Love and Lucy. Maurice Hewlett
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Upon him drifted Mrs. Worthington, like a peony in the tideway. Urquhart bowed. "Your servant, ma'am."
She cried, "Hullo, Jimmy, you here?"
"Where else?"
"Why, I thought you were in Switzerland."
"So I was," he said. "All among the curates. But I came back—because they didn't." He turned to Lucy. "And because I was asked here."
She asked him, "Were you ski-ing? Lancelot will grudge you that."
He told her, "I was not. No lonely death for me. I was bobbing it. You are swept off by dozens at a time there—by fifties in a cave. It's more cheerful." Then he seemed to remark something which he thought she ought to know. "Jimmy. You heard her? Now Macartney and I are both called James. But who ever made a Jimmy of him?" She was annoyed with him—the man seemed to suppose she could be pleased by crabbing James—and glad of Margery Dacre, a mermaid in sea-green, who swam in with apologies—due to Macartney's abhorrent eyeglass upon her. And then they all went in to their archumpelygo, where Crewdson and his ladies were waiting for them, rari nautes.
Lucy's table—she was between the Judge and Urquhart and had Mabel, Worthington and Miss Bacchus before her—at once took the mastery. Urquhart fixed Crewdson with his eye and thenceforward commanded him. James's eyeglass, speechless with horror over Lady Bliss's shoulder, glared like a frosty moon.
Miss Bacchus, it seems, was his old acquaintance. She too called him Jimmy, and drove at him with vigour. He charged her not to rally him, and being between the two sisters, talked to both of them at once, or rather started them off, as a music-hall singer starts the gallery, and then let them go on over his head.
They talked of Wycross, Lucy's house in the country, compared it with Peltry, which Mabel deprecated as a barrack, and came to hear of Urquhart's house in the New Forest. It was called Martley Thicket. Urquhart said it was a good sort of place. "I've made an immense lake," he said, with his eyes so very wide that Miss Bacchus said, "You're making two, now." He described Martley and the immense lake. "House stands high in beech woods, but is cut out to the south. It heads a valley—lawns on three sides, smooth as billiard tables—then the lake with a marble lip—and steps—broad and low steps, in flights of eight. Very good, you know. You shall see it."
Lucy wanted to know, "How big was the lake, really."
Urquhart said, "It looked a mile—but that's the art of the thing. Really, it's two hundred and fifty yards. Much better than a jab in the eye with a blunt stick. I did it by drainage, and a dam. Took a year to get the water up. When a hunted stag took to it and swam across, I felt that I'd done something. Fishing? I should think so. And a bathing-house in a wooded corner—in a cane-brake of bamboos. You'll like it."
Miss Bacchus said, "I don't believe a word of it;" but he seemed not to hear her.
"When will you come and see it?" he asked Lucy.
She agreed that see it she must, if only to settle whether it existed or not. "You see that Miss Bacchus has no doubts."
Urquhart said, "She never has—about anything. She is fixed in certainty like a bee in amber. A dull life."
"Bless you, Jimmy," she said, "I thrive on it—and you'll never thrive."
"Pooh!" said Urquhart, "what you call thriving I call degradation. What! you snuggle in there out of the draughts—and then somebody comes along and rubs you, and picks up bits of paper with you." His good spirits made the thing go—and James's eyeglass prevailed not against it.
But Urquhart's real triumph was at dessert—Lancelot sedately by his mother; between her and the Judge, who briskly made way for him. Lancelot in his Eton jacket took on an air of precocious, meditative wisdom infinitely diverting to a man who reflects upon boys—and, no doubt, infinitely provocative.
His coming broke up the talk and made one of those momentous pauses which are sometimes paralysing to a table. This one was so, and even threatened the neighbouring island. Upon it broke the voice of Urquhart talking to Mabel Corbet.
"I was out in Corfù in 1906," he was heard to say; "I was in fact in the bath, when one of my wives came to the door, and said that there was a Turk in the almond-tree. I got a duck-gun which I had and went out—" Lancelot's eyes, fixed and pulsing, interdicted him. They held up the monologue. In his hand was a robust apple; but that was forgotten.
"I say," he said, "have you got two wives?"
Urquhart's eyes met his with an extenuating look. "It was some time ago, you see," he said; and then, passing it off, "There are as many as you like out there. Dozens."
Lancelot absorbed this explanation through the eyes. You could see them at it, chewing it like a cud. He was engrossed in it—Lucy watched him. "I say—two wives!" and then, giving it up, with a savage attack he bit into his apple and became incoherent. One cheek bulged dangerously and required all his present attention. Finally, after a time of high tension, Urquhart's wives and the apple were bolted together, and given over to the alimentary juices. The Turk in the almond-tree was lost sight of, and no one knows why he was there, or how he was got out—if indeed he ever was. For all that, Urquhart finished his story to his two ladies; but Lucy paid him divided attention, being more interested in her Lancelot than in Urquhart's Turk.
Francis Lingen, at the other table, kept a cold eye upon the easy man who was to provide him with ready money, as he hoped. He admired ease as much as anybody, and believed that he had it. But he was very much in love with Lucy, and felt the highest disapproval of Urquhart's kind of spread-eagle hardihood. He bent over his plate like the willow-tree upon one. His eyelids glimmered, he was rather pink, and used his napkin to his lips. To his neighbour of the left, who was Lady Bliss, he spoke sotto voce of "our variegated friend," and felt that he had disposed of him. But that "one of his wives" filled him with a sullen despair. What were you to do with that sort of man? Macartney saw all this and was dreadfully bored. "Damn Jimmy Urquhart," he said to himself. "Now I shall have to work for my living—which I hate, after dinner."
But he did it. "We'll go and talk to the Judge," he said to his company, and led the way. Urquhart settled down to claret, and was taciturn. He answered Linden's tentative openings in monosyllables. But he and the Judge got on very well.
CHAPTER III
IN THE DRAWING-ROOM
After dinner, when the men came into the drawing-room, Francis Lingen went directly to Lucy and began to talk to her. Lancelot fidgeted for Urquhart who, however, was in easy converse with the Judge and his host—looking at the water-colours as the talk went on, and cutting in as a thought struck him. Lucy, seeing that all her guests were reasonably occupied, lent herself to Lingen's murmured conversation, and felt for it just so much tolerance, so much compassion, you may say, as to be able to brave Mabel's quizzing looks from across the room. Mabel always had a gibe for Francis Lingen. She called him the Ewe Lamb, and that kind of thing. It was plain that she scorned him. Lucy, on the other hand, pitied him without knowing it, which was even more desperate for the young man. It had never entered Lingen's head, however, that anybody could pity him. True, he was poor; but then he was very expensive. He liked good things; he liked them choice. And they must have distinction; above all, they must be rare. He had some things which were unique: a chair in ivory and bronze, one of a set made for Mme. de Lamballe, and two of Horace Walpole's snuff-boxes. He had a private printing-press, and did his own poems, on vellum. He had turned off a poem to Lucy while she was inspecting the appareil once. "To L. M. from the Fount." "Sonnets while you wait," said Mabel, curving her upper lip; but there was nothing in it, because many ladies had received the same tribute. He had borrowed that too from