‘I?’
‘Colonel Hebden has expressed a wish to make your acquaintance, as a friend of Mr Voss, the lost explorer, for whom he has been searching.’
‘I?’ repeated Miss Trevelyan. ‘But I fail to see how I can be of use or interest. It is all done with. I knew the person in question very slightly. He dined once at my uncle’s house.’
‘It is the Colonel’s wish,’ Miss Linsley said. ‘And I cannot disappoint Mrs de Courcy, who, I am told, is the widow of a judge.’
‘I,’ said Miss Trevelyan, ‘I am confused.’
As she went to her room, to revive herself for morning school with thought and cold water, several little girls who greeted her were frightened by the wind of her skirts, as well as surprised at her appearance, for her skin had turned a dark brown. But in her room, the mistress realized how little she knew herself, for she did wish to be questioned by the Colonel, though trembling already for the consequences, whatever they might prove to be.
Very quickly the day was upon them. As she waited in the hall for Miss Trevelyan and the hired carriage, Mary Hebden, in a pretty gauffered hat, thought she might be sick upon the sweating stones. She sat very formally, however, the starch of her best petticoat cutting cruelly into her knee, in every way a worthy sacrifice to Mrs de Courcy’s gathering.
Mrs de Courcy, a lady in comfortable circumstances, was herself excited, though not at the prospect of her party, for she entertained a good deal. She was moved, rather, by the presence of her cousin, Colonel Hebden, a tall, copper-coloured gentleman of a distinguished ugliness, who had done such a brave thing in going off into the bush after the lost explorer, not at all a desirable individual, she understood, and a foreigner as well.
‘You are singularly uncommunicative on the subject of your expedition,’ she now complained to the Colonel, whom she had bidden early, so that she might enjoy looking at him, and hearing things that other people would not. ‘Did you find nothing?’
‘A button under a tree,’ said the Colonel, who could not take delightful women seriously.
Moreover, he had at one time allowed himself to be persuaded that his cousin was the most delightful of all.
‘A button? If I am such an idiot!’ protested Mrs de Courcy. ‘You are an exasperating wretch, Hugo. But I shall stop pestering, since I am not a person to be trusted with information of significance.’
‘You cannot expect a man returned from the bush to be obsessed by information of significance when faced with whipped cream,’ Colonel Hebden replied.
‘Yet, you are obsessed,’ said Mrs de Courcy, whom he had intended to please.
A woman of some intelligence, she had set to work early in life to disguise her share of intellect, out of regard for the exigencies of Society, and a liking for the company of men. Such ruthlessness was almost justified by her triumphs as a hostess, the success of her late husband’s career, to which she had devoted herself unceasingly, and the continued admiration of all gentlemen. If most ladies were guarded, if not actually cold in their relationships with Mrs de Courcy, it suited her, for ladies did not enter into her scheme, except to keep the ball rolling through the hoops of social intercourse.
‘Obsessed,’ she repeated, patting a bow of the dress which she could no longer feel suited her.
‘I have lost the habit of civilized life,’ explained the Colonel.
‘You are in love with the country!’ cried Mrs de Courcy, with deliberate raucousness, making it sound like a lesson a parrot had learnt.
Today, however, he was not pleased by a display of mere skill.
‘If you had been a man, Effie, you might have become an explorer. You are sufficiently tenacious. Your thirst for conquest would have carried you over the worst of actual thirst.’
‘Though my character may be nasty enough, as you suggest, I would have become an explorer out of sheer boredom,’ Mrs de Courcy broke in.
‘Voss appears to have been inspired.’
‘Oh, Voss, Voss, Voss! And noble You? Do not tell me that you are not inspired also!’
‘I am a tentative explorer,’ said the Colonel, quite humbly for an imposing man, ‘or less than that, even — one who follows in the tracks of another, not so much to find him alive at the end, as to satisfy curiosity.’
‘You are honest,’ cried his companion, ‘and that is why I love you.’
That you no longer love me, and I am not honest enough to admit, was what she did not add.
Instead, she said, extending her throat, until it reached the point where youth returns:
‘I have a surprise for you.’
The Colonel expressed gratitude, even though he did not hope to experience surprise.
‘Strawberries,’ he said, dutifully.
‘Strawberries, certainly. But also a bitter draught. At least, I am told it is bitter by those who know. A young woman who was acquainted with your German. How intimately, those who are close to her refuse to admit. But it is common knowledge that they were conducting a correspondence.’
‘This is capital, Effie!’ shouted the Colonel, at last forgetful of the furniture.
‘Oh, yes,’ said Effie. ‘Capital. Then I shall claim my reward.’
And did.
Just then, one of the three old servants who had waited on Mrs de Courcy for years came to announce the arrival of the first guests. The mistress was unperturbed, since old Margery, although still able to function so admirably at her duties, was almost deaf and blind, as well as unsurprised.
‘Let us go down, then,’ said the hostess to Colonel Hebden, not without glancing moist-eyed at herself in a convenient glass, ‘let us go down and allow the worthy people to demolish what remains.
‘The young woman, by the way,’ she thought to add, ‘is under the impression that it is you who have sent for her.’
‘If it were I, not you, the situation could be embarrassing.’
‘I do not doubt that, in either event.’
As he followed his cousin, the Colonel was busily lowering his head to avoid cracking it upon the lintels, and in consequence did not attempt to prolong the conversation.
Guests were arriving all the time. The more established among them stood about between the flower-beds, on the springy lawns, and examined with an exaggerated interest the magnificent shrubs for which Mrs de Courcy’s garden was famed, while others pretended not to eye the tea-tables, which had been set up beneath the natural canopy of a weeping elm. Except for an enormous silver urn, ornamented with shells, wreaths, and mythical figures in a variety of positions, the load of these tables was protected from flies and eyes by nets, so weighted with festoons of little crystal beads that the valleys were green with mystery and the snowy peaks thrillingly exposed. While some of her guests were indulging in the ecstasies of soul that such a garden usually provokes, and others wondered whether they were correctly buttoned or whether to recognize the Joneses, Mrs de Courcy regarded everything as inevitably humorous, weaving in and out, in her expensive dress, refusing to countenance a segregation of the sexes, ladies who would talk bonnets and preserves, or gentlemen who must discuss wool and weather. Such was the skill of the hostess, everyone was soon daringly mixed, and in no time had she organized a game of croquet for the completely inarticulate.
‘I cannot bear it if we are a mallet short. Perhaps Mr Rankin will look in the little summer-house behind the tea trees. I see that he is the practical one.’
Young girls fell to neighing.
With her experience behind her, and a cool southerly breeze, the hostess could not help but succeed. Simple people, worthy tradesmen and their wives, and sheep-and-bullocky gentlemen from the country, were prevented by their very simplicity from wondering whether Mrs de Courcy might be considered fast, whereas those others who were of the same worldly category as herself were always far too busily engaged to notice. She was accepted, then, through ignorance and by collusion, and should have been satisfied. Yet she would sometimes halt within the frame of the conventions, like some imperious lily and, while eyes admired her for her beads and spangles, know that she would have preferred the summer’s coup de grâce.