie or not? The girl had been crying, that was obvious. Something had evidently gone wrong with her scheme. But why this surreptitious meeting, this bringing in of Lytham? It was easy, of course, to appreciate his anxiety. He needed an impeccable Fallaray. He was working for his party, his political campaign, and in the long run, being an earnest patriot, for his country.—She had a few questions to put to him too.

“Where did you meet Lola de Brézé, Young Lochinvar?” she asked.

“At Chilton Park,” said Lytham, who had begun to be somewhat mystified at the way in which things were going; and, if the truth were told, impatient. All he had come to know was whether he had an ally in Lady Feo or an enemy, and make his plans accordingly. He could see no reason for her to dodge the issue. His game of tennis looked hopeless. What curious creatures women were.

“When?”

There was the sound of quick steps in the hall.

“Last night.”

The door opened and Fallaray walked in.

With a gleeful smile Feo spoke through his exclamation of surprise. “Edmund, I would like you to tell your friends what my answer was to your request for a divorce.”

Hating to be caught in what was obviously an endeavor to influence his chief’s wife against a decision to unhitch himself from marriage and politics, Lytham sprang to his feet, feeling as disconcerted as he looked.

Lola made no movement except to stiffen in her chair.

Watching Fallaray closely, Feo saw first a flare of passion light up his eyes at the sight of Lola, and then an expression of resentment come into them at not being able, others being present, to catch her in his arms. An impetuous movement had taken him to the middle of the room, where he drew up short and stood irresolute and self-conscious and looking rather absurd under the gaze of Lytham and his wife.

“What is all this?” he asked, after an awkward pause, during which he began to suspect that he had been tricked by Feo and was faced by a combination of objection.

“Don’t ask me,” said Feo, waving her hand towards Lytham and Lola.

“Then I must ask you, George,” said Fallaray, making an effort to disguise his anger. He could see that he had been made the subject of discussion, as if he were some one to be coerced and who did not know his own business.

“This is not quite fair,” said Lytham. “Our intention was to see Lady Feo, get her views and cooperation, and then, to-night or to-morrow, come to you and beg you to do the sane thing in this affair. We had no hand in your being dragged into this private meeting.”

He too was angry. Feo had cheated and brought about the sort of crisis that should have been avoided. Any one who knew Fallaray’s detestation of personalities must have seen what this breaking down of his fourth wall would bring about.

“Who do you mean by ‘we’?” demanded Fallaray.

“Madame de Brézé and myself,” said Lytham.

“What! You ask me to believe that Madame de Brézé has come here with you to persuade my wife to go back on her promise to set me free? What do you take me for?” He laughed at the utter absurdity of the idea and in doing so, broke the tension and the stiltedness of the scene, as he realized that Feo had deliberately intended it to become. And then, with a certain boyishness that went oddly with his monk-like face, he went over to Lola and put his hand on her shoulder.

“All right,” he added. “Let’s have this out and come to a final understanding. It will save all further arguments. Just before you brought Lola here, having, as I can see, worked on her feelings by talking about your party and telling her that her coming into my life would ruin my career—I know your dogged enthusiasm, George—I saw my wife. I put my case to her at once and she agreed very generously to release me. A messenger will be here in ten minutes to take my statement to her lawyers and my resignation to the Prime Minister. I shall return to Chilton to-morrow to wait there, or wherever else it may suit me, until the end of the divorce proceedings. You won’t agree with me, but that is what I call doing the sane thing. Finally, all going well, as please God it may, this lady and I will get married and live happily ever after.”

He spoke lightly, even jauntily, but with an undercurrent of emotion that it was impossible for him to disguise.

And then, to Feo’s complete amazement, Lola, who had been so quiet and unobtrusive, rose and backed away from Fallaray, her face as white as the stone figures at Chilton under moonlight, her hands clasped together to give her strength, her eyes as dry as an empty well. She was bereft of tears.

“But I am not going to marry you,” she said, “because if I do everything will go badly.”

Fallaray sprang forward to take her in his arms and kiss her into love and life and acquiescence, as he had done before,—once at the gate and once again last night under the stars.

But she backed away and ranged herself with Lytham.

“I love Fallaray,” she said. “Fallaray the leader, the man who is needed, the man who has made himself necessary. If I were to marry Fallaray the deserter, there would be no such thing as happiness for me or for him.”

Fallaray’s eager hands fell suddenly to his sides. The word that had come to Lola as an inspiration, though it broke her heart to use it, hit him like a well-aimed stone. Deserter!—A man who turned and ran, who slunk away from the fight at its moment of crisis, who absconded from duty in violation of all traditions of service, thinking of no one but himself. Deserter! It was the right word, the damnable right word that rears itself up for every man to read at the crossroads of life.—And he stood looking at this girl who had brought him back to a momentary youth through a glamor that gave way to the cold light of duty. His was a pitiful figure, middle-aged, love-hungry, doomed to be sacrificed upon the altar of public service.

Lytham didn’t rejoice at the sight, having sympathy and imagination. Neither did Feo, who had just lost her own grasp upon a dream.

“Is it possible that you love me so much?” he asked.

And Lola said, “Yes, yes!”

It was on Lytham’s tongue to say, “My dear man, don’t you gather what I mean by the ‘sane thing’? There’s no need to take this in the spirit of a Knight Crusader. A little nest somewhere, discreetly guarded.”

And it was on Feo’s tongue to add, also completely modern, “Of course. Why not? Isn’t it done every day? No one need know, and if it’s ever found out, isn’t it the unwritten law to protect the reputations of public men so long as there is no irate husband to stir up our hypocritical moral sense by bringing the thing into the open?”

But neither spoke. There was something in the way in which Lola stood, brave but trembling, that kept them silent; something in Fallaray’s expression of adoration and respect that made them feel ashamed of their materialism. They were ignorant of all that had gone to the making of Lola’s apprenticeship to give that lonely man the rustle of silk, and of the fact that he had grown to love this girl not as a mistress, but as a wife.

And after a silence that held them breathless, Fallaray spoke again. “I must be worthy of you, my little Lola,” he said, “and not desert. I will go on with the glory of your love as a banner—and if I die first, I will wait for you on the other side of the Bridge.”

“I will be faithful,” she said.

He held out his arms, and she rushed into them with a great cry, pressed herself to his heart, and took her last living kiss.

“Till then,” said Fallaray finally, letting her go.

But nothing more came from Lola except a groping movement of her hands.

At the door, square of shoulder, Fallaray beckoned to Lytham and went out and up to his room.

It was Feo who wept.