She made no further remark, but sat clasping and unclasping her nervous hands, as powerless against the desperate languor a.s.sailing her as she had been against the gust of pa.s.sion.
Across the wide, smiling land westward a closed shadow, sharp of outline and rapid of flight, drove across the stubble field, sank in an intervening valley, and skimmed again over the close green turf to their feet as it touched the edge of the chalk pit. She shivered a little.
"Take me home, Christopher."
He helped her up and with steady hands a.s.sisted her to smooth her hair and put on her hat, and then they turned and walked back along the path they had come. Christopher was greatly troubled. It seemed to him incredible that Geoffry had been left in ignorance of this cruel inheritance. He tried to gauge the effect of it on his apparently unsuspecting mind and was uneasy and dissatisfied over the result.
"Someone must explain to Geoffry," he said presently; "will you like him to come over to-night and tell him yourself, Patricia?"
"I don"t want to see him." There was a deep note of fatigue in her voice, also a new accent of indifference. Her mind was in no way occupied with her lover"s att.i.tude towards the unhappy episode.
"Someone"s got to see him and explain. It"s only fair," persisted Christopher resolutely.
"What is there to explain. What does it matter?"
"He thinks it was an accident."
She walked on a little quicker.
"Patricia, you must tell him."
Then she turned and faced him, and her pallor was burnt out with red.
"Christopher, I will not see him. I can"t. What"s the use? What can he do?"
"He must learn how to help you, learn how to stop it," he said doggedly.
She gave a curious, choking laugh. "Geoffry stop it? Don"t be absurd, Christopher. You know he"d make me ten times worse if he tried.
Anyhow, I"m not going to marry him."
"Patricia!"
"Don"t, don"t. I can"t bear anything now. But I won"t marry him, or anyone. It"s not safe."
She went on down the path swiftly, without looking back, hardly conscious of the tears falling from her br.i.m.m.i.n.g eyes. Christopher followed her silently, furious with himself because of some unreasoning exultation in his heart, some clamorous sense of kinship with the golden land and laden earth that had been absent as they came, but it died when, presently emerging from the wood on to the park land facing Marden, she turned to him again regardless of her tears.
"He won"t want to marry me now, anyhow," she said wistfully, with a child"s appealing look of distress.
A great pity welled up in his heart and drowned the last thought of self, carrying visions of the cruel isolation this grim inheritage might entail on her, and he had hard work to refrain from taking her in his arms then and there to hold for ever shielded from the relentless pressure of her life. The temptation was more subtle and harder to withstand than on the sunny, gorse-covered cliff at Milton, for it was her need and her pain that cried for help and love, and she who suffered because he withstood. He could in no wise see what course he was to take beyond the minute, but he knew quite clearly what course he must not take, and such surety was the reward he won from that other fight.
He answered her appeal now with quite other words than those she perhaps sought, and it was the hardest pang of all to know it and recognise the vague discomfort in her eyes.
"You mustn"t be unfair to Geoffry, Patricia. You haven"t any right to say that. He will want to do his best for you when he understands."
"He went away."
"I sent him. I--I was afraid you were going to cry."
Had he done wrong? He cast his thoughts back rapidly. He knew he could not have borne that they two should witness one of her wild fits of repentance and misery. It would have been unbearably unfit. He could not have left her to Geoffry, and yet it had been Geoffry"s right. He walked on by her side wondering where he had blundered.
"You would not have gone, Christopher, no matter who said so." Her directness was dangerous. She was then going to allow herself no illusions of any kind, not even concerning the man she loved, and Christopher became suddenly aware he was very young: that they were all three very young, and had no previous experience to guide them in this difficult pa.s.s, but must gain it for themselves, gain it perhaps at greater cost than he could willingly contemplate.
"It is no question of me, whatever," he said slowly. "I"ve been used to you and I understand. I don"t know how it would be if I had not known, neither do you, but it"s clear, you or Nevil must explain the matter to Geoffry at once."
"You can do it."
"It"s not my place."
"You were there."
"That was mere chance."
She slipped her arm through his in the old way.
"Dear Christopher, I love Nevil, and he"s awfully good, but you are like my own brother. Please pretend you are really. If I had a brother, he would see Geoffry for me."
"But Nevil might not like it."
It was a difficult pa.s.s, for how could he explain to her it was of Geoffry he was thinking, not of Nevil. His evasion at least raised a little smile.
"Nevil! An explanation taken off his hands!" She spread her own abroad in mock amazement.
"Tell him yourself, Patricia."
"Christopher!"
He looked straight ahead, a certain rigidness in the outline of his face betokening a decision at variance with his will.
"What am I to tell him?"
"What you like."
"I shall not tell him the silly thing you said just now, you know."
"What thing?"
"About not marrying."
"It doesn"t matter," she said indifferently, "he won"t marry me if he thinks I tried to hit him."
Christopher closed his mind and reason to so illogical a conclusion, but he disputed the point no more, and it was not till he left her and turned to face instantly the task she had laid upon him, that he realised how overwhelmingly difficult it was.
CHAPTER XXV
"I suppose no one realised you did not know all about it as you"d known them all so long."