Deadham Hard by Lucas Malet

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This drive, the prelude to Henrietta's campaign, presented that lady at
her best. The advantage of being--as Henrietta--essentially artificial,
is that you can never, save by forgetful lapse into sincerity, be untrue
to yourself. Hence what a saving of scruples, of self-accusation, of
self-torment! Her plans once fixed she proceeded to carry them out with
unswerving ease and spontaneity. She refused to hurry, her only
criterion of personal conduct being success; and success, so she
believed, if sound, being a plant of gradual growth. Therefore she gave
both herself and others time. Once fairly in the saddle, she never
strained, never fussed.

Her cue to-day was to offer information rather than to require it.
Curious about many things she might be; but gratification of her
curiosity must wait. Damaris, on her part, listened eagerly, asking
nothing better than to be kept amused, kept busy, helped to forget.--Not
Faircloth's letter--very, very far from that!--but the inward conflict of
opposing loves, opposing duties, which meditation upon his letter so
distractingly produced. Relatively all, outside that conflict and the
dear cause of it, was of small moment--mere play stuff at best. But her
brain and conscience were tired. She would be so glad, for a time, only
to think about play stuff.

"I want you to go on being kind to Marshall Wace," Henrietta in the
course of conversation presently said. "He told me how charmingly you
received him yesterday, when he called with my note. He was so pleased.
He is exaggeratedly sensitive owing to unfortunate family complications
in the past."

Damaris pricked up her ears, family complications having latterly
acquired a rather painful interest for her.

"Poor man--I'm sorry," she said.

"His mother, a favourite cousin of my husband, General Frayling, married
an impossible person--eloped with him, to tell the truth. Her people, not
without reason, were dreadfully put out. The children were brought up
rather anyhow. Marshall did not go to a public school, which he imagines
places him at a disadvantage with other men. Perhaps it does. Men always
strike me as being quaintly narrow-minded on that subject. Later he was
sent to Cambridge with the idea of his taking Orders and going into the
Church. My husband's elder brother, Leonard Frayling, is patron of
several livings. He would have presented Marshall to the first which fell
vacant, and thus his future would have been secured. But just as he was
going up for deacon's orders, Marshall, rather I can't help feeling like
a goose, developed theological difficulties. They were perfectly genuine,
I don't doubt; but they were also singularly ill-timed--a little earlier,
a little later, or not at all would have been infinitely more convenient.
So there he was, poor fellow, thrown on the world at three-and-twenty
with no profession and no prospects; for my brother-in-law washed his
hands of him when the theological difficulties were announced. Marshall
tried bear-leading; but people are not particularly anxious to entrust
their boys to a non-public school man afflicted by religious doubts. He
thought of making use of his really exquisite voice and becoming a public
singer; but the training is fearfully expensive, and so somehow that plan
also fell through. For a time I am afraid he was really reduced to great
straits, with the consequence that he broke down in health. Through
friends, my husband got to hear of Marshall's miserable
circumstances--shortly after our marriage it was--and felt it incumbent
upon him to go to the rescue."

Henrietta paused, thereby giving extra point to what was to follow, and
pulled the fur rug up absently about her waist.

"For the last eighteen months," she said, "Marshall has practically
made his home with us. The arrangement has its drawbacks, of course.
For one thing the General and I are never alone, and that is a trial to
us both. Two's company and three's none. When a husband and wife are
really devoted they don't want always to have a third wheel to the
domestic cart."

Then, as if checking further and very natural inclination to repining,
she looked round at Damaris, smiling from behind her thick white net veil
with most disarming sweetness.

"No--no--I'm not naughty. I don't mean to complain about it," she
prettily protested. "For I do so strongly feel if one sets out to do good
it shouldn't be by driblets, with your name, in full, printed in
subscription lists against every small donation. You should plump for
your _protege_, and that with the least ostentation possible. The General
and I are careful not to let people know Marshall stays with us as a
guest. It is rather a slip speaking of it even to you; but I can trust
you not to repeat what I say. I am sure of that."

Damaris laid a hand fondly, impulsively upon the elder woman's knee.

"For certain you can trust me. For certain anything you say to me is just
between our two selves. I should never dream of repeating it."

"There speaks the precious downy owl of long ago," Mrs. Frayling brightly
cried, "bustling up in defence of its own loyalty and honour. Ah!
Damaris, how very delicious it is to have you with me!"

For, her main point having been made, she now adroitly discarded pathos.
Another word regarding her philanthropic harbourage of the young man,
Marshall Wace, remained to be spoken--but not yet. Let it come in later,
naturally and without hint of insistence.

"We must be together as much as possible during the next few weeks," she
went on--"as often as Sir Charles can be persuaded to spare you to me.
Whether the General and I shall ever make up our minds to settle down in
a home of our own, where I could ask you to stay with us, I don't know.
I'm afraid we are hopelessly nomadic. Therefore I am extra anxious to
make the most of the happy accident which has thrown us together, anxious
to get every ounce possible of intercourse out of it.--We quite
understand you have luncheon with me on Thursday, don't we?--and that you
stay and help me through the afternoon. I am always at home on Thursdays
to the neighbours. They aren't all of them conspicuously well-bred or
exciting; but I have learnt to take the rough with the smooth, the boring
along with the gifted and brilliant. India is a good school in which to
learn hospitality. The practise of that virtue becomes a habit. And I for
one quite refuse to excuse myself from further exercise of it on coming
back to Europe. The General feels with me; and we have laid ourselves out
to be civil to our compatriots here at St. Augustin this winter. A few
people were vexatiously stiff and starched at first; but each one of them
has given in, in turn. They really do, I believe, appreciate our little
social efforts."

"Who wouldn't give in to you Henrietta?" Damaris murmured.

Whereupon Mrs. Frayling delicately beamed on her; and, agreeable
unanimity of sentiment being thus established, conversation between the
two ladies for a while fell silent.

The little chestnut horses, meantime, encouraged with "Oh he-s" and "Oh
la-s" by their driver, trotted and climbed, climbed and trotted, until
the woodland lay below and the Signal de la Palu was reached. A wide
level space on a crest of the foot-hills--with flag staff bearing the
valorous tricolor, and rustic log-built restaurant offering
refreshment--opening upon the full splendour of the Maritime Alps.

Damaris stepped out of the carriage, and, patting the near horse on the
neck in passing, went forward across the sparse turf, starred with tiny
clear coloured flowers, to the edge of the platform.

The Provencal coachman, from his perch on the box-seat of the victoria,
his rough-caste crumpled countenance sun-baked to the solid ruddy brown
of the soil of his own vineyard, followed her movements with approving
glances.--For she was fresh as an opening rose the young English _Mees_,
and though most elegant, how agile, how evidently strong!

Innocent of the admiration she excited, Damaris stood absorbed, awed
even, by the grandeur of the scene. Many hundred feet below, the rent
chasm down which it took its course steeped in violet gloom, the
milk-white waters of an ice-fed river impetuously journeyed to the
fertile lowlands and the sea. Opposite, across the gorge, amazingly
distinct in the pellucid atmosphere, rose the high mountains, the
undefiled, untrodden and eternal snows. Azure shadow, transparent,
ethereal, haunted them, bringing into evidence enormous rounded shoulder,
cirque, crinkled glacier, knife-edge of underlying rock.

They belonged to the deepest the most superb of life, this rent gorge,
these mountains--like Faircloth's letter. Would beautiful and noble
sights, such as these, always in future give her an ache of longing for
the writer of that letter, for the romance, the poetry, of the
unacknowledged relation he bore to her? Tears smarted hot in Damaris'
eyes, and resolutely, if rather piteously, she essayed to wink them away.
For to her it just now seemed, the deepest, the most superb of life was
also in great measure the forbidden. The ache must be endured, then, the
longing go unsatisfied, since she could only stay the pain of them by
doing violence to plain and heretofore fondly cherished, duties.

But her tears defied the primitive process of winking. Not so
cheaply could she rid herself of their smart and the blurred
distorted vision they occasioned. She pulled out her handkerchief
petulantly and wiped them. Then schooled herself to a colder, more
moderate and reasonable temper.

And, so doing, her thought turned gratefully to Mrs. Frayling. For
mercifully Henrietta was here to help fill the void; to, in a manner,
break her fall. Henrietta didn't belong to the depths or the heights,
that she regretfully admitted. With the eternal snows she possessed
little or nothing in common. But, at a lower, more everyday level, had
not she a vast amount to offer, what with her personal loveliness, her
social cleverness, her knowledge of the world and its ways? She might not
amount to the phoenix of Damaris' childhood's adoration; but she was very
friendly, very diverting, delightfully kind. Damaris honestly believed
all these excellent things of her.--She had been stupidly fastidious
three days ago, and failed to do Henrietta justice. What she had
learned--by chance--this afternoon, of Henrietta's unselfishness and
generous treatment of Marshall Wace bore effectively convincing witness
to the sweetness of her disposition and kindness of her heart. Damaris
felt bound to make amends for that unspoken injustice, of which she now
repented. How better could she do so than by giving herself warmly,
without reserve or restraint, in response to the interest and attention
Henrietta lavished upon her?--At eighteen, to be wooed by so finished and
popular a person was no mean compliment.--She wouldn't hold back,
suspicious and grudging; but enjoy all Henrietta so delightfully offered
to the uttermost.

And there, as though clenching the conclusion thus arrived at, Mrs.
Frayling's voice gaily hailed her, calling:

"Damaris, Damaris, here is our tea--or rather our coffee. Come, darling
child, and partake before it gets cold."

So after a brief pause, spent in determined looking, the girl bowed her
head in mute farewell; and turned her back perhaps courageously, perhaps
unwisely and somewhat faithlessly, upon the mountains, and the rare
mysteries of their untrodden snows. She went across the sparse turf,
starred with tiny clear, coloured flowers, her face stern, for all its
youthful bloom and softness, her eyes meditative and profound.

The owner of the log-built restaurant, a thick-set, grizzled veteran of
the Franco-Prussian war, the breast of his rusty velveteen jacket proudly
bearing a row of medals, stood talking to Mrs. Frayling, hat in hand. His
right foot had suffered amputation some inches above the ankle, and he
walked with the ungainly support of a crutch-topped peg-leg strapped to
the flexed knee.

As Damaris approached the carriage, he swept back the fur rug in
gallantly respectful invitation; and, so soon as she ensconced herself on
the seat beside Henrietta, bending down he firmly and comfortably tucked
it round her. He declared, further, as she thanked him, it an honour in
any capacity to serve her, since had not Madame, but this moment, so
gracefully informed him of the commanding military career of the
Mademoiselle's father, possessor of that unique distinction the Victoria
Cross--a person animated, moreover, as Madame reported, by sincere
sympathy for the tragic sorrows of well-beloved and so now cruelly
dismembered France.

Damaris heard, in this singing of her father's praises, a grateful
reconciling strain. She found it profitable, just now, to recall the
heroic deeds, the notable achievements which marked his record. Her
coffee tasted the more fragrant for it, the butter the fresher, the
honey the sweeter wherewith she spread the clean coarse home-baked bread.
She ate, indeed, with a capital appetite, the long drive and stimulating
air, making her hungry. Possibly even her recent emotion contributed to
that result; for in youth heartache by no means connotes a disposition
towards fasting, rather does diet, generous in quantity, materially
assist to soothe its anguish.

This meal, in fact, partaken of in the open, alone with Henrietta,
object of her childhood's idolatry--the first they had shared since
those remote and guileless years--assumed to Damaris a sacramental
character, though of the earthly and mundane rather than transcendental
kind. Its communion was one of good fellowship, of agreement in
cultivation of the lighter social side; which, upon our maiden's part,
implied tacit consent to conform to easier standards than those until
now regulating her thought and action, implied tacit acceptance of
Henrietta as example and as guide.

Whether the latter would have found cause for self-congratulation, could
she have fathomed the precise cause of this apparently speedy conquest
and speedy surrender, is doubtful; since it, in fact, took its rise less
in the fascination of devotion given, than in that of devotion denied.
She happened to be here on the spot at a critical juncture, and thus to
catch the young girl's heart on the rebound. That was all--that, joined
with Damaris' instinctive necessity to play fair and pay in honest coin
for every benefit received.

So much must be said in extenuation of our nymph-like damsel's apparent
subjection to levity--a declension which, in the sequel and in certain
quarters, went neither unnoticed nor undeplored. But to labour this point
is to forestall history. Immediately her change of attitude announced its
existence innocently enough. For the sacramental meal once consumed, and
courteous parting words bestowed upon the valiant soldier broken in his
country's wars, the coachman mounted the box, and gathering up the reins,
with "Ho he's" and "ho la's," swung his horses half round the level and
plunged them over the hill-side, along a steep woodland track, leading by
serpentine twists and curves down to join the Corniche Road--a blonde
ribbon rimming the indentations of the five-mile distant coast.

Damaris steadied herself well back on the seat of the carriage as it
swayed and bumped over ruts and tree-roots to the lively menace of its
springs. She studiously kept her face turned towards her companion, a
myrtle-green shoulder as studiously turned towards the view. For she
found it wiser not even to glance in that direction, lest rebellious
regrets and longings should leap on her across the violet-blotted abyss
from out those shining Alpine citadels. While to strengthen herself in
allegiance to Mrs. Frayling and to, what may be called, the lighter side,
she pushed one hand into that lady's muff and coaxed the slender
pointed-fingers hiding in the comfortable pussy-warmth within.

"Tell me stories, Henrietta, please," she entreated, "about all the
people whom you've asked to your party on Thursday. Dress them up for me
and put them through their paces, so that I may know who they all are
when I see them and make no mistakes, but behave to them just as you
would wish me to."

"Gradate your attentions and not pet the wrong ones?"

Mrs. Frayling gave gentle squeeze for squeeze in the pussy-warmth,
laughing a trifle impishly.

"You sinful child," she said--"Gracious, what jolts--my spine will soon
be driven through the top of my skull at this rate!--Yes, sinful in
tempting me to gibbet my acquaintances for your amusement."

"But why gibbet them? Aren't they nice, don't you care for them?"

"Prodigiously, of course. Yet would you find it in the least interesting
or illuminating if I indexed their modest virtues only?"

"I think the old soldier found it both interesting and illuminating when
you indexed my father's virtues just now."

"Sir Charles's virtues hardly come under the head of modest ones," Mrs.
Frayling threw off almost sharply. "Give me someone as well worth
acclaiming and I'll shout with the best! But you scarcely quote your
father as among the average, do you?--The people whom you'll meet on
Thursday compared to him, I'm afraid, are as molehills to the mountains
yonder. If I described them by their amiable qualities alone they'd be as
indistinguishable and as insipid as a row of dolls. Only through their
aberrations, their unconscious perfidies, iniquities, do they develop
definiteness of outline and begin to live. Oh! nothing could be unkinder
than to whitewash them. Take Mrs. Callowgas, for instance, with one eye
on the Church, the other on the world. The permanent inconsistency of her
attitude, as I may say her permanent squint, gives her a certain _cachet_
without which she'd be a positive blank.--She is most anxious to meet
you, by the way, and Sir Charles--always supposing he is self-sacrificing
enough to come--because she knows connections of his and yours at
Harchester, a genial pillar of the Church in the form of an Archdeacon,
in whom, as I gather, her dear dead Lord Bishop very much put his trust."

"Tom Verity's father, I suppose," Damaris murmured, her colour rising,
the hint of a cloud too upon her brow.

"And who may Tom Verity be?" Mrs. Frayling, noting both colour and cloud,
alertly asked.

"A distant cousin. He stayed with us in the autumn just before he went
out to India. He passed into the Indian Civil Service from Oxford at the
top of the list."

"Praiseworthy young man."

"Oh! but you would like him, Henrietta," the girl declared. "He is very
clever and very entertaining too when"--

"When?"

"Well, when he doesn't tease too much. He has an immense amount to talk
about, and very good manners."

"Also, when he does not tease too much?--And you like him?"

"I don't quite know," Damaris slowly said. "He did not stay with us
long enough for me to make up my mind. And then other things happened
which rather put him out of my head. He was a little conceited, perhaps,
I thought."

"Not unnaturally, being at the top of the pass list. But though other
things put him out of your head, he writes to you?"

In the pussy-warmth within her muff, Mrs. Frayling became sensible
that Damaris' hand grew unresponsive, at once curiously stiff and
curiously limp.

"He has written twice. Once on the voyage out, and again soon after he
arrived. The--the second letter reached me this week."

Notwithstanding sunshine, the eager air, and lively bumping of the
descent, Henrietta observed the flush fade, leaving the girl white as
milk. Her eyes looked positively enormous set in the pallor of her face.
They were veiled, telling nothing, and thereby--to Mrs. Frayling's
thinking--betraying much. She scented a situation--some girlish
attachment, budding affair of the heart.

"My father gave Tom Verity letters of introduction, and he wanted us to
know how kindly he had been received in consequence."

"Most proper on his part," Mrs. Frayling said.

She debated discreet questioning, probing--the establishment of herself
in the character of sympathetic confidante. But decided against that. It
might be impolitic, dangerous even, to press the pace. Moreover the young
man, whatever his attractions, might be held a negligible quantity in as
far as any little schemes of her own were concerned at present, long
leave and reappearance upon the home scene being almost certainly years
distant.--And, just there, the hand within the muff became responsive
once more, even urgent in its seeking and pressure, as though appealing
for attention and tenderness.

"Henrietta, I don't want to be selfish, but won't you go on telling me
stories about your Thursday party people?--I interrupted you--but it's
all new, you see, and it interests me so much," Damaris rather
plaintively said.

Mrs. Frayling needed no further inducement to exercise her really
considerable powers of verbal delineation. Charging her palette with
lively colours, she sprang to the task--and that with a sprightly
composure and deftness of touch which went far to cloak malice and rob
flippancy of offence.

Listening, Damaris brightened--as the adroit performer intended she
should--under the gay cascade of talk. Laughed at length, letting finer
instincts of charity go by the wall, in her enjoyment of neatly turned
mockeries and the sense of personal superiority they provoked. For
Henrietta's dissection of the weaknesses of absent friends, inevitably
amounted to indirect flattery of the friend for whose diversion that
process of dissection was carried out.

She passed the whole troop in review.--To begin with Miss Maud Callowgas,
in permanent waiting upon her ex-semi-episcopal widowed mother--in age a
real thirty-five though nominal twenty-eight, her muddy complexion,
prominent teeth and all too long back.--Her designs, real or imagined,
upon Marshall Wace. Designs foredoomed to failure, since whatever his
intentions--Henrietta smiled wisely--they certainly did not include Maud
Callowgas's matrimonial future in their purview.

Herbert Binning followed next--the chaplain who served the rather staring
little Anglican church at Le Vandou, a suburb of St. Augustin much
patronized by the English in the winter season, and a chapel somewhere in
the Bernese Oberland during the summer months. Energetic, athletic, a
great talker and squire of dames--in all honesty and correctness, this
last, well understood, for there wasn't a word to be breathed against the
good cleric's morals. But just a wee bit impressionable and flirtatious,
as who might not very well be with such a whiney-piney wife as Mrs.
Binning, always ailing; what mind she might (by stretch of charity) be
supposed to possess exclusively fixed upon the chronic irregularities of
her internal organs? Recumbency was a mania with her and she had a
disconcerting habit of wanting to lie down on the most inconveniently
unsuitable occasions.--To mitigate his over-flowing energies, which cried
aloud for work, Mr. Binning took pupils. He had two exceptionably nice
boys with him this winter, in the interval between leaving Eton and going
up to Oxford, namely, Peregrine Ditton, Lord Pamber's younger son, and
Harry Ellice, a nephew of Lady Hermione Twells. They were very well-bred.
Their high spirits were highly infectious. They played tennis to
perfection and Harry Ellice danced quite tidily into the
bargain.--Damaris must make friends with them. They were her
contemporaries, and delightfully fresh and ingenuous.

Lady Hermione herself--here Henrietta's tone conveyed restraint, even
comparative reverence--who never for an instant forgot she once had
reigned over some microscopic court out in the far Colonial
wilderness, nor allowed you to forget it either. Her glance half
demanded your curtsy. Still she was the "real thing" and, in that,
eminently satisfactory--genuine _grande dame_ by right both of birth
and of training.

"She won't condescend to tell me so, being resolved to keep me very much
in my proper place," Henrietta continued; "but I learned yesterday from
Mary Ellice--Harry's sister, who lives with her--that she is intensely
desirous to meet Sir Charles. She wants to talk to him about Afghanistan
and North-west Frontier policy. A brother of hers it appears was at one
time in the Guides; and she is under the impression your father and
Colonel Carteret would have known him.--By the way, dearest child, they
do mean to honour me, those two, don't they, with their presence on
Thursday?"

"Of course they will, since you asked them. Why, they love to come
and see you."

"Do they?" Mrs. Frayling said--"Anyhow, let us hope so. I can trust
Carteret's general benevolence, but I am afraid your father will be
unutterably bored with my rubbishing little assembly."

"But, of course, he'll be nice to everybody too--as tame and gentle as
possible with them all to please you, don't you see, Henrietta."

"Ah! no doubt, all to please me!" she repeated. And fell to musing,
while the carriage, quitting at last the rough forest track, rattled out
on to the metalled high road, white in dust.

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