Part 13

“Then I must go, dear--you know how it is. That old Miss Lillicrap is such a terror with the vegetables. I do feel so vexed about it all--and your auntie will be upset, won’t she? Are you ready, dear?”

Lydia saw that the kind woman was waiting to accompany her downstairs to the dining-room, but she had every intention of making her entrance unescorted.

“I’m not quite ready,” she said coolly. “Please don’t wait--I know you want to be downstairs.”

The manageress looked bewildered, and as though she felt herself to have been rebuffed, but she spoke in her usual rather incoherently good-natured fashion as she hastened down the stairs.

“Just whatever you like, and it’ll be quite all right. I quite understand. I wish I could wait, dear, but really I daren’t....”

Lydia was very glad that Miss Nettleship dared not wait.

She herself remained upstairs for another full five minutes, although her remaining preparations were easily completed in one.

At the end of the five minutes she felt sure that all the boarders must be assembled. Hardly anyone was ever late for a meal, since meals for most of the women, at any rate, contributed the principal variety in the day’s occupation.

Nevertheless, Lydia went downstairs very slowly, until the sound of clattering plates and dishes, broken by occasional outbreaks of conversation, told her that dinner was in progress.

Then she quickly opened the dining-room door.

They were all there, and they all looked up as she came in.

Her accustomed seat at the far end of the table, next to the Greek, was empty, but on Margoliouth’s other side sat a strange woman, whom Lydia was at no pains to identify, even had Miss Forster’s description not at once returned to her mind. “Very dark--and stout--and dressed like a foreigner.”

Mrs. Margoliouth was all that.

Lydia saw the room and everyone in it, in a flash, as she closed the door behind her.

Miss Lillicrap, clutching her knife and fork, almost as though she were afraid that her food might be snatched from her plate while she peered across the room with eager, malevolent curiosity--Miss Nettleship, suddenly silent in the midst of some babbled triviality, and evidently undecided whether to get up or to remain seated--Mrs. Bulteel, her sharp gaze fixed upon Lydia and her pinched mouth half open--Miss Forster, also staring undisguisedly--Mrs. Clarence, with her foolish, red-rimmed eyes almost starting from her head--the youth, Hector Bulteel, his mouth still half-full and a tumbler arrested in mid-career in his hand--his father’s sallow face turned towards the door, wrinkled with an evident discomfiture.

Mrs. Margoliouth herself had raised a pair of black, hostile-looking eyes, set in a heavy, pasty face, to fix them upon Lydia.

Irene had stopped her shuffling progress round the table, and turned her head over her shoulder.

Only Margoliouth remained with his head bent over his plate, apparently absorbed in the food that he was sedulously cutting up into small pieces.

In the momentary silence Lydia advanced. Her heart was beating very quickly, but she was conscious of distinct exhilaration, and she remembered to tilt her chin a little upward and to walk slowly.

There was the sudden scraping of a chair, and pale, ugly Mr. Bulteel had sprung forward, and come down the room to meet her.

The unexpected little act of chivalry, which obviously came as a surprise to himself as to everybody else, nearly startled Lydia out of her predetermined composure.

She looked up at him and smiled rather tremulously, and he pulled out her chair for her, and waited until she was seated before returning to his own place again.

The meal went on, and the atmosphere was electric. Contrary to her custom, Miss Nettleship made no attempt at introducing the newcomer, and Margoliouth did not seek to rectify the omission.

He ate silently, his eyes on his plate. Twice Lydia addressed small, commonplace remarks to him, each time in the midst of a silence, wherein her voice sounded very clear and steady. He answered politely but briefly, and the other women at the table exchanged glances, and one or two of them looked admiringly at Lydia.

It was this consciousness that kept her outwardly composed, for she found the position far more of an ordeal than she had expected it to be. She was even aware that, under the table, a certain nervous trembling that she could not repress was causing her knees to knock together.

She felt very glad when the meal was over and old Miss Lillicrap--who always gave the signal for dispersal--had pushed her chair back, and said venomously:

“Well, I can’t say, ‘Thank you for my good dinner.’ The fowl was tough, and I didn’t get my fair share of sauce with the pudding.”

“Are we having a rubber to-night?” Miss Forster inquired loudly of no one in particular, with the evident intention of silencing Miss Lillicrap.

Lydia saw Mrs. Bulteel frown and shake her head, as though in warning.

Margoliouth, however, had at last looked up.

“I’m not playing to-night,” he said sullenly.

“Doesn’t your wife play Bridge?” Miss Forster inquired rather maliciously.

“No.”

“You’re tired with your journey perhaps,” piped Mrs. Clarence, looking inquisitively at the stranger.

Mrs. Margoliouth stared back at her with lack-lustre and rather contemptuous-looking black eyes.

“What journey?” she said in a thick voice. “I’ve only come up from Clapham, where we go back on Monday. Our house is at Clapham. The children are there.”

“The children?” repeated Mrs. Clarence foolishly.

“We have five children,” said Mrs. Margoliouth impassively, but she cast a fierce glance at her husband as she spoke.

Miss Forster suddenly thrust herself forward, and demonstratively put her arm round Lydia’s waist.

“I suppose you’re going upstairs to your scribbling, as usual, you naughty girl?” she inquired affectionately.

“I ought to,” Lydia said, smiling faintly. “It isn’t cold in my room now that I’ve got a little oil-stove. I got the idea from a girl I went to supper with the other night, who lives in rooms.”

“How splendid!” said Miss Forster, with loud conviction, her tone and manner leaving no room for doubt that she was paying a tribute to something other than the inspiration of the oil-stove.

Lydia smiled again, and went upstairs.

The other boarders were going upstairs too, and as Lydia turned the corner of the higher flights that led to her own room, she could hear them on the landing below.

“I do think that girl’s behaving most splendidly!”

Miss Forster’s emphatic superlatives were unmistakable.

“She looks like a sort of queen to-night,” said an awed voice, that Lydia recognized with surprise as belonging to the usually inarticulate Hector Bulteel.

She had not missed her effect, then.

Lydia did not write that evening. She went to bed almost at once, glad of the darkness, and feeling strangely tired. After she was in bed she even found, to her own surprise, that she was shedding tears that she could not altogether check at will.

Then, after all, she _minded_?

Lydia could not analyze her own emotion, and as the strain of the day relaxed, she quietly cried herself to sleep like a child.

But the eventual analysis of the whole episode, made by Lydia with characteristic detachment, brought home to her various certainties.

Margoliouth’s defection had hurt her vanity slightly--her heart not at all.

She could calmly look back upon her brief relations with him as experience, and therefore to be valued.

But perhaps the conviction that penetrated her mind most strongly, was that one which she faced with her most unflinching cynicism, although it would have vexed her to put it into words for any other human being. No grief or bereavement that her youth was yet able to conceive of could hurt her sufficiently to discount the lasting and fundamental satisfaction of the _beau rôle_ that it would bestow upon her in the view of the onlookers.

XIII

“Broken heart? Nonsense. People with broken hearts don’t eat chestnut-pudding like that,” quoth Grandpapa.

Lydia would have preferred to make her own explanations at Regency Terrace, but Miss Nettleship had already written a long letter to Aunt Beryl, as Lydia discovered when she reached home on Christmas Eve.

Aunt Beryl took the affair very seriously, and made Lydia feel slightly ridiculous.

“Trifling like that with a young girl, and him a married man the whole of the time!” said Aunt Beryl indignantly.

“It’s all _right_, auntie,” Lydia made rather impatient answer. “I didn’t take it seriously, you know.”

“How did he know you weren’t going to? Many a girl has had her heart broken for less.”

It was then that Grandpapa uttered his unkind allusion to Lydia’s undoubted appreciation of her favourite chestnut-pudding, made in honour of her arrival by Aunt Beryl herself.

Lydia knew very well that Grandpapa would have been still more disagreeable if she had pretended a complete loss of appetite, and she felt rather indignant that this very absence of affectation should thus come in for criticism.

Although she had only been away four months, the house seemed smaller, and the conversation of Aunt Beryl and Uncle George more restricted. She was not disappointed when her aunt told her that their Christmas dinner was to be eaten at midday, and that there would be guests.

“Who do you think is here, actually staying at the ‘Osborne’?” Miss Raymond inquired.

Lydia was unable to guess.

“Your Aunt Evelyn, with Olive. They’ve been worried about Olive for quite a time now--she can’t throw off a cold she caught in the autumn, and, of course, there _have_ been lungs in the Senthoven family, so they’re a bit uneasy. Aunt Evelyn brought her down here for a change, and Bob’s coming down for Christmas Day. They keep him very busy at the office now. Don’t you ever run across him in town, Lydia?”

“No, never,” said Lydia, with great decision.

She had no wish to meet Bob Senthoven in London, although she was rather curious to see both her cousins again.

She caught sight of him in church on Christmas morning, where she decorously sat between Aunt Beryl and Uncle George, in the seats that had been theirs ever since Lydia could remember.

Bob, who was on the outside, did not look as though he had altered very much. He was still short and stocky, with hair combed straight back and plastered close to his head.

Olive, much taller than her brother, was dressed in thick tweed, with a shirt and tie, and the only concession to her invalidhood that Lydia could see, was a large and rather mangy-looking yellow fur incongruously draped across her shoulders.

Mrs. Senthoven’s smaller, slighter figure was completely hidden from view by her offspring.

As they all met outside the church door, Lydia, in thought, was instantly carried back to Wimbledon again, and her sixteenth year.

“Hullo, ole gurl!” from Olive.

“Same to you and many of ’em,” briefly from Bob, in reply to anticipated Christmas greetings.

“We’ll all walk back to the Terrace together, shall we?” suggested Aunt Beryl, on whose mind Lydia knew that elaborate preparations for dinner were weighing. “Grandpapa will want to wish you all a Merry Christmas, I’m sure.”

Aunt Evelyn, not without reason, looked nervous, nor did Grandpapa’s greeting serve to reassure her.

“Why does little Shamrock bark at you so, my dear?” he inquired of Olive, with a pointed look at her short skirts. “I’m afraid he doesn’t like those great boots of yours.”

It was quite evident that Grandpapa’s opinion of the Senthoven family had undergone no modification.

They sat round the fire lit in the drawing-room in honour of the occasion, and Aunt Beryl hurried in and out, her face flushed from the kitchen fire, and hoped that they’d “all brought good appetites.”

“There’s the bell, Lydia! I wonder if you’d go down, dear? I can’t spare the girl just now, and it’s only Mr. Almond.”

Lydia willingly opened the door to her old friend, and received his usual, rather precise greeting, together with an old-fashioned compliment on the roses that London had not succeeded in fading. She took him up to the drawing-room.

“Greetings of the season, ladies and gentlemen all,” said Mr. Monteagle Almond, bowing in the doorway.

“Rum old buffer,” said Bob to Lydia, aside.

She smiled rather coldly.

She felt sure that although the Bulteels and Miss Forster--who, after all, was the friend of Sir Rupert and Lady Honoret--might have accepted Mr. Almond and his out-of-date gentility, they would never have approved of Bob and Olive, with their witless, incessant slang.

“Now, then!” said Aunt Beryl, appearing in the doorway divested of her apron, and with freshly washed hands. “Dinner’s quite ready, if the company is. George, will you lead the way with Evelyn?--Olive and Mr. Almond--that’s right--now, Bob, you haven’t forgotten the way to the dining-room--or, if you have, Lydia will show you--and I’ll give Grandpapa an arm.”

Aunt Beryl, for once, was excited and loquacious. Giving Grandpapa an arm, however, was a lengthy process, so that she missed the appreciative exclamations with which each couple duly honoured the festive appearance of the dining-room.

“How bright it looks!” cried Aunt Evelyn. “Now, doesn’t it look bright?”

“Most seasonable, I declare,” said Mr. Almond, rubbing his hands together.

“Oh, golly! crackers!”

“My eye, look at the mistletoe!” said Bob, and nudged Lydia with his elbow. Lydia immediately affected to ignore the huge bunches of mistletoe pendant in the window and over the table, and admired instead the holly decorating each place.

“A very curious old institution, mistletoe,” said Uncle George, and seemed disappointed that nobody pursued the subject with a request for further information.

When they were all seated, and Grandpapa had leant heavily upon his corner of the table, and found a piece of holly beneath his hand, and vigorously flung it into the enormous fire blazing just behind his chair, Uncle George said again:

“Probably you all know the old song of the ‘Mistletoe Bough,’ but I wonder whether anyone can tell me the origin----”

“We’ll come to the songs later on, my boy,” said Grandpapa briskly. “Get on with the carving. Have you good appetites, young ladies?”

Olive only giggled, but Lydia smiled and nodded, and said, “Yes, Grandpapa, very good.”

“You needn’t nod your head like a mandarin at me. I can hear what you say very well,” said Grandpapa, and Lydia became aware that she had instinctively been pandering to the Senthoven view that Grandpapa was a very old man indeed, with all the infirmities proper to his age.

The Christmas dinner was very well cooked, and very long and very hot, and conformed in every way to tradition.

“Don’t forget the seasoning in the turkey, George,” said Aunt Beryl agitatedly. “There’s plenty more where that comes from. Give Lydia a little more seasoning--she likes chestnut. Sausage, Evelyn? Sausage, Mr. Almond? Bob, pass the sauce-boat to your sister, and don’t forget to help yourself on the way. There’s gravy and vegetables on the side.”

Everyone ate a great deal, and the room grew hotter and hotter, so that the high colour on Olive Senthoven’s face assumed a glazed aspect, and the fumes from the enormous dish in front of Uncle George rose visibly into the air.

Presently Gertrude brought the plum-pudding, blazing in a blue flame, and with a twig of holly sticking from the top, and much amusement was occasioned by the discovery that several of the slices contained a small silver emblem. Mr. Monteagle Almond solemnly disinterred a thimble, and Bob, with a scarlet face, a wedding-ring.

Under cover of Olive’s screams on the discovery of a three-penny bit on her own plate, he pushed the ring over to Lydia.

“I shall give it to you,” he muttered gruffly.

After the plum-pudding, they ate mince-pies, and a little spirit was poured over each and a lighted match applied by Uncle George, Mr. Almond or Bob, Aunt Beryl and Aunt Evelyn, in accordance with the usage of their day, each uttering a small scream as the flame shot up. When the mince-pies were all finished, the dessert dishes were pulled out from under the piled-up heaps of crackers and holly surmounting them.

The dessert was also traditional--oranges, nuts, apples, raisins, almonds. Everybody avoided direct mention of these last from a sense of delicacy, until Mr. Monteagle Almond himself remarked humorously:

“I think I will favour my namesake, if the ladies will pardon an act of cannibalism.”

Upon which everybody laughed a great deal and jokes were made, and Bob and Olive began to ask riddles.

In the midst of Bob’s best conundrum, Grandpapa suddenly knocked loudly upon the table.

“Send round the port, George,” he ordered solemnly. “Round with the sun ... that’s right. The ladies must take a little wine, for the toasts.”

Lydia knew what was coming. She had heard it every year, and the transition from jovial animal enjoyment to sudden solemnity always gave her a slight thrill.

Grandpapa raised his glass, and everybody imitated the gesture.

“The Queen! God bless her.”

The sentiment was devoutly echoed round the table.

Then Uncle George said in a very serious way:

“Our absent friends.”

And the toast was drunk silently, Aunt Beryl raising her handkerchief to her eyes for a moment as she did every year, in whose honour nobody knew.

After that healths were proposed and honoured indiscriminately. Mr. Monteagle Almond ceremoniously toasted Aunt Beryl, and Bob, looking very sentimental, insisted upon knocking the rim of his glass several times against the rim of Lydia’s. Uncle George, noncommittally confining himself to generalities, proposed “The Fair Sex,” and Grandpapa effectually prevented anyone from rising to reply by sarcastically inquiring which of the ladies present would act as representative for them all.

The room grew steadily hotter.

Lydia had enjoyed the resumption of old festive custom and also the additional importance conferred upon herself as a two days’ visitor from London, but she found herself viewing the familiar Christmas rituals from a new and more critical angle.

She was inclined to wonder how they would strike the aristocratic boarding-house in Bloomsbury, or even the fashionable “young ladies” at Madame Elena’s.

Surely it was an out-of-date custom to join hot hand to hot hand all round the table, and sing, “Auld Lang Syne” in voices made rather hoarse and throaty from food, and silently to pull each a cracker with either neighbour, hands crossed, and Uncle George saying, “One--two--three--all together, now--_Go!_”

Lydia felt mildly superior.

They adorned themselves with paper caps and crowns, Bob sheepishly self-conscious, Lydia critically so, and all the others merely serious. When no one could eat or drink anything more, Aunt Beryl said reluctantly:

“Well, then--shall we adjourn this meeting?” and they rose from the disordered table, now strewn with scraps of coloured paper from the crackers, dismembered twigs of holly, and innumerable crumbs.

“You gentlemen will be going for a walk, I suppose?” Aunt Evelyn suggested, as everyone hung about the hall indeterminately.

“That’s right,” said Grandpapa. “Get up an appetite for tea. And you’ll take little Shamrock with you.”

Little Shamrock, having been given no opportunity for over-eating himself, after the fashion of his betters, was careering round Uncle George’s boots with a liveliness that boded ill for his docility during the expedition.

“We’ll smoke a cigarette first, at all events,” said Uncle George gloomily, and he and Mr. Almond and Bob went back into the dining-room again.

“You don’t want to go for a walk, dear, do you?” said Aunt Beryl, and sighed with evident relief when Mrs. Senthoven shook her head in reply.

“Grandpapa?”

“The drawing-room is good enough for me,” said Grandpapa, and Uncle George had to be called out of the dining-room again to help him up the stairs and instal him in his arm-chair by the window.

“I say, aren’t you girls coming with us?” demanded Bob rather disconsolately, leaning against the open door of the dining-room with a half-smoked cigar in his mouth.

“You’ll go too far for us,” said Lydia primly.

“Let you and me go off somewhere on our own,” struck in Olive. “I’m game for a toddle, if you are, but we don’t want the men, do we?”

“You want to talk secrets--_I_ know you,” jeered Bob.

Lydia lifted her chin fastidiously and turned away.

Her cousins had not improved, she thought, and she was very angry when her dignified gesture inadvertently placed her beneath a beautiful bunch of mistletoe, hung in the hall by Aunt Beryl.

“Fair cop!” yelled Bob, and put his arm round her waist and gave her a sounding kiss.

She would not struggle, but she could not force herself to laugh, and she ran upstairs with a blazing face.

It was not that Lydia had any objection to being kissed, but that the publicity, and the scuffling, and the accompanying laughter offended her taste.

She felt almost as though she could have burst into angry tears.

“Are you two girls really going out?” Aunt Beryl inquired. “If so, I’ll give you the key, Lydia. I’m letting the girl go home for the rest of the day, as soon as she’s cleared up. The char’s coming in to give her a hand with the washing-up.”

“That’s a _good_ girl you’ve got hold of,” Aunt Evelyn said emphatically. “She’s been with you quite a time now, hasn’t she?”

Aunt Beryl and Aunt Evelyn went upstairs, talking busily about the difficulty of training a servant really well, and then inducing her to remain with one. Presently, Lydia knew, they would go into Aunt Beryl’s room, under pretext of looking at a paper pattern, or a new blouse bought at a clearance sale, and they would lie down on Aunt Beryl’s bed, with eiderdowns and a couple of cloaks to keep them warm, and doze until tea-time.

Lydia herself felt heavy and drowsy, but nothing would have induced her to lie down upon her bed with Olive beside her. Instead, she put on her best hat and jacket, and a pair of high-heeled, patent-leather walking shoes, and took her cousin out into the mild damp of the December afternoon.

“What I call a muggy day,” said Olive.

“Shall we go along the Front?” Lydia inquired.

“It’s all those shoes of yours are good for, I should think,” retorted Olive candidly. “Still the same old juggins about your clothes, I see?”

The Front--a strip of esplanade with the shingle and the grey sea on one side, beneath a low stone wall, and the green of the Public Gardens on the other--was almost deserted.

One or two young men in bowler hats and smoking Woodbine cigarettes hung round the empty band-stand, and an occasional invalid was pushed or pulled along in a bath-chair. Here and there a pair of sweethearts sat together in one of the small green shelters--the girl leaning against the man, and both of them motionless and speechless.

The sight of one such couple apparently gave Olive a desired opening.

“I say, what’s all this about you falling in love with some chappie in London?” she demanded abruptly.

“I haven’t fallen in love with anybody, that I know of,” said Lydia coolly.

“But there was someone going after you, now, wasn’t there?” urged Olive.

Lydia reflected.

“Who told you anything about it?” she demanded at last.

“Aunt Beryl told the mater.”

Lydia perceived to her surprise that Olive did not, as she would have expected her to do, despise her cousin for “sloppiness.” On the contrary, she appeared to be really impressed, and anxious to hear details from the heroine of the affair. Lydia did not resist the temptation.

She gave Olive a brief and poignant version of the tragedy.