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Queen Lucia
by E. F. Benson
Though the sun was hot on this July morning Mrs Lucas preferred tocover the half-mile that lay between the station and her house on herown brisk feet, and sent on her maid and her luggage in the fly thather husband had ordered to meet her. After those four hours in thetrain a short walk would be pleasant, but, though she veiled it fromher conscious mind, another motive, sub-consciously engineered,prompted her action. It would, of course, be universally known to allher friends in Riseholme that she was arriving today by the 12.26, andat that hour the village street would be sure to be full of them. Theywould see the fly with luggage draw up at the door of The Hurst, andnobody except her maid would get out.
That would be an interesting thing for them: it would cause one ofthose little thrills of pleasant excitement and conjectural exercisewhich supplied Riseholme with its emotional daily bread. They would allwonder what had happened to her, whether she had been taken ill at thevery last moment before leaving town and with her well-known fortitudeand consideration for the feelings of others, had sent her maid on toassure her husband that he need not be anxious. That would clearly beMrs Quantock's suggestion, for Mrs Quantock's mind, devoted as it wasnow to the study of Christian Science, and the determination to denythe existence of pain, disease and death as regards herself, was alwaysfull of the gloomiest views as regards her friends, and on theslightest excuse, pictured that they, poor blind things, were sufferingfrom false claims. Indeed, given that the fly had already arrived atThe Hurst, and that its arrival had at this moment been seen by orreported to Daisy Quantock, the chances were vastly in favour of thatlady's having already started in to give Mrs Lucas absent treatment.Very likely Georgie Pillson had also seen the anticlimax of the fly'sarrival, but he would hazard a much more probable though erroneoussolution of her absence. He would certainly guess that she had sent onher maid with her luggage to the station in order to take a seat forher, while she herself, oblivious of the passage of time, was spendingher last half hour in contemplation of the Italian masterpieces at theNational Gallery, or the Greek bronzes at the British Museum. Certainlyshe would not be at the Royal Academy, for the culture of Riseholme,led by herself, rejected as valueless all artistic efforts later thanthe death of Sir Joshua Reynolds, and a great deal of what went before.Her husband with his firm grasp of the obvious, on the other hand,would be disappointingly capable even before her maid confirmed hisconjecture, of concluding that she had merely walked from the station.
The motive, then, that made her send her cab on, though subconsciouslygenerated, soon penetrated into her consciousness, and these guesses atwhat other people would think when they saw it arrive without her,sprang from the dramatic element that formed so large a part of hermentality, and made her always take, as by right divine, the leadingpart in the histrionic entertainments with which the cultured ofRiseholme beguiled or rather strenuously occupied such moments as couldbe spared from their studies of art and literature, and their socialengagements. Indeed she did not usually stop at taking the leadingpart, but, if possible, doubled another character with it, as well asbeing stage-manager and adapter, if not designer of scenery. Whatevershe did—and really she did an incredible