Part 14

“Cakes,” commanded the Duke of Bolingham in a voice that would have raised cakes from the stone flags. “Will you have a maid, Biddy?”

“Whatever for?” inquired Biddy with candid interest. “I’ve still the use of all ten of my fingers, and you’d be there to help if I broke one, wouldn’t you?”

“Yes,” said the duke, his arm closing faster about her, his voice shaken. “No maid. Is the room ready, Layton?”

“Quite ready, Your Grace.” Layton seized the great black dressing-case with the gold locks and the little snakeskin jewel case that Biddy had pounced on in Bond Street that morning, and James swung up the huge pigskin bags of His Grace, and Potter appeared from somewhere with fruit and wine, and Durkin from nowhere with a silver basket of small cakes, and a very young gentleman called Tunbridge appeared with candles that were larger than he. The duke and the duchess followed this procession up the dark splendour of the stairs, with Merlin padding superbly behind his witch. When they reached the landing the procession swung to the right.

“Here!” called Bolingham. “Which room?”

“The Damask Room, Your Grace.”

“No,” said His Grace. “No.” He did not raise his voice, but his fingers crushed down desperately on the light ones lying in his. “We’ll use the Blue Room.”

The agitated voice of the housekeeper cried, “Oh, Your Grace, it’s not ready!”

“Make it ready--flowers, candles, linen. Be quick.”

They were quick. Feet ran, hands flew, while the duke and his duchess stood waiting in the room in which a king had slept and a prince had died, and which for a hundred years had stood empty of life, save when some awed visitor tiptoed across the threshold, marvelling at its more than royal beauty--its walls stretched with velvet blue and deep as night, its painted beams, its hooded fireplace, its great bed around which the velvet curtains swept, brave with their golden Tudor roses; quick hands now brought other roses, wine-red in silver bowls, to sweeten the air, and sticks of wood to light a fire to warm it, for even August turned chilly in that magnificence; they spread a gay feast before the flames and fine linen on the bed; they brought high candelabra wrought of silver, more of them and more of them, until the shadows wavered and danced, and the new duchess clapped her hands and danced, too.

“That enough?” the duke asked her.

“Oh, ’tis enough to light the way from here to the pole! I’d not have said there were so many candles in all the world.”

“Right,” said the duke to his servitors briefly. “That’s all, then. Good-night.”

And the quick hands and the quick feet were gone, and the duke was left alone with his duchess.

“It’s not too cold?” he asked.

“No, no!” she said. “It’s fine and warm.”

“It’s not too dark?”

“No, no--it’s fine and bright!”

“My little heart, you don’t hate it? You’re not afraid?”

“Afraid?” cried his heart, alight with laughter. “Afraid with you by me? Am I mad?”

He knelt at that and put his arms about her. Even kneeling his black head was higher than her bright one.

“It’s I who am afraid. Biddy, what if I made you stop smiling? Biddy, Biddy, don’t ever stop smiling!”

“Never fear!” she cried. “Never fear, my dear love. I’ll never in this world stop smiling----” She caught her breath, and shook her curls, and laid her laughing lips gayly and bravely against his. “Nor in the next one, either!” said Her Grace.

She kept her word. That shining mischief of hers never wavered--nothing touched it, not the frozen hatred of the four outraged ladies or the surly insolence of the three dark boys, or the indifferent disdain of the county neighbours, or the blank indignation of the court. He watched over her with terror and rage in his heart; they, they to scorn his miracle!

That first dinner, with the ladies Pamela, Clarissa, Maude, and Charlotte, looking down their high noses at the radiant intruder, pouring out venom, poison, and vinegar as freely as wine----

“Say the word,” he told her through his teeth, safe in the sanctuary of their dark and beautiful room, “and the four of them shall walk to London!”

“Well, if they crawled there, ’twould be no more than they deserve!” said Her Grace with decision. “The cross faces they have, and the mean tongues! They’d wear the patience out of a Saint.”

“They can start packing now!” he cried, and made for the door.

“No, no!” Her laughter checked him like a hand. “What does it matter at all, since I’m no Saint? I’ll not need patience; all I’ll need is grace to keep a straight face and a civil tongue. Let them be, darlin’; ’tis a thousand pities my Aunt Dasheen died without laying eyes on them. They’re like her own sisters. Did no one ever give that fine Roddy of yours a good cuff?”

“I’ll give him two and a strapping,” said the duke. “The glowering young cub!”

“You’d never steal such pleasure for yourself,” she implored. “In no time at all they’ll be gone to their schools and colleges, and I’ll set what mind I have to growing tall enough to reach their ears if I stand on my toes. Would you like me better if I reached up higher?”

Their world was in that room--its four blue walls held all their heaven and earth. From its windows they saw dawns break and nights fall; when they crossed its threshold they stepped under a spell that held them safe from all disaster. No one had ever loved any one as he loved his little golden duchess; sometimes he smiled gravely and indulgently when he thought of the poor travesties that passed in the world for adoration. Dante and the girl that crossed the bridge in her wine-coloured gown--tragic and absurd to call that love, which was not strong enough to win a kiss! Paolo and Francesca stealing hot glances over a closed book in a garden--blasphemous to think that love could come clothed in secrecy and guilt. And those frantic, desperate children of the Capulets and Montagues--was love, then, something shot with blood and tears? No, no, love was shot with beauty and with mirth--love was his Biddy, dancing through darkness to his arms.

When some unshirkable duty called him from her to the London that they had forgotten he would possess his soul with what patience he might until the doors of Gray Courts opened once more, and before the doors had swung to behind his voice would ring out--

“Where is Her Grace?”

They never had need to tell him; before the words were off his lips he would hear her light feet, running to reach him across the long halls, the dark stairs.

When winter hung the world in silver frost they piled the fire higher and drew the curtains closer and sat wrapped warm in dreaming happiness while the winds roared and lashed over the world.

“Shall I take you to London?” he asked her.

“London?” she cried in wonder. “Oh, whatever for?”

“You’re not dull here? You’re not lonely?”

“Dull? With you? Lonely--lonely with you?”

After awhile she lifted her head and locked her fingers fast in his, and asked,

“When is your birthday?”

“In July--the twenty-fifth. Why?”

“I’ll have a grand present for you,” said Her Grace. “A baby. A baby that’ll have a yellow head and a twinkle in both his eyes. A baby that’ll grow tall enough to thrash the wickedness out of his black brothers and have sense enough to laugh instead of doing it.”

He bowed his head over the linked fingers.

“Biddy, what more will you give me, you who have given me all the world?”

“’Tis a small thing,” she whispered. “July. That will be a year since you came to see me dance?”

“A year, my heart.”

“How many days are there in a year, did you say?”

“Three hundred and sixty-five.”

“A day--a day is a poor short thing,” said Her Grace. “If I had a wish, I’d wish them longer. ’Tis cold in here, with the wind roaring down the chimney. Hold me closer--hold me fast.”

And with spring her wish was granted, and the days were longer; not long enough to hold the joy they poured into them--but filled to the brim with pale sunlight and primroses and hawthorn hedges. And it was June, and they were longer still, flooded with golden warmth and the smell of yellow roses and life and magic, and the taste of honey. And it was July, and it was his birthday--and the world stood still.

Her Grace gave him the yellow-headed baby for a birthday present. When they brought him his son he looked at him with strange eyes and turned his face away and asked them in a voice that none would have known,

“How is she now?”

The great doctors who had come hurrying from London shook their heads, and were grave and pompous and learned.

“Bad. Her heart was in a shocking condition--she had not told you?”

No--no, she had not told him.

“Well, we must hope; we must hope.”

But soon they could no longer hope; soon hope was gone. For all their dignity, for all their learning, they could only give her drugs to make it easier to die; they could only prop her up against the pillows in the great Tudor bed, and smooth the dark coverlet, and tiptoe from the room, leaving her to her duke. She sat there still and small, her hands on his black head where he knelt beside her, with so little breath left to tell him of her love that she sought the shortest words, she who had been a spendthrift of them.

“Darlin’.” He did not stir, even at that. “Never grieve. I’ve known it a great while; they told me in London before you came that ’twould be no more than a year. And my Aunt Dasheen, she was wise before they. ‘Wed at seventeen, dead at eighteen’----”

“Biddy,” he whispered, “I’ve killed you--I’ve killed you.”

“Oh, what talk is this? You, who gave me my life? I never minded the dying--’twas only when I thought how lonely it would be, with no one caring whether I came or went. I’ve forgotten what loneliness is with you by me. Look up at me.”

He raised his head--and her eyes were dancing.

“Has it yellow hair?”

“Yes.”

“Will you teach it to laugh?”

“Biddy--Biddy----”

“’Twill be dull in Heaven without you,” she said. “But ’twill be gay when you come.” She leaned toward him, her lips curved to mischief. “Wait till they tell my Aunt Dasheen--Saint Peter himself will have to laugh. ‘Woman, there’s someone just come asking after you--a little one, even on her toes. She says her name is Biddy and she’s Duchess of Bolingham----’”

The faint voice trailed to airy mirth, and with that music echoing still about her Her Grace closed her dancing eyes, and closed her laughing lips, and turned her bright head away and was gone, as lightly and swiftly as she had come.

THE HONOURABLE TONY

“You actually mean to tell me that you don’t want to get out of this dripping hole?”

“My dear old ass, why on earth should I want to get out of it?”

Anthony Christopher Stoningham Calvert faced the incredulous glare of the freckle-faced young gentleman from Ohio with engaging candour. Four years of soaking in tropical pest holes and rioting from Monte Carlo to Rio, from Shanghai to Singapore, since they had met, and yet there he sat, sprawled out full length in his great cane chair, as cool and shameless and unconquerably youthful as though he had just been sent down from Oxford for the first time. Even in the light that filtered in through the cane shutters, green and strange as the pallid glow that washes through aquariums, it was clear that time had found no power to touch that long grace, that bright head with its ruffled crop of short hair, those gay eyes, wide set and mischievous in the brown young face, those absurd dimples, carved deep into the lean curve of the cheek. Young Ledyard gave a bark of outraged protest, his pleasant face flushed and exasperated under its thatch of sandy hair.

“You mean it? You aren’t coming back with me?”

“Not for all the gold in the Indies, my dear kid--or out of them either, if it comes to that.” The Honourable Tony, as he had been dubbed by a scandalized and diverted public, grinned alluringly through the vaguely sinister light at his onetime comrade at arms. “The whole thing is absolutely ripping, I tell you, and the only thing that I ask is to spend the next sixty years doing precisely what I’m doing now.”

“I don’t believe you,” rejoined his baffled guest flatly. “Why in God’s name should you want to rot your life away in a little backwater Hell, when I can give you a first-rate job twenty-four hours after we land in America?”

“But, my dear fellow, I wouldn’t have your job as a birthday gift. You may be the heir apparent to the greatest rubber business in the whole jolly globe, but try to bear in mind that you see before you the chief, sole, and official British Imperial Adviser to the fattest little Sultan in Asia--who incidentally eats up every word of wisdom that falls from his adviser’s lips and sits up and begs for more, let me tell you.”

“And let me tell _you_ that it’s common gossip in every gutter in Singapore that your Sultan’s a black-hearted scoundrel who’s only waiting for a chance to double-cross England and do you one in the eye.”

“What happens to be the current gutter gossip about his adviser?” inquired that gentleman blandly.

Ledyard’s jaw looked suddenly aggressive.

“Never mind what it happens to be. What I want to know is why your friend Bhakdi isn’t back in his dirty little capital trying to straighten out some of the messes he’s got himself into instead of squatting up here in the jungle hunting tigers?”

“Because his invaluable adviser advises him to stay precisely where he is,” explained the Honourable Tony cheerfully. “Just between us, there are several nasty bits of international complications and one or two strictly domestic ones that make a protracted absence from the native heath highly advisable--oh, highly. Besides, you’d hardly have us trot back without a tiger, would you? I assure you that so far we haven’t bagged a solitary one. Not a tiger, Bill, not a tiger!”

“Oh, for the love of the Lord, shut up! I tell you this whole thing’s a rotten, ugly, dangerous business, and I didn’t come crawling up through Hades to have you turn it into a joke. I can’t stay jawing about it, and you know it--it’s going to be a darned close squeak to make connections with the steamer as it is. Are you coming or are you not?”

“I are not. Do quiet down and tell me why it is that you’re totally unable to distinguish between comic opera and melodrama? This whole performance is the purest farce, I swear! Wait till you see his Imperial Majesty--as nice a buttery, pompous little blighter as you’d want to lay eyes on, who’s spent six months at Cambridge and comes to heel like a spaniel if you tell him that anything in the world ‘isn’t done.’ He has a solid gold bicycle and four unhappy marriages and a body-guard with bright green panties and mother-of-pearl handles to their automatics! You wouldn’t expect even a Chinaman to take that seriously, would you?”

“I should think you’d go mad in your head trying to get along with a bounder who doesn’t know the first thing in the world about your code of standards or----”

“William, you are the most frightful donkey! The only code that I’ve recognized since I pattered off the ancestral estate is the jolly dot-dash thing that they use for telegrams. I’ve finally got our Bhakdi to the point where he drills his troops in pure British and plays a cracking good game of auction bridge without cheating--civilization’s greatest triumph in the Near or Far East. Personally, I ask no more of it!”

Ledyard mopped his brow despairingly. The dim room with its snowy matting and pale green cushions looked cool enough, but the heat outside would have penetrated a refrigerator. Just the other side of those protecting shutters the sun was beating down on the quiet waters until they glared back like burning silver--the tufts of palm and bamboo were hanging like so many dejected jade banners in the breathless air--the ridiculous little houses were huddled clumsily together on their ungainly piles, shrinking unhappily under their huge hats of nippa thatch.

“It’s a filthy, poisonous hole!” he protested fiercely. “It beats me why you can’t see it. If anything went wrong here, you wouldn’t have a white man in a hundred miles to turn to. You needn’t laugh. There’s nothing so howlingly funny about it. What about that Scotch engineer who was so everlastingly intimate with your precious Bhakdi’s next-door neighbour?”

“Well, what about him? The poor chap fell down a shaft and broke his neck.”

“Oh, he did, did he? Well, believe me, that’s not what they say in Singapore! Calvert, for God’s _sake_, get out of this infernal place. Every inch of it smells of death and damnation. How any one who calls himself an English gentleman can stick it for a minute----”

“But I don’t call myself an English gentleman,” the Honourable Tony assured him earnestly. “God forbid! I call myself an out-and-out waster exiled for ever from the Mother Country by a cruel and powerful elder brother. The only trick in it is that I’m simply cuckoo with ecstasy over the entire situation. Not according to Kipling, what? No, the glittering prospect of spending the remaining years of a misspent life in the largest rubber factory in Ohio leaves me considerably colder than ice.”

“I suggested Ohio because I happen to be in charge of that plant myself,” returned Ledyard stiffly. “If you’d rather have a go at one of the others----”

“But, my good child, it seems impossible to make you understand that the factory has not been built for which I would exchange one single baked banana soaked in rum and moonlight. Think of the simply hideous sacrifices that I’d make, can’t you?--taking advice instead of being paid good round guineas for giving it--working for one beastly hour after another instead of slipping from one golden minute to the next--drinking nasty chemical messes in constant terror of sudden death or prison bars, instead of tossing off bumpers and flagons and buckets of delectable fluids that smell like flowers and shine like jewels--dragging around to the most appalling festivals where pampered little females tip up their ridiculous powdered noses and distribute two minutes of their precious dances as though they were conferring the Order of the Garter, instead of----”

Ledyard looked suddenly three shades hotter beneath his freckles.

“Thanks--glad to know how much you enjoyed your visit.”

“I enjoyed every minute of it to the point of explosion, as you are thoroughly well aware. If I live to ninety-two, I shall remember the excellent yarns that your father spun over those incredibly good cigars and that simply immortal corn pudding, and the shoulders on the little red-headed creature in the black dress at the Country Club--good Lord, William, the shoulders on that creature! After four years of not especially pretty smells and not especially pretty noises, what do you think that those July evenings under the awnings on your veranda meant to a God-forsaken flying chap back from the wars, William?”

William looked frankly unappeased.

“A hell of a lot of difference it makes what I think! I know one God-forsaken flying chap who thought it wasn’t good enough for him, by a long shot. Not while he could hop off and rot his soul out in a water-logged bamboo shack in Asia!”

The owner of the bamboo shack settled deeper into his chair with a graceless and engaging grin.

“My dear chap, it was Heaven, pure and simple--but a dash too pure and simple for some of us. Every man his own Heaven, what? Well, you’re sitting in mine at the present. Of course it mightn’t suit any one with even an elementary code of principles, but having none of any kind or description it suits me down to the ground and up to the sky.”

“Oh, bunk!” commented Ledyard with fervent irritation. “You’ve got all the principles you need; do you think that I’d have come chasing up this unspeakable river in everything from a motorboat to a raft after any howling blackguard?”

“Well, it’s rather one on you, isn’t it, dear boy? Because it’s so absolutely what you’ve up and gone and done--though through no earthly fault of mine, you know! Rather not. Didn’t I spend four jolly busy years trying to get it through your thick skull that I was ninety-nine different varieties of blighter, and that nice little American kids with freckles on their noses shouldn’t come trotting around my propellers?”

“Hey, how do you get that way?” The nice little American kid raised his voice in poignant irritation. “Kid! If any one ever took the trouble to give you two looks they’d think you’d bounced straight out of rompers into long trousers without waiting for knickerbockers. Kid!”

“Old in iniquity, William, old in iniquity,” explained the Honourable Tony blithely. “Physically I grant that I’m fairly in the pink, but morally I’m edging rapidly into senile decay. I pledge you my word, which is worth considerably less than nothing, that I haven’t as many morals as I have side whiskers. And even you, my dear old chap, will be willing to admit that I don’t go in heavily for side whiskers. Take a long piercing look.”

Ledyard scowled wretchedly at the impish countenance blandly presented for inspection.

“The trouble with you is that you simply can’t take it in that any one on the whole bally globe could prefer a Bengal tiger to a British lion and a bird of paradise to an American eagle. You see before you a foul monstrosity who would trade all the British Isles for twenty yards of jungle, and gloat over his bargain. Have a cigarette?”

“No, I won’t have a cigarette. You make me so sick and tired with all that jaw about what a devil you are that I could yell. Once and for all, are you going to drop it and come back with me?”

“Once and for all I am not going to move one quarter of an inch. Stop jawing yourself for a minute, and try to see it my way. If you’d been chivvied about for your entire life by a lot of frenzied vestals for aunts who were trying to guide you to what they unfortunately considered grace, and three simply appalling bounders for brothers who set up the most frightful howl over the Bolingham name and the Bolingham honour and the Bolingham fortune every time the youngest member of the Bolingham family picked a primrose, you’d good and well think you were in Heaven if you could get out of earshot of their ghastly voices.”

“Damn it all!” cried young Ledyard violently. “You haven’t got the nerve to sit up there and tell me that you call this filthy water-hole Heaven?”

“Oh, I haven’t, haven’t I?” The Honourable Tony regarded the flushed countenance with pensive amusement. “I say, you Americans do have the most amazing cheek! Who ever asked you to come puffing and blowing into my own particular earthly Paradise and start in slanging it all over the shop? Filthy water-hole, by Gad! You won’t recognize Heaven when you have the milk and gold and harps and honey stuck under your silly nose.”

Ledyard rose sharply to his feet.

“All right, I’ll be off, then, and not waste any more of the valuable time that you’re employing so profitably. As you suggest, no one asked me to hurl myself into your affairs, and you’ve managed to make it good and clear that I was a lunatic to think that you’d take advice or help from me or any other well-meaning fool on the face of the earth. If you’ll get hold of one of those black swine that make up your circle of friends, these days, and tell them to get my men and the raft----”