The Duchess of Wrexe Part 37

"Oh, mine don't count. I went to Brittany first, then up to St. Andrews with another man to play golf."

"You're looking splendidly well and you're thinner. What was Brittany like?"

"Delightful. Have you ever been there?"

"Never. I must get Roddy to take me. Just suit him, I should think."

To Christopher's intense relief tea was brought. He came to the table and then, for an instant, he did catch her eyes, saw tears in them, and behind the tears some appeal to him to help her. Her hand was shaking.

"How silly of me to spill your tea. I'm so sorry. Let me pour it back...."

"Rachel----" he began, but a servant entered with something and he waited. When they were alone again, standing over her as though he were afraid that she would escape him, he plunged.

"Rachel dear. We're talking as though we'd never met before. You've never been shy with me like this. If marriage is going to make a stranger of you, I shall break young Seddon's neck----"

"No," she said in a voice that was between laughter and tears. "Of course, Dr. Chris. Things are just the same between us, only, only--well, I'm married and--one thing and another, you know."

He caught both her hands.

"You're perfectly happy?"

She met his eyes.

"Perfectly."

"Happier than you've ever been in your life?"

She dropped her eyes.

"Happier than I've ever been in my life."

"And you'll come to me just the same if there's any kind of trouble?"

"Of course."

"You promise?"

"I promise."

They talked then, for a little time, of other things. But he was not satisfied. Rachel's soul, caught away in alarm, was still beyond his grasp.

At last, feeling that the moments were precious and that Roddy might at any instant appear, he sat down on the sofa beside her.

"Rachel dear. Something's worrying you. You won't tell me?"

"Nothing's worrying----"

"Ah, but I know--well, if you won't you won't--but if you knew how much I loved you you'd feel that you were cruel not to let me help you."

"_Dear_ Dr. Chris--but there is _nothing_."

But her eyes were full of tears.

"Look here," he said. "Perhaps you'll feel later on you can talk to me.

Just come straight away if you do feel that."

He went on. "Don't be frightened, my dear, if there are a whole heap of new emotions, new instincts, stirred in you by marriage. Just take them all as they come. It's all progress, you know. Don't be frightened of anything. Just take the animal by the head and look at it."

That led him to speak about Brun's Tiger. He explained it--the force in people, the way they either grappled with the creature, and at last trained it to help them with their work in the world, or ignored it, silenced it, allowed it at last to die, and so, cosy and lazily comfortable, pa.s.sed to their day's end, but had, nevertheless, missed the whole purpose of life.

He enlarged on that and showed the connection of the individual Tiger with the welfare of the world, so that everyone who denied his Tiger added to his world's muddle and confusion, and at last there would come an inevitable crisis when war would spring up between those who had grappled with their Tiger and those who had not.

"One knows one's own Tiger--absolutely of oneself one knows it and has, of oneself, the choice whether to grapple or not--at least that's what I gathered he meant--I know it struck me at the time."

"Oh," she said, with a sigh that quivered through her whole body. "It's so _easy_ to talk.... But it's true what he says. I know it."

At last Christopher got up to go. He did not know whether he had done any good; he felt that he was a miserable failure, and he had a foreboding that one day he would be ashamed indeed that he had not helped her.

"Do something," a voice seemed to tell him. "You'll regret ... all your life you'll regret."

He turned and held again her hands in his.... "Rachel--dear--tell me----"

Her hands were chill and lifeless. Her voice caught. "Oh! Dr. Chris!..."

Then she suddenly stepped back from him--

"_It's_ all right.... I'm all right. Come again soon, Dr. Chris dear--come soon."

He left her and found his way into the hot, breathless street.

After he had gone Rachel sat, staring beyond the room out on to the white walls of the houses and the green branches of the trees in the square.

Roddy came in.

All the afternoon he had been thinking about her; at one moment he was furious with the discomfort that life was now becoming to him, at another moment he was imagining little plans that would sweep all the discomfort away.

All this spring they had been miserable together. Now was beginning a time that was always jolly in London and yet he could not enjoy a moment of it. Did she dislike him instead of liking him, or did he like her instead of loving her, it would all be so easy--just the same as any other couple.

Ever since that silly Nita incident there had been this restraint, and yet how could that be the cause?

Rachel had made nothing of it; it was because it had meant so little to her that he had chafed so at the remembrance of it.

She was fond of him--he knew that--she was miserably unhappy.

He loved her--and he was miserably unhappy.

d.a.m.n this weather.

He looked at her, wondered what would happen did he cross over and suddenly kiss her, knew that he would see her struggle to be kind, to give him what he wanted, knew that that would hurt most d.a.m.nably, and that he would be in a bad temper for the rest of the evening and would wonder why--