THE AIR ON THE COAST

“AND did a dark enough night ever come, Julius?” Sir Paget asked with a chuckle.

It was late summer. I had arrived that day to pay him a visit and, incidentally, to complete the transaction by which Waldo was to convey to me the reversion to Cragsfoot. My uncle and I sat late together after dinner, while I regaled him with the story of the last days of Arsenio Valdez—of his luck, his death, and his glorification.

“Alas, sir, such things can’t actually happen in this world. They’re dreams—Platonic ideas laid up in heaven—inward dispositions towards things which can’t be literally translated into action! We did it in our souls. But, no; the wreath doesn’t, in bare and naked fact, lie at the bottom of the Grand Canal. It hangs proudly in the hall of Palazzo Valdez, the apple of his eye to fat old Amedeo, with whom Lucinda left it in charge—a pledge never likely to be demanded back—when she leased the palazzo to him. He undertakes the upkeep and expenses, pays her about two hundred a year for it, and expects to do very well by letting out the apartments. He considers that the wreath will add prestige to the place and enhance its letting value. Besides, he’s genuinely very proud of it, and the Valdez legend loses nothing in his hands, I assure you.”

“It’s a queer story. And that’s the end of it, is it? Because it’s nearly six months since our friend the Monkey, as you boys used to call him, played his last throw—and won!”

“There’s very little more to tell. As you know, Sir Ezekiel’s death sent me on my travels once again—to the States and South America; I was appointed Managing Director, and had to go inspecting, and reorganizing, and so forth. That’s all settled. I’m established now in town—and here, thank God, I am—at old Cragsfoot again!”

“You’ve certainly been a good deal mixed up in the affair—by fate or choice,” he said, smiling, “but you’re not the hero, are you? Arsenio claims that rÔle! Or the heroine! What of her, Julius?”

“She came back to England four or five months ago. She’s living in rooms at Hampstead. She’s got the palazzo rent, and she still does her needlework; she gets along pretty comfortably.”

“You’ve seen her since you came back, I suppose?”

“Yes, pretty nearly every day,” I answered. “She was the first person I went to see when I got back to London; she was the last person I saw before I left London this morning.”

He sat rubbing his hands together, and looking into the bright fire of logs that his old body found pleasant now, even on summer evenings; the wind blows cold off the sea very often at Cragsfoot.

“You’re telling me the end of the story now, aren’t you, Julius?”

“Yes, I hope and think so. Indeed, why shouldn’t I say that I know it? I think that we both knew from the hour of Arsenio’s death. We had been too much together—too close in spirit through it all—for anything else. How could we say good-by and go our separate ways after all that? It would have seemed to us both utterly unnatural. First, my head had grown full of her—in those talks at Ste. Maxime that I told you we’d had; and, when a woman’s concerned, the heart’s apt to follow the head, isn’t it?”

“I don’t wonder at either head or heart. She was a delightful child; she seems to have grown into a beautiful woman—yes, she would have—and one that might make a man think about her. There was nothing between you while he lived? No, I don’t ask that question, I’ve no right to—and, I think, no need to.”

“With her there couldn’t have been; it was as impossible as it proved in the end for her to marry Waldo. For her it was a virtue in me that I knew it.”

“She wasn’t married to Arsenio Valdez when she ran away from Waldo?”

“In her own eyes she was, and when he called her—called her back—well, she had to go.”

“Ah, I’ve sometimes fancied that there might have been some untold history like that.”

“She now wishes that you and Waldo—just you two—should know that there was. Will you tell him, sir? I’d rather not. She thinks it may make you and him feel more gently to her; she’s proud herself, you know, and was sorry to wound others in their pride.”

“It’s generous of her. I’ll tell him—what I must; and you need tell me no more than you have. I shouldn’t wonder if the idea isn’t quite new to him either. There are—quarters—from which something of the sort may have been suggested, eh, Julius?”

“I know nothing as to that, but, as you say, it’s very possible. You’ll have gathered how the feelings of these two ladies towards one another runs through the whole business. And we’re not finished with them yet. Before Waldo sets his hand to that agreement, he must know that the arrangement which is to bring me to Cragsfoot will bring Lucinda there too.”

“Yes, as its mistress; even in my lifetime, if she so pleases; after me, in any case.” He looked across to me, smiling. “And the moment so difficult—the more difficult because it’s otherwise so triumphant! The Heir-Apparent is born—a month ago—I wrote you about it. The dynasty is assured; Her Majesty is at her grandest and—I will add—her most gracious. I saw her about again for the first time the day before yesterday, and she said to me, ‘Now I’m really content, Sir Paget!’—implying, as it seemed to me, that the subject world ought to be content also. All the Court was there—the Heir itself, our dear old Prince Consort, the Grand Vizier—forgive me mixing East and West, but that seems to be the sort of position which she assigns to young Godfrey Frost; an exalted but precarious position, with a throne on one hand, and a bowstring on the other! Oh, yes, and there was a Lady-in-Waiting into the bargain, a pretty girl called Eunice Something-or-other.”

“Oh, yes, she was at Villa San Carlo—Eunice Unthank,” said I, smiling. Nina—pertinacious as a limpet!

“And now we’re to come breaking in on this benevolent despotism! Our schemes border on conspiracy, don’t they?” He grew graver, though he still smiled whimsically. “A reconciliation possible?” he suggested doubtfully.

I laughed. “There’s a crowning task for your diplomacy, Sir Paget!”

“If I could change the hearts of women, I should be a wizard, not a diplomatist. Their feuds have a grand implacability beside which the quarrels of nations are trivial and transient affairs. In this matter, I’m a broken reed—don’t lean upon me, Julius! And could you answer for your side—for your fair belligerent?”

“Lucinda makes war by laughing,” said I, laughing myself. “But—well, I think she would go on laughing, you know.”

“Just what my Lady Dundrannan always hates, and occasionally suspects—even in me!”

“I wish to blazes that Waldo would have one of his old rages, and tell her it’s not her business!”

“I daresay he may wish you hadn’t taken so much interest in his runaway fiancÉe,” was Sir Paget’s pertinent retort. “No, he’ll have no rages; like you, I sometimes regret it. If she vetoes, he’ll submit.” He shook his head. “Here are we poor men up against these grand implacabilities; they transcend our understanding and mock our efforts. Even Arsenio, the great Arsenio, though he made use of them, tripped up over them in the end! What can you and I, and poor Waldo, do?” He got up. “I’ll write a line to Waldo on the point—on the two points—to-night; and send it up by the car to-morrow; he can let us know his answer before Stannard is due here, with the deeds, in the afternoon. There might even be time to telephone and stop him from starting, if the answer’s a veto!”

Diplomatist though Sir Paget was, man of affairs as I must assume myself to be—or where stands the firm of Coldston’s?—our judgments were clumsy, our insight at fault; we did no justice to the fine quality of Lady Dundrannan’s pride. It was not to be outdone by the pride of the needlewoman of Cimiez—outwardly, at all events; and do not many tell us that wholly to conquer, or even conceal, such emotions as fear and self-distrust is a moral triumph, where not to feel them is a mere fluke of nature—just the way one happens to be concocted? The only answer that came to Sir Paget’s no doubt very delicately, diplomatically expressed note, came over the telephone (Sir Paget had not trusted its secrecy!), from butler to butler. Marsden at Briarmount told Critcher at Cragsfoot that he was to inform Sir Paget that Colonel Rillington said it was all right about this afternoon. Critcher delivered the message as Sir Paget and I were sitting in the garden before lunch—on that bench by the garden door whereon Lucinda had once sat, listening fearfully to the quarrel of angry youths.

“Very well, Critcher,” said Sir Paget indifferently. But when the man had gone, he turned to me and said, with a tremor in his voice, “So you can come, you see—you and Lucinda, Julius.” I had not known till then how much he wanted us. “I say, what would poor old Aunt Bertha have said? She went over, bag and baggage!”

“She’d have come back—with the same impedimenta,” I declared, laughing.

There was a stateliness in Lady Dundrannan’s assent, given by her presence and countenance to the arrangement which the allied family of the Rillingtons had—well, I suppose Waldo had—submitted to her approval. The big Briarmount car—even bigger, more newly yellow, than the car of Cimiez—brought down the whole bunch—all the Court, as Sir Paget had called it. Briarmount’s approval was almost overwhelmingly signified. It was not, of course, the thing to mention Lucinda—that was unofficial; perhaps, moreover, slightly shameful. Godfrey, at least, wore an embarrassed air which the ostensible character of the occasion did not warrant; and little Lady Eunice—I suspected that the information had filtered down to her through the other three of them—seemed to look at me with something of the reproachful admiration one reserves for a dare-devil. Waldo, for his part, gave my hand a hard, though surreptitious, squeeze, smiling into my eyes with his old kindness, somehow conveying an immense deal to me about how he for his part felt about the implacabilities, and the way they had affected his life—and now mine. Of course I was myself in the mood to perceive—to exaggerate, or even to imagine—such thoughts in him; but there it was—his eyes traveled from my face to his lady’s shapely back (she was putting Mr. Stannard, the lawyer, at his ease—he was a cadet of an old county family, and one of the best known sportsmen in the neighborhood), and back to my face again, and—well, certainly the situation was not lost on Waldo. But it was only after our business was finished—a short recital of the effect of the deeds from Stannard—didn’t we know more than he did about that? But no doubt it was proper—and then the signatures (“Dundrannan” witnessing in a fine, bold, decisive hand!)—that he said a word to me. “God give you and yours happiness with the old place, Julius!” The pang of parting from it spoke there, as well as kindliness and forgiveness for us.

Sir Paget insisted—certainly not to the displeasure of Mr. Stannard—on “wetting the signatures” with a bottle of his Pommery 1900. Nina just wetted her lips—even to that vintage she could condescend. Then we all strolled out into the garden, while tea was preparing. There was the old place—the high cliffs above it, one narrow wooded ledge fronting the sea; scant acres, but, as it were, with all our blood in them. I felt like a usurper (in spite of the honest money that I was paying), the younger branch ousting the elder, even through an abdication. But I was a usurper happy and content—as, I daresay, they often are, in spite of the poets and the dramatists. Sir Paget and Stannard paired off; Godfrey and Eunice; Waldo sat down on the bench by the door and lit his pipe; I found myself left with Nina Dundrannan. With the slightest motion of her hand she invited me to accompany her along the walk towards the shrubbery. At once I knew that she meant to say something to me, though I had not the least idea on what lines her speech might run. She could be very candid—had she not been once, long ago, she the “skeleton at the feast”? She could also put the truth very decisively in its proper place—a remote one. Fires burnt in her—I knew that; but who could tell when the flames would show?

There was a seat placed where a gap in the trees gave a view of the sea; here we sat down together. With her usual resoluteness she began at once with what she had made up her mind to say.

“Waldo didn’t show me Sir Paget’s note, but he told me a piece of news about you which it gave him; he gave me to understand that you and Sir Paget thought that I, as well as he himself, should know it. He told me that the arrangement was no longer repugnant to his own feelings, although it once would have been; he felt both able and willing to ignore the past, and start afresh on terms of friendship with Madame Valdez—with Lucinda. He asked me what my feelings were. I said that in my view that was hardly the question; I had married into the Rillington family; any lady whom Sir Paget and he, the heads of the family, were prepared to accept and welcome as a member of it, would, as a matter of course, be accepted by me; I should treat her, whenever we met, with courtesy, as I should no doubt be treated by her; a great degree of affection, I reminded Waldo, was not essential or invariable between relations-in-law.” Here Lady Dundrannan smiled for a moment. “Least of all should I desire that any supposed feelings of mine should interfere with the family arrangement about Cragsfoot which you all three felt to be desirable; the more so as it had in a way originated with myself, since, if I had wished to make this place our principal residence, the present plan would never have been thought of at all. So I told him to put me entirely out of the question; he would be quite safe in feeling sure that I should accept the situation with a good grace.”

She paused, and I took occasion to say: “I think we’re all much indebted to you—and myself most of all. Any other attitude on your part would have upset an arrangement which I have come to have very much at heart. I’m grateful to you, Nina.”

“You know a great deal—indeed, you probably know pretty well everything—that has happened between Lucinda and me. You wouldn’t defend all that she did; I don’t defend all I did. When I’m challenged, I fight, and I suppose Jonathan Frost’s daughter isn’t dainty as to her weapons—that’s your point of view about me, anyhow, isn’t it? You’ve always been in her camp. You’ve always been a critic of me.”

“Really I’ve regretted the whole—er—difficulty and—well, difference, very much.”

“You’ve laughed at it even more than you’ve regretted it, I think,” she remarked drily. “But I’ve liked you better than you’ve liked me—though you did laugh at me—and I’m not going to make things difficult or uncomfortable for you. When I accept a state of things, I accept it without reservation. I don’t want to go on digging pins in.”

“If I have ever smiled—as you accuse me of having done—as well as regretted, it was because I saw your qualities as well as hers. The battle was well joined. You’ve both had your defeats and your victories. I should like you to be friends now.”

“Yes, I believe you would; that’s why I’m talking like this to you. But”—her voice took on a sudden ring of strong feeling—“it’s impossible. There are such memories between us.”

I did not urge the point; it would be useless with her, very likely also with Lucinda. I let it go with a shrug.

She sat for a moment in the stately composed silence that so well became her.

“It’s probable that we shall divide our time mainly between London, Dundrannan, and Villa San Carlo in future. It’s even likely that if Godfrey settles matters with Eunice Unthank, as I think he will, he’ll take a lease of Briarmount. That would not be disagreeable to you, would it?”

“Not the least in the world,” I answered, smiling. “I like them both very much.”

She turned to me with a bland and simple sincerity of manner. “The doctor thinks that the air on this coast is too strong for baby.”

I seemed to be hearing an official bulletin—or communiquÉ, as for some occult reason—or pure love of jargon—they used to call it. There was no question of a reverse at the hands of the enemy; but climatic conditions rendered further operations undesirable; the withdrawal was being effected voluntarily, in perfect order, and without loss. That the enemy was taking possession of the evacuated territory was a circumstance of no military significance whatever—though, to be sure, it might make some little difference to the inhabitants.

“It won’t do to run any risks with that precious boy!” I observed, with an approving smile, and (as I flatter myself) with just the artistic shade of jocosity—as if I were gently chaffing her on a genuine but exaggerated maternal solicitude.

“Well, when the doctor says that, what can one do?” asked Lady Dundrannan.

“Oh, one must follow his advice, of course!” I murmured, with a nod of my head.

The bark of our conversation (another metaphor may well be employed to illustrate her skill) being thus piloted through the shoals of truth into the calm deep waters of humbug, its voyage ended prosperously. “I should never forgive myself, and Waldo would never forgive me, if I took the slightest risk,” Nina concluded, as she rose from the seat.

But as we stood there, facing one another—before we began to stroll back to the house—as we stood facing one another, all alone, we allowed ourselves one little relapse into reality.

“Do you think of being off soon?” I asked, with a smile.

She gave me one sharp glance and a contemptuous smile. “Before your wedding—whenever that may be, Julius!”