Lucinda. Hope Anthony

cruelty – I knew that he could be cruel in his rage – but for their coarse vulgarity. I did not understand how he could use them. A second later he so far repented – so far recovered his manners – as to say, “I beg your pardon for that, Aunt Bertha.”

      “My poor boy!” was all the old lady said.

      “Whatever she may be – even if she were really all that up to to-day you thought – you mustn’t go after her now, Waldo – neither you nor Julius with you.” He paused a moment, and then went on slowly. “In my deliberate judgment, based on certain facts which have reached me, and reënforced by my knowledge of certain persons in high positions, all Europe will be at war in a week, and this country will be in it – in a war to the death. You fellows will be wanted; we shall all be wanted. Is that the moment to find you two traipsing over the Continent on the track of a runaway couple, getting yourselves into prison, perhaps; anyhow quite uncertain of being able to get home and do your duty as gentlemen? And you, Waldo, are a soldier!”

      Waldo sat down again; his eyes were set on his father’s face.

      “You can’t suspect me of a trick – or a subterfuge. You know that I believe what I’m telling you, and you know that I shouldn’t believe it without weighty reasons?”

      “Yes,” Waldo agreed in a low tone. His passion seemed to have left him; but his face and voice were full of despair. “This is pretty well a matter of life and death to me – to say nothing of honor.”

      “Where does your honor really lie?” He threw away his cigarette, walked across to his son, and laid a hand on his shoulder. But he spoke first to me. “As I told you, I am breaking my word in mentioning this knowledge of mine. It is desirable to confine that breach of confidence to the narrowest possible limits. If I convince Waldo, will you, Julius, accept his decision?”

      “Of course, Sir Paget. Besides, why should I go without him? Indeed, how could I – well, unless Mrs. Knyvett – ”

      “Mrs. Knyvett has nothing to do with our side of the matter. Waldo, will you come out with me for an hour?”

      Waldo rose slowly. “Yes. I should like to change first.” He still wore his frock coat and still had a white flower in his buttonhole. Receiving a nod of assent from Sir Paget, he left the room. Sir Paget returned to the fireplace and lit a fresh cigarette.

      “He will do what’s right,” he pronounced. “And I think we’d better get him to Cragsfoot to-morrow. You come too, Julius. We’ll wait developments there. I have done and said what I could in quarters to which I have access. There’s nothing to do now but wait for the storm.”

      He broke away from the subject with an abrupt turn to Aunt Bertha. “It’s a damned queer affair. Have you any views?”

      “The mother’s weak and foolish, and keeps some rather second-rate company,” said the old lady. “Surroundings of that sort have their effect even on a good girl. And she’s very charming – isn’t she?”

      “You know her yourself,” Sir Paget observed with a smile.

      “To men, I mean. In that particular way, Paget?”

      “Well, Julius?”

      “Oh, without a doubt of it. Just born to make trouble!”

      “Well, she’s made it! We shall meet again at tea, Aunt Bertha? I’ll pick up Waldo at his room along the passage. And I’d better get rid of my wedding ornament too.” He took the rose out of the lapel of his coat, flung it into the fireplace, and went out of the room, leaving me with Aunt Bertha.

      “On the face of it, she has just suddenly and very tardily changed her mind, hadn’t the courage to face it and own up, and so has made a bolt of it?” I suggested.

      “From love – sudden love, apparently – of Arsenio Valdez, or just to avoid Waldo? For there seems no real doubt that Arsenio’s taken her. He’s only once been to the flat, but the girl’s been going out for walks every day – all alone; a thing that I understand from her mother she very seldom did before.”

      “Oh, it’s the Monkey all right. But that only tells us the fact – it doesn’t explain it.”

      “Very often there aren’t any explanations in love affairs – no reasonable ones, Julius. Waldo takes it very hard, I’m afraid.”

      “She’s made an ass of him before all London. It can’t really be hushed up, you know.”

      “Well,” Aunt Bertha admitted candidly, “if such an affair happened in any other family, I should certainly make it my business to find out all I could about it.” She gave a little sigh. “It’s a shock to me. I’ve seen a lot, and known a lot of people in my day. But when you grow old, your world narrows. It grows so small that a small thing can smash it. You Rillington men had become my world; and I had just opened it wide enough to let in Lucinda. Now it seems that I might just as well have let in a high explosive. In getting out again herself, she’s blown the whole thing – the whole little thing – to bits.”

      “Love’s a mad and fierce master,” I said – with a reminiscence of my classics, I think. “He doesn’t care whom or what he breaks.”

      “No! Poor Lucinda! I wish she’d a nice woman with her!”

      I laughed at that. “The nice woman would feel singularly de trop, I think.”

      “She could make her tea, and tell her that in the circumstances she could hardly be held responsible for what she did. Those are the two ways of comforting women, Julius.”

      “As it is, she’s probably gone to some beastly foreign place where there isn’t any tea fit to drink, and Monkey Valdez is picturesquely, but not tactfully, insisting that her wonderful way has caused all the trouble!”

      “Poor Lucinda!” sighed Aunt Bertha again.

      And on that note – of commiseration, if not actually of excuse – our conversation ended; rather contrary to what might have been expected, perhaps, from two people so closely allied to the deserted and outraged lover, but because somehow Aunt Bertha enticed me into her mood, and she – who loved men and their company as much as any woman whom I have known – never, I believe, thought of them en masse in any other way than as the enemy-sex. If and where they did not positively desire that lovely women should stoop to folly, they were always consciously or unconsciously, by the law of their masculine being, inciting them to that lamentable course. Who then (as the nice woman would have asked Lucinda as she handed her the cup of tea) were really responsible when such things came about? This attitude of mind was much commoner with Aunt Bertha’s contemporaries than it is to-day. Aunt Bertha herself, however, always praised Injured Innocence with a spice of malice. There was just a spice of it in her pity for Lucinda and in the remedies proposed for her consolation.

      My own feeling about the girl at this juncture was much what one may have about a case of suicide. She had ended her life as we had known her life in recent years; that seemed at once the object and the effect of her action. What sort of a new life lay before her now was a matter of conjecture, and we had slender data on which to base it. What did seem permissible – in charity to her and without disloyalty to Waldo – was some sympathy for the struggle which she must have gone through before her shattering resolve was reached.

       CHAPTER IV

      THE FOURTH PARTY

      AS Sir Paget had suggested, we – we three Rillington men and Aunt Bertha – spent the Twelve Days, the ever-famous Twelve Days before the war, at Cragsfoot. On the public side of that period I need say nothing – or only just one thing. If we differed at all from the public at large in our feelings, it was in one point only. For us, under Sir Paget’s lead, it was less a time of hope, fear, and suspense than of mere waiting. We other three took his word for what was going to happen; his certainty became ours – though, as I believe (it is a matter of belief only, for he never told me what he told Waldo on that walk of theirs on the afternoon of the wedding day – which was not the day of a wedding), his certainty was based not so much on actual information as on a sort of instinct which long