Secret History Revealed By Lady Peggy O'Malley Part 3

The landlady had a telephone, and presently I got the message which Captain March had told me to expect. Mrs. Jewitt had consented to dine and go to the theatre. Would I like the Savoy, and to see "Milestones"

afterward? And was I sure this business wouldn't get me into trouble to-morrow?

If it had sent me into penal servitude for life, I shouldn't have hesitated; but I replied that my sister would forgive me for the sake of the American Emba.s.sy ball. I knew Di could be counted on, in the exceptional circ.u.mstances, not to tell Father; but I didn't mention that detail to Captain March. I was afraid he might think the corporal's stripe had been ill-bestowed, but one must draw the straight line of truth somewhere!

CHAPTER III

Next morning when Di came back, I told her what was necessary to tell, and not a bit more. I explained how I had met Captain Eagleston March, and how we had spent the day and the heavenly evening. But first, I let her open the invitation which had just come by hand from the American Emba.s.sy (she opens all Father's letters, except those that have a repulsively private look), and when she began, "I wonder how on earth----," I was able to work my story in neatly, as an explanation.

Di listened to the end, without interrupting me once except by opening her eyes very wide, and now and then raising her eyebrows, or giving vent to expressive sighs. I saw that she was thinking hard as I went on, and I knew what she was thinking: about the need of forgiving me because of the new interest in life my naughtiness had brought her.

When I had finished up the tale with our dinner at the Savoy, and seeing "Milestones," and then on top of all, having supper with Mrs. Jewitt and Captain March at a terribly respectable but fascinating night club of which he had been made a member, Diana didn't scold. She said that Captain March being an officer and a flying man made all the difference, but she hoped I would not have put myself into such a position with any other sort of man, whether he mistook me for a child or not. Even as it was, she wouldn't dare tell Father the history of my day: but, as they had made several American acquaintances lately, she could easily account for the Emba.s.sy invitation.

"We'll go, of course, won't we?" I catechized her, knowing that her word with Father was pretty well law.

"Yes, we'll go," she answered. "I'll write an acceptance and send it by hand."

I was so enchanted at this that I dashed up to my room and began shortening the new dress. I had mentioned it vaguely to Di, but it was the one part of my story in which she took no interest. I saw how the keenness died out of her beautiful sea-blue eyes, and how her soul retired comfortably behind them, to think of something else, just as you see people walk away from windows through which they've been looking out, leaving them emptily blank. As she didn't care what little Peggy wore, little Peggy decided to give her a surprise at the last moment.

Nothing much was said about the Emba.s.sy ball by Father or Di before me, on that day or the next, so I, too, kept my own counsel. I was afraid if I gabbled as I longed to do, Father might take it into his head that the child had better stop at home. All I heard was a little talk about the time to start, and whether a taxi should be ordered or a coupe. I thought there would be rather a squash in a coupe with Father, Diana, and me folded together in a sort of living sandwich; but I was so small, I could perhaps manage not to slide off the little flap seat with its back to the horses.

It was a coupe they finally decided on, and it was ordered for a quarter to ten. We had a short and early dinner, and as I did Diana's hair, it seemed to me that I had never seen her look prettier. I wondered whether Captain March would admire her very much, and I hoped for his own sake--I almost believed it was for his own sake!--that he wouldn't fall in love. As I thought this, I looked with a new kind of criticism at Di, to judge whether he were likely to be one of her victims.

Heaps of men had fallen in love with Di since I began to be old enough to notice such things. They had never been the right sort of men, from her point of view, for none of the lot had had a penny to bless himself with, or even a t.i.tle worth the taking. But all of them had been worth flirting with; and after they had been dropped with more or less of a dull thud, I'm afraid some of them had suffered. I didn't wish Captain March to suffer, yet I couldn't help thinking that if I were a man I might be as silly as the rest and go down before Di.

She was then--and she is now--the most lovable looking thing that can be imagined. She doesn't appear to be cool and calculating, but warm-hearted and gentle and soft, far more so than most of the girls one meets, especially in London, where I think they have the air of being rather hard: ready to sacrifice everything and everybody for the sake of what they want to get or do.

If you were going to paint a picture of Ireland, typified by a beautiful girl, so that you might name your canvas "Dark Rosaleen," you would give the world to get Di for your model. She is tall, as a Diana ought to be, and slender though not thin. She gives the effect of fas.h.i.+onable slimness, yet she is all lovely curves and roundnesses. She has a long white throat with a charming upturned chin that has a deep cleft in the middle. It's no exaggeration to say that her skin is as white as creamy milk; and on each cheek, just beneath the shadow under her eyes, is a faint pink stain, as if it had been tapped hard with a carnation, and a little of the colour had come off. Perhaps, if her face has a fault, the nose is too short and flat, but it gives her a sweetly young and innocent look, added to her eyes being set far apart. And the eyes are really glorious: very big and long, with deep shadows under them only partly cast by her thick black lashes. A man once wrote a Valentine verse to Di, in which he remarked that her eyes were "like sapphires gleaming blue where they had fallen among dark gra.s.ses"; and it wasn't a bad comparison. The man died of taking too much veronal a year after.

n.o.body said he had done it on purpose. But I wondered. He was very unhappy the day he said "Good-bye" to Ballyconal. I've never been able to forget his look.

Di's mouth is large, and a tiny bit greedy, but all the more fascinating for that, because it is so red and curved. Her forehead is rather high, really, but she makes it seem only a white line above her level eyebrows, because of the way she likes best to wear her crinkly dark hair: parted in the middle, pushed forward and down, and banded in place by a rope of hair from the back.

That night for the ball at the American Emba.s.sy she had it fastened with big, very green jade hairpins. From her little pink ears hung long loops of emeralds (heirlooms in our family, or they would have been sold long ago), and the gown she chose was the same shade of green: some very thin, soft stuff, with one of those new names dressmakers think of in their dreams. It was simply made, and not very expensive; but in it Di looked like a cla.s.sic personification of Ireland at its loveliest, and I was sure that not the best-dressed girl in the room would be as exquisite as she. I told her this on an impulse, and she was pleased.

Yet she sighed. Of course she couldn't help knowing, said she, that she wasn't bad looking. But Venus or Helen of Troy couldn't make a success, handicapped as she was.

"It might be different in some other country," she went on, more to herself than to me. "A country like America, where t.i.tles are more of a novelty, and everybody one meets doesn't remember all about one's poor mother."

"Now I must run and get ready, myself," said I, when I had established connection between Diana's most intricate hooks and eyes.

"Get ready? For what, dear?"

"Why, for the ball, of course!" The first chill of suspicion that I had been cast for the part of Cinderella crept through me, like a caterpillar walking inside my spine.

"But, my _child_!" Di exclaimed. "You couldn't have thought you were going? Officially you are a little girl. You don't exist, and if you did, you haven't a dress----"

"I have a dress. The one I bought with the money from the lace. I didn't say much, because I thought it would be fun to surprise you."

"Well, I'm awfully sorry, dear, that you've been counting on it. I never dreamed--you ought to have told me----"

"You said you'd accept for '_us_.'"

"I meant Father and me. It never crossed my mind that you----Too bad!

But anyhow, it's too late now. Father would never consent."

I might have retorted that she was the one person in the world who could make him consent to anything she wanted, but then, the truth was that she didn't want this thing. Diana had--and has--the manners of an angel; and strangers would think she was as easy to melt as sugar in the sun.

But I, who have lived with her all the years of my life, know that the sugar is only on the surface. And I have learned what is underneath.

Even then, I realized that Di had understood perfectly well from the first that I expected to go to the ball, and she had kept quiet in order to have no more than one short, sharp fuss at the end. While it was being borne in upon me that I was to stop at home, instead of going on arguing and "fishwifing" I shut up like a clam. I suppose it was a kind of obstinate pride, the sort of pride that makes condemned people not scream or throw themselves about on the way to execution. But when Father and Di had gone, I cried--oh, how I cried! There was a kind of wild pleasure in letting the sobs come, and feeling the hot tears spout out of my eyes. In any clash between us, Di always won, because she was "grown up," and I was a "little girl"; but the trick she had played on me this time roused my sense of its injustice, and with all my body and mind and soul I resolved to strengthen my soul against her. "Some day,"

I said to myself, letting the tears dry on my cheeks as I listened to a spirit of prophecy, "some day there'll be a battle for life or death between our characters, Di's and mine, and I'll save myself up to win _then_."

It seemed weak, as if I were a whipped child, to creep off to bed, yet I couldn't force myself to read, or do anything to turn my thoughts from the great injustice. At ten minutes to eleven I was making up my mind that, after all, sleep would be the best consolation, when our lodging-house landlady knocked.

We had the "drawing-room floor," up one flight of stairs from the street. Luckily I was still in the draw-dining-room--a fantastic apartment crowded with nouveau-art furniture all out of drawing, like daddy longlegs--when the woman tapped and peeped in. If I had gone upstairs to my own top-floor room, I'm sure, being a prim person, she would have considered it improper to summon me down, and I should have missed a heavenly half hour.

"A gentleman has called, Miss, and could he come up for five minutes?

The name is Captain March."

It was true! It was he! And he hadn't even met Diana yet. She had been dancing. But the hostess had introduced him to Father, and Captain March had worked round to the subject of me. When he heard that I was "too young for b.a.l.l.s," he just slipped out, took a taxi, and made a dash to Chapel Street to tell me he was sorry. I was so grateful, I could have cried more than ever. It seemed to me one of the very nicest things a man ever did. He was in full-dress uniform, because an American officer is on his native heath when he's at his own Emba.s.sy; and I thought that he looked adorable in uniform.

He stayed half an hour instead of five minutes, and then said he must go back, and "do the right thing." The right thing, which he didn't particularly want to do, was to dance with the girls who weren't booked up to the eyes, and--to meet my sister. It was my first triumph to have a man--and such a man--put me in front of Diana. I was thrilled by it, though I ought to have had sense enough to know what would happen.

Eagle March (he told me that night to call him Eagle) did go back to the ball, and did meet Diana. I heard about it next morning when I took in her breakfast: how he had asked Father if he might be introduced, and Di had liked him so much that she found a dance to give him, although everything was engaged by the time he arrived; how an American girl who knew him at home said that he had a rich aunt who might leave him "a whole heap of money" some day (the aunt of the lace, I said to myself); and how Father had consented to take Diana and me to Hendon, to see Captain March's monoplane in its hangar.

"I managed that for you, dear, to make up for your disappointment last night, and because you're really a good, useful little flap of a flapper," Di finished. "Once we're at Hendon, I'm sure Father can be coaxed to let us go up for just a short flight, though he thinks now that nothing could induce him to. Captain March has promised that I shall be his first woman pa.s.senger. Never has he taken a woman with him yet."

I only gasped inaudibly, and bit a little piece off my heart. Of course I guessed then what must have happened; and when Eagle came that afternoon, I _knew_. I was for him a nice child still--a "good, useful little flapper," as Di said, and he was my friend as before; but Diana had lit up the world for him. He could hardly take his eyes off her.

When she spoke, even at a distance, he heard every word, and nothing that any one else said.

"Why didn't you tell me your sister was such a wonderful beauty?" he mumbled as he was saying good-bye.

Old people, and even middle-aged people over twenty-five, must have forgotten how it can hurt when you are sixteen to be in love with some one who loves somebody else; for neither in books nor in real life do these worn-out persons ever take such a thing seriously. But I shall never cease to remember how it feels: like having to keep smiling while a bullet is probed for in your heart, not probed for only once, and finished for good, but prodded and poked at every minute of every hour, day after day, week after week, month after month. How can you tell whether or no it's going to be year after year as well, till all the red blood of your youth and hope has slowly been drained away?

CHAPTER IV

Neither Diana nor I had ever been at Hendon. Captain March sent a motor car for us, and I saw Father and Di were both impressed by this. They thought he must have money (as all proper Americans have, according to their idea) apart from his future expectations. What _I_ thought was, that having fallen in love with Di, nothing but a motor car could be good enough for a G.o.ddess, and--hang the expense!

Di, who was invited sometimes for a spin in friends' automobiles, had a fetching motor get-up which, eked out with one of those horrific headpieces flying people wear, could be used for a short flight. I had nothing of the sort, but Di offered to lend me her lined coat. After all, she owed the expedition and the airman to me.

It was a hired car, but, in Father's opinion, a dashed decent one. It flashed us out past the Marble Arch, straight along the Edgware Road, to the Flying Ground, which, even two years ago, was the favourite resort of fas.h.i.+on, especially female fas.h.i.+on. I had often wondered what it might be like out there, and was rather disappointed to see only some large flat fields close to the highroad, with a long line of low, uninteresting sheds ranged side by side. It did seem as if airmen, who must be br.i.m.m.i.n.g like full cups with wine of romance and imagination, ought to have invented sightlier houses for their beloved machines. But the very thought that the ugly huts were hangars gave a thrill. Captain March was to meet us at Hendon, but we didn't see him at first. As we arrived, an aeroplane went up, and a monoplane was circling the enclosure, giving sudden dips at fearfully steep angles as it took the turns, righting itself like a lazy, long-tailed eagle with far-spread wings as it came again into the straight. Captain March's hired chauffeur, who had been told exactly what to do, ran the car up a short road on the right, and stopped.

"That's the captain's hangar, my lord," said he to Father, pointing to a shed near which we had halted; and his arm hadn't time to drop before the man-made bird, which had been circling round, planed down and glided in at the wide-open door like a homing pigeon into a pigeon house.

It was beautifully managed, and so dramatic that it was like the climax of an act on the stage. Perhaps Captain March had been performing some feat before we came; anyhow, as he brought his monoplane to rest a lot of people standing about applauded him. In a minute he came almost running out of the shed straight toward us, in his leather clothes and leather helmet, with goggles pushed up to the top of his head. Instead of being proud of what he had done, whatever it was, he apologized abjectly for "being late," and I could see that Di was vain of her conquest. Lots of women were there, staring enviously at the pretty girl who knew a real, live airman--evidently, too, one of the popular ones; and Di loves to be envied. I'm afraid we all do, in the secret places of our hearts which we don't like to peer into, under the dust.