The Summons (novel)/XXI

"I hadn't an idea that we should find her here," said Hillyard. "Lady Splay told me so very clearly that Mrs. Croyle always timed her visits to avoid a party."

Hillyard was a little troubled lest he should be thought by his friend to have concurred in a plot to bring about this meeting.

"I suppose that Hardiman told her you were coming to Rackham Park. I haven't seen her until this moment, since I returned."

"That's all right, Martin," Luttrell answered.

The two men were alone in the hall. The tennis players had changed, and were out upon the court. Millie Splay had dragged Stella Croyle away with her to play croquet. Luttrell moved to a writing-table.

"You are going to join the tennis players," he said. Hillyard was already dressed for the game, and carried a racket in his hand. "I must write a letter, then I will come out and watch you."

"Right," said Martin, and he left his friend to his letter.

The hall was very still. A bee came buzzing in at the open window, made a tour of the flower-vases, and flew out again into the sunshine. From the lawn the cries of the tennis players, the calls of thrush and blackbird and dishwasher, were wafted in on waves of perfume from the roses. It was very pleasant and restful to Harry Luttrell after the sweat and labour of France. He sighed as he folded his letter and addressed it to a friend in the War Office.

A letter-box stood upon a table close to the staircase. He was carrying his letter over to it, when a girl came running lightly down the stairs and halted suddenly a step or two from the bottom. She stood very still where Stella Croyle had stood a few minutes ago, and like Stella, she looked over the balustrade at Harry Luttrell. Harry Luttrell had reached the letter-box when he caught sight of her, but he quite forgot to drop his letter through the slit. He stood transfixed with wonder and perplexity; wonder at her beauty; perplexity as to who she was.

Martin Hillyard had spoken to him of Joan Whitworth. By the delicious oval of her face, the deep blue of her eyes, the wealth of rippling bright hair, the soft bloom of colour on her cheeks, and her slim, boyish figure—the girl should rightly be she. But it couldn't be! No, it couldn't! This girl's lips were parted in a whimsical friendly smile; her eyes danced; she was buoyant with joy singing at her heart. Besides—besides——! Luttrell looked at her clothes. She wore a little white frock of chiffon and lace, as simple as could be, but even to a man's eyes it was that simplicity which is the last word of a good dressmaker. A huge rose of blue and silver at her waist was its only touch of colour. With it she wore a white, broad-brimmed hat of straw with a great blue bow and a few narrow streamers of blue ribbon floating jauntily, white stockings and shoes, cross-gartered round her slender ankles with shining ribbons. Was it she? Was it not? Was Martin Hillyard crazy or the whole world upside down?

"You must be Colonel Luttrell," his gracious vision exclaimed, with every appearance of surprise.

"I am," replied Luttrell. He was playing with his letter, half slipping it in, and then drawing it back from the box, and quite unaware of what he was doing.

"We had better introduce ourselves, I think. I am Joan Whitworth."

She held out her hand to him over the balustrade. He had but to reach up and take it. It was a cool hand, and a cordial one.

"Martin Hillyard has talked to me about you," he said.

"I like him," she replied. "He's a dear."

"He told me enough to make me frightened at the prospect of meeting you."

Joan leaned over the banister.

"But now that we have met, you aren't really frightened, are you?" she asked in so wistful a voice, and with a look so deeply pleading in her big blue eyes that no young man could have withstood her.

Harry Luttrell laughed.

"I am not. I am not a bit frightened. In fact I am almost bold enough to ask you a question."

"Yes, Colonel Luttrell?"

The invitation was clear enough. But the Colonel was suddenly aware of his audacity and faltered.

"Oh, do ask me, Colonel Luttrell!" she pleaded. The old-fashioned would have condemned Joan Whitworth as a minx at this moment, but would have softened the condemnation with a smile forced from them by her winning grace.

"Well, I will," replied Luttrell, and with great solemnity he asked, "How is Linda Spavinsky?"

Joan ran down the remaining steps, and dropped into a chair. A peal of laughter, silvery and clear, and joyous rang out from her mouth.

"Oh, she's not at all well to-day. I believe she's going. Her health was never very stable."

Then her mood changed altogether. The laughter died away, the very look of it faded from her face. She stood up and faced Harry Luttrell. In the depths of her eyes there appeared a sudden gravity, a certain wistfulness, almost a regret.

She spoke simply:

She had the air of one saying good-bye to many pleasant follies which for long had borne her company—and saying good-bye with a sort of doubt whether that which was in store for her would bring a greater happiness.

Harry Luttrell had no answer, and no very distinct comprehension of her mood. But he was stirred by it. For a little while they looked at one another without any words. The air about them in that still hall vibrated with the emotions of violins. Joan Whitworth was the first to break the dangerous silence.

"I am afraid that up till now, what I have liked, I have liked tremendously, but I have not always liked it for very long. You will remember that in pity, won't you?" she said lightly.

Harry Luttrell was quick to catch her tone.

"I shall remember it with considerable apprehension if I am fortunate enough ever to get into your good books." His little speech ended with a gasp. The letter which he was holding carelessly in his fingers had almost slipped from them into the locked letter box.

Joan crossed to where he stood.

"That's all right," she said. "You can post your letter there. The box is cleared regularly."

"No doubt," Harry Luttrell returned. "But I am no longer sure that I am going to post it."

The letter to his friend at the War Office contained an earnest prayer that a peremptory telegram should be sent to him at Rackham Park, at an early hour on the next morning, commanding his return to London.

He looked up at Joan.

"You despise racing, don't you?"

"I am going to Gatwick to-morrow."

"You are!" he cried eagerly.

"Of course."

He stood poising the letter in the palm of his open hand. The thought of Stella Croyle bade him post it. The presence of Joan Whitworth, and he was so conscious of her, paralysed his arm. Some vague sense of the tumult within him passed out from him to her. An intuition seized upon her that that letter was in some way vital to her, in some way a menace to her. Any moment he might post it! Once posted he might let it go. She drew a little sharp breath. He was standing there, so still, so quiet and slow in his decision. It became necessary to her that words should be spoken. She spoke the first which rose to her lips.

"You are going to stay for the Willoughbys' ball, aren't you?"

Harry Luttrell smiled.

"But you despise dancing."

"I? I adore it!"

She smiled as she spoke, but she spoke with a queer shyness which took him off his feet. He slowly tore the letter across and again across and then into little pieces and carried them to the waste-paper basket.

The action brought home to her with a shock that there was a letter which she, in her turn, must write, must write and post in that glass letter-box, oh, without any hesitation or error, this very evening. She thought upon it with repugnance, but it had to be written and done with. It was the consequence of her own folly, her own vanity. Harry Luttrell returned to her but he did not remark the trouble in her face.

"When I left England," he said slowly, "people were dancing the tango. That is—one couple which knew the dance, was dancing it in the ball-room, and all the others were practising in the passage. That's done with, I suppose?"

"Quite," said Joan.

Harry Luttrell heaved a sigh.

"I should have liked to have practised with you in the passage," he said ruefully.

"Still, there are other dances," Joan Whitworth suggested. "The one-step?"

"That's going for a walk," said Harry Luttrell.

"In an unusual attitude," Joan added demurely. "Do you know the fox-trot?"

"A little."

"The twinkle step?"

"Not at all."

"I might teach you that," Joan suggested.

"Oh, do! Teach it me now! Then we'll dance it in the passage."

"But every one will be dancing it in the ball-room," Joan objected.

"That's why," said Harry Luttrell, and they both laughed.

Joan looked towards the gramophone in the corner of the room. She was tempted, but she must have that letter written first. She would dance with Harry Luttrell with an uneasy mind unless that letter were written and posted first.

"Will you put a record ready on the gramophone, whilst I write a note," she suggested. "Then I'll teach you. It's quite a short note."

Joan sat in her turn at the writing table. She wrote the first lines easily and quickly enough. But she came to explanations, and of explanations she had none to offer. She sat and framed a sentence and it would not do. Meanwhile the gramophone was open and ready, the record fitted on to the disc of green baize and her cavalier in impatient attendance. She must be quick. But the quicker she wanted to be, the more slowly her thoughts moved amongst awkward sentences which she must write. She dashed off in the end the standard phrase for such emergencies. "I will write to you to-morrow," addressed and stamped her letter and dropped it into the letter box. The letter fell in the glass box with the address uppermost. But Joan did not trouble about that, did not even notice it; a weight was off her mind.

"I am ready," she said, and a few seconds later the music of "The Long Trail" was wafted to the astonished ears of the tennis players in the garden. They paused in their game and then Dennis Brown crept to the window of the hall and looked cautiously in. He stood transfixed; then turned and beckoned furiously. The lawn-tennis players forsook their rackets, Lady Splay and Stella Croyle their croquet mallets. Dennis Brown led them by a back way up to the head of the broad stairs. Here a gallery ran along one side of the hall. Voices rose up to them from the floor above the music of the gramophone.

Joan's: "That's the twinkle."

Luttrell's: "It's pretty difficult."

"Try it again," said Joan. "Oh, that's ever so much better."

"I shall never dare to dance it with any one else," said Luttrell.

"I really don't mind very much about that," Joan responded dryly.

Millie Splay could hardly believe her ears. Cautiously she and her party advanced on tiptoe to the balustrade and looked down. Yes, there the pair of them were, now laughing, now in desperate earnest, practising the fox-trot to the music of the gramophone.

"Do I hold you right?" asked Harry.

"Well—I shan't break, you know," Joan answered demurely, and then with a little sigh, "That's better."

Under her breath Stella Croyle murmured passionately, "Oh, you minx!"

As the record ran out a storm of applause burst from the gallery.

"Oh, Joan, Joan," cried Harold Jupp, shaking his head reproachfully. "There's the poet kicked right across the room."

"Where?" asked Harry Luttrell, looking round for the book.

"Oh, it doesn't matter," said Joan impatiently. "It's only an old volume of Browning."

Cries of "Shame" broke indignantly from the race-goers, and Joan received them with imperturbable indifference. Harry Luttrell, however, went on his knees and discovering the book beneath a distant sofa, carefully dusted it.

"Did you ever read 'How they Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix'?" he asked.

The audience in the gallery waited in dead silence for Joan Whitworth's answer. It came unhesitatingly clear and in a voice of high enthusiasm.

"Isn't it the most wonderful poem he ever wrote?"

The gallery broke into screams, catcalls, hisses and protests against Joan's shameless recantation.

"It's Browning, of course, but it's not Browning at all, if you understand me," Dennis Brown exclaimed with every show of indignation; and the whole party trooped away again to their tennis and their croquet.

Harry Luttrell placed the book upon a table and turned to Joan.

"Now what would you like to do?" he asked.

Joan shrugged her shoulders.

"We might cut into the next tennis set," she said doubtfully.

"You could hardly play in those shoes," said Harry Luttrell.

Joan contemplated a heel of formidable height. Oh, where were the sandals of the higher Life?

"No, I suppose not. Of course, there's a—but it wouldn't probably interest you."

"Wouldn't it?" cried Harry Luttrell.

"Well, it's a maze. Millie Splay is rather proud of it. The hedges are centuries old." She turned innocent eyes on Harry Luttrell. "I don't know whether you are interested in old hedges."

It is to be feared that "minx" was the only right word for Joan Whitworth on this afternoon. Harry Luttrell expressed an intense enthusiasm for great box hedges.

"But they aren't box, they are yew," said Joan, stopping at once.

Harry Luttrell's enthusiasm for yew hedges, however, was even greater and more engrossing than his enthusiasm for box ones. A pagoda perched upon a bank overlooked the maze and a narrow steep path led down into it between the hedges. Joan left it to her soldier to find the way. There was a stone pedestal with a small lead figure perched upon the top of it in the small clear space in the middle. But Harry Luttrell took a deal of time in reaching it. If, however, their progress was slow, with many false turnings and sudden stops against solid walls of hedge, it was not so with their acquaintanceship; each turn in the path brought them on by a new stage. They wandered in the dawn of the world.

"Suppose that I had never come to Rackham Park!" said Harry Luttrell, suddenly turning at the end of a blind alley. "I almost didn't come. I might have altogether missed knowing you."

The terrible thought smote them both. What risks people ran to be sure. They might never have met. They might have never known what it was to meet. They might have lived benighted, not knowing what lovely spirit had passed them by. They looked at one another with despairing eyes. Then a happy thought occurred to Joan.

"But, after all, you did come," she exclaimed.

Harry Luttrell drew a breath. He was relieved of a great oppression.

"Why, yes," he answered in wonderment. "So I did!"

They retraced their steps. As the sun drew towards its late setting, by an innocent suggestion from Joan here, a little question there, Harry Luttrell was manoeuvred towards the centre of the maze. Suddenly he stopped with a finger on the lips. A voice reached to them from the innermost recess—a voice which intoned, a voice which was oracular.

"What's that?" he asked in a whisper.

Joan shook her head.

"I haven't an idea."

As yet they could hear no words. Words were flung from wall to wall of the centre space and kept imprisoned there. It seemed that the presiding genius of the maze was uttering his invocation as the sun went down. Joan and Harry Luttrell crept stealthily nearer, Harry now openly guided by a light touch upon his arm as the paths twisted. Words—amazing words—became distinctly audible; and a familiar voice. They came to the last screen of hedge and peered through at a spot where the twigs were thin. In the very middle of the clear space stood Sir Chichester Splay, one hand leaning upon the pedestal, the other hidden in his bosom, in the very attitude of the orator; and to the silent spaces of the maze thus he made his address:

"Ladies and gentlemen! When I entered the tent this afternoon and took my seat upon the platform, nothing was further from my thoughts than that I should hear myself proposing a vote of thanks to our indefatigable chairman!"

Sir Chichester was getting ready for the Chichester Flower Show, at which, certainly, he was not going to make a speech. Oh dear, no! He knew better than that.

"In this marvellous collection of flowers, ladies and gentlemen, we can read, if so we will, a singular instance of co-ordination and organisation—the Empire's great needs to-day——"

Harry Luttrell and Joan stifled their laughter and stole away out of hearing.

"We won't breathe a word of it," said Joan.

"No," said Harry.

They had a little secret now between them—that wonderful link—a little secret; and to be sure they made the most of it. They could look across the dinner-table at one another with a smile in which no one else could have a share. If Sir Chichester spoke, it would be just to kindle that swift glance in lovers' eyes from which the heart takes fire. Love-making went at a gallop in nineteen hundred and sixteen; it jumped the barriers; it danced to a lively and violent tune. Maidens, as Sir Charles Hardiman had pronounced, had become more primeval. Insecurity had dropped them down upon the bed-rock elemental truths. Men were for women, women for men, especially for those men who went out with a cheery song in their mouths to save them from the hideous destiny of women in ravaged lands. The soldier was here to-day on leave, and God alone knew where he would be to-morrow, and whether alive, or perhaps a crippled thing like a child!

Joan Whitworth and Harry Luttrell had been touched by the swift magic of those days; he, when he had first seen her in the shining armour of her youth upon the steps of the stairs; she, when Harry had first entered the hall and spoken his few commonplace words of greeting. This was the hour for them, the hour at the well with the desert behind them and the desert in front, the hour within the measure of which was to be forced the essence of many days. When they returned to the hall they found most of the small party gathered there before going up to dress for dinner; and there was that in the faces of the pair which betrayed them. Hillyard looked quickly round the hall, as a qualm of pity for Stella Croyle seized him. But he could not see her. "Thank Heaven she has already gone up to dress," he said to himself. A marriage between Joan Whitworth and the Harry Luttrell of to-day, the man freed now from the great obsession of his life and trained now to the traditional paths, was a fitting thing, a thing to be welcomed. Hillyard readily acknowledged it. But he had more insight into the troubled soul of Stella Croyle than any one else in that company.

"No one's bothering about her," he reflected. "She came here to set up her last fight to win back Harry. She is now putting on her armour for it. And she hasn't a chance—no, not one!"

For Harry's sake he was glad. But he was a creator of plays; and his training led him to seek to understand, and to understand with the sympathy of his emotions, the points of view of others who might stand in a contrast or a relation. He walked up the stairs with a heart full of pity when Millicent Splay caught him up.

"What did I tell you?" she said, brimful with delight. "Just look at Joan! Is there a girl anywhere who can match her?"

Martin looked down over the balustrade at Joan in the hall below.

"No," he said slowly. "Not one whom I have ever seen."

The little note of melancholy in his voice moved Millie Splay. She was all kindness in that moment of her triumph. She turned to Martin Hillyard in commiseration. "Oh, don't tell me that you are in love with her too! I should be so sorry."

"No, I am not," Martin Hillyard hastened to reassure her, "not one bit."

The commiseration died on the instant in Millicent Splay.

"Well, really I don't see why you shouldn't be," she said coldly. "You will go a long way before you find any one to equal her."

Her whole attitude demanded of him an explanation of how he dared not to be in love with her darling.

"A very long way," Martin Hillyard agreed humbly. "All the way probably."

Lady Splay was mollified, and went on to her room. Down in the hall, Harry Luttrell turned to Joan.

"This is going to be a wonderful week for me."

"I am very glad," answered Joan, and they went up the stairs side by side.