JEAN arrived in London with a good three hours to spare before the South-Western express, by which she proposed to travel to Devonshire, was due to leave Waterloo Station. She elected, therefore, to occupy the time by touring round the great, unknown city of her dreams in a taxicab, and spent a beatific hour glimpsing the Abbey and the Houses of Parliament, and the old, grey, misty river that Londoners love, and skirmishing in and out of the shops in Regent Street and Bond Street with her hands full of absurd, expensive, unnecessary purchases only bought because this was London and she felt she just simply must have something English at once, and winding up with a spin through Hyde Park—which didn’t impress her very favourably in its winter aspect of leafless trees and barren stretches of sodden grass.
Then she drove to a hotel, and, her luggage deposited there to await her departure, her thoughts turned very naturally towards lunch. Her scamper round London in the crisp, clear, frosty air had converted the recollection of her early morning coffee and roll into something extremely nebulous and unsupporting, and it was with the healthy appetite of an eager young mind in an eager young body that she faced the several courses of the table d’hote.
She glanced about her with interest, the little snatches of English conversation which drifted to her from other near-by tables giving her a patriotic thrill of pure delight. These were typically English people lunching in a typically English hotel, and she, hitherto a stranger to her own mother-country, was doing likewise. The knowledge filled her with ridiculous satisfaction.
Nor were English people—at home in their own country—anything like as dull and dowdy as Glyn Peterson’s sweeping criticisms had led her to expect. The men were immensely well-groomed and clean-looking. She liked the “morning-tub” appearance they all had; it reminded her of the Englishman at Montavan. Apparently it was a British characteristic.
The women, too, filled her with a species of vicarious pride. They were so well turned-out, with a slim, long limbed grace of figure she found admirable, and with splendid natural complexions—skins like rose and ivory.
Two of them were drifting into the room together now, with a superbly cool assurance of manner—rather as though they had bought the hotel—which brought the sleek head-waiter automatically to their side, bowing and obsequious.
Somewhat to Jean’s satisfaction he convoyed them to the table next her own, and she was pleasantly conscious, as they passed her, of a provocative whisper of silk and of the faint fragrance of violets subtly permeating the atmosphere.
Conscious that perhaps she had been manifesting her interest a little too openly, she turned her attention to a magazine she had bought en route from Dover and was soon absorbed in the inevitable happy-ever-after conclusion of the story she had been reading.
“Lady Anne? Oh, she lives at Staple now. Didn’t you know?”
The speaker’s voice was clear and resonant, with the peculiar carrying quality which has replaced in the modern Englishwoman of the upper classes that excellent thing in woman which was the proud boast of an earlier generation.
The conjunction of the familiar words “Lady Anne” and “Staple” struck sharply on Jean’s ears, and almost instinctively she looked up.
As she stirred, one of the women glanced indifferently in her direction, then placidly resumed her conversation with her companion.
“It was just after the smash-up,” she pursued glibly. “Blaise Tormarin rushed off abroad for a time, and the news of Nesta’s death came while he was away. Poor Lady Anne had to write and tell him of it.”
“Rather ghastly!” commented the other woman. “I never heard the whole story of the affair. I was in Paris, then, and it was all over—barring the general gossip, of course!—by the time I returned. I tried to pump it out of Lady Anne once, but she was as close as an oyster.”
Both women talked without lowering their voices in the slightest degree, and with that complete indifference to the proximity of a stranger sometimes exhibited by a certain arrogant type.
Jean, realising that it was her father’s friends who were under discussion, and finding herself forced into the position of an unwilling auditor, felt wretchedly uncomfortable. She wished fervently that she could in some way arrest the conversation. Yet it was clearly as impossible for her to lean forward and say: “You are talking about the people I am on my way to visit,” as it would have been for her to put her fingers in her ears. So far nothing had been said to which she could actually object. Her feeling was chiefly the offspring of a supersensitive fear that she might learn from the lips of these two gossiping women, one of whom was apparently intimately acquainted with the private history of the Tormarin family, some little fact or detail which Lady Anne might not care for her future guest to know. Apart from this fear, it would hardly have been compatible with human nature—certainly not feminine human nature—if she had not felt pricked to considerable personal interest in the topic under discussion.
“Oh, it was a fool business,” the first woman rejoined, settling down to supply the details of the story with an air of rapacious satisfaction which reminded Jean of nothing so much as of a dog with a bone. “Nesta Freyne was a typical Italian—though her father was English, I believe—all blazing, passionate eyes and blazing, passionate emotion, you know; then there was another man—and there was Blaise Tormarin! You can imagine the consequences for yourself. Blaise has his full share of the Tormarin temper—and a Tormarin in a temper is like a devil with the bit between his teeth. There were violent quarrels and finally the girl bolted, presumably with the other man. Then, later, Lady Anne heard that she had died abroad somewhere. The funny thing is that it seemed to cut Tormarin up rather badly. He’s gloomed about the world ever since, so I suppose he must have been pretty deeply in love with her before the crash came. I never saw her, but I’ve been told she was diabolically pretty.”
The other woman laughed, dismissing the tragedy of the little tale with a shallow tinkle of mirth.
“Oh, well, I’ve only met Blaise Tormarin once, but I should say he was not the type to relish being thrown over for another man!” She peered short-sightedly at the grilled fish on her plate, poking at it discontentedly with her fork. “I never think they cook their fish decently here, do you?” she complained.
And, with that, both women shelved the affairs of Blaise Tormarin and concentrated upon the variety of culinary sins from which even expensive hotel chefs are not necessarily exempt.
Jean had no time to bestow upon the information which had been thus thrust upon her until she had effected the transport of herself and her belongings from the hotel to Waterloo Station, but when this had been satisfactorily accomplished and she found herself comfortably settled in a corner seat of the Plymouth express, her thoughts reverted to her newly acquired knowledge.
It added ............