Merry Go Round Page 4

  Then quickly he took both her hands, and, before she realized what he was about, kissed them.

  'Don't be foolish,' cried Bella, withdrawing them hurriedly, and she reddened to her very hair.

  When he saw her discomfort, boylike, he burst into a shout of laughter.

  'Oh, I've made you blush.'

  His blue eyes sparkled, and he was delighted with his little wickedness. He did not know that afterwards, in her room, Bella, the kisses still burning on her hands, wept bitterly as though her heart would break.

  4

  WHEN Miss Ley entered her drawing-room she found the punctual Dean already dressed for dinner, very distinguished in silk stockings and buckled shoes, and presently Bella appeared, attired with sombre magnificence in black satin.

  'I went to Holywell Street this morning to look round the book-shops,' said the Dean, 'but Holywell Street is pulled down. London isn't what it was, Polly. Each time I come I find old buildings gone and old friends scattered.'

  With melancholy he thought of the pleasant hours he had spent fingering second-hand books, and the scent of musty volumes rose to his nostrils. The new shops to which the Jewish vendors had removed no longer had the old dusty nonchalance, the shelves were too spick and span, the idle lounger apparently less welcome.

  Mrs Barlow-Bassett and her son were announced. She was a tall woman of handsome presence, with fine eyes and a confident step; her grey hair, abundant and curling, recalled in its elaborate arrangement the fashion of the eighteenth century, and her manner of dress, suggested by the modes of that time, gave her somewhat the look of a sitter for Sir Joshua Reynolds. Her movements were characterized by a kind of obstinate decision, and she bore herself with the fine uprightness of a woman bred when deportment was still a part of maidenly education. She was immensely proud of her son, a tall strapping fellow of two-and-twenty, with black hair no less fine than his mother's, and with singularly beautiful features. Big-boned but unmuscular, very dark, his large brown eyes, straight nose and olive skin, his full sensual mouth, made him a person of striking appearance; and of this he was by no means unconscious. He was a good-humoured, lazy creature, languid as an Oriental houri, unscrupulous, untruthful, whom his mother by an exacting adoration had forced into insincerity. Left a widow of means, Mrs Barlow-Bassett had devoted her life to the upbringing of this only son, and was pleased to think that hitherto she had kept him successfully from all knowledge of evil. She meant him to find in her a friend and confidant as well as a mother, and boasted that from her he had never kept a single action nor a single thought.

  'I want to talk to Mr Kent this evening, Mary,' she said. 'He's a barrister, isn't he? And we've just made up our minds that Reggie had better go to the Bar.'

  Reggie, who, notwithstanding the attraction of a splendid uniform, had no inclination for the restraints of a military career, and disdained the commercial walk in which his father had earned a handsome fortune, was quite content to put up with the more gentlemanly side of the law. He knew vaguely that a vast number of dinners must be eaten, a prospect to which he looked forward with equanimity; and afterwards saw himself, becomingly attired in wig and gown, haranguing juries to the admiration of the world in general.

  'You're going to sit next to Basil,' answered Miss Ley; 'Frank Hurrell is to take you down.'

  'I'm sure Reggie will do well at the Bar, and I can keep him with me in London. You know, he's never given me a moment's anxiety, and sometimes I do feel proud that I've kept him so good and pure. But the world is full of temptations, and he's so extraordinarily good-looking.'

  'He is very handsome,' returned Miss Ley, pursing her lips.

  She thought her knowledge of character must be singularly at fault if Reggie was the virtuous creature his mother imagined. The sensuality of his face suggested no great distaste for the sins of the flesh, and the slyness of his dark eyes no excessive innocence.

  Basil Kent and Dr Hurrell, meeting on the doorstep, came in together. It was Frank Hurrell whom Miss Ley, somewhat exacting in these matters, had described as the most amusing person she knew. His breadth of shoulder and solid build were too great for his height, and he had reason to envy Reggie Bassett's length of leg; nor was his face handsome, for his brows were too heavy and his jaw too square, but the eyes were expressive, mocking sometimes or hard, at others very soft, and there was a persuasiveness in his deep resonant voice of which he well knew the power. A small black moustache concealed the play of a well-shaped mouth and the regularity of his excellent teeth. He impressed you as a strong man, of no very easy temper, who held himself in admirable control. Silent with strangers, he disconcerted them by an unwilling frigidity of manner, and though his friends, knowing that at all times he could be depended upon, were eager in his praise, acquaintance often accused him of superciliousness. To be popular with all and sundry he took no sufficient pains to conceal his impatience of stupidity, and though Miss Ley thought his conversation interesting, others to whom for some reason he was not attracted found him absent and taciturn.

  An extremely reserved man, few knew that Frank Hurrell's deliberate placidity of expression masked a very emotional temperament. In this he recognized a weakness and had schooled his face carefully to betray no feeling; but the feeling all the same was there, turbulent and overwhelming, and he profoundly mistrusted his judgement, which could be drawn so easily from the narrow path of reason. He kept over himself unceasing watch, as though a dangerous prisoner were in his heart ever on the alert to break his chains. He felt himself the slave of a vivid imagination, and realized that it stood against the enjoyment of life which his philosophy told him was the only end of existence. Yet his passions were of the mind rather than of the body, and his spirit urged his flesh constantly to courses wherein it found nothing but disillusion. His chief endeavour was the search for truth, and somewhat to Miss Ley's scorn (for she rested easily in a condition of satisfied doubt, her attitude towards life indicated by a slight shrug of the shoulders) he strove after certainty with an eagerness which other men reserve for love or fame or opulence. But all his studies were directed at the last to another end; convinced that the present life was final, he sought to make the completest use of its every moment; and yet it seemed preposterous that so much effort, such vast time and strange concurrence of events, the world and man, should tend towards nothing. He could not but think that somewhere a meaning must be discernible, and to find this examined science and philosophy with an anxious passion that to his colleagues at St Luke's, worthy craftsmen who saw no further than the slide on their microscopes, would have seemed extraordinary and almost insane.

  But it would have required an imaginative person to discover in Dr Hurrell at that moment trace of a conflict as vehement as any passionate disturbance of more practical people. He was in high good-humour, and while they waited for the remaining guests talked to Miss Ley.

  'Isn't it charming of me to come?' he asked.

  'Not at all,' she replied; 'it's very much nicer for a greedy person like you to eat my excellent dinner than to nibble an ill-cooked chop in your own rooms.'

  'How ungrateful! At all events, as a stopgap I have no duties to my neighbour, and may devote myself entirely to the pleasures of the table.'

  'Like a friend of mine – people weren't so polite forty years ago, and much more amusing – who, when his neighbour made some very foolish remark, shouted at her: "Go on with your soup, madam!" '

  'Tell me who else is coming,' said Frank.

  'Mrs Castillyon, but she'll be monstrously late. She thinks it fashionable, and the county in London has to take so many precautions not to seem provincial. Mrs Murray is coming.'

  'D'you still want me to marry her?'

  'No,' replied Miss Ley, laughing, 'I've given you up. Though it wasn't nice of you to abuse me like a pickpocket because I offered you a handsome widow with five thousand a year.'

  'Think of the insufferable bore of marriage, and in any case Heaven save me from an intellectual wif
e. If I marry at all, I'll marry my cook.'

  'I wish you wouldn't make my jokes, Frank. ... But as a matter of fact, unless I'm vastly mistaken, Mrs Murray has made up her mind to marry our friend Basil.'

  'Oh!' said Frank.

  Miss Ley noticed a shadow cross his eyes, and examined his expression sharply.

  'Don't you think it would be a very suitable thing if she did?'

  'I have no views on the subject,' returned Frank.

  'I wonder what you mean by that. Basil is poor and handsome and clever, and Mrs Murray has always had an inclination for literary men. That's the worst of marrying a cavalryman – it leads you to attach so much importance to brains.'

  'Was Captain Murray an absolute fool?'

  'My dear Frank, you don't ask if a guardsman has intelligence, but whether he can play polo. Captain Murray did two wise things in his life: he made a will leaving his wife a large fortune, and then promptly departed to a place where stupidity is apparently no disadvantage.'

  Miss Ley, for Bella's peculiar edification, had invited also the most fashionable cleric in London, the Rev. Collinson Farley, Vicar of All Souls, Grosvenor Square, and it amused her to see the look of Frank Hurrell, who detested him, when this gentleman was announced. Mr Farley was a man of middle size, with iron-grey hair carefully brushed, and a rather fine head; his well-manicured hands were soft and handsome, adorned with expensive rings. He was an amateur of good society, and could afford, such were his fascinations, to be very careful in his choice of friends; a coronet no longer dazzled a man who realized how hollow was earthly rank beside earthly riches. Poverty he could excuse only in a duchess, for there is in the strawberry leaves, even when, faded and sere, they wreathe the wrinkled brow of a dowager, something which inspires respect in the most flippant. His suave manner and intelligent conversation had gained him powerful friends when he was but a country rector, and through their influence the opportunity came at last to move to a sphere where his social talents met their due appreciation. Ecclesiastical dignity, like the sins of the fathers, may descend to the third and fourth generation, and obviously a man whose grandfather was a bishop could not lack decorum; something was surely due to a courteous person who had been actually born in an episcopal palace. Mrs Castillyon, as her hostess predicted last to arrive, at length appeared.

  'I hope I'm not late, Miss Ley,' she said, putting out both hands with a pretty little gesture of appeal.

  'Not very,' replied her hostess. 'Knowing that you make a point of being unpunctual, I took care to ask you for half an hour earlier than anyone else.'

  In solemn procession the company marched down to the dining-room, and Mr Farley surveyed the table with satisfaction.

  'I always think a well-dressed table one of the most truly artistic sights of our modern civilization,' he remarked to his neighbour.

  And his eyes wandered round the dining-room, in the furniture of which he observed a comforting but discreet opulence. Mr Farley had known the house in Miss Dwarris' lifetime, and noticed now that a portrait of her no longer hung in its accustomed place.

  'I see you have removed that excellent picture of the former occupant of this house, Miss Ley,' he said, with a graceful wave of his white and jewelled hand.

  'I couldn't bear that she should watch me eat three meals a day,' replied his hostess. 'I have a vivid recollection of her dinners: she fed me on husks and acorns, like the prodigal son, and regaled me with accounts of the torment that awaited me in an after-life.'

  The Dean smiled gravely. He looked upon Miss Ley with a kind of affectionate disapproval; and though often he rebuked her for the books she read or for the flippancy of her conversation, took always in good part the irony with which she met his little sermons.

  'You're very uncharitable, Polly,' he said. 'Of course Eliza was a difficult person to live with, but she exacted no more from others than she exacted from herself. I always admired her strong sense of duty; it was very striking at the present time when everyone lives entirely for pleasure.'

  'We may not be so virtuous as our fathers, Algernon,' answered Miss Ley, 'but we're very much easier to live with. After all, forty years ago people were positively insufferable: they spoke their minds, which is a detestable habit; their temper was abominable, and they drank more than was good for them. I always think my father was typical of his period. When he flew into a passion he called it righteous anger, and when I did anything to which he objected he suffered from – virtuous indignation. D'you know that till I was fifteen I was never allowed to taste butter, which was thought bad both for my figure and my soul? I was brought up exclusively on dripping and Jeremy Taylor. The world was a hazardous path beset with gins and snares; and at every turn and corner were immature volcanoes from which arose sulphurous fumes of hell-fire.'

  'It was an age of tyranny and vapours,' said Frank, 'of old gentlemen who were overbearing and young ladies who swooned.'

  'I'm sure people aren't so good as they used to be,' said Mrs Bassett, glancing at her son, who was much engrossed in a conversation with Mrs Castillyon.

  'They never were,' answered Miss Ley.

  'The perverseness of men would have made an infidel of me,' added the Dean, in his sweet, grave voice, 'but for the counteracting impression of Divine providence in the works of Nature.'

  Meanwhile Reggie Bassett enjoyed his dinner far more than he expected. He found himself next to Mrs Castillyon, and on sitting down proceeded to examine her with some effrontery. A rapid glance had told her that the boy was handsome, and when she saw what he was about, to give him opportunity at his leisure to observe her various graces, she began to talk volubly with her other neighbour. But presently she turned to Reggie.

  'Well, is it satisfactory?' she asked.

  'What?'

  'Your inspection.'

  She smiled brightly, flashing a quick, provoking look into his fine dark eyes.

  'Quite,' he answered, with a smile, not in the least disconcerted. 'My mother is already thinking that Miss Ley oughtn't to have let me sit by you.'

  Mrs Castillyon was a vivacious creature, small and dainty like a shepherdess in Dresden china, excitable and restless, who spoke with a loud, shrill voice; and with a quick, nervous gesture, constantly threw herself back in her chair to laugh boisterously at what Reggie said. And finding he could venture very far indeed without fear of offence, the model youth told her little scabrous stories in a low, suave voice, staring meanwhile into her eyes with the shameless audacity of a man conscious of his power. It is the fascination-look of the lady-killer, and its very impudence appears to be half its charm; the rake at heart feels that here modest pretences are useless, and with unhidden joy descends from the pedestal upon which the folly of man has insisted on placing her. Mrs Castillyon's face was thin and small, overpowdered, with rather high cheekbones, her hair, intricately dressed, had an unnatural fairness; but this set Reggie peculiarly at his ease, for he had enough experience of the sex to opine that women who used such artifices were always easier to get on with than the others. He thought his neighbour quite pretty, notwithstanding her five-and-thirty years; and the somewhat faded look of a thin blonde was counterbalanced by the magnificence of her jewels and the splendour of her gown: this was cut so low that Bella from the other side of the table naively wondered how on earth it was kept on at all.

  When the men were left to smoke, Reggie, helping himself to a third glass of port, drew his chair to Hurrell's.

  'I say, Frank,' he exclaimed, 'that was a nice little woman next to me, wasn't it?'

  'Had you never met Mrs Castillyon before?'

  'Never! Regular ripper, ain't she? By Jove! I thought this dinner would be simply deadly – politics and religion, and all that rot. The mater always makes me come, because she says there's intellectual conversation. My God!'

  Frank laughed at the idea of Mrs Barlow-Bassett combining instruction with amusement for her son at Miss Ley's dinner-table.

  'But Mrs Castillyon's a bit of all ri
ght, I can tell you. Little baggage! And she don't mind what you say to her. ... Why, she isn't like a lady at all.'

  'Is that a great recommendation?'

  'Well, ladies ain't amusing, are they? You talk to 'em of the Academy and all that sort of rot, and you've got to take care you don't swear. Ladies may be all very well to marry, but, upon my soul, for giving you a good time I prefer them a bit lower in the scale.'

  A little later, on the stairs, when they were going up to the drawing-room, Reggie slipped his arm through Frank's.

  'I say, old man, don't give me away if my mater thanks you for asking me to dinner on Saturday.'

  'But I haven't. Neither have I the least desire that you should dine with me on that day.'

  'Good Lord! d'you think I want to come – and talk about bugs and beetles all the evening? Not much! I'm going to dine with a little girl I know – typewriter, my boy, and a real love touch. Stunning little thing, I can tell you.'

  'But I don't see why, because you wish to entertain a young person connected with typewriting, I should imperil my immortal soul.'

  Reggie laughed.

  'Don't be an ass, Frank; you might help me. You don't know how utterly rotten it is to have a mother like mine who wants to keep me tied to her apron-strings. She makes me tell her everything I do, and of course I have to fake up some yarn. The only thing in it is that she'll swallow any damned lie I tell her.'

  'You can tell her lies till you're blue in the face,' said Frank, 'but I don't see why the devil I should.'

  'Don't be a beast, Frank. You might help me just this once. It won't hurt you to say I'm grubbing with you. The other night, by Jove! I nearly gave the show away. You know she always waits up for me. I told her I should be working late with my crammer, and went to the Empire. Well, I met a lot of chaps there and got a bit squiffy. There would have been a shindy if she'd noticed it, but I managed to pull myself together a bit, and said I'd got the very deuce of a headache. And next day I heard her tell someone that I was next door to a teetotaller.'