The Light Heart (7 page)

B
EFORE
nightfall Oliver was inclined to regret his hasty offer of a horse and the anemones, for he found he could think of nothing else but seeing Virginia’s American cousin again, and he was forced to remind himself that there was no sense in that, because of Maia.

It was a new sensation to Oliver, who had always been a free soul, to have to remember Maia.

Like everybody else, except possibly Maia herself, he was still uncertain exactly how it had happened, though he hated to admit that even to himself. He had been confined to his rooms in London by bad weather and his wound, and Clare insisted that he needed cheering up and would be better off in her Belgrave Square establishment. His batman, on whom he depended for everything, had had a bad go of fever and was able only to creep about to do for them both, and needed a bit of leave himself. Under Clare’s persuasion, Oliver arranged for Simmons to go to his own people near Oxford for a month and allowed himself to be transplanted, bag and baggage, to Clare’s luxurious household, until he should be well enough to leave London and enjoy a bit of air and mild exercise at the Hall.

He had been given his own sitting-room in Clare’s house, and he got very dull in it, keeping rather quiet because of the unhealed hole in his back, playing patience and reading himself blue by choosing all the wrong sort of books. Maia had been a diversion. She was easy to look at, she brought him grapes and gossip, and she poured out his afternoon tea and plumped up his tired pillows and didn’t seem to mind that he was seedy and low in his spirits. Having had very little experience of being ill, Oliver was impressed at how pleasant a woman’s ministrations can be. One day he kissed Maia’s hand as she did him some trifling service, and was not rebuked. The next day when she came her eyes were expectant, and it was raining outside and cosy inside, and life was beginning to flow back into him, and still he was tied to his invalid routine and the doctors wouldn’t let him off the lead—he was bored—she was kind—he was grateful—she was clever, passing so close to his chair as she moved about the room that her soft skirts dragged across his feet, bending above him so that her perfume reached his nostrils, offering his teacup with lingering, manicured hands—sympathetic, entertaining, preferring his company to gayer
surroundings—he said too much—she was too willing—there was no retreat.

After she had gone he sat a while alone in the dusky room, bidding good-bye to certain cherished aspects of his existence—contemplating the possibilities of the new life ahead. He
suspected
within twenty-four hours that he had made a mistake, and promised himself that no one else would ever suspect, least of all Maia. He had always maintained that you could make a life with whatever you had, if you tried. He would have an attractive wife, with money of her own, who knew how to be a pleasant companion and who would be a suitable mother to the children he would like to have before he got much older. What more could a man ask, he would demand of himself in his solitude. The rapture and agony and intricacies of falling wildly in love? That was for people in novels. Besides, he was getting on for that sort of thing—thirty next birthday. Where had the time gone? Where had his love affairs gone? Two or three in India—one or two in Egypt—no better than Maia, any of them, if you came down to it. Except the first. And she had had a husband.

Thus Oliver, a born philosopher with a light heart, assumed the inevitable consequences of making careless love to his sister’s friend, and looked forward with interest to what could be done with a marriage he knew dismayed his relatives. He would show them all. He would be happy with Maia, he would start a family of his own, and the rest of them would see that he knew perfectly well what he was about. You could always be happy with a woman if you took a little trouble to make her happy, unless she was an absolute harpy. All it required was a little care and consideration, a little tact and good management, and a life could be built, a home could be founded. In most countries except England it was seldom done any other way. Sometimes the rapture came later.

And then, sitting on his right hand at a family luncheon party in the country, was this slim grave girl with the dignity and reserve of a princess, and the eyes of a troubled child. What
had given her that look in the eyes, he wondered during the laggard hours which had to elapse between the luncheon and ten o’clock the next morning—patient and good and obedient she looked, as though she had been taught to watch and not touch. It was against nature that a person so young should have so much the look of
waiting,
so that whatever it was she didn’t have you longed to give to her quickly and coax her to smile. She had smiled, of course, at luncheon—they had laughed together more than once—she had beautiful teeth and a cleft in her funny little chin. But she had only laughed on the
surface
, there was something deep and still and unstirred inside her. She must take things very hard, he decided, and that was always a mistake. In his soldier’s fatalistic scheme of things, you had to take life as it came and make the most of it, without wishing it was different, or you would never be happy at all. You lived whatever was ahead of you up to the hilt and enjoyed it the best you could, whether it was a hand-to-hand fight (in which, be sure, there was a certain joy) or a dull spell of footling manoeuvres with never a glimpse of the enemy and with manifold bodily discomforts—or, if it came to that, marrying Maia. There was always something to be said for most of it, and the main thing was, you weren’t dead. But the little American had allowed life to puzzle her. There was something she hadn’t solved. Her search for the solution was visible in her steady, unembarrassed gaze, which questioned and appealed. You wanted to hold out a hand to her and say, Mind the step—now you’re all right—it’s quite safe, just follow me….

Maia always seemed to know exactly where she was going.

All that was chivalrous and tender-hearted in Oliver had risen up to answer the little American’s unconscious need. She seemed to have so much to learn, there seemed to be so much ahead of her, and who was there to see that she didn’t go blundering about in the dark and hurt herself? Because she would hurt herself, she was endlessly vulnerable in her present unfledged state. She hadn’t learned to cut her losses. She hadn’t learned to laugh things off.

He wondered how he knew so much about her, for he had never had second sight before. But long after his lamp was out and the fire had died on his bedroom hearth, he lay in the dark and thought about Phoebe Sprague and how she could be armoured against circumstance. It was not his affair, of course, to try to protect from unknown eventualities a perfectly strange girl who had a large, capable family of her own as a bulwark. But so far they didn’t seem to have been much good to her. They had left her to grope. That was it. Phoebe was groping. And her outstretched, seeking hand had touched his heart. Pleased with the high literary tone of his metaphors, he fell asleep.

The idea of Phoebe as a lost child who must be seen safely into competent hands was waiting beside his pillow when he awoke. While he bathed and shaved and dressed in riding clothes, he turned over in his mind various words of wisdom he might utter during their ride. But you couldn’t just say suddenly, out of the blue, Look here, my dear, life is really a lot easier than you might think. She would question your right to give her advice. She had a right to tell you to mind your own business. Besides—maybe he was all wrong about the girl, maybe the next time he saw her she would have all Virginia’s insouciance, or Rosalind’s heedless ingrained gaiety, or Maia’s cool audacity. He had no real reason to think he knew her inside out on the strength of sitting next to her once at luncheon But he did. That was the funny part. He did know her, right down to the bottom of her transparent soul.

He supposed of course Virginia would have mentioned his engagement to Maia, so there would be no misapprehensions on Phoebe’s part if they saw something of each other while she was at Farthingale. It was a beastly nuisance, though, not being free. A year ago—Oliver paused, with somewhat the sensation of having tripped over his own heart, and stood with a military brush in each hand, looking into his own eyes in the mirror of the chiffonier. A year ago wouldn’t he have
undertaken
to make quite sure that Phoebe Sprague would be
properly looked after for the rest of her life? Good Lord, what have I done, said Oliver to himself in the glass. No. It’s not possible. One
doesn’t fall in love at first sight at my age. Besides, I’m already in love with somebody else. Supposed to be, that is….

He put down the brushes absently and went to stand at the window of his room, which looked out over the sunken garden. This really won’t do, he said to himself in
astonishment
. I must get her off my mind somehow, this is preposterous. The best thing is to see her again and find out how wrong I am and stop imagining things. She doesn’t need me, there are heaps of people to look after her. A girl like that is bound to have a dozen faithful admirers at home….

But somehow he knew she hadn’t. No matter what he told himself, he knew that without him Phoebe Sprague was going to get hurt. And she was certain to be without him.

His heart was beating considerably faster than it had done in the cordon at Tarkastaad as he rode up the chestnut avenue to Farthingale, leading the best horse in Edward’s stables which wore a side saddle, and his lips were drawn in a rather
one-sided
smile. He could not but be amused at his own youthful sensations. He had outgrown all this long ago. Women no longer made his heart beat like that.

But this one did.

P
HOEBE
was waiting for him in the drawing-room, dressed for riding. It occurred to him forcibly all over again how she had the somehow pathetic gravity of all very young things—kittens, puppies, colts—you wanted to laugh, but you felt like crying too, because they were trying so hard.

And Phoebe, who had wakened at dawn feeling as though it was her birthday, and had been unable to go back to sleep, was thinking dizzily as he tossed her into the saddle, But there must be
something
wrong with him,
nobody
could be so good-looking
all the way to his bones—either he’s a heartless flirt, or—or he drinks too much, or—well, no, that would show, wouldn’t it, what sins don’t show, because those are the ones he’s got….

Meanwhile, when they had dealt with the weather and the horses and the state of everybody’s health since yesterday—

“Tell me about your father,” he was saying. “You’ve roused my curiosity about him.”

“I’ve never tried to describe him before,” she confessed, at a loss. “Where I come from, everybody knows him. I did try to write about him once, but Cousin Sue said it wasn’t any use, paper was too cold and flat to hold him. Cousin Sue has had nearly twenty books published,” she added with a certain pride.

“Yes, I know. I was in Egypt the year she came to England, so I never met her. My major did, though—and fell heels over head in love with her, I believe.”

“With
Cousin
Sue?
”
cried Phoebe incredulously. “I never knew about that!”

“Perhaps you weren’t supposed to. Nothing came of it, and he was killed in South Africa, poor chap. I never got it from him, of course, Virginia told me about it after I came back.”

“Does Cousin Sue know he’s dead?”

“Sure to. Bracken would have seen to that, wouldn’t he?”

“She’s never mentioned him.” Phoebe rode in thoughtful silence. “Isn’t it strange what can go on inside of people you see every day and you never suspect a thing! It makes you despair of ever knowing what anyone is really like, inside.”

“Usually it’s none of your business,” he suggested, and she laughed uncertainly.

“That’s true, I suppose. But if you marry someone—it would be convenient to know then, wouldn’t it?”

“Perhaps you do know then, after a time, anyway. I admit Maia is still a closed book to me, but I’ll manage somehow, I hope.” There, that had to be done, in case Virginia had not warned her.

“I—could I ask you a question?” she said hesitantly.

“Anything you like,” he assured her, wondering.

“Well, suppose you had given a girl an engagement ring—your Maia, suppose—and she lost it. What would you do?”

“First, I’d smack her for being so careless. And then I suppose I’d get her another ring. Why?”

“You wouldn’t be angry—or terribly hurt? She wouldn’t—needn’t be afraid to tell you?”

He turned in the saddle and looked at her straightly with those little amber flames in his eyes.

“Look here, are you engaged to somebody? And have you lost the ring?”

“Mm-hm.” She nodded guiltily and her beautiful lower lip came out a little. “To my Cousin Miles back home. I left the ring on the wash-basin in the lavatory on the ship, and when I went back it was gone. I—don’t know what to say to Miles, and I thought you m-might help me.”

“Because I remind you of your father?” he smiled, and her eyes filled piteously.

“Well, we always say nothing ever looks so bad after you’ve told Father,” she said.

“God help me, I’ve no idea what he would say now,” Oliver began. “But as for myself, I should just like to ask, Do you love this fellow Miles and is he in love with you?”

“Yes, of course. What a funny thing to ask. We’re engaged.”

“Then how can there be anything you’re afraid to tell him?”

“Well, for one thing—he’s not like you.”

“And Father,” he interpolated.

“And Father,” she agreed gravely. “You see—Miles always takes things very hard.”

“I wish people wouldn’t do that,” Oliver remarked. “Doesn’t it seem to you that part of growing up is to find some way of facing things and not minding—too much?”

“It’s not good for Miles to be upset,” Phoebe said obstinately.

“Oh, dear, oh, dear,” murmured Oliver, looking straight ahead of him. His jaw was rather set.

“You see, Miles got fever in Cuba,” the hesitant voice beside him went on. “He’s never been well since he got back. He may never be
quite
well again. You have to be careful, because you never know how things are going to strike him.”