Part Three — The Great Emotion
I
Mrs. Alan Hosack, bearing a more than ever remarkable resemblance to those ship’s figureheads that are still to be seen in the corners of old lumber yards, led the way out to the sun porch. Her lavish charms, her beaming manner, her clear blue eye, milky complexion, reddish hair, and the large bobbles and beads with which she insisted upon decorating herself made Howard Cannon’s nickname of Cornucopia exquisitely right. She was followed by Mrs. Cooper Jekyll and a man servant, whose arms were full of dogs and books and newspapers.
“The dogs on the ground, Barrett,” she said, “the books and papers on the table there, my chair on the right-hand side of it and bring that chair forward for Mrs. Jekyll. We will have the lemonade at once. Tell Lestocq that I shall not want the car before lunch, ask Miss Disberry to telephone to Mrs. John Ward Harrison and say that I will have tea with her this afternoon with pleasure, and when those two good little Sisters of Mercy finally arrive,—I could see them, all sandy, struggling along the road from my room, Augusta; dear me, what a life,—they are to be given luncheon as usual and the envelope that is on the hall table. That will do, I think.”
The man servant was entirely convinced that it would.
“And now, make yourself comfortable, dear Augusta, and tell me everything. So very kind of you to drive over like this on such a sunny morning. Yes, that’s right. Take off that lugubrious Harem veil,—the mark of a Southampton woman,—and let me see your beautiful face. Before I try to give you a chance to speak I must tell you, and I’m sure you won’t mind with your keen sense of humor, how that nice boy, Harry Oldershaw, describes those things. No, after all, perhaps I don’t think I’d better. For one reason, it was a little bit undergraduate, and for another, I forget.” She chuckled and sat down, wabbling for a moment like an opulent blancmange.
Minus the strange dark blue thing which had hidden her ears and nose and mouth and which suggested nothing but leprosy, Mrs. Jekyll became human, recognizable and extremely good to look at. She wore her tight-fitting suit of white flannel like a girl and even in that clear detective light she did not look a day over thirty. She painted with all the delicacy of an artist. She was there, as a close friend of Alice Palgrave, to discover why Gilbert had not gone with her to the Maine coast.
“I haven’t heard from you since we left town,” she said, beating about the bush, “and being in the neighborhood I thought it would be delightful to catch a glimpse of you and hear your news. I have none, except that I have just lost the butler who has been with me for so long, and Edmond is having his portrait painted again for some club or institution. It’s the ninth time, I believe. He likes it. It’s a sort of rest cure.”
“And how did you lose that very admirable butler? Illness or indiscretion?”
“Neither. Commerce, I suppose one might call it. It appears that one of these get-rich-quick munition men offered him double his wages to leave me, and Derbyshire couldn’t resist it. He came to me with tears in his eyes and told me that he had to make the sacrifice owing to the increased cost of living. He has a family, you know. He said that the comic atmosphere of his new place might bring on neuritis, but he must educate his three boys. Really, there is a great deal of unsung heroism in the world, isn’t there? In the meantime, I am trying to get accustomed to a Swiss, who’s probably a German spy and who will set up a wireless installation on the roof.” Then she dropped her baited hook. “You have a large house party, I suppose.”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Hosack, swinging her foot to keep the flies away. The wind was off the land.
“Primrose is so depressed if the house isn’t full. And so the d’Oylys are here,—Nina more Junoesque than ever and really quite like an Amazon in bathing clothes; Enid Ouchterlony, a little bitter, I’m afraid, at not being engaged to any one yet,—men are horribly scared of an intelligent girl and, after all, they don’t marry for intelligence, do they?—Harry Oldershaw, Frank Milwood and Courtney Millet, all nice boys, and I almost forgot to add, Joan Gray, that charming girl. My good man is following at her heels like a bob-tailed sheep dog. Poor old dear! He’s arrived at that pathetic period of a man’s life when almost any really blond girl still in her teens switches him into a second state of adolescence and makes him a most ridiculous object—what the novelists call the ‘Forty-nine feeling,’ I believe.”
Bennett brought the lemonade and hurried away before his memory could be put to a further strain. “Tell me about Joan Gray,” said Mrs. Jekyll, letting out her line. “There’s probably no truth in it, but I hear that she and Martin have agreed to differ. How quickly these romantic love matches burn themselves out. I always say that a marriage made in Heaven breaks up far sooner than one made on earth. It has so much farther to fall. Whose fault is it, hers or his?”
Mrs. Hosack bent forward and endeavored to lower her voice. She was a kind-hearted woman who delighted to see every one happy and normal. “I’m very worried about those two, my dear,” she answered. “There are all sorts of stories afloat,—one to the effect that Martin has gone off with a chorus girl, another that Joan only married him to get away from her grandparents and a third that they quarreled violently on the way home from church and have not been on speaking terms since. I daresay there are many others, but whatever did happen, and something evidently did, Joan is happy enough, and every man in the house is sentimental about her. Look out there, for instance.”
Mrs. Jekyll followed her glance and saw a girl in bathing clothes sitting on the beach under a red and blue striped umbrella encircled by the outstretched forms of half a dozen men. Beyond, on the fringe of a sea alive with bursting breakers, several girls were bathing alone.
“H’m,” said Mrs. Jekyll. “I should think that the second story is the true one. A tip-tilted nose, chestnut hair and brown eyes are better to flirt with than marry. Well, I must run away if I’m to be back to lunch. I wish I could stay, but Edmond and his artist may kill my new butler unless I intervene. They are both hotly pro-Ally. By the way, I hear that Alice Palgrave has gone to the Maine coast with her mother, who is ill again; I wonder where Gilbert is going?”
“Well, I had a very charming letter from him two days ago, asking me if he could come and stay with us. He loves this house and the beach, and I always cheer him up, he said, and he is very lonely without Alice. Of course I said yes, and he will be here this afternoon.”
Whereupon, having landed her fish, Mrs. Jekyll rose to go. Gilbert Palgrave and Joan Gray,—there was truth in that story, as she had thought. She had heard of his having been seen everywhere with Joan night after night, and her sister-in-law, who lived opposite to the little house in East Sixty-seventh Street, had seen him leaving in the early hours of the morning more than once. A lucky strike, indeed. Intuition was a wonderful gift. She was highly pleased with herself.
“Good-by, my dear,” she said. “I will drive over again one day this week and see how you are all getting on in this beautiful corner of the world. My love to Prim, please, and do remember me to the little siren.”
And away she went, leaving Mrs. Hosack to wonder what was the meaning of her rather curious smile. Only a hidebound prejudice on the part of the Ministries of all the nations has precluded women from the Diplomatic Service.