Part 24 (2/2)

Leonie broke off to manipulate the tea-things to the rhythm of a one-step.

”And all the rest of the money, Leonie, oh! it's scandalous!”

”Oh, that!” said Leonie, manoeuvring the milk out of a broken milk-jug.

”Except for Sir Walter's special bequests, it all goes back to the family. They've almost all come to see me at the hotel, such honest, nice people; and oh! so grateful. Mrs. Sam Hickle is moving to Balham from the Waterloo Road to open a fruit shop, she brought me a huge basket of vegetables, carried it into my room herself; and a young Bert Hickle, who has a whelk-barrow in the Borough, brought me a whole turbot which had soaked through its newspaper wrapping. He gave it to the page-boy to carry, and I _do_ wish you had seen their faces when the tail suddenly burst through, just as the page-boy was gingerly laying it down on a most appropriate resting-place, a marble consol.”

Leonie laughed just as the music stopped, a ringing, happy laugh which caused people to stare and then nudge, or kick each other surrept.i.tiously as they recognised her.

”It's all settled about you, Auntiekins. I'm paying your debts, which aren't so terrific, only foolish, and giving you five hundred pounds to go on with. That, with your own income, will be all right if only you will live in the country instead of hanging on to the edge of a society which doesn't want you. Still, you do exactly as you like, dear, only remember that I shall only have just enough to live on when I've got through the thousand pounds, and don't run up any more debts.”

”Why not _invest_ the thousand, Leonie, _sensibly_.” Susan Hetth's voice was dull, choked doubtlessly by the dust of her castle ruins.

”I've got to go to India!”

”Why, for goodness sake?”

”I don't know, Auntie, I've simply got to go!”

”How silly,” said Auntie, as she forced a cigarette inartistically into a holder, adding abruptly, as her commonplace mind jumped at a commonplace loop-hole, ”Where is Jan Cuxson? I should think----”

Leonie answered quickly, breaking her aunt's words.

”I have no idea! I haven't heard from him since he left England.”

”Huh!” said Susan Hetth, putting up an absolute smoke screen, ”and what will you do after the money is spent, pray?”

Leonie stared wide-eyed into the tobacco haze. ”That,” she said slowly, ”is on the knees of the G.o.ds!”

Talking being temporarily suspended by the band in the death throes of the overture to Zampa, the two women sat silent; one frantically trying to solve financial problems, the other with her head a little on one side as though trying to catch the thread of some conversation.

A strange thing happened as the band stopped.

Leonie rose quite suddenly, with a half-eaten cake half-way to her mouth.

”I must go!” she said quite flatly, placing the cake on a plate and looking at her aunt without seeing her.

”_Go_!” shrilled Susan Hetth, putting her fourth cup of tea down with an irritated slam. ”Where on earth _to_?”

But Leonie turned and walked away with never a word of explanation, and her aunt, with the thrifty side of her plebeian soul uppermost, turned to the task of getting through as much as possible of what was left of the two teas for which two s.h.i.+llings had been paid.

The porter looked hard at Leonie when she asked for a taxi, hesitated for a moment, looked hard again, and refrained from putting the question hovering on his tongue.

”Seemed quite dazed like,” he explained later to his wife in Camberwell as she juggled with sausages, ”pale as death, with a kind of funny look round her eyes!”

”To the British Museum,” Leonie said through the window as the taxi door closed, and the funny look round her eyes deepened into a line of perplexity between the eyebrows, as the cab bore her swiftly to her destination and her destiny.

She walked swiftly up the steps to the inst.i.tution she was visiting for the first time, and through the gla.s.s swing doors, just as though she was hurrying to an appointment; she turned, without hesitating, sharply to the left up the long flight of stairs, pa.s.sed through the rooms filled with relics of Rome found in Britain, and stopped.

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