Read Ebook: Love and Lucy by Hewlett Maurice

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 1086 lines and 63738 words, and 22 pages

CHAPTER

LOVE AND LUCY

ONSLOW SQUARE

Lucy encouraged her beloved. "It's very neat indeed," she said, and her grey eyes glowed, or seemed to glow.

"Yes, Lancelot?"

She agreed. "Yes, I should like that. Very likely one of them is."

Lancelot looked extremely serious. "Not Mr. Urquhart?" he said.

"No," said Lucy, "I am sure Mr. Urquhart is older than that. But there's Margery Dacre. She might do."

Lancelot had his own ideas as to whether women counted or not, in omens, but was too polite to express them.

"Is she twenty-five, do you think? She's rather thin." Lucy exploded, and had to kiss the unconscious humourist. "Do you think we grow fatter as we grow older? Then you must think me immense, because I'm much more than twenty-five," she said.

Here was a vital matter. It is impossible to do justice to Lancelot's seriousness, on the edge of truth. "How much more are you, really?" he asked her, trembling for the answer.

I wish I could do justice to his struggle, politeness tussling with pity for a fall, but tripping it up, and rising to the proper lightness of touch. "Are you really thirty-one? Oh, well, that's nothing." It was gallantly done. She kissed him again, and Lancelot changed the subject.

"There's Mr. Lingen, isn't there?" he asked, adding, "He's always here."

Meanwhile Mr. Macartney in his leisurely way had risen from the table, cigar in mouth, had smoothed his hair before the glass on the chimney-piece, looked at his boots, wriggled his toes in them with gratifying results, adjusted his coat-collar, collected his letters in a heap, and left the room. They saw no more of him. Half an hour later the front door shut upon him. He had gone to his office, or, as he always said, Chambers.

He was rather bleak, and knew it, reckoning it among his social assets. Reduced into a sentence, it may be said of Macartney that the Chief Good in his philosophy was to be, and to seem, successful without effort. What effort he may have made to conceal occasional strenuous effort is neither here nor there. The point is that, at forty-two, he found himself solidly and really successful. The husband of a very pretty wife, the father of a delightful and healthy son, the best-dressed solicitor in London, and therefore, you may fairly say, in the world, with an earned income of some three or four thousand a year, with money in the funds, two houses, and all the rest of it, a member of three very old-fashioned, most uncomfortable and absurdly exclusive clubs--if this is not success, what is? And all got smoothly, without a crease of the forehead, by means of an eyeglass, a cold manner and an impassivity which nothing foreign or domestic had ever disturbed. He had ability too, and great industry, but it was characteristic of him to reckon these as nothing in the scales against the eyeglass and the manner. They were his by the grace of God; but the others, he felt, were his own additions, and of the best. These sort of investments enabled a man to sleep; they assured one of completeness of effect. Nevertheless he was a much more acute and vigorous-minded man than he chose to appear.

He was a solicitor, it is true, and had once been called an attorney by a client in a rage; but he could afford to smile at that because he was quite a peculiar sort of solicitor, by no means everybody's money. Rather, he was a luxury, an appanage of the great. His office, which he called "Chambers," as if it was an old house in the country, was in Cork Street; his clients were landed gentry, bankers, peers and sons of peers. The superior clergy, too: he handled the affairs of a Bishop of Lukesboro', and those of no less than three Deans and Chapters. Tall, dark and trenchant, with a strong nose and chin, and clouded grey eyes, a handsome man with a fine air of arrogant comfort on him, he stood well, and you could not but see what good clothes he wore--to my taste, I confess, a little too good. His legs were a feature, and great play was made by wits with his trousers. He was said to have two hundred pairs, and to be aiming at three hundred and sixty-five. Certainly they had an edge, and must have been kept in order like razors; but the legend that they were stropped after every day's use is absurd. They used to say that they would cut paper easily, and every kind of cheese except Parmesan.

He wore an eyeglass, which, with the wry smile made necessary by its use, had the marked effect of intimidating his clients and driving them into indiscretions, admissions and intemperate discourse. Hypnotised by the unknown terrific of which the glitter of the blank surface, the writhen and antick smile were such formidable symbols, they thought that he knew all, and provided that he should by telling it him. To these engines of mastery he had added a third. He practised laconics, and carried them to the very breaking point. He had in his time--I repeat the tale--gone without his breakfast for three days running rather than say that he preferred his egg poached. His wife had been preoccupied at the time--it had been just before Lancelot was born, barely a year after marriage--and had not noticed that he left cup and platter untouched. She was very penitent afterwards, as he had intended she should be. The egg was poached--and even so she was afraid to ask him when the time was ripe to boil it again. It made her miserable; but he never spoke of it. Of course all that was old history. She was hardened by this time, but still dreadfully conscious of his comforts, or possible discomforts.

This was the manner of the man who, you may say, had quizzed, or mesmerised, Lucy Meade into marriage. She had been scarcely eighteen; I believe that she was just seventeen and a half when he presented himself, the second of three pretty, dark-haired and grey-eyed girls, the slimmest and, as I think, by far the prettiest. The Meades lived at Drem House, which is practically within Bushey Park. Here the girls saw much society, for the old Meades were hospitable, and the Mother Meade, a Scotchwoman, had a great idea of establishing her daughters. The sons she left to Father Meade and his competent money-bags. Here then James Adolphus Macartney presented himself, and here sat smiling bleakly, glaring through his glass, one eyebrow raised to enclose it safely--and waited for her to give herself away. Swaying beneath that shining disk, she did it infallibly; and he heard her out at leisure, and accepted her.

That's poetry of course. Really, it came near to that. He had said to her at a garden-party, in his easiest, airiest manner, "You can't help knowing that I am in love with you. Now, don't you think that we should be a happy couple? I do. What do you say, Lucy? Shall we have a shot?" He had taken her hand--they were alone under a cedar tree--and she had not known how to take it away. She was then kissed, and had lost any opportunity there might have been. That was what really happened, and as she told her sister Mabel some time afterwards, when the engagement had been made public and there could be no question of going back, "You know, Mabel, he seemed to expect it, and I couldn't help feeling at the time that he was justified." Mabel, tossing her head up, had protested, "Oh, my dear, nobody knows whether he was justified but yourself;" and Lucy, "No, of course not." "The question," Mabel went on, "is whether you encouraged him or not." Lucy was clear about that: "No, not the least in the world. He--encouraged himself. I felt that I simply had to do something."

Now when Lucy Meade, practically a child for all her sedateness and serious eyes, married him, two things terrified her on the day. One was her husband and the other lest her friends should discover it. They never did, and in time her panic wore off. She fought it in the watches of the night and in the glare of her lonely days. Not a soul, not her mother, not even Mabel, knew her secret. James never became comic to her; she never saw him a figure of fun; but she was able to treat him as a human being. Lancelot's arrival made all the difference in the world to that matter as to all her other matters, for even Lucy herself could not help seeing how absurdly jealous James was of his offspring. For a time he was thrown clean out of the saddle and as near falling in his own esteem as ever in life. But he recovered his balance, and though he never regained his old ascendency, which had been that of a Ju-ju, he was able to feel himself, as he said, "Master in his own house," with a very real reserve of terrorism--if it should be wanted. The great thing, Macartney thought, was discipline, constant, watchful discipline. A man must bend everything to that. Women have to learn the virtue of giving up, as well as of giving. Giving is easy; any woman knows that; but giving up. Let that be seen as a subtle, a sublimated form of giving, and the lesson is learned. But practice makes perfect. You must never relax the rein. He never did. There was all the ingenuity and patience of a woman about him.

But she was one-and-thirty, and as sweet and pretty a woman as you would wish to see. She had the tender, dragging smile of a Luini Madonna; grave, twilight eyes, full of compassionate understanding; very dark eyebrows, very long lashes, like the fringe of rain over a moorland landscape. She had a virginal shape, and liked her clothes to cling about her knees. Long fingers, longish, thin feet. But her humorous sense was acute and very delightful, and all children loved her. Such charms as these must have been as obvious to herself as they were to everybody else. She had a modest little court of her own. Francis Lingen was almost admittedly in love with her; one of Macartney's friends. But she accepted her riches soberly, and did not fret that they must be so hoarded. If, by moments, as she saw herself, or looked at herself, in the glass, a grain of bitterness surged up in her throat, that all this fair seeming could not be put out to usury--! well, she put it to herself very differently, not at all in words, but in narrowed scrutinising eyes, half-turns of the pretty head, a sigh and lips pressed together. There had been--nay, there was--Lancelot, her darling. That was usufruct; but usury was a different thing. There had never been what you would call, or Miss Bacchus would certainly call, usury. That, indeed! She would raise her fine brows, compress her lips, and turn to her bed, then put out the light. Lying awake very often, she might hear James chain the front door, trumpet through his nose on the mat, and slowly mount the stairs to his own room. She thought resolutely of Lancelot pursuing his panting quests at school, or of her garden in mid-June, or of the gorse afire on Wycross Common,--and so to sleep.

A long chapter, but you will know the Macartney pair by means of it.

A DINNER PARTY

This was not to be one of Macartney's grand full-dress dinner-parties, the sort where you might have two lords, and would be sure to have one with his lady; or a Cabinet Minister in a morning-coat and greenish tie; or a squire and squiress from Northumberland up for a month of the season; or the Dean of Mells. No, nor was it to be one which Lucy had to give to her visiting-list, and at which, as Macartney rarely failed to remark, there was bound to be a clergyman, and some lean woman with straw-coloured hair interested in a Settlement. It was to be a particular kind of dinner-party, this one, of which the first object was to bring Urquhart in touch with Lingen. It could have been done at a club, no doubt. Macartney admitted it. "Yes, I know, I know,"--he used his most tired voice, as if he had been combating the suggestion all along. "You are perfectly right. It might--if it had not happened to be exactly what I didn't want. Jimmy Urquhart is rather a queer fish. He is apt to shy off if one is not careful. It don't suit me to bring them together explicitly, do you see? I want them to happen on each other. They can do that better here than anywhere. Do you see?"

Lucy saw, or saw enough. She never enquired into James's law affairs. "Shall I like Mr. Urquhart, do you think?" she asked him.

The eyeglass focussed upon the cornice, and glared at a fly which found itself belated there. "Oh, I think so. Why not?"

"Well, you see, I don't know why not--or why I should. Have I ever seen him?"

James was bored. "No doubt you have. He's very much about."

"Yes," said Lucy, "but I am not."

James left the fly, and fixed her--apparently with horror. Then he looked at his boots and moved his toes up and down. "He looks like a naval officer," he said; "you instinctively seek the cuffs of his coat. Beef-coloured face, blue eyes, a square-jawed chap. Yes, you might like him. He might amuse you. He's a great liar." Lucy thought that she might like Mr. Urquhart.

On those lines the party was arranged: the Blisses because "we owe them a dinner; and I think the Judge will be amused by Jimmy;" the Worthingtons--make-weights; but "She's a soft pink woman, like a Persian kitten."

"Does Mr. Urquhart like that?" Lucy asked, but James, who didn't like his jokes to be capped, said drily, "I don't know."

Then Lucy's favourite sister Mabel was to be allowed because James rather liked Corbet. He thought him good style. Now we wanted two women. One must be Miss Bacchus--"hideous, of course," said James; "a kind of crime, but very smart." He meant that she mixed with the aristocracy, which was true, though nobody knew why. The last was to be Margery Dacre, a very pretty girl. Lucy put her forward, and James thought her over, gazing out of window. "I like her name," he said--so Lucy knew that she was admitted.

That was all. The rest was her care, and he washed his mind of it, very sure that she would see to it. He wished the two men to meet for a particular reason in a haphazard way, because it was better to drift Urquhart into a thing than to lead him up to it. Moreover, it was not at all disagreeable to him that Urquhart, a club and office acquaintance, should see how comfortably placed he was, how well appointed with wife and child, with manservant and maidservant and everything that was his. Urquhart was a rich man, and to know that his lawyer was rich was no bad thing. It inspired confidence. Now the particular thing to be done with the two men, Francis Lingen and Urquhart, was this. Francis Lingen, who might be a baronet some day and well to do, was at the moment, as at most moments hitherto, very short of money. Urquhart always had plenty. Macartney's idea was that he might get Urquhart to fill Francis Lingen's pockets, on terms which could easily be arranged. There was ample security, of course. Francis Lingen could have gone to the Jews, or the bank, but if the thing could be done in a gentlemanly way through one's lawyer, who also happened to be a gentleman, in one's own set, and so on--well, why not?

Hence the little dinner, over whose setting forth Lucy puckered her brows with Mrs. Jenkins, her admirable cook, and wrote many notes on little slips of paper which she kept for the purpose. She knew quite well when James was "particular" about a party. He said less than usual when he was "particular." Over this one he said practically nothing. So she toiled, and made a success of it.

The drawing-room looked charming, and she herself in black over white, with her pearls, the most charming thing in it. It wanted a week of Lancelot's day for school; he was to come in to dessert--that was understood. But the possible danger of a thirteenth was removed by their being two tables of six each. James had suddenly ordered this variation of practice--he did not say why--and so it was to be. Crewdson, the invaluable butler-valet of the house, who presided over a zenana of maids, and seemed to carry his whiskers into the fray like an oriflamme, was visibly perturbed at this new notion. "Mr. Macartney has his reason, we know. But how is one gentleman's servant to split himself in halves? And where does he stand, Mrs. Jenkins? With tables dotted about--like a caf?--or an archumpelygo?" He knew that it was done in the highest places, but he knew his own place best. "We are not what you call the smart set," he said. "We are not Park Lane or Brook Street. But we are solid--the professions--the land and the church. No jinks in this house. And small tables is jinks. Not a dinner, but a kick-up." So Crewdson thought, and so he looked, but his master was flint.

Mabel came the first, the lively and successful Mabel, two years younger than Lucy--she and Laurence: he was Laurence Corbet, Esq., of Peltry Park, Wavertree, and Roehampton, S.W., a hunting man and retired soldier, as neatly groomed as a man may be. He was jolly, and adored his Mabel. He was county, and approved by James. Lucy used to say of him that his smile could cure a toothache. Lancelot pounced upon the pair instantly and retired with them to the conservatory to show off his orange-tree, whose pip had been plunged on his first birthday. But before long a suspicious sliding of the feet and a shout from Corbet of "Goal!" betrayed the orange-tree's eclipse.

Next plunged Miss Bacchus, with her front hair and front teeth, and air of digging you in the ribs. She explained that she made a point of being early lest she should be taken for an actress, and forestalled Macartney's assurance that she never would be--which annoyed him. The Worthingtons--she like an autumn flower-bed, and he pale and sleek--and Francis Lingen came in together: Lingen, a very elegant, pale pink and frail young man with a straw-coloured moustache, who bowed when he shook your hand as if he was going to kiss it but remembered just in time that he was in England. He lowered his voice when he spoke to women, and most of them liked it. Lucy wasn't sure whether she did or not. It made her self-conscious and perverse at once. She found herself wondering whether he was going to make love to her, when he was going to begin, and how she might best cut him out. All this was bewildering, made her feel stupid, and annoyed her. But she really liked Francis Lingen, and had been amused to discover how much he was "Francis" in her private mind. Certainly he was very elegant. He had an outside pocket to his dress coat, and a handkerchief which you could have plugged your tooth with.

He had just said to Lucy, "I'm so glad to see you. It's more than a week since we met--and I want your advice--" when Crewdson, like a priest, announced Sir Matthew and Lady Bliss. The Judge and his dame were before Lucy--the lady had a motherly soul in crimson satin and paste, the gentleman square and solid, like a pillar-box with a bald head. That is a pretty exact description of him. The Judge was very square-headed, very shiny and very plain; but he was solid, and he was useful. Macartney used to say that he had a face like a bad egg. Certainly he was curdled--but he shone and looked healthy.

Lucy allowed herself to be mothered, and in the meantime murmured the Judge's name and Miss Bacchus's.

"Everybody knows Miss Bacchus," said the gallant man, and Miss Bacchus briskly rejoined, "More people know Tom Fool--" After that they got on excellently. Then she heard from the door, "Mr. Urquhart" and had time to turn Francis Lingen over to Lady Bliss before she faced the ruddy and blue-eyed stranger. Her first thought, the only one she had time for, was "What very blue eyes, what a very white shirt-front!" when she shook hands.

"How d'ye do? You won't know who I am," he said at once.

"Oh, but I do," she assured him. "James described you to me."

He blinked. "Oh, did he? I suppose he told you I was a great liar?"

James's very words. She nodded without speaking, but laughter flickered over her face like summer lightning.

"Well," said Urquhart, "I am--to him. I've known Macartney for years--long before you did. I like him, but I think he gives himself airs. Now you can't, you know, when the man with you is a liar. You never know where to have a liar, or whether you have him or not. And then you get in a fright whether he's not having you. Macartney, saving your presence, doesn't like being had."

Lucy laughed, and turned to wave her hand to Lancelot in the entry of the conservatory.

"That your boy?" Urquhart asked. "But of course. He's like you--with his father's tricks." That was perfectly true. "And that's your sister, of course. Pretty woman. Like you too--you in a sunset." Perfect unconsciousness robbed this open commentary of sting.

Upon him drifted Mrs. Worthington, like a peony in the tideway. Urquhart bowed. "Your servant, ma'am."

She cried, "Hullo, Jimmy, you here?"

"Where else?"

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet