At the Relton Arms

by Evelyn Sharp

"Hullo, father, here I am! All right, father? I say, isn't it awfully jolly to be together again, eh, father?"

The premier's speech on fruit-growing for the million fluttered down into the coal scuttle; and the Squire wiped his spectacles violently, and gave in to the fascination of the single man who never worked. And when Digby strolled in ten minutes later, he found the prodigal filling his father's pipe with Canadian tobacco, and telling him American anecdotes, while the little room resounded with their laughter.

"Come in, Digby, and listen to this fellow," said Sir Marcus, jovially; "did you ever know such a fellow as Jack? It's a pity you don't try America, Digby, it would do you a world of good, man!"

Digby accepted the situation and his eviction with a laugh, not only because, as he had said to Lady Joan, he knew he would be received back into favor again on the morrow when the fascination of the prodigal would have exhausted itself for the time, but also from a lurking hope that he would at last have some chance of talking to their fair guest, whom the Squire had as yet entirely monopolized, in the way he usually monopolized any stranger who would lend a willing and fresh ear to his hobbies. But the musician did not get his chance that evening, though he tried very hard for it. Jack's return proved but a doubtful assistance to him: to begin with, it caused an alteration in the dinner-table, by which he found himself out of the range of her conversation; it also made the conversation in the drawing-room afterwards more hopelessly general than ever, for they all sat round in a circle and listened to the American anecdotes, and when the American anecdotes flagged for a moment Digby had to go to the piano and play the returned wanderer's favorite airs, while the hero himself took the opportunity of opening a desperate flirtation with Lady Joan under cover of the crashing chords of his eldest brother.

The musician was full thirty years old, and had been in love almost as many times as he had photos in his West End studio; like his father, it was only the trifling circumstances of life, or its visions, that seemed to him to be worthy of serious consideration, and like his father he had retained his boyish temperament past the age when such a temperament is sufficient for the demands of circumstance. From the first his connection with Lady Joan had been unusual. She had not begun by fascinating him, and he had not begun by giving her singing-lessons. She was one of the few people of his acquaintance who knew of that secret marriage of his which had left him a widower three years ago, with a baby son whom Sir Marcus would not acknowledge, and who did not regard it either as a boyish entanglement from which his wife's death had luckily released him, or as a reason for abstaining from future marriage altogether. Not that she had any definite views on the subject of boyish entanglements or second marriages, for Lady Joan never had definite views on anything, they were too much trouble to defend, and she would not have taken up any position which would not lend itself to modification on occasion; but she was unconventional, and she knew it, and in spite of her boast that she was a woman of the world, there was enough of the school-girl in her to give her an exquisite delight in shocking other people who were not unconventional. So hers was the only hand that was held out to Digby when he came to Relton after his wife's death, in search of a home for his child; and it was she who braved the many-tongued slander of an idle country town, and helped him to find what he wanted in the motherly landlady of the "Relton Arms," with whom he could leave the boy in safety. The arrangement necessarily brought him constantly to Relton, when he was naturally prompted by gratitude and courtesy to leave his card at the Hall; but it was some time before she began to have any real interest for him. It was true that she was a beautiful woman, but her beauty and her wit were of a subtle kind, unlike the obvious and doll-like charms that usually attracted him in women; she showed him that she found him interesting, but she did not adore him like his other lady friends, and she disputed his dicta, and she did not understand his music. After a time these very differences drew them together, and they passed into the desperately dangerous stage of friendship, in which the man had to confess to himself that he was again in love, and the woman had to ask herself if he meant anything, and whether she was to continue to be natural and pleasant to him, or whether the time had come for her in the eyes of society to avoid him and pretend she did not care for him. Lady Joan, hating the laws of society, and dreading still more the chain of another man's will, broke the connection at this point and went abroad for a year, and was away long enough for Digby to fall in and out of another hot love affair, and returned on the day of his reception in the studio to find him rather more interesting than before, and herself made weaker in her resolution by a year's sojourn with a lady companion. Digby on his part was persuading himself that her return to England had caused the revival of his old love, and that this attachment which had begun so coldly and forced itself into his heart by the most estimable instincts of gratitude and friendship, was superior to all the other attachments of his life, which had begun with infatuation and ended with indifference, and was therefore to be cherished as the only real feeling he had ever had for any woman.

"I'm not the sort of man to be a bachelor," he said to himself earnestly, somewhere about midnight that evening, as he leaned out of his bedroom window and smoked a cigarette meditatively. "Some fellows ought never to marry; I told Dick Stephens so when he got engaged, and he was separated from his wife within a year of their marriage. But I am not like Dick Stephens. I am really a most domesticated sort of man, and it is time I settled down. I am tired of being a Bohemian; every wretched little pygmy who writes ballads and lets his hair grow and doesn't wash, is a Bohemian. And there is the boy, too; he ought to have a mother of course, poor little chap: we both want a woman about us, don't we, Sonny? Yes, there is no doubt that it is my duty to Sonny to marry very soon."

In the room above, among the cushions on the sofa, lay Lady Joan with her hair down and a fan in her hand, opposite a full-length mirror; in her most secret moments Lady Joan liked to assure herself that she played the part picturesquely.

"I like him. He is fresh, and original, and amusing. He doesn't bore me, and I can flirt with him—safely. He has no theories about things, and he does not want to upset creation, and he doesn't take life so desperately seriously. It is such a blessing to meet some one who is content with the age as it is—bah! what a smell of tobacco smoke!"

And she rose, shut the window with a bang, and went to bed, where she slept soundly till the morning.

"It is curious," murmured the musician, lighting another cigarette, "how Fate seems to have propelled her towards me at every crisis of my life; just after Mary died, for instance, and again before I met Norah!—poor little Norah! and then again the other day, when I really had made up my mind to go to Africa, and she came back from the Continent in time to prevent me. And now—ah, I believe I could write that song now."