And indeed aplomb had been required. For the guests behaved strangely--unless it was that the hostess was in a nervous mood for fancying trouble! Julian Maldon was fidgety and preoccupied. And Louis himself--usually a model guest--was also fidgety and preoccupied. As for Rachel, the poor girl had only too obviously lost her head about Louis. Mrs. Maldon had never seen anything like it, never!

III

Julian, having opened the case, disclosed twin brier pipes, silver-mounted, with alternative stems of various lengths and diverse mouthpieces--all reposing on soft couches of fawn-tinted stuff, with a crimson, silk-lined lid to serve them for canopy. A rich and costly array! Everybody was impressed, even startled. For not merely was the gift extremely handsome--it was more than a gift; it symbolized the end of an epoch in those lives. Mrs. Maldon had been no friend of tobacco. She had lukewarmly permitted cigarettes, which Louis smoked, smoking naught else. But cigars she had discouraged, and pipes she simply would not have! Now, Julian smoked nothing but a pipe. Hence in his great-aunt's parlour he had not smoked; in effect he had been forbidden to smoke there. The theory that a pipe was vulgar had been stiffly maintained in that sacred parlour. In the light of these facts did not Mrs. Maldon's gift indeed shine as a great and n.o.ble act of surrender? Was it not more than a gift, and ent.i.tled to stagger beholders? Was it not a sublime proof that the earth revolves and the world moves?

Mrs. Maldon was as susceptible as any one to the drama of the moment, perhaps more than any one. She thrilled and became happy as Julian in silence minutely examined the pipes. She had taken expert advice before purchasing, and she was tranquil as to the ability of the pipes to withstand criticism. They bore the magic triple initials of the first firm of brier-pipe makers in the world--initials as famous and as welcome on the plains of Hindustan as in the Home Counties or the frozen zone. She gazed round the table with increasing satisfaction.

Louis, who was awkwardly fixed with regard to the light, the shadow of his bust falling always across his plate, had borne that real annoyance with the most charming good-humour. He was a delight to the eye; he had excellent qualities, especially social qualities. Rachel sat opposite to the hostess--an admirable girl in most ways, a splendid companion, and a sound cook. The meal had been irreproachable, and in the phrase of the _Signal_ "ample justice had been done" to it. Julian was on the hostess's left, with his back to the window and to the draught. A good boy, a sterling boy, if peculiar! And there they were all close together, intimate, familiar, mutually respecting; and the perfect parlour was round about them: a domestic organism, honest, dignified, worthy, more than comfortable.

And she, Elizabeth Maldon, in her old age, was the head of it, and the fount of good things.

"Thank ye!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Julian, with a queer look askance at his benefactor. "Thank ye, aunt!"

It was all he could get out of his throat, and it was all that was expected of him. He hated to give thanks--and he hated to be thanked.

The grandeur of the present flattered him. Nevertheless he regarded it as essentially absurd in its pretentiousness. The pipes were A1, but could a man carry about a huge contraption like that? All a man needed was an A1 pipe, which, if he had any sense, he would carry loose in his pocket with his pouch--and be hanged to morocco cases and silk linings!

"Stoke up, my hearties!" said Louis, drawing forth a gun-metal cigarette-case, which was chained to his person by a kind of cable.

Undoubtedly the case of pipes represented for Julian a triumph over Louis, or, at least, justice against Louis. For obvious reasons Julian had not quarrelled with a rich and affectionate great-aunt because she had accorded to Louis the privilege of smoking in her parlour what he preferred to smoke, while refusing a similar privilege to himself. But he had resented the distinction. And his joy in the spectacular turn of the wheel was vast. For that very reason he hid it with much care.

Why should he bubble over with grat.i.tude for having been at last treated fairly? It would be pitiful to do so. Leaving the case open upon the table, he pulled a pouch and an old pipe from his pocket, and began to fill the pipe. It was inexcusable, but it was like him--he had to do it.

"But aren't you going to try one of the new ones?" asked Mrs. Maldon, amiably but uncertainly.

"No," said he, with cold nonchalance. Upon n.o.body in the world had the sweet magic of Mrs. Maldon's demeanour less influence than upon himself. "Not now. I want to enjoy my smoke, and the first smoke out of a new pipe is never any good."

It was very true, but far more wanton than true. Mrs. Maldon in her ignorance could not appreciate the truth, but she could appreciate its wantonness. She was wounded--silly, touchy old thing! She was wounded, and she hid the wound.

Rachel flushed with ire against the boor.

"By the way," Mrs. Maldon remarked in a light, indifferent tone, just as though the glory of the moment had not been suddenly rent and shrivelled. "I didn't see your portmanteau in the back room just now, Julian. Has any one carried it upstairs? I didn't hear any one go upstairs."

"I didn't bring one, aunt," said Julian.

"Not bring--"

"I was forgetting to tell ye. I can't sleep here to-night. I'm off to South Africa to-morrow, and I've got a lot of things to fix up at my digs to-night." He lit the old pipe from a match which Louis pa.s.sed to him.

"To South Africa?" murmured Mrs. Maldon, aghast. And she repeated, "South Africa?" To her it was an incredible distance. It was not a place--it was something on the map. Perhaps she had never imaginatively realized that actual people did in fact go to South Africa. "But this is the first I have heard of this!" she said.

Julian's extraordinary secretiveness always disturbed her.

"I only got the telegram about my berth this morning," said Julian, rather sullenly on the defensive.

"Is it business?" Mrs. Maldon asked.

"You may depend it isn't pleasure, aunt," he answered, and shut his lips tight on the pipe.

After a pause Mrs. Maldon tried again.

"Where do you sail from?"

Julian answered--

"Southampton."

There was another pause. Louis and Rachel exchanged a glance of sympathetic dismay at the situation.

Mrs. Maldon then smiled with plaintive courage.

"Of course if you can't sleep here, you can't," said she benignly. "I can see that. But we were quite counting on having a man in the house to-night--with all these burglars about--weren't we, Rachel?" Her grimace became, by an effort, semi-humorous.

Rachel diplomatically echoed the tone of Mrs. Maldon, but more brightly, with a more frankly humorous smile--

"We were, indeed!"

But her smile was a masterpiece of duplicity, somewhat strange in a girl so downright; for beneath it burned hotly her anger against the brute Julian.

"Well, there it is!" Julian gruffly and callously summed up the situation, staring at the inside of his teacup.

"Propitious moment for getting a monopoly of door-k.n.o.bs at the Cape, I suppose?" said Louis quizzically. His cousin manufactured, among other articles, white and jet door-k.n.o.bs.

"No need for you to be so desperately funny!" snapped Julian, who detested Louis' brand of facetiousness. It was the word "propitious"

that somehow annoyed him--it had a sarcastic flavour, and it was "Louis all over."

"No offence, old man!" Louis magnanimously soothed him. "On the contrary, many happy returns of the day." In social intercourse the younger cousin's good-humour and suavity were practically indestructible.

But Julian still scowled.

Rachel, to make a tactful diversion, rose and began to collect plates.

The meal was at an end, and for Mrs. Maldon it had closed in ignominy.

From her quarter of the table she pushed crockery towards Rachel with a gesture of disillusion; the courage to smile had been but momentary.

She felt old--older than she had ever felt before. The young generation presented themselves to her as almost completely enigmatic.

She admitted that they were foreign to her, that she could not comprehend them at all. Each of the three at her table was entirely free and independent--each could and did act according to his or her whim, and none could say them nay. Such freedom seemed unreal. They were children playing at life, and playing dangerously. Hundreds of times, in conversation with her coevals, she had cheerfully protested against the ba.n.a.l complaint that the world had changed of late years.

But now she felt grievously that the world was different--that it had indeed deteriorated since her young days. She was fatigued by the modes of thought of these youngsters, as a nurse or mother is fatigued by too long a spell of the shrillness and the _navete_ of a family of infants. She wanted repose.... Was it conceivable that when, with incontestable large-mindedness, she had given a case of pipes to Julian, he should first put a slight on her gift and then, brusquely leaving her in the lurch, announce his departure for South Africa, with as much calm as though South Africa were in the next street?...

And the other two were guilty in other ways, perhaps more subtly, of treason against forlorn old age.

And then Louis, in taking the slop-basin from her trembling fingers, to pa.s.s it to Rachel, gave her one of his adorable, candid, persuasive, sympathetic smiles. And lo! she was enheartened once more.

And she remembered that dignity and kindliness had been the watchwords of her whole life, and that it would be shameful to relinquish the struggle for an ideal at the very threshold of the grave. She began to find excuses for Julian. The dear lad must have many business worries.

He was very young to be at the head of a manufacturing concern. He had a remarkable brain--worthy of the family. Allowances must be made for him. She must not be selfish.... And a.s.suredly that serviette and ring would reappear on the morrow.

"I'll take that out," said Louis, indicating the tray which Rachel had drawn from concealment under the Chesterfield, and which was now loaded. Mrs. Maldon employed an old and valued charwoman in the mornings. Rachel accomplished all the rest of the housework herself, including cookery, and she accomplished it with the stylistic smartness of a self-respecting lady-help.

"Oh no!" said she. "I can carry it quite easily, thanks."

Louis insisted masculinely--

"I'll take that tray out."

And he took it out, holding his head back as he marched, so that the smoke of the cigarette between his lips should not obscure his eyes.