Lucinda. Anthony Hope
a tie, a union that she could not lightly nor wholly disown. He did not speak of it directly, but he would circle round it in talk, and smile in an impish exchange of the unspoken memory; he would laugh at Waldo, while with feigned sincerity he praised his sterling qualities. “Oh, his reliability, his English steadiness—dear, good, old Waldo! You’d trust him—even in a gondola, Lucinda!”
The gondola! Let it stand for the whole of Venice’s romantic paraphernalia; an old theme, a picture painted a thousand times. No need to expatiate on it here. To him it was all very familiar—the nearest thing he had to a home; to her, of course, it was a revelation. They were both susceptible to impressions, to beauty. He retained his sensibility, she developed hers. She saw new things through his eyes; he saw old ones newly reflected in the light of hers. His feelings regained freshness, while hers grew to maturity—a warm ripeness in which the man and the place were fused together in one glowing whole. “Oh, I lived then!” she cried, clasping her hands together and beating them upon her knee.
Yet it must still have been with her own aloofness, delicacy, difficulty of approach; the fires gleamed through the veil, but the veil was round them. He complained, it appeared, of her coldness, of the distance at which she kept him, at relapses into formality after hours of unreserved merriment. Mrs. Knyvett chid her; was he not the friend, the host, the benefactor? Within prudent bounds he should be handsomely encouraged—and rewarded. “Mother told me that well-bred girls knew how to make themselves respected without being prudish.” Maternal philosophy of an affectionately utilitarian order—one eye on present amenities, the other on grander prospects in the future!
But was there no fear also in that maternal breast? Did the situation and the actors raise no apprehension? To some people—to how many? Some have maintained to all!—morality is not a master, but a good and ever vigilant servant. It preserves the things that are of real value, the marketable stuff. And it dignifies its watch and ward with such high names, such sacred and binding traditions, that—well, really, what between the august sanctions on the one hand and the enormous material advantages on the other, can it be dreamt of that any reasonable girl will forget herself? So one may suppose that Mrs. Knyvett reasoned. For what, after all, is the “leading article” in a girl’s stock-in-trade? Who, properly instructed, would sell that under market price, and so stand bankrupt?
So much may be said in apology for Mrs. Knyvett’s blindness to her daughter’s peril; for in peril she was. Then an apology is needed for Arsenio? It would show a lack of humor to tender it; it is the last thing which those who have known and liked Monkey Valdez would think of doing. He was a “good Catholic” by tradition, and a gentleman by breeding; but he was an honest man only by fits and starts—when honesty appealed to his histrionic sense, when it afforded him the chance of a beau geste, when he felt himself under the eyes of the men with whom he had been brought up, who expect honesty even in dealings with women—at all events, with girls of their own caste; who draw a broad distinction between an intrigue and a seduction; who are, in fact (not to labor the subject), born and trained adepts in the niceties, some of them curious, of the code of honor, which is certainly not a religious rule or an ethical system, but may be considered to embody the laws of sex warfare, to be a Hague Convention between the sexes.
Yet there is no need to picture the poor Monkey as the deliberate villain of the stage. Your true villain must be deliberate and must rejoice in his villainy, or all the salt is out of him. Arsenio was certainly not deliberate, and in no way realized himself as a villain. The event—the course of affairs afterwards—proves that. He probably let his boat drift pleasantly, delightfully, down the river, till the swirl of rapids caught it; it is likely that he was himself surprised; the under-nature stormed the hesitating consciousness.
She gave me no particulars; I asked for none. She shrank from them, as I did. It was after a delightful evening alone together, on the water, that it came. Mrs. Knyvett had gone to bed; they were alone, full of the attraction of each other—and of “it all.” So Lucinda summed up the notoriously amatory influences of the Adriatic’s Queen. She appealed to me—woman now, to a man of middle age—to understand how it happened. As she told me—well, she hardly told me, she let me see—she laid her hand in mine, her eyes sought mine, straight, in question—yet hardly to me—rather to some tribunal which she blindly sought, to which she made a puzzled but not despairing, not altogether too tragic, appeal: “At Cragsfoot he had kissed my lips, you know; and I wasn’t angry. That meant I liked him, didn’t it? That meant——? That meant—the same?”
That seemed to me to record—as she, saying it, still seemed to retain—a wonderful freedom from the flesh. She judged things by the spirit. A terribly dangerous criterion; anybody can distort it; anybody may snigger at it—though I think that it offers more resistance to an honest laugh. There is a sort of pathos about it. Meant the same! Poor dear! The gulf between the two things! Immeasurable! Let speak religion (though there perhaps the voices have varied), morality, prudence, the rest of them! And virgin modesty? Shall we lay its fall most essentially in the less or the greater—in the parley or in the surrender? That’s what she seemed to ask. But what answer could a plain man of the world give her?
She had a few—a very few days of happiness, of forgetfulness of everything except their love. Then the clouds gathered. She waited for a word from him that did not come—not the first time that he had kept her thus waiting—yet how different! Arsenio grew fretful, disconsolate, and sometimes sullen. One of his disappearances occurred; he was raising the wind among his long-suffering aristocrats; he was scraping together every coin he could and throwing them all on the gaming table. If fortune smiled, he would do the right thing, and do it handsomely; if she frowned—and there could be no doubt that she was frowning now—what lay before him, before them? A scamped and mean ménage à trois, existence eked out with the aid of Mrs. Knyvett’s scanty resources, and soured by her laments! No money for gayety, for play, to cut a figure with! He shrank from the prospect. He could not trust his love with it; probably he did not trust hers either. He began to draw away from her; she would not reproach or beseech. “I had taken the chances; I had gambled too,” she said.
Unless something had happened which put Arsenio under an even more imperative obligation—one which, as I would fain believe, he must have honored—it seems probable that the affair would in any case have ended as it did; but the actual manner of its ending was shaped by an external incident.
The two were sitting together one morning in the Knyvett salon, Lucinda mending her gloves, Arsenio doing nothing and saying nothing, melancholy and fagged after a bout of gambling the night before. Mrs. Knyvett came in, with an air of triumph, holding a letter in her hand. She was still ignorant of the situation; still sure that her daughter was making herself respected—though surely less apprehensive of her prudishness? And, while they had been pursuing their devices, she had had hers also to pursue. Success had crowned her efforts. The letter was from “dearest Miss Fleming”; it invited mother and daughter to pay another visit to herself and Sir Paget as soon as they returned to England; that is, in about six weeks; for they had a stay with friends in Paris arranged in the immediate future—a thing that had already begun to trouble Lucinda.
“It’s delightful!” said Mrs. Knyvett. “Won’t it help us splendidly through the summer! Any chance of your being there too, Don Arsenio? That would make it perfect!”
The good lady did not stay for an answer. She had her hat on, and was going out to do her marketing. She laid the letter down on the table between them, and bustled out, her face still radiant with the joy of successful maneuver.
So Cragsfoot, completely forgotten of recent days, made its reëntry on the scene.
For a few moments they sat silent still, with the letter between them. Then Lucinda said, “What are we to do, Arsenio?” She raised her eyes from her sewing and looked across at him. He did not return her glance; he was scowling. The invitation to Cragsfoot (he did not know about the French visit, which Mrs. Knyvett could readily have put off if she had preferred to stay on at Venice) brought him up short; it presented him with an issue. It forced Lucinda’s hand also. No mere excuse, no mere plea of disinclination, would prevent Mrs. Knyvett from going to Cragsfoot and taking her daughter with her. To stay there was not only a saving and a luxury, in