CHAPTER I
When a man has been turned down by the Only Girl (although she isn't, and never was) and, subsequently, finds her present in the same batch of dinner-guests as himself, it is hardly to be expected that he will prove the life and soul of the party.
But, thought Mrs. Carmichael, vexed with herself for a blundering hostess who ought to have known, and still more vexed with Cyprian Sterne for not having waited until after the 17th to try his luck with Muriel, there was no need for him to gloom at his soup as if he were gauging its depths for a suicidal dive and there was no need for him to have waved aside the champagne. Champagne was clearly indicated on the occasion, medicinally, if not (as she felt inclined to insist, herself, despite appearances) in felicitation.
Cyprian always showed himself so ridiculously sensitive. And Muriel looked so ... adamant. Yes, that was the word; hard and bright like a crystal prism you could not see through clearly, however often the attractive suggestion of buried rainbows within might tempt you to hold it close to your eyes. With the closeness even the rainbows became blurred.
"An incarnation of the three B's which constitute the Perfect Woman," said her men-admirers.
Brain, Beauty and Breeding. All by heredity. No wonder she behaved as if she had the right to wealth also, of a standard not to be extracted from the scholarly pockets of Cyprian and his like.
Had he a like? Mrs. Carmichael doubted. She wondered what mislaid edition of Persian verse or Grecian ethics was, even now, spoiling the symmetry of his evening coat. A little bowed, the shoulders, even when he stood upright. The scrutiny of the very blue eyes a little fixed when he addressed you with that air of seeing behind things which betrays the short-sighted. Interesting, the long dreamy face, but hardly handsome. And his acknowledged cleverness did not flash in your face like Muriel's, so that, waiving her awareness of his Double Firsts at Oxford and all that, she had been heard to tick him off as "a dry old stick." Encouraging his transparent admiration the while. Minx!
One had wished he would hurry up and propose and get the inevitable yearnings for a premature grave over and then forget. And now he had completed the first item on that programme—most inconsiderately before the 17th—and the yearnings were upon him and he was ruining his end of the dinner-party.
Muriel sat opposite him and it was comprehensible that he should not want to look at her and, therefore, incomprehensible why he insisted on trying to.
As usual, she was worth looking at. Those very fair women, particularly when dressed in soft watery greens, recalled old legends of sirens who floated gold hair about their insinuating bodies, luring mankind by music and provocative laughter to its destruction despite the warning, eternally present, of white bones on the sand.
A pity that Cyprian's mental vision was as myopic as his physical when it came to those bones.
Mrs. Carmichael could see them quite clearly herself: here, the skull of Major Ames (a nice little man, and of course, that hunting tragedy had proved an accident, although at the time They said...) there, the femur, rather nobbly, of Maurice Waring who had parted, not exactly with his life, to be sure, but certainly with his wife since sighting the siren's shining head. But those two had never got on anyhow, and if, eventually, he managed the divorce ... how much more nearly would he and Muriel prove birds of a feather than she and poor Cyprian with his good old-fashioned conviction that this modern laxity in matrimonial matters was a national menace. Refreshing, to find a man like Cyprian, even though as he was not safely religious one was inclined to wonder, when it came to personal influence, would Muriel...? Mrs. Carmichael's subconscious musings (for consciously she was smiling eager attention to ex-Colonel Maddock's—he was now, by virtue of a dead American wife, by way of being a millionaire, which is far better—account of his last yachting cruise, and praying Providence for the strength and the strategy to resist suggestions that she and Robin should join him next time) were shattered by the despairing howl of what sounded like a soul in torment. Only, it emanated from regions too nearly at the top of the house to be described as "nether."
"It's that child again," remarked Robin accusingly down the long table, interrupted in an intense discussion with Miss Mabel Clement, the playwright: "I have always said we would suffer for it if you were so weak with her in the beginning."
"To any child born in the East, English nursery-life is impossibly terrifying," and Mrs. Carmichael apologetically sought the support of her guests. "Since Peter went to school she has had to sleep alone. It's all very well for Robin to call me weak but I can't believe it is good for a child's nerves to..."
Another wail crescendoed to the uttermost heights of horror and died away.
"That noise does not improve mine," Robin Carmichael answered dryly: "What is the nurse thinking of?"
"It's her evening out."
And, inwardly, his wife sighed for their return to Burma where servants did not have evenings out, and ... and people were too enslaved to official etiquette to show their feelings at dinner-parties.
A chair grated harshly back, rumpling the rug on the polished parquet floor.
"Let me go up to her for a moment," said Cyprian, "I undertook to visit the nursery when I arrived but was told she had gone to sleep."
Well, if it would take his mind off himself and his stricken face from the vicinity of the Hon. Mrs. Porter, who was beginning to wear a worried look. Mrs. Carmichael knew that Robin would say that it was all wrong, of course, in the morning, but she could hardly let Ferlie howl throughout dinner and, if the parlour-maid went up, Rose would have to hand round the fish single-handed and she was under notice to go, and therefore, under no obligation to behave. In Burma there had always been someone to sit with Ferlie if she woke.
"Tell her to go to sleep at once then," and Ferlie's mother favoured Cyprian with an indulgent smile. His fondness for the child was really too quaint. In the circumstances, pathetic.
The incident might well arouse Muriel's better nature ... but no, not quite.
It would, in all likelihood, encourage her worse one, since she was no character in a book written with a mission behind it. Already her clear eyes were glinting humorously and something she remarked to Captain Wright, in an undertone, had just made that young gentleman, who never at any time required much encouragement to giggle, choke violently into his napkin. Why couldn't Cyprian realize that he didn't in the least want Muriel, but a Womanly Woman of Yesterday?
* * * * * *
Meanwhile, Cyprian, incapable of perceiving his desire for any woman, save one who was the figment of his own imagination, clothed in a blurred semblance to Muriel Vane, mounted the stairs to an airy room with a sloping roof which lent queer profundities to the dancing shadows born of Ferlie's night-light. Found Ferlie sitting up among the pillows with the sheet over her head and the fear of the devil in her soul. Ferlie, at seven, was afraid of darkness, being accidentally buried alive, and wolves. Not lions and tigers: only wolves. This, since she had never seen a wolf; though tigers, looking loose and heavy, had been marched across her horizon more than once by excitedly shouting coolies, when everyone was in holiday camp and Mr. Carmichael had been out shooting. They inspired sympathy rather than respect in that condition, and lions, naturally, slipped into the same category of beasts one's father could, if he so desired, bring home on poles and transform into carpets for the bungalow. Wolves were different. She had a book concerning their activities in a land called Siberia. They chased people there for miles and miles over stuff like ground-rice pudding, commonly known as "snow," and even ate the sleigh. England, in which she now found herself, might very easily resemble Siberia in this particular: it was cold also, and snow came with cold. The birth of the being-buried-alive fear dated from a conversation overheard between her parents anent the accuracy of the Bible with regard to the reappearance from the grave of one, Lazarus.
Her father was a thoughtful sceptic, but Ferlie did not find him out for many years. Her mother's views were founded on the Book of Common Prayer and the story, "There, but for the Grace of God ..." though she was divided in her mind whether Bunyan had invented the one and Gladstone said the other, or vice versa. Her own father, a bishop, and a busy one, had rather taken her catechism for granted when he confirmed her, on the assumption that a daughter educated in a godly ecclesiastical household and never exposed to the youthful heresies of a boarding-school must necessarily be in a perpetual state of knowledgeable grace. And he had passed on his gaiters as a matter of course before retiring to her elder brother.
Her husband explained away miracles by Euclidean methods which struck terror to her orthodox heart.
"A possible and recorded case of suspended animation," had been his verdict on Lazarus. "Occurs every day. Read Hudson's Psychic Phenomena." Mrs. Carmichael had no intention of doing any such thing.
"There are countless instances of people being buried alive," continued Mr. Carmichael. And, after racking his brains for two, cited them in clear convincing tones. Ferlie had scooped the last grains of melting sugar out of an empty cocoa-cup and thoughtfully left the room. Mrs. Carmichael vaguely hoped that God was not listening to the conversation and then forgot all about it. So did Robin. Ferlie remembered. Always at night in this England, deprived of her patiently crooning Burmese nurse, she remembered. The wigwam of sheets and blankets was to shut out Fear.
She knew the footsteps on the stairs which were coming to the rescue now; though he was not, in his customary accomplished fashion, taking two steps at a time.
"Is that you, Cyprian?"
"Yes, old lady."
"I thought it might be Satan."
"Why Satan?"
She came out of her fastness with a shudder.
"They call him the Prince of Darkness, you know. This is the witching hour when I think he probberly might..."
"Might what?" Vainly he tried to sort the tumbled bed-clothes. Her Viyella night-dress was dripping wet.
"Might take an' bury me in the Tomb," said Ferlie in a hoarse whisper. Cyprian tried to make his laugh aggressively reassuring.
"Who on earth suggested such nonsense to you?"
"It can't be nonsense if it's in the Bible. An' in a book by a man named Hudson. He makes the kitchen soap 'cos Cook told me so when I asked. He must be clever for every person to buy his soap. An' he buried Lazarus."
It was beyond Cyprian's power to disentangle her from this web. The servants must have been frightening the child. It was common knowledge that the best of nurses were often grossly imaginative.
He stroked the russet mop of fluff resting against his shoulder and resorted to practical conversation. Except that it concerned her own private affairs and was therefore connected with Teddy-bears, the duck-pond in the park, the little-girl-next-door, and other important personages of summers six to ten, it was conducted as gravely as though they were of an age.
Cyprian did not really understand anything about talking down to a child's level and that was why Ferlie loved him. She detected the simple sincerity behind his sometimes complicated language and when he used words beyond her ken it was seldom she failed to grasp the drift.
Neither the child nor the man realized that each being sensitive to a fault, they affected one another atmospherically and their true conversation existed in emotions experienced side by side rather than in sentences interchanged. Thus, to-night, her quick intuition arrived at the cause of that veiled look in his eyes.
"Are you going to be married to that Vane girl?" she enquired, betraying instantaneously to Cyprian that there were those who disapproved of his matrimonial projects.
He answered, "No," quietly, after an instant's pause.
"Why not?" asked Ferlie suspiciously. "Nurse says she's a hussy."
"No one should have said such a thing to you."
"It wasn't to me: it was to Rose. Rose used to live in her house, an'..."
"It doesn't matter what either Rose or Nurse says," said Cyprian. "But who told you about my marrying anyone, Ferlie?"
"I think that was just in my head," struggling to remember where the impression had first indented itself upon her responsive brain. "Why aren't you...?"
He saw there was no help for it and replied patiently, "She does not want to marry me; that's all."
"Then she's a dam fool," said Ferlie with complete conviction. He was genuinely shocked.
"You must never say that of anyone, dear, even if you don't like them."
"Dad says it of mostly all peoples, whether he likes them or not."
"That's different."
"How?"
"He's grown-up."
"How can grown-ups...?"
"And he's a man," Cyprian went on, desperately aware that he was not doing very well. "Ladies don't use such words."
Then Ferlie played her trump card. "Miss Vane does," she said coldly.
Cyprian preserved a masterly silence. Good gracious! she was modern enough, of course. Muriel! There was music in her name ... and in her throat when she sang ... and in the delicate hands moving over the keys of the grand piano downstairs; for she always played to them after dinner in the evenings. She had the whitest throat he had ever seen and the most beautiful hands.
"Why do people always want to marry other people?" insisted his companion, alive to mysteries unsolved and femininely peevish in consequence. Cyprian considered this himself before attempting to clear it up.
"I suppose they grow lonely living just for themselves," he said at last.
"I don't believe that there girl would make loneliness feel better," declared Ferlie.
"You don't understand, dear." She cuddled his sleeve, ecstatically sympathetic with that which she did understand, his tone of voice.
"Are you so sorry you can't get married, Cyprian? Why not make Miss Cartwright marry you astead? She'd do it, I daresay, 'f I begged her for my sake. She says she'd do most things for me, only not run upstairs backwards at her timerlife. An' she cooks lovely choclick fudge. Miss Vane can't, I'm sure. You ask her."
"I think you are probably right about that."
"Then we've settled it," much relieved. "I wouldn't go marrying anyone myself 'less they had a hand for fudge. I'll tell Miss Cartwright to-morrow that you want to get married to her this directly immejantly, an' I was to ask her not to say 'No' like Miss Vane."
"Good God!" exclaimed Cyprian rousing himself. "I beg your pardon—I mean—you must never say that, Ferlie. But neither must you say anything to Miss Cartwright. Promise! It's just—you see, this must be a dead secret between you and me, about Miss Vane and all." Happy thought! He might trust Ferlie to the stake with their numerous unique secrets.
"But, Cyprian, why..."
"Dear, my dear," said the man, speaking more to the beauty of her upturned face than to the child, "when you want to marry it is only the one person who counts. The one person with all her faults and weaknesses—because those, too, are part of her. Chocolate fudge (and there are more kinds of that than you know) doesn't come into it with the averagely decent man. You just love the person or you don't. You will understand all about it some day, when you are older."
The comforting arms which stole round his neck might have understood all about it now.
"Do you really love that Miss Vane?"
"Heaven help me, I do!"
"Can't you stop if you want to?"
"Apparently not; but one doesn't want to. That's the ridiculous part ... the thing grips you, like invisible iron hands, to drag you along a road of withered flowers, forcing you to breathe the rot of that Dead Sea fruit which fills the air with the bitter fumes of jealousy and passion.... Fruit?"
"Cyprian, didn't you not bring me up a cryssalized apricot?"
He nearly chuckled as he stumbled back along his "withered paths" to Reality.
"Sorry, Little Thing. I forgot. You shall have a whole box to-morrow."
"I shan't get a moment's peace to eat them unless we have it as a secret," she suggested wheedlingly.
"Oh!" he cried, delightedly hugging her, "You'll be a woman so much too soon."
"Mother says..." she began dreamily, and that reminded him.
"She said I was to tell you to go to sleep at once."
"Such a silly sort of thing to say to a child!" said Ferlie, palpably quoting, "Sleep is like that marrying feeling of yours: it can't be made to go or stop ... Cyprian..."
"Well!"
"You did a wriggle. You aren't goin' away."
"Not if you'll shut your eyes," he undertook feebly. "But, you know, there is really nothing to be afraid of, Ferlie, whether I am here or not."
She knew better. "And that's another thing you can't let go nor stop, neither," she told him.
Considering it, with her head growing heavier every moment against his shoulder, Cyprian came to the conclusion that she was right. The darkness deepened about them as someone shut the door between hall and stairs.
"Cyprian."
"Dear."
"Whoever you get married to, you will always like me best, won't you?"
"Why, of course," said Cyprian. "Of course..."
Her breathing became contentedly regular.
* * * * * *
Downstairs, Muriel Vane had been very clever at his expense.
More like a siren than ever, perched behind the looming rock of the grand piano, a few gleaming threads of escaping hair picked out against the background of polished wood, while, every now and again, her fingers rippled the accompanying chords of some haunting French song.
She usually sang in French.
"To shock folk in legitimate ignorance," she informed Captain Wright, leaning over her with every symptom of shortly shedding his bones in the vicinity.
"Dear Muriel!" placidly reproved Mrs. Carmichael. She did not understand sung French, or for that matter, any but the brand which, by dint of firm repetition, brings you your hot water and "Du thé—pas chocolat. Pas!" in Parisian hotels at eight a.m.
Muriel's sort of French was of little use to anyone but foreigners, and there were so seldom foreigners present.
"Sing 'Sanson et Dalila'," begged the Hon. Mrs. Porter, feeling surer of her ground when dealing with passion in opera, where, however unbridled, it remained respectably unconvincing to the mind of the British matron.
"I was saving that till Cyprian Sterne had finished rocking the cradle upstairs," said Muriel. "It happens, quite unsuitably, to be his favourite song, and the hand that rocks the cradle rules the girls—in that its action suggests a future peacefully free from that domestic duty for them."
"I have sent up two messages," Mrs. Carmichael anticipated her husband plaintively, "but he replied that he was not feeling very well to-night and would join us after dinner."
"I have repeatedly said——" began Mr. Carmichael, but was firmly interrupted: "I know you have, dear, but if half an hour with Ferlie amuses him, I think it would be better to leave him alone to-night." She looked across, meaningly, at Muriel and closed her lips. Tact was a thing nobody seemed able to acquire who had not been born with it.
Muriel made a little grimace and burst suddenly into a very simple melody:
"J'ai pris un bluet Fluet
Enclos parmi l'herbe
Et quelqu'un m'a dit; Mon Dieu!
Il n'est pas de bleu plus bleu
Que ce bleu superbe.
Moi, qui sais ce que je sais—
J'ai souri sans lui rien dire
Car à tes yeux je pensais—
Sans rien dire, sans rien dire."
The notes quickened with heartless mirth, and the pure voice rang out again:
"Au rosiers fleuris j'ai pris."
Mrs. Carmichael, ruminating that the piano, at any rate, kept Muriel out of mischief, here clutched thankfully, decided that the song concerned roses, and framed an intelligent appreciation, on that hypothesis, against its finish.
Cyprian walked into the room as the last verse, reckless with desire, was sweetening the air:
"J'ai pris un pavé, trouvé
Au fond de cratère
Et quelqu'un m'a dit, Mon Dieu!
Plus dur pavé ne se peut
Trouver dans la terre.
Moi, qui sais ce que je sais—
J'ai pleuré sans lui rien dire,
Car à ton cœur je pensais—
Sans rien dire... Sans rien dire...."
"I always like songs about flowers, don't you?" queried their hostess of the world.
And "Here you are at last," her husband remarked to Cyprian before Muriel's curving lips could make the most of that joke; "you really should not spoil Ferlie."
"She is such a highly-strung child," the Hon. Mrs. Porter volunteered languidly, waving a gold-tipped ostrich feather, though, had she stopped to consider the matter, she would have discovered that she was cold in her chair near the door.
"Never yet," said Colonel Maddock, who adopted the criticizing privileges of an unofficial uncle in the house, "have I met the fortunate mother whose children were not exceptionally highly-strung. What does the term mean exactly?"
"That they need a disciplined existence," said Mr. Carmichael. "All these modern methods of making things easy for children are wrong. Life is not easy. They must be fitted to overcome difficulties."
"Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control!" mocked Muriel, with accusing eyes on Captain Wright who was trying to press her hand behind the music-stand. "I cannot bear a man, particularly, without self-control; and the child is father to the man—in Ferlie's case."
Cyprian dejectedly decided that he had let himself go, rather, at the scene of the proposal. She had looked so infinitely desirable.
"Ferlie was frightened," he said, rather lamely. "I think, perhaps, the servants——"
"There!" cried Mrs. Carmichael. "What did you tell Robin about English servants?"
"You should discipline her out of being frightened," declared Muriel. "Why make it easy for a child to go to sleep with night-lights and such nonsense? Think of all the insomnia she will have to battle against in future years. Let her learn to overcome——"
Mr. Carmichael was looking so stiff that his wife intervened.
"Dear Muriel! You do talk such nonsense. Robin did not mean that."
"No?" Muriel turned limpid eyes on Cyprian. "And what line did you take with her?"
"We talked a little," he said, blinking quickly at the carpet, "and presently she fell asleep. I must thank her for affording me the excuse to get rid of a slight headache."
"I thought you were not yourself at dinner," said Mrs. Porter forgivingly. "You are fond of children?"
"No," said Cyprian, somewhat bluntly. He was not fond of children.
"Really! Ferlie is so devoted to you."
"She is about the first child I have ever addressed, and will probably be the last."
"If she were a normal specimen, the first time you addressed her would have been the last," said Muriel, "I have heard you doing it. I am glad when you are with me you talk down to my level, Cyprian. I have not Ferlie's pristine trust in dictionarial expressions. I should imagine that you were swearing at me half the time."
"I think he talks very good English," said Mrs. Carmichael kindly. "We none of us speak enough like books these days."
Mabel Clement who, during the greater part of the evening had been scrutinizing Muriel and Captain Wright with a view to working them into her new satire, "The Man-Eater," came out of a frowning wilderness of thought, wherein the others had completely forgotten her, to say that the ideal language, as yet unborn, should consist merely of a riot of sound, expressing the emotion it was required to convey.
"Our spelling is execrable, our grammar clumsy, and the elegant diction of the one-time popular novelist of the Jane Austen calibre was affected in the extreme. Life is too short for these chains of superfluous sentences, and far too short for us to master all the tongues of Babel before we can test the mentality of other nations. It should be possible to invent a tongue, common to all, conveying to the brain, by sound, what it is desired to express."
"Let's begin to invent it now," Muriel suggested rapturously: "Colonel Maddock! Whu-u! Why! Whu-u-u! Isn't my meaning perfectly clear?" She tilted her flower-face up to his, drawing in her breath in a series of staccato jerks.
The Colonel grinned down amiably as he inhaled the fragrance of a delicate hair-wash.
"I know!" Captain Wright bawled triumphantly from his corner: "she wants a drink!"
In the storm of merriment which followed, Mabel Clement smiling resignedly, retired again into the fastness of her soul, while Cyprian crossed the room to a tray containing, Eastern fashion, several long bottles and a syphon.
While the party were breaking up in a fizzling glitter of glasses, Mrs. Carmichael drew close and gently touched his sleeve. Then and there the memories were blotted out of occasions when he had wondered how a clever man like Carmichael stood her! Madonna-sweet, her smile at that moment.
"Wait a bit after the others leave," she said in an undertone; "Robin and I have been wondering about your plans. And I want to consult you over Ferlie's school."
The note on which the last word was spoken broke in two. When she and her husband returned to Burma they would be minus encumbrances. Subtly conveying her own need of a little sympathy in the only idiom she knew, Mrs. Carmichael remained unaware that in so doing she represented to Cyprian the beauty of the Essentially Feminine.
She kissed Muriel "Good night," reflecting cattily how boring women's kisses must seem to her after ... and staved off the Colonel's last broad approach to the forthcoming pleasure-cruise in the yacht.
"Good night, Mrs. Porter."
"Good night, dear. Such a pleasant... Yes, thank you, that is my vanity bag, though at my time of life you may well be wondering ... and Muriel with a Vinolia complexion has no business to own such a thing."
"Robin, will you... Ah! Here is the parlour-maid...."
A low-murmured plea from Captain Wright, whose arms encircled Muriel's cloak.... The diamond glitter of answering eyes....
Good night.... Good-night.