Aggie!” he said. “Been talking Secret Service on the stairs?”
“Mr. Goodenough and I,” said Agnes carefully, “were waiting for Robbie. Do go and find him and bring him here by his golden hair.”
“What, is Robbie here?” he asked, thereby conveying to me that he was an Oriolist. “I didn’t see him. If Robbie is in a room it’s not easy to miss him. I didn’t even know he was in town.”
“Of course he is,” said Agnes. “Fancy not knowing if Robbie is in town. You might as well not know—”
“If the sun is shining,” said I fervently.
“Quite. Lord Marrible, do go back and see if he isn’t there. He and Mr. Goodenough and I are going back to his flat, and he is going to read to us. And then he is going to play the piano and then I suppose it will be time for breakfast before we have talked enough.”
Mrs. Withers rose like a great salmon fresh from the sea, and rushed at this wonderful lure.
“I never heard anything so improper,” she said. “You and—and Mr. Goodenough and Robbie Oriole! My dear Miss Lockett, who is chaperoning you?”
Agnes’s face dimpled into the most delicious smile.
“Ah, we don’t want any chaperon in the sunlight,” she said, as John shouldered his way back into the music-room.
“Then let me drop you all at his flat,” said Mrs. Withers. “I have my motor here, and I’m going home now. I am sure it is not out of my way.”
Agnes nudged me with her elbow to indicate that I had to answer this.
“Robbie’s car is here, many thanks,” I said. “It’s waiting for us. I saw it when I came in.”
“And he plays the piano too?” asked Mrs. Withers.
Agnes laughed.
“Ah, I believe you know him all the time,” she said, “and mean to repeat to him all the nice things that we say about him. You know him intimately, I believe, but if you tell me that he has already sent you those three sonnets he wrote as he flew to Cologne the other day, which he promised to read us tonight, I don’t think I could bear it. Mr. Goodenough and I were promised the first hearing of them, and I believe he has sent them to you already.”
“Indeed he hasn’t,” said Mrs. Withers in a social agony. “I really don’t know Mr. Oriole, though I am dying to. I hoped you would have brought him to my little party last Thursday.”
“Thursday, Thursday,” said Agnes. “Yes, I remember: Robbie was up in the Lakes. Such a pity! He would have loved it, just the sort of party he adores.”
Mrs. Withers’s brow, that Greek brow with a fillet of crimson velvet across it, from which depended a splendid pearl, grew slightly corrugated, and made the pearl tremble. She prided herself on knowing all her engagements for a week ahead, but the recollection of them was difficult even to her.
“Sunday at lunch then,” she said. “Will you both come and bring Mr. Oriole? Tell him how divine it would be if he would read us the Cologne sonnets.”
“I’ll tell Robbie,” said Agnes, “but as for your chance of finding him disengaged, I couldn’t promise anything. How his friends grab him when he appears I Ah, there’s John—I mean Lord Marrible. Well?”
“He simply isn’t here.”
Agnes turned to me.
“Ah, now I remember,” she said. “He told me that if he couldn’t get here by half-past ten, he wouldn’t come at all, but would just send the car for us. What time is it now?”
“Eleven,” said I.
“Oh, come quick, then,” said she. “We’ve missed half an hour already.”
Lord Marrible turned to Mrs. Withers.
“Well, you and I must console ourselves with supper,” he said, “as Robbie hasn’t asked us.”
It was all very well for Agnes to say that we would go quickly, but Mrs. Withers just clung.
“But wouldn’t he let me come too?” she said. “Mayn’t I drop you at his door, Miss Lockett, and I would wait while you asked him if I might come in?”
Agnes’s face dimpled again.
“My dear, if it were possible!” she said. “But with Robbie, however intimately you know him, you can’t quite do that. You agree with me, Lord Marrible, I know. But if—if he gives me a copy of the Cologne sonnets, or lets me make one, you may guess to whom I will show it, unless he absolutely forbids me to show it to anybody. How tiresome it is that you don’t know him!”
Mrs. Withers’s pearl trembled again.
“Or if lunch on Sunday won’t suit Mr. Oriole,” she said, “I have got a few people to dinner on Tuesday and Wednesday, and if you would bring him then I should be more than charmed.”
She remembered that her hospitable table was crammed on Wednesday, but there were two or three people who did not matter, and she could easily tell them that she expected them not that Wednesday but the next.…
“Or if he would ring me up and suggest any time,” she added.
Agnes laughed again.
“Too kind of you,” she said, “and how rude of me to laugh! I laughed at the idea of Robbie telephoning. He can’t bear any modern invention.”
“But he is an airman, isn’t he?” asked Mrs. Withers.
Never have I admired the quickness and felicity of the female mind more than at that critical moment which would have caused any mere man to stumble and bungle, and leave an unconvincing impression. There was not even the “perceptible pause” before Agnes answered.
“Ah, but Robbie says that flying is the effort to recapture bird-life of a million years ago,” she said. “Birds and angels fly; it is not a modern discovery, but a celestial and ancient secret now being learned by us in our clumsy way. Robbie is lyrical about flying. But what bird or angel ever telephoned? Come, Mr. Goodenough, let us find that car.”
“I forget how he reconciles himself to motoring,” I said. I did not want to put Agnes in a fix, but only to delight my soul with another instance of feminine alacrity.
“He doesn’t,” said she brightly. “But then you have got to get to places quickly, and you can’t fly through the streets of London yet.”
“He sounds too marvellous,” said Mrs. Withers ecstatically. “Sunday, Tuesday or Wednesday then. Any of them.”
The discerning reader will easily have perceived by this time that both John Marrible and I were but wax in the inventive hands of Agnes, and flowed into the shapes that her swift fingers ordained for us. Occasionally we suggested little curves and decorations of our own, which she might or might not permit; but we had no independent will in the matter of Robert Oriole. She was the architect who built this splendid temple
