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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.