Part 43 (1/2)
”Mrs. Portal! I didn't know you knew her.”
”Yes; she and I met when I was in Durban, and became friends. She happened to be lunching here yesterday when I arrived, and she came up and spoke to me. You can imagine what it meant to have someone welcoming me as she did, after long exile from my own land--but, if you know her at all, you know how kind and lovely her ways are.”
”Yes, indeed,” Bramham heartily agreed. ”She is altogether charming.”
All the same, he was astonished. Mrs. Portal was charming, but she stood for orthodoxy, and the girl before him was mysteriously unorthodox--to say the least of it.
”I am dining with her to-night to meet her great friend, Mrs. Cap.r.o.n,”
continued Poppy, eyeing him gravely.
”Then you ought to be careful,” he blurted out; ”for you are dining with the two most precise and conventional women in the place”--here he perceived himself to be blundering--”but I may also say the most delightful,” he added hastily.
”Ah! and why shouldn't I?” she queried softly, but her tone brought a slight flush to Bramham's cheek.
”Oh, I don't know,” he stammered. ”No reason at all, I imagine.”
”On the contrary,” she said quietly, ”you imagine every reason.”
Bramham scrambled out of his tight corner as best he might.
”At any rate,” he made haste to say, ”I am delighted that you have a woman friend who has it in her power to make things as pleasant and interesting as they can be in a place like this.”
”Thank you,” she said; ”and, dear friend--you need not be anxious for me. I only confess where I am sure of absolution and the secrecy of the confessional--never to women.”
Bramham, first pleased, then annoyed, then sulky over this piece of information, made no immediate response, and a waiter appearing at the moment to inquire whether they would take lunch, the matter dropped. He followed in the wake of her charming lilac gown, through tessellated squares and palm-gardens, with the glow of personal satisfaction every right-minded man feels in accompanying the prettiest and best turned-out woman in the place.
When they were seated at the pleasantest corner of the room, and she had ordered without fuss an excellently dainty lunch, Bramham's desire being to sit with his elbows on the table and dip into the depths of lilac eyes lashed with black above two faintly-tinted cheek-bones, he reverted to his sulky demeanour. But a scarlet mouth was smiling at him whimsically.
”Don't let us be cross! Everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds, you know; and you are the best of all possible confessors. There is nothing I can hide from you. I am even going to tell you where I got my pretty clothes from, and the money to be careering about the world and staying at the Royal--I know you are consumed with apprehension on these two points.”
She smiled at him with such comrades.h.i.+p that he could not sulk any longer.
”Well, you know the last time I saw you, you were in hard-luck street, at a guinea a week, and too proud to use a friend's purse. I suppose you have been getting on?”
”You suppose rightly: I have _got_ on. I have three plays running at London theatres, two novels selling well, and a book of poems in its tenth edition--not bad for poems, you know.”
It was a day of surprises for Bramham, and it should be excused in him that he sat for three minutes with his mouth open.
”You!... You!... why, I've never even heard of you!” he cried, mortified, astonished, and it must be confessed, slightly unbelieving.
”But perhaps you have heard of _Eve Destiny_? Here are a pile of letters and things from my managers and publishers. I want you to look over them, and advise me, will you, about money and things ... I'm most frightfully unpractical and extravagant.... I can see that I shall very soon be poor again unless someone advises me and puts me on the right road. And I don't want to be poor again, Charlie. Poverty hurts ... it is like the sun, it shows up all the dark corners--in one's nature. If I can only arrange my affairs so as to have about a hundred a year to live on, I shall be satisfied.”
”A hundred a year!” Bramham had been skimming through her papers with his business eye, which fortunately for his feminine acquaintances was a very different organ to his pleasure eye. All his instincts were outraged at this careless view of what was evidently a splendid working concern.
”A hundred a year! Why, if you go on like this you'll be more likely to haul in ten thousand a year.”
”Ah! but I'm not going on,” she interpolated calmly. ”I don't mean to work any more.”
”Not work any more? Why? Are you panned?... dried up ... fizzled out?”