The Summons Part 17

Millie Splay nodded.

"I am glad. There's always a room here for Stella. I told her so immediately after I met her, and she took me at my word, as I meant her to do. But she avoids Goodwood week and festivals generally, and she is wise. For though I would take her anywhere myself, you know what long memories people have for other people's sins. There might be humiliations."

"I understand that," said Hillyard, and he added, "I gathered from Mrs.

Croyle that you had remained a very staunch friend."

Millie Splay shrugged her shoulders.

"I am a middle-aged woman with a middle-aged woman's comprehension.

There are heaps of things I loathe more and more each day, meanness, for instance, and an evil tongue. But, for the other sins, more and more I see the case for compa.s.sion. Stella was hungry of heart, and she let the hunger take her. She had her blind, wild hour or two; she was a fool; she was--well, everything the moralists choose to call her. But she has been paying for her hour ever since, and will go on paying. Now, if I can only hit your yellow ball from here, I shall have rather a good game on."

Lady Splay succeeded and, carrying the four croquet b.a.l.l.s with her, went round the rest of the hoops and pegged out.

"I must go in and change," she said, and suddenly, in a voice of melancholy, she cried, "Oh, I do wish----" and stopped.

"What?"

"Oh, it doesn't matter," she answered. But her eyes were upon the window, where Joan Whitworth stood in full view in all her disfiguring panoply. Lady Splay wrung her hands helplessly. "Oh, dear, dear, if she weren't so thorough!" she moaned.

When they returned into the drawing-room, Sir Chichester was still standing near to Harold Jupp and Dennis Brown, s.h.i.+fting from one foot to another, and making little inarticulate sounds in his throat.

"Haven't you two finished yet?" asked Millicent Splay.

"Just," said Dennis Brown, rubbing his hands together with a laugh, "and we ought to have four nice wins to-morrow."

"Good!" said Sir Chichester. "Then might I have a newspaper?"

"But of course," said Dennis Brown, and he handed one over the table to him. "You haven't been waiting for it all this time, Sir Chichester?"

"Oh no, no, no," exclaimed Sir Chichester, quickly. He glanced with a swift and experienced eye down the columns, and tossed the paper aside.

"Might I have another?"

"But of course, sir."

The second paper was disposed of as rapidly as the first, and the others followed in their turn.

"Nothing in them," said Sir Chichester with a resigned air. "Nothing in them at all."

Millie Splay laughed.

"All that my husband means is that his name is not to be found in any one of them."

"The occurrence seems so rare that he has no great reason to complain,"

said Hillyard; and, in order to a.s.suage any disappointment which might still be rankling in the baronet's bosom, Hillyard related at the dinner-table, with the necessary discretions, his election to the mess at Senga.

Sir Chichester was elated. "So far away my name is known! Really, that is very pleasant hearing!"

There was no offence to him in the reason of his honorary members.h.i.+p of the Senga mess, which, however carefully Hillyard sought to hide it, could not but peep out. Sir Chichester neither harboured illusions himself as to his importance nor sought to foster them in others. There was none of the "How do these things get into the papers?" about _him_.

"I am not a public character. So I have to take trouble to keep myself in print. And I do--a deuce of a lot of trouble."

"Now, why?" asked Harold Jupp, who possessed an inquiring mind and was never satisfied by anything but the most definite statements.

"Because I like it," replied Sir Chichester. "I am used to it, and I like it. Unless I see my name in real print every morning, I have all day the uncomfortable sensation that I am not properly dressed."

Millie Splay and the others round the table, with the exception of one person, laughed. To that one person, Sir Chichester here turned good-humouredly:

"All right, you can turn your nose up, Joan. It seems extraordinary to you that I should like to see my name in print. I can tell you something more extraordinary than that. The public likes it too. Just because I am not a public character, every reference to me must be of an exclusively personal kind. And that's just the sort of reference which the public eats. It is much more thrilled by the simple announcement that a Sir Chichester Splay, of whom it has never heard, has bought a new pair of purple socks with white stripes than it would be by a full account of a Cabinet crisis."

Once more the company laughed at Sir Chichester's apology for his foible.

Lady Splay turned to Hillyard.

"And who is the ingenious man who discovered this way of keeping the peace at Senga?"

Hillyard suddenly hesitated.

"A great friend of mine," he answered with his eyes on Millie Splay's face. "He was with me at Oxford. A Captain Luttrell."

But it was clear almost at once that the name had no a.s.sociations in Lady Splay's mind. She preferred to entertain her friends in the country than to live in town. She knew little of what gossip might run the streets of London; and since Luttrell was, as yet, like Sir Chichester, in that he was not a public character, there had been no wide-run gossip about Stella Croyle or himself which Millicent Splay was likely to meet.

Hillyard thought at first, that with a woman's self-control she turned a blank face to him of a set purpose. But one little movement of hers rea.s.sured him. Her eyes turned towards Joan Whitworth, as though asking whether this Harry Luttrell was a match for her, and she said:

"You must bring your friend down to see us, when he comes back to England. We are almost acquainted as it is."

No! Millicent Splay did not connect Harry Luttrell with Stella Croyle.

It would have been better if Hillyard, that very night, had enlightened her. But he was neither a gossip nor a meddler. It was not possible that he should.

CHAPTER X

THE SUMMONS

It is curious to recollect how smoothly the surface water ran during that last week of peace. Debates there were, of course, and much argument across the table. It was recognised that great changes, social, economic, military, would come and great adaptations have to be made.

But, meanwhile, to use the phrase which was soon to be familiar in half a million mouths, people carried on. The Brown couple, for instance.

Each morning they set out gaily, certain of three or four nice wins; each evening they returned after a day which was "simply awful." Harold Jupp was at hand with his unfailing remedy.

"We'll go jumping in the winter and get it all back easily. Flat racing's no good for the poor. The Lords don't come jumping."

Joan Whitworth carried on too, in her sackcloth and sashes. She was moved by the enthusiastic explosions of Miranda Brown to reveal some details of the great novel which was then in the process of incubation.

"_She_ insists on being married in a violet dress," said Joan, "with the organ playing the 'Funeral March of a Marionette.'"

"Oh, isn't that thrilling!" cried Miranda.