SHE would read the paper to-morrow, she had said. But on the morrow she awoke with a violent headache and stayed abed, and had only time to scramble into her clothes and attend a twelve o’clock committee meeting in Westminster. And for the remainder of the day, until she went to bed exhausted at midnight, she had not a minute to spare. The next morning she had her early appointment with Godfrey. She went forth into a raw air with a threat of autumn in it, and a slight drizzle from an overcast sky. The two-seater, with damp hood up, was waiting round the corner of the Square. She opened the door and jumped in, almost before he was aware of her approach, and rather hysterically flung her arms about him. “Oh darling, be good to me! I’m feeling so tired and miserable.”
He proclaimed himself a brute for dragging her out on such a filthy morning. It was super-angelic of her to come, but he had scarcely expected her. Wouldn’t it be better to go back home and rest?
“No, no, dear,” she murmured. “This is my rest. Beside you. Storm or sunshine, what does it matter, so long as we’re together?”
“It doesn’t matter to me,” said he, driving off. “Hell and damnation would be Paradise if I always had you with me.”
And in the same emotional key they talked all the time during their drive through a dank and dismal world. They felt like Paolo and Francesca in Watts’s picture, clinging together alone in comfortless space, remote from War Office and wars and other affairs of men. She wailed:
“Oh, darling, if only I had met you before I made my wretched marriage!”
“Yes, by God!” said Godfrey, setting his teeth and feeling very fierce.
It did not occur to either of them, in their unhumorous mood, that when she married he was a gawky boy of sixteen.
Gradually they came to vital things.
“If I were little Mrs. Tomkins, whom nobody knows, we could get a hidden nest somewhere, you and I. It would be happiness, and it would be hurting or betraying nobody. But I’m Lady Edna Donnithorpe, related to half the peerage, and known by sight to everybody who looks at an illustrated paper.”
“Why not cut everything and make a bolt of it?” asked Godfrey, glaring straight in front of him at the cheerless, almost empty road, his young face set very stem.
“Your career——”
He cursed his career.
“Your soldier’s post. How can you leave it? You’re doing a man’s work for your country.”
“Hell take it!” said he.
“Take what?”
“The whole infernal universe,” he growled, and swerved viciously so as to avoid imminent collision with an indignant motor-bus. Again they came to the bed-rock fact of his soldier’s duty.
On their return journey it rained in torrents.
“You’ll get wet through if you walk,” said he, when they arrived at their trysting spot. “I’ll drive you up to the house and chance it.”
He chanced it, helped her out of the car and stood on the pavement, watching her until she had let herself in with her latchkey. She ran upstairs, to be confronted with her husband at the door of his room which was on the same landing. He was in his dressing-gown, and one side of his face was shaven, the other lathered.
“I thought you went to a canteen in the mornings?”
“So I do,” she replied calmly.
“Does young Baltazar work there too?”
“Young Baltazar very often calls for me, when it rains, on his way to the War Office, and gives me a lift home.”
“You’re seeing far too much of that young man.”
“The last time we discussed the Baltazar family,” she said with a scornful laugh, “you accused me of an intrigue with his father. My dear Edgar, go on with your shaving and don’t be idiotic.” She flung into her room angry and humiliated. After all, Edgar had the right to consider his good name, even though his jealousy could not proceed from betrayed affection. This was the first time he had referred to Godfrey in any way. Uneasiness beset her; so did the eternal question of the deceitful wife: “How much did he know?” They did not meet that day till dinner-time—it was one of the rare occasions on which they dined alone together—when he seemed to be making amends for the morning’s attack by more than usual courteous conversation on current events. They parted amicably.
The next afternoon, arriving home very late, she was surprised at seeing him coming, half dressed for dinner, from her room. He smiled in a friendly way and held up a button-hook.
“Mine’s nowhere to be seen—that confounded new parlourmaid—I hope you don’t mind.”
“We’re getting quite domestic,” she said ironically.
“It’s pleasanter,” said he.
She wondered much at his graciousness for the next few days. He became attentive, manifested dry solicitude as to her health and her social and political interests. She dreaded a recrudescence of the thin sentiment that, on his part, had sanctioned their marriage. The fear tainted the joy of her visits to the mythical canteen. Sooner open hostility than this semblance of conjugal affection.
“I’m sorry, darling, to have been so mouldy,” she said, taking leave of Godfrey one morning, “but the situation is getting on my nerves. I’m fed up.”
A day or two later Edgar Donnithorpe entered her sitting-room, where she was writing letters.
“Sorry to interrupt you, Edna,” said he, “but have you definitely decided to go to Moulsford this next week-end?”
“Certainly. I told you. The Barringtons and Susie Delamere and one or two others are coming.”
“Do you mind if I don’t turn up till Sunday?”
“Of course not,” she replied. He was exceedingly polite.
“Thanks,” said he. “The fact is, I want to ask a dozen men or so to dinner here. Only men, you know.”
She glanced at him rather puzzled, for his proposal was an unprecedented departure from the custom of the house. Hitherto he had given his men’s political dinner parties at his club. There had been no arrangement or understanding between them as to this mode of entertainment, but so had it chanced to be; and he was a creature of routine.
“Of course. Just as you like. But what’s wrong with the only place fit to dine at in London?”
“It’s war time, my dear,” said he, eyeing her shiftily. “War time. All the clubs have gone to the devil.”
“All right. If you’ll tell me how many are coming, I’ll see to it.”
“No, please don’t. Please don’t worry your head about it.” He made a step forward and held up his thin hand in a deprecatory sort of way. “I’ll fix it up. I don’t want it to be the slightest bit of a concern to you. Thanks so much.”
He hurried out. Lady Edna frowned at her half-written letter. A devious man, Edgar. What was in the wind? The cook the next day, however, submitted to her a menu which, with a housewifely modification or so, she passed, and thought no more of the material banquet.
During the week the hint of a rumour reached her, when, at a public meeting, she ran up against the Rt. Hon. Sir Berkeley Prynne, a Member of the Government who had been hostile to her husband for many years and had only given the hatchet superficial burial during the party truce.
“I suppose you know a lot of us are quaking in our shoes?” he said, half banteringly.
“I don’t,” she said. “But I’ve no doubt it’s good for you. What’s the matter?”
“Signs of underground rumblings. Your quick ears have detected nothing?”
“No. Really. Honour bright. Do tell me.”
He shook his head and laughed. “It’ll be a wash-out,” said he, moving away.
Gibe or warning, Sir Berkeley’s words were not devoid of significance. They were aimed at her husband. Underground rumblings meant intrigue. She had long suspected Edgar of half-hearted support of the Government; but passionate devotion to anything was so foreign to his crafty, opportunist nature, that she had not greatly troubled her mind about his loyalty. Here, however, was cause for deeper consideration. The old hacks, as she had said to Godfrey, were being squeezed out as decently as might be, so as to give place to fresher and honester men, and Edgar’s position was daily growing more insecure. But she had thought he was sticking to it desperately. Was the worm about to turn? And had the projected dinner-party anything to do with the turning?
She asked him casually who were coming.
“Men connected with the business of the Ministry,” he replied. “People I must be civil to and who don’t expect us to worry about their women-folk.”
And she had to be contented with the answer.
On the Saturday afternoon, at Moulsford, she was surprised to see Rolliter, the old butler, who she thought was staying the night at Belgrave Square to superintend the dinner party. Why was he here?
“Mr. Donnithorpe’s orders, my lady. He said he could get on quite well without me this evening. I couldn’t insist, my lady, but I didn’t like leaving at all, especially as Lord Trevanion was coming.”
“Lord who?” she cried, for he had mentioned a name that was anathema maranatha in Government circles.
“I think it’s Trevanion, my lady,” said the butler, rather taken aback by her expression of incredulity. He fished a paper from his pocket and consulted it. “Yes, my lady. I saw the list on Mr. Donnithorpe’s table, so I copied it out so as to write the name-cards before I left.”
An idea struck her. “You did this without Mr. Donnithorpe’s orders?”
“Why, yes, my lady. Mr. Donnithorpe being so busy, I thought it might slip his memory.”
“Did you write the cards?”
“No, my lady. When Mr. Donnithorpe told me to come down here, I asked him about the name-cards, and he said he didn’t want them.”
“Let me see the list,” she said, recovering her languid manner.
“Certainly, my lady.” He handed her the paper. “The only reason I mentioned Lord Trevanion,” he continued, “was because I happen to know his lordship is one of the most particular men in England, and I couldn’t bear to have things done anyhow when he was dining at the house.”
She laughed in her charming way. “The blood’s on Mr. Donnithorpe’s head, not yours, Rolliter.”
Rolliter had been in her father’s service before she was born and had followed her, as butler, when she married.
“Thank you, my lady,” said he, retiring and leaving her with the list of guests.
It was an instructive and at the same time bewildering document. It contained the names of representatives of all the disgruntled and pacifist factions in England. No wonder Edgar dared not face the publicity of a club or restaurant dinner! No wonder he had lied to her about his guests. No wonder he had sent Rolliter to the country without writing out the cards. He wanted to hide the identity of his guests even from his butler! At each name a new shiver went down her back. Lord Trevanion, blatant millionaire Little Englander whom even the Radical Government of 1906 had joyfully allowed to purchase a peerage, so as to get him out of the House of Commons. There were Benskin and Pottinger and Atwater, members of a small Parliamentary gang who lost no opportunity of impeding the prosecution of the war. Lady Edna gasped. Finch of the Independent Labour Party. Was Edgar going mad? Samways, M.P. and Professor of History, pessimistic apostle of German efficiency and preacher of the hopelessness of the Allies’ struggle. Editors of pacifist organs—Featherstone, the most brilliant, whose cranky brain had made him the partisan of England’s enemies all through his journalistic career; Fordyce, snaky in his intellectual conceit; Riordan, dark and suspect. . . . There were others, politicians and publicists, self-proclaimed patriots and war-winners, but openly hostile to the Government. Altogether the most amazing crew that ever Minister of the Crown delighted to honour.
That the ultimate object of this gathering was the overthrowal of the Government there could be no doubt. How they were going to manage it was another matter. A rabble like that, thought Lady Edna scornfully, could not upset a nervous old lady. It looked rather like a preliminary meeting, held in secrecy, to start the network in which greater personalities should be enmeshed and involved. At any rate, on the part of Edgar Donnithorpe it was black treachery. The more she scanned the list the more did her soul sicken within her. It seemed intolerable that this pro-German orgy should take place in the house of which she was the mistress, while she remained here, fooled, with her little week-end party. She burned with vengeance against her husband.
It was half-past four. She stood in the drawing-room, which she had entered a few minutes before, leaving her guests on the lawn, in order to give some trivial order, and twisted the accusing paper in her hands, her lips thin, deep in thought. Presently into her eyes crept a smile of malice, and she went out of the French window and crossed the grass and joined her friends. There were only three, Colonel and Mrs. Barrington and Miss Delamere. A couple of men who were to have come down had providentially been detained in London.
“My dear people,” she said, smiling. “The war has spread to Moulsford. There’s nothing in the house for dinner. There’ll be heaps to-morrow, but none to-night.”
“I’ll go down to the river and angle for a roach,” said Colonel Barrington.
“Or else come with me to town and dine at the Carlton. I’ll take you all in the Rolls-Royce. It will be a lovely run back.”
“But, my dear, it’ll be joy-riding!” cried Mrs. Barrington.
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