Love and Lucy

by Maurice Hewlett

It was after that queer look, after her too conscious blush that she began to envisage the state of her affairs. She was going to Martley Thicket for Whitsuntide; it was an old engagement, comparatively old, that is; she did want to go, and now she knew that she did. Well, how much did she want to go? Ought she to want it? What had happened?

Questions thronged her when once she had opened a window. What did it matter to her whether Urquhart qualified as an aviator or not? What had made her ask him not to do it? How had she allowed him to say "Assume that you like me"? The short dialogue stared at her in red letters upon the dark. "Assume that you like me—" "You may assume it." "I do." She read the packed little sentences over and over, and studied herself with care. No, honestly, nothing jarred. There was no harm; she didn't feel any tarnish upon her. And yet—she was looking forward to Martley Thicket with a livelier blood than she had felt since Easter when James had kissed her in the shrouded garden. A livelier blood? Hazarding the looking-glass, she thought that she could detect a livelier iris too. What had happened? Well, of course, the answer to that question was involved in another: how much was she to assume? How much did Urquhart like her? She hoped, against conviction, that she might have answered these questions before she met him again—which would probably be at Martley. Just now, stoutly bearing her disapproval, he was doubtless at Byfleet or elsewhere risking his neck. She answered a question possibly arising out of this by a shrewd smile. "Of course I don't disapprove. He knows that. I shiver; but I know he's perfectly right. He may be sure." The meeting at Martley would, at the very least, be extremely interesting. She left it there for the moment.

But having once begun to pay attention to such matters as these, she pursued her researches—in and out of season. It was a busy time of year, and James always laid great stress on what he called "the duties of her station." She must edge up crowded stairways behind him, stand at his side in hot and humming rooms where the head spun with the effort not to hear what other people were saying—so much more important, always, than what your partner was. James's height and eyeglass seemed to give him an impartial air at these dreadful ceremonies. Behind his glass disk he could afford to be impertinent. And he was certainly rude enough to be an Under-Secretary. Without that shining buckler of the soul he would have been simply nobody; with it, he was a demi-god. Here then, under the very shadow of his immortality, Lucy pursued her researches. What of the romantic, hidden, eponymous James? Where did he stand now in her regard?

Since Easter at Wycross, James had not been her veiled Eros, but the possibilities were all there. He was not a garden god, by any means, nor a genius of the Spring. January and Onslow Square had not frozen his currents; February and the Opera House had heightened his passion. At any moment he might resume his devotional habit—even here in Carlton House Terrace. And what then? Well—and this was odd—this ought to have produced a state of tension very trying to the nerves; and, well—it hadn't. That's all. At that very party in Carlton House Terrace, with a band braying under the stairs, and a fat lord shouting in her ear, her secret soul was trembling on a brink. She was finding out to her half-rueful dismay—it was only half—that she was prepared to be touched, prepared to be greatly impressed, but not prepared to be thrilled as she had been, if James should kiss her again. She was prepared, in fact, to present—as statesmen do when they write to their sovereign—her grateful, humble duty—and no more. In vain the band brayed, in vain Lord J——, crimson by her ear, roared about the weather in the West of Ireland, Lucy's soul was peering over the edge of her old world into the stretches of a misty new one.

This was bad enough, and occupied her through busy nights and days; but there was more disturbing matter to come, stirred up to cloud her mind by Mabel's unwonted discretion. Mabel had been more than discreet. She had been frightened. Pushing out into a stream of new surmise, she had suddenly faltered and hooked at the quay. Lucy herself was at first merely curious. She had no doubts, certainly no fears. What had been the matter with Mabel, when she hinted that perhaps, after all, James had never done anything? What could Mabel know, or guess, or suspect? Lucy owned to herself, candidly, that James was incomprehensible. After thirteen years, or was it fourteen?—suddenly—with no warning symptoms, to plunge into such devotion as never before, when everything had been new, and he only engaged—! Men were like that when they were engaged. They aren't certain of one, and leave no chances. But James, even as an engaged man, had always been certain. He had taken her, and everything else, for granted. She remembered how her sisters, not only Mabel, but the critical Agnes (now Mrs. Riddell in the North), had discussed him and found him too cocksure to be quite gallant. Kissed her? Of course he had kissed her. Good Heavens. Yes, but not as he had that night at the Opera. "You darling! You darling!" Now James had called her "my darling" as often as you please—but never until then "you darling." There's a world of difference. Anybody can see it.

And then—after the beautiful, the thrilling, the deeply touching episode—the moment after it—there was the old, indifferent, slightly bored James with the screwed eye and the disk. Not a hint, not a ripple, not the remains of a flush. It was the most bewildering, the most baffling jig-saw of a business she had ever heard of. You would have said that he was two quite separate people; you might have said—Mabel would have said at once—that James had had nothing to do with it.

But she had said so! The discovery stabbed Lucy in the eyes like a flash of lightning, left her blind and quivering, with a swim of red before her hurt vision. That was why Mabel had been frightened. And now Lucy herself was frightened.

Francis Lingen, absurd! Mr. Urquhart? Ah, that was quite another thing. She grew hot, she grew quite cold, and suddenly she began to sob. Oh, no, no, not that. A flood of tossing thoughts came rioting and racing in, flinging crests of foam, like white and beaten water. She for a time was swept about, a weed in this fury of storm. She was lost, effortless, at death's threshold. But she awoke herself from the nightmare, walked herself about, and reason returned. It was nonsense, unwholesome nonsense. Why, that first time, he was in the library with James and Francis Lingen, his second visit to the house! Why, when she was at the Opera he had been at Peltry with the Mabels. And as for Wycross, he had wired from St. James's in the afternoon, and come on the next day. Absurd—and thank God for it. And poor Francis Lingen! She could afford to laugh at that. Francis Lingen was as capable of kissing the Duchess of Westbury—at whose horrible party she had been the other night—as herself.

She felt very safe, and enormously relieved. So much so that she could afford herself the reflection that if hardihood had been all that was wanting, Jimmy Urquhart would have had plenty and to spare. Oh, yes, indeed. But—thank God again—he was a gentleman if ever there was one. Nobody but a gentleman could afford to be so simple in dealing.

Having worked all this out, she felt that her feet at least were on solid ground. A spirit of adventure was renewed in her, and a rather unfortunate contretemps provoked it. Before she knew where she was, she was up to the neck, as Urquhart would have said, in a turbid stream.