Читать книгу The Reckless Lady - Philip Gibbs - Страница 8

Table of Contents

Stephen spoke a word to Sylvia about his mother next morning. It was at breakfast-time, and the verandah window was open, with the sun streaming through, and a little breeze stirring and bringing in the scent of mimosa growing in golden clumps in the garden outside.

Sylvia was in a blue silk dressing-gown, with her dark hair in plaits over her shoulders and her bare feet in mocassin slippers. She had just received a telegram from Edward Hillier inviting them both to join him at the Veglione, or fancy-dress ball at the Hôtel de Paris that evening. He must have got up very early in the morning to send it, and, like most Americans, was extravagant in the number of words he used over the telegraph wires—quite a letter!

“Should be charmed and glad if you and your brother would be my guests at the fancy-dress ball Hôtel de Paris to-night stop My last night before going Paris and England stop Propose coming in pierrot dress for lack of original ideas stop Vastly disappointed if you cannot come stop Cable reply stop Edward Hillier.”

Sylvia was excited. She had been longing to wear her own fancy-dress which she had cajoled out of her mother, a gypsy thing in red and white silk, with a little velvet mask. Count Goldoni had invited her to a bal masqué at the Anglais the following night, so she would be able to put in two glorious dances which were much more amusing if one dressed up.

“I shan’t come,” said Stephen.

“Oh, yes, you will!” said Sylvia. “Mr. Hillier will probably introduce you to an American heiress. If you’re nice to her it may provide for your future. You can paint her portrait—idealising her carefully—and she’ll get her rich papa to buy it at an extravagant price. After that there are other possibilities. But they can wait till you’re grown-up, my child.”

“I’m worried about Mother,” said Stephen. “She hasn’t slept a wink all night. And she’s been crying.”

He had taken in his mother’s breakfast—a habit of which he was jealous, so that he would never allow Sylvia to rob him of this right, or the old French servant who had been with them now almost as long as he could remember. He had seen at a glance that his mother had been crying, though she tried to hide it from him by pretending that she had a cold in her head.

Sylvia was not as distressed as she ought to have been by this news of her mother’s health.

“Poor old Mumsey!” she said. “Probably read a sentimental novel last night. They upset her dreadfully. I never knew anyone so emotional. If the hero doesn’t marry the heroine she takes it as a personal tragedy. It’s the romantic temperament, which you’ve inherited, Stephen. Heaven help you when you fall in love!”

“Heaven help the man who falls in love with you!” said Stephen. “You’re heartless.”

Sylvia jeered at him.

“You’re always bad-tempered at breakfast-time. When I’m married I shall never let my husband breakfast with me. Men are impossible until they’ve been thawed out by hot coffee.”

“How do you know that?” asked Stephen, marvelling at his sister’s knowledge of life.

She laughed in a mysterious way.

“We women are born wise. It’s intuition, and a heritage of guile. Besides, there’s dear old Arnold Bennett, to say nothing of H. G. Wells. They seem to know.”

“Mother is all nerves,” said Stephen, avoiding the issue. “She can’t bear the villa, and talks of chucking it and going back to Rome. Next week!”

“Not if I know it!” cried Sylvia, really distressed this time. “Why, we’ve only just settled down, and it’s perfectly splendid here. And I’m going to have a wonderful time with Count Goldoni, who is passionately in love with me and quite charming, though he does look like a baby Mussolini.”

“Well, that’s the idea,” said Stephen. “She wants to go away from Monte Carlo, for some reason. Says it gets on her nerves.”

“I must talk reason to her,” said Sylvia calmly. “What you and Mother would do without my common sense I fail to imagine. Thank goodness I was born without the artistic temperament—all moods and emotions, up one day, down the next! I remain up, steadily, seeing the best of life, which is wonderful. The great, glad song!”

She trilled one of her absurd little songs from Italian opera, all shake and tremolo, like Tetrazzini in a love-scene.

Stephen groaned and said, “Not so early in the morning, old girl! It turns the cream sour.”

He pushed away his coffee-cup and lit a cigarette, and stood staring out of the verandah. Suddenly he turned and spoke rather passionately.

“I’m fed up with this wandering life in foreign cities.”

“What’s the matter with it?” asked Sylvia. “What’s wrong with Monte Carlo?”

“It doesn’t lead anywhere. I can’t see the use of it; and we’re exiles from our own land. What do we know about England?”

“What do we want to know?” asked Sylvia, helping herself to some jam.

“We’re becoming Continentalised,” said Stephen. “Losing our own nationality, almost our own speech. Why, you speak French and Italian better than English. You’ve foreign ways of thought. The actual make-up of your mind is un-English. Why can’t we go home and live with our own crowd, and get to know the inside of London as well as Paris, Rome, Florence and all the rest of it? I want to know my own people a bit.”

Sylvia was surprised at this outburst. She did not agree with it.

“You wouldn’t like them,” she said. “They’re so very stuffy. Shocked at the slightest thing! Look at all those old people who come out to the Riviera. Why, they haven’t an idea in their heads beyond golf and knitting and bridge and the poor old British Empire. What do they know about art, music, the charm of life? What books have they read, except Ethel M. Dell and Phillips Oppenheim? They stare if I mention Dostoevsky or Romain Rolland, or Paul Bourget, or—some others which perhaps are best not mentioned to respectable English ladies.”

She smiled elusively at the thought of some of the books she had read. Even her mother, who was wonderfully broadminded, had objected to them, though they were perfectly harmless and very amusing.

“No,” she said, “I’m afraid I should find England very dull, and there’s a lamentable absence, they tell me, of charming young men. Mostly killed, poor dears. Still, I could do with a season in London. I wouldn’t mind giving them a treat in Hyde Park.”

“We’re English,” said Stephen, moodily. “We ought to know England. We ought to know our own relations. Why should they shun us as they do? Father’s crowd can’t be too bad. The old aristocracy all right.”

“Poor as church mice,” said Sylvia. “Shabby genteel. Decayed. Mouldy. Awful people, I imagine.”

“We know nothing about them,” answered Stephen, gloomily. “Mother always jibs when we ask about them.”

“Well,” said Sylvia, “you know what happened, old boy. Father treated Mother like a beast—although I suspect he has something to say on his side—and his relations thought he was a poor ill-treated fellow, and had a grudge against Mother. Very simple. Why bother about them?”

“There’s more in it than that,” said Stephen. “One day I’m going to find out. Anyhow, I want to have a look at England, and settle down there for a bit of work.”

“I’m happy here,” said Sylvia. “This sunshine pleases me. I need sunshine for my little body and soul. I like that yellow mimosa, though it smells a little strong at breakfast. I like orchestras, white houses, open-air cafés, interesting crowds, fancy-dress dances, and amusing men who—to tell the truth, Stephen dear!—are beginning to find me rather attractive.” She laughed merrily, and trilled another little song.

“You’re getting as vain as a silly shop-girl!” said Stephen grumpily. “Look at you now, smirking into that looking-glass! If your nose happened to be set on straight, you might be decent-looking.”

He thought her the prettiest girl in the world. They were comrades who would be miserable if parted for a day. He counted upon her to sew on his buttons, mend his shirts, encourage his artistic efforts, teach him to dance, discuss life, art and beauty with him, play dominoes on wet evenings. He knew her to be immeasurably superior to himself in all the graces. He even acknowledged in his own mind that she was less selfish than himself and quite generous in her admiration of his own gifts. But as a brother it was necessary to sit on her head sometimes, and that reference to her nose, which was not strictly classical, was always effective.

“Freckles!” she said. “Other people like my nose. Mr. Hillier sees no harm in it. Count Goldoni worships it.”

“They ignore it,” said Stephen. “They pretend not to notice it. And I’m going out for a walk to the hills.”

“And I’m going to telegraph one little word to Mr. Hillier—‘Charmed!’ ”

Stephen yielded against his will, sulkily, after further arguments. It would be rather mean not to go, as he secretly admitted. If he didn’t go, Sylvia couldn’t, and she had set her heart on wearing that fancy frock. All the same, it was beastly selfish—leaving their mother alone again.

“She’s perfectly happy with her old frumps,” said Sylvia. “Watching people lose their money in the jolly old Casino, where you and I cannot enter in, my child, because we have not yet escaped from the age of innocence. Wait till I’m twenty-one. I’ll make the croupiers sit up and look astonished!”

She gave a little cry of mirth at the sight of a figure coming up the garden path. It was Count Goldoni, a little man of middle-age, exquisitely dressed in a fawn-coloured suit with white spats. He was carrying a great bouquet of tulips and stood outside the verandah, bowing and smiling.

“Buon giorno, Signorina. Fa bello tempo, oggi!”

He kissed his hand to Sylvia, and taking a tulip from the bouquet, put it to his lips and threw it to her. She caught the flower and held it to her breast and cried “Poor little beauty!” in Italian. “What cruelty to be flung about so early in the morning.”

“Don’t you think you had better go and make yourself decent?” said Stephen, looking at her bare feet in the fur-lined moccasins.

“Englishman!” said Sylvia. Count Goldoni was ravished by Sylvia’s plaits. He compared her with Beatrice and said he felt like Dante on the Ponte Vecchio at the first vision of that divine beauty, and Sylvia laughed because this chubby little Italian looked less like Dante than any man alive. He then saluted her as Juliet, and vowed that he was Romeo, and sang a little bit from the balcony scene, enchanted when Sylvia appeared on the verandah in her blue silk dressing-gown and sang the song of Juliet very prettily.

“Good heavens! what’s all this?” cried a laughing voice.

It was Mrs. Fleming who came into the verandah, behind her daughter, to whose pig-tailed plaits she gave a little tug.

Count Goldoni greeted her with the same homage that he had given Sylvia, that he gave to any woman between sixteen and sixty. He kissed both her hands and called her lovely lady and beautiful creature, in his liquid Italian, and swore “per Bacco” that no mortal man could say which was mother and which daughter, as no one could tell the difference between two flowers of equal and adorable beauty.

On Mrs. Fleming’s face there was no trace of that night of wakefulness, those tears which Stephen had seen, a little while ago, when he took breakfast to his mother, now dressed for the day and laughing at this scene on the verandah. She had that laughing mask ready, nearly always ready, for her children and her friends. Rather, perhaps, she had the habit of shutting up her own worries, her little nagging memories, in a secret cupboard, hiding the key even from herself, so that she could face life and her children with their own sense of humour, their own zest, their own youthfulness. She had indeed been the leader of their game in life, the mirth-maker, always restless in her eagerness to keep them amused and happy, to avoid any dreariness or sadness. All through the war she had fought against the depression of the time for their sake, struggled to save them from any touch of its cold shadow of mortality. She had refused to let them see her weeping for so many friends who were killed, the lovers of her girlhood, her husband’s comrades. She had made a jest of life, even then, so that their childhood should not be spoilt. “That gay Mrs. Fleming,” people called her. “Always laughing, you know. Rather heartless, don’t you think?”

She had overheard the “old cats,” as Sylvia called them, talking like that. So now, after her night of wakefulness, an agony of tears—how should she escape from the man who claimed her children, how could she give him the slip again, and keep them safe?—the old habit reasserted itself and she came smiling to this verandah where Goldoni played Romeo to Sylvia’s Juliet. But she was conscious that Stephen was watchful. He suspected something. Were her eyes still puffed? ... He went out for his walk in the hills, where he chummed up to French peasants and innkeepers, and made passing friends with the people who watched him sketching. A queer, thoughtful, moody boy, with bursts of rowdiness and high spirits, and hours of depression which she did her best to shake off by any kind of nonsense.

Sylvia made a rendezvous for the afternoon with Count Goldoni—a harmless little man in spite of his gallantry and amorous speech—and Stephen stayed out to lunch, with some bread-and-cheese sandwiches and a couple of oranges stuffed into his pockets. She had a free day for her own plans. If luck favoured her, she might find that way of escape from her husband who had come back claiming what he should never have—a share of her dear ones. She would have to pay the rent of the villa—an awful sum!—settle up with the tradespeople—a mass of bills—get the tickets to Rome, arrange a thousand things in a hurry, and all expensive. Unless luck were on her side she would find herself trapped; and lately luck had been against her.

When the beautiful Mrs. Fleming made her way to the Casino that afternoon, nodding in her bright way to people she knew, they did not guess that she was going to play against Fate for the lives of her children.

But one, at least, guessed that she was going to play for high stakes. It was the old Frenchman who had greeted her in the tea-shop, the old Vicomte with the dirty yellow gloves. He was sitting under the palm-trees of the Casino gardens with a young woman who had a dead-white face and vermilion lips.

“Regard that beautiful woman, Princess,” he said in French. “She plays every day in the season. An English lady, and very charming. She won a lot of money last year, but I fancy her luck is out. Well, it’s an amusing but expensive vice. I’m a victim, ma chérie, as you know.”

He lifted his hat to Mrs. Fleming as she passed.