The Light Heart (30 page)

“Yes, Conrad,” said Aunt Christa meekly, and Aunt Nini nodded grave agreement with the head of the family who had just slapped them all down hard, as it was his place to do, and they adored him for it. And Uncle Eugen’s unmarried son squirmed in his chair and grinned self-consciously under his father’s considering eye.

Above Rosalind’s head Prince Conrad glanced at Phoebe and if she read his look correctly it had a sardonic triumph, as though to say, You thought I wasn’t going to stop them, didn’t you.

E
ARLY
June in the forest at Heidersdorf was indescribably lovely, but there was no childish gathering of wild strawberries by Phoebe and Rosalind. They viewed the beauty of the tidy pine woods and mountain lake sedately from a carriage driven along the endless avenues which wound through thirty square miles of private park—and the strawberries, small and pink and sweet, came to the dinner table in meringues, smothered in rich whipped cream.

Each time Phoebe mentioned Cannes and Aunt Sally,
Rosalind
implored her to stay just a few days longer, and the visit of what they privately called Uncle Eugen’s travelling circus went on and on. Because of Cuno’s now flagrant attentions to Phoebe, Malvida had taken to looking heartbroken and
reproachful
. Because of Uncle Eugen’s uninhibited reactions to so much free, unmarried attractiveness and so much spirit too, Aunt Nini had inquired more than once about Phoebe’s aunt in Cannes, whom she plainly by now regarded as apocryphal—and Conrad was more than once shaken by heartless internal mirth when Phoebe was forced to retreat almost, as it were,
into his arms for protection from his ebullient relative. Even Uncle Eugen’s married son had begun to show signs of taking notice, and his wife in revenge ignored Phoebe as far as possible, and looked at her with sidelong, spiteful, measuring glances, as though trying to see what Phoebe had that she lacked herself, she being years younger as anyone could tell.

Between Phoebe and Prince Conrad there existed a strange, unexpressed camaraderie, based on their instinctive
understanding
of each other, in which there was no
room for illusions. He knew, beyond a doubt, that he would get nowhere with her now. She knew, with a watchful certainty, that he was always willing to try. Unfortunately to be kept at arm’s length by so clever an opponent in the game as Phoebe was a new experience for His Highness, and he enjoyed it as he enjoyed all trials of skill—and even to look at from a respectful distance Phoebe was charming and added spice to his days.

During the first week in June Prince Conrad was summoned to Berlin by the Emperor, and the family awaited his return in a state of unsuppressible excitement. Aunt Christa prophesied that it would be the Order of the Black Eagle, with diamonds. Uncle Eugen, for unexplained reasons of his own, thought it was something to do with the autumn manoeuvres, at which aeroplanes fitted with guns were going to be tried. Malvida, from some unguarded remark of Cuno’s as he prepared to accompany His Highness, was convinced that at last it was war. And Rosalind confessed privately to Phoebe that she hoped it might be the offer of a diplomatic post—perhaps as Ambassador to Vienna—though of course Conny was still young for an Embassy….

He returned a few days later, just at tea time, and followed by his uniformed aides came straight into the green drawing-room where the family was assembled. Very mysterious, very much at his leisure, he kissed his womenfolk all round, made Phoebe a rather special bow and a much more perfunctory one to Malvida, accepted a cup of tea from his wife’s hand, and sat down with it, surrounded by an expectant silence.

“
Ach,
Conrad, how you tease!” cried Aunt Christa. “What did the All-Highest say to you? Have you nothing to show us?”

“To show you? What an idea!” said Conrad, playing up to her and sipping his tea, which he drank very hot instead of allowing it to cool first like the cautious British.

“Perhaps the interview was secret and confidential,” Uncle Eugen suggested, full of meaning. “Our new weapons of war are not subjects to be bandied about the drawing-room by gossiping women,
hein,
Conrad?”

“I am not on the Imperial Staff,” Conrad reminded him good-naturedly, lifting his cup again. “Not yet, anyway.”

Rosalind had been sitting with her hands locked in her lap, watching her husband’s face. Now she leaned forward and said, very low, “Are you being sent somewhere on a mission?”

In exaggerated, humorous surprise, he returned his cup to its saucer with a clink and stared at her.

“They will burn you for a witch some day,” he said. “How did you guess?”

“Where?” said Rosalind tensely, sitting motionless.

“Your clairvoyance doesn’t tell you that as well?”

She shook her head mutely, her hands pressed together in her lap.

“Guess,” he said, setting down his cup and taking a cigarette from the crested gold cigarette case he carried.

“Vienna?” said Rosalind, barely audible, and he smiled and blew out the match, and the rest of them sat watching this small intimate drama as though at a play.

“Rome,” said Rosalind, with a sort of unwilling conviction, and then something in his face lit an incredulous hope in hers. “Oh, Conny, not—not—” She seemed unable to go on.

“I go to London for the Coronation,” he told her, smiling.

“Conny!” Rosalind was out of her chair and bending over him, her small, trembling hands clutching his massive shoulders. “Conny, is it true? You’re not joking—you’re not—fooling me—?”

“It would be a pointless sort of joke, wouldn’t it, to say I was
going to London for the Coronation and then set out for Constantinople?”

“
London!
” cried Rosalind, and it was a hallelujah. She swung round to Phoebe, her arms outflung, her slim body in its clinging tea-gown seeming to vibrate and shimmer with joy. “Phoebe, do you hear?
London
—
at
last
—oh, won’t you change your mind about it now and come too?”

“But Conrad has said nothing about taking you to London with him,” said Aunt Christa sulkily, for it was not the Black Eagle after all.

Rosalind turned back to her husband as though wilting in mid-flight. Her face went white in an instant, leaving her eyes wide and dark, her hands dropped to her sides.

“Conny—?” she whispered, and waited like a disciplined child who dares not be importunate for fear of failure.

“Victor is just getting over his cold,” said Aunt Christa, her voice like a heavy hand imposing silence. “I do not understand how you can be so heartless, Rosalind, as to go dancing off to a foreign crowning and leave a sick child behind you. Everyone knows how delicate Victor is.”

Rosalind gave no glance in her direction, but stood rooted, with her eyes fixed on Conrad, looking frightened and childish, and almost without hope. Her words came faintly, but with a rush.

“But, Conny, he’s not ill any more, the doctor says he is recovered, and he goes out again—and—there’s nothing I can do here even when he is ill, Smith won’t let me go near him—he doesn’t
want
me, I sometimes think, he’s used to Smith, he’d rather have her, I’m sure—”

Conrad had risen and come towards her while she spoke, and he set his hand under her chin in the usual possessive way.

“Is this place then such a prison to you?” he asked gravely, with his habitual arrogant faculty of ignoring the existence of spectators.

“Oh, no, Conny,
no,
this place is—is my home,” said Rosalind, remembered her duty with pathetic haste. “But it has
been such a long time since I saw England—I—I—” Her lips trembled, and Phoebe could see the working of her slender throat as she tried to swallow. “—I would like a holiday there,” she managed to say almost voicelessly, “—with you.”

“I was not a week away in Berlin,” said Conrad, looking down at her while the smoke from the cigarette in his other hand curled up around their heads, “and I was more bored than I can be in a month at home. For my own sake, I must take you with me, wherever I go.” He pinched her chin as a caress, and there before them all she caught the big hand in both hers and pressed her lips to it in a gesture of abject
gratitude
and affection that opened Uncle Eugen’s eyes and caused his son’s wife to look down her nose, while Aunt Christa said
Tsck-Tsck,
and Phoebe went hot and cold with embarrassment that a woman could be so brought to her knees by a man who professed to love her.

When Phoebe still declined to consider going to London she thought she saw a gleam in Prince Conrad’s eye which said that she did not dare because of him. And she wondered now and then, with a passing chagrin, if her obstinate insistence on Cannes might not look to him like the better part of valour, and assured herself that it was nothing of the kind, and that she had no use for him whatever and would not touch him with a barge-pole.

Nothing short of a command from the All-Highest would have made it decent for Conrad and his wife to leave
Heidersdorf
during a family visit like Uncle Eugen’s, but it was necessary for them to start for London at once. By a small miracle of diplomacy, it had been arranged that the Crown Prince and Princess of Germany should represent the Kaiser at the Coronation, though Wilhelm had visited England earlier in the year for the unveiling of the memorial to his
grandmother
in front of Buckingham Palace, and King George had succeeded very well as his host. The German Embassy was of course packed out with the Crown Prince’s entourage, and Rosalind and Conrad were to stay at one of the big ducal
houses in Park Lane until they had time to formulate their own programme.

Unlike the special envoys to the ceremony, Prince Conrad seemed to have no time limit on his stay in England, and assured Rosalind easily that she would have plenty of
opportunity
to see her friends and make visits at Farthingale and the Hall if she liked. I wonder what it means, Phoebe found herself thinking. I wonder why he’s been sent. I wonder … what Bracken would say….

She was to travel with them in their special train as far as Paris, and there she would turn southward towards Cannes while they took the Calais route to England. But it was with an oddly fatalistic feeling, almost without shock, that on the day before their departure from Heidersdorf she received a cable from New York:
Dinah
seriously
ill.
Have
cancelled
sailing.
Please
go
to
London
in
my
place
send
me
Coronation
story,
that’s
a
good
girl.
Name
your
price,
I’ll
double
it.
Love.
BRACKEN.

Still with an absence of surprise that she could not account for, Phoebe showed the cable to Rosalind and accepted her enthusiastic invitation to accompany them all the way to London. Then she cabled Bracken:
Am
on
my
way.
Give
love
to
Dinah.
Address
me
care
Virginia.
PHOEBE. Even while she wrote it, she entertained again the teasing query—Why was Conrad sent to London now? What would Bracken give to know? What would Bracken do to find out? How could she find out … for Bracken? …

She wrote out telegrams to Aunt Sally at Cannes, postponing her visit there, and to Virginia at Farthingale asking to be put up. And when that was done, she sat soberly at the writing-desk in her bedroom at Heidersdorf contemplating the
unforeseen
workings of Providence. Finally she went to stand in front of a mirror, searching her own image with anxious eyes. If Oliver was stationed at Aldershot it was no good saying she might not see him. She would. And how would she look to him, after these nine years? It was no good saying it didn’t matter now. It did.

London
Summer,
1911

T
HERE was no time for Phoebe and Rosalind to shop for new clothes in Paris on the way to London. Prince Conrad’s special train was routed straight through to Calais and they were to go on from there by the turbine, which was said by Conrad in his zealous care for their comfort to be steadier than the Flushing or Ostend boats.

But Phoebe had bought a gay wardrobe in New York for her visit to Germany and the Riviera, and it was so long since Rosalind had been to London that everything she had was as good as new there. Judging by the mountains of luggage which accumulated in her apartments as her maids packed, she was adequately equipped anyway for a Coronation Season. There was even a
jupe-culotte,
which she had got from Paris at Easter time to enliven her convalescence—a delicious tea-gown
variation
of the debated harem skirt, in soft blue satin veiled with a beaded ninon tunic, so high-waisted and low-cut that the bodice was hardly more than a jewelled
ceinture
around the breast, and the skirt was subtly bifurcated with intricate drapery into trousers below the tunic. She was not allowed to wear it at Heidersdorf except when she and Conny were absolutely alone—but he was much diverted by it and inspired to call her
his little blue-eyed houri from paradise, and to recollect
sentimentally
that he had always admired her in trousers. Rosalind intended to wear her
jupe-culotte
in English country houses, where she hoped it would cause a mild sensation and testify to the broadmindedness of her dignified Serene Highness husband.

They arrived in England during Ascot Week, and Archie himself came down to Dover to collect Phoebe, while Prince Conrad and Rosalind were ceremoniously met by their ducal host’s representative and escorted to a reserved compartment in the London train. Phoebe was gratified that Archie had got a reserved compartment of his own, so that on the way up to Town she could ask questions and hear all the family news.

He and Virginia had taken a furnished house in South Audley Street for the Season, and the children were there too. He had booked a table for Cup Night at the Savoy, and Phoebe was sure to see everyone there that she used to know. Edward and Winifred had opened the St. James’s Square house and were giving a ball a few nights after the Coronation. Their son Hubert was at a preparatory school for Eton now, as was his cousin Lionel Flood, and each of them would soon be joined there by a younger brother. Clare was determined that her next child, which had ruined her Season by promising to appear in August, would be a girl, and Clare usually got her way about things, Archie said, so the stork had better watch out. Winifred had been heard to remark that it was a mercy she herself was not expecting now, as it might have prevented her from taking her rightful place as Countess of Enstone in the Abbey at the Coronation, and putting on her coronet along with the other peeresses as the Queen was crowned.

When they reached South Audley Street, where Virginia was awaiting them, Phoebe was taken almost at once to the nursery, and was duly impressed and enchanted by what she found there. Virginia had done everything in the best possible style, producing her own counterpart in dark, slim Daphne, now nine years old, while Irene who was seven had red-gold
curls like her Aunt Dinah, and Nigel, at two, was beginning to look just like Archie and would doubtless, said Phoebe, be called to the Bar in due course.

From Virginia, when Archie had tactfully withdrawn and left them to gossip the night away, Phoebe learned that Dinah in New York had lost her baby but was out of danger now. It wasn’t just that she was so small, she seemed to have injured herself some time ago, perhaps with so much riding, and there had been anxiety from the beginning. The doctors were saying now that side-saddles were very bad for one, and a great many women were learning to ride astride, which Virginia thought must be very uncomfortable, and besides, how would one look from behind?

It was the most extraordinary thing, Virginia continued, but Clare was actually getting on with Mortimer Flood, and she didn’t deserve to, either, for everyone knew she had only married him for his money. But he was kind, and well-
meaning
, and devoted to the children, and made money hand over fist, and Clare had her own motor car and a personal fortune in jewels and dressed at Lanvin and Worth, which was a good thing because she was putting on weight and losing her looks—

“Which you certainly have not done,” Phoebe put in at this point, for Virginia was still slender though she had bloomed and ripened into more pronounced beauty than she had had as a girl.

“Nor have you,” said Virginia promptly. “I like your hair done that way, wrapped round your head. Do you think mine would go up like that? Can you do it yourself?”

“Yes, I’ll show you tomorrow. I’ve been thinking how we’ve changed, though—it’s partly the styles. When I was here before our skirts trailed on the ground—it was a prettier line than now, don’t you think—belts are so high we can’t have any waistlines at all, and we’re supposed to look smaller at the feet than at the hips. Rosalind has a blue
jupe-culotte
from Paris—so marvellously made you can’t be sure the skirt
is
divided, but it is! She says it makes Conny laugh.”

“Do you remember the cakewalk?” said Virginia dreamily.

“Don’t I! That was the start of all the trouble for Rosalind!”

“Is there trouble? I knew there would be! What’s he like, really?”

“He’s only half German,” said Phoebe, trying to be fair. “But sometimes that’s more than enough! And his family—!’ She gave a short, graphic account of life at the
Schloss,
at which Virginia crowed with heartless laughter until she finally broke off to say, “How does she
stand
it? But she must see how funny it is!”

“She does, most of the time, I think,” Phoebe said. “But it isn’t funny, you know, to have to live with it.”

“Why on earth doesn’t she come home oftener and got a breather?” Virginia asked in her innocence, and Phoebe said darkly, “That’s where the German half of him comes out.”

“You mean he won’t
let
her?” Virginia cried incredulously. “But he promised!”

“She says he admits now he would have promised anything to get her.”

“Why, the low-down, lyin’, yellow hound-dawg!” cried Virginia furiously, and Phoebe nodded.

“He is, and then some. But—he can be very fascinating.”

Virginia sniffed, and looked at her suspiciously.

“You haven’t been flirting with Rosalind’s husband!” she accused.

“No, indeed, I’ve spent my time trying to prevent him from flirting with me!”

“Is he
that
kind too?”

“Very much that kind. And jealous along with it. If I had to choose, I think I’d rather be Clare.”

“We all said at the time, if only Rosalind would marry an Englishman!” Virginia sighed, and this brought them to Charles Laverham, who was still at the War Office.

Thus, roundabout, they reached Oliver at Aldershot—and then it was Virginia’s turn again.

“Some day, somebody is going to lay hold of Maia and
bang her head against the wall till her eyes and teeth fall out,” said Virginia. “It might even be me. But never Oliver, poor lamb!”

Phoebe felt her stomach contract suddenly around a cold lump of lead, and said uncertainly, “As bad as that?”

“What we really ought to do,” Virginia went on, “is to maroon His Serene Highness and Maia Campion on a desert island somewhere and let them get on with it together. Talk about jealous! Phoebe, I give you my word, I have seen her go and deliberately sit down between Oliver and some woman he was talking to on a sofa and ask what they found so absorbing to discuss! She calls him to heel in a room full of people, as though he was a bird-dog. Sometimes he doesn’t come at once, and then she goes home without him and doesn’t send the motor back. I’ve heard her make remarks in the worst possible taste before other people about his dinner partner or someone he was legitimately dancing with. I’ve seen her look at him like an assassin when he had merely made his manners to his hostess. I’ve heard her jeer at what she calls his conquests, and name names, I’m warning you, Phoebe, if you give any
indication
that you knew him years ago or were fond of him you’ll have an embarrassing scene on your hands!”

“But, g-good heavens, does he have to put up with it?” Phoebe asked after a stunned silence.

“I think he’s tried everything he knows,” Virginia said. “He doesn’t talk to me about it, of course, and I shouldn’t dare to bring it up. But the last time they stayed with us Archie did try to get at him privately about the way Maia behaved, and Oliver admitted he was at his wits’ end and said that it was really a sort of madness with her, and swore he had never given her any sort of cause. He says it first began to get really bad out in India after the baby died, and Maia imagined that she couldn’t hold him, as she calls it, if she hadn’t got a child. But now they’ve got Hermione, who is a
brat
if I ever saw one, and things are no better, and it’s become impossible to ignore. I wouldn’t have mentioned it except I know you and Oliver
were great friends once,” said Virginia tactfully, “and you must be warned for your own sake, to save unpleasantness.”

“Oh, horrors,” Phoebe said miserably. “Maybe we won’t meet at all, I shan’t be in London long.”

“But they are coming up for Winifred’s ball on the
twenty-sixth
.”

“Oh. Well, I needn’t dance with him, I suppose.”

“It might be better if you didn’t,” Virginia agreed. “He does dance with people, of course, he gives in to her just as little as possible, but you’re laying yourself open to spiteful remarks from her if you do, and he might let fly back at her if she ever got her knife into you—”

“Oh, how
awful,
” Phoebe moaned. “Apart from Maia, how is he?”

“Much the same. She can’t get him down, nothing can. You would never know to look at him that he wasn’t ideally married and not a care in the world. Except around the eyes. They’re a little tired.”

There was a pause, while Phoebe sat trying not to wring her hands over Oliver or otherwise insult his bright spirit by pitying him, and Virginia tried not to watch Phoebe’s tell-tale face, and finally said, “He worships the child—and she’s going to look just like Maia, and screams with rage if she doesn’t get what she wants. No Nannie on earth can cope with it, because Maia is always interfering and bribing Hermione with sweets instead of relying on any sort of discipline. I know, I know, everything I say makes it worse, but it’s just a mess, Phoebe, and you had to know!” And then Virginia added, not altogether irrelevantly, “How’s Miles?”

“All right, I reckon,” said Phoebe, her mind not on Miles. “He’s got a job at the College in Williamsburg now, and is living at Cousin Sue’s house.”

“That’s nice for both of them, isn’t it. Tell me about Gwen’s babies.”

“I haven’t seen them, I’m afraid. Cousin Sue says Rhoda has Gwen’s brown eyes, and the baby is fair, like Fitz. Belle’s twins
are eighteen, doesn’t that make you think? And Marietta’s Audrey is fourteen!”

“Good Lord!” said Virginia, appalled. “She was born the year I came out! Do you ever hear from Johnny Malone?”

“Sometimes. He’s still at Madrid. He says there’s going to be a war.”

“Where?”

“In Europe. The Balkans first, according to Johnny.”

“Oh, Bracken’s been bleating about the Balkans ever since I can remember!” cried Virginia impatiently. “Suppose the Balkans do have a war, it won’t touch England!”

“The big countries might jump in,”. said Phoebe without much conviction. “They call it Spheres of Influence, and the Balance of Power. Russia can’t let Austria come too close on the west, and France would back up Russia, and Germany would help Austria—and so on.”

“Who has England got to help?” Virginia asked sceptically.

“France, I should think. Certainly not Germany. What does Charles say about it now?”

“Charles has gone potty about aeroplanes. He wants the British Army to have whole fleets of them, mounted with guns, as though they were ships. To
fight
with, mind you! When it’s all they can do to stay up!”

“It’s a beastly idea, isn’t it,” said Phoebe with a shiver. “Well, at least I’ll dare to talk to Charles about old times, he hasn’t got a wife to shoo me off! Will he be at Winifred’s ball?”

“Sure to be. But you’ll see him tomorrow night at the Savoy. Lady Shadwell is bringing a party.”

“Is she still
alive?
”

“Very much alive. She has promised Daphne to present her at Court along about 1918, and Daphne is practising already.”

C
UP
N
IGHT
at the Savoy was perhaps the smartest, gayest evening of the London Season, and this was a Coronation Year. Everybody was wearing their best, drinking champagne with supper, greeting friends, talking horses.

Charles was there in Lady Shadwell’s party, looking scrubbed and brushed and Army in his evening black and white—a little heavier in build and a little less tanned than Phoebe remembered him—but very fit. He came across to Archie’s table and took both Phoebe’s hands and said, “Welcome to London,” and “You look beautiful,” with such sincerity that she found herself clinging to him after the handshaking was over and begging him for a chance to
talk.
“Come and have lunch,” said Charles at once, as though he had not a calendar full of appointments at the War Office.

“Yes, please,” said Phoebe with undisguised eagerness.

“How about Monday?” said Charles.

“Yes, please,” said Phoebe.

“One o’clock at the Ritz,” said Charles.

“Thank you,” said Phoebe. “Have you seen Rosalind?”

“Not yet. Am I safe to go and say Hello, do you think?”

“Do it anyhow,” said Phoebe.

“Right you are. Monday. God bless.” Charles moved on down the room, towering, serene.

There was a stir at the Duke’s table as the men all rose when Charles paused there, and the host greeted him affectionately as “my boy” and Prince Conrad offered his hand in a friendly clasp. “Hello, Charles,” said Rosalind, and Charles said, “Hello, nice to see you back in London. Going to be here long?”