Stephen McKenna

"And some say, that it was at that time Pyrrhus answered one, who rejoiced with him for the victory they had won: If we win another of the price, quoth he, we are utterly undone."

Plutarch: "Pyrrhus."

The season ended in a riot of sound and colour before Jack received his promised report on the "Children's Party." In the last week of July Bertrand Oakleigh gave a dinner in Princes' Gardens to celebrate Deryk Lancing's engagement to Mrs. Dawson and Loring's to Miss Hunter-Oakleigh. It was Jack's first public appearance outside a club since the Ross House ball, and he was riddled with questions by his friends, who wanted to know whether he had been ill and, if not, why he had been in hiding for two months. Before dinner began, he escaped into a corner and asked if there was any hope of seeing Loring privately before he went to Monmouthshire.

"I should like a talk with you some time," he added.

"Yes, I know you would," Loring answered, smiling a little wistfully. "I'm taking Vi down immediately after lunch to-morrow, but, if you care to come round to-night——? We'll get away as soon as we can, and, after I've taken her home, I'm at your service for as long as you like."

"Thanks. I'll be at your place between half-past eleven and twelve. When are you going to be married?"

"At the beginning of September, if there's no hitch. I see from to-night's papers that there's every possibility of a row between Austria and Servia, which is a bore, because we wanted to spend our honeymoon in Dalmatia."

When Loring entered his library at midnight, Jack was contentedly smoking a cigar and looking at a richly illustrated book on trout-flies. Closing the book, he accepted a brandy and soda and took up his stand by the fire-place.

"I heard you say you were giving a party at Chepstow," he began. "I was wondering whether Babs was going."

"Allowing for her rather erratic temperament, I should say 'yes.' I didn't want her, but she's invited herself." Loring described the 'Children's Party,' ending, "After that, I decided to have no more to do with her, but I was reckoning without Vi. As soon as the engagement was announced, Barbara called and virtually persuaded her that she'd arranged the whole thing by inviting us both to her ball and opening my eyes to the fact that I was in love. I wasn't in the mood then to quarrel with my worst enemy, so I said she could come.... Jack, have you seen or heard anything of her lately?"

"Not since Ross House. What's she been doing?"

"Oh, nothing in particular. She's won her laurels, and there's no temptation. When all's said and done, the Children's Party was a big idea. She's made a unique position for herself; there's no one of her age, there's not an unmarried girl in England, who can compete with her—my sister Amy, Phyllis Knightrider, Sally Farwell, even Sonia, who makes the running for her; there are precious few married women, even among the political lot and semi-public hostesses, who can touch her; and, when it comes to a tussle between a girl of twenty-one and a woman like Harriet Pebbleridge, who's as solid and well-established as the Nelson Column, it's Barbara who wins. I'm told she's had a perfect crop of invitations to become visitor or patroness or vice-chairman of different things; she rules over committees on anything from a national theatre to an art guild—and does it uncommon well, I believe.... How do you stand with her now? You're very likely to meet, if you pay your annual visit to Raglan."

"That's why I asked. I want to."

Loring was conscious that he had been talking rather volubly to postpone what he knew Jack had come there to discuss; inevitably advice would have to be given, an opinion expressed, responsibility shouldered.

"Apart from a formal invitation, she's made no effort to meet you? Jack, I wonder whether she's been playing the game with you. It's incomprehensible to me that a girl should let you get to the point of proposing and then fall back on something that's either non-essential or else so important that she ought to have warned you beforehand."

"I'm afraid you're rather biassed against poor Barbara."

Four years earlier, Loring knew that he would have been as immovable, if any one had suggested that Sonia had a blemish. Oakleigh had tried and failed; but he was right in trying....

"If you've said anything that's rankled.... She's vindictive, as she shewed by making a scene over the cable episode twelve months later. And she's full of mischief. And you, who take things rather seriously, probably don't appreciate that nothing matters to her except the moment—and her vanity. In effect the only thing she could find to say about you that night was that she'd cured you of criticizing her and talking about dog-whips. You've not seen her for a couple of months; why not wait a bit longer? As I told you months ago in this room, if she wants you, she'll contrive to meet you in some way."

"With her vanity?"

"Yes, if she cares for you more than for her vanity. You see that I can't very well keep her away from Chepstow, but I think you'd be wise to postpone your visit to Raglan."

The book of trout-flies was becoming irksome. Jack lifted it from his knees and restored it to its shelf. Then he ranged for a moment in front of the glazed cases, reading the titles and whistling to himself between his teeth.

"It's too late. I've taken the plunge," he said at last, without turning round. "I don't propose to discuss it with you, Jim; but I shall certainly come to your party, and the only thing I ask you to do is not to tell Babs I'm coming. I want to pick up the swords exactly where we dropped them. You've nothing more to tell me about her? I've been kept on short commons of news lately."

The last few days had been so crowded with his own new happiness that Loring had lost count of time; he had forgotten that everybody else was not standing still; he had almost forgotten that the world held any one but Violet and him.

"I—wish—to—God you hadn't done it," he cried in spite of himself.

"There was no point in waiting."

"And if you're wrong?"

"But I'm not."

Jack's face, as he turned from the books, was composed and assured.

"She never promised to marry you, if you did become a Catholic," Loring persisted. "You're banking so frightfully on some mysterious instinct."

"I'm as certain of her as you are of Miss Hunter-Oakleigh."

"I was certain of Sonia four years ago. If you're wrong?"

Jack was silent for many moment before answering.

"Well, she and you and I shall know about it; and none of us will have much interest in talking about it.... For the rest—well, my poor family will be spared a nasty jar."

"You haven't told them yet?"

"No, I thought I'd wait till I'd got something to shew for my apparent lapse from sanity."

When they parted, it was Jack who went to bed with a tolerably tranquil mind and Loring who first tramped the library like a caged beast and then put on his hat and wandered aimlessly into the streets. He was no nearer conviction when Lady Knightrider called next morning to warn him that there had been some unexplained friction between Jack and Barbara earlier in the season and to ask whether it was politic for them to meet at Chepstow.

"Jack knows she's going to be with us," was all that he could answer. "He asked specially; he's very anxious to meet her again."

"Oh, well!... I only wanted to be sure that there was no unpleasantness."

"Unpleasantness?"

Loring laughed incredulously; but, when his aunt was gone and he returned to his letters, the word echoed maddeningly.

As Jack had asked that Barbara should not be warned in advance of their meeting, the Chepstow party had to be handled strategically at Paddington. Lady Knightrider and Phyllis, Charles Framlingham and Jack were in a reserved carriage at the back of the train, and Barbara was deftly flanked by an obscuring bodyguard consisting of Arden, Deganway, four maids and a footman. Whatever the outcome of their meeting, her sense of the dramatic would have been excited if she had known that Jack and she were in different parts of the same train, travelling to the end of England for the last round in their long contest. For himself, Loring only wished that he could get rid of Barbara and of her elaborate atmosphere of mystery and intrigue; if she decided to marry Jack, he would rather not have it said by the Warings that he had abetted their son in a course which they would never condone: if there were any kind of unpleasantness, he would sooner have it happen elsewhere than at Loring Castle.... And in the meantime Barbara sat in her corner, sparring impartially with Deganway and Arden.

It seemed for a moment that he might get his wish and avert the meeting. Lady Knightrider wrote two days later to ask whether the arrangements for the ball held good. Her son had written from London to say that "a man in the War Office" did not see how hostilities could be prevented. The word was to be interpreted in its widest sense; an outbreak between Austria and Servia was inevitable, and it was no less inevitable that Russia should come to the support of Servia and Germany to the aid of Austria. Then France would throw in her lot with Russia, and Great Britain with France. The sequence was automatic and inevitable. The diplomatists might possibly find a safety-valve, but, unless they did, there would be war, "and that," proclaimed Victor Knightrider, "is where we come in."

"It's all so unnecessary and so dreadful," wrote his mother, "that one feels almost wicked to talk of things like dancing until we see what is going to happen. Of course, you understand that, if the ball takes place, I shall come; I'm so happy about you and dear Violet that nothing would keep me away from a gathering like this. But, if you decide to postpone it till a less stormy day...."

Loring debated with himself and with his mother, before deciding to leave his arrangements unchanged. No one could pretend to be satisfied with the political outlook, but war on Victor Knightrider's all-embracing scale was inconceivable.

"Unless there's any change for the worse before Friday," he wrote in reply, "I propose to go on."

The papers, morning and evening, confirmed him in his optimism. A world at war had only to be imagined in order to be dismissed. It was not until the late afternoon before the ball that George Oakleigh, O'Rane and Summertown, deriving their information from different sources and speaking with different degrees of conviction and gravity, persuaded him that, even if the incredible did not take place, at least a great many intelligent observers thought that it would. At Raglan no one shared Lady Knightrider's alarms. Phyllis and Framlingham were as much resolved not to be cheated of the ball as Jack was determined to meet Barbara. He assured his hostess that Victor was only trying to make her flesh creep. For two days Framlingham and Phyllis played tennis or motored together, and for two days Jack walked up and down one bank of the stream that bordered the Knightrider property, meditatively thrashing the water and smoking one pipe after another. His luncheon he carried with him when he left the house after breakfast; on both days Lady Knightrider drove through the woods in her pony-carriage with a tea-basket and drove back again because she lacked courage to ask him about Barbara.

On the morning of the ball, the optimism of the preceding days declined sharply. The news could hardly be called worse, because the papers contained nothing but the death-rattle of the Buckingham Palace Conference. But a presentiment of evil sprang up and was fed by crazy invention and baseless gossip. Victor wrote again with extracts from the prophecies of two journalists, the private secretary to a minister and the same "man in the War Office." Jack received a gloomy letter from Eric Lane, and Framlingham was warned to keep himself within reach of a telegraph office.

"It's too late for Jim to stop the thing now," said Jack.

"He'd have been wiser to stop it at the beginning of the week. Of course, he can't be expected to feel quite as I do. If we go to war, the Guards will be sent out before any one. And that means Victor."

It was tea-time before she desisted from the last of her vacillations, and the car was ordered to the door. Wrapped in coats and dust-rugs, they drove through Raglan in blazing sunlight and reached Loring Castle as the first stars appeared. The men were still in the long banqueting-hall, and Lady Knightrider put her head in at the door to ask whether she might drink Jim's health. Jack stayed behind in the hall, trying to get his bearings in a strange house. A sound of voices came to him through an open door on the opposite side, and, without waiting to take off his coat, he walked on tip-toe and looked in.

Barbara was standing by the fire-place, a coffee-cup in her hand, talking to Violet Hunter-Oakleigh. Slender and tall, a study in black and white, ghostly and arresting, she might have incarnated herself from an Aubrey Beardsley drawing. Her dress was raven's wing and silver, not unlike the one that she had worn at Croxton; there was a gleaming band around her hair, and silver heels to her shoes. As he looked at her, Jack remembered Loring's phrase in describing a distant view of Sonia at the Coronation, after their engagement had been broken off. He felt that same "tug at the heart" and told himself that he must be steady; though Barbara did not expect him, he felt sure that she would betray little surprise and no embarrassment.

Lady Loring was seated near the door, and, as they shook hands, Barbara turned and caught sight of him. He could not see whether her expression changed, but in a moment she had left Violet and was coming across the room to him.

"I never expected to see you here!" she exclaimed, holding out her hand and watching him with eyes that were unreflecting pools of deep blue.

"I'm staying with Lady Knightrider at Raglan, and she brought me over," he explained.

"I thought you must have gone abroad or something. You've quite disappeared lately."

"I've been rather busy."

"No one seemed to know what had happened to you."

As Lady Loring moved away, he examined her critically.

"You're looking very well, Babs. And I've heard a great deal about you."

"You always had a talent for that," she laughed. "And for commenting very freely on what you heard. What have you been doing with yourself?"

"I'll tell you at supper, if you'll consent to have supper with me."

He was speaking in the tone and terms that he had used in the old days—before the Ross House ball, before the disastrous Easter gathering at Crawleigh.

"I've promised it to Val Arden," she answered in the same measure. "And two other people, now that I come to think of it."

"Well, promise me—and keep the promise."

"But why should I disappoint them?"

"I feel you owe it to me, after we've not met for so long."

Barbara could not wholly hide from him that she was puzzled.

"I'll—see," she said.

"You used to be more gracious; you used to say, 'Yes—if you want me to.'"

"That was in the old days," she answered quickly and saw, too late, that she had needlessly raised the temperature of the discussion.

"Nothing's happened to change it, I hope," said Jack easily.

After the first embarrassment of the meeting, he felt that he was holding his own and that Barbara was mystified and uncomfortable.

"Jack, you've not forgotten our last meeting?" she asked.

"It was at Ross House. We had supper together then——"

"Well, you don't want to—repeat it, do you?" she asked deliberately.

"I want to have supper with you again."

She was undecided whether to be distressed or intrigued. Jack could always arouse her combativeness by criticizing, or—as now—by coolly taking her for granted. But she did not want to repeat the Ross House scene. He had an unpleasant faculty of frightening her—and yet to be frightened by him was not wholly unpleasant....

"You can find some one else far more amusing," she suggested.

"I don't even know who's here."

"But you didn't know I was going to be here."

"I asked Jim—five days ago.... I came straight in here without even taking off my coat. Barbara, may I have supper with you?"

Insensibility, which was his chief characteristic, counted for much. A brazen desire, which she could understand, to treat the Ross House meeting as if it had never occurred might count for more. Barbara would sooner have bandied epigrams with Val Arden or flirted with his supplanter, but she felt that she would be unable to sleep until she knew why Jack had disappeared for more than two months and then followed her to a remote castle in Monmouthshire—and why he came to her, like a needle to a magnet, without waiting to get rid of his scarf and coat.

"I'll have supper with you, if you want me to," she said.

A sound of voices behind him warned Jack that the men were coming out of the banqueting-hall, and, as he hurried to get rid of his overcoat before any of them could grow inquisitive about his surreptitious visit to the drawing-room, the doors were flung open and the first cars rolled into sight. Loring threw away the end of his cigar and ran upstairs to help his mother receive their guests. A group of men gathered round the open fire-place, pulling on their gloves and waiting for the rest of their parties. Jack stood with them for a few minutes, wondering what to do with himself until supper. He was in no mood to dance or to debate the possibility of war or to chatter about Jim's engagement or to discuss what he meant to do during the vacation. He could only think of one thing at a time and he had not determined whether they were to publish the news then and there or to wait until they were back in London. He would have liked to proclaim it at supper and to see every man and woman rising to drink their health, but he decided, on reflection, that he must talk to Lord Crawleigh before making the announcement.

Phyllis Knightrider and her mother came out of the drawing-room and went upstairs. He followed them and, in duty, asked for a dance; but, as soon as it was over, he escaped to the terrace in front of the castle and sat down by himself as far as possible from the door. Barbara's curiosity was piqued; and, if he met her before supper, she would disturb him with artless little questions instead of waiting to hear the whole story. Yet, if she would trouble to think, there was no room for curiosity.

"You are dancing? No?" said Val Arden behind him. "One can offer you the half of a tolerable lair, not too near the music and adequately provisioned."

He led the way to a recess overlooking the ball-room and waved his hands towards two armchairs and a table with cigars, coffee and liqueurs.

"Aren't you dancing either?" Jack asked, as he sat down.

"These young women may be less energetic in three, four hours' time. One is waiting for the requisite mood of abandonment. One rejoices to meet you again after this long time, even at the cost of losing Lady Lilith's companionship at supper."

"Well, I think I deserve it," Jack answered. "I haven't seen her for months."

"She is a little difficile to-night. 'Out of temper' would be too strong a phrase. But, you may observe, even the urbane Summertown is out of favour."

Barbara swept by them, as he spoke, and both heard her exclaiming petulantly, "You're very tiresome to-night! I shan't dance with you any more." Both saw them parting at the door; Summertown laughed imperturbably, Barbara ran away and did not appear again until the beginning of the next dance.

She had found time to quarrel with four of her partners by eleven o'clock and was prepared for a fifth and all-atoning quarrel with Jack as soon as he claimed her for supper. The party at Loring Castle had been delightful, until he came; for the last two months in London she had felt like a released prisoner. Now the shock of meeting him again had spoiled her evening; and, when she wanted to enjoy herself, she could only worry her brain to find out why he had come. In the Ross House encounter she liked to think that, by all public tests, she had beaten him; but her victory brought her little satisfaction. When she reconstructed the scene, something that was suspiciously like conscience disturbed her. To pretend that she could not marry him because he was not a Catholic was more serviceable than true. And to pretend that religion meant anything to her was almost blasphemous, the sort of thing that might bring her months of ill-luck. Any other excuse would have been better, safer; at least she would not be inviting a judgement on herself. Some things did undoubtedly make Providence angry; and she had thought seriously of writing to Jack and saying that religion was not the stumbling-block, that she had been flustered until she did not know what she was saying. But then he would start again from the beginning....

He had frightened her at Ross House with a simple and massive resolve to get his own way; and it was fear rather than curiosity or annoyance which was spoiling her evening for her. First he would arrange a meeting, then discharge a proposal, then retire for more ammunition, then arrange another meeting, and then.... She felt sure that he was going to propose to her again.... It was so characteristic of his methods that he should come early, engage her for supper—and then disappear. If she "forgot" her promise and supped with some one else, if she went to her room and locked the door, he would only wait until she reappeared or else engineer a meeting in Scotland or the Isle of Wight; he could not be avoided indefinitely.

Loring found her standing by herself at an open window and told her that she was looking tired.

"Supper's just starting," he added, and she felt herself wincing. "I needn't ask whether you've got a partner for it."

"I don't know that I want any supper," she answered, looking round over her shoulder. There was no sign of Jack, but punctually at the first note of the next dance he appeared from space and claimed her.