But Mr. Brumley didn"t remember clearly enough to make any use of that.
"Everybody naturally _is_ sorry on an occasion of that sort," said Sir Isaac. "But you come and see what we"ve done in that barn. In three weeks. They couldn"t have got it together in three months ten years ago.
It"s--system."
Mr. Brumley still tried to cling to Lady Harman.
"Have you been interested in this building?" he asked.
"I still don"t understand the system of the corridor," she said, rising a little belatedly to the occasion. "I _will_ come."
Sir Isaac regarded her for a moment with a dubious expression and then began to explain the new method of building with large prepared units and shaped pieces of reinforced concrete instead of separate bricks that Messrs. Prothero & Cuthbertson had organized and which had enabled him to create this artistic corridor so simply. It was a rather uncomfortable three-cornered conversation. Sir Isaac addressed his exposition exclusively to Mr. Brumley and Mr. Brumley made repeated ineffectual attempts to bring Lady Harman, and Lady Harman made repeated ineffectual attempts to bring herself, into a position in the conversation.
Their eyes met, the glow of Mr. Brumley"s declarations remained with them, but neither dared risk any phrase that might arouse Sir Isaac"s suspicions or escape his acuteness. And when they had gone through the new additions pretty thoroughly--the plumbers were still busy with the barn bathroom--Sir Isaac asked Mr. Brumley if there was anything more he would like to see. In the slight pause that ensued Lady Harman suggested tea. But tea gave them no opportunity of resuming their interrupted conversation, and as Sir Isaac"s invincible determination to shadow his visitor until he was well off the premises became more and more unmistakable,--he made it quite ungraciously unmistakable,--Mr.
Brumley"s inventiveness failed. One thing came to him suddenly, but it led to nothing of any service to him.
"But I heard you were dangerously ill, Lady Harman!" he cried. "Lady Beach-Mandarin called here----"
"But when?" asked Lady Harman, astonished over the tea-things.
"But you _know_ she called!" said Mr. Brumley and looked in affected reproach at Sir Isaac.
"I"ve not been ill at all!"
"Sir Isaac told her."
"Told her I was ill!"
"Dangerously ill. That you couldn"t bear to be disturbed."
"But _when_, Mr. Brumley?"
"Three days ago."
They both looked at Sir Isaac who was sitting on the music stool and eating a piece of tea-cake with a preoccupied air. He swallowed and then spoke thoughtfully--in a tone of detached observation. Nothing but a slight reddening of the eyes betrayed any unusual feeling in him.
"It"s my opinion," he said, "that that old lady--Lady Beach-Mandarin I mean--doesn"t know what she"s saying half the time. She says--oh!
remarkable things. Saying _that_ for example!"
"But did she call on me?"
"She called. I"m surprised you didn"t hear. And she was all in a flurry for going on.... Did you come down, Mr. Brumley, to see if Lady Harman was ill?"
"That weighed with me."
"Well,--you see she isn"t," said Sir Isaac and brushed a stray crumb from his coat....
Mr. Brumley was at last impelled gateward and Sir Isaac saw him as far as the high-road.
"Good-bye!" cried Mr. Brumley with excessive amiability.
Sir Isaac with soundless lips made a good-bye like gesture.
"And now," said Sir Isaac to himself with extreme bitterness, "now to see about getting a dog."
"Bull mastiff?" said Sir Isaac developing his idea as he went back to Lady Harman. "Or perhaps a Thoroughly Vicious collie?"
"How did that chap get in?" he demanded. "What had he got to say to you?"
"He came in--to look at the garden," said Lady Harman. "And of course he wanted to know if I had been well--because of Lady Viping"s party. And I suppose because of what you told Lady Beach-Mandarin."
Sir Isaac grunted doubtfully. He thought of Snagsby and of all the instructions he had given Snagsby. He turned about and went off swiftly and earnestly to find Snagsby....
Snagsby lied. But Sir Isaac was able to tell from the agitated way in which he was cleaning his perfectly clean silver at that unseasonable hour that the wretched man was lying.
--8
Quite a number of words came to the lips of Mr. Brumley as he went unwillingly along the pleasant country road that led from Black Strand to the railway station. But the word he ultimately said showed how strongly the habits of the gentlemanly _litterateur_ prevailed in him.
It was the one inevitable word for his mood,--"Baffled!"
Close upon its utterance came the weak irritation of the impotent man.
"What the _devil_?" cried Mr. Brumley.
Some critical spirit within him asked him urgently why he was going to the station, what he thought he was doing, what he thought he had done, and what he thought he was going to do. To all of which questions Mr.
Brumley perceived he had no adequate reply.
Earlier in the day he had been inspired by a vague yet splendid dream of large masterful liberations achieved. He had intended to be very disinterested, very n.o.ble, very firm, and so far as Sir Isaac was concerned, a trifle overbearing. You know now what he said and did. "Of course if we could have talked for a little longer," he said. From the stormy dissatisfaction of his retreat this one small idea crystallized, that he had not talked enough without disturbance to Lady Harman. The thing he had to do was to talk to her some more. To go on with what he had been saying. That thought arrested his steps. On that hypothesis there was no reason whatever why he should go on to the station and London. Instead----He stopped short, saw a convenient gate ahead, went to it, seated himself upon its topmost rail and attempted a calm survey of the situation. He had somehow to continue that conversation with Lady Harman.
Was it impossible to do that by going back to the front door of Black Strand? His instinct was against that course. He knew that if he went back now openly he would see n.o.body but Sir Isaac or his butler. He must therefore not go back openly. He must go round now and into the pine-woods at the back of Black Strand; thence he must watch the garden and find his opportunity of speaking to the imprisoned lady. There was something at once attractively romantic and repellently youthful about this course of action. Mr. Brumley looked at his watch, then he surveyed the blue clear sky overhead, with just one warm tinted wisp of cloud. It would be dark in an hour and it was probable that Lady Harman had already gone indoors for the day. Might it be possible after dark to approach the house? No one surely knew the garden so well as he.
Of course this sort of thing is always going on in romances; in the stories of that last great survivor of the Stevensonian tradition, H.B.
Marriot Watson, the heroes are always creeping through woods, tapping at windows, and scaling house-walls, but Mr. Brumley as he sat on his gate became very sensible of his own extreme inexperience in such adventures. And yet anything seemed in his present mood better than going back to London.
Suppose he tried his luck!
He knew of course the lie of the land about Black Strand very well indeed and his harmless literary social standing gave him a certain freedom of trespa.s.s. He dropped from his gate on the inner side and taking a bridle path through a pine-wood was presently out upon the moorland behind his former home. He struck the high-road that led past the Staminal Bread Board and was just about to clamber over the barbed wire on his left and make his way through the trees to the crest that commanded the Black Strand garden when he perceived a man in a velveteen coat and gaiters strolling towards him. He decided not to leave the road until he was free from observation. The man was a stranger, an almost conventional gamekeeper, and he endorsed Mr. Brumley"s remark upon the charmingness of the day with guarded want of enthusiasm. Mr. Brumley went on for some few minutes, then halted, a.s.sured himself that the stranger was well out of sight and returned at once towards the point where high-roads were to be left and adventure begun. But he was still some yards away when he became aware of that velveteen-coated figure approaching again. "d.a.m.n!" said Mr. Brumley and slacked his eager paces.
This time he expressed a view that the weather was extremely mild.
"Very," said the man in velveteen with a certain lack of respect in his manner.
It was no good turning back again. Mr. Brumley went on slowly, affected to botanize, watched the man out of sight and immediately made a dash for the pine-woods, taking the barbed wire in a manner extremely detrimental to his left trouser leg. He made his way obliquely up through the trees to the crest from which he had so often surveyed the shining ponds of Aleham. There he paused to peer back for that gamekeeper--whom he supposed in spite of reason to be stalking him--to recover his breath and to consider his further plans. The sunset was very fine that night, a great red sun was sinking towards acutely outlined hill-crests, the lower nearer distances were veiled in lavender mists and three of the ponds shone like the fragments of a shattered pink topaz. But Mr. Brumley had no eye for landscape....
About two hours after nightfall Mr. Brumley reached the railway station.
His trousers and the elbow of his coat bore witness to a second transit of the barbed-wire fence in the darkness, he had manifestly walked into a boggy place and had some difficulty in recovering firm ground and he had also been sliding in a rec.u.mbent position down a bank of moist ferruginous sand. Moreover he had cut the palm of his left hand. There was a new strange stationmaster who regarded him without that respect to which he had grown accustomed. He received the information that the winter train service had been altered and that he would have to wait forty-five minutes for the next train to London with the resignation of a man already chastened by misfortune and fatigue. He went into the waiting-room and after a vain search for the poker--the new stationmaster evidently kept it in a different place--sat down in front of an irritatingly dull fire banked up with slack, and nursed his damaged hand and meditated on his future plans.
His plans were still exactly in the state in which they had been when Sir Isaac parted from him at the gate of Black Strand. They remained in the same state for two whole days. Throughout all that distressing period his general intention of some magnificent intervention on behalf of Lady Harman remained unchanged, it produced a number of moving visions of flights at incredible speeds in (recklessly hired) motor-cars of colossal power,--most of the purchase money for Black Strand was still uninvested at his bank--of impa.s.sioned interviews with various people, of a divorce court with a hardened judge congratulating the manifestly quite formal co-respondent on the moral beauty of his behaviour, but it evolved no sort of concrete practicable detail upon which any kind of action might be taken. And during this period of indecision Mr. Brumley was hunted through London by a feverish unrest.
When he was in his little flat in Pont Street he was urged to go to his club, when he got to his club he was urged to go anywhere else, he called on the most improbable people and as soon as possible fled forth again, he even went to the British Museum and ordered out a lot of books on matrimonial law. Long before that great machine had disgorged them for him he absconded and this neglected, this widowed pile of volumes still standing to his account only came back to his mind in the middle of the night suddenly and disturbingly while he was trying to remember the exact words he had used in his brief conversation with Lady Harman....