"I felt that way at first. I don"t now. Perhaps I understand you a little better. But, in any case, I couldn"t take his."
He pushed the liberty a little further. "But if you"re going to marry him--"
"That"s just it. I wonder if you"ve the faintest idea of what it means to a woman to marry a man by making herself a burden to him in advance--and such a burden!"
"It wouldn"t be a burden to any one who--who--"
"I know what you"re going to say. Love does make a difference. Of course. But it acts one way on the man and another way on the woman. In proportion as it urges him to make the sacrifice, it impels her to prevent it."
He grew still bolder. The cover of the night and the intimacy of the situation made him venturesome. "Then why don"t you break off your engagement?"
It was a long while before she answered. "He won"t let me," she said then. "And, besides," she added, after slight hesitation, "it"s difficult not to be true to a man who"s showing himself so n.o.ble."
"Is that your only reason?"
She raised her head slightly and turned toward him. He expected something cutting, but she only said: "What makes you ask that?"
He was a little frightened. He backed down, and yet not altogether. "Oh, nothing. I only--wondered."
"If you think I don"t care for him--"
"Oh no. Not that--not that at all."
"Well, if you _were_ to think it, it would probably be because I"ve been through so much--I"m _going_ through so much--that that sort of thing has become secondary."
"I didn"t know that--that sort of thing--was ever secondary."
"Because you"ve never had the experience. If you had--"
The freedom of speech she seemed to be according him led him on to say:
"I"ve had experience enough--as you may know--to be sure it wouldn"t be secondary with me."
She seemed willing to discuss the point. "When I say secondary I mean that I"m in a position in which I find it isn"t the most important thing in the world to me to marry the man I--I care for."
"Then, what _is_ the most important thing?"
She stirred impatiently. "Oh, it"s no use going into that; I suppose it would be--to be free--not to owe you anything--or anybody anything--to be out of this big, useless house--away from these unpaid servants--and--and free! I"m not a dependent person. I dare say you"ve noticed that. I shouldn"t mind having no money. I know a way by which I could support myself--and papa. I"ve thought that out. I shouldn"t mind being alone in the world, either--if I could only burst the coil that"s been wound about me."
"But since you can"t," he said, rather cruelly, "wouldn"t the next best thing be--to marry the man you care for?"
Her response was to say, irrelevantly, somewhat quaveringly, in a voice as near to tears as he could fancy her coming: "I wish I hadn"t fallen out with Aunt Vic."
"Why? Would she help you?"
"She"s very good and kind--in her way."
"Why don"t you write to her?"
"Writing wouldn"t be any good now. It"s too late."
Another long silence fell between them. The darkened windows of the house on the other side of the lawn began to reflect a pallid gleam as the moon rose. Shadows of trees and of clumps of shrubbery became faintly visible on the gra.s.s. The great rounded elm in the foreground detached itself against the shimmering, illuminated sky like an open fan. Davenant found something ecstatic in the half-light, the peace, and the extraordinary privilege of being alone with her. It would be one more memory to treasure up. Silence, too, was a form of communion more satisfactory to him than speech. It was so full of unutterable things that he wondered at her allowing it to last.
Nevertheless, it was he who broke it. The evening grew chilly at last.
Somewhere in the town a clock struck ten. He felt it would be indiscreet to stay longer.
"I"ll make a try for it, Miss Guion," he said, when he had got on his feet to go away. "Since you want me to see Colonel Ashley, I will."
"They always say that one man has such influence on another," she said, rising, too--"and you see things so clearly and have such a lot of common sense.... I"ll walk down to the gate with you.... I"m tired with sitting still."
He offered his hand to help her in descending the portico steps. Though there was no need for her to take it, she did so. The white cloak, loosely gathered in one hand in front, trailed behind her. He thought her very spirit-like and ethereal.
At the foot of the steps his heart gave a great bound; he went hot and cold. It seemed to him--he was sure--he could have sworn--that her hand rested in his a perceptible instant longer than there was any need for.
A moment later he was scoffing at the miracle. It was a mistake on his part, or an accident on hers. It was the mocking of his own desire, the illusion of his feverish, overstrained senses. It was a restorative to say to himself: "Don"t be a d.a.m.ned fool."
And yet they walked to the gate almost in silence. It was a silence without embarra.s.sment, like that which had preceded it. It had some of the qualities of the silence which goes with long-established companionships. He spoke but once, to remind her, protectingly, that the gra.s.s was damp, and to draw her--almost tactually--to the graveled path.
They came to the gate, but he did not immediately say good night.
"I wish you could throw the burden of the whole thing on me, Miss Guion," he ventured, wistfully, "and just take it easy."
She looked away from him, over the sprinkling of lights that showed the town. "If I could do it with any one, it would be with you--now."
There was an inflection on the _now_ which again gave him strange and sudden thrills, as though some extraordinary chemical agent had been infused into his blood. All kinds of capitulations were implied in it--changes of heart and mind and att.i.tude--changes that had come about imperceptibly, and for reasons which he, and perhaps she, could not have followed. He felt the upleaping of great joy. It was joy so intense that it made him tactful, temperate. It also made him want to rush away and be alone.
"I"ll make that do for the present," he said, smiling down at her through the darkness. "Thank you for letting me come. Good night."
"Good night."
There was again that barely noticeable lingering of her hand in his. The repet.i.tion rather disappointed him. "It"s just her way of shaking hands," was the explanation he gave of it.
When he had pa.s.sed out of the gate he pretended to take his way down Algonquin Avenue, but he only crossed the Street to the shelter of a friendly elm. There he could watch her tall, white figure as it went slowly up the driveway. Except for a dim light in the fan-shaped window over the front door the house was dark. The white figure moved with an air of dragging itself along.
"It isn"t the most important thing in the world for her," he whispered to himself, "to marry--_the man she cares for_."
There was a renewal of his blind fury against Ashley, while at the same time he found himself groaning, inwardly: "I wish to G.o.d the man she cares for wasn"t such a--such a--trump!"
XVIII
When the colonel of the Suss.e.x Rangers woke on the following morning the Umfraville element in him, fatigued doubtless with the demands of the previous day, still slept on. That strain in him which had made his maternal ancestors gentlemen-adventurers in Tudor times, and cavaliers in the days of Charles the First, and Jacobites with James the Second, and roysterers with George the Fourth--loyal, swashbuckling, and impractical, daring, dashing, lovable, absurd, bound to come to grief one day or another, as they had come--that strain lying dormant, Ashley was free to wake in the spirit of the manufacturer of brushes. In other words he woke in alarm. It was very real alarm. It was alarm not unlike that of the gambler who realizes in the cold stare of morning that for a night"s excitement he has thrown away a fortune.
The feeling was so dreadful that, as he lay for a few minutes with his eyes closed, he could say without exaggeration that he had never felt anything so sickening in his life. It was worse than the blue funk that attended the reveille for his first battle--worse than the bluer remorse that had come with the dawn after some of his more youthful sprees. The only parallel to it he could find was in the desolation of poor creatures he had seen, chiefly in India, reduced suddenly by fire, flood, or earthquake to the skin they stood in and a lodging on the ground. His swaggering promises of yesterday had brought him as near as possible to that.