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The Moon out of Reach. Margaret Pedler
but when he finally reappeared, his face wore an expression of humorous satisfaction.
"I've fixed it all," he said. "Your car has just arrived at Abbencombe and the chauffeur told to wait there. I've got hold of another one here for our journey. Now let me put you into it and then I'll see about your luggage."
Nan took her seat obediently and reflected that there was something tremendously reliable about this man. He had a genius for appearing at the critical moment and for promptly clearing away all difficulties. Almost unconsciously she was forced into comparing him with Maryon Rooke—Rooke, with his curious fascination and detached, half-cynical outlook on life, his beautiful ideals and—Nan's inner self flinched from the acknowledgment—his frequent fallings-short of them. Unwillingly she had to confess to the fact that Maryon was something both of poseur and actor, with an ineradicable streak of cynicism in his composition added to a strange undercurrent of passion which he rarely allowed to carry him away. Apart from this he was genuine, creative artist. Whereas Peter Mallory, beautifully unself-conscious, was helpful in a simple, straightforward way that gave one a feeling of steadfast reliance upon him. And she liked his whimsical smile.
She was more than ever sure of the latter fact when he joined her in the car, remarking smilingly:
"This is a great bit of luck for me. I should have had a long drive of twenty-five miles all by myself if you hadn't been left high and dry as well."
"It's very nice of you to call it luck," replied Nan, as the car slid away into the winter dusk of the afternoon. "Are you usually a lucky person? You look as if you might be."
Under the light of the tiny electric bulb which illuminated the car she saw his face alter suddenly. The lines on either side the sensitive mouth seemed to deepen and a weary gravity showed for an instant in his grey-blue eyes.
"Appearances are known to be deceitful, aren't they?" he answered, with an attempt at lightness. "No, I'm afraid I've not been specially lucky."
"In love or in cards?"
The words left Nan's lips unthinkingly, almost before she was aware, and she regretted them the moment they were spoken. She felt he must inevitably suspect her of a prying curiosity.
"I'm lucky at cards," he replied quietly.
There was something in his voice that appealed to Nan's quick, warm sympathies.
"Oh, I'm so sorry!" she said, rather tremulously. "Perhaps, some day, the other kind of luck will come, too."
"That's out of the question"—harshly.
"Do you know a little poem called 'Empty Hands'?" she asked. "I set it to music one day because I liked the words so much. Listen."
In a low voice, a trifle shaken by reason of the sudden tensity which had crept into the atmosphere, she repeated the brief lyric:
"But sometimes God on His great white Throne
Looks down from the Heaven above,
And lays in the hands that are empty
The tremulous Star of Love."
As she spoke the last verse Nan's voice took on a tender, instinctive note of consolation. Had she been looking she would have seen Peter Mallory's hand clench itself as though to crush down some sudden, urgent motion. But she was gazing straight in front of her into the softly lit radiance of the car.
"Only sometimes there isn't any star, and your hands would be 'outstretched in vain,' as the song says," he commented.
"Oh, I hope not!" cried Nan. "Try to believe they wouldn't be!"
Mallory uttered a short laugh.
"I'm afraid it's no case for 'believing.' It's hard fact."
Nan remained silent. There was an undertone so bitter in his voice that she felt as though her poor little efforts at consolation were utterly trivial and futile to meet whatever tragedy lay behind the man's curt speech. It seemed as though he read her thought, for he turned to her quickly with that charming smile of his.
"You'd make a topping pal," he said. And Nan knew that in some indefinable way she had comforted him.
They drove on in silence for some time and when, later on, they began to talk again it was on ordinary commonplace topics, by mutual consent avoiding any by-way that might lead them back to individual matters. The depths which had been momentarily stirred settled down once more into misleading tranquillity.
In due course they arrived at Abbencombe, and the car purred up to the station, where the Chattertons' limousine, sent to meet Nan, still waited for her. The transit from one car to the other was quickly effected, and Peter Mallory stood bareheaded at the door of the limousine.
"Good-bye," he said. "And thank you, little pal. I hope you'll never find your moon out of reach."
Nan held out her hand. In the grey dusk she felt him carry it to his lips.
"Good-bye," he said once more.
CHAPTER III
A QUESTION OF EXTERNALS
It was a grey November afternoon two days later. A faint, filmy suggestion of fog hung about the streets, just enough to remind the Londoner of November possibilities, but in the western sky hung a golden sun, and underfoot there was the blessing of dry pavements.
Penelope stood at one of the windows of the flat in Edenhall Mansions, and looked down at the busy thoroughfare below. Hither and thither men and women hurried about their business; there seemed few indeed nowadays of the leisured loiterers through life. A tube strike had only recently been brought to a conclusion, and Londoners of all classes were endeavouring to make good the time lost during those days of enforced stagnation. Unfortunately, time that is lost can never be recovered. Even Eternity itself can't give us back the hours which have been flung away.
Rather bitterly Penelope reflected that, in spite of all our vaunted civilisation and education, men still resorted, as did their ancestors of old, to brute force in order to obtain their wishes. For, after all, a strike, however much you may gloss over the fact, is neither more nor less than a modern substitute for the old-time revolt of men armed with pikes and staves. That is to say, in either instance you insist on what you want by a process of making other people thoroughly uncomfortable till you get your way—unless they happen to be stronger than you! And incidentally a good many innocent folk who have nothing to do with the matter get badly hurt in the fray.
All the miseries which inevitably beset the steadfast worker when a strike occurs had fallen to Penelope's lot. She had scrambled hopelessly for a seat on a motor-'bus, or, driven by extremity into a fit of wild extravagance, had vainly hailed a taxi. Sometimes she had been compelled to tramp the whole way home, through drenching rain, from some house at which she had been giving a lesson, in each case enduring the very kind of physical stress which plays such havoc with a singer's only capital—her voice. She wondered if the strikers ever realised the extra strain they inflicted on people so much less able to contend with the hardships of a worker's life than they themselves.
The whirr and snort of a taxi broke the thread of her thoughts. With a grinding of brakes the cab came to a standstill at the entrance to the block of flats, and after a few minutes Emily, the unhurried maid-of-all-work, whom Nan's sense of fitness had re-christened "our Adagio," jerked the door open, announcing briefly:
"A lidy."
Penelope turned quickly, and a look of pleasure flashed into her face.
"Kitty! Back in town at last! Oh, it's good to see you again!"
She kissed the new-comer warmly and began to help off her enveloping furs. When these—coat, stole, and a muff of gigantic proportions—were at last shed, Mrs. Barry Seymour revealed herself