The Eye of Love (19 page)

It was her first appearance upstairs, in Harry's office, for several months, as she took the opportunity to remind him, by peeping with pretty trepidation round the door.

“May I?” coaxed Miranda. “Dadda's been giving me lunch. I haven't come to
distract
you, Harry!”

In fact, Harry didn't mind her presence at all—or no more than he ever minded it—with Mr Joyce to chaperon them. The roguish look in her eye merely offended without alarming him. For the old man himself his welcome was genuine, and he ceded the chair behind the desk with good grace.

“All I want,” said Mr Joyce, “is a look at the ledgers '29 to '31.”

Harry Gibson, in the act of placing a second chair for Miranda, froze. It was well for him that the ledgers had been seen already, by the Joyce accountants, so that his look couldn't be misinterpreted. He in fact made the point almost immediately.

“So I know they have,” agreed Mr Joyce. “Now I just want a look myself. Where d'you keep 'em, son? In the safe?”

All the old Gibson ledgers were in the safe. Harry Gibson kept them there from habit. They were of no importance. There was nothing in the safe of importance, except a Spanish comb.

2

Harry had taken it out only that morning, just to hold in his hands a few moments: now as he fiddled clumsily with the lock (for he had no option, he couldn't refuse to open up), he tried desperately to remember where he'd put it back. On the bottom shelf, he thought, and behind, not in front of, the cash-box; he was almost certain he remembered a deep, thrusting motion of his hand—the gesture of one burying a treasure. And he was right. As the door swung open only a corner of the handkerchief-swaddling was visible, and might have been a scrap of crumpled paper.

Harry pulled out the ledgers from the shelf above and with a springing step carried them to the desk.

“Will you take them or look at them here?” he asked cheerfully.

“Here,” said Mr Joyce. “I haven't come to rob you, son.”

“Did I think you had?” protested Harry Gibson—quite hurt.

“Just now, you looked as though you had a pistol at your head,” said Mr Joyce. “And why not? No businessman likes to open up his safe, even to a partner.”

It was spoken with much kindness, particularly in the use of the word partner; even at that moment Harry Gibson felt the force of the old man's sympathy. As he sat down, glad of the opportunity to steady himself, he managed an appreciative smile. Indeed, he felt all right again almost immediately, all he needed was to turn his mind from the danger so narrowly escaped; the time to thank his stars would come later, when he was alone …

“Guess what I had for lunch!” began Miranda provocatively. “Vol-au-vent of chicken and peach melba! Wasn't I
dreadfully
un-British!”

“Miranda, be quiet,” said Mr Joyce.

He began to go steadily through the books. Harry Gibson would have liked to ask what he was looking for. But for the presence of Miranda, he would have.

She was actually behaving very well. Mr Gibson noted with pleasure her Dadda's restraining influence. She held her tongue, she didn't attempt to sit on his, Mr Gibson's, knee, and her
oeillades
he could avoid. She fidgeted no more than any woman might fidget—poked into a letter file, disarranged the stationery, exclaimed that there was no red ink in the red-ink-well. “For bad debts, Harry no longer needs it,” murmured Mr Joyce, still looking for whatever it was he sought. “Sit still, Miranda, or else go home!”

In the grateful hush that followed, broken only by the regular turning of a page, Harry Gibson sat relaxed. It didn't hurt him to see old Joyce going through the Gibson books; it even struck him to wish his own parent had been through them more often and as thoroughly, to trace the disastrous results of auction-room quixotry. “It was the pater Joyces should have taught business to!” thought Harry Gibson—and involuntarily, wryly, grinned, as he recalled the fanatic light in the pater's eye, the St. Vitus jerk of the pater's catalogue, as any detritus of the Romanoffs came up for sale. The pater had been unteachable …

Miranda sat still for at least five minutes. At least five minutes passed before she began to poke about again. The safe still stood open, to put the books back. Harry Gibson hadn't time, as Miranda suddenly pounced, to slam its door on her fingers.

“Oh, look what
I
've found!” cried Miranda Joyce.

3

The handkerchief fluttered away as she jumped up, holding the comb aloft in pretty glee. In a last ray of winter sunshine the carved butterfly-spread of tortoiseshell quivered as though with its own life, it looked like a great brown butterfly caught in her hand.

“Put that down!” shouted Harry Gibson.

“Oh, Harry, but why?” cried Miranda. “Isn't it for me?”

“Put it back!” shouted Harry Gibson.

“
I
know! It was to be a surprise!” cried Miranda.

“All right, so it was to be a surprise!” shouted Harry recklessly. “Put it back!”

She danced girlishly away from him, still holding the comb tantalisingly above her head. Mr Gibson could have taken it from her by force, but the scene was already violent enough; he was also instinctively aware that some such physical violence was what Miranda wanted to provoke. Even under the eye of her father, thought Harry Gibson with horror, she was ready to jump into a semi-amorous struggle. Luckily Mr Joyce, a man with remarkable powers of concentration, had now found whatever it was he looked for.

“Thank you, Harry boy,” said Mr Joyce. “Miranda, what are you needling him about?”

His daughter at once looked penitent. The mild yet authoritative intervention produced such a drop in the emotional temperature, it was the best thing she could do. She nonetheless sketched a motion of slipping from Harry's grasp, as she darted to drop the comb under her father's nose. It happened to fall upon the still-open ledger. Harry Gibson wasn't a man much given to symbolism, but he saw the two halves of his life meet …

“Harry had a surprise for me, and I found it, and now he doesn't want me to see,” pouted Miranda.

Mr Joyce picked up the comb and looked at it. In his knowledgeable palm it weighed like a feather—but he examined it with increasing respect.

“Old,” pronounced Mr Joyce. “Fine workmanship. I'd say this was a very old piece indeed. Where did you get it, son?”

Harry Gibson swallowed.

“It just happened to come into my hands …”

“He's lying!” cried Miranda—turning to vivacity again. “Oh, what a liar my Harry is! He paid a fortune for it, and doesn't want me to know! Is it my wedding-present, Harry? Oh, Harry, do you see me such a Spanish type?”

“Now I'll have to buy her a Spanish shawl,” complained Mr Joyce humorously. “Now we're going to live on Spanish-style chicken and rice.” His eye was still appreciative. “You say it just came into your hands? Then I'm taking on a partner who can teach me something,” said old man Joyce. “Want to tell me how much you really paid for it?”

“
With all my life
!” Harry Gibson might have answered. “
With all my life
!” He naturally couldn't say it. Fortunately his silence could as naturally be taken for that of a lover justifiably chagrined at the surprising, by his beloved, of his surprise for her. Mr Joyce dropped the question, which really interested him, of the comb's price, and looked at his daughter admonishingly.

“See how a pleasure is spoiled by too much noseying! Let Harry put it back where it belongs, until the proper time. Harry, it should be in a box.”

Still without speaking, Mr Gibson stooped, and picked up his handkerchief, and dropped it over the comb as it lay on the open ledger. He wouldn't touch it, while he was watched.

“That's not enough protection,” said Mr Joyce decisively. “Remind me after dinner to-night, and I'll give you a cigar-box.”

Before they left Miranda apologised very prettily for making Harry cross, and promised never to mention the comb again—until the proper time. All she begged was that she might have it very very early on the wedding-day, for the florist to fix up with orange-blossom, to wear in her hair.

4

The results of this episode, in the event, were far-reaching beyond expectation upon the destinies of all concerned. Everything that now followed, followed from it. Dolores' bitterest tears followed, and Harry's bitterest anguish, and Miranda's moment of triumph, from this fortuitous bringing to light of the Spanish comb.

Harry Gibson sent it back next day. For the first time, he realised that what he'd borne away as a last gage of love was in fact an object of value; and he could imagine how Dolores might be pressed for money. (Where she herself had picked up the comb, he remembered her once telling him, was in the Caledonian Market; where famous bargains had been picked up before.) After night-long, agonising reflection, in the morning he sent it back, by special-messenger. (Also in Mr Joyce's cigar-box. Nothing he could find in the way of cardboard offered equal protection.) So the last link was broken, he had nothing left to remember her by, his Spanish rose; and the opening of the package reduced Dolores to despair.

There wasn't a line of writing with it. Mr Gibson, pen in hand for three hours, at the end of them had written nothing. What good would it do to either of them, to write, “
I love you, you are my only love”?
Yet what else could he write? So he wrote nothing; and Dolores, opening the package, laid her head down and wept.

PART III

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

1

As the last dislodged pebble unlooses the avalanche—as the last additional straw beats the camel to its knees—so acted upon Dolores' heart and situation the return of her Spanish comb in a cigar-box.

It had been a symbol of her personality as a Spanish rose. It had been the symbol of the mutual love she and her King Hal bore to each other. When Dolores missed it on the tragic morning after his departure, she still rejoiced to guess it in her lover's keeping. Thus its return broke her heart.

All her tragedy being shot with absurdity, the cigar-box broke her heart, so to speak, extra. A cigar-box also is a symbol—of carelessly-puffing prosperity. Mr Gibson in his new good fortune, it seemed to Dolores, threw that new good fortune in her face. She was utterly mistaken—down to the detail that even Mr Joyce no longer smoked cigars, having taken to a pipe like Harry; but she could not know, and her last, lingering, foolish spark of hope was quenched.

Once only she set the comb in her coiled hair again, and sat before the mirror perhaps half-an-hour. Her enormous dark eyes stared back at her dolorously; for the first time the meaning of her taken-name occurred to her, she realised vaguely that it meant something sad—an unlucky name perhaps to have chosen? Dolorous were the lines about her mouth, dolorous her hollowing cheeks: King Hal's Spanish rose had withered indeed. All that remained of her was the flare of carved tortoiseshell, elegant, erect and glossy, mocking the grey in the once-black hair. “Passée,” thought Dolores. “I'm passée …” The tears started under her lids; after she had cried a little she looked worse.

She drew the tortoiseshell from her braids and shut it not in her dressing-table, but in the long wardrobe-drawer, among the potpourri, under Mr Gibson's dressing-gown. At some future date, she dimly acknowledged, that drawer might have to be emptied; but not yet. The photograph by the bed she also left in place. (Not yet, not yet!)—She looked at it as long as she'd looked at her own reflection; though it was many years since Mr Gibson, save to the eye of love, had much resembled that martial image, she had no doubt that it was a true and continuing likeness. Only she herself had withered; King Hal could not …

During the following days Mr Phillips noted the change in her with satisfaction. He found her far less uppish, far less lah-di-dah. In fact, for a few days at least she went about as though she'd been beaten. Mr Phillips had no idea what caused this welcome phenomenon, he hadn't been there when the packet arrived, and put it down to a general coming to her senses. Though subdued, she was evidently trying to please him; and when he tired of seeing her long face, and jocosely told her to cheer up, she smiled.

2

On the Saturday of the same week Miranda took Miss Harris out to lunch.

Miranda hadn't believed the pretty myth of a surprise wedding-gift for one moment. She knew it to be her own invention. (It was also a credit, in the circumstances, to her wit.) She had successfully taken in both her father and Harry Gibson, but she hadn't taken in herself. She couldn't—not before Harry's last look of all, his look as she'd petitioned, so prettily, to wear the comb among her orange-blossom …

Miranda in fact rightly guessed the Spanish comb to have been the property of Harry's unknown Past.

He kept it in his safe.

He couldn't bear to see it handled, or even looked at.

His mother claimed to know how he spent every minute of the day, and this Miranda accepted, especially after making such friends with the showroom; she knew herself how he spent his evenings. She didn't imagine Harry still saw his Past; but she was certain that he still thought about her, and in a way most offensive to a fiancée's feelings. Miranda's jealousy and curiosity, that had never been quietened altogether, now gave her no peace.

It was all very well to say let sleeping dogs lie; that was a man's point of view.

Miranda didn't hire detectives. She hadn't the courage to, without her father's backing, and Dadda's earlier lack of sympathy with such a project would scarcely have diminished. On the contrary—Miranda was perfectly aware that at the first hint he would at once begin to defend Harry, cover up for Harry, even warn Harry what was afoot. (“Like two schoolboys!” thought Miranda angrily. “Harry could steal apples, Dadda would keep guard!”) She knew better than to invoke so corrupted an ally; so she took Miss Harris out to lunch.