Mr. Toomer protested he had no morbid curiosities.

"But you, Susan?"

Miss Sharsper declared she would _love_ to come. Wasn't it her business to study out-of-the-way types? Mr. Roper produced a knowing sort of engagement--"I'm provided for already, Lady Beach-Mandarin," he said, and the cousins from Perth had to do some shopping.

"Then we three will be the expedition," said the hostess. "And afterwards if we survive we'll tell you our adventures. It's a house on Putney Hill, isn't it, where this Christian maiden, so to speak, is held captive? I've had her in my mind, but I've always intended to call with Agatha Alimony; she's so inspiring to down-trodden women."

"Not exactly down-trodden," said Mr. Brumley, "not down-trodden. That's what's so curious about it."

"And what shall we do when we get there?" cried Lady Beach-Mandarin. "I feel we ought to do something more than call. Can't we carry her off right away, Mr. Brumley? I want to go right in to her and say 'Look here! I'm on your side. Your husband's a tyrant. I'm help and rescue.

I'm all that a woman ought to be--fine and large. Come out from under that unworthy man's heel!'"

"Suppose she isn't at all the sort of person you seem to think she is,"

said Miss Sharsper. "And suppose she came!"

"Suppose she didn't," reflected Mr. Roper.

"I seem to see your flight," said Mr. Toomer. "And the newspaper placards and head-lines. 'Lady Beach-Mandarin elopes with the wife of an eminent confectioner. She is stopped at the landing stage by the staff of the Dover Branch establishment. Recapture of the fugitive after a hot struggle. Brumley, the eminent _litterateur_, stunned by a spent bun....'"

"We're all talking great nonsense," said Lady Beach-Mandarin. "But anyhow we'll make our call. And _I_ know!--I'll make her accept an invitation to lunch without him."

"If she won't?" threw out Mr. Roper.

"I _will_," said Lady Beach-Mandarin with roguish determination. "And if I can't----"

"Not ask him too!" protested Mr. Brumley.

"Why not get her to come to your Social Friends meeting," said Miss Sharsper.

--2

When Mr. Brumley found himself fairly launched upon this expedition he had the grace to feel compunction. The Harmans, he perceived, had inadvertently made him the confidant of their domestic discords and to betray them to these others savoured after all of treachery. And besides much as he had craved to see Lady Harman again, he now realized he didn't in the least want to see her in a.s.sociation with the exuberant volubility of Lady Beach-Mandarin and the hard professional observation, so remarkably like the ferrule of an umbrella being poked with a noiseless persistence into one's eye, of Miss Sharsper. And as he thought these afterthoughts Lady Beach-Mandarin's chauffeur darted and dodged and threaded his way with an alacrity that was almost distressing to Putney.

They ran over the ghost of Swinburne, at the foot of Putney Hill,--or perhaps it was only the rhythm of the engine changed for a moment, and in a couple of minutes more they were outside the Harman residence.

"Here we are!" said Lady Beach-Mandarin, more capaciously gaminesque than ever. "We've done it now."

Mr. Brumley had an impression of a big house in the distended stately-homes-of-England style and very necessarily and abundantly covered by creepers and then he was a.s.sisting the ladies to descend and the three of them were waiting cl.u.s.tered in the ample Victorian doorway.

For some little interval there came no answer to the bell Mr. Brumley had rung, but all three of them had a sense of hurried, furtive and noiseless readjustments in progress behind the big and bossy oak door.

Then it opened and a very large egg-shaped butler with sandy whiskers appeared and looked down himself at them. There was something paternal about this man, his professional deference was touched by the sense of ultimate responsibility. He seemed to consider for a moment whether he should permit Lady Harman to be in, before he conceded that she was.

They were ushered through a hall that resembled most of the halls in the world, it was dominated by a handsome oak staircase and scarcely gave Miss Sharsper a point, and then across a creation of the Victorian architect, a ma.s.sive kind of conservatory with cla.s.sical touches--there was an impluvium in the centre and there were arches hung with manifestly costly Syrian rugs, into a large apartment looking through four French windows upon a verandah and a large floriferous garden. At a sideways glance it seemed a very pleasant garden indeed. The room itself was like the rooms of so many prosperous people nowadays; it had an effect of being sedulously and yet irrelevantly over-furnished. It had none of the large vulgarity that Mr. Brumley would have considered proper to a wealthy caterer, but it confessed a compilation of "pieces"

very carefully authenticated. Some of them were rather splendid "pieces"; three big bureaus burly and bra.s.sy dominated it; there was a Queen Anne cabinet, some exquisite coloured engravings, an ormolu mirror and a couple of large French vases that set Miss Sharsper, who had a keen eye for this traffic, confusedly cataloguing. And a little incongruously in the midst of this exhibit, stood Lady Harman, as if she was trying to conceal the fact that she too was a visitor, in a creamy white dress and dark and defensive and yet entirely unabashed.

The great butler gave his large vague impression of Lady Beach-Mandarin's name, and stood aside and withdrew.

"I've heard so much of you," said Lady Beach-Mandarin advancing with hand upraised. "I had to call. Mr. Brumley----"

"Lady Beach-Mandarin met Sir Isaac at Black Strand," Mr. Brumley intervened to explain.

Miss Sharsper was as it were introduced by default.

"My vividest antic.i.p.ations outdone," said Lady Beach-Mandarin, squeezing Lady Harman's fingers with enthusiasm. "And what a charming garden you have, and what a delightful situation! Such air! And on the very verge of London, high, on this delightful _literary_ hill, and ready at any moment to swoop in that enviable great car of yours. I suppose you come a great deal into London, Lady Harman?"

"No," reflected Lady Harman, "not very much." She seemed to weigh the accuracy of this very carefully. "No," she added in confirmation.

"But you should, you ought to; it's your duty. You've no right to hide away from us. I was telling Sir Isaac. We look to him, we look to you.

You've no right to bury your talents away from us; you who are rich and young and brilliant and beautiful----"

"But if I go on I shall begin to flatter you," said Lady Beach-Mandarin with a delicious smile. "I've begun upon Sir Isaac already. I've made him promise a hundred guineas and his name to the Shakespear Dinners Society,--nothing he didn't mention eaten (_you_ know) and all the profits to the National movement--and I want your name too. I know you'll let us have your name too. Grant me that, and I'll subside into the ordinariest of callers."

"But surely; isn't his name enough?" asked Lady Harman.

"Without yours, it's only half a name!" cried Lady Beach-Mandarin. "If it were a _business_ thing----! Different of course. But on my list, I'm like dear old Queen Victoria you know, the wives must come too."

"In that case," hesitated Lady Harman.... "But really I think Sir Isaac----"

She stopped. And then Mr. Brumley had a psychic experience. It seemed to him as he stood observing Lady Harman with an entirely unnecessary and unpremeditated intentness, that for the briefest interval her attention flashed over Lady Beach-Mandarin's shoulder to the end verandah window; and following her glance, he saw--and then he did not see--the arrested figure, the white face of Sir Isaac, bearing an expression in which anger and horror were extraordinarily intermingled. If it was Sir Isaac he dodged back with amazing dexterity; if it was a phantom of the living it vanished with an air of doing that. Without came the sound of a flower-pot upset and a faint expletive. Mr. Brumley looked very quickly at Lady Beach-Mandarin, who was entirely unconscious of anything but her own uncoiling and enveloping eloquence, and as quickly at Miss Sharsper.

But Miss Sharsper was examining a blackish bureau through her gla.s.ses as though she were looking for birthmarks and meant if she could find one to claim the piece as her own long-lost connection. With a mild but gratifying sense of exclusive complicity Mr. Brumley reverted to Lady Harman's entire self-possession.

"But, dear Lady Harman, it's entirely unnecessary you should consult him,--entirely," Lady Beach-Mandarin was saying.

"I'm sure," said Mr. Brumley with a sense that somehow he had to intervene, "that Sir Isaac would not possibly object. I'm sure that if Lady Harman consults him----"

The sandy-whiskered butler appeared hovering.

"Shall I place the tea-things in the garden, me lady?" he asked, in the tone of one who knows the answer.

"Oh _please_ in the garden!" cried Lady Beach-Mandarin. "Please! And how delightful to _have_ a garden, a London garden, in which one _can_ have tea. Without being smothered in blacks. The south-west wind. The dear _English_ wind. All your blacks come to _us_, you know."

She led the way upon the verandah. "Such a wonderful garden! The s.p.a.ce, the breadth! Why! you must have Acres!"

She surveyed the garden--comprehensively; her eye rested for a moment on a distant patch of black that ducked suddenly into a group of lilacs.

"Is dear Sir Isaac at home?" she asked.

"He's very uncertain," said Lady Harman, with a quiet readiness that pleased Mr. Brumley. "Yes, Snagsby, please, under the big cypress. And tell my mother and sister."

Lady Beach-Mandarin having paused a moment or so upon the verandah admiring the garden as a whole, now prepared to go into details. She gathered her ample skirts together and advanced into the midst of the large lawn, with very much of the effect of a fleet of captive balloons dragging their anchors. Mr. Brumley followed, as it were in attendance upon her and Lady Harman. Miss Sharsper, after one last hasty glance at the room, rather like the last hasty glance of a still unprepared schoolboy at his book, came behind with her powers of observation strainingly alert.

Mr. Brumley was aware of a brief mute struggle between the two ladies of t.i.tle. It was clear that Lady Harman would have had them go to the left, to where down a vista of pillar roses a single large specimen cypress sounded a faint but recognizable Italian note, and he did his loyal best to support her, but Lady Beach-Mandarin's attraction to that distant clump of lilac on the right was equally great and much more powerful.

She flowed, a great and audible tide of socially influential womanhood, across the green s.p.a.ces of the garden, and drew the others with her. And it seemed to Mr. Brumley--not that he believed his eyes--that beyond those lilacs something ran out, something black that crouched close to the ground and went very swiftly. It flashed like an arrow across a further s.p.a.ce of flower-bed, dropped to the ground, became two agitatedly receding boot soles and was gone. Had it ever been? He glanced at Lady Harman, but she was looking back with the nave anxiety of a hostess to her cypress,--at Lady Beach-Mandarin, but she was proliferating compliments and decorative scrolls and flourishes like the engraved frontispiece to a seventeenth-century book.

"I know I'm inordinately curious," said Lady Beach-Mandarin, "but gardens are my Joy. I want to go into every corner of this. Peep into everything. And I feel somehow"--and here she urged a smile on Lady Harman's attention--"that I shan't begin to know _you_, until I know all your environment."

She turned the flank of the lilacs as she said these words and advanced in echelon with a stately swiftness upon the laurels beyond.

Lady Harman said there was nothing beyond but sycamores and the fence, but Lady Beach-Mandarin would press on through a narrow path that pierced the laurel hedge, in order, she said, that she might turn back and get the whole effect of the grounds.