A gate ahead! Well, never mind. The horse was quiet; she could easily manage any ordinary latch.
But the gate was difficult, and she fumbled at, it. Again and again, she brought up her horse, only to fail. And the cob began to get nervous and jump about--to rear a little. Whenever she stooped towards the gate, it would swerve violently, and each unsuccessful attempt made it more restive. She began to get nervous herself.
"How abominable! Must I go back? Suppose I get off? But if I do, can I get on again?" She looked round her for a log or a stone.
Who was that approaching? For suddenly she saw a horse and rider coming from the Hilkley direction towards the gate. A moment--then through the dusk she recognised the rider; and agitation--suffocating, overwhelming--laid hold upon her.
A sharp movement on the part of the horseman checked his horse. Falloden pulled up in amazement on the further side of the gate.
"You?--Lady Constance!"
She controlled herself, with a great effort.
"How do you do? My horse shies at the gate. He"s so tiresome--I was just thinking of getting off. It will be most kind if you will let me through."
She drew aside, quieting and patting the cob, while he opened the gate.
Then she pa.s.sed through and paused, looking back.
"Thank you very much. Are there any more gates?"
"Two more I am afraid," he said formally, as he turned and joined her.
"Will you allow me to open them for you?"
"It would be very good of you," she faltered, not knowing how to refuse, or what to say.
They walked their horses side by side, through the gathering darkness.
An embarra.s.sed and thrilling silence reigned between them, till at last he said: "You are staying at Scarfedale--with your aunts?"
"Yes."
"I heard you were there. They are only five miles from us."
She said nothing. But she seemed to realise, through every nerve, the suppressed excitement of the man beside her.
Another couple of minutes pa.s.sed. Then he said abruptly:
"I should like to know that you read my last letter to you--only that! I of course don"t ask for--for any comments upon it."
"Yes, I received it. I read it."
He waited a little, but she said no more. He sharply realised his disappointment, and its inconsequence. The horses slowly descended the long hill. Falloden opened another gate, with the hurried remark that there was yet one more. Meanwhile he saw Connie"s slender body, her beautiful loosened hair and black riding-hat outlined against the still glowing sky behind. Her face, turned towards the advancing dusk, he could hardly see. But the small hand in its riding-glove, so close to him, haunted his senses. One movement, and he could have crushed it in his.
Far away the last gate came into sight. His bitterness and pain broke out.
"I can"t imagine why you should feel any interest in my affairs," he said, in his stiffest manner, "but you kindly allowed me to talk to you sometimes about my people. You know, I presume, what everybody knows, that we shall soon be leaving Flood, and selling the estates."
"I know." The girl"s voice was low and soft. "I am awfully, awfully sorry!"
"Thank you. It doesn"t of course matter for me. I can make my own life.
But for my father--it is hard. I should like you to know"--he spoke with growing agitation--"that when we met--at Cannes--and at Oxford--I had no knowledge--no idea--of what was happening."
She raised her head suddenly, impetuously.
"I don"t know why you say that!"
He saw instantly that his wounded pride had betrayed him into a blunder--that without meaning it, he had seemed to suggest that she would have treated him differently, if she had known he was not a rich man.
"It was a stupid thing to say. Please consider it unsaid."
The silence deepened, till she broke it again--
"I see Mr. Radowitz sometimes. Won"t you like to know that he is composing a symphony for his degree? He is always working at it. It makes him happy--at least--contented."
"Yes, I am glad. But nothing can ever make up to him. I know that."
"No--nothing," she admitted sadly.
"Or to me!"
Constance started. They had reached the last gate.
Falloden threw himself off his horse to open it and as she rode through, she looked down into his face. Its proud regularity of feature, its rich colour, its brilliance, seemed to her all blurred and clouded. A flashing insight showed her the valley of distress and humiliation through which this man had been pa.s.sing. His bitter look, at once of challenge and renunciation, set her trembling; she felt herself all weakness; and suddenly the woman in her--dumbly, unguessed--held out its arms.
But he knew nothing of it. Rather her att.i.tude seemed to him one of embarra.s.sment--even of _hauteur_. It was suddenly intolerable to him to seem to be asking for her pity. He raised his hat, coldly gave her a few directions as to her road home, and closed the gate behind her. She bowed and in another minute he was cantering away from her, towards the sunset.
Connie went on blindly, the reins on her horse"s neck, the pa.s.sionate tears dropping on her hands.
CHAPTER XIII
Douglas Falloden rode home rapidly after parting from Connie. Pa.s.sion, impatience, bitter regret consumed him. He suffered, and could not endure to suffer. That life, which had grown up with him as a flattering and obsequious friend, obeying all his whims, yielding to all his desires, should now have turned upon him in this traitorous way, inflicting such monstrous reprisals and rebuffs, roused in him the astonishment and resentment natural to such a temperament.
He, too, drew rein for a moment at the spot where Connie had looked out over Flood Castle and its valley. The beautiful familiar sight produced in him now only a mingling of pain and irritation. The horrid thing was settled, decided. There was no avoiding ruin, or saving his inheritance.
Then why these long delays, these endless discomforts and humiliations?
The lawyers prolonged things because it paid them to do so; and his poor father wavered and hesitated from day to day, because physically and morally he was breaking up. If only his father and mother would have cleared out of Flood at once--they were spending money they could not possibly afford in keeping it up--and had left him, Douglas, to do the odious things, pay the creditors, sell the place, and sweep up the whole vast mess, with the help of the lawyers, it would have been infinitely best. His own will felt itself strong and determined enough for any such task. But Sir Arthur, in his strange, broken state, could not be brought to make decisions, and would often, after days of gloom and depression, pa.s.s into a fool"s mood, when he seemed for the moment to forget and ignore the whole tragedy. Since he and Douglas had agreed with the trustees to sell the pictures, that sheer bankruptcy might just be escaped, Sir Arthur had been extravagantly cheerful. Why not have their usual shooting-party after all?--one last fling before the end! He supposed he should end his days in a suburban villa, but till they left Flood the flag should be kept flying.
During all this time of tension indeed, he was a great trial to his son.
Douglas"s quick and proud intelligence was amazed to find his father so weak and so incompetent under misfortune. All his boyish life he had looked up to the slender, handsome man, whom he himself so much resembled, on a solider, more substantial scale, as the most indulgent of fathers, the princeliest of hosts, the best of shots and riders, chief indeed of the Falloden clan and all its glories, who, like other monarchs, could do no wrong.
But now the glamour which must always attend the central figure of such a scene withered at the touch of poverty and misfortune. And, in its absence, Douglas found himself dealing with an enthusiastic, vain, self-confident being, who had ruined himself and his son by speculations, often so childishly foolish that Douglas could not think of them without rage. Intellectually, he could only despise and condemn his father.
Yet the old bond held. Till he met Constance Bledlow, he had cared only for his own people, and among them, preeminently, for his father. In this feeling, family pride and natural affection met together. The family pride had been sorely shaken, the affection, steeped in a painful, astonished pity, remained. For the first time in his life Douglas had been sleeping badly. Interminable dreams pursued him, in which the scene in Marmion quad, his last walk with Constance along the Cherwell, and the family crash, were all intermingled, with the fatuity natural to dreams. And his wakings from them were almost equally haunted by the figures of Constance and Radowitz, and by a miserable yearning over his father, which no one who saw his hard, indifferent bearing during the day could possible have guessed. "Poor--poor old fellow!"--he had once or twice raised himself from his bed in the early morning, as though answering this cry in his ears, only to find that he himself had uttered it.
He had told his people nothing of Constance Bledlow beyond the bare fact of his acquaintance with her, first at Cannes, and then at Oxford. And they knew nothing of the Radowitz incident. Very few people indeed were aware of the true history of that night which had marred an artist"s life. The college authorities had been painfully stirred by the reports which had reached them; but Radowitz himself had written to the Head maintaining that the whole thing was an accident and a frolic, and insisting that no public or official notice should be taken of it, a fact which had not prevented the Head from writing severely to Falloden, Meyrick, and Robertson, or the fellows of the college from holding a college meeting, even in the long vacation, to discuss what measures should be taken in the October term to put down and stamp out ragging.
Falloden had replied to the Head"s letter expressing his "profound regret" for the accident to Otto Radowitz, and declaring that n.o.body in the row had the smallest intention of doing him any bodily harm.