The Light Heart (6 page)

It began to simplify at luncheon when Edward and Winifred took their places at the ends of the table, and wives were naturally not seated next to their husbands. By a process of elimination Phoebe made out Penelope and Tommy
Chetwynd
, Clare and Mortimer Flood. Then the lovely creature next to Archie across the table must be Rosalind, and the pretty woman with the overdone hair was her mamma. Phoebe tried hard not to stare at Rosalind, who typified in her slim person all the romantic heroines Phoebe had ever imagined.

Rosalind had softly waved dark hair abundantly dressed and seeming to make her little head too heavy for its slender neck. Her eyes were dark blue, with the longest eyelashes God ever gave a woman. Her brows were arched and quizzical, her rather large mouth curved in a somehow expectant smile, her chin was pointed and young. She was not more than eighteen inches at the waist, and her voice lilted like a child’s. She was
plainly on good terms with Archie and was enjoying herself with him so much that one could observe her without being caught. The man on her other side was devoting himself to Eden, and was either Charles or Oliver, Phoebe wasn’t sure which. He was big enough for a Guardsman, heaven knew, with brushed-looking dark red hair and a rather plain, square, honest face which expanded into a most engaging grin at intervals. But all the men at the table seemed enormous in their country tweeds, except Archie, who looked oddly boyish and brittle in this hefty company.

Eden was on Edward’s right, and Phoebe on his left found herself undergoing a sort of catechism as though she was not more than ten years old, obediently answering her host’s blunt, friendly questions while he placed her in his mind, docketed and pigeon-holed her, with her precise position in Virginia’s family, her experience—or lack of it—in travel, her attitude towards dogs and hunting, and so forth. Phoebe could ride, for all the family rode, and understood horses. But she was not a passionate sportswoman and had never cared about riding to hounds. This was obviously a black mark against her character, and Edward showed his disillusionment by joining the conversation with Eden.

Phoebe sat in rebuffed silence for a few minutes, eating, and then became very conscious of the presence on her left, which had to be either Oliver or Charles, and she was still not sure which. Whoever he was, she was afraid of him, for he was the best-looking man she had ever seen, and she was sure that a country-mouse like herself could be of no possible interest to him, and dreaded the moment when she must try and entertain him. She had already seen in incredulous stolen glances before they left the drawing-room that his dark hair fitted his
well-shaped
skull like a cap, that his dark moustache was clipped more closely than was the fashion and showed the curve of his upper lip above his white teeth when he smiled, and that his brown eyes shone and dazzled in his tanned face—so that if you were not accustomed to holding your own with so much
masculine splendour, and Phoebe wasn’t, you looked down, and away, and couldn’t think of anything to say.

“Has Edward been bullying you?” said the voice on her left, sympathetically. “You look sort of trampled on.”

“I said the wrong thing,” she heard herself confessing impulsively. “I don’t hunt.”

“Heavens above,” he murmured. “That’s a social error in these parts.”

“Yes, I begin to think it is.” A silver platter came down between them, creating a pause, and then was removed. “Are you the VC in the Horse Guards or the DSO Lancer?” she inquired then, still trying for her bearings.

“That’s the VC over there,” he said, indicating the man on Eden’s right. “I’m just one of Kitchener’s messenger boys.”

“Then you’re Dinah’s brother,” she discovered with some relief.

“Yes, I’m Oliver. I don’t wonder you’ve got a bit mixed up.”

“Was he wounded too?” she inquired, looking at Charles, who was guilty of conspicuous bravery.

“Got nicked in the arm somewhere. We’ve both had sick leave, but he’s back on the King’s duty now. You’ll see him swanking about in the Procession, on Coronation Day.”

“What did he do?”

“When?”

“To get the VC”

“Oh, that. Pulled some other bloke out of a hole, I suppose, at the risk of his own neck. That’s what most of ’em are for.”

“Don’t you
know?
”

“’Fraid I don’t, as a matter of fact. I wasn’t there.”

“Well, why don’t you
ask
him?”

“Couldn’t do that, he’d probably tell me to go boil my head!”

“Aren’t men funny,” she mused, echoing Virginia.

“And do you flatter yourself that women aren’t?”

There was laughter in his words, and she turned her head to share it with him and was caught by his eyes—clear brown, with dancing amber lights, the whites very white, like his
teeth, in his tanned face. They were the
livest
eyes she had ever seen, as though they were charged with electricity, and they were very kind….

“Now tell me when I was born, my favourite flower, and what I had for breakfast,” he suggested quietly, and she realized that she had been gazing at him openly and flushed. “Do forgive me,” he added quickly before she could speak. “But you were looking through me as though I were plate glass. What
did
you see?”

“A soldier,” she said. “I—never knew a soldier before, except my Cousin Miles and he was only an amateur and didn’t like it. Do you?”

“Very much indeed. It’s a good life—keeps you busy, no time to brood over the state of your soul or your liver. That’s all taken care of for you in the Regulations.”

“You wouldn’t change?”

“Not till they kick me out for old bones!”

“I don’t know much about the war in South Africa,” she said seriously. “I should like to understand it better.”

Oliver laughed outright.

“So should I!” he said. “So would Charles, no doubt!”

“So should I what?” said Charles, looking round at his name.

“Miss Sprague was saying she would like to understand the war better. I tell her she’s not alone in that.”

“She’s got lots of company up at the War Office, I should think,” said Charles. His voice was rather light for so big a man, and had a sort of softening overtone like a burr, which came of his Gloucestershire upbringing and which Eton had failed entirely to eliminate.

Edward then gave it as his opinion that they were a lot of bl-blithering fools at the War Office and that General Buller ought to get the sack, and Winifred said what about the b.f.’s at Westminster while he was about it, and the conversation became general and rather heated. Phoebe thought she could see Bracken making mental notes on the state of public opinion in England and she sat silent, wondering about Rosalind and
Charles, weaving romance around them and Rosalind’s ambitious mamma. And by the time the dessert came in she had become so aware of the man on her left that she felt him like a tingling in her fingertips.

Life, and a zest for living emanated from Oliver Campion like a fragrance. His casual humour, baiting Edward
good-naturedly
, kept ripples of laughter running through her. Once when his elbow accidentally touched hers she started as though the tweed sleeve had burned her. She was obsessed by the need to look and look at him, imprinting his lean brown sparkling face on her memory, and like a man who triumphs over the fumes of a heady wine and by sheer will power holds his behaviour to a normal pitch she forced herself to keep her eyes turned from him and her mind on what was being said by the rest of them. He’s like Father, she found herself thinking dazedly in her inner turmoil. He outshines everybody else without trying. And again, sealing her own doom with the knowledge—Father must have been like this when he was young.

“What
are
you thinking of, all by yourself?” said Oliver’s low voice on her left, and Phoebe, caught off guard, blurted out the truth.

“You remind me of my father,” she said, and his eyes searched hers briefly for any sort of double meaning or
transatlantic
jest, and found only a troubled honesty.

“That must be rather a compliment,” he said then.

“I thought there was no one like him,” she explained simply. “But you are. When he was your age, I mean.”

“Thank you,” said Oliver. “I should like to say, if I may, that I never dreamed there was anybody like you.”

For a moment more, surrounded by that noisy, contentious luncheon table, they looked at each other, and then realized that their hostess had risen.

They said no more to each other until the general good-byes, when he took her hand in a warm, hard clasp, and remarked, “My leave runs through July, so you’ll see a good deal of me, I expect. Do you like to ride without the fox and hounds?”

“Very much.”

“Good. I’ve got just the horse here. May I bring him round tomorrow morning about ten?”

“Thank you, I’d like to if—if Virginia has nothing else planned.”

“She’ll lend you to me,” he promised confidently. “The anemones are out, and you must see them at their prime, they don’t last long.”

Phoebe was very quiet on the drive home, which she made in the dog-cart with Bracken and Virginia, while the others followed in the barouche. Virginia rattled on to Bracken, who was anxious to hear about everything which had happened since he was last in England the previous autumn, and then suddenly she said, “What did you think of Oliver, Phoebe, isn’t he a duck? I was terribly afraid you might get stuck down with Mortimer, who bores us all to tears, poor dear. The best I hoped for you was Tommy Chetwynd, who is all sorts of a fool but rather sweet. When I saw you’d drawn Oliver, I knew you’d be all right.”

“Yes, I—he’s charming,” said Phoebe rather breathlessly, and Virginia sighed and scowled at her slipper toes.

“If only Maia was a little
easier
,”
she said. “Oliver is such a light-hearted soul, and she does grind him beneath her chariot wheels!”

“Who is Maia?” Phoebe asked automatically.

“The girl he’s going to marry, dammit,” said Virginia. “We none of us know quite how it happened, and we none of us can bear her, isn’t it awful? She made such a dead set at him you’d think
any
man would have run like a stag, but darling Oliver just put his silly head into the noose like the gentleman he is, and there we are!”

“What
is
the matter with that girl?” Bracken demanded. “And am I going to meet up with her while I’m here? You’ve all got your knife into her, and nobody can give me any clear reason why!”

“She’s up in Yorkshire now. She has to spend a lot of time there because her mother is dead and her father is an invalid,”
Virginia explained. “Sometimes I think Maia is only marrying Oliver to get away from home, though of course he’s beautiful to look at and lets her order him around to her heart’s content.”

“How did she meet him, then?”

“She was in London when he first came home from South Africa and was so ill, and probably he hadn’t seen a woman for months. Clare had taken her up for some reason, though she’s sick of her now, and Maia was always underfoot in Belgrave Square, and then suddenly,
wham,
she had him!”

“Well, I’m still waiting to hear what’s wrong with her,” Bracken insisted equably, and Virginia gave another impatient little sigh.

“It’s hard to say, it really is. She’s pretty in an exotic sort of way. You see, her father made his money in tea, and married out in Calcutta, where Maia was born. Nobody in England ever saw his wife because she died out there, and while everything
appears
to be all right, one does sort of wonder—”

“Great Scott, not some sort of
mixture!
”
cried Bracken.

“Oh, no, that is, not
recently
,
of course, and some of it is very good blood at that—but Maia
is
rather sallow, and her eyes are set in a rather odd way—”

“But the Army is very fussy about such things,” Bracken pointed out.

“Oh, Oliver must know all about her background, of course, or he would never—and since his commanding officer allows the marriage it pretty well proves Maia’s pedigree, I suppose. It’s only—well, I happen to know Charles hates it. And besides, she isn’t nice to Oliver.”

“How do you mean? She must have been fairly nice to him or he wouldn’t—”

“I think it’s because she’s uncertain of herself,” Virginia said thoughtfully. “And she takes it out of him. She likes to tyrannize in little ways—she makes him wait on her hand and foot—fans, scarves, gloves, shut the window, open the window, please do this, don’t do that—and there’s something stingy about her mouth. Mind you, she’s a beauty in her way, and
knows how to dress to bring out her good points. But she’s one of those
tight-lipped
women!”

“Oh, Lord,” said Bracken with perfect comprehension at last.

“Oliver deserves better,” said Virginia with her unexpected, acute perception. “A woman who marries a professional soldier ought to be the sort to fling herself into love head first and not care if it drowns her. Rosalind could do it like that—I’ve always sort of hoped Rosalind and Oliver would take to each other seriously, but they give no signs at all, I suppose because they’ve grown up together and she’s got used to him—but no woman could resist him if he really tried.”

“But you just said Maia did fling herself at him,” Bracken objected.

“Till she got him, and not the same way I mean. Oliver is wasting himself on a woman who will make him beg for everything he gets from her,” Virginia prophesied gloomily. “And she doesn’t even think he’s funny.
I
think Oliver is awfully funny, don’t you, Phoebe?” she asked suddenly of the silent figure beside her. “I saw you two laughing together like anything.”

“Yes, he—said some very funny things, I thought,” Phoebe agreed hastily, while the green world beyond the dog-cart tipped and spun before her eyes and she felt something beating in the roof of her mouth which seemed to be her heart. Oliver had put his silly head into the noose. Oliver was engaged to be married. But so am I, Phoebe told herself as though reassuring a small, whimpering child. So am I engaged—to Miles.