I
“My dear Cynthia, you haven’t seen our Hermit yet. He’s quite the show exhibit of the place.”
Lady Cynthia Stockdale yawned and lit a cigarette. Hermits belonged undoubtedly to the class of things in which she was not interested; the word conjured up a mental picture of a dirty individual of great piety, clothed in a sack. And Lady Cynthia loathed dirt and detested piety.
“A hermit, Ada!” she remarked, lazily. “I thought the brand was extinct. Does he feed ravens and things?”
It is to be regretted that theological knowledge was not her strong point, but Ada Laverton, her hostess, did not smile. From beneath some marvellously long eyelashes she was watching the lovely girl lying back in the deck-chair opposite, who was vainly trying to blow smoke rings. A sudden wild idea had come into her brain—so wild as to be almost laughable. But from time immemorial wild ideas anent their girl friends have entered the brains of young married women, especially the lucky ones who have hooked the right man. And Ada Laverton had undoubtedly done that. She alternately bullied, cajoled, and made love to her husband John, in a way that eminently suited that cheerful and easygoing gentleman. He adored her quite openly and ridiculously, and she returned the compliment just as ridiculously, even if not quite so openly.
Moreover, Cynthia Stockdale was her best friend. Before her marriage they had been inseparable, and perhaps there was no one living who understood Cynthia as she did. To the world at large Cynthia was merely a much photographed and capricious beauty. Worthy mothers of daughters, who saw her reproduced weekly in the society papers, sighed inwardly with envy, and commented on the decadence of the aristocracy: the daughters tore out the pictures in a vain endeavour to copy her frocks. But it wasn’t the frocks that made Cynthia Stockdale: it was she who made the frocks. Put her in things selected haphazard from a jumble sale—put her in remnants discarded by the people who got it up, and she would still have seemed the best-dressed woman in the room. It was a gift she had—not acquired, but natural.
Lady Cynthia was twenty-five, and looked four years younger. Since the war she had been engaged twice—once to a man in the Blues, and once to a young and ambitious member of Parliament. Neither had lasted long, and on the second occasion people had said unkind things. They had called her heartless and capricious, and she had scorned to contradict them. It mattered nothing to her what people said: if they didn’t like her they could go away and have nothing to do with her. And since in her case it wasn’t a pose, but the literal truth, people did not go away. Only to Ada Laverton did she give her real confidence: only to Ada Laverton did she show the real soul that lay below the surface.
“I’m trying,” she had said, lying in that same chair a year previously, “I’m trying to find the real thing. I needn’t marry if I don’t want to; I haven’t got to marry for a home and a roof. And it’s got to be the right man. Of course I may make a mistake—a mistake which I shan’t find out till it’s too late. But surely when one has found it out before it’s too late, it’s better to acknowledge it at once. It’s no good making a second worse one by going through with it. I thought Arthur was all right”—Arthur was the member of Parliament—“I’m awfully fond of Arthur still. But I’m not the right wife for him. We jarred on one another in a hundred little ways. And he hasn’t got a sense of humour. I shall never forget the shock I got when I first realised that. He seemed to think that a sense of humour consisted of laughing at humorous things, of seeing a jest as well as anyone else. He didn’t seem to understand me when I told him that the real sense of humour is often closer to tears than laughter. Besides”—she had added inconsequently—“he had a dreadful trick of whistling down my neck when we danced. No woman can be expected to marry a permanent draught. And as for poor old Bill—well Bill’s an angel. I still adore Bill. He is, I think, the most supremely handsome being I’ve ever seen in my life—especially when he’s got his full dress on. But, my dear, I blame myself over Bill. I ought to have known it before I got engaged to him; as a matter of fact I did know it. Bill is, without exception, the biggest fool in London. I thought his face might atone for his lack of brains; I thought that perhaps if I took him in hand he might do something in the House of Lords—his old father can’t live much longer—but I gave it up. He is simply incapable of any coherent thought at all. He can’t spell; he can’t add, and once when I asked him if he liked Rachmaninoff, he thought it was the man who had built the Pyramids.”
This and much more came back to Ada Laverton as she turned over in her mind the sudden wild idea that had come to her. Above all things she wanted to see Cynthia married; she was so utterly happy herself that she longed for her friend to share it too. She knew, as no one else did, what a wonderful wife and pal Cynthia would make to the right man. But it must be the right man; it must be the real thing. And like a blinding flash had come the thought of the Hermit—the Hermit who had come into the neighbourhood six months previously, and taken the little farm standing in the hollow overlooking the sea. For, as she frequently told John, if it hadn’t been for the fact that she was tied to a silly old idiot of a husband, she’d have married the Hermit herself.
“No, he doesn’t feed ravens,” she remarked at length. “Only puppies. He breeds Cairns and Aberdeens. We’ll stroll up and see him after tea.”
“A hermit breeding dogs!” Cynthia sat up lazily. “My dear, you intrigue me.”
“Oh! he’s not a bad young man,” said Ada Laverton, indifferently. “Quite passable looking, D.S.O. and M.C. and that sort of thing. Been all over the world, and is really quite interesting when you can get him to talk.”
“What sort of age?” asked her friend.
“Thirty to thirty-five. You shall see him. But you’re not to go and turn his head; he’s very peaceful and happy as he is.”
Lady Cynthia smiled.
“I don’t think hermits are much in my line. A man’s job is to be up and doing; not to bury himself alive and breed dogs.”
“You tell him so,” said her hostess. “It will do him good.”