She had distinctly recollected me for a moment; she had pronounced my name! Now she gave me one of her smiles—never too numerous. “I don’t know how much you trust me, Julius, but I really am trying to tell the truth.”
“A difficult and thankless task, Lucinda?”
“Not thankless—somehow—to you.” She gave me, this time, a friendly little nod, and went back to her story. We had dined together on this evening; I smoked my cigar and listened; everybody else had finished, and departed; properly speaking, the salle-à-manger was shut. I had tipped the waiter to leave us one light. It shone behind her face, throwing it into relief; the rest of the room was in dimness. I had no difficulty at all in understanding that her “line of defense” had proved successful—only too sure and only too successful.
“When I said just now that I didn’t desire success—at any rate beyond what was necessary to my self-defense—I spoke too broadly. I feared too much success; if Waldo came to love me, to ask me to marry him, I should have to deal with a situation the thought of which frightened me. But what a lot of things there were to make me desire that success! Some obvious and, if you like, vulgar—the name, the money, the comfort, the end of cadging and scamping. A little higher comes the appeal that dear old Cragsfoot made to me—I should love to live at Cragsfoot. Then I was very fond of all you Rillingtons; it would be in its way wonderful to belong to the family, to be one of you. And Sir Paget and Aunt Bertha wanted me—by this time I was quite sure of that. Especially Aunt Bertha—though at first, perhaps, mainly because I wasn’t Nina Frost! Indeed, I came to believe that my being at Cragsfoot at all just then was a plot of Aunt Bertha’s; she had scented the Nina danger and looked round for a weapon against it! All those things influenced me—I suppose, too, poor Mother’s obvious delight at the idea. But the chief things I’ve left to the last. One I can tell you quite simply—Nina Frost! Is that vulgar too? I daresay, but I think it’s human. She had declared herself my enemy. Who likes to see his enemy triumph? And she would think that I was beaten on my merits! If Waldo asked me, and I refused him, could I tell her that? Would she believe me if I did? Besides, my real triumph would be in taking and keeping, not in refusing. If I refused, she would step in—or so I thought. The other thing—the last thing—was, of course, what I felt about Waldo himself, and the way in which I should stand towards him. It was funny. I had had no sense of taking a chance at Venice—though I did take a chance—gambled and, as it had turned out, lost heavily; but there was nothing but just plain being in love in the case at Venice. Don’t smile—love of that kind is really very simple. But with Waldo—and in the circumstances—matters were very different. I liked him very much; he was such a change from Arsenio, about whom I was still, of course, very sore—sore, not angry. He was very jolly at that time; if he’d behaved rather badly to Nina, it troubled him, I think, almost as little as it troubled me—which was not at all! But, first and foremost, Waldo was an adventure. Great as my charms were—we’ve agreed about that, haven’t we, Julius?—I knew that they would avail me nothing if Waldo knew the truth. Because I had—gone wrong! That would have been a shock; it would have meant a storm. But—well, who knows? Perhaps——! But Arsenio! With Arsenio! They had been great friends, those two; but in the end—deep down, there was antagonism, aversion. The one despised, the other felt himself despised. Oh, but I know—look what I’ve been to them both! And now they were rivals! Through me! All through Venice Arsenio had never forgotten Waldo—nor what Waldo called him, as I’ve told you. All through Cragsfoot Waldo never forgot Arsenio. It was not only Nina who dragged Arsenio in—though she did. Waldo used to bring in his name—and watch me. He said to me once, in a light way, ‘I suppose you and our friend Monkey had a picturesque flirtation at Venice—gondolas and concerts on the Grand Canal, and all the rest of it?’ I laughed and said, ‘Of course we had! But I don’t think I found Venice any more intoxicating than—well, than Cragsfoot, Waldo.’ That lifted the cloud from his face. He took it to himself—as I meant him to; a bit of self-defensive tactics! That was by no means the only time that he tried to draw me about Arsenio. But he never put a single question—not one—to Mother. That was against his code, you know.
“There it all was: the charm of Cragsfoot, the desire to please, comfort, soreness with Arsenio, anger at Nina, liking for Waldo—and the adventure! I seemed, in the end, to act on an impulse; I suppose that it was really the outcome of all these things. But it seemed impulse, and Nina was the direct—I mean, the immediate—cause of it. How I remember that day!
“She came to lunch at Cragsfoot, and was fairly agreeable—for her. After lunch we three were alone in the smoking room, and she proposed that Waldo should walk back to Briarmount with her and play billiards. It was inclining to rain, not attractive for a long walk. Waldo asked me to come too. The weather didn’t tempt me; I said no. By now I was not, of course, in the least afraid of leaving him alone with Nina. However, he went on pressing me, and at last I consented. She kept quiet during the pressing, but I saw the hard look in her eyes that always meant temper. We started off, all in our mackintoshes, for the rain was coming down smartly now. Silence for the first half mile or so; Nina’s nose was in the air, Waldo was sullen; I was amused; but I wasn’t going to make talk for them if they chose to be sulky. Suddenly she began on Arsenio again. She wished Don Arsenio was here! What jolly times we had when Don Arsenio was here! And so on. Neither of us said anything. Then she said directly to me, across Waldo, who was walking between us, ‘Don’t you know where he is? Don’t you ever hear from him? He was a great admirer of yours.’ I answered carelessly that I hadn’t heard since he left Venice; but I felt my color rising. Waldo listened silently, but I felt him getting annoyed—I always could. And I was getting afraid. If we’d been alone, I could easily have got away from the topic and smoothed him down. But she was there. ‘Don’t you miss him too, Waldo? You and he and Lucinda used to have such fun together!’ I could see that Waldo was just holding himself in. ‘The Monkey’s all right,’ he said, ‘but I can live without him, you know. And I imagine you can too, Lucinda?’ There was a look on his face that I didn’t like. I saw that, Nina or no Nina, I must do something. ‘Perfectly!’ I said with a laugh. I put my arm through his and gave him a little squeeze on his wrist. I think we’re quite all right as we are, Waldo!’
“We were just at the top of the hill—where you turn along the cliff towards Briarmount. Waldo pressed my arm between his arm and his side, so that I couldn’t draw it away. He stopped, and stood facing Nina like that, making me face her too, with my arm in his like that. ‘Now you understand our views, and you can drop the subject,’ he said in a low voice; it trembled a little. I felt very excited; I didn’t know how she would take it, what she would say; his voice was brusque, angry, contemptuous. But I wasn’t the least prepared for what did happen. She stood opposite to us for a minute, smiling sarcastically, or trying to smile; then her mouth began to work, and her lips turned down, and—she began to cry! Quite loudly—like a passionate child. What I’d been through is supposed to be the greatest humiliation a woman can go through—being taken and left. But this that she was going through seemed to me infinitely worse. I whispered, ‘Nina!’ and tried to draw my arm away from Waldo; I felt that I must go to her. He wouldn’t let me; he held my arm in a vise, and himself just stood looking at her, pale as pale, absolutely quiet! She tried to speak, but couldn’t get any words out, because of her sobbing. She gave it up, and began to undo her mackintosh, to get her handkerchief. She found it, and wiped her eyes; but she was sobbing still. I clung to Waldo now, for support; my legs were shaking under me; I didn’t sob, but I felt tears on my cheeks. At last she threw out her arm towards us, in a threatening sort of gesture, sobbed out, ‘You’ll be sorry for this!’ turned away, and hurried off along the cliff towards Briarmount. Her figure swayed as she walked. It was very pitiful.
“But Waldo watched her without any sign of pity—watched her till she was quite a long way off. Then he turned to me, put his hands under my arms and drew me close to him; he covered my face with kisses—my face wet with both rain and tears. ‘You love me, you love me, Lucinda?’ he whispered. I didn’t speak; I let him kiss me. I think I did love him; at any rate, I was completely overmastered. Now I began to sob myself, just repeating ‘Waldo! Waldo!’ through my sobs—nothing else—and clinging to him.”
Lucinda came to a stop and then turned her eyes to mine—they had been looking into the dimness of the salle-à-manger—“So—it happened,” she said.
She had brought her scene before my eyes vividly enough—the three wet, drab, mackintoshed figures there on the cliff in the rain; the sudden explosion of misery, spite, and love; the fight between the two girls; the disaster to one, to the other a victory that had brought no abiding peace. Yet, as she talked, there had been also in my mind’s eye another, a competing, picture. At the same spot—quite accidentally the same, or did she haunt it?—a tall, stately young woman—her figure quite ‘finished’ now, no longer lumpy—a young woman composed, ironical, verging indeed on the impudent—yet just vulnerable, prone to flush, tempted to fib, when the wedding of Waldo and Lucinda was the topic. I saw now why she had not been invited to that ceremony. Her presence would have been awkward for all parties. The skeleton at the feast indeed—if the feast had ever happened! But set against her, the sobbing girl, with her pitiful passion, her melodramatic “You’ll be sorry for this”—thrown out in the random of fury and spite, but perhaps not without some subtle instinct, some feminine intuition of the truth.