<SPAN name="startofbook"></SPAN>
<h1>LUCINDA</h1>
<p class="pc1 lmid">BY</p>
<p class="pc1 large">ANTHONY HOPE</p>
<h2 class="p4">CHAPTER I</h2>
<p class="pch">THE FACE IN THE TAXI</p>
<p class="drop-cap04">HIS “Business Ambassador” was the title
which my old chief, Ezekiel Coldston, used
to give me. I daresay that it served as
well as any other to describe with a pleasant mixture
of dignity and playfulness, the sort of glorified bag-man
or drummer that I was. It was my job to go
into all quarters of the earth where the old man had
scented a concession or a contract—and what a
nose he had for them!—and make it appear to powerful
persons that the Coldston firm would pay more
for the concession (more in the long run, at all
events) or ask less for the contract (less in the first
instance, at all events) than any other responsible
firm, company, or corporation in the world. Sir
Ezekiel (as in due course he became) took me from
a very low rung of the regular diplomatic ladder
into his service on the recommendation of my uncle,
Sir Paget Rillington, who was then at the top of<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_2" id="Page_2">[2]</SPAN></span>
that same ladder. My employer was good enough
to tell me more than once that I had justified the
recommendation.</p>
<p>“You’ve excellent manners, Julius,” he told me.
“Indeed, quite engaging. Plenty of tact! You work—fairly
hard; your gift for languages is of a great
value, and, if you have no absolute genius for business—well,
I’m at the other end of the cable. I’ve
no cause to be dissatisfied.”</p>
<p>“As much as you could expect of the public school
and varsity brand, sir?” I suggested.</p>
<p>“More,” said Ezekiel decisively.</p>
<p>I liked the job. I was very well paid. I saw the
world; I met all sorts of people; and I was always
royally treated, since, if I was always trying to get
on the right side of my business or political friends,
they were equally anxious to get on the right side of
me—which meant, in their sanguine imaginations,
the right side of Sir Ezekiel; a position which I believe
to correspond rather to an abstract mathematical
conception than to anything actually realizable in
experience.</p>
<p>However, I do not want to talk about all that. I
mention the few foregoing circumstances only to account
for the fact that I found myself in town in the
summer of 1914, back from a long and distant excursion,
temporary occupant of a furnished flat (I was
a homeless creature) in Buckingham Gate, enjoying
the prospect of a few months’ holiday, and desirous
of picking up the thread of my family and social connections—perhaps<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[3]</SPAN></span>
with an eye to country house visits
and a bit of shooting or fishing by and by. First of
all, though, after a short spell of London, I was due
at Cragsfoot, to see Sir Paget, tell him about my
last trip, and console him for the loss of Waldo’s
society.</p>
<p>Not that anything tragic had happened to Waldo.
On the contrary, he was going to be married. I
had heard of the engagement a month before I sailed
from Buenos Aires, and the news had sent my
thoughts back to an autumn stay at Cragsfoot two
years before, with Sir Paget and old Miss Fleming
(we were great friends, she and I); the two boys,
Waldo and Arsenio, just down from Oxford; respectable
Mrs. Knyvett—oh, most indubitably respectable
Mrs. Knyvett;—myself, older than the
boys, younger than the seniors, and so with an agreeable
alternation of atmosphere offered to me—and
Lucinda! True that Nina Frost was a good deal
there too, coming over from that atrocious big villa
along the coast—Briarmount they called it—still,
she was not of the house party; there was always
a last talk, or frolic, after Nina had gone home, and
after Mrs. Knyvett had gone to bed. Miss Fleming,
“Aunt Bertha,” liked talks and frolics; and
Sir Paget was popularly believed not to go to bed at
all; he used to say that he had got out of the habit
in Russia. So it was a merry time—a merry,
thoughtless——!</p>
<p>Why, no, not the least thoughtless. I had nearly<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[4]</SPAN></span>
fallen into a <i>cliché</i>, a spurious commonplace. Youth
may not count and calculate. It thinks like the deuce—and
is not ashamed to talk its thoughts right out.
You remember the Oxford talk, any of you who
have been there, not (with submission to critics) all
about football and the Gaiety, but through half the
night about the Trinity, or the Nature of the Absolute,
or Community of Goods, or why in Tennyson (this
is my date rather than Waldo’s) Arthur
had no children by Guinevere, or whether the working
classes ought to limit—well, and so on. The
boys brought us all that atmosphere, if not precisely
those topics, and mighty were the discussions,—with
Sir Paget to whet the blades, if ever they grew blunt,
with one of his aphorisms, and Aunt Bertha to round
up a discussion with an anecdote.</p>
<p>And now Lucinda had accepted Waldo! They
were to be married now—directly. She had settled
in practice the problem we had once debated through
a moonlight evening on the terrace that looked out
to sea. At what age should man and woman marry?
He at thirty, she at twenty-five, said one side—in
the interest of individual happiness. He at twenty-one,
she at eighteen, said the other, in the interest
of social wellbeing. (Mrs. Knyvett had gone to
bed.) Lucinda was now twenty-one and Waldo
twenty-six. It was a compromise—though, when I
come to think of it, she had taken no part in discussing
the problem. “I should do as I felt,” had
been her one and only contribution; and she also<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[5]</SPAN></span>
went to bed in the early stages of the wordy battle.
Incidentally I may observe that Lucinda’s exits were
among the best things that she did—yes, even in
those early days, when they were all instinct and no
art. From Sir Paget downwards we men felt that,
had the problem been set for present solution, we
should all have felt poignantly interested in what
Lucinda felt that she would do. No man of sensibility—as
they used to say before we learnt really
colloquial English—could have felt otherwise.</p>
<p>I will not run on with these recollections just now,
but I was chuckling over them on the morning of
Waldo’s and Lucinda’s wedding day—a very fine
day in July, on which, after late and leisurely breakfast,
I looked across the road on the easy and scattered
activity of the barracks’ yard. That scene was
soon to change—but the future wore its veil. With
a mind vacant of foreboding, I was planning only
how to spend the time till half-past two. I decided
to dress myself, go to the club, read the papers,
lunch, and so on to St. George’s. For, of course, St.
George’s it was to be. Mrs. Knyvett had a temporary
flat in Mount Street; Sir Paget had no town
house, but put up at Claridge’s; he and Waldo—and
Aunt Bertha—had been due to arrive there from
Cragsfoot yesterday. Perhaps it was a little curious
that Waldo had not been in town for the last week;
but he had not, and I had seen none of the Cragsfoot
folk since I got home. I had left a card on Mrs.
Knyvett, but—well, I suppose that she and her<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[6]</SPAN></span>
daughter were much too busy to take any notice. I
am afraid that I was rather glad of it; apprehensive
visions of a <i>partie carrée</i>—the lovers mutually
absorbed, and myself left to engross Mrs. Knyvett—faded
harmlessly into the might-have-beens.</p>
<p>I walked along the Mall, making for my club in
St. James’s Street. At the corner by Marlborough
House I had to wait before crossing the road; a
succession of motors and taxis held me up. I was still
thinking of Lucinda; at least I told myself a moment
later that I must have been still thinking of
Lucinda, because only in that way could I account,
on rational lines, for what happened to me. It was
one o’clock—the Palace clock had just struck. The
wedding was at half-past two, and the bride was,
beyond reasonable doubt, now being decked out for
it, or, perchance, taking necessary sustenance. But
not driving straight away from the scene of operations,
not looking out of the window of that last taxi
which had just whisked by me! Yet the face at the
taxi window—I could have sworn it was Lucinda’s.
It wore her smile—and not many faces did that.
Stranger still, it dazzled with that vivid flush which
she herself—the real Lucinda—exhibited only on
the rarest occasions, the moments of high feeling.
It had come on the evening when Waldo and Arsenio
Valdez quarreled at Cragsfoot.</p>
<p>The vision came and went, but left me strangely
taken aback, in a way ashamed of myself, feeling a
fool. I shrugged my shoulders angrily as I crossed<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[7]</SPAN></span>
Pall Mall. As I reached the pavement on the other
tide, I took out my cigarette case; I wanted to be
normal and reasonable; I would smoke.</p>
<p>“Take a light from mine, Julius,” said a smooth
and dainty voice.</p>
<p>It may seem absurd—an affectation of language—to
call a voice “dainty,” but the epithet is really
appropriate to Arsenio Valdez’s way of talking,
whether in Spanish, Italian, or English. As was
natural, he spoke them all with equal ease and mastery,
but he used none of them familiarly; each was
treated as an art, not in the choice of words—that
would be tedious in every-day life—but in articulation.
We others used often to chaff him about it,
but he always asserted that it was the “note of a
Castilian.”</p>
<p>There he stood, at the bottom corner of St.
James’s Street, neat, cool, and trim as usual—like
myself, he was wearing a wedding garment—and
looking his least romantic and his most monkeyish:
he could do wonders in either direction.</p>
<p>“Hullo! what tree have you dropped from, Monkey?”
I asked. But then I went on, without waiting
for an answer. “I say, that taxi must have passed
you too, didn’t it?”</p>
<p>“A lot of taxis have been passing. Which one?”</p>
<p>“The one with the girl in it—the girl like Lucinda.
Didn’t you see her?”</p>
<p>“I never saw a girl like Lucinda—except Lucinda
herself. Have you lunched? No, I mean the<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[8]</SPAN></span>
question quite innocently, old chap. Because, if you
haven’t, we might together. Of course you’re
bound for the wedding as I am? At least, I can
just manage, if the bride’s punctual. I’ve got an
appointment that I must keep at three-fifteen.”</p>
<p>“That gives you time enough. Come and have
lunch with me at White’s.” I put my arm in his
and we walked up the street. I forgot my little
excitement over the girl in the cab.</p>
<p>Though he was a pure-blooded Spaniard, though
he had been educated at Beaumont and Christ
Church, Valdez was more at home in Italy than
anywhere else. His parents had settled there, in
the train of the exiled Don Carlos, and the son still
owned a small <i>palazzo</i> at Venice and derived the
bulk of his means (or so I understood) from letting
the more eligible floors of it, keeping the attics for
himself. Here he consorted with wits, poets, and
“Futurists,” writing a bit himself—Italian was the
language he employed for his verses—till he wanted
a change, when he would shoot off to the Riviera, or
Spain, or Paris, or London, as the mood took him.
But he had not been to England for nearly two years
now; he gave me to understand that the years of
education had given him, for the time, a surfeit of
my native land: not a surprising thing, perhaps.</p>
<p>“So I lit out soon after our stay at Cragsfoot, and
didn’t come back again till a fortnight ago, when
some business brought me over. And I’m off again
directly, in a day or two at longest.”</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[9]</SPAN></span></p>
<p>“Lucky you’ve hit the wedding. I suppose you
haven’t seen anything of my folks then—or of the
Knyvetts?”</p>
<p>“I haven’t seen Waldo or Sir Paget, but I’ve
been seeing something of Mrs. Knyvett and Lucinda
since I got here. And they were out in Venice last
autumn; and, as they took an apartment in my house,
I saw a good deal of them there.”</p>
<p>“Oh, I didn’t know they’d been to Venice. Nobody
ever writes to tell me anything when I’m
away.”</p>
<p>“Poor old chap! Get a wife, and she’ll write to
tell you she’s in debt. I say, oughtn’t we to be
moving? It won’t look well to be late, you know.”</p>
<p>“Don’t be fidgety. We’ve got half an hour, and
it’s not above ten minutes’ walk.”</p>
<p>“There’ll be a squash, and I want a good place.
Come on, Julius.” He rose from the table rather
abruptly; indeed, with an air of something like impatience
or irritation.</p>
<p>“Hang it! you might be going to be married
yourself, you’re in such a hurry,” I said, as I finished
my glass of brandy.</p>
<p>As we walked, Valdez was silent. I looked at
his profile; the delicate fine lines were of a poet’s,
or what a poet’s should be to our fancy.
Not so much as a touch of the monkey! That
touch, indeed, when it did come, came on the lips;
and it came seldom. It was the devastating acumen
and the ruthless cruelty of boyhood that had winged<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[10]</SPAN></span>
the shaft of his school nickname. Yet it had followed
him to the varsity; it followed him now; I
myself often called him by it. “Monkey Valdez”!
Not pretty, you know. It did not annoy him in the
least. He thought it just insular; possibly that is
all it was. But such persistence is some evidence of
a truthfulness in it.</p>
<p>“Have you been trying a fall with Dame Fortune
lately?” I asked.</p>
<p>He turned his face to me, smiling. “I’m a reformed
character. At least, I was till a fortnight
ago. I hadn’t touched a card or seen a table for
above a year. Seemed not to want to! A great
change, eh? But I didn’t miss it. Then when—when
I decided to come over here, I thought I would
go round by the Riviera, and just get out at Monte
Carlo, and have a shot—between trains, you know.
I wanted to see if my luck was in. So I got off, had
lunch, and walked into the rooms. I backed my
number everyway I could—<i>en plein</i>, <i>impair</i>, all the
rest. I stood to win about two hundred louis.”</p>
<p>“Lost, of course?”</p>
<p>“Not a bit of it. I won.”</p>
<p>“And then lost?”</p>
<p>“No. I pouched the lot and caught my train.
I wasn’t going to spoil the omen.” He was smiling
now—very contentedly.</p>
<p>“What was the number?”</p>
<p>“Twenty-one.”</p>
<p>“This is the twenty-first of July,” I observed.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[11]</SPAN></span></p>
<p>“Gamblers must be guided by something, some
fancy, some omen,” he said. “I had just heard that
Waldo and Lucinda were to be married on the
twenty-first.”</p>
<p>The monkey did peep out for a moment then; but
we were already in George Street; the church was in
sight, and my attention was diverted. “Better for
you if you’d lost,” I murmured carelessly.</p>
<p>“Aye, aye, dull prudence!” he said mockingly.
“But—the sensation! I can feel it now!”</p>
<p>We were on the other side of the road from
the church, but almost opposite to it, as he spoke,
and it was only then that I noticed anything peculiar.
The first thing which I marked was an unusual
animation in the usual small crowd of the
“general public” clustered on either side of the
steps: they were talking a lot to one another. Still
more peculiar was the fact that all the people in
carriages and cars seemed to have made a mistake;
they drew up for a moment before the entrance;
a beadle, or some official of that semi-ecclesiastical
order, said something to them, and
they moved on again—nobody got out! To crown
it, a royal brougham drove up—every Londoner
can tell one yards away, if it were only by the
horses—and stopped. My uncle, Sir Paget himself,
came down the steps, took off his tall hat,
and put his head in at the carriage window for a
moment; then he signed, and no doubt spoke, to
the footman, who had not even jumped down from<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[12]</SPAN></span>
the box or taken off his hat. And the royal brougham
drove on.</p>
<p>“Well, I’m damned!” said I.</p>
<p>Valdez jerked his head in a quick sideways nod.
“Something wrong? Looks like it!”</p>
<p>I crossed the road quickly, and he kept pace
with me. My intention was to join Sir Paget, but
that beadle intercepted us.</p>
<p>“Wedding’s unavoidably postponed, gentlemen,”
he said. “Sudden indisposition of the bride.”</p>
<p>There it was! I turned to Valdez in dismay—with
a sudden, almost comical, sense of being let
down, choused, made a fool of. “Well, twenty-one’s
not been a lucky number for poor Lucinda,
at all events!” I said—rather pointlessly; but his
story had been running in my head.</p>
<p>He made no direct reply; a little shrug seemed
at once to accuse and to accept destiny. “Sir Paget’s
beckoning to you,” he said. “Do you think I might
come too?”</p>
<p>“Why, of course, my dear fellow. We both want
to know what’s wrong, don’t we?”</p>
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