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قراءة كتاب The Summons

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‏اللغة: English
The Summons

The Summons

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دار النشر: Project Gutenberg
الصفحة رقم: 3

number of moments and Luttrell only broke the silence in the end, to declare definitely,

"That, at all events, is all I have to say."

Sir Charles nodded and drew the case of forms close to him. There was something more then. There always is something more, which isn't told, he reflected, and the worst of it is, the something more which isn't told is always the real reason. Men go to the confessional with a reservation; the secret chamber where they keep their sacred vessels, their real truths and inspirations, as also their most scarlet sins—that shall be opened to no one after early youth is past unless it be—rarely—to one woman. There was another reason at work in Harry Luttrell, but Sir Charles Hardiman was never to know it. With a shrug of his shoulders he took a pencil from his pocket, filled up one of the forms and handed it to Luttrell.

"That's what I should reply."

He had written:

"I am travelling to London to-morrow to apply for transfer.Luttrell."

Luttrell read the telegram with surprise. It was not the answer which he had expected from the victim of the flesh-pots in front of him.

"You advise that?" he exclaimed.

"Yes. My dear Luttrell, as you know, you are a guest very welcome to me. But you don't belong. We—Maud Carstairs, Tony Marsh and the rest of us—even Mario Escobar—we are the Come-to-nothings. We are the people of the stage door, we grow fat in restaurants. From three to seven, you may find us in the card-rooms of our clubs—we are jolly fine fellows—and no good. You don't belong, and should get out while you can."

Luttrell moved uncomfortably in his chair.

"That's all very well. But there's another side to the question," he said, and from the deck above a woman's voice called clearly down the stairway.

"Aren't you two coming?"

Both men looked towards the door.

"That side," said Hardiman.

"Yes."

Hardiman nodded his head.

"Stella Croyle doesn't belong either," he said. "But she kicked over the traces. She flung out of the rank and file. Oh, I know Croyle was a selfish, dull beast and her footprints in her flight from him were littered with excuses. I am not considering the injustice of the world. I am looking at the cruel facts, right in the face of them, as you have got to do, my young friend. Here Stella Croyle is—with us—and she can't get away. You can."

Luttrell was not satisfied. His grey eyes and thin, clean features were troubled like those of a man in physical pain.

"You don't know the strange, queer tie between Stella Croyle and me," he said. "And I can't tell you it."

Hardiman grew anxious. Luttrell had the look of a man overtrained, and it was worry which had overtrained him. His face was a trifle too delicate, perhaps, to go with those remorseless sharp decisions which must be made by the men who win careers.

"I know that you can't go through the world without hurting people," cried Hardiman. "Neither you nor any one else, except the limpets. And you won't escape hurting Stella Croyle, by abandoning your chances. Your love-affair will end—all of that kind do. And yours will end in a bitter, irretrievable quarrel after you have ruined yourself, and because you have ruined yourself. You are already on the rack—make no doubt about it. Oh, I have seen you twitch and jump with irritation—how many times on this yacht!—for trumpery, little, unimportant things she has said and done, which you would never have noticed six months ago; or only noticed to smile at with a pleased indulgence."

Luttrell's face coloured. "Why, that's true enough," he said. He was remembering the afternoon a week ago, when the yacht steamed between the green islands with their bathing stations and châlets, over a tranquil, sunlit sea of the deepest blue. Rounding a wooded corner towards sunset she came suddenly upon the bridges and the palace and the gardens of Stockholm. The women of the party were in the saloon. A rush was made towards it. They were summoned to this first wonderful view of the city of beauty. Would they come? No! Stella Croyle was in the middle of a game of Russian patience. She could play that game any day, every day, all day. This exquisite vision was vouchsafed to her but the once, and she had neglected it with the others. She had not troubled, even to move so far as the saloon door. For she had not finished her game.

Luttrell recalled his feeling of scorn; the scorn had grown into indignation; in the end he had made a grievance of her indifference to this first view of the city of Stockholm; a foolish, exasperating grievance, which would rankle, which would not be buried, which sprang to fresh life at each fresh sight of her. Yes, of a certainty, sooner or later Stella Croyle and he would quarrel, so bitterly that all the king's horses and all the king's men could never bring them again together; and over some utterly unimportant matter like the first view of Stockholm.

"Youth has many privileges over age," continued Hardiman, "but none greater than the vision, the half-interpreted recurring vision of wider spaces and greater things, towards which you sail on the wind of a great emotion. Sooner or later, a man loses that vision and then only knows his loss. Stay here, and you'll lose it before your time."

Luttrell looked curiously at his companion, wondering what manner of man he had been in his twenties. Hardiman answered the look with a laugh. "Oh, I, too, had my ambitions once."

Luttrell folded the cablegram which Hardiman had written out and placed it in the breast pocket of his dinner-jacket.

"I will talk to Stella to-night at dinner. Then, if I decide to send it, I can send it from the hotel over there at the landing-steps before we return to the yacht."

Sir Charles Hardiman rose cumbrously with a shrug of his shoulders. He had done his best, but since Luttrell would talk the question over with Stella Croyle, shoulder to shoulder with her amongst the lights and music, the perfume of her hair in his nostrils and the pleading of her eyes within his sight—he, Charles Hardiman, might as well have held his tongue.

So very likely it would have been. But when great matters are ripe for decisions one way or the other, the little accident as often as not decides. There was a hurrying of light feet in the corridor outside, a swift, peremptory knocking upon the door. The same woman's voice called in rather a shrill note through the panels! "Harry! Why don't you come? We are waiting for you."

And in the sound of the voice there was not merely impatience, but a note of ownership—very clear and definite; and hearing it Luttrell hardened. He stood up straight. He had the aspect of a man in revolt.


CHAPTER II

An Anthem Intervenes

Upon the entrance of Hardiman's party a wrinkle was smoothed away from the forehead of a maître d'hôtel.

"So! You have come!" he cried. "I began to despair."

"You have kept my table?" Sir Charles insisted.

"Yes, but with what an effort of diplomacy!"; and the maître d'hôtel led his guests to the very edge of the great balcony. Here the table was set endwise to the balustrade, commanding the crowded visitors, yet taking the coolness of the night. Hardiman was contented with his choice of its position. But when he saw his guests reading the cards which assigned them their places, he was not so contented with the order of their seating.

"If I had known an hour before!" he said to himself, and the astounding idea crept into his mind that perhaps it was, after all, a waste to spend so much time on the disposition of a dinner-table and the ordering of food.

However, the harm was done now. There was Luttrell already seated at the end against the balustrade. He had the

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