--6

Presently as they paced the croquet lawn together, the preoccupation of Mr. Brumley's mind drew their conversation back to Lady Harman.

"I wish," he repeated, "you would go and see these people. She's not at all what you might infer from him."

"What could one infer about a wife from a man like that? Except that she'd have a lot to put up with."

"You know,--she's a beautiful person, tall, slender, dark...."

Lady Beach-Mandarin turned her full blue eye upon him.

"_Now!_" she said archly.

"I'm interested in the incongruity."

Lady Beach-Mandarin's reply was silent and singular. She compressed her lips very tightly, fixed her eye firmly on Mr. Brumley's, lifted her finger to the level of her left eyelash, and then shook it at him very deliberately five times. Then with a little sigh and a sudden and complete restoration of manner she remarked that never in any year before had she seen peonies quite so splendid. "I've a peculiar sympathy with peonies," she said. "They're so exactly my style."

CHAPTER THE THIRD

LADY HARMAN AT HOME

--1

Exactly three weeks after that first encounter between Lady Beach-Mandarin and Sir Isaac Harman, Mr. Brumley found himself one of a luncheon party at that lady's house in Temperley Square and talking very freely and indiscreetly about the Harmans.

Lady Beach-Mandarin always had her luncheons in a family way at a large round table so that n.o.body could get out of her range, and she insisted upon conversation being general, except for her mother who was impenetrably deaf and the Swiss governess of her only daughter Phyllis who was incomprehensible in any European tongue. The mother was incalculably old and had been a friend of Victor Hugo and Alfred de Musset; she maintained an intermittent monologue about the private lives of those great figures; n.o.body paid the slightest attention to her but one felt she enriched the table with an undertow of literary a.s.sociations. A small dark stealthy butler and a convulsive boy with hair (apparently) taking the place of eyes waited. On this occasion Lady Beach-Mandarin had gathered together two cousins, maiden ladies from Perth, wearing valiant hats, Toomer the wit and censor, and Miss Sharsper the novelist (whom Toomer detested), a gentleman named Roper whom she had invited under a misapprehension that he was the Arctic Roper, and Mr. Brumley. She had tried Mr. Roper with questions about penguins, seals, cold and darkness, icebergs and glaciers, Captain Scott, Doctor Cook and the shape of the earth, and all in vain, and feeling at last that something was wrong, she demanded abruptly whether Mr. Brumley had sold his house.

"I'm selling it," said Mr. Brumley, "by almost imperceptible degrees."

"He haggles?"

"Haggles and higgles. He higgles pa.s.sionately. He goes white and breaks into a cold perspiration. He wants me now to include the gardener's tools--in whatever price we agree upon."

"A rich man like that ought to be easy and generous," said Lady Beach-Mandarin.

"Then he wouldn't be a rich man like that," said Mr. Toomer.

"But doesn't it distress you highly, Mr. Brumley," one of the Perth ladies asked, "to be leaving Euphemia's Home to strangers? The man may go altering it."

"That--that weighs with me very much," said Mr. Brumley, recalled to his professions. "There--I put my trust in Lady Harman."

"You've seen her again?" asked Lady Beach-Mandarin.

"Yes. She came with him--a few days ago. That couple interests me more and more. So little akin."

"There's eighteen years between them," said Toomer.

"It's one of those cases," began Mr. Brumley with a note of scientific detachment, "where one is really tempted to be ultra-feminist. It's clear, he uses every advantage. He's her owner, her keeper, her obstinate insensitive little tyrant.... And yet there's a sort of effect, as though nothing was decided.... As if she was only just growing up."

"They've been married six or seven years," said Toomer. "She was just eighteen."

"They went over the house together and whenever she spoke he contradicted her with a sort of vicious playfulness. Tried to poke clumsy fun at her. Called her 'Lady Harman.' Only it was quite evident that what she said stuck in his mind.... Very queer--interesting people."

"I wouldn't have anyone allowed to marry until they were five-and-twenty," said Lady Beach-Mandarin.

"Sweet seventeen sometimes contrives to be very marriageable," said the gentleman named Roper.

"Sweet seventeen must contrive to wait," said Lady Beach-Mandarin.

"Sweet fourteen has to--and when I was fourteen--I was Ardent! There's no earthly objection to a little harmless flirtation of course. It's the marrying."

"You'd conduce to romance," said Miss Sharsper, "anyhow. Eighteen won't bear restriction and everyone would begin by eloping--illegally."

"I'd put them back," said Lady Beach-Mandarin. "Oh! remorselessly."

Mr. Roper, who was more and more manifestly not the Arctic one, remarked that she would "give the girls no end of an adolescence...."

Mr. Brumley did not attend very closely to the subsequent conversation.

His mind had gone back to Black Strand and the second visit that Lady Harman, this time under her natural and proper protection, had paid him.

A little thread from the old lady's discourse drifted by him. She had scented marriage in the air and she was saying, "of course they ought to have let Victor Hugo marry over and over again. He would have made it all so beautiful. He could throw a Splendour over--over almost anything." Mr. Brumley sank out of attention altogether. It was so difficult to express his sense of Lady Harman as a captive, enclosed but unsubdued. She had been as open and shining as a celandine flower in the sunshine on that first invasion, but on the second it had been like overcast weather and her starry petals had been shut and still. She hadn't been in the least subdued or effaced, but closed, inaccessible to conversational bees, that astonishing honey of trust and easy friendship had been hidden in a dignified impenetrable reserve. She had had the effect of being not so much specially shut against Mr. Brumley as habitually shut against her husband, as a protection against his continual clumsy mental interferences. And once when Sir Isaac had made a sudden allusion to price Mr. Brumley had glanced at her and met her eyes....

"Of course," he said, coming up to the conversational surface again, "a woman like that is bound to fight her way out."

"Queen Mary!" cried Miss Sharsper. "Fight her way out!"

"Queen Mary!" said Mr. Brumley, "No!--Lady Harman."

"_I_ was talking of Queen Mary," said Miss Sharsper.

"And Mr. Brumley was thinking of Lady Harman!" cried Lady Beach-Mandarin.

"Well," said Mr. Brumley, "I confess I do think about her. She seems to me to be so typical in many ways of--of everything that is weak in the feminine position. As a type--yes, she's perfect."

"I've never seen this lady," said Miss Sharsper. "Is she beautiful?"

"I've not seen her myself yet," said Lady Beach-Mandarin. "She's Mr.

Brumley's particular discovery."

"You haven't called?" he asked with a faint reproach.

"But I've been going to--oh! tremendously. And you revive all my curiosity. Why shouldn't some of us this very afternoon----?"

She caught at her own pa.s.sing idea and held it. "Let's Go," she cried.

"Let's visit the wife of this Ogre, the last of the women in captivity.

We'll take the big car and make a party and call _en ma.s.se_."