Читать книгу Gerald Cranston's Lady - Gilbert Frankau - Страница 29

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At six o’clock that afternoon the chairman of Cranston’s, Limited, took his hat and coat from the hook behind the door, wished his staff a curt “Good evening,” descended, told Havers, “Phillimore Gardens!” and, leaning back against the upholstery as the car gathered way, kindled himself one of his rare cigarettes. “Got to be careful of my temper,” he thought, watching the lamplights of the Embankment streak by. “One can’t be a winner all the time.”

Then, once more self-controlled, he began to consider his mother. His mother, bless her! didn’t take enough care of herself. She oughtn’t to be in town all the winter; she ought to be in Egypt, or on the Riviera....

Mrs. Cranston, however, thought otherwise. When her youngest son, seated opposite to her in his own especial chintz-covered arm-chair, broached the subject across the tea-table, she merely laughed at him.

“Home’s home,” laughed the little old-fashioned woman in the little old-fashioned dress, with a glance, half pleased and half ironical, at the miscellany of knickknacks that littered the provincial-looking room she insisted on referring to as the “parlor.” And, “Don’t you try to mollycoddle me, my son,” she went on, the tired blue eyes twinkling in her lined, homely face, as her well kept hands floated between jam and tea-pot. “I’m not one of your la-di-da Society women. I don’t need a change of air every month or so.”

Cranston, knowing her obstinacy (which more than matched his own), abandoned the topic.

“Harold been here?” he asked casually.

“He’s just gone.”

“Didn’t say anything about business, I suppose?”

“Not a word”—the tired eyes still twinkled—“except to say that you were overworking yourself as usual. Talk about me going to the Riviera, Gerry! What about you?”

“I don’t need holidays; besides, I’ve only just got back from Studley.”

“You’ve been back six weeks, and working till eleven most nights.”

“Who told you that yarn, Mother?”

“Your wife.”

“When was she here?” asked Cranston, a trifle annoyed that Hermione, about whom he had hardly thought since nine o’clock that morning, should have “put silly ideas into the old lady’s head.”

“She lunched with me to-day,” went on the “old lady.” “A very sensible woman she is, too. Nothing of the la-di-da about her.”

“I’m glad you and she get on, Mother.” Cranston laughed. “It isn’t usual, I believe.”

“Bunkum,” countered Mrs. Cranston. “Why shouldn’t a mother-in-law get on with her daughter-in-law? Take it from me, son, that wife of yours is no fool. She’ll run that new house you’ve taken almost as well”—with a little chuckle which somehow reminded Cranston of Ephraim—“as I should.”

“You don’t think she’ll be too extravagant with the butter?”

“She’ll never be half as extravagant as you are, Gerry. Rolls-Royces, indeed! You’ll be filing your petition one of these fine days.”

Mother and son continued to talk, in the hard, bantering manner that both affected to conceal their feelings, for another half-hour; at the end of which time Havers, summoned grumbling by a trim parlor-maid from his comfortable tea in the basement, was instructed to drive to the Ritz. “And tell Lees I shall want him at half-past seven, sharp,” ordered Cranston, the drive finished.

“Very good, sir,” Havers saluted. “I fancy her ladyship has already given similar instructions. Usual time in the morning for you, sir?”

“No. Half an hour earlier—till further notice. Good night to you, Havers.”

“Goodnight, sir.”

The flaxen-haired Yorkshireman, still grousing under his breath, drove off up Arlington Street to the new garage; and Cranston, pushing his tall way through the revolving door of the hotel, stopped for a moment at the mahogany desk to inquire if there were any letters.

“None this evening, Mr. Cranston,” smiled the blue-uniformed hall-porter, adding, “Her ladyship has not yet gone up-stairs. She told me to tell you.”

“Thanks. I see where she is.”

Cranston, handing his hat and coat to a page, strode off toward the rotunda, where Hermione, dignified in black hat and dark day-clothes, was entertaining an impromptu party consisting of her cousin Angela, her youngest brother, Alan, and—quite fortuitously, he having called to leave cards and found her taking tea—Gordon Ibbotsleigh.

Hermione acknowledged his arrival with her usual calm; Gordon Ibbotsleigh said, a trifle stiffly: “Good evening, Cranston. How are you?” the Honorable Alan Rawley—a tall, well groomed cavalry subaltern, whose resemblance to his sister stopped short at the coloring of his hair, which was almost albino—excused himself with a drawled: “Well, I’ve got to be off. Meet you at the family dinner-table this evening”; but Angela Hemmingway, extending a limp little provocative hand, sparkled instantly to effusion.

“Gerald—I hope you don’t mind my calling him Gerald now he’s one of the family, Hermione,” sparkled Angela; “you’re disgustingly late. And why on earth do you live at the Ritz? The Ritz is quite unfashionable for millionaires nowadays. If I were your wife”—a provocative smile allied itself to the provocative hand—“I should insist on moving to Claridge’s.”

“Oh, the Ritz isn’t as bad as all that,” retorted Gerald, freeing his fingers and drawing himself up a chair. “Besides, we sha’n’t be here long.”

“You’ll be here another six weeks.” Angela leaned back, a tiny manikin of a figure against the chinchilla cloak which draped her gold chair. “And the rest—if I know anything about builders. Tell me: how is the housing problem? Aldford Street’s going to be simply wonderful, I suppose. Enough to make one break the tenth commandment; it is the tenth, isn’t it? And while you’re telling me, if you have a spark of family affection in you, order me another cocktail. Martini with a dash, please. Gordon will have one too, if you ask him; won’t you, Gordon?”

The ordered cocktails came; and Ibbotsleigh, sipping his in silence while Angela prattled on, watched her appraisingly.

There was no mystery, to him, about Angela. Everybody in the various sets she frequented—and she frequented several—knew of her two arranged restitution suits, of the chivalry that had prevented either of her husbands from defending them.

No! there was no mystery—none of that mystery, for instance, which exhaled like a perfume from the whole dignified personality of Hermione—about the woman who had just divorced Lionel Hemmingway. She represented, continued Ibbotsleigh’s thought, a type: “Society,” as imagined by the moving-picture patron. Yet, type or no type, one had to admit, scrutinizing the displayed charms of that straw-blond head, of that pale-cheeked, blue-eyed, scarlet-lipped countenance, Angela’s attractions. And, “Damn it,” decided the mining engineer abruptly; “damn it, if men like Cranston must marry women of our class, why the devil don’t they marry the Angelas?”

Once again, as on that last occasion at Studley Farm, he wanted to get away from Cranston. Angela, however, whom he had promised to see home, prattled on; till gradually, his eyes deserting her too animated face for the calm dignity of Hermione’s, he grew conscious of the old hatred against Hermione’s husband. So far, he had kept that hatred in check; but this evening—as though some fire, long damped down, had blazed up sudden in the dark places of his soul—he knew the full scorch of it. Knew, too, with a sudden strange irresistible knowledge, that he loved, and had always loved, Hermione.

Yes! even in the old days, the days when she was Tony’s, long and long before she sold herself—through his chance instrumentality—to this opulent outsider, to this Gerald Cranston, whose very proprietorial air was an insult, he, Gordon Ibbottsleigh, had cared for his friend’s wife; cared for her not as men cared for the Angelas of the world, but whole-heartedly, with that passion which smolders and smolders till, finally, it devours both the lover’s body and his soul.

And, “God,” he thought, “God! I want her—I want her to madness.”

For there was but little self-discipline and no fear of woman in Gordon Ibbotsleigh!