3
When we reached the opera-house, the second act was over; and, on the way to our box, we ran the gauntlet of a dozen friends, who invited us to meals, and of a hundred staring strangers, who turned to their neighbours and whispered: “There’s Lady Barbara!” with the mingled triumph and awe which the English display when they recognize any idol of the illustrated papers.
“One gets used to anything, even the manners of the well-bred,” I murmured, as we struggled towards the stairs.
“If any one else asks us to lunch, I shall say we’ve given up eating. . . . Oh, I must speak to Marion! You go on.”
I ploughed slowly into an open space by the entrance to the pit-tier boxes, then came to an involuntary standstill. Face to face, too near for either of us to escape, I found Eric Lane smoking a cigarette and looking over my shoulder to the place where Barbara was talking to Mrs. Shelley. Unless she had already seen him and was lingering behind till I had made myself a screen, they must meet in another moment. Eric never had much colour to lose, but even his lips now seemed bloodless. When our eyes met, I could not have said which was the more uncomfortable. I enquired after his father, I believe; and he asked me, as he had been in Japan at the time of our wedding, to accept his belated good wishes now.
“When are we to have another play?,” I asked.
“This autumn, I hope,” he answered.
“Good for that. Well, Eric, I little thought in the old Phoenix Club days that we were entertaining a genius unawares.”
“They were g-good days,” he sighed.
Then there was a pause; and the cordiality which old habit had brought to life wilted. As he glanced in Barbara’s direction, I fancy he was charging her with making our friendship impossible; this second sight of her seemed to incapacitate him; and we stood stockishly silent. When she joined us, there was, indeed, a smile on either side, a high and rather breathless “Oh, how do you do?” Then we hurried to our box; and Eric strolled across the hall. His hand was shaking as he tried to relight his cigarette; and the hollow eyes and cadaverous cheeks seemed ten years older for the ten seconds’ encounter.
Was it a presentiment of this meeting that had unnerved Barbara? I had no time to speak before we were surrounded by a new throng. It was her first appearance at Covent Garden; and from the boxes and stalls we had opera-glasses trained upon us until I seemed to be looking at a tank of lobsters; a queue formed outside our door and we were flattened against the side of the box. The acclamation was not confined within a ring of our friends: I felt the atmosphere of the whole house warming in the greatest tribute to personality that I have ever seen.
“I watched you coming in to-night,” Dr. Gaisford told her at the end. “It was like the sun breaking through. . . . How are you, my dear child? As you don’t come to see me professionally, I hope that means you’re well and happy?”
“Everything’s perfect,” Barbara cried, with a conviction that had been lacking when she used the same words earlier. As we settled ourselves in the car, she added joyously: “How sweet every one is! Marion wants us to choose a night for dining with her next week. And I’ve committed you to the Pinto de Vasconcellos the week after. And Bobbie Pentyre wants us to go to Croxton one week-end. Can you remember all that? And will you come?”
“Anywhere you like,” I promised. “You seem to have had rather a success to-night, Babs.”
“It’s a good world! I’ve got back my grip on life. . . . I feel free,” she went on with a note of wonder; and her hand stole shyly into mine as though we were composing a quarrel: “George dear, I’m sorry to have been unsatisfactory, sorry to have worried you. I promised on Armistice Day that I wouldn’t speak of certain people. You can’t help thinking of them, but since to-night I’m not . . . haunted. Seeing Eric has broken the spell. . . . I can meet him now. I’m going to. Madame Pinto said he was coming to her party.”
Remembering Eric’s look of anguish when he caught sight of Barbara, I felt that the greatest kindness she could shew him would be to prevent further meetings. It was folly, I thought, for her to invite him to our first reception, it was madness to expect that he would come; and, if I said nothing at the time, it was for fear she would imagine that I was jealous.
“Make things as easy as you can for him,” I recommended.
“We can give him the opportunity of being friends again.”
“And don’t be hurt if he doesn’t take it. Men of that kind, imaginative and highly-strung . . . In his way, he is a bit of a genius.” . . .
“I gave him that,” she murmured with a pride which I thought ill-timed. “He had only talent before.”
To judge by appearances, Eric had paid dearly for his goddess’ kiss.
“They feel things more intensely,” I continued, “than dull, matter-of-fact people like me.”
Barbara made no answer for several minutes; then she looked straight ahead and asked:
“Wouldn’t you feel it as much if you lost me?”
“I should feel it more than anything in the world.”
“It’s broken Eric. He’ll never be mended. But it wouldn’t break you?”
Faint though the challenge was, I fancied, for the first time in my life, that Barbara was trying to drag me into a ‘scene’.
“We won’t talk about it,” I said.
“I don’t think anything would break you. And you may take that how you like.”
The words may have been her tribute to flint-like resolution or her criticism of wooden insensibility. The way that I decided to take them was in silence. Barbara hid her face in the great nosegay of carnations which she always carried, then held them out, like an impulsive child, for me to smell. As she walked, slender, tall and radiant, into the house, I felt that this was the day which I had waited fourteen months to see dawning.
“Yes, I had quite a success,” she murmured to her reflection, when we paused in front of a mirror halfway up the stairs. “You seem surprised, George.”
“I don’t know how any one could hope to resist you,” I said. “I never can.”
The South American dinner to which Barbara had committed me marked our grudging surrender to a lady whose hospitality was rapidly breaking the morale of London. Madame Pinto de Vasconcellos, if her ambitions had been examined before the judgement-seat, must have confessed a resolution to force free wine, food and tobacco on a larger number of victims than had fallen to any other Brazilian. Setting out with an introduction to the Duchess of Ross and a system of snowball terrorization for every one else, she secured B for her parties by playing on his fear of hurting A’s feelings.
“She is a stranger to London,” the duchess explained to Lady Crawleigh in a tone that hid natural exultation under less natural pity. “I should like to shew her a little hospitality.”
Lady Crawleigh had been caught too often in similar traps to forget that, while Herrig Castle and Ross House remained unlet, no one was secure; but, like every one else, she tried to shelter herself behind a substitute. Madame Pinto, she told Barbara, had heard so much of her “beautiful daughter”; it would be only a kindness to accept one of her many invitations.
When I pointed out that the whole English-speaking world had heard so much of Barbara, my mother-in-law rejoined wistfully that it was a small thing to ask, that she did not ask much and that she would not have asked now if she had imagined we should make difficulties. Remembering the unsteady concordat which was the best that a heretic and a radical could ever hope to establish with the Crawleighs, I urged Barbara to capitulate before I knew that Eric Lane was to be our fellow-guest. Had I now urged her to refuse, Lady Crawleigh would have had a grievance; and Barbara might have thought that I had a personal interest in preventing another encounter.
Though the dinner passed off pleasantly enough, it had one wholly unexpected result which changed the course of history for two or three of Madame Pinto’s guests. Had we refused this invitation, I might not have seen John Carstairs for another month; had I not seen him, I should not have asked him to tell me about his recent tour of the Ross estates in Connemara; had he not told me, I might have contentedly played my part of absentee landlord for years to come. Carstairs, however, succeeded in frightening me with his stories of impending Irish trouble. The precarious peace, he said, might break down at any moment. As trustee for his half-witted brother, he was anxious to sell at any sacrifice and advised me to do the same. Whether I sold or not, I should be a fool if I did not at least visit an estate which I had neglected since the Easter rising of 1916.
Our chance conversation was the cause of my first serious disagreement with Barbara. Before parting with a property that had been in the family for three hundred years, I told her that we must explore the conditions of the County Kerry for ourselves. In my suggestion that we should go to Lake House for Whitsuntide she acquiesced at once, only stipulating that she should be allowed to stay behind at the last moment if the crossing threatened to be very rough. Next morning I reserved our sleepers and arranged with Spence-Atkins to postpone his own holiday and to take charge of our paper till my return; in the evening she warned me, rather fretfully, that she might not feel well enough to come. I asked if she would care for me to send for Gaisford; but, after a night’s rest, she assured me buoyantly that she was all right. I telegraphed to warn my agent of our coming; and, when I read out his reply, Barbara exclaimed with almost hysterical passion that, well or ill, in fine weather or foul, nothing would induce her to come with me to Ireland.
“Well, do you mind my leaving you alone here?,” I asked, when I had recovered my breath.
“No. Bobbie Pentyre has arranged his Croxton party for Whitsuntide.”
“But why didn’t you tell me that before? I could have gone another week. Now I’ve made Spence-Atkins cancel his own plans . . .”
“Oh, you’d better stick to your present arrangement,” she answered. Then, for some reason that I could not guess, she broke into wild weeping. “I’m so miserable! I’m mad! I don’t know what I’m saying! George, I’m sorry I was rude.”
“You weren’t rude,” I assured her.
“I’ve not slept for nights and nights,” she gasped. “You’ve been very patient with me. Go on being patient, go on loving me! I’m so miserable.” . . .
This time I determined to be a moral coward no longer:
“But why?”
“Oh, I’ve told you! Because I’m a damned soul. I told you that when you asked me to marry you.”
“And I told you that I’d make you happy or die in the attempt. There’s nothing I won’t do . . .”
In her first convulsion of grief, Barbara had allowed me to take her into my arms; but, as she became more composed, I felt her struggling gently to be free.
“You really mean that?,” she asked, with her head averted. “If it meant your honour, your life, your happiness, you’d give all that to see me happy?” I fancied again that she was challenging me and that, if I made unguarded reservations, I should be told that I did not love her as Jack Waring and Eric Lane had loved her. The second, as she believed, was paying with his life; the first had already paid with his soul. “I don’t know what I’m saying!” she cried, with her hands pressed to her temples. “I’m worried . . . No, I won’t see a doctor. You go off as you arranged. I’ll go to Croxton if I feel in the mood. When you come back, I may be all right; if not . . .”
She stared distractedly round the room in a way that reminded me of the sad, mad time when Eric first went out of her life.
“But you will be all right,” I assured her.
“If I’m not, remember you married a lost soul, George; I warned you. I kill whatever I touch.” . . .