Lucia Victrix (54 page)

Elizabeth, on one of these days of April tempest when digging was suspended, came up from Grebe for her morning's marketing in her rain-cloak and Russian boots. The approach of a violent shower had driven her to take shelter in Diva's house, who could scarcely refuse her admittance, but did not want her at all. She put down her market-basket, which for the best of reasons smelt of fish, where Paddy could not get at it.

‘Such a struggle to walk up from Grebe in this gale,' she said. ‘Diva, you could hardly believe the monstrous state of neglect into which the kitchen-garden there has fallen. Not a vegetable. A sad change for me after my lovely garden at Mallards where I never had to buy even a bit of parsley. But beggars can't be choosers, and far be it from me to complain.'

‘Well, you took every potato out of the ground at Mallards before you left,' said Diva. ‘That will make a nice start for you.'

‘I said I didn't complain, dear,' said Elizabeth sharply. ‘And how is the Roman Forum getting on? Any new temples? Too killing! I don't believe a single word about it. Probably poor Lucia has discovered the rubbish-heap of odds and ends I threw away when I left my beloved old home for ever.'

‘Did you bury them in the ground where the potatoes had been?' asked Diva, intensely irritated at this harping on the old home.

Elizabeth, as was only dignified, disregarded this harping on potatoes.

‘I'm thinking of digging up two or three old apple-trees at Grebe which can't have borne fruit for the last hundred years,' she said, ‘and telling everybody that I've found the Ark of the Covenant or some Shakespeare Folios among their roots. Nobody shall see them, of course. Lucia finds it difficult to grow old gracefully: that's why she surrounds herself with mysteries, as I said to Benjy the other day. At that age nobody takes any further interest in her for herself, and so she invents Roman Forums to kindle it again. Must be in the limelight. And the fortune she's supposed to have made, the Office, the trunk-calls to London. More mystery. I doubt if she's made or lost more than half a crown.'

‘Now that's jealousy,' said Diva. ‘Just because you lost a lot of money yourself, and can't bear that she should have made any. You might just as well say that I didn't make any.'

‘Diva, I ask you.
Did
you make any?' said Elizabeth, suddenly giving tongue to a suspicion that had long been a terrible weight on her mind.

‘Yes. I did,' said Diva with great distinctness, turning a rich crimson as she spoke. ‘And if you want to know how much, I tell you it's none of your business.'

‘
Chérie
– I mean Diva,' said Elizabeth very earnestly, ‘I warn you for your good, you're becoming a
leetle
mysterious, too. Don't let it grow on you. Let us be open and frank with each other always. No one would be more delighted than me if Lucia turns out to have found the Parthenon in the gooseberry-bushes, but why doesn't she let us see anything? It is these hints and mysteries which I deprecate. And the way she talks about finance, as if she was a millionaire. Pending further evidence, I say “Bunkum” all round.'

The superb impudence of Elizabeth of all women giving warnings against being mysterious and kindling waning interest by hinting at groundless pretensions, so dumbfounded Diva
that she sat with open mouth staring at her. She did not trust herself to speak for fear she might say, not more than she meant but less. It was better to say nothing than not be adequate and she changed the subject.

‘How's the tiger-skirt?' she asked. ‘And collar.' Elizabeth rather mistakenly thought that she had quelled Diva over this question of middle-aged mysteriousness. She did not want to rub it in, and adopted the new subject with great amiability.

‘Sweet of you to ask, dear, about my new little frock,' she said. ‘Everybody complimented me on it, except you, and I was a little hurt. But I think – so does Benjy – that it's a wee bit smart for our homely Tilling. How I hate anybody making themselves conspicuous.'

Diva could trust herself to speak on this subject without fear of saying too little.

‘Now Elizabeth, she said, ‘you asked me as a friend to be open and frank with you, and so I tell you that that's not true. The hair was coming off your new little frock – it was the old green skirt anyway – in handfuls. That day you lunched with Lucia and hit your foot against the table-rail it flew about. Grosvenor had to sweep the carpet afterwards. I might as well trim my skirt with strips of my doormat and then say it was too smart for Tilling. You'd have done far better to have buried that mangy tiger-skin and the eye I knocked out of it with the rest of your accumulations in the potato-patch. I should be afraid of getting eczema if I wore a thing like that, and I don't suppose that at this minute there's a single hair left on it. There!'

It was Elizabeth's turn to be dumbfounded at the vehemence of these remarks. She breathed through her nose and screwed her face up into amazing contortions.

‘I never thought to have heard such words from you,' she said.

‘And I never thought to be told that strips from a mangy tiger-skin were too smart to wear in Tilling,' retorted Diva. ‘And pray, Elizabeth, don't make a face as if you were going to cry. Do you good to hear the truth. You think everybody else is being mysterious and getting into deceitful ways just because
you're doing so yourself. All these weeks you've been given honey and driven in Susan's Royce and nobody's contradicted you because – oh, well, you know what I mean, so leave it at that.'

Elizabeth whisked up her market-basket and the door banged. Diva opened the window to get rid of that horrid smell of haddock.

‘I'm not a bit sorry,' she said to herself. ‘I hope it may do her good. It's done me good, anyhow.'

The weather cleared, and visiting the flooded trench one evening Lucia saw that the water had soaked away and that digging could be resumed. Accordingly she sent word to her two workmen to start their soil-shifting again at ten next morning. But when, awaking at seven, she found the sun pouring into her room from a cloudless sky, she could not resist going out to begin operations alone. It was a sparkling day, thrushes were scudding about the lawn listening with cocked heads for the underground stir of worms and then rapturously excavating for their breakfast: excavation, indeed, seemed like some beautiful law of Nature which all must obey. Moreover she wanted to get on with her discoveries as quickly as possible, for to be quite frank with herself, the unfortunate business of the Spencer-tile had completely exploded, sky-high, all her evidence, and in view of what she had already told the reporter from the
Hastings Chronicle
, it would give a feeling of security to get some more. To-day was Friday, the
Hastings Chronicle
came out on Saturday, and, with the earth soft for digging, with the example of the thrushes on the lawn and the intoxicating tonic of the April day, she had a strong presentiment that she would find the rest of that sacred bottle with the complete dedication to Apollo in time to ring up the
Hastings Chronicle
with this splendid intelligence before it went to press.

Trowel in hand Lucia jumped lightly into the trench. Digging with a trowel was slow work, but much safer than with pick and shovel, for she could instantly stop when it encountered any hard underground resistance which might prove to be a fragment of what she sought. Sometimes it was a pebble
that arrested her stroke, sometimes a piece of pottery, and once her agonized heart leapt into her mouth when the blade of her instrument encountered and crashed into some brittle substance. But it was only a snail-shell: it proved to be a big brown one and she remembered a correspondence in the paper about the edible snails which the Romans introduced into Britain, so she put it carefully aside. The clock struck nine and Grosvenor stepping cautiously on the mud which the rain had swept on to the gravel path came out to know when she would want breakfast. Lucia didn't know herself, but would ring when she was ready.

Grosvenor had scarcely gone back again to the house, when once more Lucia's trowel touched something which she sensed to be brittle, and she stopped her stroke before any crash followed, and dug round the obstruction with extreme caution. She scraped the mould from above it, and with a catch in her breath disclosed a beautiful piece of glass, iridescent on the surface, and of a rich green in substance. She clambered out of the trench and took it to the garden tap. Under the drip of the water there appeared stamped letters of the same type as the APOL on the original fragment: the first four were LINA, and there were several more, still caked with a harder incrustation, to follow. She hurried to the garden-room, and laid the two pieces together. They fitted exquisitely, and the ‘Apol' on the first ran straight on into the ‘Lina' of the second.

‘Apollina,' murmured Lucia. In spite of her Latin studies and her hunts through pages of Roman inscriptions, the name ‘Apollina' (perhaps a feminine derivative from Apollo) was unfamiliar to her. Yet it held the suggestion of some name which she could not at once recall. Apollina … a glass vessel. Then a hideous surmise loomed up in her mind, and with brutal roughness regardless of the lovely iridescent surface of the glass, she rubbed the caked earth off the three remaining letters, and the complete legend ‘Apollinaris' was revealed.

She sat heavily down and looked the catastrophe in the face. Then she took a telegraph form, and after a brief concentration addressed it to the editor of the
Hastings Chronicle
, and wrote: ‘Am obliged to abandon my Roman excavations for the time.
Stop. Please cancel my interview with your correspondent as any announcement would be premature. Emmeline Lucas, Mallards House, Tilling.'

She went into the house and rang for Grosvenor.

‘I want this sent at once,' she said.

Grosvenor looked with great disfavour at Lucia's shoes. They were caked with mud which dropped off in lumps on to the carpet.

‘Yes, ma'am,' she said. ‘And hadn't you better take off your shoes on the doormat? If you have breakfast in them you'll make an awful mess on your dining-room carpet. I'll bring you some indoor shoes and then you can put the others on again if you're going on digging after breakfast.'

‘I shan't be digging again,' said Lucia.

‘Glad to hear it, ma'am.'

Lucia breakfasted, deep in meditation. Her excavations were at an end, and her one desire was that Tilling should forget them as soon as possible, even as, in the excitement over them, it had forgotten about Elizabeth's false pretences. Oblivion must cover the memory of them, and obliterate their traces. Not even Georgie should know of the frightful tragedy that had occurred until all vestiges of it had been disposed of; but he was coming across at ten to help her, and he must be put off, with every appearance of cheerfulness so that he should suspect nothing. She rang him up, and her voice was as brisk and sprightly as ever.

‘Dood morning, Georgino,' she said. ‘No
excavazione
to-day.'

‘Oh, I'm sorry,' said Georgie. ‘I was looking forward to finding more glass vessel.'

‘Me sorry, too,' said Lucia. ‘Dwefful busy to-day, Georgie. We dine to-morrow, don't we,
alla casa dei sapienti
.'

‘Where?' asked Georgie, completely puzzled.

‘At the Wyses',' said Lucia.

She went out to the garden-room. Bitter work was before her but she did not flinch. She carried out, one after the other, trays A, B, C and D, to the scene of her digging, and cast their contents into the trench. The two pieces of glass that together
formed a nearly complete Apollinaris bottle gleamed in the air as they fell, and the undecipherable coin clinked as it struck them. Back she went to the garden-room and returned to the London Library every volume that had any bearing on the Roman occupation of Britain. At ten o'clock her two workmen appeared and they were employed for the rest of the day in shovelling back into the trench every spadeful of earth which they had dug out of it. Their instructions were to stamp it well down.

Lucia had been too late to stop her brief communication to the reporter of the
Hastings Chronicle
from going to press, and next morning when she came down to breakfast she found a marked copy of it (‘see page 2' in blue pencil). She turned to it and with a curdling of her blood read what this bright young man had made out of the few words she had given him.

‘All lovers of art and archaeology will be thrilled to hear of the discoveries that Mrs Lucas has made in the beautiful grounds of her Queen Anne mansion at Tilling. The
châtelaine
of Mallards House most graciously received me there a few days ago, and in her exquisite
salon
which overlooks the quaint old-world street gave me, over “the cup that cheers but not inebriates”, a brilliant little
résumé
of her operations up to date and of her hopes for the future. Mrs Lucas, as I need not remind my readers, is the acknowledged leader of the most exclusive social circles in Tilling, a first-rate pianist, and an accomplished scholar in languages, dead and alive.

‘“I have long,” she said, “been studying that most interesting and profoundly significant epoch in history, namely the Roman occupation of Britain, and it has long been my day-dream to be privileged to add to our knowledge of it. That day-dream, I may venture to say, bids fair to become a waking reality.”

“‘What made you first think that there might be Roman remains hidden in the soil of Tilling?” I asked.

‘She shook a playful but warning finger at me. (Mrs Lucas's hands are such as a sculptor dreams of but seldom sees.)

‘“Now I'm not going to let you into my whole secret yet,” she said. “All I can tell you is that when, a little while ago, the
street outside my house was dug up to locate some naughty leaking gas pipe, I, watching the digging closely, saw something unearthed that to me was indisputable evidence that under my
jardin
lay the remains of a Roman villa or temple. I had suspected it before: I had often said to myself that this hill of Tilling, commanding so wide a stretch of country, was exactly the place which those wonderful old Romans would have chosen for building one of their
castra
or forts. My intuition has already been justified, and, I feel sure, will soon be rewarded by even richer discoveries. More I cannot at present tell you, for I am determined not to be premature. Wait a little while yet, and I think, yes, I think you will be astonished at the results …'”