When Lord Reggie asked Lady Locke to come with him into the yew tree walk that Sunday afternoon, he fully intended to tell her that he would be glad to marry her. It seemed to him that Sunday was a very appropriate day for such a confession, and would give to his remarks a solemnity that they might otherwise lack. But somehow the conversation became immediately unmanageable, as conversations have a knack of doing, and turned into channels which had less than nothing to do with marriage. By a series of ingenious modulations Lord Reggie might doubtless have contrived eventually to arrive at the key in which he wanted to breathe out his love song; but the afternoon was too sultry for ingenuities, and so they talked about the influence of Art on Nature, and his anthem, until it was time to dress for dinner.
Lady Locke was a woman, and so it may be taken for granted that she divined her companion's original intention, and was perhaps a little amused at his failure to carry it into an act. But she manifested no consciousness, and disappeared to her bedroom without displaying either disappointment or triumph. She did, however, in fact know that Lord Reggie meant to ask her the fateful question, and she had quite decided now how she meant to answer it.
She had fallen into a curious sort of fondness for this tired, unnatural boy, whom she considered as twisted as if he had been an Egyptian cripple, zigzagging along a sandy track on his hands with his legs tied round his neck; and two or three days ago she had even thought seriously what she would say to him if he asked her to join lives with him permanently. The motherly feeling had verged on something else, very different; and when one day he carelessly touched her hand she had felt her heart beating with a violence that was painfully natural. But now, more than one incident that had since occurred had forged links in a new chain of resolution that held her back from a folly. Although possibly she hardly knew it, the scrap of conversation that she had chanced to overhear between Lord Reggie and Tommy had really decided her to meet the former with a refusal if he asked her to be his wife. It had opened her eyes, and shown her in a flash the influence that a mere pose may have upon others who are not posing. Her mother's heart flushed with a heat of anger at the idea of Tommy, her dead soldier's son, developing into the sort of young man whom she chose to christen "Modern"; and as her heart flushed, unknown to her her mind really decided. She still fancied that Lord Reggie was nothing more than a whimsical poseur, bitten by the tarantula of imitation that preys upon weak natures. She still fancied what she hoped. But incertitude strengthened resolve, and she never intended to be Lady Reggie Hastings. Yet she meant Lord Reggie to propose to her. She liked him so well that, womanlike, she could not quite forbear the pleasure of hearing him even pretend that he loved her—she supposed he would feel bound to pretend so much; and his proposal would give to her an opportunity of saying one or two things to him—of preaching that affectionate sermon, in fact, that she had long ago written in her thoughts.
Sweet women love to preach to those whom they like, and Lady Locke liked Lord Reggie very much, and wished strongly to have the chance of telling him so.
But he said nothing that night, and she had to wait for a while. The weather, which had certainly shown the most graceful politeness to the Surrey week, was still in a complaisant frame of mind when Monday morning dawned, and the tents were put up for the school children, and the Aunt Sallies and other instruments of amusement were posed in their places about the garden, without any fear arising lest the rain should prevent their being used. Esmé Amarinth spent the morning in reflecting upon his address, and constructing pale paradoxes; and the rest of the party at the "Retreat" did nothing with all the quiet ingenuity that seems inbred in the English race.
At four o'clock the sound of lusty singing in the dusty distance announced the approach of the expected guests, who, under the direction of Mr. Smith, expressed their youthful feelings of anticipation and excitement in a processional hymn, whose words dealt with certain ritualistic doctrines in a spirit of serene but rather incompetent piety, and whose tune was remarkable for the Gounod spirit that pervaded its rather love-lorn harmonies. As Mr. Amarinth said, it sounded like a French apostrophe to a Parisian Eros, and was tinged with the amorous music colour of Covent Garden.
Mrs. Windsor received the party with weary grace, and a general salute that might have included all the national schools in the kingdom, so wide and so impersonal was its manner. She impressed the children as much as Madame Valtesi frightened them by examining them with a stony and sphinx-like gravity through her tortoise-shell eyeglass. The teachers conducted the programme of games—in which, however, Lady Locke, Tommy, and Lord Reggie fitfully took part; and after tea had been munched with trembling delight in the largest of the tents, and more games had been got through, Mr. Smith distributed small presents to all the children, some of whom were quite unstrung by the effort they had to make not to seem too happy in the presence of "the quality." The curate then took his leave, as he was obliged to visit a sick parishioner, and, as the sun was evidently on the point of beginning to imitate Turner's later pictures, Mrs. Windsor directed that the children should be assembled under the great cedar tree on the lawn, to hear Esmé Amarinth's promised address.
The picture that the garden presented at this moment was quite a pretty one. The sun, as I have said, was declining towards the West in a manner strongly suggestive of a scene at the Lyceum Theatre after many rehearsals with a competent lime-light man. The monstrous yew trees cast gross misshapen shadows across the smooth, velvet lawns. The air was heavy with the scents of flowers. Across the gleaming yellow of the sky a black riband of homeward passing rooks streamed slowly towards the trees they loved. Under the spreading branches of the cedar stood the big motley group of flushed and receptive children, flanked by their more staid teachers, and faced by Bung, who sat upon his tail before them, and panted serenely, with his tongue hanging out sideways nearly to the ground. Dotted about upon creaking garden chairs were Mrs. Windsor, Madame Valtesi, Lady Locke, and Lord Reggie, while Tommy in a loose white sailor suit scampered about from one place to another, simmering in perfect enjoyment. And the central figure of all was Esmé Amarinth, who stood leaning upon an ebony stick with a silver knob, surveying his audience with the peculiar smile of humourous self-satisfaction that was so characteristic of his large-featured face.
Just before he began his address Mrs. Windsor fluttered up to him, and whispered in his ear—
"Don't make any classical allusions, will you, Esmé? I promised Mr. Smith there should be nothing of that kind. He thinks classical allusions corrupting. Of course he's wrong—good people always are—but perhaps we ought to humour him, as he is the curate, you know."