"I beg to suggest again," said Jack composedly, "that Oscard has not yet brought any accusations against you. You have brought them all yourself."
"You are both cruel and cowardly," she exclaimed, suddenly descending to vituperation. "Two to one. Two men--GENTLEMEN--against one defenceless girl. Of course I am not able to argue with you. Of course you can get the best of me. It is so easy to be sarcastic."
"I do not imagine," retorted Jack, "that anything that we can say or do will have much permanent power of hurting you. For the last two years you have been engaged in an--intrigue, such as a thin-skinned or sensitive person would hardly of her own free will undertake. You may be able to explain it to yourself--no doubt you are--but to our more limited comprehensions it must remain inexplicable. We can only judge from appearances."
"And of course appearances go against me--they always do against a woman," she cried rather brokenly.
"You would have been wise to have taken that peculiarity into consideration sooner," replied Jack Meredith coldly. "I admit that I am puzzled; I cannot quite get at your motive. Presumably it is one of those--SWEET feminine inconsistencies which are so charming in books."
There was a little pause. Jack Meredith waited politely to hear if she had anything further to say. His clean-cut face was quite pallid; the suppressed anger in his eyes was perhaps more difficult to meet than open fury. The man who never forgets himself before a woman is likely to be an absolute master of women.
"I think," he added, "that there is nothing more to be said."
There was a dead silence. Millicent Chyne glanced towards Guy Oscard.
He could have saved her yet--by a simple lie. Had he been an impossibly magnanimous man, such as one meets in books only, he could have explained that the mistake was all his, that she was quite right, that his own vanity had blinded him into a great and unwarranted presumption.
But, unfortunately, he was only a human being--a man who was ready to give as full a measure as he exacted. The unfortunate mistake to which he clung was that the same sense of justice, the same code of honour, must serve for men and women alike. So Millicent Chyne looked in vain for that indulgence which is so inconsistently offered to women, merely because they are women--the indulgence which is sometimes given and sometimes withheld, according to the softness of the masculine heart and the beauty of the suppliant feminine form. Guy Oscard was quite sure of his own impressions. This girl had allowed him to begin loving her, had encouraged him to go on, had led him to believe that his love was returned. And in his simple ignorance of the world he did not see why these matters should be locked up in his own breast from a mistaken sense of chivalry to be accorded where no chivalry was due.
"No," he answered. "There is nothing more to be said."
Without looking towards her, Jack Meredith made a few steps towards the door--quietly, self-composedly, with that perfect savoir-faire of the social expert that made him different from other men. Millicent Chyne felt a sudden plebeian desire to scream. It was all so heartlessly well-bred. He turned on his heel with a little half-cynical bow.
"I leave my name with you," he said. "It is probable that you will be put to some inconvenience. I can only regret that this--denouement did not come some months ago. You are likely to suffer more than I, because I do not care what the world thinks of me. Therefore you may tell the world what you choose about me--that I drink, that I gamble, that I am lacking in--honour! Anything that suggests itself to you, in fact. You need not go away; I will do that."
She listened with compressed lips and heaving shoulders; and the bitterest drop in her cup was the knowledge that he despised her. During the last few minutes he had said and done nothing that lowered him in her estimation--that touched in any way her love for him. He had not lowered himself in any way, but he had suavely trodden her under foot.
His last words--the inexorable intention of going away--sapped her last lingering hope. She could never regain even a t.i.the of his affection.
"I think," he went on, "that you will agree with me in thinking that Guy Oscard"s name must be kept out of this entirely. I give you carte blanche except that."
With a slight inclination of the head he walked to the door. It was characteristic of him that although he walked slowly he never turned his head nor paused.
Oscard followed him with the patient apathy of the large and mystified.
And so they left her--amidst the disorder of the half-unpacked wedding presents--amidst the ruin of her own life. Perhaps, after all, she was not wholly bad. Few people are; they are only bad enough to be wholly unsatisfactory and quite incomprehensible. She must have known the risk she was running, and yet she could not stay her hand. She must have known long before that she loved Jack Meredith, and that she was playing fast and loose with the happiness of her whole life. She knew that hundreds of girls around her were doing the same, and, with all shame be it mentioned, not a few married women. But they seemed to be able to carry it through without accident or hindrance. And illogically, thoughtlessly, she blamed her own ill-fortune.
She stood looking blankly at the door which had closed behind three men--one old and two young--and perhaps she realised the fact that such creatures may be led blindly, helplessly, with a single hair, but that that hair may snap at any moment.
She was not thinking of Guy Oscard. Him she had never loved. He had only been one of her experiments, and by his very simplicity--above all, by his uncompromising honesty--he had outwitted her.
It was characteristic of her that at that moment she scarcely knew the weight of her own remorse. It sat lightly on her shoulders then, and it was only later on, when her beauty began to fade, when years came and brought no joy for the middle-aged unmarried woman, that she began to realise what it was that she had to carry through life with her. At that moment a thousand other thoughts filled her mind--such thoughts as one would expect to find there. How was the world to be deceived? The guests would have to be put off--the wedding countermanded--the presents returned. And the world--her world--would laugh in its sleeve. There lay the sting.
CHAPTER XLII. A STRONG FRIENDSHIP
Still must the man move sadlier for the dreams That mocked the boy.
"Where are you going?" asked Meredith, when they were in the street.
"Home."
They walked on a few paces together.
"May I come with you?" asked Meredith again.
"Certainly; I have a good deal to tell you."
They called a cab, and singularly enough they drove all the way to Russell Square without speaking. These two men had worked together for many months, and men who have a daily task in common usually learn to perform it without much interchange of observation. When one man gets to know the mind of another, conversation a.s.sumes a place of secondary importance. These two had been through more incidents together than usually fall to the lot of man--each knew how the other would act and think under given circ.u.mstances; each knew what the other was thinking now.
The house in Russell Square, the quiet house in the corner where the cabs do not pa.s.s, was lighted up and astir when they reached it. The old butler held open the door with a smile of welcome and a faint aroma of whisky. The luggage had been discreetly removed. Joseph had gone to Mr.
Meredith"s chambers. Guy Oscard led the way to the smoking-room at the back of the house--the room wherein the eccentric Oscard had written his great history--the room in which Victor Durnovo had first suggested the Simiacine scheme to the historian"s son.
The two survivors of the originating trio pa.s.sed into this room together, and closed the door behind them.
"The worst of one"s own private tragedies is that they are usually only comedies in disguise," said Jack Meredith oracularly.
Guy Oscard grunted. He was looking for his pipe.
"If we heard this of any two fellows except ourselves we should think it an excellent joke," went on Meredith.
Oscard nodded. He lighted his pipe, and still he said nothing.
"Hang it!" exclaimed Jack Meredith, suddenly throwing himself back in his chair, "it is a good joke."
He laughed softly, and all the while his eyes, watchful, wise, anxious, were studying Guy Oscard"s face.
"He is harder hit than I am," he was reflecting. "Poor old Oscard!"
The habit of self-suppression was so strong upon him--acquired as a mere social duty--that it was only natural for him to think less of himself than of the expediency of the moment. The social discipline is as powerful an agent as that military discipline that makes a man throw away his own life for the good of the many.
Oscard laughed, too, in a strangely staccato manner.
"It is rather a sudden change," observed Meredith; "and all brought about by your coming into that room at that particular moment--by accident."
"Not by accident," corrected Oscard, speaking at last. "I was brought there and pushed into the room."
"By whom?"
"By your father."
Jack Meredith sat upright. He drew his curved hand slowly down over his face--keen and delicate as was his mind--his eyes deep with thought.
"The Guv"nor," he said slowly. "The Guv"nor--by G.o.d!"
He reflected for some seconds.
"Tell me how he did it," he said curtly.