The Sack of Monte Carlo 5

The Sack of Monte Carlo 5

CHAPTER V

 

ANGLESEY LODGE—MY INTERVIEW WITH LUCY IN KENSINGTON GARDENS—NOT

SO SATISFACTORY AS I COULD DESIRE

 

 

THERE was a piano-organ playing in front of Anglesey Lodge as I drove

up; it was playing the old “Les Roses” waltz, and quite dramatic and

affecting the music sounded as I impatiently waited in the drawing-room,

hung with Doré’s works to impress parents, and with a model of the Taj

under glass, done in soapstone, and sent by some girl-pupil, I imagine,

who had married and gone out to India.

 

The aunt soon joined me, smiling, with Mr. Thatcher’s open letter in her

hand, and a very handsome woman she must have been—indeed, still

was—with traces, on a florid scale, of Lucy’s simple and yet delicate

beauty.

 

She was so friendly, and made herself so fascinating, it was fully half

an hour before I could get away. She told me Lucy was out with some of

the pupils, and that, if I went to Kensington Gardens and walked down

the Broad Walk, I should be sure to see them. Further, if we made it up

(as we surely should, she graciously added), she begged me to come back

to lunch at half-past one; though she must ask me not to walk home with

the young ladies through the streets for fear of adverse neighborly

comments, and upsetting them for the afternoon studies.

 

I was soon at the entrance to the gardens in the Bayswater Road, where

the keeper’s lodge is, with its glass bottles of sweets and half-penny

rock-buns; and, true enough, there was dear Lucy, sitting on one of the

seats facing the walk, reading to one of the little girls, while the

other bigger ones, perhaps half a dozen of them, were playing rounders

in French, among the trees and the dead leaves.

 

“_Combien de rounders avez-vous?_” cried one of them as I came up; and

“_Courrez, Maud, courrez!_” cried another, clapping her hands, as the

tennis-ball in its torn cover whizzed close by me, whacked by a young

person with a racquet, who was soon off on her round in a short frock

but with uncommonly long legs.

 

I came quite close behind Lucy, taking care not to make the leaves

rustle. She was reading Bonnechose’s _History of France_ aloud,

something about the wars of the Fronde and Cardinal Richelieu.

 

“‘_The conduct of the cardinal at this juncture_—’” she was saying with

great seriousness, when the little girl beside her, who naturally wasn’t

attending, looked up and saw me. I gave her a friendly smile, and after

that moment’s careful scrutiny which females of all ages indulge in, she

smiled back. The next moment Lucy looked at her and then round up at me,

giving a soft, frightened “Hah!” and then going as white as a sheet.

 

Really, it is quite impossible to say at what age a comprehension of

love, its torments and its joys, arises in the fresh girlish breast. The

pretty creature seated at Lucy’s side couldn’t have been more than

eleven, but she saw at once I loved her teacher and desired to be alone

with her; so she immediately rose, staid and composed as a woman, shook

her long hair, and, with complete unconsciousness, strolled off and

joined the other older girls; while they, not to be behindhand in

delicacy, soon stopped their somewhat noisy game, and, forming a

sympathetic group at some little distance under an elm, stood there

talking in whispers with their backs to us; pretending to be immensely

interested and absorbed in the ’buses rumbling down the Bayswater Road.

 

But for her little frightened cry, Lucy received me in silence, and

didn’t even give me her hand. She sat there on the seat—cut and scarred

with other, happier lovers’ records—with her head slightly turned away

from me; perfectly composed, apparently, after the first shock and

natural agitation of seeing me again so suddenly were over.

 

I asked her how she was and how long she had been in town; she said she

was quite well, and had been there since the day before yesterday.

 

Then she said, calmly, “Can you tell me the time, please?” and on my

replying it was a quarter to one, murmured she must be going home to

dinner, and made as if she would rise.

 

I stopped her with, “Please, Lucy, let me speak to you first.” So she

remained perfectly still, though with her pretty head still turned away

from me.

 

Eloquent, or, at all events, talkative, as I generally am with the sex,

I admit I couldn’t for the life of me tell how to begin.

 

At last I said I was afraid she must think badly of me, and then waited

of course for her contradiction; but as it never came, and she never

made a sign, I went on to say I shouldn’t dare approach her were it not

I was a free man; that my affair with—with the other lady was finally

at an end, and so I came to her first and at once with my whole heart.

As I spoke, I watched her closely, if only in the hope I might detect

some slight twitching of her small ungloved hands, or some involuntary

twittering of her eyes or lips, when I told her I was free; but she sat

so like an antique, or, for the matter of that, a modern statue, I began

to grow frightened, since I know very well how implacable even the

tenderest of women can sometimes be when it suits them.

 

“Oh, Lucy dear!” I stammered, “d-don’t be hard on me. I loved you the

moment I saw you. I never really loved the other one. Since the day I

first set eyes on you, I have never given any other woman a serious

thought. You can’t be so unkind as to break my life in pieces, merely

because I’ve been careless, merely because I spoke to you before I was

quite sure I was free? Why, I was free of her directly I saw you, and if

she hadn’t released me of her own accord, as she has done—Oh, Lucy!

don’t leave me in this dreadful suspense! Do, my dear girl, say

something kind to me, for mercy’s sake!”

 

“I don’t feel kindly towards you, Mr. Blacker,” Lucy answered, cold and

stern, “and I can’t pretend. I know quite well what’s happened. You

thought I was only an innkeeper’s daughter—”

 

“Oh, Lucy!”

 

“And that so long as you were staying there you might as well amuse

yourself.”

 

“Love is no amusement, Lucy—it’s a most fearful trial.”

 

“But did you ever, when you were daring to make love to me,” she said,

suddenly turning on me with amazing fierceness, “even cease writing love

letters to her? Tell me that, Mr. Vincent Blacker!”

 

I groaned; for the truth is I had written more warmly to Mabel Harker

all that delightful month at “The French Horn” than usual; from the

simple fact that, myself feeling happier, I naturally wished Mabel to

share, in a sense, in my joy. So what could I do but groan?

 

“If we hadn’t found out quite by accident you were engaged,” Lucy went

on, “should we have ever found it out from you? Were you making any

effort of any sort to free yourself? You were acting an untruth to me

all that time. How can I tell you are not acting an untruth to me now?”

 

“I wasn’t in the least acting an untruth when I said I loved you. How

can you say such a thing, Lucy dear?”

 

“You mustn’t call me by my Christian name,” she answered, pale, and

setting her lips tight; and then she was silent again.

 

“You are very hard on me,” I cried, after a pause, “and I hope you will

never live to regret it. What could a man do differently, situate so

unfortunately as I was?”

 

“You should have been perfectly honest and frank. At least, you should

have made sure you were off with the old love before you tried to be on

with the new.”

 

“But you talk as if these things always lay within our power! I didn’t

purposely fall in love with you—I simply couldn’t help myself! And into

the other affair I had been more or less entrapped.”

 

“Yes,” she replied, with some scorn, “and three months hence you will be

saying exactly the same thing to the next girl.”

 

“I shall never speak to any one again,” I answered, solemnly and truly,

“as I am speaking now to you. You can believe me or not, as you please,

but I can never think of any one as I think of you, and I never have. If

you will only think of me kindly, and try to make excuses for me; if you

will only consult your own heart a little—”

 

“I mustn’t allow myself to be turned round by a few soft speeches,” said

Lucy, looking almost frightened and rising before I could prevent her.

“You have hurt me very much, and I don’t know that my feelings will ever

alter, or that I should allow them to.”

 

“But you will let me see you again?” I humbly entreated.

 

“I don’t know. Certainly not for some little time.”

 

“I may write to you?”

 

“No, certainly not!”

 

“This is all very poor comfort, Lucy,” I groaned, “after the journey I

have taken on purpose to see you and make it all right.”

 

“What other comfort do you deserve, Mr. Blacker?” she asked me,

haughtily, and immediately moved away from the seat towards her young

ladies.

 

“I will come down at Christmas, if I may,” I said, tenderly and humbly;

but she never replied, and the next moment was marshalling the girls for

walking home.

 

They walked to the gate in the Bayswater Road in a group, and formed up

two and two as they got outside.

 

Lucy never turned her head once, but nearly every young lady treated

herself to a look behind; when they might have seen me plunged down in

melancholy on the seat, digging a morose pattern into the Broad Walk

with the point of my stick.

 

I drawled back unhappily across the Gardens and down the empty Row to

Hyde Park Corner, along Piccadilly, and to the club.

 

Christmas! and this was only October!

 

Sympathetic readers (and I desire no others) can have no conception what

I suffered during the next few days.

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER VI

 

EARLY DIFFICULTIES—I FAIL TO PERSUADE THE HONORABLE EDGAR

FANSHAWE, THE REVEREND PERCY BLYTH, AND MR. PARKER WHITE, M. P.,

TO JOIN OUR MONTE CARLO PARTY

 

 

LUCY declares I have written enough about her, and now had better get on

to the Monte Carlo part—who went with me, and why they went, and so on.

 

I dare say she’s right; for though we neither of us know anything

whatever about writing, she says she represents the average reader, and,

having been told (as well as I could do it) something about “The French

Horn” and my love-affair there, is, as an average reader, growing

anxious to learn how I got the party together for so apparently hazardous, not to say hopeless, an enterprise.