Mrs.
Friend shyly. She knew, alack, that she had no gift for repartee.
"Oh, no, he never pays compliments—least of all to me. He has a most critical, fault-finding mind. Haven't you, Cousin Philip?"
"What a charge!" said Lord Buntingford, lighting another cigarette. "It won't take Mrs. Friend long to find out its absurdity."
"It will take her just twenty-four hours," said the girl stoutly. "He used to terrify me, Mrs. Friend, when I was a little thing … May I have some tea, please? When he came to see us, I always knew before he had been ten minutes in the room that my hair was coming down, or my shoes were untied, or something dreadful was the matter with me. I can't imagine how we shall get on, now that he is my guardian. I shall put him in a temper twenty times a day."
"Ah, but the satisfactory thing now is that you will have to put up with my remarks. I have a legal right now to say what I like."
"H'm," said Helena, demurring, "if there are legal rights nowadays."
"There, Mrs. Friend—you hear?" said Lord Buntingford, toying with his cigarette, in the depths of a big chair, and watching his ward with eyes of evident enjoyment. "You've got a Bolshevist to look after—a real anarchist. I'm sorry for you."
"That's another of his peculiarities!" said the girl coolly, "queering the pitch before one begins. You know you might like me!—some people do—but he'll never let you." And, bending forward, with her cup in both hands, and her radiant eyes peering over the edge of it, she threw a most seductive look at her new chaperon. The look seemed to say, "I've been taking stock of you, and—well!—I think I shan't mind you."
Anyway, Mrs. Friend took it as a feeler and a friendly one. She stammered something in reply, and then sat silent while guardian and ward plunged into a war of chaff in which first the ward, but ultimately the guardian, got the better. Lord Buntingford had more resource and could hold out longer, so that at last Helena rose impatiently:
"I don't feel that I have been at all prettily welcomed—have I, Mrs. Friend? Lord Buntingford never allows one a single good mark. He says I have been idle all the winter since the Armistice. I haven't. I've worked like a nigger!"
"How many dances a week, Helena?—and how many boys?" Helena first made a face, and then laughed out.
"As many dances—of course—as one could stuff in—without taxis. I could walk down most of the boys. But Hampstead, Chelsea, and Curzon Street, all in one night, and only one bus between them—that did sometimes do for me."
"When did you set up this craze?"
"Just about Christmas—I hadn't been to a dance for a year. I had been slaving at canteen work all day"—she turned to Mrs. Friend—"and doing chauffeur by night—you know—fetching wounded soldiers from railway stations. And then somebody asked me to a dance, and I went. And next morning I just made up my mind that everything else in the world was rot, and I would go to a dance every night. So I chucked the canteen and I chucked a good deal of the driving—except by day—and I just dance—and dance!"
Suddenly she began to whistle a popular waltz—and the next minute the two elder people found themselves watching open-mouthed the whirling figure of Miss Helena Pitstone, as, singing to herself, and absorbed apparently in some new and complicated steps, she danced down the whole length of the drawing-room and back again. Then out of breath, with a curtsey and a laugh, she laid a sudden hand on Mrs. Friend's arm.
"Will you come and talk to me—before dinner? I can't talk—before him. Guardians are impossible people!" And with another mock curtsey to Lord Buntingford, she hurried Mrs. Friend to the door, and then disappeared.
Her guardian, with a shrug of the shoulders, walked to his writing-table, and wrote a hurried note.
"My dear Geoffrey—I will send to meet you at Dansworth to-morrow by the train you name. Helena is here—very mad and very beautiful. I hope you will stay over Sunday. Yours ever, Buntingford."
"He shall have his chance anyway," he thought, "with the others. A fair field, and no pulling."
CHAPTER II
"There is only one bathroom in this house, and it is a day's journey to find it," said Helena, re-entering her own bedroom, where she had left Mrs. Friend in a dimity-covered arm-chair by the window, while she reconnoitred. "Also, the water is only a point or two above freezing—and as I like boiling—"
She threw herself down on the floor by Mrs. Friend's side. All her movements had a curious certainty and grace like those of a beautiful animal, but the whole impression of her was still formidable to the gentle creature who was about to undertake what already seemed to her the absurd task of chaperoning anything so independent and self-confident. But the girl clearly wished to make friends with her new companion, and began eagerly to ask questions.
"How did you hear of me? Do you mind telling me?"
"Just through an agency," said Mrs. Friend, flushing a little. "I wanted to leave the situation I was in, and the agency told me Lord Buntingford was looking for a companion for his ward, and I was to go and see Lady Mary Chance—"
The girl's merry laugh broke out:
"Oh, I know Mary Chance—twenty pokers up her backbone! I should have thought—"
Then she stopped, looking intently at Mrs. Friend, her brows drawn together over her brilliant eyes.
"What would you have thought?" Mrs. Friend enquired, as the silence continued.
"Well—that if she was going to recommend somebody to Cousin Philip—to look after me, she would never have been content with anything short of a Prussian grenadier in petticoats. She thinks me a demon. She won't let her daughters go about with me. I can't imagine how she ever fixed upon anyone so—"
"So what?" said Mrs. Friend, after a moment, nervously. Lost in the big white arm-chair, her small hand propping her small face and head, she looked even frailer than she had looked in the library.
"Well, nobody would ever take you for my jailer, would they?" said
Helena, surveying her.
Mrs. Friend laughed—a ghost of a laugh, which yet seemed to have some fun in it, far away.
"Does this seem to you like prison?"
"This house? Oh, no. Of course I shall do just as I like in it. I have only come because—well, my poor Mummy made a great point of it when she was ill, and I couldn't be a brute to her, so I promised. But I wonder whether I ought to have promised. It is a great tyranny, you know—the tyranny of sick people. I wonder whether one ought to give in to her?"
The girl looked up coolly. Mrs. Friend felt as though she had been struck.
"But your mother!" she said involuntarily.
"Oh, I know, that's what most people would say. But the question is, what's reasonable. Well, I wasn't reasonable, and here I am. But I make my conditions. We are not to be more than four months in the year in this old hole"—she looked round her in not unkindly amusement at the bare old-fashioned room; "we are to have four or five months in London, at least; and when travelling abroad gets decent again, we are to go abroad—Rome, perhaps, next winter. And I am jolly well to ask my friends here, or in town—male and female—and Cousin Philip promised to be nice to them. He said, of course, 'Within limits.' But that we shall see. I'm not a pauper, you know. My trustees pay Lord Buntingford whatever I cost him, and I shall have a good deal to spend. I shall have a horse—and perhaps a little motor. The chauffeur here is a fractious idiot. He has done that Rolls-Royce car of Cousin Philip's balmy, and cut up quite rough when I spoke to him about it."
"Done it what?" said Mrs. Friend faintly.
"Balmy.