But he got no explanation from this young man, who seemed to be like a bird whose wings had been cut. “My dear Father,” he said, “I’ve no sympathy with Feo’s little pranks. She and the Malwood girl seem to have picked up a bounder and a shivering Welsh terrier this time, and even they probably regret it. I ran over this afternoon to yarn with you, as a matter of fact. Come on, let’s get out of this. Let’s go down to the stream and sit under the trees and have it out.”
And so they left together, unnoticed by that disconcerted foursome with whose little games fate had had the impudence to interfere. And presently, seated on the bank of the brook which ran through the lower part of the park, Lord Gilbert Jermyn, ex-major Royal Air Force, D. S. O., M. C., got it off his chest. “O God,” he began, “how fed up I am with this infernal peace.”
The old man gazed at his son with amazement. “I don’t follow you,” he said. “Peace? My dear lad, we have all been praying for it and we haven’t got it yet.”
The boy, and he was nothing more than that, sat with rounded shoulders and a deep frown on his face, hunched up, flicking pieces of earth into the bubbling water.
“I know all about that,” he went on. “Of course you’ve prayed for peace. So did everybody over twenty-four. But what about us,—we who were caught as kids, before we knew anything, and taught the art of flying and sent up at any old time, careless of death, the eyes of the artillery, the protectors of the artillery, the supermen with beardless faces. What about us in this so-called peace of yours? Here we are at a loose end, with no education, because that was utterly interrupted, able to do absolutely nothing for a living,—let down, let out, looked on rather as though we were brigands because we have grown into the habit of breaking records, smashing conventions and killing as a pastime. Do you see my point, old boy? We herd together in civics when we’re not in the police courts for bashing bobbies and not in the divorce courts for running off with other people’s wives, and we ask ourselves, in pretty direct English, what the hell is going to become of us,—and echo answers what. But I can tell you this. What we want is war, perpetual bloody war, never mind who’s the enemy. You made us want it, you fitted us for it and for nothing else. We’re all pretty excellent in the air and in consequence utterly useless on earth. And when I read the papers, and I never read more than the headlines anyway, I long to see that Germany is going to take advantage of the damned stupidity of all the Allied governments, including that of America, gather up the weapons that she hasn’t returned and the men who are going to refuse to pay reparations and start the whole business over again. My God, how eagerly I’d get back into my uniform, polish up my buttons, stop drinking and smoking and get fit for flying once more. I’d sing like Caruso up there among the clouds and empty my machine gun at the first Boche who came along with a thrill of joy. That’s my job. I know no other.”
The old man’s hair stood on end,—all of it, like a white bush.
IV
Something happened that afternoon which might have swung Lola’s life on to an entirely different set of rails and put Fallaray even farther out of her reach. The unrest which had followed the War had made the acquisition of servants very difficult. The young country girls who had been glad enough to go into service in the large houses now preferred to stick to their factories, because they were able to have free evenings. The housekeeper at Chilton Park was very short-handed and in consequence asked Lola and Mrs. Malwood’s maid if they would make themselves useful. Mrs. Malwood’s didn’t see it. She had been well bitten by the trades-union bug and, therefore, was not going to do anything of any sort except her specific duties, and those as carelessly as she could. The housekeeper could go and hang herself. Violet, the girl in question, intended to lie on her bed and read Scarlet Bits until she was needed by her mistress. Lola, whose blood was good, was very glad to lend a hand. With perfect willingness she committed an offence against lady’s maids which shocked Violet to the very roots of her system. She donned a little cap and apron and turned herself into a parlor maid, a creature, as all the world knows, many pegs of the ladder beneath her own position as a lady’s maid. When, therefore, tea was served on the terrace, Lola assisted the butler, looking daintier than ever, and so utterly free from coquetry, because there was no man in the world except Fallaray for her, that she might have been a little ghost.
But the trained eye of Gordon Macquarie looked her over immediately. He turned to Lady Feo, to whom he had not addressed a word for twenty minutes, and said with a sudden flash of enthusiasm, “Ye gods and little fishes, what a picture of a girl! Wouldn’t she look perfectly wonderful in the front line of the chorus on the O. P. side! An actress too, I bet you. Look at the way she’s pretending not to be alive. Of course she knows how perfectly sweet she looks in that saucy make-up.”
If Mr. Gordon Macquarie had deliberately gone out of his way to discover the most brilliant method of sentencing himself to the lethal chamber he could not have been more successful than by using that outpouring of gushing words. Feo had fully realized, from the moment that she had left the dining room, that in acquiring Gordon Macquarie she had committed the gravest faux pas of her life. Not only was he a bounder but he did not possess the imagination and the sense of proportion to know that in being invited down to Chilton Park by Lady Feo he had metaphorically been decorated with a much coverted order. His egotism and his whining fright had made him unable to maintain his fourth wall and at least imitate the ways of a gentleman. Never before in her history had Feo spent an afternoon so unpleasant and so humiliating, and now, to be obliged to listen to a pæan of praise about her maid, if you please, was the last straw. Any other woman would probably have risen from her place among her cushions, followed Lola into the house and either boxed her ears or ordered her back to town.