A.E.W. Mason - The Summons

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Harry Luttrell smiled.

"But you despise dancing."

"I? I adore it!"

She smiled as she spoke, but she spoke with a queer shyness which took
him off his feet. He slowly tore the letter across and again across and
then into little pieces and carried them to the waste-paper basket.

The action brought home to her with a shock that there was a letter
which she, in her turn, must write, must write and post in that glass
letter-box, oh, without any hesitation or error, this very evening. She
thought upon it with repugnance, but it had to be written and done with.
It was the consequence of her own folly, her own vanity. Harry Luttrell
returned to her but he did not remark the trouble in her face.

"When I left England," he said slowly, "people were dancing the tango.
That is--one couple which knew the dance, was dancing it in the
ball-room, and all the others were practising in the passage. That's
done with, I suppose?"

"Quite," said Joan.

Harry Luttrell heaved a sigh.

"I should have liked to have practised with you in the passage," he said
ruefully.

"Still, there are other dances," Joan Whitworth suggested. "The
one-step?"

"That's going for a walk," said Harry Luttrell.

"In an unusual attitude," Joan added demurely. "Do you know the
fox-trot?"

"A little."

"The twinkle step?"

"Not at all."

"I might teach you that," Joan suggested.

"Oh, do! Teach it me now! Then we'll dance it in the passage."

"But every one will be dancing it in the ball-room," Joan objected.

"That's why," said Harry Luttrell, and they both laughed.

Joan looked towards the gramophone in the corner of the room. She was
tempted, but she must have that letter written first. She would dance
with Harry Luttrell with an uneasy mind unless that letter were written
and posted first.

"Will you put a record ready on the gramophone, whilst I write a note,"
she suggested. "Then I'll teach you. It's quite a short note."

Joan sat in her turn at the writing table. She wrote the first lines
easily and quickly enough. But she came to explanations, and of
explanations she had none to offer. She sat and framed a sentence and it
would not do. Meanwhile the gramophone was open and ready, the record
fitted on to the disc of green baize and her cavalier in impatient
attendance. She must be quick. But the quicker she wanted to be, the
more slowly her thoughts moved amongst awkward sentences which she must
write. She dashed off in the end the standard phrase for such
emergencies. "I will write to you to-morrow," addressed and stamped her
letter and dropped it into the letter box. The letter fell in the glass
box with the address uppermost. But Joan did not trouble about that, did
not even notice it; a weight was off her mind.

"I am ready," she said, and a few seconds later the music of "The Long
Trail" was wafted to the astonished ears of the tennis players in the
garden. They paused in their game and then Dennis Brown crept to the
window of the hall and looked cautiously in. He stood transfixed; then
turned and beckoned furiously. The lawn-tennis players forsook their
rackets, Lady Splay and Stella Croyle their croquet mallets. Dennis
Brown led them by a back way up to the head of the broad stairs. Here a
gallery ran along one side of the hall. Voices rose up to them from the
floor above the music of the gramophone.

Joan's: "That's the twinkle."

Luttrell's: "It's pretty difficult."

"Try it again," said Joan. "Oh, that's ever so much better."

"I shall never dare to dance it with any one else," said Luttrell.

"I really don't mind very much about that," Joan responded dryly.

Millie Splay could hardly believe her ears. Cautiously she and her party
advanced on tiptoe to the balustrade and looked down. Yes, there the
pair of them were, now laughing, now in desperate earnest, practising
the fox-trot to the music of the gramophone.

"Do I hold you right?" asked Harry.

"Well--I shan't break, you know," Joan answered demurely, and then with
a little sigh, "That's better."

Under her breath Stella Croyle murmured passionately, "Oh, you minx!"

As the record ran out a storm of applause burst from the gallery.

"Oh, Joan, Joan," cried Harold Jupp, shaking his head reproachfully.
"There's the poet kicked right across the room."

"Where?" asked Harry Luttrell, looking round for the book.

"Oh, it doesn't matter," said Joan impatiently. "It's only an old volume
of Browning."

Cries of "Shame" broke indignantly from the race-goers, and Joan
received them with imperturbable indifference. Harry Luttrell, however,
went on his knees and discovering the book beneath a distant sofa,
carefully dusted it.

"Did you ever read 'How they Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix'?"
he asked.

The audience in the gallery waited in dead silence for Joan Whitworth's
answer. It came unhesitatingly clear and in a voice of high enthusiasm.

"Isn't it the most wonderful poem he ever wrote?"

The gallery broke into screams, catcalls, hisses and protests against
Joan's shameless recantation.

"It's Browning, of course, but it's not Browning at all, if you
understand me," Dennis Brown exclaimed with every show of indignation;
and the whole party trooped away again to their tennis and their
croquet.

Harry Luttrell placed the book upon a table and turned to Joan.

"Now what would you like to do?" he asked.

Joan shrugged her shoulders.

"We might cut into the next tennis set," she said doubtfully.

"You could hardly play in those shoes," said Harry Luttrell.

Joan contemplated a heel of formidable height. Oh, where were the
sandals of the higher Life?

"No, I suppose not. Of course, there's a--but it wouldn't probably
interest you."

"Wouldn't it?" cried Harry Luttrell.

"Well, it's a maze. Millie Splay is rather proud of it. The hedges are
centuries old." She turned innocent eyes on Harry Luttrell. "I don't
know whether you are interested in old hedges."

It is to be feared that "minx" was the only right word for Joan
Whitworth on this afternoon. Harry Luttrell expressed an intense
enthusiasm for great box hedges.

"But they aren't box, they are yew," said Joan, stopping at once.

Harry Luttrell's enthusiasm for yew hedges, however, was even greater
and more engrossing than his enthusiasm for box ones. A pagoda perched
upon a bank overlooked the maze and a narrow steep path led down into it
between the hedges. Joan left it to her soldier to find the way. There
was a stone pedestal with a small lead figure perched upon the top of it
in the small clear space in the middle. But Harry Luttrell took a deal
of time in reaching it. If, however, their progress was slow, with many
false turnings and sudden stops against solid walls of hedge, it was not
so with their acquaintanceship; each turn in the path brought them on by
a new stage. They wandered in the dawn of the world.

"Suppose that I had never come to Rackham Park!" said Harry Luttrell,
suddenly turning at the end of a blind alley. "I almost didn't come. I
might have altogether missed knowing you."

The terrible thought smote them both. What risks people ran to be sure.
They might never have met. They might have never known what it was to
meet. They might have lived benighted, not knowing what lovely spirit
had passed them by. They looked at one another with despairing eyes.
Then a happy thought occurred to Joan.

"But, after all, you did come," she exclaimed.

Harry Luttrell drew a breath. He was relieved of a great oppression.

"Why, yes," he answered in wonderment. "So I did!"

They retraced their steps. As the sun drew towards its late setting, by
an innocent suggestion from Joan here, a little question there, Harry
Luttrell was manoeuvred towards the centre of the maze. Suddenly he
stopped with a finger on the lips. A voice reached to them from the
innermost recess--a voice which intoned, a voice which was oracular.

"What's that?" he asked in a whisper.

Joan shook her head.

"I haven't an idea."

As yet they could hear no words. Words were flung from wall to wall of
the centre space and kept imprisoned there. It seemed that the presiding
genius of the maze was uttering his invocation as the sun went down.
Joan and Harry Luttrell crept stealthily nearer, Harry now openly guided
by a light touch upon his arm as the paths twisted. Words--amazing
words--became distinctly audible; and a familiar voice. They came to the
last screen of hedge and peered through at a spot where the twigs were
thin. In the very middle of the clear space stood Sir Chichester Splay,
one hand leaning upon the pedestal, the other hidden in his bosom, in
the very attitude of the orator; and to the silent spaces of the maze
thus he made his address:

"Ladies and gentlemen! When I entered the tent this afternoon and took
my seat upon the platform, nothing was further from my thoughts than
that I should hear myself proposing a vote of thanks to our
indefatigable chairman!"

Sir Chichester was getting ready for the Chichester Flower Show, at
which, certainly, he was not going to make a speech. Oh dear, no! He
knew better than that.

"In this marvellous collection of flowers, ladies and gentlemen, we can
read, if so we will, a singular instance of co-ordination and
organisation--the Empire's great needs to-day----"

Harry Luttrell and Joan stifled their laughter and stole away out of
hearing.

"We won't breathe a word of it," said Joan.

"No," said Harry.

They had a little secret now between them--that wonderful link--a little
secret; and to be sure they made the most of it. They could look across
the dinner-table at one another with a smile in which no one else could
have a share. If Sir Chichester spoke, it would be just to kindle that
swift glance in lovers' eyes from which the heart takes fire.
Love-making went at a gallop in nineteen hundred and sixteen; it jumped
the barriers; it danced to a lively and violent tune. Maidens, as Sir
Charles Hardiman had pronounced, had become more primeval. Insecurity
had dropped them down upon the bed-rock elemental truths. Men were for
women, women for men, especially for those men who went out with a
cheery song in their mouths to save them from the hideous destiny of
women in ravaged lands. The soldier was here to-day on leave, and God
alone knew where he would be to-morrow, and whether alive, or perhaps a
crippled thing like a child!

Joan Whitworth and Harry Luttrell had been touched by the swift magic of
those days; he, when he had first seen her in the shining armour of her
youth upon the steps of the stairs; she, when Harry had first entered
the hall and spoken his few commonplace words of greeting. This was the
hour for them, the hour at the well with the desert behind them and the
desert in front, the hour within the measure of which was to be forced
the essence of many days. When they returned to the hall they found most
of the small party gathered there before going up to dress for dinner;
and there was that in the faces of the pair which betrayed them.
Hillyard looked quickly round the hall, as a qualm of pity for Stella
Croyle seized him. But he could not see her. "Thank Heaven she has
already gone up to dress," he said to himself. A marriage between Joan
Whitworth and the Harry Luttrell of to-day, the man freed now from the
great obsession of his life and trained now to the traditional paths,
was a fitting thing, a thing to be welcomed. Hillyard readily
acknowledged it. But he had more insight into the troubled soul of
Stella Croyle than any one else in that company.

"No one's bothering about her," he reflected. "She came here to set up
her last fight to win back Harry. She is now putting on her armour for
it. And she hasn't a chance--no, not one!"

For Harry's sake he was glad. But he was a creator of plays; and his
training led him to seek to understand, and to understand with the
sympathy of his emotions, the points of view of others who might stand
in a contrast or a relation. He walked up the stairs with a heart full
of pity when Millicent Splay caught him up.

"What did I tell you?" she said, brimful with delight. "Just look at
Joan! Is there a girl anywhere who can match her?"

Martin looked down over the balustrade at Joan in the hall below.

"No," he said slowly. "Not one whom I have ever seen."

The little note of melancholy in his voice moved Millie Splay. She was
all kindness in that moment of her triumph. She turned to Martin
Hillyard in commiseration. "Oh, don't tell me that you are in love with
her too! I should be so sorry."

"No, I am not," Martin Hillyard hastened to reassure her, "not one bit."

The commiseration died on the instant in Millicent Splay.

"Well, really I don't see why you shouldn't be," she said coldly. "You
will go a long way before you find any one to equal her."

Her whole attitude demanded of him an explanation of how he dared not to
be in love with her darling.

"A very long way," Martin Hillyard agreed humbly. "All the way
probably."

Lady Splay was mollified, and went on to her room. Down in the hall,
Harry Luttrell turned to Joan.

"This is going to be a wonderful week for me."

"I am very glad," answered Joan, and they went up the stairs side by
side.

CHAPTER XXII

JENNY PRASK

"I have put out the blue dress with the silver underskirt, madam," said
Jenny Prask, knowing well that nothing in Stella Croyle's wardrobe set
off so well her dark and fragile beauty.

"Very well, Jenny."

Stella Croyle answered listlessly. She was discouraged by her experience
of that afternoon. She had come to Rackham Park, certain of one factor
upon her side, but very certain of that. She would find no competitor,
and lo! the invincible competitor, youth, had put on armour against her!
Stella looked in the mirror. She was thirty, and in the circle within
which she moved, thirty meant climbing reluctantly on to the shelf.

"Don't you think, Jenny, the blue frock makes me look old?"

Jenny Prask laughed scornfully.

"Old, madam! You! Just fancy!"

Stella Croyle, living much alone, had made a companion of her maid.
There was nothing of Mrs. Croyle's history which Jenny Prask did not
know, and very few of her hopes and sorrows were hidden from her.

"My gracious me, madam! There will be nobody to hold a candle to you
here!" she said, with a sniff, as she helped Stella to undress.

Stella looked in the glass. Certainly there was not a line upon the
smoothness of her cheeks; her dark hair had lost none of its gloss. She
took her features one by one, and found no trace of change. Nor, indeed,
scrutinised in that way did Stella show any change. It was when you saw
her across a room that you recognised that girlhood had gone, and that
there was a woman in the full ripeness of her beauty.

"Yes," she said, and her listlessness began to disappear. She turned
away from the mirror. "Come, Jenny!" she cried, with a hopeful smile.
She was saying to herself, "I have still a chance."

Jenny rattled on while she assisted her mistress. Stella's face changed
with her mood, more than most faces. Disappointment and fatigue aged her
beyond due measure. Jenny Prask was determined that she could go down to
dinner to-night looking her youngest and best.

"I went for a walk this evening with Mr. Marvin. He's Colonel Luttrell's
soldier-servant, and quite enthusiastic, he was, madam."

"Was he, Jenny?"

"Quite! The men in his company loved him--a captain he was then. He
always looked after their dinner. A bit strict, too, but they don't mind
that."

Jenny was busy with Stella Croyle's hair; and the result satisfied her.

"There won't be anybody else to-night, madam," she said.

"Won't there, Jenny?" said Mrs. Croyle, incredulously. "There'll be Miss
Whitworth."

Jenny Prask sniffed disdainfully.

"Miss Whitworth! A fair sight I call her, madam, if I may say so. I
never did see such clothes! And how she keeps a maid for more than a
week beats me altogether. What I say, madam, is those who button in
front when they should hook behind are a fair washout."

Stella laughed.

"I'm afraid that you'll find, Jenny, that Miss Whitworth will hook
behind to-night."

Jenny went on unaffected by the rejoinder. She had her little item of
news to contribute to the contentment of her mistress.

"Besides, Miss Whitworth is in love with the foreign gentleman. Oh,
madam, if you turn as sharp as that, I can't but pull your hair."

"Which foreigner?"

"That Mario Escobar." Jenny looked over Stella's head and into the
reflection of her eyes upon the mirror. "I don't hold with foreigners
myself, madam. A little ridiculous they always seem to me, with their
chatter and what not."

"And you believe Miss Whitworth's in love with him."

"Outrageous, Mr. Harper says. Quite the talk of the servants' hall, it
is. Why, even this afternoon she wrote him a letter. Mr. Harper showed
it me after he took it out of the letter-box to post it. 'That's her
'and,' says he--and there it was, Mario Escobar, Esquire, the Golden Sun
Hotel, Midhurst----"

"Midhurst?" cried Stella with a start. She looked eagerly at the
reflection of Jenny Prask. "Mr. Escobar is staying in an hotel at
Midhurst?"

"Yes, madam."

"And Miss Whitworth wrote to him there this afternoon?"

"It's gospel truth, madam. May it be my last dying word, if it isn't!"
said Jenny Prask.

The blood mounted into Stella Croyle's face. Since that was true--and
she did not doubt Jenny Prask for a moment--Jenny would have given
anything she had to save her mistress trouble, and Stella knew it. Since
it was true, then, that Mario Escobar was staying hidden away in a
country hotel five miles off, and that Joan was writing to him, why,
after all, she had no rival.

Her spirits rose with a bound. She had a week, a whole week, in the
company of Harry Luttrell; and what might she not do in a week if she
used her wits and used her beauty! Stella Croyle ran down the stairs
like a girl.

Jenny Prask shut the door, and, opening a wardrobe, took from a high
shelf Mrs. Croyle's dressing-bag. She opened it, and from one of the
fittings she lifted out a bottle. The bottle was quite full of a white,
colourless liquid. Jenny Prask nodded to herself and carefully put the
bottle back. There was very little she did not know about the
proceedings of her mistress. Then she went out of the room into the
gallery, and peeped down to watch the other guests assemble. She saw
Miranda Brown, Stella, Sir Chichester Splay, Dennis and Harry Luttrell
come from their different rooms and gather in the hall below. From a
passage behind her, a girl, butterfly-bright, flashed out and danced
joyously down the stairs. A new-comer, thought Jenny, with a pang of
alarm for her mistress! But she heard the new-comer speak, and heard her
spoken to. It was Joan Whitworth.

"Oh!" Jenny Prask gasped.

Undoubtedly Joan "hooked behind" to-night. What had come over her? Jenny
asked. Her quick mind realised that Mario Escobar was not answerable for
the change since Mario Escobar was miles away at Midhurst. Besides,
according to Mr. Harper, this flirtation with Escobar had been going on
a year and more.

Jenny Prask looked from Joan to Harry Luttrell. She saw them drawn to
one another across the hall and move into the dining-room side by side.
She turned back with a little moan of disappointment into Stella
Croyle's bedroom; and whilst she tidied it, more than once she stopped
to wring her hands.

Stella Croyle, however, kept her good spirits through the evening. For
after dinner Harry Luttrell, of his own will, came straight to her in
the drawing-room.

"Oh, Wub," she said in a whisper as she drew her skirt aside to make
room for him upon the couch. "Oh, Wub, what years it is since I have
seen you."

When the old nickname fell upon Harry's ears, he looked quickly about
him to see where Joan Whitworth sat. But she was at the other end of the
room.

"Yes, it is a long time."

"Stockholm!" said Stella, dwelling upon the name. She lowered her voice.
"Wub, I suffered terribly after you went away. Oh, it wasn't a good
time. No, it wasn't!"

"Stella, I am very sorry," he said gently. He knew himself this day the
glories and the pangs of love. He was sunk ocean-deep one moment in the
sense of his unworthiness, the next he knocked his head against the
stars on the soaring billow of his pride. He could not but feel for
Stella, who had passed through the same furnace. He could not but grieve
that the wondrous book of which he was racing through the first pages
had been closed for her by him. Might she not open it again, some time,
with another at her side?

"Wub, tell me what you have been doing all these years," she said.

He began the tale of them in the short, reluctant, colloquial phrases
which the English use to strip their achievements of any romantic
semblance until Millicent Splay sailed across the room and claimed him
for a table of bridge.

"He will be safer there," she said to herself.

"Yes, but she had to take him away," Stella's thoughts responded. She
was dangerous then in Millie Splay's judgment. The sweet flattery set
Stella smiling. She went up to her room rejoicing that she had chosen
that week to visit Rackham Park. She was playing a losing game, but she
did not know it.

Thus the very spirit of summer seemed to inform the gathering. Saturday
brought up no clouds to darken the clear sky. Harold Jupp and Dennis
Brown actually scored four nice wins at Gatwick on horses which, to
celebrate the week, miraculously ran to form. Miranda under these
conditions would have inevitably lost, but by another stroke of fortune
no horse running had any special blemish, name, colour or trick
calculated to inspire her. Sir Chichester was happy too, for he saw a
lady reporter write down his name in her notebook. So was Mr. Albany
Todd. For he met the Earl of Eltringham, with whom he had a passing
acquaintance; and his lordship, being complimented upon his gardens, of
which _Country Life_ had published an account, was moved to say in the
friendliest manner: "You must propose yourself for a week-end, Mr. Todd,
and see them."

As for Joan and Harry Luttrell, it mattered little where they were, so
that they were together. They walked in their own magical garden.

It fell to Martin Hillyard to look after Stella Croyle, and the task was
not difficult. She kept her eyes blindfold to what she did not wish to
see. She had a chance, she said to herself, recollecting her talk with
Harry last night, and the news of Joan which Jenny Prask had given to
her. She had a chance, if she walked delicately.

"Old associations--give them opportunity, and they renew their
strength," she thought. "Harry is afraid of them--that's all."

On the Monday evening Jenny Prask brought a fresh piece of gossip which
strengthened her hopes.

"Miss Whitworth had a letter from him this morning," said Jenny. "She
wouldn't open it at the breakfast-table, Mr. Harper says. Quite upset
she was, he says. She took it upstairs to her room just as it was."

"It might have been from some one else," answered Stella.

"Oh, no, madam," replied Jenny. "It had the Midhurst postmark, and Mr.
Harper knows his handwriting besides. Mr. Harper's very observant."

"He seems to be," said Stella.

"Miss Whitworth answered the letter at once, and took it out to the
village and posted it with her own hands," Jenny continued.

"Are you sure?" cried Mrs. Croyle.

"I saw her go with my own eyes, I did. She went in her own little
runabout, and was back in a jiffy, with a sort of 'There-I've-done-it!'
look about her. Oh, there's something going on there, madam--take my
word for it! She's a deep one, Miss Whitworth is, and no mistake. Will
you wear the smoke-grey to-night, madam? I am keeping the pink for the
ball on Thursday."

Stella allowed a moment or two to pass before she answered.

"I shan't go to the Willoughbys' ball, Jenny."

Jenny Prask stared in dismay.

"You won't, madam!"

"No, Jenny. But I want you to be careful not to mention it to any one. I
shall dress as if I was going, but at the last moment I shall plead a
headache and stay behind."

"Very well, madam," said Jenny. But it seemed to her that Stella was
throwing down her arms. Stella, however, had understood, upon hearing of
the invitation for Lady Splay's party, that she could do nothing else.
The Willoughbys were strict folk. Mrs. Croyle could hardly hope to go
without some rumour of her history coming afterwards to the ears of that
family; and the family would hold her presence as a reproach against
Millie Splay. Stella had herself proposed her plan to Millie, and she
noted the relief with which it was received.

"You will be careful not to mention it to a soul, Jenny," Stella
insisted.

"My goodness me, madam, I never talk," replied Jenny. "I keep my ears
open and let the others do that."

"I know, Jenny," said Stella, with a smile. "I can't imagine what I
should do without you."

"And you never will, madam, unless it's your own wish and doin'," said
Jenny heartily. "I have talked it over with Brown"--Brown was Mrs.
Croyle's chauffeur--"and he's quite willin' that I should go on with you
after we are married."

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