"And what a marvel she is! I do so want you to know her, Lady Harman. She'd be a Revelation to you...."
Everything had gone wonderfully so far. "And now," said Lady Beach-Mandarin, thrusting forward a face of almost exaggerated motherliness and with an unwonted tenderness suffusing her voice, "show me the Chicks."
There was a brief interrogative pause.
"Your Chicks," expanded Lady Beach-Mandarin, on the verge of crooning. "Your little Chicks."
"Oh!" cried Lady Harman understanding. "The children."
"Lucky woman!" cried Lady Beach-Mandarin. "Yes."
"One hasn't begun to be friends," she added, "until one has seen—them...."
"So true," Mrs. Sawbridge confided to Mr. Brumley with a look that almost languished....
"Certainly," said Mr. Brumley, "rather."
He was a little distraught because he had just seen Sir Isaac step forward in a crouching attitude from beyond the edge of the lilacs, peer at the tea-table with a serpent-like intentness and then dart back convulsively into cover....
If Lady Beach-Mandarin saw him Mr. Brumley felt that anything might happen.
§4
Lady Beach-Mandarin always let herself go about children.
It would be unjust to the general richness of Lady Beach-Mandarin to say that she excelled herself on this occasion. On all occasions Lady Beach-Mandarin excelled herself. But never had Mr. Brumley noted quite so vividly Lady Beach-Mandarin's habitual self-surpassingness. She helped him, he felt, to understand better those stories of great waves that sweep in from the ocean and swamp islands and devastate whole littorals. She poured into the Harman nursery and filled every corner of it. She rose to unprecedented heights therein. It seemed to him at moments that they ought to make marks on the walls, like the marks one sees on the houses in the lower valley of the Main to record the more memorable floods. "The dears!" she cried: "the little things!" before the nursery door was fairly opened.
(There should have been a line for that at once on the jamb just below the lintel.)
The nursery revealed itself as a large airy white and green apartment entirely free from old furniture and done rather in the style of an æsthetically designed hospital, with a tremendously humorous decorative frieze of cocks and puppies and very bright-coloured prints on the walls. The dwarfish furniture was specially designed in green-stained wood and the floor was of cork carpet diversified by white furry rugs. The hospital quality was enhanced by the uniformed and disciplined appearance of the middle-aged and reliable head nurse and her subdued but intelligent subordinate.
Three sturdy little girls, with a year step between each of them, stood up to receive Lady Beach-Mandarin's invasion; an indeterminate baby sprawled regardless of its dignity on a rug. "Aah!" cried Lady Beach-Mandarin, advancing in open order. "Come and be hugged, you dears! Come and be hugged!" Before she knelt down and enveloped their shrinking little persons Mr. Brumley was able to observe that they were pretty little things, but not the beautiful children he could have imagined from Lady Harman. Peeping through their infantile delicacy, hints all too manifest of Sir Isaac's characteristically pointed nose gave Mr. Brumley a peculiar—a eugenic, qualm.
He glanced at Lady Harman and she was standing over the ecstasies of her tremendous visitor, polite, attentive—with an entirely unemotional speculation in her eyes. Miss Sawbridge, stirred by the great waves of violent philoprogenitive enthusiasm that circled out from Lady Beach-Mandarin, had caught up the baby and was hugging it and addressing it in terms of humorous rapture, and the nurse and her assistant were keeping respectful but wary eyes upon the handling of their four charges. Miss Sharsper was taking in the children's characteristics with a quick expertness. Mrs. Sawbridge stood a little in the background and caught Mr. Brumley's eye and proffered a smile of sympathetic tolerance.
Mr. Brumley was moved by a ridiculous impulse, which he just succeeded in suppressing, to say to Mrs. Sawbridge, "Yes, I admit it looks very well. But the essential point, you know, is that it isn't so...."
That it wasn't so, indeed, entirely dominated his impression of that nursery. There was Lady Beach-Mandarin winning Lady Harman's heart by every rule of the game, rejoicing effusively in those crowning triumphs of a woman's being, there was Miss Sawbridge vociferous in support and Mrs. Sawbridge almost offering to join hands in rapturous benediction, and there was Lady Harman wearing her laurels, not indeed with indifference but with a curious detachment. One might imagine her genuinely anxious to understand why Lady Beach-Mandarin was in such a stupendous ebullition. One might have supposed her a mere cold-hearted intellectual if it wasn't that something in her warm beauty absolutely forbade any such interpretation. There came to Mr. Brumley again a thought that had occurred to him first when Sir Isaac and Lady Harman had come together to Black Strand, which was that life had happened to this woman before she was ready for it, that her mind some years after her body was now coming to womanhood, was teeming with curiosity about all she had hitherto accepted, about Sir Isaac, about her children and all her circumstances....
There was a recapitulation of the invitations, a renewed offering of outlooks and vistas and Agatha Alimony. "You'll not forget," insisted Lady Beach-Mandarin. "You'll not afterwards throw us over."
"No," said Lady Harman, with that soft determination of hers. "I'll certainly come."
"I'm so sorry, so very sorry, not to have seen Sir Isaac," Lady Beach-Mandarin insisted.
The raid had accomplished its every object and was drifting doorward. For a moment Lady Beach-Mandarin desisted from Lady Harman and threw her whole being into an eddying effort to submerge the already subjugated Mrs. Sawbridge. Miss Sawbridge was behind up the oak staircase explaining Sir Isaac's interest in furniture-buying to Miss Sharsper. Mr. Brumley had his one moment with Lady Harman.
"I gather," he said, and abandoned that sentence.
"I hope," he said, "that you will have my little house down there. I like to think of you—walking in my garden."
"I shall love that garden," she said. "But I shall feel unworthy."
"There are a hundred little things I want to tell you—about it."
Then all the others seemed to come into focus again, and with a quick mutual understanding—Mr. Brumley was certain of its mutuality—they said no more to one another. He was entirely satisfied he had said enough. He had conveyed just everything that was needed to excuse and explain and justify his presence in that company.... Upon a big table in the hall he noticed that a silk hat and an umbrella had appeared since their arrival. He glanced at Miss Sharsper but she was keenly occupied with the table legs. He began to breathe freely again when the partings were over and he could get back into the automobile. "Toot," said the horn and he made a last grave salutation to the slender white figure on the steps. The great butler stood at the side of the entrance and a step or so below her, with the air of a man who has completed a difficult task. A small attentive valet hovered out of the shadows behind.
§5
(A fragment of the conversation in Lady Beach-Mandarin's returning automobile may be recorded in a parenthesis here.
"But did you see Sir Isaac?" she cried, abruptly.
"Sir Isaac?" defended the startled Mr. Brumley. "Where?"
"He was dodging about in the garden all the time."
"Dodging about the garden!... I saw a sort of gardener——"
"I'm sure I saw Him," said Lady Beach-Mandarin. "Positive. He hid away in the mushroom shed. The one you found locked."
"But my dear Lady Beach-Mandarin!" protested Mr. Brumley with the air of one who listens to preposterous suggestions. "What can make you think——?"
"Oh I know I saw him," said Lady Beach-Mandarin. "I know. He seemed all over the place. Like a Boy Scout.