Capricious Caroline.

by E. Maria Albanesi.

CHAPTER 1

As the large motor swung along with the easy velocity and a.s.surance of some enormous bird, Camilla Lancing nestled more cosily into the warmth of her fur wraps.

Rupert Haverford was driving, and he looked back every now and then to see if his guest was comfortable.

"Is this too quick for you?" he asked once; and Mrs. Lancing only shook her head with a smile.

"It is too delightful," she answered.

The little town where they had been lunching lay far, far away in the distance now, its ugliness softened by the mingling of sun and haze, and the country through which they were pa.s.sing was very open; in a degree bleak. On one hand marshland and rough common ground, and on the other the beach inland, then stretches of wet sand, and then the restless, murmuring sea, bearing on its shimmering surface the cold embrace of the setting November sun.

Mrs. Lancing sighed involuntarily as she looked dreamily away to where the sky and sea seemed to meet, but her sigh was an unconscious tribute to the graciousness of the circ.u.mstances in which she found herself.

The smooth swinging movement of the car fascinated her. As she now and then closed her eyes, she felt as if she were being carried away from all that const.i.tuted life to her at other times; from excitement and pleasure and anxiety, from sordid and obtrusive care; even from the fever of hope and the illusive charm of chance. It was a delightful sensation.

Sometimes as the road curved the car seemed almost to approach the water, and the white-crested waves broke within a few yards of it with a boom; the rushing of the incoming and receding water making a musical accompaniment to the humming sound of the motor. Then they pa.s.sed from the coastline, and the road began to wind upwards. The sea was shut from view by a wall of chalky hillocks covered with stubbly gra.s.s, and only the country outlook remained.

Just before, for a brief while, the world had worn a soft, an almost rosy tint; but as the sun vanished this warmth went also, and now the landscape stretched into the distance grey, unsympathetic, and monotonous.

The speed of the car lessened as the ascent grew steeper; a thin mist began to gather ahead of them. To Mrs. Lancing's imaginative eye this mist took the form of a flock of fleecy white birds just hovering before winging flight.

Haverford pulled up here and, relinquishing his place to the chauffeur, climbed into the body of the car.

"Are you very cold?" he asked anxiously; "do you know, I am very much afraid, Mrs. Lancing, that this road will put us back an hour or so. It was foolish of me to come this way, for the country is new to me, and the road is certainly about the worst we have struck lately."

He occupied himself in tucking the big fur rug more securely about his guest, despite her protestations that she was quite warm enough, and quite comfortable.

The road was certainly very bad, and though the car disposed of the rough ground with an air of superb indifference, a certain amount of jolting was inevitable.

Camilla Lancing only laughed, however, as she was tossed up and down occasionally by the elastic movement of the springs.

"It is a matter of perfect indifference to me what time we arrive home," she said. "That is the effect motoring has on me! It engenders a heavenly sensation of irresponsibility. I simply don't care a pin what happens. My one conscious desire is to go on, and on, and on."

Rupert Haverford sat down in the other seat and looked at her with the sincerest pleasure; she was so delightful to look at. The tone of her garb was a rich brown; she had on a long coat of some rough fur, but round her throat and shoulders she wore a stole of the softest sables; there was a small cap of sables on her brown hair, and she had tied the brown gauze veil she wore in a cunning bow under her chin. A knot of white flowers that Rupert Haverford had given her at luncheon was tucked in among the fur at her breast, and was the only break in the harmonious whole. She turned to him as she spoke lightly; she had a bird-like trick of moving her small head that was very characteristic and very pretty.

"But of course this sounds horribly selfish. So like me. Shall we be very late? I am so sorry if you are sorry, otherwise I don't think it matters. Agnes said she would expect us when she saw us.

Fortunately"--Mrs. Lancing laughed--"dinner is a movable feast at Yelverton, or indeed anywhere where Agnes Brenton presides."

Haverford answered this very frankly.

"I am afraid I am not troubling in the very least about Mrs. Brenton or her dinner, I am thinking entirely of you. This is the first time you have entrusted yourself to my care, you know, and I want everything to go smoothly."

"Can anything go crookedly with you?" asked Camilla Lancing; there was the faintest tinge of envy in her voice.

Haverford laughed.

"Oh! I suppose so," he said. "I have certainly had more than my share of luck up to now, but one never knows what is waiting for one round the corner." Then he half rose and looked ahead. "What a mist!" he said. "I hope we are not in for a sea fog. I hate fog of any sort."

They drove on in silence for a few moments, and the mist gathered increasingly about them; the flock of birds had melted away, and the white velvety film floated about them like smoke. Everything became indistinct; even the broad outline of the chauffeur was veiled and vague.

Camilla Lancing spoke first.

"Now, please don't worry about me," she said, half-petulantly, translating his silence adroitly. "I am absolutely comfortable.

Naturally"--she added with a laugh--"I know that if I had done my duty I should have insisted on driving back with Agnes, though she declared she did not want me; but it is so nice _not_ to do one's duty every now and then. Did you ever hear of the little boy who always asked to be allowed some wickedness on Sundays, as he had to be so good all the days of the week? I share the sentiments of that little boy, Mr.

Haverford."

The car pulled up here again, and the chauffeur got down and lit the powerful lamps. By now they had pa.s.sed completely into the embrace of the white fog; the air was raw, and the damp cold very penetrating.

"But perhaps you mean you wanted me to go back with the others," Mrs.

Lancing murmured softly, as they moved onwards again.

Haverford just looked into her eyes, that even through the mist and her veil shone brilliantly.

"You know perfectly well I was not likely to do that," he answered bluntly, and yet there was a kind of restraint in his voice. Mrs.

Lancing caught that restraint, and with a sudden impatient contraction of her brows moved almost imperceptibly nearer to him; she arranged her veil with her small, white-gloved hand, and then left it lying for an instant on the outside of the rug. It was very close to his; but Rupert Haverford did not touch the hand, nor enfold it as he might so easily have done protectingly in his large, brown, strong one.

Mrs. Lancing bit her lip.

"There is no mistake, we _are_ in for a fog," she said jerkily, and she slipped her hand as she spoke back into the warmth of her big sable m.u.f.f. It was not the first time that this man had unconsciously repulsed her; there were times when, in her irritation, she called him a prig. But she misjudged him; Rupert Haverford was not a prig, he was only a very straightforward, practical, in a sense, simple-minded man, who, like an explorer, was advancing step by step into an unknown world, meeting and mingling every day with elements that were not only new to him, but that belonged to a range of things about which he had never had occasion to think hitherto. Camilla herself was prominent amongst these new sensations; she at once was a bewilderment and a fascination. There had been no woman of this cla.s.s in his life up to a couple of years before; indeed, women of any kind had played but a nominal part in the busy, uneventful, and certainly unpicturesque existence that had been his lot since early boyhood.

Mrs. Lancing, of course, knew briefly the outlines of the story of this working man and his sudden and unexpected accession to wealth, and recognized clearly enough that Haverford was as far removed in thought and social education from the various men who fluttered in and out of her life as the sun is from the earth; but she had little discrimination. With her it was never a question of character or quality; fundamentally she decreed all men were alike, strong in prejudice, weak in temptation, selfish, and even tyrannical; vain and sentimental, uncomfortably moral at times, but amazingly loyal, and, as a rule, sensitively moved by the potent charm of a woman of her temperament and attractions.

She liked men very much, she had many men friends, and few women friends, although the spontaneous effervescing sympathy, which was perhaps her most marked characteristic, made her very attractive to women, and accounted for her wide popularity; there was something so disarming, so delightful about Camilla Lancing. Beauty alone would never have given her a quarter the power she possessed; it was her ready interest (absolutely genuine for the moment), her quickness in a.s.sociating herself with those things that were paramount with the persons who approached her, that made her irresistible to all sorts and kinds of people.

She had the tact of a delicately fashioned nature, and a vast amount of endurance.

But she was not patient, and the more she saw of Rupert Haverford, the more necessary he became to her, the less patience she had.

He puzzled her; he piqued her; he annoyed her; he made her nervous.

What were his feelings towards herself?

"He is so horribly slow," she mused now fretfully, "he ponders every word he says. I suppose he is terribly afraid of making a mistake. I am sure his money oppresses him. He must have been ever so much nicer when he was working as a foreman, or drayman, or whatever he was before all this money came to him."

She kept her eyes turned resolutely away from Haverford. For perversely enough, though he was so slow, so silent, so dull, he was exceedingly good to look at. Old-fashioned, or rather out of the fashion, he might be, but his manners were irreproachable, and his speech cultured, and he dressed very well.

It came to Camilla as an inspiration, as the car moved on cautiously through the cold white fog, that he was only shy and perhaps stupid.

Rupert Haverford had certainly a good amount of diffidence in his disposition, but at the present moment it was the most exquisite, and the most real sense of hospitality that tinged even his protective courtesy with restraint.

When their hostess had deserted the motor after luncheon, and had insisted in making her way homeward in a hired carriage, Haverford had been delighted because Mrs. Lancing had elected to return with him. But this very fact--the fact that this woman, who had been charming herself into his inmost thoughts of late, was alone with him, charged him with a sense of responsibility, and he steeled himself carefully against even a suggestion of the delicious intimacy with which the situation was fraught.