The Irrational Knot Part 11

"No; but I have you where _you_ cant make a row; and I intend to have it out with you once and for all. If you quarrel now, so help me Heaven I'll never speak to you again!"

"It is you who are quarrelling."

"Very well," said Susanna, opening her purse as though the matter were decided. "Waiter."

"I am going to pay."

"So you can--for what you had yourself. I dont take dinners from strange men, nor pay for their ices."

Marmaduke did not reply. He took out his purse determinedly; glanced angrily at her; and muttered, "I never thought you were that sort of woman."

"What sort of woman?" demanded Susanna, in a tone that made the other occupants of the room turn and stare.

"Never mind," said Marmaduke. She was about to retort, when she saw him looking into his purse with an expression of dismay. The waiter came.

Susanna, instead of attempting to be beforehand in proffering the money, changed her mind, and waited. Marmaduke searched his pockets. Finding nothing, he muttered an imprecation, and, fingering his watch chain, glanced doubtfully at the waiter, who looked stolidly at the tablecloth.

"There," said Susanna, putting down a sovereign.

Marmaduke looked on helplessly whilst the waiter changed the coin and thanked Susanna for her gratuity. Then he said, "You must let me settle with you for this to-night. Ive left nearly all my cash in the pocket of another waistcoat."

"You will not have the chance of settling with me, either to-night or any other night. I am done with you." And she rose and left the restaurant. Marmaduke sat doggedly for quarter of a minute. Then he went out, and ran along Regent Street, anxiously looking from face to face in search of her. At last he saw her walking at a great pace a little distance ahead of him. He made a dash and overtook her.

"Look here, Lalage," he said, keeping up with her as she walked: "this is all rot. I didnt mean to offend you. I dont know what you mean, or what you want me to do. Dont be so unreasonable."

No answer.

"I can stand a good deal from you; but it's too much to be kept at your heels as if I were a beggar or a troublesome dog. _Lalage_." She took no notice of him; and he stopped, trying to compose his features, which were distorted by rage. She walked on, turning into Gla.s.shouse Street.

When she had gone twenty yards, she heard him striding behind her.

"If you wont stop and talk to me," he said, "I'll make you. If anybody interferes with me I'll smash him into jelly. It would serve you right if I did the same to you."

He put his hand on her arm; and she instantly turned and struck him across the face, knocking off his hat. He, who a moment before had been excited, red, and almost in tears, was appalled. There was a crowd in a moment; and a cabman drew up close to the kerb with a calm conviction that his hansom would be wanted presently.

"How dare you put your hand on me, you coward?" she exclaimed, with remarkable crispness of utterance and energy of style. "Who are you? I dont know you. Where are the police?" She paused for a reply; and a bracelet, broken by the blow she had given him, dropped on the pavement, and was officiously picked up and handed to her by a battered old woman who shewed in every wrinkle her burning sympathy with Woman turning at bay against Man. Susanna looked at the broken bracelet, and tears of vexation sprang to her eyes. "Look at what youve done!" she cried, holding out the bracelet in her left hand and shewing a sc.r.a.pe which had drawn blood on her right wrist. "For two pins I'd knock your head off!"

Marmaduke, quite out of countenance, and yet sullenly very angry, vacillated for a moment between his conflicting impulses to knock her down and to fly to the utmost ends of the earth. If he had been ten years older he would probably have knocked her down: as it was, he signed to the cabman, who gathered up the reins and held them clear of his fare's damaged hat with the gratification of a man whose judgment in a delicate matter had just been signally confirmed by events.

As they started, Susanna made a dash at the cab, which was pulled up, amid a shout from the crowd, just in time to prevent an accident. Then, holding on to the rail and standing on the step, she addressed herself to the cabman, and, sacrificing all propriety of language to intensity of vituperation, demanded whether he wanted to run his cab over her body and kill her. He, with undisturbed foresight, answered not a word, but again s.h.i.+fted the reins so as to make way for her bonnet. Acknowledging the attention with one more epithet, she seated herself in the cab, from which Marmaduke at once indignantly rose to escape. But the hardiest Grasmere wrestler, stooping under the hood of a hansom, could not resist a vigorous pull at his coat tails; and Marmaduke was presently back in his seat again, with Susanna clinging to him and half sobbing:

"Oh, Bob, youve killed me. How could you?" Then, with a suspiciously sudden recovery of energy, she screamed "Bijou Theatre. Drive on, will you" up at the cabman, who was looking down through the trapdoor. The horse plunged forward, and, with the jolt, she was fawning on Marmaduke's arm again, saying, "Dont be brutal to me any more, Bob. I cant bear it. I have enough trouble without your turning on me."

He was young and green, and too much confused by this time to feel sure that he had not been the aggressor. But he did, on the whole, the wisest thing--folded his arms and sat silent, with his cheeks burning.

"Say something to me," she said, shaking his arm. "I have nothing to say," he replied. "I shall leave town for home to-night. I cant shew my face again after this."

"Home," she said, in her former contemptuous tone, flinging his arm away. "That means your cousin Constance."

"Who told you about her?"

"Never mind. You are engaged to her."

"You lie!"

Susanna was shaken. She looked hard at him, wondering whether he was deceiving her or not. "Look me in the face, Bob," she said. If he had complied, she would not have believed him. But he treated the challenge with supreme disdain and stared straight ahead, obeying his male instinct, which taught him that the woman, with all the advantages on her side, would nevertheless let him win if he held on. At last she came caressingly to his shoulder again, and said:

"Why didnt you tell me about her yourself?"

"d.a.m.n it all," he exclaimed, violently, "there is nothing to tell! I am not engaged to her: on my oath I am not. My people at home talk about a match between us as if it were a settled thing, though they know I dont care for her. But if you want to have the truth, I cant afford to say that I wont marry her, because I am too hard up to quarrel with the governor, who has set his heart on it. You see, the way I am circ.u.mstanced----"

"Oh, bother your circ.u.mstances! Look here, Bob, I dont want you to introduce me to your swell relations; it is not worth _my_ while to waste time on people who cant earn their own living. And never mind your governor: we can get on without him. If you are hard up for money, and he is stingy, you had better get it from me than from the Jews."

"I couldnt do that," said Marmaduke, touched. "In fact, I am well enough off. By the bye, I must not forget to pay you for that lunch. But if I ever am hard up, I will come to you. Will that do?"

"Of course: that is what I meant. Confound it, here we are already. You mustnt come in, you would only be in the way. Come to-night after the burlesque, if you like. Youre not angry with me, are you?"

Her breast touched his arm just then; and as if she had released some spring, all his love for her suddenly surged up within him and got the better of him. "Wait--listen," he said, in a voice half choked with tenderness. "Look here, Lalage: the honest truth is that I shall be ruined if I marry you openly. Let us be married quietly, and keep it dark until I am more independent."

"Married! Catch me at it--if you can. No, dear boy, I am very fond of you, and you are one of the right sort to make me the offer; but I wont let you put a collar round _my_ neck. Matrimony is all very fine for women who have no better way of supporting themselves, but it wouldnt suit me. Dont look so dazed. What difference does it make to _you_?"

"But----" He stopped, bewildered, gazing at her.

"Get out, you great goose!" she said, and suddenly sprang out of the hansom and darted into the theatre.

He sat gaping after her, horrified--genuinely horrified.

CHAPTER III

The Earl of Carbury was a youngish man with no sort of turn for being a n.o.bleman. He could not bring himself to behave as if he was anybody in particular; and though this pa.s.sed for perfect breeding whenever he by chance appeared in his place in society, on the magisterial bench, or in the House of Lords, it prevented him from making the most of the earldom, and was a standing grievance with his relatives, many of whom were the most impudent and uppish people on the face of the earth. He was, if he had only known it, a born republican, with no natural belief in earls at all; but as he was rather too modest to indulge his consciousness with broad generalizations of this kind, all he knew about the matter was that he was sensible of being a bad hand at his hereditary trade of territorial aristocrat. At a very early age he had disgraced himself by asking his mother whether he might be a watchmaker when he grew up, and his feeble sense on that occasion of the impropriety of an earl being anything whatsoever except an earl had given his mother an imperious contempt for him which afterward got curiously mixed with a salutary dread of his moral superiority to her, which was considerable. His aspiration to become a watchmaker was an early symptom of his extraordinary turn for mechanics. An apprentices.h.i.+p of six years at the bench would have made an educated workman of him: as it was, he pottered at every mechanical pursuit as a gentleman amateur in a laboratory and workshop which he had got built for himself in his park. In this magazine of toys--for such it virtually was at first--he satisfied his itchings to play with tools and machines. He was no sportsman; but if he saw in a shop window the most trumpery patent improvement in a breechloader, he would go in and buy it; and as to a new repeating rifle or liquefied gas gun, he would travel to St.

Petersburg to see it. He wrote very little; but he had sixteen different typewriters, each guaranteed perfect by an American agent, who had also pledged himself that the other fifteen were miserable impostures. A really ingenious bicycle or tricycle always found in him a ready purchaser; and he had patented a roller skate and a railway brake. When the electric chair for dental operations was invented, he sacrificed a tooth to satisfy his curiosity as to its operation. He could not play bra.s.s instruments to any musical purpose; but his collection of double slide trombones, bombardons with patent compensating pistons, comma trumpets, and the like, would have equipped a small military band; whilst his newly tempered harmonium with fifty-three notes to each octave, and his pianos with simplified keyboards that n.o.body could play on, were the despair of all musical amateurs who came to stay at Towers Cottage, as his place was called. He would buy the most expensive and elaborate lathe, and spend a month trying to make a true billiard ball at it. At the end of that time he would have to send for a professional hand, who would cornet the ball with apparently miraculous skill in a few seconds. He got on better with chemistry and photography; but at last he settled down to electrical engineering, and, giving up the idea of doing everything with his own half-trained hand, kept a skilled man always in his laboratory to help him out.

All along there had been a certain love of the marvelous at the bottom of his fancy for inventions. Therefore, though he did not in the least believe in ghosts, he would "investigate" spiritualism, and part with innumerable guineas to mediums, slatewriters, clairvoyants, and even of turbaned rascals from the East, who would boldly offer at midnight to bring him out into the back yard and there and then raise the devil for him. And just as his tendency was to magnify the success and utility of his patent purchases, so he would lend himself more or less to gross impostures simply because they interested him. This confirmed his reputation for being a bit of a crank; and as he had in addition all the restlessness and eccentricity of the active spirits of his cla.s.s, arising from the fact that no matter what he busied himself with, it never really mattered whether he accomplished it or not, he remained an unsatisfied and (considering the money he cost) unsatisfactory specimen of a true man in a false position.

Towers Cottage was supposed to be a mere appendage to Carbury Towers, which had been burnt down, to the great relief of its n.o.ble owners, in the reign of William IV. The Cottage, a handsome one-storied Tudor mansion, with tall chimneys, gabled roofs, and transom windows, had since served the family as a very sufficient residence, needing a much smaller staff of servants than the Towers, and accommodating fewer visitors. At first it had been a.s.sumed on all hands that the stay at the Cottage was but a temporary one, pending the re-erection of the Towers on a scale of baronial magnificence; but this tradition, having pa.s.sed through its primal stage of being a standing excuse with the elders into that of being a standing joke with the children, had naturally lapsed as the children grew up. Indeed, the Cottage was now too large for the family; for the Earl was still unmarried, and all his sisters had contracted splendid alliances except the youngest, Lady Constance Carbury, a maiden of twenty-two, with a thin face and slight angular figure, who was still on her mother's hands. The ill.u.s.trious matches made by her sisters had, in fact, been secured by extravagant dowering, which had left nothing for poor Lady Constance except a miserable three hundred pounds a year, at which paltry figure no man had as yet offered to take her. The Countess (Dowager) habitually a.s.sumed that Marmaduke Lind ardently desired the hand of his cousin; and Constance herself supported tacitly this view; but the Earl was apt to become restive when it was put forward, though he altogether declined to improve his sister's pecuniary position, having already speculated quite heavily enough in brothers-in-law.

In the August following the Wandsworth concert Lord Carbury began to take his electrical laboratory with such intensified seriousness that he flatly refused to entertain any visitors until the 12th, and held fast to his determination in spite of his mother's threat to leave the house, alleging, with a laugh, that he had got hold of a discovery with money in it at last. But he felt at such a disadvantage after this incredible statement that he hastened to explain that his objection to visitors did not apply to relatives who would be sufficiently at home at Towers Cottage to require no attention from him. Under the terms of this capitulation Marian, as universal favorite, was invited; and since there was no getting Marian down without Elinor, she was invited too, in spite of the Countess's strong dislike for her, a sentiment which she requited with a pungent mixture of detestation and contempt. Marian's brother, the Reverend George Lind, promised to come down in a day or two; and Marmaduke, who was also invited, did not reply.

The morning after her arrival, Marian was awakened at six o'clock by a wagon rumbling past the window of her room with a sound quite different from that made by the dust-cart in Westbourne Terrace. She peeped out at it, and saw that is was laden with packages of irregular shape, which, judging by some strange-looking metal rods that projected through the covering, she took to be apparatus for Lord Jasper's laboratory. From the wagon, with its patiently trudging horse and dull driver, she lifted her eyes to the lawn, where the patches of wet shadow beneath the cedars refreshed the sunlit gra.s.s around them. It looked too fine a morning to spend in bed. Had Marian been able to taste and smell the fragrant country air she would not have hesitated a moment. But she had been accustomed to believe that fresh air was unhealthy at night, and though nothing would have induced her to wash in dirty water, she thought nothing of breathing dirty air; and so the window was shut and the room close. Still, the window did not exclude the loud singing of the birds or the sunlight. She ventured to open it a little, not without a sense of imprudence. Twenty minutes later she was dressed.

She first looked into the drawing-room, but it was stale and dreary. The dining-room, which she tried next, made her hungry. The arrival of a servant with a broom suggested to her that she had better get out of the way of the household work. She felt half sorry for getting up, and went out on the lawn to recover her spirits. There she heard a man's voice trolling a stave somewhere in the direction of the laboratory. Thinking that it might be Lord Carbury, and that, if so, he would probably not wait until half past nine to break his fast, she ran gaily off round the southwest corner of the Cottage to a terrace, from which there was access through a great double window, now wide open, to a lofty apartment roofed with gla.s.s.

At a large table in the middle of the room sat a man with his back to the window. He had taken off his coat, and was bending over a small round block with little holes sunk into it. Each hole was furnished with a neat bra.s.s peg, topped with ebony; and the man was lifting and replacing one of these pegs whilst he gravely watched the dial of an instrument that resembled a small clock. A large straw hat concealed his head, and protected it from the rays that were streaming through the gla.s.s roof and open window. The apparent triviality of his occupation, and his intentness upon it, amused Marian. She stole into the laboratory, came close behind him, and said:

"Since you have nothing better to do than play cribbage with yourself, I----"