LONDON LOVERS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLV, Issue 13722, 11 April 1908, Page 3 (Supplement)

LONDON LOVERS.

BY MARGARET BAILLIE-SAUNDERS, Author of "Saints in Society."

COPYRIGHT. \

PUBLISHED BY SPECIAL AEEANGEMEJJT.

CHAPTER XVlll.—(Continued.) In- the distance, across the rather scattered glasses and tangled smilax, the face of Leger loomed pinky out of the blurred effect of rows ot men's faces and glistening shirt fronts, more distrait than of old, and not quite so good-looking even in the complacent fashion that had been, his style. There were loose puffs under his eyes, and to Lucason he seemed thinner, not the neat thinness of the " fit" by any means, but the limp lack of muscle peculiar to. internal decay of some sort, either of mind or body. It was the first time he had come across the man since Winnie's confidence, and the sight of Tiim roused in the watcher a sense of stern, rude contempt. His neighbour may have seen the direction of his glance. "Are you looking at that unhappy Leger?" lie said, half laughing. "Lord, what an object!" "Why, is he unhappy?" said Lucason. "Oh. don't you know him? Spent the first few years of his life mooning about because he hadn't any money and his uncle wouldn't die off and leave him some. Then when the old boy did go, spent his time howling because the money wasn't enough. So he "married a girl with money. Now he's mooning and mooning because the marriage is after all—Oh well, so-so, and the lady keeps the bank notes. Poses as a' martyr, because he was engaged to one of the prettiest girls I ever saw, and either she wouldn't have him or he wanted money instead, and their affair came to nothing. Now lie's come back from a long tour he's beginning to pose as a man with a story. Guess ahe has—he's,told plenty in his liteLucason said something short very violently under his breath, still looking at the affected face in. the distance. "Oh, he's only an diot," went on his neighbour. " You could hold these creatures by a string and make 'em perform, and laugh at 'em, but for one thing that always maddens me —women take them seriously. , That's why I want to kick them myself. Apparently nice women, sane women do, so long as the brutes make enough limp love to them. I've seen it over and over again! One would hardly bo got to bel&ve it unless one had seen it. I don't know the dear lady he managed to miss matrimonially* but I'd bet my boots she's flattered by his mawkish air of having broken his heart for her As if any yowling tenor at a sixpenny chamber concert couldn't do the trick just as well and better, because at least that would be respectable and done for a fee." The- latter proposition possibly appealing equally to a Scotchman and a Jew, the two friends dropped the subject of Leger, but it remained sinister and bitter in a corner of Lucason's mind, a corner where he kept the rubbish. Sad to say, Winnie now hovered very near it. To be the talk of strangers at public banquets! To have become a sort of patronising by-word, a creature whose name was invariably tacked ■ on to the unsavoury name of Leger! What a fate! ■ That night when ho got home he found Naomi Reubenssohn with his mother; she was just leaving to run back along the terrace to her own home, and stood in the hall with her dark head veiled by a. fleecy lace wrap and her gay frock covered in a furry cloak. She had been discussing the club this evening and making various arrangements with Mrs. Lucason about the working of a. country house of rest that they had for some time had in project. She still sparkled with the zest of her evening's labours, and Mrs. Lucason was looking genially contented at the thought of eventually getting a very great Royal lady to sanction its existence. Naomi looked up and hughe das More! came in. "Well, most noble and exalted person, wo shall all quite miss you when you take up country squiring!" she said. "The inconsolable are not to be numbered!" She laughed up at him with her kind dark eyes, and he suddenly offered to see her home along the terrace. He thought he had never admired her sister Zilla so much as at this moment when her own face looked gayer and younger and so reminded him of the girl her people had always wanted him to marry. He almost felt to-night that there might ue something in the idea. Happy hearted, jog-trot little Zilla. was at least a contented home-girl; she lived in the lives of her brothers and her people like the most chirpy of tame canaries, and had not an idea beyond Regent's Park, the Continent, the Litest musical comedy, dresses, songs and babies. Men did not talk of her slightingly in the city; no one dreamed of speculating as to what she would or would not do when some notorious libertine came to town. All his most noble blood instincts, the mighty instinct for home purity and the safe-guarding of a man's own women were to-night on the side of Zilla, as opposed, bitterly opposed to Winnie ; he was never so truly a Jew as to-night when he walked along the terrace with Naomi, reflecting dimly that it is better to marry a woman who is all, absolutely all your own, than the woman you love, the woman you could go mad for, of whom other men speak lightly. The ancient Eastern idea of the sacredness of a man's claim as the complete owner and arbiter of his womenhood came uppermost in him now, oddly enough, when he was no longer by profession a Jew; when there might even be difficulties with Zilla's people on that account. For unconsciously and by immemorial custom beating in his very blood, he thought of Zilla's people in this connection, not of Zilla herself; their consent, their arranging, not hers. And yet, when he had wooed Winnie he had never dreamed of telling the Hardwinters, or imagined the possibility of going to anybody but Winnie herself with his love-offering! But Winnie had been a new experience, rending and breaking the chaiiia of all bi& old .tribal pufe.

toms. Was he now stepping back into that custom? Without being quite aware of it he was. In his mind's eye to-night he saw the conventional Jewish home he might have, the tender ways he might return to, all inspired by Naomi—the home atmosphere so bravely guarded, the bonded intimacy of friends born of generations of good fellowship, the clannish peace, the certain, safe, strong home barriers for the little willing dark-eyed wife; the dark-browed clever children; the centralness of it all, the sublimated essence of self-created companionship, K a little camp as it were in a desert world, the patheticaly beautiful result of ages of terrorised wanderings. There was a charm, in those clannisms, a peaceful afternoon-like glow over those inward pictures of a child-filled garden, a sort of calm evening-pipey, good-humoured comfort, browsing ami pleasant, that seemed almost like a mirage to a man who had in two years been shaken to the very foundations of his being, and who had "yet humanly speaking received nothing and found no comfort in love, but only storm and stress; and now flat disappointment. Naomi chattered on. She talked of Zilla. perhaps a little consciously. She was too good a Jewess not to be to some extent a match-maker, and this man by her side who had been like her brother, for whom she had worked, and whom now the world had chosen to recognise and honour, was to her gentle mind all complete save that he had not- yet taken to himself a, wife. If he would do that, and let his wife be her own sister, how happily enlarged would their cheery circle be! Poor Naomi, who was not a mother, and who would so wistfully have liked to be an aunt, as second best!

So she talked about Zilla and his club. How her sister had gone down with her and sung to the girls, and been so much interested. As a matter of fact, Zilla had only gone once, and had been very disappointed that Mord was not there, but she had certainly trilled several musical comedy songs, one called, " The Love-sick Postage Stamp," and'one "The Gay, Giddy Dinnerbell," light pretty tunes to words apparently utterly without meaning unless you smiled archly in just the right places. Zilla had smiled archly in just the right places; only Mord was not there. However, her sister told of this with genuine pleasure, and Lucason was interested. At Naomi's gate he bade her good-night and sent his thanks to Zilla, laughingly, and added, "And give her my love.' Then he went home. For a very long time he sat and thought, leaning out into the night for air; it was a fine warm night for April, and the wet night-scents from the Park trees came up and filled his senses with a more certain longing for that home picture he had conjured up; singing Zilla in a garden of her own—and his. When he went to bed he took Winnie's crumpled picture out of his collar drawer with a sudden irreverent jerk. He looked at it for a few seconds very hard, and then slowly and. absent-mindedly folded it in half in a tight stiff fold, as one would a newspaper, and put it back again. He had never done that before, and yet at this moment he was not aware that he had done it; did not know that the pictured Winnie lay there dishonoured and defaced with the sharp fold in the thick "leaded" paper '.making a business-like crack across her nose. CHAPTER XIX. " I've been telling mamma that something must be. done immediately to put an end to this, Winnie," said Constance one raw eastwindy day in March, when she had rushed up to town in quest of something deadly and useful for her deeply uninteresting family. Winnie had not inquired whether it was teeth or boots, or shoulder-straps, or other props for the bodies of thos-? pathetically well brought-up children. She merely accepted her sister-in-law's presence as one of the unavoidable ills of the day like the blasting wind that turned everything blue, and certain duties and anxieties of_ her own; so she said nothing, but pushed aside a little lined book with an imitation leather cover in which she seemed to be entering accounts, and wilting very black and rather muddled figures with great care. She stuck it under the flap of her little desk and glanced back at Constance. How sensible that lady looked! How determinedly the unspoilableness of her black costume by wind and weather hit you in the eye. and how firmly was her strong hat planted down on to her neat head. Winnie almost looked for an elastic and a velvet-covered button at the back. For the widow's bonnet had been early discarded as too foolish and chiffony, and very plain American hats, rather like shoes in shape, poked down sternly over her brows.

"If Constance could only keep her prejudices out of her clothes!" Winnie sighed to herself, "I would endure them. I should think it was quite enough to have such a moral nose, without adding a hat. That Wellingtonian sweep at the top, with the shine on it, means so much!" Again she sighed. Constance continued: "Mamma was always a trifle foolish in such matters. But this sort of thing looks positively bad— must see that! Here you are left for months to your own devices without anyone but that old mam'selle, and making yourself miserable in this hideous, depressing house for goodness knows what reason! I hear of your having been seen at all kinds of places and with all sorts of people this winter. What has come over you. Winnie? What is it?" "Has anything?" said Winnie. " You know it has. No one ever sees you anywhereexcept at, T mean, impossible places, and your dress is so— peculiar, I am sure there is something behind it." "There's me," said Winnie. "Though there's certainly less of that than there was." She glanced at a trim little waist thoughtfully. " When one sees very marked changes in anyone so— showy as you used to be," went on the magisterial voice, " one begins to get suspicious." "Oh, you would,' said Winnie. "It's a kind of sport to you." " All 1 can say is it looks odd; and anything that looks odd should not be." Constance did not realise that on this hypothesis she herself should not be since her large useful form certainly looked odd on Lady Sarah's most quaint rose-garlanded chair. Suddenly she changed the subject. "Have you seen Leger again?" Her eyes penetrated Winnie's face sharply. "Yes. Joan asked me round to see her new house. They've settled here for the season."

Constance grunted. "Well, all I can say is I do hope, Winnie, you won't go and fly in the face of appearances now that he is married, as you did before! I hear he jiakes no secret that it was you he always cared for, and people are talking about it everywhere. Joan is not happy, they say, and the marriage is far from satisfactory. If you let yourself be seen too much with them, and especially with him, goodness knows what you will come to! You must be careful. His reputation is very bad indeed."

There was some truth in Constance's words, and her counsel was this time honestly meant. But unfortunately for a person called to put a very untidy world in order, to her her fellow creatures were not difficult, complex human beings, but so many machines, differentiated in slight ways, of course, but equally capable of a limited stock of feelings, ideas, prejudices, and actions. She considered herself the unerring type of her kind ; what she could feel or do, all the world could feel and do, no more and no less. She could not conceive of a state -f mind in any other person of which she was not only "fully cognisant and an authority, but of which she was not also, indeed, 'by the right of supreme forcefulness, constituted to judge and direct. In this simple, strong belief she hectored over friends, relations, tenantry, local politics, committees, and the neighbouring press; in its strength she asked aloud in people's drawing-rooms who other people were, and annexed the off-side man at a dinner party, as well as her own, to whom to air her views on sport, religion, hygiene, Europe, motors, or diplomacyunless, of course, the off-side man had a fine appetite, or a pretty partner, or a temper— even Constance occasionally failed. But even then she failed with eclat, as do all the great; and later on held forth on men's selfish gluttony, bad manners, or absurd tendency to be taken by " dolls," as she invariably* called anything fluffy or comparatively amiable, and so managed a counterblast not unworthy of her ancient glory. But Winnie began to laugh to herself, as i though at some hidden joke of her own. *

"I wish they had forced you to marry that Lueason!" said Constance, her voice rising. *' You seem incapable of takiug care of yourself or of behaving properly. I tell you ;K beu, l jjaar of your hems eeej^-.jgitk;,

the Legers, and the comment* that people are beginning to make— man is a wretch —I am amazed that your brother should allow it. But he is ©&ly a silly boy after all! People still say there is an engagement, or something, between you and the Jew, and I can toll you I'm thankful that they do. I don't contradict it. He is an honourable man, and has got on splendidly, and may become even yet More respectable. Nowadays his very name i? a protection. You need it if you are seen much with Leger. "Joan is mv cousin," said Winnie. "I can't cut her husband. li you really want to know, Constance, he too thinks I am— I am—that there is some sort of an engagement between myself and Mr. Lucason." "Then for heaven's sake let him think so," cried Constance. "I shan't contradict it, till"—Winnie turned to her little leather-covered book and glanced thoughtfully into it at the rows of stodgy black figures till it suits me." She put the book back in its place again, and wiped some ink off her nail "Or till," Slid Constance, very deliberately, "you hear of his engagement to Miss Cohen. I do not mix in their world, but I hear that he has taken a place in Sussex and is having it- all most exquisitely decorated. And there is a talk of a Miss Zilla Cohen." Winnie's face just faintly contracted. "Oh, lie bought that place ages ago," she said. "He consulted me about the alterations. I've heard of the Cohens—she and her sister help him with his work-people's clubs." " Yes, hut suppose, it- is true and they are engaged?" "Suppose. Well?" " Well you will again be left in the lurch!" "Ah. shall I?" "My dear Winnie, you must, see yourself that you cannot go on like this for ever. Your ways of going on a year ago were bad enough, but all this mystery and retirement and oddity is even worse. You do not even look like the sister of Lord Hardwinter now. Your clothes are absolutely not only shabby—that is respectable in a* way —but cheap. You have somehow gone down in the social scale. You somehow give a- meaner and commoner impression than you did. I say it for your good. You are not what you were." " No, I am not," said Winnie very quietly. She tapped her desk with her little lined book, and impatiently hummed a tune, but her eyes that- looked beyond Constance out of the window were worried and strained, and her piquant face looked graver and straighter. Constance thought she had worked this change by her advice, and pressed her point further. " Well, now, why not come to some decision aT~once and get settled No doubt this affair of Lucason's is still tentative? He would still, I expect, like to marry well into a family like ours. No doubt he would come if asked to meet you again. You say you have not contradicted what people have been saying about him and you?"' "No." "Well, then—'" Winnie leaned over and referred again to her little book, with the end of a pencil in her mouth. " I shall do so on May 26." "What?", "I shall contradict it on May 26." "What ever do you mean? Are you mad?" " No. Only I have other plans." " Is there somcoody else?' " I shall not tell you." " But, Winnie, oh you can't be 60 — "1 can't tell you any more, Constance. I let Leger and everybody else say and think what they liked about my affairs. It saved me annoyance. As you say it was a protection. But its use will be nil—on May 26." " But you are surely not going to do anything startling?" " Something very startling »or a Hardwinter." " What do you mean?" " Pay offan old score," said Winnie, in a cold and deadly voice. Her face was a study in grim secrecy. Constance rose, horror shaking her every limb. "Why?— Good heavens, Winnie, I shall send your brother to see into this." " Neither Ronnie nor anyone else could ever see into this," said Winnie, still in that chilled hard voice. There was the concentrated purpose- of a year of planning and working in her set little face. Constance fled from the scene. " You are going mad!" she said. "I did that long ago!" Winnie replied with a defiant laugh. Out on a Sussex lawn in May two smartly cloaked and hatted ladies sauntered away from a chattering crowd and talked together. "Isn't it a charming house?" said one whose dark eyes shone out of a long blue motor-veil. " Now he ought to marry." " Oh, he will, you'll see," said another.. "He's been contemplating it for a long time, then?" Yes, but that is why the Cohens are here." " Oh, is it Zilla? But they're such strict —such very old-fashioned religionists in their views. He turned Christian, you know. Would her people permit it?" " Only Naomi Reubenssohn is strict of all the lot now. I assure you it's true. They no longer observe any of the feasts, I'm told, except Tabernacles. Everybody sticks to Tabernacles who has the ghost of fidelity left. It's the last thing to go." " Well, she'll have to let that go now if she marries Mordecai Lucason," said the other. "Ha didn't simply slip away from the moorings. I hear he was quite formally receivedand formally excommunicated!' she added. " Yes, he was. It was rather silly of him. If he had only waited people would have received him just as well without his doing ail that; he's made himself such a foremost man now that society wouldn't have blinked at his full profession of his own faith, and race. But I sometimes fancy -—I - don't know, of course, but" She paused. Her friend said: "What do you fancy?" "Why, that it was all a erase. That he is really and truly as much a Jew as you or I, still. All that humanitarian work of his is not purely Christian. It is nonsectarian. Christian work is rrade up of sect," she added, calmly unconscious of 1 irony, stating what she believed to be time. " If it gets rid of the sect element they call it by another name. People only dare* to j openly describe themselves as Christians if i they are shocked at at least half the rest of the world, and, better still, the next-door neighbour." "I suppose it's English," said the other. "That may be. But it isn't at all like the Preacher of Nazareth," said the first speaker quietly. " It's an utter contradiction of a most beautiful life and teaching. I don't profess to know what Mordecai dees or doesn't believe, because he never talks I about it; but I have sometimes thought I that that conversion of his was all on the \ surface, merely an impulse." "Well," yawned the motor-veil, "if it was, it was an impulse that did him a lot of good. He used to be a regular bear, I and so uninteresting! At least he does rather interesting things now, and he's much nicer and more courteous somehow. I used , to think he and his detestable sister were J a pair. But they've grown quite different, even in a few years. Now if that's his idea of a. Christian "l don't blame him for trying it." "No, or showing it. He doesn't stop at ideas. Zilla will be a lucky girl if she marries him." "Zilla would marry anything, it is the institution she has been trained to revere. The man wouldn't matter." They turned to retrace their steps and came across a large noisy group of men and women, amongst whom was Lucason. They were examining the grounds, after having seen over the house, and commenting on this and that in thrilling, high-pitched voices. Most of them wore traces of motor-dress, and most appeared to be in an enthusiastic hurry. Zilla Cohen was dancing in and out amongst the crowd, drawing shrill attention to this and that, with eager and. bird-like gestures. She was a little bird-like person in whose narrow olive face two almondshaped slits of black eyes, slightly elevated at the outer corners, gave her almost tins look of a Japanese. She was perfectly clad in the most exquisite Parisian masquerade of a country morning gown and hat, delicate to a degree, and matched even by a psic of. charming' impossible, &&&$* WJ A i

though only five-and-fcwcnty,/;- she ; gave a. strange impression of having lived tor years. As the motor- had remarked, not with» out terseness, " ZUla is not really pretty-— all her toques look like stringiest! bonnets.':' It may perhaps require a woman's mind to grasp" this quite brilliantly lucid description ; but motor-veil's dictum must stand. Her sister Naomi, who had brought her down for this lunch-party and house-warm-ing:, gave a strange effect of being bora of a totally different class of life, though feet clothes were not particularly French, and she was utterly without consciousness. People almost expected Naomi to tolerate Zilia's little baby oddities as a Blatter of county", for the reason that the really great are generally tolerant, and certainly the bond of kindness between the two sisters was very marked, sad had been, in * sen*?, the thing,that had drawn Lucason to think of the younger one,, His admiration for the deep-eyed, stately Naomi had been 60 long and so well-earned, and perhaps ho had unconsciously begun to read her sister with her own eyes and to credit her with all the store of womanly character that singled out Naomi in his eves as a queen among her race. It was easy when Naomi, who did so tactfully with the work-people, told him with glowing eyes of her sister's praiseworthy efforts, to place to Zilia's credit all the gracious, wise things he had seen Mrs. Reubenssohn say and do from time to time. lib be continued*on Wednesday nest.)