Lucinda. Hope Anthony
I put out my hands to keep him off – in fun, you know. But he came and took hold of my hands, and pulled me to him and kissed me on my lips. ‘Caught!’ he said as he let me go. Then I saw Waldo just a few yards off, watching us. I was trembling all over. I ran away from them, back towards the house; but I didn’t dare to go straight in; I felt that I shouldn’t be able to answer, if anybody spoke to me. I sat down on the bench that stands close by the door, but is hidden from it by the yew hedge. Presently I heard them coming; I heard Waldo speaking angrily, but as they got nearer the house, he stopped talking, so I didn’t hear anything that he said. But Arsenio told me – later on – that he said that English gentlemen didn’t do things like that, though dirty Spaniards might – and so on. I sat where I was, and let them go in. But presently I felt that I must see what was happening. So I went in, and found them quarreling: at least, Waldo was abusing Arsenio – but you know about that; you were there. I thought they’d fight – they would have if you and Sir Paget hadn’t been there – but somehow, by now, I didn’t mind if they did. I wasn’t frightened any more; I was excited. You know how it ended. I didn’t then, because after a good deal of it Sir Paget sent me to bed – don’t you remember? I went to bed, but I didn’t go to sleep for ever so long. I felt that something great had happened to me. Men had tried to kiss me a few times before; one or two had managed just to kiss my cheek in a laughing kind of way. This was different to me. And there was Waldo too! I was very young. I suddenly seemed to myself immensely important. I wondered – oh, how I wondered – what they would do the next morning – and what I should do. I imagined conversations – how I should be very stiff and dignified – and Arsenio very penitent, but protesting his devotion. But I couldn’t imagine how Waldo would behave. Anyhow, I felt that the next morning would be the most awfully exciting moment in my life, that anything might happen.”
Lucinda paused, looking at me with a smile that mocked the girl whose feelings she had been describing. “Nothing did!”
After another pause she went on: “Later on, of course, I heard how that was. I’ve heard it from both of them! Arsenio didn’t really care for me at that time, though Waldo did. And Arsenio was very fond of Waldo; he felt he’d behaved rather badly, and he didn’t bear malice against Waldo for abusing him. Arsenio is malicious in a way; it’s fun to him to make people look and feel silly; but he doesn’t harbor malice. He’s not rancorous. He went to Waldo’s room early in the morning – while Waldo was still in bed – and apologized. He said he must have had a glass too much of champagne, that he hadn’t meant anything, and that if he’d had the least notion how Waldo would feel about it – and so on! In fact, he made light of the whole thing, so far as I was concerned. Waldo listened to it all in silence, and at the end just said, ‘All right, old chap. There’s an end of it.’ But he didn’t really forgive Arsenio – and he didn’t forgive me, though it hadn’t been my fault – had it? In the first-place, between us we’d made him give himself away; he’s very proud, and he hates that. In the second, he’s much better than you’d suppose at seeing into things; he has a sort of instinct; and from that day, right on, he was instinctively afraid of Arsenio; he felt that, if Arsenio chose, he could be dangerous – about me. I know it, from the way he used to speak of him later on – when we were engaged – always trying to probe me, to find out my feelings about Arsenio, whether I was thinking about him, whether I ever heard from him, and things like that. All the time he never had Arsenio out of his mind. Well – he was right.
“But I knew nothing of all that at the time. To me they seemed just a little sulky to one another, and to me, too. Otherwise they ignored what had happened, made nothing of it, never referred to it in any way. I was most frightfully hurt and – and let down. To me it had been a great beginning – of something, though I didn’t know of what. I couldn’t understand how Arsenio could treat it as nothing – that he shouldn’t apologize and abase himself if he’d meant nothing serious, that he shouldn’t speak to me again if he really cared for me. I felt utterly bewildered. Only I had a strange feeling that somehow, in some way, Arsenio had acquired a right over me by kissing my lips. Of that feeling I never got rid.”
From a frown she broke into a smile again, as she went on. “It was a miserable week – till we went. Both the boys avoided me whenever they could. Both have told me why since, but I don’t believe that either of them told me the truth. Arsenio said it was because he couldn’t trust himself not to make love to me, and he had practically promised that he wouldn’t. I think it was because he thought I would expect to be made love to (I did!), and he didn’t want to; he wasn’t in love with me then; besides he was afraid of Waldo. Waldo said it was because he was ashamed of himself. I daresay he was ashamed, but it was much more because he was in love with me, but was too proud to seem to compete with Arsenio. Whatever the reasons, the result was – triumph for Nina! She was invited over every day and all day. Both of them tried to keep with her – in order to avoid me. I wasn’t exactly jealous, because I knew that they really wanted to be with me – but for the complications. But I was exasperated to see that she thought – as, of course, she must – that she had cut me out. How her manner changed! Before this she had adored me – as younger girls do older ones sometimes; ‘Darling Lucinda!’ and so on! I’d noticed her trying to imitate me, and she used to ask where I got such pretty frocks. Now she patronized me, told me how I must wish I had a nice home (she knew I hadn’t) like Cragsfoot or Briarmount, and said what a pity it was my mother couldn’t give me more chances of riding, so that I could improve! She did ride much better than I – which made it worse.”
Here I looked at Lucinda, asking leave to laugh. She gave it in her own low-murmuring laughter at herself. “So it ended. We went away, and I was very glad when we did. I went away without either Arsenio or Waldo having said to me a single word that mattered.”
“I must have been very dull to have noticed nothing – except just the quarrel; well, the quarrel itself, and how you looked while it was going on – till you were sent to bed.”
“How did I look?”
“Just as you did when I saw you in the taxi at the corner by Marlborough House.”
“I’m very glad I didn’t see you! You’d have brought back what I’d managed to put out of my mind. As though I could put it out of my life!”
Suddenly and abruptly she pushed her chair back from the table. “Aren’t we staying here a frightfully long time? That waiter’s staring at us.”
“But surely I haven’t heard all the story yet?”
“All the story? No. Only the prologue. And the prologue’s a comedy, isn’t it? A children’s comedy! The rest isn’t quite like that. Pay the bill and let’s go. For a walk, if you like – and have time.”
“I ought just to call at my hotel – the Méditerranée– and see if there’s anything for me – any telegrams. If there aren’t, I should like to sit by the sea, and smoke, and hear the next chapter.”
At the moment Lucinda merely nodded. But as we walked away, she put her arm in mine and said, “The next chapter is called ‘Venice,’ and it’s rather a difficult one for me to tell.”
“I hope I’m not a person who has to have all the t’s crossed and all the i’s dotted. Arsenio has – or had – a ‘palazzo’ at Venice?”
“Yes. We stayed there.”
CHAPTER VI
VENICE
THE instructions for which I was waiting did not reach me for three days: I found reason to suspect, later on, that bribery had been at work; they had almost certainly been delayed, copied, and communicated to enemy quarters. The bulk of these enforcedly idle hours I spent with Lucinda – at the restaurant, on the sea-front, once or twice at my hotel, but never in the little house where she had a room: I often escorted her to the door, but she never asked me in. But we grew intimate; she told, I think, all, or almost all, the story, though often still with the air of examining herself, or of rendering an account to herself, rather than of being anxious to tell me: sometimes she would seem even to forget my presence. At other points, however, she would appeal directly to me, even urgently, as though she hung on my verdict. These changes gave variety