Part 4 (1/2)

Marie Louise did not pretend surprise at seeing Easton, but went on scolding Victor and Bettina.

”If any of these other boys catch you playing submarine they'll submarine you!”

And she brought the proud Bettina to book with a, ”You were so glad the _Lusitania_ was sunk, you see now how it feels!”

She felt the puerile incongruity of the rebuke, but it sufficed to send Bettina into a cyclone of grief. She was already one of those who are infinitely indifferent to the sufferings of others and infinitesimally sensitive to their own.

When Nicky heard the story he gave Marie Louise a curious look of disapproval and took Bettina into his lap. She was also already one of those ladies who find a man's lap an excellent consolation. He got rid of her adroitly and when she and Victor were once more engaged in navigation Nicky took up the business he had come for.

”May I stop a moment?” he said, and sat down.

”I have a letter for you,” said Marie Louise.

His roving eyes showed him that the coast was clear, and he slipped a letter into her hand-bag which she opened, and from it he took the letter she cautiously disclosed. He chatted awhile and moved away.

This sort of meeting took place several times in several places. When the crowds were too great or a bobby loitered about, Nicky would murmur to Marie Louise that she had better start home. He would take her arm familiarly and the transfer of the parcel would be deftly achieved.

This messenger service went on for several weeks. Sir Joseph apologized for the trouble he gave Marie Louise. He seemed to be sincerely unhappy about it, and his little eyes in their fat, watery bags peered at her with a tender regret and an ulterior regret as well.

He explained a dozen times that he sent her because it was such an important business and he had no one else to trust. And Marie Louise, for all her anxiety, was sadly glad of his confidence, regarded it as sacred, and would not violate it so much as to make the least effort to learn what messages she was carrying. Nothing, of course, would have been easier than to pry open one of these envelopes. Sometimes the lapel was hardly sealed. But she would as soon have peeked into a bathroom.

Late in June the Weblings left town and settled in the great country seat Sir Joseph had bought from a bankrupt American who had bought it from n.o.bility gone back to humility. Here life was life. There were forests and surrept.i.tious pheasants, deer that would almost but never quite come to call, unseen nightingales that sang from lofty nave and transept like cherubim all wings and voice.

The house was usually full of guests, but they were careful not to intrude upon their hosts nor their hosts upon them. The life was like life at a big hotel. There was always a little gambling to be had, tennis, golf, or music, or a quiet chat, gardens to stroll and sniff or grub in, horses to ride, motors at beck and call, solitude or company.

Lady Clifton-Wyatt came down for a week-end and struck up a great friends.h.i.+p with the majestic Mrs. Prothero from Was.h.i.+ngton, D. C., so grand a lady that even Lady C.-W. was a bit in awe of her, so gracious a personage that even Lady C.-W. could not pick a quarrel with her.

Mrs. Prothero gathered Marie Louise under her wing and urged her to visit her when she came to America. But Polly Widdicombe had already pledged Marie Louise to make her home her own on that side of the sea.

Polly came down, too, and had ”the time of her young life” in doing a bit of the women's war work that became the beautiful fas.h.i.+on of the time. The justification of it was that it released men for the trenches, but Polly insisted that it was shamefully good sport.

She and Marie Louise went about in breeches and s.h.i.+rts and worked like hostlers around the stables and in the paddocks, breaking colts and mucking out stalls. They donned the blouses and boots of peasants, and worked in the fields with rake and hoe and harrow. They even tried the plow, but they followed it too literally, and the scallopy furrows they drew across the fields made the yokels laugh or grieve, according to their natures.

The photographers were alive to the piquancy of these revelations, and portraits of Marie Louise in knickers and puttees, and armed with agricultural weapons, appeared in the pages of all the weeklies along with other aristocrats and commoners. Some of these even reached America.

There was just one flaw for Rosalind in this ”As You Like It” life and that was the persistence of the secret a.s.sociation with Nicky. It was the strangest of clandestine affairs.

Marie Louise had always liked to get out alone in a saddle or behind the wheel of a runabout, and Sir Joseph, when he came up from town, fell into the habit of asking her once in a while to take another little note to Nicky.

She found him in out-of-the-way places. He would step from a clump of bushes by the road and hail her car, or she would overtake him and offer him a lift to his inn, or she would take horse and gallop across country and find him awaiting her in some lonely avenue or in the twist of a ravine.

He was usually so preoccupied and furtive that he made no proffer of courts.h.i.+p; but once when he seemed peculiarly triumphant he rode so close to her that their knees girded and their spurs clashed, and he tried to clip her in his arms. She gathered her horse and let him go, and he plunged ahead so abruptly that the clinging Nicky dragged Marie Louise from her saddle backward. He tried to swing her to the pommel of his own, but she fought herself free and came to the ground and was almost trampled. She was so rumpled and so furious, and he so frightened, that he left her and spurred after her horse, brought him back, and bothered her no more that day.

”If you ever annoy me again,” she said, ”it'll be the last you'll see of me.”

She was too useful to be treated as a mere beauty, and she had him cowed.

It was inevitable that Marie Louise, being silently urged to love Nicky, should helplessly resist the various appeals in his behalf.

There is no worse enemy to love than recommendation. There is something froward about the pa.s.sion. It hangs back like a fretful child, loathing what is held out for its temptation, longing for the forbidden, the sharp, the perilous.

Next to being asked to love, trying to love is the gravest impediment.

Marie Louise kept telling herself that she ought to marry Nicky, and herself kept refusing to obey.