Part 20 (2/2)

”Dear old Simpky,” she said, with that wide-eyed candor of hers, ”I'm in such a hurry. With any luck I shall just be able to catch the bus that will take me home to lunch.”

But Simpkins put his back against the door. ”No,” he said. ”Not like that. Even if I've lost yer, I love yer, and it's my job to see you don't come to no 'arm. You've got to tell me what you're doing.”

There was something in the man's eyes and in the whiteness of his face that warned Lola immediately of the need to be careful. Her mother had said that Simpkins was a good man with something of ecstasy in his nature, and she guessed intuitively that the latter might take the form eventually, in his ignorance and his love, of a dangerous watchfulness.

So she was very patient and quiet and commonplace, remembering a similar scene which had taken place with Treadwell outside Mrs. Rumbold's battered house.

”I went to a concert with a married friend of mine. Lady Feo gave me the frock. It's very kind of you to worry, Simpky. And now, please--”

And after a moment's hesitation Simpkins opened the door and with a curious dignity gave the girl her freedom. He loved her and believed in her. She was Lola and she was good, and but for some catastrophic accident she might be engaged to be married to him.

But Lola didn't go immediately. She turned round and put her hand on the valet's arm. ”What are you going to do?” she asked, affectionately concerned.

”There isn't anything for me to do,” he said, ”now.”

”Come home with me.”

But he shook his head. ”I couldn't,” he said. ”Your father is a friend of mine and might slap me on the back and tell me to go on 'oping-and there isn't any-_is_ there?”

And she said, ”No, Simpky dear. I'm sorry to say there isn't. But you can't sit here looking at the carpet with the sun s.h.i.+ning and so much to see. Why not come on the bus as far as Queen's Road and then go for a walk. It would do you good.”

And he said, ”Nothing can do me good.”

And she could see that he had begun to revel in his pain, and nurse it, and elevate it to a great tragedy. And for the first time she recognized in this man a menace to her scheme. He loved her too well and she had made him a fanatic.

This scheme of hers, so like one of the Grimm's fairy tales in which the woodcutter's daughter dared to love the prince,-was it to get all over the town? Miss Breezy had a friend in Scotland Yard, a detective. Lady Feo was on the watch, and here was Simpkins turned into a protector. And all the while Prince Fallaray lived in the same house and did nothing more than just remember her name, thinking that she was a friend of the woman who called herself his wife.

Never mind; the sun was s.h.i.+ning, tears had dried, courage had returned, frocks and shoes and stockings had come and the impossible was one of the things that nearly always happened.

An hour later the door of the watchmaker's shop opened in answer to her knock. There stood the fat man with his beaming smile of welcome and surprise, and out of the little parlor came an enticing aroma of roast lamb and mint sauce.

V

That evening, controlling her excitement and anxious to make her people happy, Lola went to the family chapel with them,-the watchmaker in a gargantuan tail coat, a pair of pepper and salt trousers, and a bowler hat in which he might have been mistaken for the mayor of Caudebac-sur-Seine or a deputy representing one of the smaller manufacturing towns of France. Beside him his little wife stood bluntly for England. Everything that she wore told the story not only of her birth and tradition but of that of several grandmothers. There must have been at that moment hundreds of thousands of just such women, dressed in a precisely similar manner, on their way to answer the summons of a bell which was not very optimistic,-the Church having fallen rather low in popular favor. It had so many rivals and some of them were, it must be confessed, more in the mood of the times.

It was a sight worth seeing to watch these Breezys ambling up Queen's Road, proudly, with their little girl. And it was because Lola knew that she was conferring a great treat upon her parents that she submitted herself to an hour and a half of something worse to her than boredom.

Only a little while ago she had looked forward to the evening service on Sundays and had been gently moved by the hymns, by the reading from the Scripture and even by the illiterate impromptus of the minister; and she had found, in moments that were dull, the usual feminine pleasure in casting surrept.i.tious glances about the small, plain unbeautiful building to see what Mrs. This wore or Mrs. That. But now she found herself going through it all like a fish out of water. As Ellingham had outgrown Lady Feo, so had she outgrown that flat, uninspired, and rather cruel service, in which the name of G.o.d was always mentioned as a monster of vengeance, without love and without forgiveness, and with a suspicious eye to the keyhole of every house. With a sort of shame she found herself finding fault with the rhymes of the hymns, which every now and then were dreadful, and were, oh, so badly sung; and when a smug-faced, uneducated man came forward, shut his eyes, placed himself in an att.i.tude of elaborate piety and let himself go with terrible unction, treating G.o.d and death and life and joy and humanity as though they were b.u.t.ter, or worse still, margarine, goose flesh broke out upon her and a curious self-consciousness as though she were intruding upon a scene at which she had no right to be present. Away and away back, church had not been like this to her. Out of a dream she seemed to hear the deep reverberation of a great organ, the high sweet voices of unseen boys and the soft murmur of an old scholar retelling the simple story of Christ's pathetic struggle, and of G.o.d's mercy.-Oh, the commonplace, the misinterpretation, the hypocrisy, the ignorance. No wonder the busses were filled, she thought, the commons crowded on the outskirts of the city. To her there was more religion in one shaft of evening sun than in all those chapels put together.

It was with thankfulness and relief that Lola went back with her parents to the street and turned into Queen's Road again, which wore a Sunday expression. Gone for a brief time were the itinerant musicians, the innumerable perambulators, the ogling flappers with their cheap silk stockings and misshapen legs, the retired colonels eking out a grumbling living on infinitesimal pensions.

”Let's take a little walk,” said Mrs. Breezy. ”It's nice now. The Gardens look more like the country in the twilight.”

”Of course,” said Breezy, ”walk. Best exercise in the world. Oils a man up.” But all the same he didn't intend to go far. Athleticism was a pose with him. He had grown so fat sitting on that backless chair behind the gla.s.s screen, looking into the works of sick watches like a poor man's doctor who treated a long line of ailing people. If it wasn't the mainspring, then it was over-winding. Very simple.

But Lola steered them away from Kensington Gardens because soldiers were there under canvas, and Chalfont was in command of the London district, and it might happen easily that all of a sudden that purring car would draw up at the curb and her name be called by the man with the cork arm.

”Let's go the other way,” she said, ”for a change. I love to look at all the houses that are just the same and wonder what the people are like who live in them, and whether they're just the same.”

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