The Eye of Love Page 19

  He wanted to pour it out. He wanted to tell it, not only in self-justification, but also because it was so beautiful. It was so beautiful, the wonder of it still struck him afresh. “I called her my Spanish rose,” said Harry Gibson. “You wouldn’t think a chap like me could think of it, would you?” He went back—and it was well Mr Joyce had resigned himself, for in the cinema round the corner Miss Molyneux and Miss Harris saw a third of the big picture, before Harry Gibson stopped talking—he went back to the Chelsea Arts Ball, with its coup de foudre; to the moment when they lost each other afterwards, which now seemed like a warning, and to their astounding, fated reunion. He dwelt like the lover that he was on the ten magical years in their secret garden, describing in detail the poem Dolores had made of the sitting-room, the pink curtains sewn by her own hands. (“I could see ’em as soon as I turned the corner,” yearned Harry Gibson. “Sometimes I almost ran down the road.”) Martha he barely mentioned, she appeared only as Miss Diver’s orphan niece, only to display the exquisite tenderness of Miss Diver’s nature; indeed it had always been the spell of the little house that it existed for its King alone. “It was a Kingdom of Love Divine,” recorded Harry Gibson solemnly, “exactly as the song-chappie says. You wouldn’t think this either, but when she called me, sometimes, her King Hal, it didn’t seem cracked. It just made me feel like a King …”

  Miranda’s father listened with—envy.

  It wasn’t the emotion he’d expected to feel. He’d let Harry have his head from a sense that it would be better to get the facts; but what he’d heard were facts only insofar as they adumbrated a date or two, cleared up a point or two relative to the choice of a curtain-colour, or the provenance of a Spanish comb; otherwise, moonshine. It was the moonshine he envied.

  For who had ever called Mr Joyce their King? Certainly not Miranda’s extremely well-dowered Mamma.

  “You were right,” sighed Mr Joyce at last. “I didn’t know …”

  “I’ve often wanted to tell you,” Harry Gibson said truthfully. “But how could you understand, unless you’d seen her?”

  Mr Joyce unconsciously shook his head. The physical appearance of that Spanish rose was still definite to his mental eye. “All moonshine!” thought Mr Joyce …

  Yet what was moonshine but a belittling name for love? Employed only by the envious? “My poor Harry and his Kiss of Death, they love each other,” thought Mr Joyce uneasily. He gazed earnestly at his friend and tried to make him look like a King. It was no use, Harry had begun to sweat again. The eye of friendship couldn’t do it, only the eye of love … So love it was.

  Mr Joyce pulled himself together.

  “For myself, I sympathise with you,” he said. “Believe me, you have my sympathy.” (It didn’t occur to him to ask why Harry hadn’t married his Rose in the first place. Like Harry himself, he took the original omission for granted. The only point unusual was that he appeared determined to marry her now.) “But I have my daughter to think of,” went on Mr Joyce. “How can I let you jilt Miranda practically on the honeymoon? How can you, Harry, even think of such a wicked thing?”

  Harry Gibson groaned.

  “Because I can’t help it. Do I want to behave like a cad?”

  “It is the most caddish thing a man can do. Harry,” said Mr Joyce sternly, “it’s un-British.”

  Mr Gibson bowed his head on his chest—as upon the barrack-square, while all his buttons are cut off, bows his head the Outcast of the Regiment. Then he lifted it again.

  “What sort of a husband should I make, to Miranda, thinking all the time of another woman?”

  “A very good husband,” said Mr Joyce stubbornly. “Did I never think of another woman, married to Miranda’s mother?”

  “Not all the time.”

  “For many years, every day,” affirmed Mr Joyce rashly. “A girl I knew when I was a young boy. So pretty, no money—”

  “Tell me,” said Harry Gibson.

  4

  She had evidently been far more obviously attractive than Dolores—Mr Joyce’s first love. But though Harry (their rôles now reversed) listened with genuine sympathy, he couldn’t help feeling also a certain disdain. To fall for a brown shoulder and a white blouse—how naïf, how calfish! Yet that, it seemed, was what Mr Joyce remembered best …

  “You don’t see them now, those blouses,” mourned Mr Joyce. “Anyway not in Bond Street … gathered full and very low round the neck, so one shoulder always slipping out, like a little brown pigeon. Maybe you wouldn’t think that of me,” added Mr Joyce, with a faint smile, “but it was what came into my mind. To squeeze, it was just like a plump little bird.”

  Harry Gibson nodded—thinking with passion of Miss Diver’s collar-bones. How slender, how fragile, his own Spanish rose! How unbucolic!

  “Hilda,” pronounced Mr Joyce softly. “Her name was Hilda. Every summer my grandmother took a châlet in the Black Forest, and there we spent our holidays, and there Hilda lived. An educated girl too: some French, some English, nice manners, everything. Everything except a penny. For dowry perhaps a herd of pigs. Was my father in the pig-business? Harry boy,” said Mr Joyce resolutely, “I tell you this to show my sympathy, but all I assure you has been for the best. To-day that girl is a fat old woman, seven sons and seven daughters maybe, and here am I like Mrs Grandjean said, without a care in the world but what you yourself load down on me.”

  Regretfully—as regretfully as Mr Joyce returned from the Black Forest—Harry Gibson returned from Alcock Road. The idyllic interlude was over.

  “I’m sorry,” he said heavily. The very words, the very accent, of an hour earlier! Mr Joyce groaned.

  “Damn it, what is the use to say you’re sorry? Show you are sorry! Think, consider!” implored Mr Joyce. “Have some port! Sit quiet for ten minutes and consider!”

  “I have considered,” said Harry stubbornly.

  “When? When I came in, you were asleep. You haven’t considered anything! Give me some port too!” shouted Mr Joyce. “Have you no affection? Have you thought what life Miranda will lead me? And what can I do to you back? Even just to satisfy Miranda, what can I do to you?”

  “You can ruin me,” said Mr Gibson.

  5

  Now they were down to business.

  It was a situation in which Mr Joyce held every advantage. He had Harry where he wanted him. For all his talk of partnership, the business in Kensington was as much his own property as the business in Bond Street. Harry Gibson dismissed from his employ, he could as easily keep him out of another berth in the fur-trade as he could if necessary find him one. Otherwise, in the depression, Harry hadn’t a hope. Mr Joyce held every advantage—save one.

  He was fond of Harry. Harry was his friend. When he looked at Harry solemnly pouring out the port, when he remembered the consolatory hours they’d spent together, in that very study—sharing that very decanter—the drawing-room full of women—also the good British grub Harry had introduced him to, so annoying to old Beatrice, and his encouragement over the new hairy overcoat—when Mr Joyce remembered all this, his heart failed.

  “You can ruin me,” repeated Harry Gibson. “Chin-chin.”

  “I don’t want to ruin you,” said Mr Joyce irritably.

  Harry Gibson smiled—a smile of pure affection. But he said nothing, while Mr Joyce regarded him with increasing exasperation.

  “How will you live, if I ruin you?”

  “God knows,” said Harry Gibson.

  “How will your mother live?” demanded Mr Joyce.

  Harry shrugged his big shoulders. To Mr Joyce it was appallingly like the gesture of a man shrugging off a load.

  “From seventeen years old,” said Harry thoughtfully, “that question has been asked me … whenever I wanted to do anything different; when I wanted to go to the War. But I went to the War.” He smiled again. “I dare say she will come and live here,” he offered helpfully. “The mater is a great chum of Auntie Bee.”

  “Are you mad?” demanded Mr Joyce—
justifiably.

  “They could have the new sitting-room, then it wouldn’t be wasted,” joked—actually joked!—Harry.

  “You are mad,” said Mr Joyce, in no mood for humour. “Miranda would do murder. Sooner than that, I would give a little pension—” He broke off, too late; the fatal suggestion had been made, Harry was looking brighter every minute. To wipe the brightness from his face Mr Joyce hit hard.

  “And the woman, and the orphan-child you speak of, how are they to live?” he asked grimly. “God knows, you say for yourself—out goes noble Harry to starve! Are they to starve too? Or is she to keep you all, poor woman, taking lodgers? At least in the shop you earned your bread!” cried Mr Joyce bitterly. “Not like a kept man!”

  Harry might have been armoured in moonshine. Even this last, sharpest arrow glanced off his moonshine armour. It might have been shot from Cupid’s bow—with a message of hope tied to the shaft.

  “If I earn my bread there, why not some other place? Bath, or Cheltenham?” suggested Harry Gibson resourcefully. “In both places we have connections. Start up a small branch, no need to tell Miranda—”

  At this point Mr Joyce took his head in his hands and felt it gently all over, as though feeling for a crack in his skull.

  “First you try to jilt my daughter,” he recapitulated, “then you ask me to set you up in business. One of us is mad.”

  “It wouldn’t be my business,” pointed out Harry. “I’d be on salary.”

  Mr Joyce came up from his attitude of prayer with a grim smile.

  “Put that out of your head, Harry boy. It was a good idea, but put it out of your head. Say toodle-oo to it.”

  “Righty-ho,” said Harry Gibson. “But you won’t make me change my mind.”

  Unexpectedly—

  “You must be hungry,” said Mr Joyce. “I’ll get you some cold beef.”

  6

  He took his time about it. Crossing the hall to the dining-room, cutting a nice plateful—trimming it up with some bits of green stuff—Mr Joyce didn’t hurry. He needed a respite. This was not, however, the chief motive of his butler-work, as neither was it solicitude for Harry’s stomach. He had come to the conclusion that his best ally, in bringing Harry to his senses, was now the mere clockwork passage of time.

  Whatever folly a man swears at night, by the cold light of day is not uncommonly foresworn; moreover the situation Harry Gibson faced in the morning was simply, in Mr Joyce’s opinion, unfaceable. So Harry, he believed, would find. In cold blood (and by daylight) he would find it utterly beyond him to throw overboard livelihood and honour, gratitude and filial affection, also make fresh arrangements about his laundry. (Mr Joyce ticked off this last point quite without cynicism. He simply and gratefully recognised how deflating to a fit of heroics such material pinpricks could be.) The essential, Mr Joyce now considered, was to get through the night without any irretrievable act performed—without Harry rushing off, for example, back to Paddington. Thus it was something to have salvaged ten minutes; also in furtherance of this aim Mr Joyce was prepared to go on talking to Harry Gibson, or listening to Harry Gibson, until morning.

  “‘Came the dawn,’” thought Mr Joyce, with a long, yet not hopeless sigh; and provisioned himself also.

  “There is more I have remembered about Hilda,” announced Mr Joyce, returning in an evidently nostalgic mood. “Her hair—”

  It wasn’t that Harry wouldn’t listen. Harry’s gratitude and affection were by no means dead, on the contrary, and to show this he would have listened willingly. The interruption came from without, when the door opened on Miranda. Both Mr Joyce and Mr Gibson had forgotten that the door was now unlocked.

  “Dadda!” exclaimed Miranda. “Harry! Dadda, why ever don’t you come to bed? What ever are you doing?” demanded Miranda Joyce.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  1

  As Mr Joyce had remarked in another context, it was a miracle she hadn’t appeared sooner. For hours she had lain with her door ajar, listening for him to come upstairs: planning to slip down herself for a delicious midnight interview with Harry. (Or if not entirely delicious, at any rate exciting.) All she heard was Mr Joyce cross the hall to the dining-room, and return to the study, and it was now almost one o’clock. It was a miracle indeed that her impatience and curiosity had been so long bridled.

  “Whatever are you doing?” demanded Miranda.

  On the face of it, though this by no means placated her, Mr Joyce and Mr Gibson were having a midnight snack. Their plates and glasses at once caught her eye. But they had no air of enjoyment, their dishevelment—for Mr Joyce too by this time had loosed his collar; Harry had taken off his waistcoat—their dishevelment appeared as no genial unbuttoning, but rather the effect of some desperate passage. They looked as though they’d been through something; and Miranda, who immediately thought she knew what, prepared with pleasure to join in and calm them both down.

  Graceful, feminine and becoming is the rôle of peacemaker.

  “Go back to bed!” said Mr Joyce.

  They were the first words he had spoken; nor had Harry spoken. Miranda looked from one to the other of them understandingly, and sat down. She was wearing a negligée that strictly belonged to her trousseau, pale blue velvet; its long wide skirts dropped in graceful folds, beneath which the toe of a pale blue mule peeped provocatively forth. Miranda naturally couldn’t see it from Harry’s viewpoint, but she felt there was to be a deliciousness about the interview after all.

  “I shan’t,” said Miranda—half-woman, half-child! “I know what’s been going on. Dadda, you’ve been scolding poor Harry. Haven’t I told you there’s nothing to worry about?”

  “It was what I told you,” said Mr Joyce. “I was wrong. Please go back to bed.”

  Miranda swung a pretty toe.

  “Not till you’ve made it up. Poor Harry! If I’ve forgiven him, that’s all that matters. Dadda, you must make it up.”

  Mr Joyce looked at her helplessly. He almost looked at Harry, for help; but obviously this wouldn’t do. In the course of a whole evening that had been one long difficult situation, this was the second peak—the first being when he surprised Miss Diver in Harry’s arms. There was literally nothing he could think of to say that mightn’t precipitate a crisis—except “Go to bed,” and Miranda wouldn’t. With horror he heard Harry clear his throat.

  “He can’t forgive me,” stated Harry Gibson. “You wouldn’t want him to.”

  Miranda smiled her understanding smile.

  “But of course I do, darling! When I have!”

  “You won’t either,” said Harry Gibson.

  “But I tell you I have!” insisted Miranda—now with a trifle of impatience. “Oh, Harry, didn’t you confess to me yourself?”

  “Yes, but I’ve got to confess again,” said Harry.

  There was a doggedness about him which even at that moment stirred Mr Joyce’s admiration. “The bull-dog breed!” thought Mr Joyce admiringly. But that doggedness was hurrying them all to disaster, and in alarm he made haste to interpose.

  “Wait till morning,” interposed Mr Joyce swiftly. “Something so important, wait till morning!”

  “I can’t,” said Harry. “Miranda’s got to know now.”

  “I ask it as a personal favour! I beg you! Harry boy,” said Mr Joyce earnestly, “if you have any fondness for me at all, if you feel I have behaved at all well to you, oblige me in this last thing I ask. Remember I have troubles too, and oblige me.”

  It was a moving appeal. Harry was moved. Mr Joyce, seeing him waver, without the least concern for his own dignity, caught him by the sleeve and pulled at it.

  “Haven’t we been friends, Harry boy?” pleaded Mr Joyce. “Haven’t we been real pals? Can’t you do me one small kindness? Wait till morning, Harry; wait till morning!”

  Harry Gibson wavered. He might have given way. But Miranda had been too long out of the conversation for her liking, and felt it time to reassume control.

  “Dadd
a, Harry!” she cried gaily. “What a fuss! Whatever Harry wants to tell I want to hear! Did you kiss her good-bye, Harry, after all? If you did, I’m not jealous! How could I be,” laughed Miranda, “of such a scarecrow?”

  As Mr Joyce subsequently remarked, in one of his new slangy phrases, that tore it.

  2

  For a moment, Harry didn’t comprehend; then the blood rushed up to his face, and all his love, and his fury, burst forth in one outraged cry.

  “How dare you!” roared Harry Gibson. “Not jealous! What else but jealousy is that lie?”

  Miranda instantly jumped up. If he was furious, so now was she.

  “What lie? Calling that creature a scarecrow?” She laughed again, but on a very different note. “Let me tell you, Dadda called her far worse! A skeleton, a bag-of-bones—”

  “Miranda, for God’s sake!” implored Mr Joyce.

  “—a kiss of death!” finished Miranda recklessly. “And I say so too!”

  “Keep your tongue off her!” shouted Harry Gibson. “Now I’ll tell you something!”

  “Stop!” shouted Mr Joyce. “He’s mad!” he added rapidly, to Miranda. “Don’t listen to him! Go to bed! Leave it to me!”

  “I’m going to marry her,” said Harry Gibson, suddenly calm. “Now you know.”

  There followed an abrupt silence, sudden, and as generally disconcerting, as Harry’s new demeanour. The air of the study seemed to quiver with it: for a moment, it seemed, as in a heat-haze, the outlines of solid objects swam. Then Miranda looked at her parent. She had every reason for disbelief, but what she saw in his face shook her.

  “I told you, he’s mad,” said Mr Joyce. “Leave him alone, let it pass.”

  Miranda frowned uncertainly.

  “What he said, Dadda … of course is nonsense. How could he marry anyone, without—?”

  She paused; almost pathetically, the words refused to be uttered. But Harry Gibson had no compunction. He had heard his Spanish rose called a scarecrow, and a bag-of-bones, and a skeleton and a kiss of death.