I suppose that my tone was irritable. He raised his brows, smiling still. “Don’t you think that a little curiosity is natural? She is, after all, an important figure in the family history. And she is, so far as I’m aware, the only woman who’s ever got the better of Nina. I should like to see her.” He paused a moment, his lips set in the firm and resolute smile with which I was familiar on Lady Dundrannan’s lips—the Frost smile. “Yes, I should certainly like to see her. And I’m not really much interested in roulette systems. That for your information, Julius!”
CHAPTER XIV
FOR AULD LANG SYNE
I AWOKE the next morning with my head full of Lucinda; the thought of her haunted me. My desire to see her, to know how she fared, had been constant since I came to Mentone; it had really prompted my visit to Arsenio Valdez; it had made me restless under the gilded hospitality of Villa San Carlo—a contrast was always thrusting itself under my eyes. But it was brought to a sharper point by the events of the day before, by the mode of living in which I had found Valdez, by his concealment of her and reticence about her. I felt now simply unable to go on faring sumptuously at Villa San Carlo every day, while she was in all likelihood suffering hardship or even want.
There was another strain of feeling, which developed now, or came to the surface. As I drank my morning coffee and smoked a cigar, my memory traveled back through my acquaintance with her—back through my intercourse with her at Ste. Maxime, with all its revelation of her doings, feelings, and personality; back through all that to the first days at Cragsfoot which seemed now so long ago, on the other side of the barrier which her flight had raised and the war had made complete. It was Arsenio who had set me on the line of thought. I recalled my mood in those days, the state of mind in which I had been, and saw how justly his quick wits had then divined it and had yesterday described it. I had chosen to play the fogy, to consider myself out of the running. It was quite true. He had paid me the compliment of saying that he did not know why I should have done this. He did not know. I do not think that I knew myself at the time. We see our feelings most clearly when they possess us no longer. The woman who had been more than any one else in the world to me was still alive in my heart in those days, and still mistress of my thoughts, though she walked the earth no longer and her voice was forever silent. It was still seeming to me, as it does to a man in such a case, that my story was told and finished, that I was done. Beside the fresh young folk at Cragsfoot, I might well feel myself a fogy. What could Lucinda seem to me then but a charming child playing with her fellows?
If Arsenio’s words set me thus smiling—even if half in melancholy over a vanished image that rose again from the past, and flitted transiently across a stage that she had once filled—smiling at the memory of how old—how “finished” for affairs of the heart—I had once seemed to myself, there was a danger that they might make me forget how old I was, in sad fact, at the present moment.
Towards this mistake another thing contributed. Combativeness is usually a characteristic of youth; Godfrey Frost had stirred it up in me. In spite of the plea of “family history” which he had put forward (with a distinct flavor of irony in his tone), my feelings acknowledged no warrant for his claim to a just curiosity and interest about Lucinda, and resented the intimation, conveyed by that firm and resolute Frost smile, that he intended to take a hand in her affairs, on the pretext of studying a roulette system under her husband’s tuition. Such an attitude, such an intention, seemed somehow insulting to her; if the Rillingtons had a right to treat her with less respect than that which is due to any lady—even if Nina based a right to do so on what had happened in the past—Godfrey had none. If she chose to remain hidden, what business was it of his to drag her into the light? There seemed something at least ungallant, unchivalrous in it. I ought to have remembered that he had only the general principles of chivalry to guide him, whereas I had the knowledge of what Lucinda was, of her reserve and delicate aloofness. In the end his curiosity might find itself abashed, rebuked, transformed. I did not think of that, and for the time anger clouded my liking for him.
Coincidently there came over me a weariness, an impatience, of Villa San Carlo. It was partly that Lady Dundrannan created—quite unintentionally, of course—the atmosphere of a Court about her; there was always the question of what would please Her Majesty! This was amusing at first, but ended by growing tedious. But, deeper than this, there was the old conflict, the old competition. Some unknown and dingy lodging, somewhere on the Riviera coast, was matching its lure against all the attractions of magnificent Villa San Carlo. That was the end of it with me—and with Godfrey Frost!