Sherston’s Wedding Eve
In the gathering twilight a man stood at the eastern window of a room which formed the top story of one of the houses in Peter the Great Terrace—that survival from the early nineteenth century which forms a kind of recess in the broad thoroughfare linking Waterloo Bridge with the Strand. The man’s name was Shirley Sherston, and among the happy, prosperous few who are concerned with such things, he was known for his fine, distinguished work in domestic architecture.
It was the evening of October 13, 1915, and Sherston was to be married to-morrow.
Now, for what most people would have thought a puerile reason, that with him 13 had always proved a luck number, he had much wished that to-day should be his wedding day. And Helen Pomeroy, his future wife, who never thought anything he did or desired to do puerile or unreasonable, had been quite willing to fall in with his fancy. The lucky day had actually been chosen. Then a tiresome woman, a sister of Miss Pomeroy’s mother, had said she could not be present at the marriage if it took place on the thirteenth, as on that day her son, who had been home on leave, was going back to the Front. She had also pointed out quite unnecessarily, that 13 is an unlucky number.
Staring out into the darkness, Sherston’s stormy, eager heart began to quiver with longing, with regret, and with the half-painful rapture of anticipation. He had suddenly visioned—and Sherston was a man given to vivid visions—where he would have been now, at this moment, had his marriage indeed taken place this morning. He saw himself, on this beautiful starlit, moonless night, standing, along with his dear love, on the platform of a medieval tower, which, together with the picturesque farmhouse which had been tacked on to the tower about a hundred years ago, rose, close to the seashore, on a lonely stretch of the Sussex coast.
But what was not true tonight would be true to-morrow night, twenty-four hours from now.
He had bought tower and house three years ago, and he had spent there many happy holidays, boating and fishing, alone, or in company of some man chum. Sherston had never thought to bring a woman there, for the morrow’s bridegroom, for some six to seven years past, had had an impatient contempt for, as well as fear of, women.
Sherston was a widower, though he never used the word, even in his innermost heart, for to him the term connoted something slightly absurd, and he was sensitive to ridicule.
Very few of the people at preset acquainted with the brilliant, pleasantly eccentric architect, knew that he had been married before. But of course the handful of old Bohemian comrades whom he had faithfully kept from out of the past, were well aware of the fact. They were not likely to forget it either, for whenever it was mentioned, each of them at once remembered that which at the time it had happened, Sherston had every reason to tell rather than to conceal, namely, that the woman who had been his wife had gone down with the Titanic.
But how long ago that now seemed!
The outbreak of war, which caused so much unmerited misfortune to English artists and their like, and which at one moment had threatened to wreck his own successful opening career, had brought to Shirley Sherston a piece of marvelous good fortune..
Early in the memorable August, 1914, at a time when the fabric of his life and work seemed shattered, and when the lameness which he had so triumphantly coped with during his grown up life as to cause those about him scarcely to know it was there, made it out of the question for him to respond to his country’s first call for men, the architect happened to run across James Pomeroy, a cultivated millionaire with whom he had once had a slight business relation. Acting on a kindly impulse which even now Mr. Pomeroy hardly knew whether to remember with pleasure or regret, the older man had pressed the younger to spend a week in a country house which he had taken for the summer near London.
That was now fourteen months ago, but Sherston, standing there, remembered as if it had happened yesterday, his first sight of the girl who was to become his wife to-morrow. Helen Pomeroy had been standing on a brick path bordered with holly hocks, and she had smiled, a little shyly and gravely, at her father’s rather eccentric-looking guest. But on that war-summer morning she had appeared to the stranger as does a mirage of spring water to a man who is dying of thirst in the desert.
Up to that time Sherston had always supposed himself to be attracted to small women. He was a big, fair man, with loosely hung limbs, and his wife—poor little baggage—had been a tiny creature, vixenish at her worst, kittenish at her best. But Helen Pomeroy was tall, with the noble proportions and tapering limbs of a goddess, and gradually—not for some time, for all social life was dislocated in England during that strange summer—Sherston became aware, with a kind of angry revolt of soul, that he was but one of many worshipers at the shrine.
Following an irresistible impulse, he early in their acquaintance told Helen Pomeroy more of himself than he had ever told any other human being; and his confidences at last included a bowdlerized account of his wretched marriage. But though they soon became friends, and though he went on seeing a great deal of her, all through that autumn and winter, Sherston feared to put his fate to the touch, and he was jealous—God alone knew how hideously, intolerably jealous—of the khaki-clad soldiers who came and went in her father’s house in town.
and then, one day, during the second summer of their acquaintance, a word let drop by Mr. Pomeroy, who had become fond of the odd, restless fellow, opened a pit before Sherston’s feet. It was a word implying that now, at last, Helen’s father and mother hoped she would “make up her mind.” A very distinguished soldier, whom she had refused as a girl of twenty, had come back unchanged, after six years, from India, and Helen, or so her parents hoped and thought, was seriously thinking of him.
Sherston had kept away. He had even left two of her letters—the rather formal letters which had come to mean so very much in his life—unanswered. A fortnight had gone by, and then there had reached him a prim little note from Mrs. Pomeroy, asking him why he had not been to see them lately. There was a postscript: “If you do not come soon, you will not see my daughter. She has not been well, and we are thinking of sending her up to Scotland, to friends who are in Skye, for a good long holiday.”
He had gone to Cadogan Square (it was August 13th) as quickly as a taxi could take him, and by a blessed stroke of luck he had found Miss Pomeroy alone. In a flash all had come right between them. That had only been nine weeks ago, and now they were to be married to-morrow…
Sherston had been standing a long time at that casement of his which commanded the huge gray mass of Somerset House, when at last he turned round, and went quickly across the room to the other, western, window.
Even in the gathering darkness what a faery view was there! Glad as he was to know that after to-night he would never again see this living room in its present familiar guise—for he had arranged with a furniture dealer to come and take everything left in it away, within an hour of his departure—he told himself that never again could he hope to live with such a view as that on which he was gazing out now.
The yellowing branches of the trees which have their roots deep in the graveyard of the old Savoy Chapel formed, even in mid-October, a delicious screen of living, moving leaves. Far below, to his left, ran the river Thames, its rushing waters full of a mysterious, darksome beauty, and illumined, here and there, with the quivering reflection of shadowed white, green and red lights. Sherston in his heart often blessed the Sepelin scare which had banished the monstrous, flaring signs which, till a few months ago, had so offended his eyes each time that he looked out into the night, towards the water.
The lease of a fine old house in Cheyenne Walk had been chosen by Mr. Pomeroy as his daughter’s wedding gift, and already certain of Sherston’s personal possessions had been moved there. But he was taking with him as little as possible, and practically nothing from this memory-haunted room.
It was the big, light, airy, loft-like apartment which had attracted him in these chambers fifteen years ago, when he had first come to London from the Midlands, at the age of three-and-twenty. It was here, five years later, that he had come straight back from the Soho Registry Office with the young woman whom he had quixotically drawn up out of a world—the nether world—where she had been happier than she could ever hope to become with him. For Kitty Brawle—her very surname was symbolic—was one of those doomed creatures who love the mud, who never really wish to leave the mud—who feel scraped and sad when clean.
Unhappy Sherston! The noblest thing he had ever done, or was ever likely to do, in his life, proved, for a time at least, his undoing. Kitty had made him from generous mean, from unsuspecting suspicious, and during the wretched year they had spent together she had had a disastrous effect on his work. At last, acting on the shrewd advice of one of those instinctive men of the world of which Bohemia is full, he had bought her a billet in a theatrical touring company. There, by an extraordinary chance, Kitty made a tiny hit—sufficiently of a hit to bring her from an American impresario a creditable offer, contingent on her fare being paid to the States.
Gladly, how gladly only he himself had known—Sherston had taken her passage in the Titanic, Kitty’s own characteristic choice of a boat. And he had done more. though short of money, he had given Kitty a hundred pounds.
Four days after their parting had come the astounding news of the sinking of the liner, followed, by Sherston, by a period of strange, painful suspense, filled with the eager scanning of lists, cables to and from America, finally terminated by an official intimation that poor Kitty had gone down in, and with, the ship.
Sherston’s imagination was inconveniently vivid, and for a few poignant weeks his wife’s horrible end haunted him. But after a while he forced himself to take a long holiday in Greece, and from there he came back with his nerves in better order than they had ever been.
Fate, which so seldom interferes with kindly intention in the lives of men, had cut what had become a strangling knot, and Kitty, from a dreadful, never-forgotten burden, had become a rather touching, piteous memory, growing ever dimmer as first the months, and then the years, slipped by.
Even so, her ghost sufficiently often haunted this large room, and the other apartments which composed Sherston’s set of chambers, to make him determine that Miss Pomeroy should never come there. And she, being in this as unlike other, commonplace, young woman as she was in everything else, had never put him to the pain of finding an insincere excuse for his unwillingness to show her the place in which he lived and worked….
The coming night stretched long and bleak before to-morrow’s bridegroom. There were fourteen hours to live through before he could even see Helen, for the time of the marriage had been fixed for eleven o’clock.
Sherston was not looking forward to the actual ceremony—no man ever does; and though it was to be a war wedding, a great many people, as he was ruefully aware, had been bidden to the ceremony. But it was comfortable to know that none of the guests had been asked to go back to the house from which he and his bride were to start for Sussex at one o’clock, in the motor which was Mrs. Pomeroy’s marriage gift to her daughter.
Suddenly Sherston discovered the he was very hungry! He had lunched at Cadogan Square at a quarter to two, but he had felt too inwardly excited in that queer atmosphere of tears and laughter, of trousseau and wedding presents, to eat.
Even the least earthly of Romantics cannot forget for long the claims of the flesh, and so, smiling a little wryly in the darkness, he now told himself that the best thing he could do was to go out and get some supper. Acquainted with all the eating houses in the region, he was glad indeed that after to-night he would never have to enter one again.
Pulling down the green blind in front of him, Sherston walked across the room and pulled down the blind of the other window, for the London lighting orders had become much stricter of late. Then he turned on the electric light switch, took up his hat and stick, and went out into the little lobby.
Before him was a narrow aperture which opened straight on to the steep, short flight of steps connecting his chambers with the stone staircase of the big old house. This latter-like set of steps had a door top and bottom, but the lower door, which gave on to the landing, was generally left open. Turning out the light in the lobby, Sherston put his left hand on the banister and slid down in the darkness, taking the dozen steps as it were in one stride.
As he reached the bottom he suddenly became aware that the door before him, that giving on the landing, was shut, and that some one, almost certainly a child—for there was not room on the mat for a full-grown person—was crouching down just within the door.
Sherston felt sharply, perhaps unreasonably, irritated. Known in the neighborhood as open-handed and kindly, it had sometimes happened, but generally only in wintry weather, that he had come home to find some poor waif lying in wait for him. Man, woman or child who had wandered in, maybe, before the big door downstairs was closed, or who, if still blessed with some outer semblance of gentility, had managed cunningly to get past the Cerberus who lived in the basement, and whose duty it was to open the front door, after eight at night, to non-residents.
He felt in his pocket for a half-a-crown, and then, pretending still to be unaware that there was any one there, he fumbled for the spring lock.
The door burst open—he saw before him the shaft of glimmering whiteness shed by the skylight, for since the Zeppelin raid of the month before, the staircase was always left in darkness—and the figure of his unknown guest rolled over, picked itself up, and stood revealed, a woman, not a child, as he had at first thought. And then a feeling of sick, shrinking fear came over Sherston, for there fell on his ears the once horribly familiar accents—plaintive, wheedling, falsely timorous—of his dead wife’s voice….
“Is that you, Shirley? I didn’t know that you was at home. The windows were all dark, and—” In an injured tone this: “I’ve been waiting here ever so long for you to come in!”
The wraith-like figure before him was only too clearly flesh and blood, and, as he stepped forward, it moved quickly across, and stood, barring his way, on the top stone step of the big staircase.
Sherston remained silent. He could think of nothing to say. But his mind began to work with extraordinary rapidity and lucidity.
There was only one thing to do, here and now. That was to give the woman standing there a little money—not much—and tell her to come back again the next day. Having thus got rid of her—he knew that on no account must she be allowed to stay here the night—he must go at once to Mr. Pomeroy and tell him of this terrible, hitherto unimaginable, calamity. He told himself that it would be, if not exactly easy, then certainly possible to arrange a divorce.
Determinedly, in these tense, terrible moments, he refused to let himself face the coming anguish and dismay of the morrow. It was just a blow, straight between the eyes from fate—that fate who he had foolishly thought had been kind.
“Well? Are you going to let me stand here all night?”
“No, of course not. Wait a minute—I’m thinking.” He spoke in a quick, hoarse tone, a tone alas! which Kitty at one time in their joint lives had come to associate with deep feeling on his part, in those days when she used to come and tell the lonely man of her sorrows, of her temptations, and of her vague, upward aspirations….
She lurched a little towards him. Everything was going far better than she could have hoped; why, Sherston did not seem angry, hardly annoyed, at her unheralded return!
Suddenly he felt her thin, strong arms closing round his body, in a horrible vice-like grip—
“Don’t touch me!” he cried fiercely; and making a greater physical effort than he would have thought himself capable of, he shook himself violently free.
He saw her reel backwards and fall, with a queer grotesque movement, head over heels down the stone steps. The dull thud her body made as she fell on the half landing echoed up and down the bare well of the staircase.
Sherston’s heart smote him. He had not meant to do THAT. Then he reminded himself bitterly that drunkards always fall soft. She could not have hurt herself much, falling that little way.
He waited a few moments; then, as she made no effort to raise herself, he walked down, slowly, unwillingly, towards her. From the little he could see in the dim light cast from above, Kitty was lying very oddly, all in a heap, her head against the wall.
He knelt down by her side.
“Kitty,” he said quietly. “Try and get up. I’m sorry if I hurt you, but you took me by surprise. I—I—”
But there came no word, no moan even, in answer.
He felt for her limp hand, and held it a moment, but it lay in his, inertly. Filled with a queer, growing fear, he struck a match, bent down, and saw, for the first time that night, her face. It looked older, incredibly older, than when he had last seen it, five years ago! The hair near the temples had turned gray. Her eyes were wide open—and even as he looked earnestly into her face, her jaw suddenly dropped. He started back with an extraordinary feeling of mingled fear and repugnance.
Striking match after match as he went, he rushed up again into his chambers, and looked about for a hand mirror…. He failed to find one, and at last he brought down his shaving glass.
With shaking hands he laid it close against that hideous, gaping mouth, for five long dragging minutes. The glass remained clear, untarnished.
Putting a great constraint on himself, he forced himself to move her head. And the truth came to him! In that strange short fall Kitty had broken her neck. For the second time he was free. But this time her death, instead of cutting a knot, bound him as with cords of twisted steel to shame, and yes, to deadly peril.
Slowly he got up from his knees. Unless he went and jumped over the parapet of the Embankment into the river—a possibility which he grimly envisaged for a few moments—he knew that the only thing to do was to go off at once for the police, and make, as the saying is, a clean breast of it. After all he was innocent—innocent of even a secret desire of encompassing Kitty’s death. But would it be possible to make even the indifferent, when aware of all the circumstances, believe that? Yes, there was one such human being—and as he thought of her his heart glowed with gratitude to God for having made her known to him. Helen would believe him, Helen would understand everything—and nothing else really mattered. It was curious how the thought of Helen, which had been agony an hour ago, now filled him with a kind of steadfast comfort.
As Sherston turned to go down the staircase, there came the distant sound of the bursting of a motor tire, and the unhappy man started violently. His nerves were now in pieces, but he remembered, as he went down the stone steps, to feel in one of his pockets, to be sure he had what he so seldom used, a card-case on him.
On reaching the front door he was surprised to find it open, and to see just within the hall, their white caps and pale faces dimly illumined by the little light that glimmered in from outside, two trained nurses with bags in their hands. They were talking eagerly, and took no notice of him as he passed.
For a moment Sherston wondered whether he ought to tell them of the terrible accident which had just happened upstairs—but after a momentary hesitation he decided that it would be better to go straight off to the Police Station. Already his excited brain saw a nurse standing in the witness-box at a trial where he himself stood in the dock on a charge of murder. So, past the two whispering women, he hurried out into the darkness.
Even in the grievous state of mental distress in which he now found himself, Sherston noticed that the street lamps were turned so low that there only shone out, under their green shades, pallid spots of light. And as he stumbled across the curb of the pavement, he told himself, with irritation, that that was really rather absurd! More accidents proceeded from the absence of light than were ever likely to be caused by the Zeppelins.
Perforce walking warily, he hastened towards the Strand. There was less traffic than usual, fewer people, too, on the pavement, but it was just after nine o’clock, the quietest time of the evening.
Suddenly a huge column of flame shot up some thirty yards in front of him, and then (it seemed to all to happen in a moment) a line of men, police, and special constables, spread across the thoroughfare in which he now was, barring off the Strand.
Sherston quickened his footsteps. For a moment his own disturbed and fearsome thoughts were banished by the extraordinary and exciting sight before him. Higher and higher mounted the pillar of fire, throwing a sinister glare on the buildings, high and low, new and old, round about it. “Good Heavens!” he exclaimed involuntarily. “Is that the Lyceum on fire?” A policeman near whom he was now standing, turned round and said shortly, “Can’t say, I’m sure, sir.”
He witnessed in the next few minutes a strange scene of confusion, of hurrying and scurrying hither and thither. Where there had been almost pitch darkness, was now a glittering, brilliant bath of light, in which the figures of men and women, moving swiftly to and fro, appeared like animated silhouettes. But even as he stared before him at the extraordinary Hogarthian vision, the roadway and the pavements of the Strand became strangely and suddenly deserted, while he began to hear the hoot, hoot of the fire-engines galloping to the scene of the disaster. Before him the line of police and of special constables remained unbroken, and barred his further progress.
“I don’t want to go past the theater,” he whispered urgently. “I only want to get to Bow Street, as quickly as possible, on a very important matter.” He slipped the half-crown he had meant to give the waif he had taken Kitty to be, into a policeman’s hand, and though the man shook his head he let him through.
Sherston shot down the Strand, to his left. Almost filling up the steep, lane-like street which leads down to the Savoy Hotel, were rows of ambulances, groups of nurses, and Red Cross men, and absorbed though he was once more in his own sensations, and the thought of the terrible ordeal that lay in front of him, Sherston yet found himself admiring the quickness with which they had been rushed hither.
On he went, and crossed the empty roadway. How strange that so little attention was being paid to the fire! Instead of a hurrying mob of men and women, the Strand was now extraordinarily empty, both of people and of vehicles, and now and again he could hear the sound of knocking, of urgent knocking, as if some one who has been locked out, and is determined to be let in.
He strode quickly along, feeling his way somewhat, for apart from the reflection of the red sky, it was pitch dark in the side streets, and soon he stood before the Police Station. The big old-fashioned building was just within the outer circle of light cast by the huge fire whose fierceness seemed to increase rather than diminish, and Sherston suddenly espied an Inspector standing half in the open door. “I’ve some very urgent business,” he said hurriedly. “Could you come inside for a moment, and take down a statement?”
“What’s your business about?” said the man sharply, and in the wavering light Sherston thought his face looked oddly distraught and pale.
“There’s a woman lying dead at No. 19 Peter the Great Terrace,” began Sherston curtly—
The man bent forward. “There’s many women already lying dead about here, sir, and likely to be more—babies and children too—before we’re through with this hellish business!” he said grimly. “If she’s dead, poor thing, we can do nothing for her. But if you think there’s any life left in her—well, you’ll find plenty of ambulances, as well as doctors and nurses, down Strand way. But if I was you, I’d wait a bit before going back. They’re still about—” and even as he uttered the word “about” he started back into the shelter of the building, pulling Sherston roughly in with him as he did so, and there came a loud, dull report, curiously analogous to that which a quarter of an hour ago—it seemed hours rather than minutes—Sherston had taken for the bursting of a motor tire. But this time the sound was at once followed by that of shattered glass, and of falling masonry.
“Good God!” he cried. “What’s that?”
“A goodish lot of damage this time, I should think,” said the Inspector thoughtfully. “Though they’re doing wonderfully little considering how they—”
“THEY?”
“Zeppelins, of course, sir! Why didn’t you guess that? They say there’re two over us if not three.” Then in a voice, so changed, so charged with relief, that his own mother would not have known it for the same, the man exclaimed, “Look up, sir—there they are! And they’re off—the hellish things!” And Sherston throwing up his head, did indeed see what looked to his astonished eyes like two beautiful golden trout swimming across the sky just above him.
As he stood awestruck, fascinated at the astounding sight, he also saw what looked like a falling star shoot down from one of the Zeppelins, and again there fell on his ears that strange explosive thud.
The man by his side uttered a stifled oath. “There’s another—let’s hope it’s the last in this district!” he exclaimed. “See! They’re off down the river now!”
Even as he said the words the space in front of the Police Station was suddenly filled with a surging mass of people, men, women, even children, making their way Strandward, to see all that there was to see, now that the immediate danger was past.
“If I were you, sir, I think I’d stay here quietly a bit, till the crowd has thinned, and been driven back. I take it you can’t do that poor woman of whom you spoke just now any good—I take it she’s dead, sir?” the Inspector spoke very feelingly.
“Yes, she certainly is dead,” said Sherston dully.
“Well, I must be going now, but if you like to stay here a while, I’m sure you’re welcome, sir.”
“No,” said Sherston. “I think I’ll go out and see whether I can do anything to help.”
The two passed out into the roadway, and took their place among the slowly moving people there, the Inspector make a way for himself and his companion through the excited, talkative, good-humored Cockney crowd. “There it is! Can’t you see it? Up there just like a little yellow worm.” “There’s naught at all! You’ve got the cobble-wobbles!” and then a ripple of laughter.
Sherston was borne along with the human stream, and with that stream he suddenly found himself stopped at the westward end of Wellington Street. Over the heads of the people before him—they were, oddly enough, mostly women—he could see the column of flame still burning steadily upwards, and scarcely affected at all by the huge jets of water now playing on it.
It seemed to start from the ground, a massive pillar of fire, and all round it was an empty space—a zone no human being could approach for fear of being at once roasted and shriveled up to death. “The bomb got down to the big gas main,” observed a voice close to him. “It’ll be days before they get THAT fire under!”
He, Sherston, felt marvelously calm. This strange, awful visitation had made for him a breathing space in which to reconsider what he had better do, and suddenly he decided that he would go and consult Mr. Pomeroy. But before doing that he must force himself to go back and fetch certain documents which fortunately he had kept….
He made his way, with a great deal of difficulty—for it was as if all London had by now flocked to this one afflicted area—by a circuitous way to the Strand. Tramping through a six-inch-deep flood of broken glass he made his way by the Embankment and the Waterloo Bridge steps to the upper level, that leading to, and past, Peter the Great Terrace.
A vast host was now westward from over the river, and he felt the electric currents of joyous excitement, retrospective fear, and, above all, of eager, almost ferocious, curiosity, linking up rapidly about him. The rough and ready cordon of special constables seemed powerless to dam the human tide, and caught in that tide’s eddies, Sherston struggled helplessly.
“Let me through,” he shouted at last. “I MUST get through!”
“You can’t get through just here—there’s a house been struck in Peter the Great Terrace! ’Twas the last bomb did it!”
Sherston uttered a groan—Ah! If only that were true! But he had just now glanced up and seen the row of big substantial eighteenth century houses, of which his was the end one, solidly outlined against the star-powdered sky, though every pane of glass had been blown out.
Then some one turned round. “It’s the corner house been struck. Bomb fell right through the skylight. They’ve sent for the firemen to see what damage was done. You can’t see anything from this side.”
Through the Skylight?
Sherston was a powerful man. He forced his way, he did not know how, blindly, to the very front of the crowd.
Yes, there were two firemen standing by the low, sunk-in door, that door through which he had come and gone hundreds, nay thousands, of times, in his life. So much was true, but everything else was as usual. “I live here,” he said hoarsely. “Will you let me through?”
The fireman shook his head. “No, sir. I can’t let any one through. And if I did ’twould be no good. The staircase is clean gone—a great big stone staircase, too! It’s all in bits, just like a lot of rubble. The front of the house ain’t touched, but the center and behind—well, sir, you never did see such a sight!”
“Any one hurt?” asked Sherston in a strangled tone. He felt a most extraordinary physical sensation of lightness—of—of—was it dissolution?—sweep over his mind and body. He heard as in a far away dream the answer to his question.
“There was no one in the house at all, from what we can make out. The caretaker had a lucky escape, or he’d be buried alive by now, but he and his missus had already gone out to see the sights.”
A moment later the fireman was holding Sherston in his big brawny arms, and shouting, “An ambulance this way—send a long a nurse please—gentleman’s fainted!” The crowd parted eagerly, respectfully. “Poor feller!” exclaimed one woman in half piteous, half furious tones. “Those damned Germans—they’ve gone and destroyed the poor chap’s little all. I heard him explaining just now as what he lived here!”
[signed]Maid Belloc Lowndes