Lucia Victrix Read Online Free PDF Page A

you invented saying “Au reservoir” instead of “
Au revoir
”. We all said it for about a week and then got tired of it. Miss Mapp came here just about then, because she picked it up at my garden-party. She stopped quite to the end, eating quantities of red-currant fool, and saying that she had inherited a recipe from her grandmother which she would send me. She did, too, and my cook said it was rubbish. Yes: it was the au reservoir year, because she said au reservoir to everyone as they left, and told me she would take it back to Tilling. That’s the one. Why?’
    ‘Georgie, your memory’s marvellous,’ said Lucia. ‘Now about the advertisement I saw in
The Times
. Miss Mapp is letting her Queen Anne house called Mallards, h. & c. and old-world garden, for August and September. I want you to drive over with me to-morrow and see it. I think that very likely, if it’s at all what I hope, I shall take it.’
    ‘No!’ cried Georgie. ‘Why of course I’ll drive there with you to-morrow. What fun! But it will be too awful if you go away for two months. What shall I do? First there’s Olga not coming back for a year, and now you’re thinking of goingaway, and there’ll be nothing left for me except my croquet and being Drake.’
    Lucia gave him one of those glances behind which lurked so much purpose, which no doubt would be disclosed at the proper time. The bees were astir once more in the hive, and presently they would stream out for swarmings or stingings or honey-harvesting … It was delightful to see her looking like that again.
    ‘Georgie, I want change,’ she said, ‘and though I’m much touched at the idea of your missing me, I think I must have it. I want to get roused up again and shaken and made to tick. Change of air, change of scene, change of people. I don’t suppose anyone alive has been more immersed than I in the spacious days of Elizabeth, or more devoted to Shakespearian tradition and environment – perhaps I ought to except Sir Sidney Lee, isn’t it? – than I, but I want for the present anyhow to get away from it, especially when poor Daisy is intending to make this deplorable public parody of all that I have held sacred so long.’
    Lucia swallowed three or four strawberries as if they had been pills and took a gulp of water.
    ‘I don’t think I could bear to be here for all the rehearsals,’ she said; ‘to look out from the rue and honeysuckle of my sweet garden and see her on her palfrey addressing her lieges of Riseholme, and making them walk in procession in front of her. It did occur to me this morning that I might intervene, take the part of the Queen myself, and make a pageant such as I had planned in those happy days, which would have done honour to the great age and credit to Riseholme, but it would spoil the dream of Daisy’s life, and one must be kind. I wash my hands of it all, though of course I shall allow her to dress here, and the procession to start from my house. She wanted that, and she shall have it, but of course she must state on the programmes that the procession starts from Mrs Philip Lucas’s house. It would be too much that the visitors, if there are any, should think that my beautiful Hurst belongs to Daisy. And, as I said, I shall be happy to coach her, and see if I can do anything with her. But I won’t be here for the fête, and I must be somewhere and that’s why I’m thinking of Tilling.’
    They had moved into the music-room where the bust of Shakespeare stood among its vases of flowers, and the picture of Lucia by Tancred Sigismund, looking like a chessboard with some arms and legs and eyes sticking out of it, hung on the wall. There were Georgie’s sketches there, and the piano was open, and
Beethoven’s Days of Boyhood
was lying on the table with the paper-knife stuck between its leaves, and there was animation about the room once more.
    Lucia seated herself in the chair that might so easily have come from Anne Hathaway’s cottage,