She retrieved the flowers, noticing that they were wilting already, and laid the stems into two neat bunches.
And still Danny did not move. He lay there quite overcome by the strangeness, the utter uniqueness of the thing which had happened to him in the last few minutes. He was cured. When she had said ‘I’m not angry, only politeness had held back his true rejoinder, ‘I don’t give a damn whether you’re angry or not.’ He now lay savouring his relief, his joy at being his own man again. But he was still puzzled; this affair had begun in a curious way, it had followed an unusual course, and it had ended in a fashion, which, only half an hour ago, he would have said was impossible. Such a rebuff at such a moment should, by all the rules, have quickened his desire; but it hadn’t, it had killed it stone dead. It was as though he had been bargaining for something and the seller kept putting the price up until in the end he’d no longer wanted it. When he had wrenched out the words about marriage he’d ached for her; when she pushed him away again it was suddenly all over. He’d been mad, he’d gone stark mad in October and now he was sane again. He lay face downwards and looked forward to a future when he hadn’t to go to chapel and could go into the Black Horse. ‘It’s getting dark, Danny.’
He jumped up at once and said with an impersonal kindness which many a girl in the six parishes would have
recognised as ominous:
‘So it is, and we have to get you home. I’ll carry the
flowers.’
So it ended, as oddly as it had begun. And perhaps the strangest thing about it was the memory which it left. It was natural that Damask should remember. But Danny? Danny, who grew into just such a stout, red-faced, top-booted, sporting farmer of the period as was to be immortalised as ‘John Bull’—why should he remember and feel something stirring deep in his bulk when such a day visited the earth again, and sometimes shove aside, with an impatient gesture, the jar of bluebells which one of his daughters had set on the dinner-table, and distort the simple facts of what he remembered until it seemed as though he had been cheated? Why should he? Only the gods, the ones in the thicket and the One who tweaked the leash of a conscience, could answer that.
Danny was not at chapel, and he did not come to take Damask home on her June Saturday; but that was understandable. The hay harvest was in full swing, and from the moment when the morning dew had dried off until darkness fell men were busy. On that June Saturday Damask made the beef-pudding and a quantity of gooseberry jam; and Mrs Greenway, encouraged by the reception of the feather-stitching, embarked upon some real embroidery—true-lovers’ knots and little posies. She also asked whether Damask had thought any more about the golden-brown lindsey, and Damask said she had had her quarter’s money and had asked Miss Lee, the governess at Muchanger, to buy the stuff for her when she took Miss Amelia to the dentist in Colchester.
Damask was radiant that day; radiant with virtue, radiant with hope, for Danny had asked her to marry him. Once more she had proved the truth of the Bible. ‘Seek ye first the Kingdom of Heaven, and all these things shall be added unto thee.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Richard Shelmadine had collected the quarter’s salary due to him when he returned to Fort St George; and as a ship was ready to sail within two days, and there was nothing upon which to waste money during the voyage, he arrived in England with money in his pocket. Not being the man to take thought for the morrow, he picked out the most comfortable-looking hackney carriage, had his baggage loaded, helped in Linda, who was wan and frail from the last bout of sea-sickness, and said to the
driver:
‘Mrs Everton’s; Soho square.’
Linda so far forgot her policy of non-interference as to
say:
‘We owed Angelina money when we left. She won’t have
forgotten.’
‘Nor have I, my pretty one. It is not customary among gentlemen to regard a debt as a reason for patronising a
rival establishment.’
The smooth snub was his instant retaliation to the criticism implied by her reminder, but it went almost unnoticed. The day was long past when reference to her middle-class origin could plant a barb.
‘I thought Angelina had no rivals,’ Linda said, and was rewarded by a glint of amusement.
‘A true word,’ Richard said.
Angelina Everton, born plain Aggie Stubbs, had spent the first thirty years of her life pitting her moderate good looks, her lively wits and her indomitable spirit against the world, which had received her unwillingly and
promised her nothing but poverty, degradation and disease. She had served ale in a pot-house, exposed her limbs and sung vulgar songs on the stage, had been one of the gossamer-veiled ‘virgins’ in Mr Scudamore’s shortlived infamous Temple of Diana—all before she was seventeen years of age. She left the Temple to become mistress to a foolish, wealthy young man who kept her just long enough to set her foot on the bottom of the ladder which led to the bedchamber of the Duke of Brittlesford, who, like the psalmist David, had ‘waxed cold’ with age and asked little but kindliness and comfort from his bedfellow. He had always promised Angelina that he would provide for her, she need never wrestle with the world again; but he failed in his promise, and when he died he left Angelina, then aged forty-two, nothing that he knew of. She had helped herself to the deeds of the house in Soho Square and coarsely invited the outraged family to take what action they liked to recover them. She had saved and swindled small amounts over the twelve years and had two thousand pounds laid by; she had jewellery worth perhaps a thousand more. She could have lived in modest comfort for the rest of her days; but modest comfort was not what she desired. Her tastes were extravagant, she craved excitement.
So she turned the house in Soho Square into … what, exactly? It depended upon what you were looking for. There was a great drawing-room whose four tall windows looked out upon an ‘Italian’ garden of reassuring primness and formality, and there, under the glittering chandeliers, ladies and gentlemen of the most unimpeachable character could gather to hear the best musicians and singers in London. Mrs Everton’s fortnightly musical gatherings were something not to be missed by anyone who wished to be regarded as the possessor of taste. At other times the chandeliers scattered their prismatic lights upon livelier, but still formal, assemblies where the conversation and the presence of the literary celebrities and the even more renowned literary-minded great were the attraction. But Mrs Everton also catered for lighter tastes,
I
still well on the respectable side. She sponsored a number of fortune-tellers, giving preference to those of foreign origin; and lectures on every subject of fashionable interest had been given from the little platform of her ‘Forest Room’—so called from the two or three dozen exotic plants, survivors of several thousands, which grew and hung and trailed against its panelled walls.
It was a large house, however; and the wide hall where the primmest matron in London might be seen drinking coffee or chocolate or sipping a glass of Madeira, the great drawing-room and the Forest Room—only entered by invitation or ticket—were far from comprising the whole. A few people—all men of liberal mind and catholic tastes —knew as much of it as was open to the public; but on the whole those who visited Angelina’s ground-floor rooms were strangers to those above stairs, while those who visited the upper floor were seldom to be seen at the concerts and lectures below. On the first floor there were three public rooms: two devoted to gaming and one where food was served—excellent food, served grudgingly, purely for the convenience of patrons who could only spare a little time between games. Nobody ever went to Angelina’s in order simply to eat. ‘I do not run a chop-house,” she said. And although behind the three public rooms there were a number of very comfortably appointed sleeping chambers, nobody could go there and hire a room; they were for the convenience of gentlemen who, playing deep, and drinking deep as they played were too late, or too early, to go home to their own beds.
But there was another staircase, another floor; a honeycomb of small, luxurious cells; each, one might say, occupied by a queen bee, about whom the male drones clustered. And now and then, as from humbler hives, one of the queen bees took wing, flew some distance and settled, the acknowledged ruler of some great house as Angelina had been in her day; and now and then, as in humbler hives, a male drone died, untimely. The clusterings, the flights and the deaths were all hushed away; everything concerning that topmost floor was hushed,