Second String Part 30

"Or by not being Vivien's _fiance_ any longer?"

"What, Harry love? What's that about not being Vivien's _fiance_ any longer?" Mrs. Belfield was roused by words admitting of so startling an interpretation.

"Well, we shall be married soon, shan't we, mother?"

"How stupid of me, Harry dear!" Sleep again descended. Harry swore softly; Isobel laughed low.

"This is ridiculous!" she remarked. "Couldn't you take just one turn with Vivien's companion? Your mother might hear straight just once."

"I'll be hanged if I chance it to-night," said Harry. "I'll take Wellgood on at billiards."

"Yes, go and do that; it's much better. It may bring back your colour, Harry."

Harry looked at her in exasperation--and in longing. "I wish there wasn't a woman in the world!" he growled.

"It's men like you who say that," she retorted, smiling. "Go and forget us for an hour."

He went without more words--with only such a shrug as he had given when he said good-bye to Mrs. Freere. Isobel sat on, by dozing Mrs. Belfield, the picture of a dutiful neglected companion, while Wellgood and Harry played billiards, and Belfield, wheezing over an unread evening paper, honoured her with a tribute of distrustful curiosity. Left alone in the flesh, she could boast that she occupied several minds that evening.

Perhaps she knew it, as she sat silent, thoughtfully gazing across to where Vivien and Andy sat together, their dim figures just visible in enshrouding darkness. "He saw--but he won't speak!" she was thinking.

"How funny of Harry to say he sighed as a lover!" Vivien remarked to Andy.

Andy had the pride and pleasure of informing her that her lover was indulging in a quotation from another lover, more famous and more temperate.

"'I sighed as a lover. I obeyed as a son.' I see! How funny! Do you think Gibbon was right, Mr. Hayes?"

"The oldest question since men had sons and women had lovers, isn't it?"

"Doesn't love come first--when once it has come?"

"After honour, the poet tells us, Miss Wellgood."

Vivien knew that quotation, anyhow. "It's beautiful, but isn't it--just a little priggish?"

"I think we must admit that it's at least a very graceful apology,"

laughed Andy.

Their pleasant banter bred intimacy; she was treating him as an old friend. He felt himself hardly audacious in saying "How you've grown!"

She understood him--nay, thanked him with a smile and a flash, revealing pleasure, from her eyes, often so reticent. "Am I different from the days of the lame pony and Curly? Not altogether, I'm afraid, but I hope a little." She sat silent for a moment. "I love Harry--well, so do you."

"Yes, I love Harry." But he had a sore grudge against Harry at that moment. Who at Halton had once talked about pearls and swine? And in what connection?

"That's why I'm different." She laughed softly. "If you'd so far honoured me, Mr. Hayes, and I had--responded, I might never have become different. I should just have relied on the--policeman."

"The Force is always ready to do its duty," said Andy.

"Take care; you're nearly flirting!" she admonished him merrily; and Andy, rather proud of himself for a gallant remark, laughed and blushed in answer. She went on more seriously, yet still with her serene smile.

"First I've got to please him; then I've got to help him. He must have both, you know."

"Please him, oh, yes! Help him, how?"

"I'm sure you know. Poor boy! His ups and downs! Sometimes he comes to me almost in despair. It's so hard to help then. Isobel can't either.

He's not happy, you know, to-night."

She had grown. This penetration was new; should he wish that it might become less or greater? Less for the sake of her peace, or greater for her enlightenment's?

"It seems as if a darkness swept over him sometimes, and got between him and me." Her voice trembled a little. "I want to keep that darkness away from him; so I mustn't be afraid."

"Whether you're afraid or not, you won't run away. Remember Curly!"

She turned to him with affectionate friendliness. "But you'll be there in this too, so far as you can, won't you? Don't forsake me, will you?

It's sometimes--very difficult." Her face lit up in a smile again. "I hope it'll make a man of me, as father used to say of that odious hunting."

It had, at least, made an end of the mere child in her. The discernment of her lover's trouble, the ignorance of whence it came, the need of fighting it--she faced these things as part of her work. Her engagement was no more either amazement merely, or merely joy. She might still be afraid of dogs, or shrink from a butcher's shop. She knew a difficulty when she saw one, and for love's sake faced it. Andy thought it made the love dearer to her; with an inward groan he saw that it did. For he was afraid. What she told of Harry told more than she could fathom for herself.

Andy was a partisan. He cried whole-heartedly, "The pity for Vivien!" He could say, "The pity for Harry!" for old Harry's sake, and more for Vivien's. No, "The pity for Isobel!" was breathed in his heart. The case seemed to him a plain one there; and he was not of the party who would have the Recording Angel as liberal with tears as with ink, sedulously obliterating everything that he punctiliously wrote--in the end, on that view, a somewhat ineffectual registrar, who might be spared both ink and tears, and provided with a retiring pension by triumphant believers in Necessity. It may come to that.

"I think Harry may be wanting me." She rose in her slim grace, and held out a hand to him--not in formal farewell, but in an impulse of good-will. She had come into her heritage of womanhood, and bore it with a shy stateliness. "Thank you"--a pause rather merry than timid--"Thank you, policeman Andy."

"No, but I thank you--and you seem to me rather like the queen of the fairies."

She smiled, and sighed lightly. "If I can make the king think so always!"

Then she was gone, a white shadow gliding over the gra.s.s--a woman now, still in a child's shape. She flitted past Isobel Vintry, kissing her hand, and so pa.s.sed in to where "Harry wanted her."

Politeness dictated that Andy, thus left to himself, should join his hostess; he did not know that she was asleep, quite sound asleep by now.

Having sat down before he discovered this state of affairs, he found himself committed to a virtual _tete-a-tete_ with Isobel Vintry, quite the last thing he desired. He did not find it easy to open the conversation.

"Oh, we can talk! We shan't disturb her," Miss Vintry hastened to a.s.sure him with a smile. "You've been quite a stranger at Nutley. Did you find the atmosphere too romantic? Too much love-making for your taste?"

"I did feel rather in the way now and then."

"Perhaps you were once or twice! When you attached yourself to Vivien after dinner, and left Mr. Harry no resource but poor me!"

Surely if she spoke like that--actually recalling the critical occasion--she could have no suspicion? Either she must never have noticed the shawl at all, or feel sure that it had been removed before her talk with Harry reached the point of danger.

"I'm sure you entertained him very well. I don't think he'd complain."

"Well, sometimes people like talking over their affairs with a third person for a change--as I daresay Vivien has been doing with you just now! And, after all, because you're engaged, everybody else in the world needn't at once seem hopelessly stupid."

Certainly Isobel Vintry could never seem hopelessly stupid, thought Andy. Rather she was superbly plausible.

"And perhaps even Mr. Harry may like a rest from devotion--or will you be polite enough to suggest that a temporary change in its object is a better way of putting it?"

Precisely what it had been in Andy's mind to suggest--but not exactly by way of politeness! It was disconcerting to have the sting drawn from his thoughts or his talk in this way.