Sparrows Part 115

"I shan't."

"If I were other than I am, I should compel you."

"How could you?"

"With my lips. As it is---"

"Yes--tell me."

"My infirmity stops me from saying and doing what I would."

"Why let it?" asked Mavis in a low voice, while her eyes sought the ground.

"You--you mean that?" he asked, in the manner of one who scarcely believed the evidence of his ears.

"I mean it."

He did not speak for such a long time that Mavis began to wonder if he regretted his words. When she stole a look at him, she saw that his eyes were staring straight before him, as if his mind were all but overwhelmed by the subject matter of its concern.

Mavis touched his arm. He s.h.i.+vered slightly and glanced at her as if surprised, before he realised that she was beside him.

"Listen!" he said. "You asked--you shall know; whether you like or hate me for it. I love you. Women have never come into my life; they've always looked on me with pitying eyes. I would rather it were so. But you--you--you are beautiful, with a heart like your face, both rare and wonderful. Perhaps I love you so much because you are young and healthy. It hurts me."

His eyes held such a piteously fearful look that Mavis was moved in spite of herself. He went on:

"If my disposition were like my twisted body, it wouldn't matter. But I love life, movement, struggling. Were I as I used to be, I should love to have a beautiful, responsive woman for my own. I should love to have you."

Before Mavis knew what she had done, she had put her hand on his. Then he said, as if speaking to himself:

"What have I to offer besides a helpless, envious love? My wife would be a nurse, not a mistress, as she should be."

"Stop! stop!" she pleaded.

"No, I will not stop," he cried, as he bent over to hold her head so that her eyes looked into his. "You shall listen and then decide. I love you. If it's good enough, I'm yours. You know what I have to offer, and I ask you to be my wife because I can't help myself.

Because--"

Mavis had closed her eyes for fear that he should read her heart. He pa.s.sionately kissed the closed lids before sinking back exhausted in his chair.

"Listen to me," said Mavis after a while. "It's I who am to blame. Let me go away so that you can forget me."

"Forget you! forget you!" he cried. "No, you shall not go away; not till you've said 'yes' or 'no' to what I ask."

"When shall I answer?"

"Give yourself time--only--"

"Only?"

"Don't keep me waiting longer than you can help."

For three days, Mavis drifted upon uncertain tides. She was borne rapidly in one direction only to float as certainly in another. She lacked sufficient strength of purpose to cast anchor and abide by the consequences. She deplored her irresolution, but, try as she might, she found it a matter of great difficulty to give her mind to the consideration of Harold's offer. Otherwise, the most trivial happenings imprinted themselves on her brain: the aspect of the food she ate, the lines on her landlady's face, the flittings in and out of the front door of the "dust-cloak" on its way to trumpery social engagements, the while its mother minded the baby, all acquired in her eyes a prominence foreign to their importance. Also, thoughts of Windebank now and again flooded her mind. Then she remembered all he had done for her, at which grat.i.tude welled from her soul. At such times she would be moved by a morbid consideration for his feelings; she longed to pay back the money he had spent on her illness, and felt that her mind would never be at ease on the matter till she had.

If only he would come down, and, despite anything she could say or do, insist on marrying her and determine to win her heart; failing that, if he would only write words of pa.s.sionate longing which might awaken some echo in her being! She read and re-read the letter in which he offered her marriage; she tried to see in his formal phrases some approximation to a consuming love, but in vain.

She had never answered this letter; she reproached herself for not having done so. Mavis sat down to write a few words, which would reach Windebank by the first post in the morning, when she found that the ink had dried in the pot. She rang the bell. While waiting, a vision of the piteous look on Harold's face when he had told her of his love came into her mind. Accompanying this was the recollection of the cause of which her friends.h.i.+p with Harold was an effect. Hatred of the Devitts possessed her. She remembered, and rejoiced, that it was now in her power to be revenged for all she believed she had suffered at their hands. So black was the quality of this hate that she wondered why she had delayed so long. When the ink was brought, it was to Harold that she was about to write; Windebank was forgotten.

As Mavis wrote the day of the month at the head of the page, she seemed to hear echoes of Harold's resonant voice vibrating with love for her.

She sighed and put down her pen. If only she were less infirm of purpose. Her hesitations were interrupted by Mrs Budd bringing in a letter for Mavis that the postman had just left. It was from Mrs Trivett. It described with a wealth of detail a visit that the writer had paid to Pennington Churchyard, where she had taken flowers to lay on the little grave. Certain nerves in the bereaved mother's face quivered as she read. Memories of the long-drawn agony which had followed upon her boy's death crowded into her mind. Mavis hardened her heart.

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

MAVIS'S REVENGE

Upon a day on which the trees and hedges were again frocked in spring finery in honour of approaching summer, Mrs Devitt was sitting with her sister in the drawing-room of Melkbridge House. Mrs Devitt was trying to fix her mind on an article in one of the monthly reviews dealing with the voluntary limitation of families on the part of married folk.

Mrs Devitt could not give her usual stolid attention to her reading, because, now and again, her thoughts wandered to an interview between her husband and Lowther which was taking place in the library downstairs. This private talk between father and son was on the subject of certain snares which beset the feet of moneyed youth when in London, and in which the unhappy Lowther had been caught. Mrs Devitt was sufficiently vexed at the prospect of her husband having to fork out some hundreds of pounds, without the further promise of revelations in which light-hearted, lighter living young women were concerned. Debts were forgivable, perhaps excusable, in a young gentleman of Lowther's standing, but immorality, in Mrs Devitt's eyes, was a horse of quite another colour; anything of this nature acted upon Mrs Devitt's susceptibilities much in the same way as seeing red afreets an angry bull.

Miss Spraggs, whom the last eighteen months had aged in appearance, looked up from the rough draft of a letter she was composing.

"Did you hear anything?" she asked, as she listened intently.

"Hear what?"

"The door open downstairs. Lowther's been in such a time with Montague."

"I suppose Lowther is confessing everything," sighed Mrs Devitt.

"Nothing of the sort," remarked Miss Spraggs.

"What do you mean?"

"No one ever does confess everything: something is always kept back."

"Don't you think, Eva, you look at things from a very material point of view?"

Eva shrugged her narrow shoulders. Mrs Devitt continued:

"Now and again, you seem to ignore the good which is implanted in us all."

"Perhaps because it's buried so deep down that it's difficult to see."

Half an hour afterwards, it occurred to Mrs Devitt that she might have retorted, "What one saw depended on the power of one's perceptions,"

but just now, all she could think of to say was:

"Quite so; but there's so much good in the world, I wonder you don't see more of it."