Part 9 (2/2)
I have arrived! Bring out your best and watch me!” There were people--women--who said he had a cruel mouth. They said this, not with censure or regret, but with a deliciously fearful rapture as though the cruel mouth (if it were cruel) were not the least part of his attraction.
Lord Tybar's lady, who was twenty-eight, carried in her countenance and in her hair the pleasing complement of her lord's tan and olive hue and of his cropped black poll. She was extraordinarily fair. Her skin was of the hue and of the sheen of creamy silk, and glowed beneath its hue. It presented amazing delicacy and yet an exquisite firmness. Children, playing with her, and she delighted in playing with children (but she was childless), often asked to stroke her face. They would stare at her face in that immensely absorbed way in which children stare, and then ask to touch her face and just stroke it; their baby fingers were not more softly silken. Of her hair Lady Tybar had said frequently, from her girlhood upwards, that it was ”a most sickening nuisance.” She bound it tightly as if to punish and be firm with the sickening nuisance that it was to her. And these close, gleaming plaits and coils children also liked to touch with their soft fingers.
Her name was Nona.
Out of a hundred people who pa.s.sed her by quite a considerable number would have denied that she was beautiful. Her face was round and saucy rather than oval and cla.s.sical. Incontestable the striking attraction of her complexion and of her hair; but not beautiful,--quite a number would have said, and did say. Oh, no; pretty, perhaps, in a way, but that's all.
But her face was much more than beautiful to Sabre.
V
Until this moment, standing there with his bicycle, she on her beautiful horse, he had not seen her, nor Lord Tybar, for two years. They had been travelling. Now seeing her, thus unexpectedly and thus gallantly environed, his mind, with that astonis.h.i.+ng precision of detail and capriciousness of selection with which the mind retains pictures, reproduced certain masculine discussion of her looks at a time when, as Nona Holiday of Chovensbury Court, daughter of Sir Hadden Holiday, M.P.
for Tidborough, she had contributed to local gossip by becoming engaged to Lord Tybar.
”Pretty girl, you know,” masculine discussion had said; and Sabre had thought, ”Fools!”
”Oh, hardly pretty,” others had maintained; and again ”Fools!” he had thought. ”Pretty--_pretty_! Hardly pretty--hardly--!” Furious, he had flung away from them.
The time and the place of the discussion had been when the news of her engagement had just been brought into the clubhouse of the Penny Green Golf Club. He had flung out into the rain which had caused the pavilion to be crowded. Fools! Was she pretty! Did they mean to say they couldn't see in her face what he saw in her face? And then he thought, ”But of course they haven't loved her. It's nothing to them what they've only just heard, but what she told me herself this morning.... And she knew what it meant to me when she told me.... Although we said nothing. Of course I see her differently.”
He saw her ”differently” now after two years of not seeing her, and ten years since that day of gossip at the golf club. Pretty!... Strange how he could always remember that smell of the rain as he had come out of the clubhouse ... and a strange fragrance in the air as now he looked upon her.
Upon the warm and trembling air, as he stood with his bicycle before the horses, were borne to him savour of hay newly turned in the fields about, and of high spring-tide blowing in the hedgerows; and with them delicious essence from the warm, gleaming bodies of the horses, and pungent flavour of the saddlery, and the mare's sweet breath puffed close to his face in little gusty agitations.
The s.h.i.+ning, tingling picture of strength and beauty superbly modelled that the riders and their horses made, seemed, as it were, to arise out of and be suspended s.h.i.+mmering in the heart of the warm incense that he savoured. So when a sorcerer casts spiced herbs upon the flame, and scented vapour uprises, and in the vapour images appear.
Exquisite picture of strength and beauty superbly modelled: the horses'
glossy coats glinting all a polished chestnut's hues; the perfect artistry and symmetry of slender limbs, and glorious, arching necks, and n.o.ble heads, and velvet muzzles; the dazzling bits and chains and buckles; the glinting bridles, reins and saddles; Lord Tybar's exquisitely poised figure, so perfectly maintaining and carrying up the symmetry of his horse as to suggest the horse would be disfigured, truncated, were he to dismount; his taking swagger, his gay, fine face; and she....
An incantation: jingle of bits mouthed in those velvet muzzles; a hoof pawed sharply on the road; swish of long, restless tails; creaking of saddlery; and sudden bursts of all the instruments in unison when heads were tossed and shaken. Remotely the whirr of a reaping machine. And somewhere birds....
Pretty!
VI
Greetings had been exchanged; his apologies for his blundering descent upon them laughed at. Lord Tybar was saying, ”Well, it's a tiger of a place, this Garden Home of yours, Sabre--”
”It's not mine,” said Sabre. ”G.o.d forbid.”
”Ah, you've not got the same beautiful local patriotism that I have.
It's one of my most elegant qualities, my pa.s.sionate devotion to my countryside. That was what that corker of a vicar of yours, Boom Bagshaw, told me I was when I wept with joy while he was showing me round. Yes, and now I'm a patron of the Garden Home Trust or a governor or a vice-priest or something. I am really. What is it I am, Nona?”
”You're a bloated aristocrat and a bloodsucker,” Nona told him in her clear, fine voice. ”And you're living on estates which your brutal ancestors ravaged from the people. That's what you are, Tony. I showed it you in the _Searchlight_ yesterday. And, I say, don't use 'elegant'; that's mine.”
”Oh, by gad, yes, so I am,” said Lord Tybar. ”Bloodsucker! Good lord, fancy being a bloodsucker!”
He looked so genuinely rueful and abashed that Sabre laughed; and then said to Nona, ”Why is elegant 'yours', Lady Tybar?”
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