The Finer Grain Part 3

"Oh, I don't say," Mark ruefully smiled, "that I should like him to see _me_--!"

Newton Winch, from where he stood--and they were together now, on the great hearth-rug that was a triumph of modern orientalism--put out one of the noted fine hands and, with an expressive headshake, laid it on his shoulder. "Don't wish him that, Monteith--don't wish him that!"

"Well, but,"--and Mark raised his eyebrows still higher--"he'd see I bear up; pretty well!"

"G.o.d forbid he should see, my dear fellow!" Newton cried as for the pang of it.

Mark had for his idea, at any rate, the oddest sense of an exaltation that grew by this use of frankness. "I'd go to him. Hanged if I wouldn't--anywhere!"

His companion's hand still rested on him. "You'd go to him?"

Mark stood up to it--though trying to sink solemnity as pretentious.

"I'd go like a shot." And then he added: "And it's probably what--when we've turned round--I _shall_ do."

"When 'we' have turned round?"

"Well"--he was a trifle disconcerted at the tone--"I say that because you'll have helped me."

"Oh, I do nothing but want to help you!" Winch replied--which made it right again; especially as our friend still felt himself rea.s.suringly and sustainingly grasped. But Winch went on: "You _would_ go to him--in kindness?"

"Well--to understand."

"To understand how he could swindle you?"

"Well," Mark kept on, "to try and make out with him how, after such things--!" But he stopped; he couldn't name them.

It was as if his companion knew. "Such things as you've done for him of course--such services as you've rendered him."

"Ah, from far back. If I could tell you," our friend vainly wailed--"if I could tell you!"

Newton Winch patted his shoulder. "Tell me--tell me!"

"The sort of relation, I mean; ever so many things of a kind--!" Again, however, he pulled up; he felt the tremor of his voice.

"Tell me, tell me," Winch repeated with the same movement.

The tone in it now made their eyes meet again, and with this presentation of the altered face Mark measured as not before, for some reason, the extent of the recent ravage. "You must have been ill indeed."

"Pretty bad. But I'm better. And you do me good"--with which the light of convalescence came back.

"I don't awfully bore you?"

Winch shook his head. "You keep me up--and you see how no one else comes near me."

Mark's eyes made out that he was better--though it wasn't yet that nothing was the matter with him. If there was ever a man with whom there was still something the matter--! Yet one couldn't insist on that, and meanwhile he clearly did want company. "Then there we are. I myself had no one to go to."

"You save my life," Newton renewedly grinned.

VII

"Well, it's your own fault," Mark replied to that, "if you make me take advantage of you." Winch had withdrawn his hand, which was back, violently shaking keys or money, in his trousers pocket; and in this position he had abruptly a pause, a sensible, absence, that might have represented either some odd drop of attention, some turn-off to another thought, or just simply the sudden act of listening. His guest had indeed himself--under suggestion--the impression of a sound. "Mayn't you perhaps--if you hear something--have a call?"

Mark had said it so lightly, however, that he was the more struck with his host's appearing to turn just paler; and, with it, the latter now _was_ listening. "You hear something?"

"I thought _you_ did." Winch himself, on Mark's own pressure of the outside bell, had opened the door of the apartment--an indication then, it sufficiently appeared, that Sunday afternoons were servants', or attendants', or even trained nurses' holidays. It had also marked the stage of his convalescence, and to that extent--after his first flush of surprise--had but smoothed Monteith's way. At present he barely gave further attention; detaching himself as under some odd cross-impulse, he had quitted the spot and then taken, in the wide room, a restless turn--only, however, to revert in a moment to his friend's just-uttered deprecation of the danger of boring him. "If I make you take advantage of me--that is blessedly talk to me--it's exactly what I want to do.

Talk to me--talk to me!" He positively waved it on; pulling up again, however, in his own talk, to say with a certain urgency: "Hadn't you better sit down?"

Mark, who stayed before the fire, couldn't but excuse himself.

"Thanks--I'm very well so. I think of things and I fidget."

Winch stood a moment with his eyes on the ground. "Are you very sure?"

"Quite--I'm all right if you don't mind."

"Then as you like!" With which, shaking to extravagance again his long legs, Newton had swung off--only with a movement that, now his back was turned, affected his visitor as the most whimsical of all the forms of his rather unnatural manner. He was curiously different with his back turned, as Mark now for the first time saw it--dangling and somewhat wavering, as from an excess of uncertainty of gait; and this impression was so strange, it created in our friend, uneasily and on the spot, such a need of explanation, that his speech was stayed long enough to give Winch time to turn round again. The latter had indeed by this moment reached one of the limits of the place, the wide studio bay, where he paused, his back to the light and his face afresh presented, to let his just pa.s.singly depressed and quickened eyes take in as much as possible of the large floor, range over it with such brief freedom of search as the disposition of the furniture permitted. He was looking for something, though the betrayed reach of vision was but of an instant.

Mark caught it, however, and with his own sensibility all in vibration, found himself feeling at once that it meant something and that what it meant was connected with his entertainer's slightly marked appeal to him, the appeal of a moment before, not to remain standing. Winch knew by this time quite easily enough that he was hanging fire; which meant that they were suddenly facing each other across the wide s.p.a.ce with a new consciousness.

Everything had changed--changed extraordinarily with the mere turning of that gentleman's back, the treacherous aspect of which its owner couldn't surely have suspected. If the question was of the pitch of their sensibility, at all events, it wouldn't be Mark's that should vibrate to least purpose. Visibly it had come to his host that something had within the few instants remarkably happened, but there glimmered on him an induction that still made him keep his own manner. Newton himself might now resort to any manner he liked. His eyes had raked the floor to recover the position of something dropped or misplaced, and something, above all, awkward or compromising; and he had wanted his companion not to command this scene from the hearth-rug, the hearthrug where he had been just before holding him, hypnotising him to blindness, _because_ the object in question would there be most exposed to sight Mark embraced this with a further drop--while the apprehension penetrated--of his power to go on, and with an immense desire at the same time that his eyes should seem only to look at his friend; who broke out now, for that matter, with a fresh appeal. "Aren't you going to take advantage of me, man--aren't you going to _take_ it?"

Everything had changed, we have noted, and nothing could more have proved it than the fact that, by the same turn, sincerity of desire had dropped out of Winch's chords, while irritation, sharp and almost imperious, had come in. "That's because he sees I see something!" Mark said to himself; but he had no need to add that it shouldn't prevent his seeing more--for the simple reason that, in a miraculous fas.h.i.+on, this was exactly what he did do in glaring out the harder. It was beyond explanation, but the very act of blinking thus in an attempt at showy steadiness became one and the same thing with an optical excursion lasting the millionth of a minute and making him aware that the edge of a rug, at the point where an arm-chair, pushed a little out of position, over-straddled it, happened just not wholly to have covered in something small and queer, neat and bright, crooked and compact, in spite of the strong toe-tip surrept.i.tiously applied to giving it the right lift Our gentleman, from where he hovered, and while looking straight at the master of the scene, yet saw, as by the tiny flash of a reflection from fine metal, _under_ the chair. What he recognised, or at least guessed at, as sinister, made him for a moment turn cold, and that chill was on him while Winch again addressed him--as differently as possible from any manner yet used. "I beg of you in G.o.d's name to talk to me--to _talk_ to me!"

It had the ring of pure alarm and anguish, but was by this turn at least more human than the dazzling glitter of intelligence to which the poor man had up to now been treating him. "It's you, my good friend, who are in deep trouble," Mark was accordingly quick to reply, "and I ask your pardon for being so taken up with my own sorry business."

"Of course I'm in deep trouble"--with which Winch came nearer again; "but turning you on was exactly what I wanted."

Mark Monteith, at this, couldn't, for all his rising dismay, but laugh out; his sense of the ridiculous so swallowed up, for that brief convulsion, his sense of the sinister. Of such conivence in pain, it seemed, was the fact of another's pain, and of so much worth again disinterested sympathy! "Your interest was then----?"

"My interest was in your being interesting. For you _are!_ And my nerves--!" said Newton Winch with a face from which the mystifying smile had vanished, yet in which distinction, as Mark so persistently appreciated it, still sat in the midst of ravage.

Mark wondered and wondered--he made strange things out. "Your nerves have needed company." He could lay his hand on him now, even as shortly before he had felt Winch's own pressure of possession and detention. "As good for you yourself, that--or still better," he went on--"than I and my grievance were to have found you. Talk to we, talk to we, Newton Winch!" he added with an immense inspiration of charity.

"That's a different matter--that others but too much can do! But I'll say this. If you want to go to Phil Bloodgood----!"

"Well?" said Mark as he stopped. He stopped, and Mark had now a hand on each of his shoulders and held him at arm's-length, held him with a fine idea that was not disconnected from the sight of the small neat weapon he had been fingering in the low luxurious morocco chair--it was of the finest orange colour--and then had laid beside him on the carpet; where, after he had admitted his visitor, his presence of mind coming back to it and suggesting that he couldn't pick it up without making it more conspicuous, he had thought, by some swing of the foot or other casual manoeuvre, to dissimulate its visibility.

They were at close quarters now as not before and Winch perfectly pa.s.sive, with eyes that somehow had no shadow of a secret left and with the betrayal to the sentient hands that grasped him of an intense, an extraordinary general tremor. To Mark's challenge he opposed afresh a brief silence, but the very quality of it, with his face speaking, was that of a gaping wound. "Well, you needn't take _that_ trouble. You see I'm such another."

"Such another as Phil-----?"

He didn't blink. "I don't know for sure, but I guess I'm worse."

"Do you mean you're guilty-----?"

"I mean I shall be wanted. Only I've stayed to take it."

Mark threw back his head, but only tightened his hands. He inexpressibly understood, and nothing in life had ever been so strange and dreadful to him as his thus helping himself by a longer and straighter stretch, as it were, to the monstrous sense of his friend's "education." It had been, in its immeasurable action, the education of business, of which the fruits were all around them. Yet prodigious was the interest, for prodigious truly--it seemed to loom before Mark--must have been the system. "To 'take' it?" he echoed; and then, though faltering a little, "To take what?"