The Safety Curtain, and Other Stories Part 34

Hugh Chesyl's good-looking face crumpled a little, then smoothed itself again to its usual placid expression. "Ah, well!" he said equably, "we won't quarrel about it. Let's have some tea!"

He sat up in the punt and looked across at her; but she would not meet his eyes, and there ensued a considerable pause before he said gently, "I'm sorry you are not happy, you know."

"Are you?" she said.

"Yes. That's why I want you to marry me."

"Should I be any happier if I did?" said Doris, with a smile that was somehow slightly piteous.

"I don't know." Hugh Chesyl's voice was as pleasantly vague as his personality. "I shouldn't get in your way at all, and, at least, you would have a home of your own."

"To be miserable in," said Doris, with suppressed vehemence.

"I don't know why you should be miserable," he said. "You wouldn't have anything to do that you didn't like."

She uttered a laugh that caught her breath as if it had been a sob. "Oh, don't talk about it, Hugh! I should be bored--bored to death. I want the real thing--the real thing--not a polite subst.i.tute."

"Sorry," said Hugh imperturbably. "I have offered the utmost of which I am capable. May I have my tea here, please? It's less trouble than scrambling ash.o.r.e."

She acceded to his request without protest; but she stepped on to the bank herself, and sat down with her back to a corn-sheaf. Very young and slender she looked sitting there with the suns.h.i.+ne on her brown, elf-like face, but she was by no means without dignity. There was a fairy queenliness about her that imparted an indescribable charm to her every movement. Her eyes were grey and fearless.

"How lovely to own a field like this!" she said. "And plough it and sow it and watch it grow up, and then cut it and turn it into sheaves! How proud the man who owns it must be!"

Something stirred on the other side of the sheaf, and she started a little and glanced backwards. "What's that?"

"A rat probably," said Hugh Chesyl serenely from his couch in the punt.

"I expect the place is full of 'em. Won't you continue your rhapsody?

The man who owns this particular field is a miller as well as a farmer.

He grinds his own grain."

"Oh, is he that man?" Eagerly she broke in. "Does he live in that perfectly exquisite old red-brick house on the water with the wheel turning all day long? Oh, isn't he lucky?"

"I doubt if he thinks so," said Hugh Chesyl. "I've never met a contented farmer yet."

"I don't like people to be too contented," said Doris perversely. "It's a sign of laziness and--yes--weakness of purpose."

"Oh, is it?" Again he uttered his good-tempered laugh; then, as he began to drink his tea, he gradually sobered. "Has anything happened lately to make you specially discontented with your lot?" he asked presently.

Doris's brows contracted. "Things are always happening. My stepmother gets more unbearable every day. I sometimes think I will go and work for my living, but my father won't hear of it. And what can I do? I haven't qualified for anything. The only thing open to me is to fill a post of unpaid companion to a rich and elderly cousin who would put up with me but doesn't much want me. She lives at Kensington, too, and I can breathe only in the country."

"Poor little girl!" said Hugh kindly.

"Oh, don't pity me!" she said quickly. "You can't do anything to help.

And I shouldn't grumble to you if there were anyone else to grumble to."

She leaned back against her sheaf with her eyes on the sunlit water below. "I suppose I shall just go on in the same old way till something happens. Anyhow, I can't see my way out at present. It's such a shame to be unhappy, too, when life might be so ecstatic."

"How could life be ecstatic?" asked Hugh, pa.s.sing up his cup to be refilled.

She threw him a quick glance. "You wouldn't understand if I were to tell you," she said. "It never could be--for you."

He sighed. "I know I'm very limited. But it's a mistake to expect too much from life, believe me. Ask but little, and perhaps--if you're lucky--you won't be disappointed."

"I would rather have nothing than that," she said quickly.

Hugh Chesyl turned and regarded her curiously. "Would you really?" he said.

She nodded several times emphatically. "Yes; just live my own life out-of-doors and do without everything else." She pulled a long stalk of corn from the sheaf against which she rested and looked at it thoughtfully. Her eyes were downcast, and the man in the punt could not see the deep shadow of pain they held. "If I can't have corn," she said slowly, with the air of one p.r.o.nouncing sentence, "I won't have husks. I will die of starvation sooner."

And with that very suddenly she rose and walked round the sheaf.

The movement was abrupt, so abrupt that Hugh Chesyl lifted his brows in astonishment. He was still more surprised a moment later when he heard her clear, girlish voice raised in admonition.

"I don't think it's very nice of you to lie there listening and not to let us know."

Hugh sat upright in the punt. Who on earth was it that she was reproving thus?

The next moment he saw. A huge man with the frame of a bull rose from behind the sheaf and confronted his young companion. He had his hat in his hand, and the afternoon sun fell full upon his uncovered head, revealing a rugged, clean-shaven face that had in it a good deal of British strength and a suspicion of gipsy alertness. To Chesyl's further amazement he did not appear in the least abashed by the encounter.

"I'm sorry I overheard you," he said, with blunt deference. "I was half-asleep at first. Afterwards, I didn't like to intrude."

Doris's grey eyes looked him up and down for a moment or two in silence, and a flush rose in her tanned face. It seemed to Hugh that she was likely to become the more embarra.s.sed of the two, and he wondered if he ought to go to the rescue.

Then swiftly Doris collected her forces. "I suppose you know you are trespa.s.sing?" she said.

At that Hugh laid himself very suddenly down again in the bottom of the boat, and left her to fight her own battles.

The man on the bank looked down at his small a.s.sailant with a face of grim decorum. "No, I didn't know," he said.

"Well, you are," said Doris. "All this ground is private property. You can see for yourself. It's a cornfield."

The intruder's eyes travelled over the upstanding sheaves, pa.s.sed gravely over the man in the punt, and came back to the girl. "Yes; I see," he said stolidly.

"Then don't you think you'd better go?" she said.

He put his hat on somewhat abruptly. "Yes. I think I had better," he said, and with that he turned on his heel and walked away through the stubble.

"Such impertinence!" said Doris, as she stepped down the bank to her companion.

"It was rather," said Hugh.

She looked at him somewhat sharply. "I don't see that there is anything to laugh at," she said.

"Don't you?" said Hugh.

"No. Why are you laughing?"

Hugh explained. "It only struck me as being a little funny that you should order the man off his own ground in that cavalier fas.h.i.+on."