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Page 63
Rose wanted to say No again to this. Lotty would have in her
place, and would, besides, have expounded all her reasons. But she
could not turn herself inside out like that and invite any and
everybody to come and look. How was it that Lotty, who saw so many
things, didn't see stuck on her heart, and seeing keep quiet about it,
the sore place that was Frederick?
"Who is your husband?" asked Mrs. Fisher, carefully adjusting
another nut between the crackers.
"Who should he be," said Rose quickly, roused at once by Mrs.
Fisher to irritation, "except Mr. Arbuthnot?"
"I mean, of course, what is Mr. Arbuthnot?"
And Rose, gone painfully red at this, said after a tiny pause,
"My husband."
Naturally, Mrs. Fisher was incensed. She couldn't have believed
it of this one, with her decent hair and gentle voice, that she too
should be impertinent.
Chapter 14
That first week the wistaria began to fade, and the flowers of
the Judas-tree and peach-trees fell off and carpeted the ground with
rose-colour. Then all the freesias disappeared, and the irises grew
scarce. And then, while these were clearing themselves away, the
double banksia roses came out, and the big summer roses suddenly
flaunted gorgeously on the walls and trellises. Fortune's Yellow was
one of them; a very beautiful rose. Presently the tamarisk and the
daphnes were at their best, and the lilies at their tallest. By the
end of the week the fig-trees were giving shade, the plum-blossom was
out among the olives, the modest weigelias appeared in their fresh pink
clothes, and on the rocks sprawled masses of thick-leaved, star-shaped
flowers, some vivid purple and some a clear, pale lemon.
By the end of the week, too, Mr. Wilkins arrived; even as his
wife had foreseen he would, so he did. And there were signs almost of
eagerness about his acceptance of her suggestion, for he had not waited
to write a letter in answer to hers, but had telegraphed.
That, surely, was eager. It showed, Scrap thought, a definite
wish for reunion; and watching his wife's happy face, and aware of her
desire that Mellersh should enjoy his holiday, she told herself that he
would be a very unusual fool should he waste his time bothering about
anybody else. "If he isn't nice to her," Scrap thought, "he shall be
taken to the battlements and tipped over." For, by the end of the
week, she and Mrs. Wilkins had become Caroline and Lotty to each other,
and were friends.
Mrs. Wilkins had always been friends, but Scrap had struggled not
to be. She had tried hard to be cautious, but how difficult was
caution with Mrs. Wilkins! Free herself from every vestige of it, she
was so entirely unreserved, so completely expansive, that soon Scrap,
almost before she knew what she was doing, was being unreserved too.
And nobody could be more unreserved than Scrap, once she let herself
go.
The only difficulty about Lotty was that she was nearly always
somewhere else. You couldn't catch her; you couldn't pin her down to
come and talk. Scrap's fears that she would grab seemed grotesque in
retrospect. Why, there was no grab in her. At dinner and after dinner
were the only times one really saw her. All day long she was
invisible, and would come back in the late afternoon looking a perfect
sight, her hair full of bits of moss, and her freckles worse than ever.
Perhaps she was making the most of her time before Mellersh arrived to
do all the things she wanted to do, and meant to devote herself
afterwards to going about with him, tidy and in her best clothes.
Scrap watched her, interested in spite of herself, because it
seemed so extraordinary to be as happy as all that on so little. San
Salvatore was beautiful, and the weather was divine; but scenery and
weather had never been enough for Scrap, and how could they be enough
for somebody who would have to leave them quite soon and go back to
life in Hampstead? Also, there was the imminence of Mellersh, of that
Mellersh from whom Lotty had so lately run. It was all very well to
feel one ought to share, and to make a beau geste and do it, but the
beaux gestes Scrap had known hadn't made anybody happy. Nobody really
liked being the object of one, and it always meant an effort on the
part of the maker. Still, she had to admit there was no effort about
Lotty; it was quite plain that everything she did and said was
effortless, and that she was just simply, completely happy.
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