The Story Of Louie Part 17

"--disgracing yourself among younger and more innocent girls----"

"--with a Lovenant-Smith, anyway----"

Again the stamp. "I forbid you to mention his name!"

"Roy----"

"Leave the room!"

("Please, please!" besought Miss Harriet.)

"You will pack your boxes at once!"

"I shall consult Lord Moone's lawyer first. You accepted my fees--your college is an imposition from beginning to end, and I'll see that's known. That will be another scandal----"

"Ah!" choked Mrs. Lovenant-Smith, perhaps with some hazy recollection of the law of slander in her head. "You hear that, Miss Chesson? You hear that? You heard those words?"

"No, I didn't quite catch--ladies--please!"

"If you didn't catch it, I said the whole place was a shameless fraud," said Louie calmly.

"Very good. Ring the bell, Miss Chesson!"

But the servant appeared only in time to see Mrs. Lovenant-Smith's complete collapse. She sank, shaking, into a chair, and gazed unseeingly into a pigeon-hole of her desk, as if she might find some help against this devilish girl there. As she clung (as it were) to the ropes, Louie let her have it (so to speak) on the beezer.

"You oughtn't to be here at all, really, you know," she said. "You ought to be in one of those places--you know--in the Queen's gift, at Kensington or Hampton Court, with the dowagers and maids-of-honour. If you like I'll ask my uncle whether he can't do anything."

And without waiting for an answer she swept out, not by the door, but by the French window. The reflection of the yellow-shaded standard-lamp swung again as she did so.

She entered the courtyard by the side door, pa.s.sed under the dark yew and the arch beneath the box-room, and made her way through the orchard. She had reached her pitch at the foot of the hill before she remembered that she had forgotten her mattress and blankets. She returned in search of them. Twenty minutes later she was in bed, her knees up, her hands clasped behind her head.

She was white with triumph. That woman! Well, Louie thought she had held her own. She had had the last word, at all events, and an optic-bunging one too. Now should she leave, or stay? It was entirely a question of balance between her desire to see the last of the place and her resolve to go at n.o.body's pleasure but her own. It might be that she would have to stay another week in order to avoid the suspicion that she was turning tail. The fraud of a place!

She lay, pale and victorious, thinking the matter over.

One thing was certain; she would not return to Trant. She supposed she was vindictive by nature, but that would merely mean at the most a week's gradually increasing strain on her temper and then another series of embroilings with her mother. A philosophic elf somewhere deep within her--it was hardly affection--bade her spare her mother what she had not spared Mrs. Lovenant-Smith. Why seek a known trouble at Trant? If she must take trouble with her wherever she went, she might as well take it to a fresh place.

Before she was aware they had done so, her thoughts had flown to the vouched-for but incredible things Richenda Earle had said about life and London.

Lord Moone had a house, and Captain Chaffinger chambers, in London, and she knew both. For the rest, her knowledge of the place was pretty much what Richenda had guessed it to be--shops, restaurants, theatres.

Of her five visits two had been spent at Lord Moone's, two at Cynthia's friends, the Kayes, and one at an hotel--this not counting the night on which, having run away from the convent, she had occupied Chaff's room and had wondered at his large pincus.h.i.+on, his pictures, and ribboned haircurlers that he doubtless kept in memory of his departed youth.

Her father, too, lived in London, or thereby----

She fell to wondering about her father.

There was a full but late-rising moon that night; it had not yet cleared the tree-tops of the eastern end of the orchard below. She watched its silver through the topmost boughs. Already it filled the heavens with a mist of light, dimming the stars; the glister on near leaves was brighter than the Plough over her head. Scents of the distant gardens stole undispersed through the night; that of the night-flowering tobacco-plant was for some minutes almost sicklily oppressive; and behind her she heard the scurrying of the rabbits at play.

It was odd that she thought of her father rather than of Roy. Somehow only Roy's actual presence had the power to colour those now pale cheeks of hers. Certainly it had done so that afternoon. For an hour, aboard the yacht, the rose-peonies in the garden had been paler than she. But her father had her thoughts now, and the sum of them was that she would have given much to be able to think of him as not cruel, not faithless, not a man who had had to be thrust back into the ditch whence he had come. She might have sought him out then.

For she was going to London; that was settled. She had her allowance, more by a half than the income Richenda and her Mr. Weston would gladly have married on, and not one penny more of it would she waste at Chesson's. The next day or two would almost certainly provide her with a "good exit." Then n.o.body would be able to say she had slunk out.

Oh, if her father had but not been a brute!

The moon cleared the trees, and another too-sweet tract of the night-flowering tobacco enveloped her. A bird or two stirred. Some time before she had thought she had heard the sound of a curlew's whistle, low and not very near, but she had disregarded it. Now it came again. All the effect it had was to turn her thoughts, tardily and almost unnoticed by herself, to Roy.

She knew little about yachts; yachting was no pastime of Lord Moone's; but even her vaunting mood relaxed to a momentary smile as she remembered the yacht down under the hill there. Those two boys must be crazy to risk their lives like that. They had rounded Land's End in her, and in quite good faith evidently expected the miracle to be repeated. The only wonder was that the centre-board had gone before the rest of the crazy fabric. "I told you to put some old clothes on,"

Roy had apologised for his vessel, "--and I say--I don't think I'd sit on the table if I were you--I'm not _quite_ sure about it, you see--may have to send it to Mazzicombe after all--come on the locker."

So they had sat on the locker----

She had felt safer when, half-an-hour later, she had clambered down into the little dinghy again. It would be Davy Jones's locker for Master Roy and his friend Mr. Izzard unless some fatherly fisherman took them and their boat in hand.

Then came the thoughts of her unknown father again.

"_Ee-oooo-eee!_"

She sat up. The whistle came from the stile up the hill. And suddenly she knew it was no curlew. It was Roy.

She listened.

"_Ee-oooo-eee!_"

It was Roy.

She knew he would not seek her farther than the stile. Had there not been other sleepers just below the orchard, it would still have been the extreme of his boldness that he had got so far. But--she remembered how from the first she had been the prime mover in their entirely wanton flirtation--was it necessarily the extreme of hers?

Then, as the devil would have it, something brought Mrs.

Lovenant-Smith into her head again.

That woman!

All the blood left her cheeks and thronged to her heart again.

Roy would certainly not pa.s.s the stile----

She hesitated for a moment longer, and then suddenly got up from her bed.

Her clothes were wrapped in her waterproof; she took the waterproof and put it on. She thrust her feet into a pair of slippers. The waterproof was not so long as the garment beneath it; the moon was now well above the trees; it showed the hurrying white about her heels as she walked quickly up the hill. She drew the under-garment up a little. The waterproof was almost the colour of the scorched gra.s.s.

The small shadow that preceded her was now the thing most plainly to be seen.

Over the stile she saw the shoulder of his white sweater. Again her caution awoke.

"You might have put a coat on," she said, a little out of breath. "You can be seen half-a-mile away on a night like this."

"I thought you were never going to hear me!" he said.

"Oh! You seem to have been sure I'd come if I did."