“It’s awfully good of you,” he said. “I’ve been a perfect ass, of course. If I could win back half what I’ve lost, I swear I’d never back a horse again!”
“I expect your luck will turn,” repeated Barbara hopefully. She had all a gambler’s instinct of optimism.
But Sidney only laughed again rather recklessly as he got up to go. The interval was over and the people were hurrying back to their seats.
“As the orchestra seems to be going to make another effort,” he said, “I must get back to the Garringdons’ box. Good night, Miss Turner; good night, Aunt Ruth; I’ll come and look you up in a day or two, if I get over to-morrow without being obliged to put a sudden end to my career.”
“What did Joe mean by his last remark?” Mrs. Vanderstein asked as the door shut behind the young man’s vanishing form. “I don’t understand what he meant about putting an end to his career.”
“He was telling me he has lost a lot of money lately, racing,” Barbara murmured rather reluctantly, for she was not sure if Sidney would like her to repeat what he had said. Still, she thought, it was surely absurd for her to imagine that he would confide in her anything he would hesitate to tell a relation. “I suppose he was trying to joke about that.”
“It’s nothing to joke about,” said Mrs. Vanderstein severely. “Not that I saw anything like a joke. I think it’s disgraceful, and I shall alter my opinion of him very seriously if he really has been betting. But hush, the music is going to begin.”
And she was soon entirely engrossed in listening to it.
But Barbara, to whose ear any but the most elementary tunes presented nothing but a confused medley of noises, wriggled rather impatiently on her chair from time to time, as she waited for the act to come to an end. Recollections that had lain dormant for a long time, put away on some high shelf of the wardrobe of memory, had been awakened again by her conversation with Sidney and the letter she had that day received from the old stableman. How happy her childhood seemed when viewed now through the flattering medium of the intervening years, which obscured all that had been disagreeable, and magnified the delights of her unrestrained wanderings and of the free and easy company of her father and her father’s delightfully jocular friends.
How they used to laugh at each other’s witty remarks, and how she, too, had laughed, joining in the mirth without understanding in the least what aroused it but with enjoyment none the less complete on that account. With closed eyes she leant back against the wall of the box, her lips curved in a smile and her head a little to one side in an attitude of listening. But it was not the voices of the singers she heard. Instead, the thud, thud of galloping hoofs sounded in her ears, coming nearer and nearer, and, mixed with the creaking of leather, the excited snorts of her pony and the jingling of bits. She seemed to see around her the bare, open spaces of the heath and the figures of the watchers, among them herself, crouching low in the saddle with her back to the bitter east winds that sweep across the bleak Newmarket country in the spring. Splendid bracing air, her father used to say, and for her part she had never given a thought to the weather. Happy, happy times! Oh, that they could return. Why could not Mrs. Vanderstein give her that £500 a year, thought Barbara, and let her take a cottage, however tiny, within reach of a race-course and within hail of a training stable? If only she had a little money of her own. Money was everything, after all. It meant liberty. If Averstone won his race it would be something to the good.