Agnes looked up with a quick smile.
"We never _quite_ lost hope," she said.
"Eric told me that you and your people had been out to see him in Switzerland. How did you find him?"
The smile died away in wistfulness.
"Well, he"s alive, and that"s the great thing," Agnes answered. "The doctors out there don"t seem to think that he"ll ever be able to do much work with his head again; he"ll probably have to give up the bar and live out of doors. You can understand that, when a man"s just begun to get a practice together----"
"But is that quite certain?" Barbara interrupted.
"N-no. But it seems probable. There"s a report that some of the bad cases are going to be sent home. Then we shall see."
Eric watched the faces of the two girls. Barbara"s expressed nothing more than the conventional sympathy of one stranger hearing of another"s misfortune; a few months earlier Agnes had not known that Jack and Barbara were even acquainted.
"How soon do you expect him?" asked Barbara.
"Oh, I don"t think anything"s been decided yet. And you know how long these things take. . . . Eric, if I"d had any idea how late it was . . .!"
He accompanied her to the door and returned to find Barbara still standing, still in her cloak. The flicker of animation which she had presented on meeting Agnes had died down, and she was again the sport of man and the plaything of fate.
"I like her, Eric," she remarked thoughtfully. "Why don"t you marry her?
Any one can see she"s in love with you."
"You"re the only person in the world I want to marry," he answered.
Barbara"s face twisted in a spasm of pain.
"G.o.d! How it hurts when you say that! Eric, I shall make you miserable and be miserable myself! I love you; you know I love you! But I don"t want to marry you. Why don"t you forget me? Go away----"
"Forget you!" Eric gripped her by the shoulders. "What d"you think would be left, if I lost you?"
Her eyes opened wide with wonder.
"You can"t love me as much as that, Eric!"
"I love you so much that I"d sooner have an air-raid to-night and a bomb on my head here, now, than lose you! You"re the whole world to me!"
She shook her head miserably and without hope of flattering rea.s.surance.
"I could have killed myself when you told me that I"d destroyed your power of work," she whispered. "And to-night, when that girl said that Jack might never be able to work again . . . It"s what I should feel, if we married and I couldn"t bear children! I should be incomplete, useless!"
"But _you_"re not responsible."
"I might make things easier. . . ."
So compa.s.sion was coming to reinforce or supplant vanity. . . . Eric felt that he knew Barbara"s moods in advance. Lady Knightrider--a curse on her name--had started by setting every nerve on edge; the sight of Agnes Waring--with Jack"s eyes, hair and voice--had completed her discomfiture; and Barbara had been morbidly drawing one unhappy picture after another. Jack was incapacitated; and, with his pride, he would never win through pity what he had failed to win on merit. Incapacitated or not, Jack was a pauper; and, with his fantastic honour, he would regard himself as an outcast from Barbara"s society.
"Even if he can"t go back to the bar," said Eric at length, "his father will have no difficulty in getting him a job. Lord Waring could take him on as his agent."
"Oh, I never thought he"d starve! But it must be such a disappointment."
"Well, the war"s been such a mix-up that seven men out of ten will change their careers, when they come back. . . . Babs . . . do you care for Jack as much as that?"
She looked up quickly with a gleam of hope in her eyes.
"Are you going to--forget my promise?"
"No! I asked whether you cared for Jack as much as all that."
Barbara shook her head in bewilderment.
"I"ve given you my heart, Eric. But I owe Jack my soul."
Behind the neat phrasing of the professional trafficker in emotions, Eric felt that she was trying to weary him of their forty-eight hours"
engagement. . . .
3
At the beginning of November Eric went to Lashmar for a long week-end.
After the first days of his engagement he had hardly seen or heard anything of Barbara. She was presumably at Crawleigh Abbey, but for a week she answered no more than one letter out of three; after that, with a sense that he could do nothing right and that they were fretting each other"s nerves, he ceased to correspond and was trying to absorb and exhaust himself with work. Now his novel was in the agent"s hand, and "Mother"s Son" had been sent to Manders.
As he dawdled before a book-stall at Waterloo, Eric"s eye was caught by "_The World and His Wife_" contents" bill, which announced, with other attractions, an "Ill.u.s.trated Interview with Mr. Eric Lane." There had not been time for him to receive the article from his news-cutting agency, and he bought a copy to read in the train. The pictures were well reproduced, and he was by now so hardened to the perverse inaccuracy and genial blatancy of the letter-press that he hardly blushed at the aspirations which were attributed to him, until his attention was arrested in mid-paragraph by Barbara"s name. Collecting himself and glancing almost guiltily round the somnolent carriage, he turned back to the beginning.
"_Rumour has been busy with the names of Mr. Lane and of Lady Barbara Neave, only daughter of the Marquess of Crawleigh. No official announcement has been made, but the young people have been going about together a good deal lately; some of our readers may have seen them at the PREMIeRE of "The Bomb-Sh.e.l.l." The Stage has of recent years surrendered so much of its beauty and talent to the Peerage that it is high time for the Peerage to make this romantic return to the Stage. . . .
Mr. Lane"s advice to budding playwrights is reminiscent of Mr.
Punch"s famous advice to those about to marry--"Don"t." Though the "Divorce" was his first play to be produced, it was not the first that he had written; like most authors, he had to buy experience._ . . ."
There was nothing in the rest of the article to incriminate him, but the offending paragraph was enough in itself. Guiltily Eric looked round a second time. Two of his fellow-pa.s.sengers, slumbering with mouths agape, were clutching "_The World and His Wife_" to their stomachs; it was the one periodical of later date than "_Punch_" and the monthly reviews which his parents took in at the Mill-House. Sat.u.r.day was made eventful by its appearance; even Sir Francis interested himself in the full-page studies of actresses and _debutantes_, the house-party groups and snapshots of celebrities in the Park. . . .
As he climbed into the car Eric was careful to let Sybil see that he was carrying the paper in his hand. She had scarcely wormed her way out of the traffic and shot free along the Melton road before she nodded towards the bulging strap of his despatch-box.
"Is that true, Ricky?"
"Is what true?"
"That you"re engaged to that woman?"
"Does the paper say so?" Eric enquired loftily. "By the way, Barbara Neave is a great friend of mine, and I don"t very much care about hearing her described as "that woman. . . ." I think the paper only said that "rumour" had "been busy with" our "names." Rumour"s been d.a.m.nably busy; it won"t leave us alone!"
His sister was silent for some moments.
"I hope to _Heaven_ you"re not going to make a fool of yourself with her," she exclaimed at length. "She"ll wear you out, spoil your work, make you bankrupt in a month----"
"Isn"t this rather sweeping about some one you"ve never even met?" Eric interposed gently.
"You take such jolly good care that we shouldn"t meet her," Sybil answered at a tangent.