2
The days of Christmas week passed in walks, dancing, and talk in the billiard-room.
On Christmas Day Rory had given Concha a volume of the Harrow songs with music, and to the Doña an exquisite ivory hand-painted eighteenth-century fan with which she was extremely pleased; indeed, to Teresa’s surprise, he had managed to get into her good graces, and they had started a little relationship of their own consisting of mock gallantry on his side and good-natured irony on hers.
As to Concha, she had taken complete possession of him and seemed to know as much about his relations—“Uncle Jimmy,” “old Lionel Fane” and the rest of them—as he did himself; she knew, too, who had been his fag at Harrow and the names of all his brother officers; in fact, the sort of things that, hitherto, she had only known about Arnold; and Arnold evidently was not overpleased.
One day a little incident occurred in connection with Arnold that touched Teresa very much. Happening to want something out of her room she found its entry barred by him and the Doña, she superintending, while he was nailing on to the door a small piece of canvas embroidered with the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
“We won’t be a minute,” said the Doña serenely; and Arnold, scowling and rather red, silently finished his job. By the end of the morning there was not a room in the house that had not the Sacred Heart nailed on its door. Dick being by this time too cowed to protest.
Teresa knew how Arnold must have loathed it; but he evidently meant by his co-operation to make it clear once and for all that he was on his mother’s side in the present crisis as opposed to his father’s.
In connection with the undercurrent of life at Plasencia, another little scene is perhaps worth recording.
“By the way, Guy,” said Rory, one morning they were sitting in the billiard-room, “How are Uncle Roger and Aunt May getting on in Pau?”
“Oh, same old thing—mother plays croquet and goes to the English Church, and father plays golf and goes to the English Club. Sometimes they motor over to Biarritz to lunch with friends—and that’s about all!”
“Well, and a jolly good life too! That’s how I’ll spend the winter when I’m old, only I won’t go to Pau, I’ll go to Nice—there’s a better casino. And what’s more, I’ll drag you there, Guy. It would do him a lot of good, wouldn’t it, Miss Lane?” and Rory grinned at Teresa, who, staring at Guy critically through narrowed eyes, said: “I don’t think he’ll need any dragging. I can see him when he’s old—an extremely mondain figure in white spats, constantly drinking tea with duchesses, and writing his memoirs.”
Guy looked at her suspiciously—Mallock, certainly, drank tea with duchesses and wrote his memoirs; not a bad writer, Mallock! But probably Teresa despised him; Swinburne had been a dapper mondain figure in his youth—what did she mean exactly?
“Poor old Guy!” laughed Rory, “I can see him, too—a crusty old Tory, very severe on the young and their idiotic poetry.... I expect you’re a violent Socialist, Miss Lane, ain’t you?”
Foolish, conventional young man, going round sticking labels on every one! Well, so she was labelled “a Socialist,” and that meant “high-browed,” and undesirable; But why on earth did she mind?
Concha was looking at her with rather a curious little smile. She sometimes had an uncomfortable feeling that Concha was as good at reading her thoughts as she was as reading Concha’s.
“She is a Socialist like you, isn’t she, Guy?” persisted Rory.
“He means an intellectual character,” explained Guy, not ill-pleased.
“No, but you do want to blow us all up, don’t you?”
“Do I?” said Teresa coldly.
“Well, I believe I’m a Bolshevik myself, a revolution would be my only chance of getting into the Guards. ‘Hell-for-leather Dundas of the Red Guards!’ It sounds like a hero by ... that mad woman our mothers knew in Florence, Guy—what was her name?... Yes, like a hero in a Ouida novel.”
“Do I hear you say, Dundas, that you think yourself like one of ... er ... Ouida’s heroes?” said Harry Sinclair, coming in at that moment with Dick.
“Well, sir, modesty forbids me to say so in so many words,” grinned Rory.
“There used to be an aged don at Cambridge,” continued Harry, “half-blind, wholly deaf, and with an ... er ... game ... leg, and when he was asked to what character in history he felt most akin he answered ... er ... er ‘ALCIBIADES’!”
“That was old Potter, wasn’t it? I remember ...” began Dick, but Concha interrupted him by exclaiming eagerly: “What a good game! Let’s play it—history or fiction, but we mustn’t say our own, we must guess each other’s’—Rory is settled, he thinks himself like a Ouida hero ...” and she suddenly broke off, turned red, and looked at Teresa with that glazed opaque look in her eyes, that with her was a sign of mingled embarrassment and defiance.
Teresa’s heart began to beat a little faster; who would Concha say she, Teresa, thought herself like? And who would she say Concha thought herself like? It would perhaps be a relief to them both to say, for once, things that were definitely spiteful—a relief from this continual X-raying of each other’s thoughts, and never a word said.
“Who does Guy think himself like? Some one very wicked and beautiful—don’t you, Guy?” said Rory.
“Dorian Gray!” said Arnold, looking up from his book with a meaning grin.
“Oh no, no, I’m sure it’s some very literary character,” said Concha.
“Shelley?” suggested Teresa; but she gave the little smile that always seemed scornful to Guy.
“Percy Bysshe ... is she right, Guy?”
“No,” said Guy sulkily.
“Shakespeare—Tennyson—Burns? Who, then?”
“Oh, Keats if you like—when he was in love with Fanny Brawne,” cried Guy furiously, and, seizing the book that lay nearest to him, he began to read it.
“I say, this is a lovely game—almost as good as cock-fighting!” said Rory: “What about Mr. Lane? I wonder who you think you are like, sir.”
Tactful young man, so anxious to make his host feel at home!
Dick, who had been dreading this moment, looked sheepish. It seemed to him that the forehead of every one in the room slid sideways like a secret panel revealing a wall upon which in large and straggling characters were chalked up the words: DON JUAN. And Teresa was saying to herself: “Would it be vulgar ... should I dare to say Lydia Bennett? And who will she say? Hedda Gabler?”
She had forgotten what the game really was and had come to think it consisted of telling the victim the character that you yourself thought they resembled.
“Who does Mr. Lane think he’s like?” repeated Rory.
“Drake, I should think,” said Guy, who never sulked for long.
Dick felt unutterably relieved.
“Is that right, sir?”
“That will do—Drake if you like,” said Dick, with a laugh.
“A Drake somewhat ... er ... cramped in his legitimate activities through having ... er ... married an ... er ... SPANISH LADY,” said Harry.
What the devil did he mean exactly by that? Surely the Doña hadn’t been blabbing to him—Harry of all people! But she was capable of anything.
“Oh yes, the Doña would see to it he didn’t singe the King of Spain’s beard twice,” laughed Concha.
Oh yes, of course, that was it! He laughed aloud with relief.
And then followed a discussion, which kept them busy till luncheon, as to whether it could be proved by Mendelism that the frequent singeing of Philip II.’s beard was the cause of his successors having only an imperial.
So here was another proof of the fundamental undramaticness of life as lived under civilised conditions—for ever shying away from an emotional crisis. As usual, the incident had been completely without point; and on and on went the frivolous process of a piece of thistle-down blown by a summer breeze hither, thither, nowhere, everywhere.